Abstract
We can now begin to take a closer look at radical and methodological posthumanism as the main candidates for a non-humanist alternative to dystopic and liberal posthumanism. These approaches develop alternative frameworks that move beyond the essentialism inherent in instrumental and substantive models of technology that inform dystopic and liberal posthumanism. Radical posthumanism argues for a reflexive model of technology, in which technologies are both seen as the product of human creativity and a force that shapes human existence, i.e. technologies are determinative of human experience, though not deterministic. And methodological posthumanism introduces the key concept of technological mediation, which implies that technologies are active mediators of how humans experience the world and how humans act, transforming ourselves and the world in the process.
Both approaches imply an “originary prostheticity”, the idea that the human exists in relation to and is dependent on its technologies; that the human emerges as a result of this relationship. In this view, the dualist humanist paradigm is a hindrance to understanding how humans engage with technologies. Both approaches also argue for more positive conceptualizations of technology than previous critical philosophy of technology allowed for. For radical posthumanism, starting with the “Cyborg Manifesto”, this implies a celebration of the political potential inherent in new technologies. For methodological posthumanism this means conceptualizing the ambivalent status of technology, which may lead to a loss of involvement of humans in their environment in some instances, but also amplifies and creates new forms of engagement.
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- 1.
Heidegger also sees a “saving power” in technology, which he develops to a much lesser extent than the danger here involved towards the end of the essay. If the human relationship to technology is the result of a challenging-forth that humanity takes up, he argues, then technology is not just a revealing and an ordering that humans orchestrate, it is something that humans have not made, but receive. Revealing is something that does not arise from human ingeniousness, but something that “awaits” humans, that needs them. Humans make revelations not as a means of conquering the world but to show how they belong to the world, even in their apparent alienation from it. Technology’s ability to reveal beings and create a world, a capacity that it shares with artwork, can thus also save us.
- 2.
Postphenomenology will be discussed in greater detail in Chap. 5.
- 3.
These relations appear as the basis of the phenomenology of technics Ihde has been developing over the last three decades. They are first clearly developed in Technology and the Lifeworld (1990).
- 4.
More recently Latour has turned away from the ANT framework, see Latour (1999b). Namely because each of the elements of ANT – actor-, network, theory and the hyphen between – have been too often misused, he explains.
- 5.
This notion of the black box was first developed in science studies, where scientific theories were seen as black boxes that provide a truth about reality, but that conceal all the relations between scientists and the phenomena being investigated, all the problem-defining, experimentation and observation carried out to reach the theory.
- 6.
This is, of course, precisely the shift that Heidegger describes tools undergo from being “ready-to-hand” to “present-to-hand”. Verbeek makes this point, and adds it to a list of examples in which Latour reveals his ignorance of Heidegger (Verbeek 2005: 158, note 7), at least the Heidegger of the tool analysis in Being and Time (1962). Worse, Verbeek explains, is the fact that in the chapter on mediation in Pandora’s Hope, Latour starts off with an attack on Heidegger’s conception of technology and presents his analysis in opposition to Heidegger: “For Heidegger”, Latour writes, “a technology is never an instrument, a mere tool. Does that mean that technologies mediate action? No, because we have ourselves become instruments for no other end than instrumentality itself” (1999a: 176). As Verbeek claims, Latour here relates to the Heidegger of “The Question Concerning Technology”, and does not account for Heidegger’s tool analysis as depicted above, which can be seen as a basis for the notion of technological mediation. Søren Riis, in his fittingly titled article “The Symmetry between Bruno Latour and Martin Heidegger” (2008), makes this critique of Latour even more clearly. “When looked at carefully”, Riis argues, “Latour’s examination of technical mediation stands out as a detailed reflection of Heidegger’s studies” (285). There are other areas too where Latour’s analyses are very Heideggerian, and resemble Heidegger’s considerations on being and Dasein, such as his claim that “I want to situate myself at the stage before we can clearly delineate subjects and objects … Full-fledged human subjects and respectable objects out there in the world cannot be my starting point; they may be my point of arrival” (Latour 1999a: 182). For this reason, in Chap. 6 that discusses posthuman approaches to subjectivity, I interpret Latour, as other methodological posthumanists insofar as subjectivity is concerned, as a continuation of Heidegger.
- 7.
For a discussion of the differences and similarities between ANT and postphenomenology see Verbeek (2005). Verbeek argues that the notion that these two views are incompatible arises mainly from Latour’s anti-phenomenological stance and its alleged subjectivism, a critique that is precisely incorporated into Ihde’s postphenomenological approach.
- 8.
I use the terms nature, life, human nature, body, self, subjectivity, etc., interchangeably here, since in any discussion of technology as extensive in a supplementary sense these terms interchangeably become the “other” of technology, while with regards to technology as extensive in an originary sense, the very opposition between technology and any of these terms is undermined.
- 9.
McLuhan is often upheld as the theorist of cyberculture, and his readings of media as forms of human embodiment have been particularly significant for theories interested in the communities and identities made possible through web-based interactions, such as chatrooms and multiuser games. Arthur Kroker (1992) places McLuhan’s extension thesis at the center of his analysis of technology and postmodernity. And Baudrillard has extended McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message”, namely in “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media” (1984).
- 10.
The first of these images was made available on the National Library of Medicine’s website, www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible in November 1994.
- 11.
As Waldby remarks, the VHP itself is also infused with such dreams of wholeness: the two virtual bodies it has imaged are referred to as “Adam” and “Eve”.
- 12.
Recently, some cognitive scientists have adopted this originary prosthetic perspective. In a series of experiments on macaques at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan for example, scientists concluded that treating simple tools as temporary extensions of the body induces a modification of body image that incorporates the tool, and that in evolutionary terms this in turn led to the gradual emergence of a sense of self more complex than the basic body image our evolutionary ancestors started out with. See (Ishibashi et al. 2000).
- 13.
See www.kevinwarwick.org.
- 14.
See Joanna Zylinska’s The Cyborg Experiments (2002b), which brings together a number of essays by leading theorists on Stelarc’s works, Mark Dery’s lengthy discussion on the artist in Escape Velocity (1996), and most recently, the anthology Stelarc: The Monograph (Smith 2007), with contributions by Jane Goodall, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Brian Massumi and William Gibson. Stelarc’s website, www.stelarc.va.com.au provides graphic illustrations of his events as well as a many of his texts.
- 15.
Earlier uses of the concept of the machine that Deleuze and Guattari claim debt to are Lewis Mumford’s argument that society must be regarded as a machine and his description of certain ancient forms of empires as “megamachines” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 251, 141), and Samuel Butler’s fictional work, where he challenges the way in which lines are drawn between machinic and animal life (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 284). In “The book of the machines” section in his work Erewhon, Butler writes:
Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made up of delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup. (1985: 199)
- 16.
In A New Philosophy of Society (1985) Manuel DeLanda carries out an excellent discussion of this aspect of assemblages and their contrast to Hegelian totalities. Organic wholes, he explains, are characterized by “relations of interiority” such that all component elements are identified by their functioning in constituting the whole, and that, detached from the whole, the elements no longer exist. Assemblages, by contrast, are characterized by “relations of exteriority”, such that the identities of component elements are not reducible to the relations in which they find themselves at any time, i.e., they are assumed to self-subsist. The assemblage thus possesses synthetic or emergent properties.
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Sharon, T. (2014). Towards a Non-Humanist Posthumanism: The Originary Prostheticity of Radical and Methodological Posthumanism. In: Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7554-1_4
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