immanence

Theory has a mobile army of metaphors that account for its own importance. The vanguardist notion of a “cutting edge” has long served as a paradigmatic metaphor for theoretical innovation, and it’s one I take issue with in my article “Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or What Can the Human Be?,” which has just come out in a special issue devoted to posthumanism of the Shanghai Academy-based, bilingual Chinese journal Critical Theory. (The issue, which is focused on posthumanism, features a significant new piece by N. Katherine Hayles, alongside work by several Chinese scholars.)

A more helpful metaphor for theoretical novelty is Jacques Rancière’s “redistribution of the sensible,” which can also be applied to the literature on the “post-human” and on posthumanism. By the “distribution of the sensible,” or portage du sensible, Rancière means

“the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. […] This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.” (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, p. 12)

It is, in other words, an epistemé (if we emphasize its epistemological valences), an ontology (if we emphasize the ontological), or an “onto-epistemology” that is established through social (and other) activities and that can therefore be challenged, disestablished, and replaced.

The main virtue of Rancière’s term, for me, is its emphasis on the senses — the activities of seeing, hearing, feeling, noticing, and of making oneself seen, heard, felt, and noticed — in making up what is taken to be real (ontology) and how it can be known (epistemology). And it is “dissensus” on what is sensible — on what shapes the correspondence between the perceptible and the reasonable — that makes theory political. (I should add that I’m no expert on Rancière, and am relying more on secondary writings by Panagia and others than on his own work.)

Like any school of social or cultural theory, posthumanism is an attempt to “change the conversation” in order to affect what counts and what doesn’t, what is sensorially, ethically, culturally, and politically perceivable and what isn’t. It is an attempt both to question the “distribution of the sensible” of the humanist imaginary and to expand it so as to be more inclusive (of the nonhuman, the inhuman, the more-than-human, the beyond-human).

In the article, I argue that posthumanism fails (as a construct) when considered through a process-relational (and therefore anti-essentialist) prism, because it ignores the multiplicity and openness at the core of any particular “human.” There are better ways of being posthuman than to tout (or shout) “posthumanism now!” But it can still provide an evocative way of delimiting the range of all possible humanisms — that is, of thinking extinction. As a posthumanism, written under erasure, the term can point to a kind of “being-towards-death” not for the individual Dasein of Heideggerian existential phenomenology, but for the species.

The full article can be read here. (Note that the page sometimes loads slowly.)