Thought Bricolage

Posthumanism presents a variety of paths of inquiry to think through the ways we experience existence as a species. I find thinking around posthumanism in service of reconstructing the idea of the human to serve as a basis for more equitable futures the most compelling. The distillation of society to its constituent parts - construed as individuals, life-forms, citizens - are all defined by their relationship to the mutable cultural archetype of ‘human’, whether they represent a lacking or a fulfillment of the ‘human’ criteria. Therefore, for the constituent parts of society, and consequently, society itself, to change their character, the definition of human must be one that supports equity as natural and immutable, akin to the natural laws coming out of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinking. I am interested in how a redefinition of human could be theorized and justified within the current scope and rhetoric of ‘humanity’ that maps its essence onto, and relative to, the body.

The reading Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations and There Are Always More Things Going on Than You Thought! Methodologies as Thinking Technologies, an interview with Donna Haraway, introduced me to the concept of the figuration as a thinking technology, and the concept of thinking technology itself. These ideas were extremely exciting to me, as I see them as ways of taking inquiry to new theoretical geographies and finding alternate perspectives and ‘ins’ to ideas to think them otherwise. The figure of the Dog was the most compelling to me, as it articulates a drawback of the figuration, especially when mapped onto a material sensing being, of ‘thinking with’ the figuration being ultimately informed by one’s own capacity for expansive thought, and uninformed by embodied sense. This precludes the figuration from being able to access a complete truth, its end epistemological goal being to create knowledge that represents alternate thinking that may prove useful to articulate or investigate truths that can be corroborated and framed by the flesh. The idea of the figuration parallels the toxic embodiment (Nakamura 51) enabled by VR: an imagined sense of being in someone’s body, enabled by a valuation and consideration of sight as the most crucial and truth-defining sense. Figuration has the ability to hallucinate truth where there isn’t any, especially when it values the subject position of the thinker as the ultimate objective one and is unaware of their blindspots. The role of the figuration in posthuman thought is a primary one, especially as posthumanism is a racial question, engaged with by those who are and are not racialized, as well as one that involves much speculation and hypothetical situations.

When it comes to its racial connotations, the word ‘human’ has historically and contemporarily been used by a given group to denote a group more deserving of being seen as the same as the onlooker who considers themself, too, human, within their empathetic bond. This understanding of ‘human’ is informed by Sylvia Wynter’s 1492: A New Worldview. Wynter employs the term ‘propter nos’ to describe the group that looks out for its own interests, and, to maintain the justification for its insular concerns, must enforce a perspective that those outside its empathetic purview are lacking or extreme. Post- the human of the propter nos, the human that exists so that others can be justifiably inhuman, is an uncharted territory in tangible history, as expressed by Rinaldo Walcott in The Long Emancipation, which argues that Black freedom has yet to be achieved, and that within the framework of emancipation, continued Black oppression was enshrined judicially. This conception of posthumanism, the one to which I find myself the most drawn, has less to do with the body its rendition as the locus of the human (as transhumanism implies) and therefore its modification than the way we are defined by our relationships in a way that is unique to our species.

Transsexualism (and I use this terminology to emphasize the material, biological sex change present in this trans identity) sits in that crossroads of material biological change and relational change, in our case enabled by material change. I can use the figuration of the transsexual to imagine a posthumanity as a post-propter nos. Material change is for us enabled by hormone replacement therapy and surgery, as well as adopting the paraphernalia of gendered aesthetics. For us, material change serves to enable relational change by communicating our dis/inclusion from gendered groupings that inform relationality. Material markers of communication bring the mind and body into closer concordance, this reality then being affirmed outside of the inner psyche and the dissonance between the flesh and the sense of self are quelled. I was in Ottawa for the national Pro-Palestine action and everyone rallied, informed by resonance with flesh. Solidarity was accomplished because of a union of mind and activated body, activated by the empathic substrate of the flesh; and mind and body, and mind and body, into the hundreds of thousands, into the same action, driven by the same information. Material markers of sameness are diverse and most potent when experienced in, within, and about the flesh, it appears to me: death and racialization unite and divide while they embrace as intertwined, interaffective, forces. Walcott makes this connection between death and racialization as inextricable in his writing on Black death as the physical and metaphorical foundation of America. A posthumanity as a post-propter nos could be supported to be maintained and to thrive by a sense of empathetic bond stemming from solidarity sensed with, in, and about the flesh as explicitly Meat, as opposed to a medium of communication, not to be transcended, but a site within which to locate our sense of the human. I can think of this through my figurative lens as a transsexual: my nature as Meat is activated for me most acutely in my surgery scars and in the feeling of my voice resonating in my chest, as that is where my agency to change my body and my Meat encounter each other the most intensely, directly influencing each other. A post-propter nos, then, could be centred on absolute body sovereignty - Meat and agency combined - as a core trait of homo sapiens and therefore the basis for forming empathetic bonds and to inform approaching the non-human world. The road to a post-propter nos posthumanity could then be one of global conceptual and its consequent material change on the scale of the Enlightenment. This next Enlightenment could be a material understanding and flesh-located sensing of the non-disposable nature of the homo sapiens. I feel seeds of hope for this in the Pro-Palestine movement and the increasing awareness that all liberation struggles are connected, an understanding based in solidarity stemming embodied harm with the same perpetrator of colonialism. A post- ‘humanity as we know it’, and post- ‘humanity since 1492’ is synonymous with a post-propter nos definition of human, which is in turn synonymous with the decolonial struggle. If unguided by flesh-based solidarity, a post-propter nos could take the form of hyperindividualism, a deletion of a sense of ‘nos’, and therefore deepening suspicion. Symptoms of this posthumanity are visible in the increase in conspiratorial thinking among the western Right.

Posthumanism can also be thought of as a post- material boundaries of the human biological form. It asserts that the limits defined on the biological axis (rather than in the social scope) of the human as homo sapiens are permeable and mutable. I am interested in how this posthumanism, one that actively dissolves the boundaries of the flesh and of that which may be considered ‘flesh’, moves the state of the human in relation to the concept of the propter nos, and how it complicates it, potentially moving the human on the axis of biology towards social definition of the human as a site of body autonomy. Again, the transsexual serves as a useful figuration: we demonstrate and live how mutable biology is. This undefines the human as a biologically-defined concept. The ways our homo sapiens nature can be read, in the social context, in our case no longer stretches to results of prescribed biology on an individual scale, as the assumption of the biologically-defined human induces one to think, therefore destabilizing the idea of the biologically-defined homo sapiens at all. Transsexuality is post- material, biological boundary of the human, and therefore in kinship with entanglement as a way of addressing the assumption of the human as insular due to the perceived boundaries of the body. There is kinship, too, formed with object-oriented ontologies, which displaces the human and its body as the central arbiters of meaning. All of these are active mutations to the state of the human as a biological entity.

These alternate phenomena of enacting existence, of creating and leaving im/material traces on the world, contain their capacity for making meaning in their ability to be autonomous, to exist without the constant intervention of the human, and to therefore become sovereign agents of affect. The human then becomes one enactor of existing among many, un-unique in its ability to be a fertile ground for and solidifying meaning. The human as unexceptional at its core is unappealing to currents of rhetoric that would maintain the human as inherently denotative as superior to the ‘animal’, those same currents whose definition of human requires an imagined lack of humanness to construct its definition. The Wynter’s propter nos, too, is founded on exceptionality, in the sense of ‘what makes us separate from others is what makes us the same’. In her description, the ‘torrid zone’ marking what lay south of North Africa, at the end of the ‘habitable world’ known by the Europeans at the end of the Middle Ages is this line of separation. Unity based in a sense of separation does not bode well for bodily autonomy because the body must conform to being adequately ‘separate’ from other bodies and ratifications of human to be included in a given propter nos, demanding a demonstration of separateness through aesthetics and attitudes. A humanity grounded in the human as location of sovereignty is a humanity that does not end the definition of the human at the fleshy boundaries of the homo sapiens, and has the potential of extend the empathetic bonds of the propter nos to other sovereign entities that may or may not be homo sapiens.