Posthumanism

Running Head: Posthumanism
Posthumanism — Is the post-human a new departure, or is it merely creative rebranding?
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Posthumanism — Is the post-human a new departure, or is it merely creative rebranding?
Recent years have witnessed a much debate on post-humanism as a subject in various areas of social sciences. This debate has also become a basis for question that whether the post-human is a new departure or it is merely a creative rebranding. Post-humanism has become a subject in discussions in medicine as the scope of technological and genetic exploitation and bodily development. Nevertheless, it has had small consideration in the debate of adult education and lifelong learning. This paper is using post-humanism neither to just refer to a gathering after humanism, nor to refer to those who advocate a utopian future of genetically modified embodied technologies. Instead this paper is trying to find whether the post-human a new departure, or it is merely creative rebranding.
Problematising Nature and Man
Post-humanism, in fact, speaks about a performance that deconstructs the disconnection of subjects and objects and, with that, the spotlight on the human issue as either a representative of an essentialised human character or in a state of constant is receiving more attention. Levi-Strauss (1969) sees a person as a biological being and social individual. "Among his responses to external or internal stimuli, some are wholly dependent upon his nature, others upon his social environment." (Levi-Strauss 1969, 3) Nevertheless, it is also an issue that the deconstruction needs a subject and object to deconstruct. This understanding is helpful to assume that post-human is not a new departure, but merely a creative rebranding. It is significant then that the ‘post-` of the post-human is not considered as ‘anti-`. Levi-Strauss is of the view that culture is not simply contrasted to life nor superimposed upon it, but in one way serves as alternate for life.
"If this general distinction is relatively easy to establish, a twofold difficulty emerges when it has to be analysed. An attempt might be made to establish a biological or social cause for every attitudes, and a search made for the mechanism whereby attitudes, which are cultural in origin, can be grafted upon a successfully integrated with forms of behaviour which are themselves biological in nature." (Levi-Strauss 1969, 4)
Cyborgs and Complexities
It is a difference of opinion that the attempt to collect many actants seeks to provoke hardness to the thing to be enacted. Very simply, it is an argument that pursues a focus on ontology rather than representation. Nevertheless, the attention on ontology is not human- or subject-centric, but points to the embarrassment of the human and non-human, because without the non-human, humans would neither survive nor be able to show they are part of the world. In other world it can be said that the existence of human is largely depended on the existence of non-human. People are always in grouping within worlds. This is the age of information technology and this era of ubiquitous digitalisation sometimes speaks about as a cyborg condition that points to the entanglement of the ample and technical and the materiality of things.
Bruno Latour in his work has discussed the neurophilosopher Paul Churchaland who carries a colour picture of his spouse in his wallet. He says the picture doesn`t show his wife face, but a scan of her brain. Latour is of the opinion that the example functions to reject the traditional opposition between the body as an object and as subject, between the body people have and the body they are, between the known, objectified body of scientific knowledge and the lived, subjective body of phenomenology.
"Paul may be perfectly right in saying that we should all become sensitive to electrical differences in each other`s brains and that this sensitivity, this learning to be affected, will make us have a richer and more interesting understanding of other`s personality than mere boring facial expressions. (Latour 2004, 225)
It can be argued that fundamental to this post-human state could be entanglements in the world that involve practices of conditionality, for example, unreliability — experimentation and the possibility of failure and accountability — responding to others and otherness. This also shows that post-human is merely a creative rebranding. These are the acts that can be made as an answer to the disbelief there can be toward grand narratives of human survival. For developing this debate, a claim also be made that a post-human condition could point to the end of lifetime learning rather than the latter being a part of that condition. In case, this has been defined by some authors, the acts of learning have been essential to the focus of the human subject. It can be argued here that a post-human state may not be one of learning as people have tended to comprehend it, that is, learning about objects by subjects. Here one can find more evidence for the argument that post-human is merely a creative rebranding.
Finding answer about post-human`s condition of rebranding is an endeavour at an intercession into the acts of lifelong learning, including the acts of representing lifelong learning. It is very basic to argue that it is a change of position from epistemology to ontology as each entails the other. The thing which this situation suggests is that the type of discussion that have been going on about lifelong learning arise from positioning it exclusively within a figurative binary that separates matter and meaning, substance and connotation, object and subject, where the latter is grounded in some concept of human nature purified of other matters.
There has always been a predisposition in the debate of lifelong learning, and in connection to education more commonly, to have to start from the beginning in everything that is written. Definitely, origins are myths and any such condition is itself always already part of the regulatory acts in awareness production, placing constraints on experimentation on the basis of a rigour that can come close to rigor mortis at times. According to many authors, including Foucault (1970) and Despret (2004), this is not out of arrogance, but out of frustration that discussions in the wider academic environment seem generally to be sanitized from the discussion of lifelong learning, or to be marginalised to those with a concentration in theory. As a consequence, lifelong learning mainly remains an under-theorised thing.
Collectivities, Companion Species & Comparisons
Actions of people can be judged in many ways. There has been continued evaluation over decades now of the binaries that form what is placed crudely as a Western emotional response. These binaries are held to makeup people`s ways of theorising and overriding, providing the conditions of possibility for how people might take steps in the world. A significant philosophical binary is that between epistemology and ontology, where the former, which focuses on how people can understand something, has been the main focus of concern. However, such binaries already suppose what they produce, insofar as the focus on understanding already presumes a connection between matters and meaning, object and subject, which themselves are positioned as separate from each other.
Meaningful is not essentially straightforward in the senses people have come to connect with the practices of the sciences — natural and social. Much has been discussed and much space has been given to pursuing the ways in which humans can create the truthfulness of the meanings through which people represent matter. This in itself imagines a division of the subject from the object with the connected issue of how to fill the gap. The world is full of endeavours at such a filling, yet the gap exits. Objects object, refusing demonstration, even as it is suggested by human subjects as an essential state for knowing. Objects stay the other to the subject, separate.
From a variety of positions, the supposition of basic separations has been topic to sustained analysis. This analysis involves not merely an attempt to privilege ontology over epistemology, reversing the binary, but to reframe the whole entanglements within the world. Authors linked to these moves that are being drawn upon included Latour (1993), Haraway (1991), Haraway (2000) and Strum and Fedigan (2000a).
According to Riegler, Peschl and Stein (1999), representationalism takes the idea of severance as foundational. The authors are of the opinions that it divides the world into the "ontologically disjunct domains of words and things, leaving itself with the predicament of their connection such that knowledge is possible… representationalism is a prisoner of the challenging metaphysics it assumes".
The authors are drawing upon a difference between representing/theorising and intervening/experimenting as common orientations in the world. It is generally believed that the former has been divided and given dominance over the latter, thus positioning theory as a set of abstract ideas, detached from matter and what matters. This division results from and in the dividing of matter from meaning and divides more the material into, for example, the social, the natural, the technological, the cultural and the economic. These divisions are then taken to be foundational and a priori rather than them being the impacts of enactments, the manifestations. The authors have taken the representations to be objects that are then black-boxed rather than arising from the work of specific practices and assemblages of the human and non-human.
Hacking (1999) and Latour (1999) see this like a social constructivist vision of the world, but it is significant to differentiate the post-human from this viewpoint. For these writers, both realism and social constructivism are held to depend on the same representationalist division of matter/object from meaning/subject that the post-human is putting into question. Their ideas about social constructivist vision are clear. According to them, in social constructivist enactments, meaning may be constructed rather than just imitate reality in a mirror-like way, but it remains estranged out from matter, leaving untroubled the basic binaries informing them. Both realism and social constructivism remain human/subject-centric, due to an a priori separation of meaning from matter.
Certainly a supposition is that rather than division as basic to enacting a cleaned human condition, entanglement is significantly and practically basic to a hybridised post-human condition. Objects are not completely separate entities, but are mixings, gatherings, things, what Latour (1993) speaks about as ‘quasi-objects` in his discussion that people have never been modern i.e. purified. It ...