{"id":11676,"date":"2021-03-31T12:52:43","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T17:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=11676"},"modified":"2021-03-31T12:52:46","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T17:52:46","slug":"posthumanist-redistributions-of-the-sensible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/03\/31\/posthumanist-redistributions-of-the-sensible\/","title":{"rendered":"Posthumanist redistributions of the sensible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Theory has a mobile army of metaphors<\/a> 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<\/s> Be?<\/a>,” which has just come out in a special issue devoted to posthumanism<\/a> of the Shanghai Academy-based, bilingual Chinese journal Critical Theory<\/em>. (The issue, which is focused on posthumanism, features a significant new piece<\/a> by N. Katherine Hayles, alongside work by several Chinese scholars.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more helpful metaphor for theoretical novelty is Jacques Ranci\u00e8re’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<\/a>,” or portage du sensible<\/em>, Ranci\u00e8re means <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

“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.” (Ranci\u00e8re, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible<\/a>, p. 12) <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is, in other words, an epistem\u00e9<\/em> (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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main virtue of Ranci\u00e8re’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<\/a>” on what is sensible — on what shapes the correspondence between the perceptible<\/em> and the reasonable<\/em> — that makes theory political. (I should add that I’m no expert on Ranci\u00e8re, and am relying more on secondary writings by Panagia<\/a> and others than on his own work.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> posthuman than to tout (or shout) “posthumanism now!” But it can still provide an evocative way of delimiting the range of all possible<\/em> humanisms — that is, of thinking extinction. As a posthumanism<\/s>, written under erasure, the term can point to a kind of “being-towards-death” not for the individual Dasein<\/em> of Heideggerian existential phenomenology, but for the species. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The full article can be read here.<\/a> (Note that the page sometimes loads slowly.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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?,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977],"tags":[660327,660330,17800,660329,222083,628407,109062,660328,628364,628486,628487,4426],"class_list":["post-11676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","tag-alternative-humanisms","tag-chinese-humanities-journals","tag-critical-theory","tag-distribution-of-the-sensible","tag-extinction","tag-humanism","tag-humanities","tag-jacques-ranciere","tag-post-human","tag-posthumanism","tag-posthumanities","tag-theory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-32k","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11148,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/12\/14\/what-are-the-humanities-two-cultures-redux\/","url_meta":{"origin":11676,"position":0},"title":"What are the humanities? (Two cultures, redux)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"As a humanistic scholar within an interdisciplinary school, I'm often put in a position to distinguish how the humanities differ from the social and natural sciences. There is a long tradition of distinguishing between these \"two cultures,\" with the most frequent point of focus, for humanists, being that they concern\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/10\/liu-tema-genus-posthumanities-hub.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/10\/liu-tema-genus-posthumanities-hub.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/10\/liu-tema-genus-posthumanities-hub.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/10\/liu-tema-genus-posthumanities-hub.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/10\/liu-tema-genus-posthumanities-hub.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":13402,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2023\/11\/22\/woodsworth-chair-three-challenges\/","url_meta":{"origin":11676,"position":1},"title":"Woodsworth Chair: Three challenges","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 22, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"I\u2019m delighted to formally announce that I have accepted an offer to take up the\u00a0position of J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities\u00a0at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, beginning next year. (Simon Fraser recently, once again, took the\u00a0top spot among comprehensive universities in Macleans' Canadian university rankings.) The chair\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2023\/11\/Vancouver-green-city-scaled.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2023\/11\/Vancouver-green-city-scaled.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2023\/11\/Vancouver-green-city-scaled.jpeg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2023\/11\/Vancouver-green-city-scaled.jpeg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2023\/11\/Vancouver-green-city-scaled.jpeg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2023\/11\/Vancouver-green-city-scaled.jpeg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1258,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/05\/05\/lines-in-ecocritical-sands\/","url_meta":{"origin":11676,"position":2},"title":"lines in ecocritical sands","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Greg Garrard, who's become something of a point-man for synoptic treatments of ecocriticism (like this one, and see my previous post on him), has come out with a lucid and judicious review of recent publications in The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. It covers the years 2007-8, which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10816,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/06\/17\/we-are-all-tuteishi-or-on-not-being-posthuman\/","url_meta":{"origin":11676,"position":3},"title":"We are all tuteishi (or, on not being posthuman)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 17, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy's masterful book on \"premodern identities\" in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cultural politics"","block_context":{"text":"Cultural politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cultural_politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/582991504ef3e.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/582991504ef3e.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/582991504ef3e.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/582991504ef3e.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7645,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/06\/12\/on-naming-the-anthropocene\/","url_meta":{"origin":11676,"position":4},"title":"On naming the Anthropocene","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 12, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The following are the comments I prepared for the roundtable \"The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.\" They follow in the line of critical thinking on the Anthropocene initiated by\u00a0gatherings like the Anthropocene Project (see here, here, and here, and some of the posts\u00a0at A(S)CENE) and journals like Environmental\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"HABITUS-9-medium-1024x682","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/06\/HABITUS-9-medium-1024x682-275x183.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7942,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/12\/13\/anthropocene-multispecies-other-trends\/","url_meta":{"origin":11676,"position":5},"title":"Anthropocene, multispecies, & other trends","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 13, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how\u00a0the digital and the Anthropocene have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year's American Anthropological Association conference.\u00a0(A few others are mentioned here\u00a0and here, Bruno Latour's keynote being one of them. Here's a collection of tweets on Latour's talk, most\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11676"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11712,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11676\/revisions\/11712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}