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  • Writer's pictureBelinda Keyte

Jay David Bolter 'Posthumanism'

My intention was to research Donna Haraway and I found a book that interested me titled 'Making Kin Not Population' (2018 Prickly Paradigm Press) that is a series of essays from leading anti-racist, ecologically-concerned, feminist scholars. Yet I couldn't access this. I was led to a link to the above publication. Published by the Georgia institute, USA 2016.


Posthumanism is the breaking away from fundamental assumptions of Modern Western culture. It looks at the relationship between the human, animal and technological, breaking down these barriers. I guess the natural world is the 'animal' subject. As opposed to humanism, which places man in the literary & philosophical centre (instead of God, as previously) it posits that 'Man' is not the be-all and end-all in being able to explain the world objectively, even if this kept changing in shape and shifting from Darwinian theory to Marxist economics to Freudian theory. Posthumanism subverts claims to unity, simplicity and universality.


Bolter looks at posthumanism in regards to different disciplines.


Early posthumanism (and here is where Donna Haraway (1991) comes in) focused on techno-science & biology. Using the cyborg as a metaphor for the ambivalent contemporary human being, a rejection and reconfiguring of the values of the traditional humanist subject. Cloning showed that animal and nature are not bound by biology and humans are not apart from nature. So does politics belong only to humans. Animal rights became a serious philosophical & sociopolitical issue. And this is where the environmental movement comes in.


Yet it took until 1993 in We Have Never Been Modern, until Latour made a convincing argument against the epistemological frameworks that had controlled Western scientific thinking. Haraway showed how feminist theory could contribute to posthumanism in her essay on the cyborg and elsewhere, as it posits the standard / centre of everything away from 'Man'. And Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) argued that gender and sex is constructed by the individual. Because of the importance of gender for identity she concluded identity itself is performed by individuals, within different subjects and cultures.


I have already discussed Katherine Hayles and informatics. Seeing the human subject as a mechanism is how I understand it's contribution to posthumanism. AI contributed to this analogy of a computer, where the comparison was not between brains and electrical circuits, but computer programs and human minds.


Bolter points out that social media is a good advocate for the materiality of the digital. Digital communication is not a refuge from the real world, but fully involved in it. Therefore an important way to examine the contemporary human subject and provide opportunities for redefining us. And sometimes the users interact with others (at the same or different times) but sometimes they don't. Interacting with the computer system evidences the 'willingness to join oneself with a digital system', discounting previous humanist theory saying this was not the case.


Lastly, posthumanism essentially overthrows humanist institutions (such as universities) and demands a reconfiguration of the approaches of and materials studied in academia.


The article was really interesting and it would have been great to have a section on the arts. but I guess that's primarily humanities, dipping into pretty much all the other disciplines discussed. I feel the arts always reflects a movement very early on and helps shape it.

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