POSTHUMANISM: A COHERENT FRAME FOR THINKING ABOUT

HUMANS AND OTHERS?

Questions about where to draw the lines of division between humans and animals (and between the
organic and inorganic, since that is also at issue) have a long history. But they are being posed today in
a novel form in the sense that the current concern is less with finding and fixing the criteria for drawing
clear demarcations between human, animal and machine, and more with winning acceptance to the
idea that these borders are more blurred than we previously thought. Very often, moreover, claims to
this effect come with a suggestion that it is ecologically progressive and/or humanly emancipatory to
break down these conceptual barriers and commit ourselves to less rigid, fuzzier modes of thinking.4

Advances in genetics have prompted some of this kind of thinking, given the new questions they pose
about where to draw the divide between the artificially contrived and the naturally given. So, too, have
developments in IT, and there are so-called ‘connectionists’ and advocates of ‘Emergent Artificial
Intelligence’ who emphasize the unpredictable, non-rule governed and non-determined qualities of the
most sophisticated computers, and view these as ‘psychological machines’.5 (Conversely, the human
mind is often seen in cognitive science as best understood on the computational model).

The politics of animal liberation has also, of course, as already indicated, prompted reconsideration of
humanist approaches to the human-animal divide. This ‘ecological naturalism’ represents a spectrum of
positions within which there are important philosophical divisions, but what is common to all those
sharing its anti-dualist perspective is a resistance to treating the differences between humans and other
animals as anything but matters of degree within an essential ontological continuity, and the assumption
that the more we come to recognize this and hence the fluidity of the divide between the human and the
animals, the more eco-friendly our policies are likely to be, or, at any rate, the less tolerant we shall
become of the maltreatment of animals.6 In the cyborg thinking of Donna Haraway and her
followers,7 we have been invited to blur or collapse both the organic-inorganic and the human-animal
opposition in favour of an ontology that cheerfully accepts the ‘leakiness’ of these boundaries, and
revels in the emancipatory potential of cyber-technology to destabilize and revise existing constituencies
and identities.8 Thus we find, in their influential work on the condition of global ‘empire’, Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri arguing that the primary condition of political progress is ‘[…] recognition that human
nature is in no way separate from nature as whole, that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries
between the human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth;
it is the recognition that nature itself is an artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures and
hybridizations’.9

Support of a more general philosophical kind for this type of ontological destabilization and revision has
also come from the anti-foundationalist shift in philosophy, most influentially in the arguments of
Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. One might particularly note here Derrida's last writings on animals, and
his presentation of our intuitive demarcations between human and non-human ‘others’ as a form of
unwarranted conceptual policing.10 Derrida, Singer and the cyborgists might seem strange bedfellows in
certain respects, but there are some striking parallels between recent Continental animal philosophizing
and arguments produced – albeit in a very different style – much earlier within Anglo-American
environmental ethics (on this subject see the 2004 volume Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, co-
edited by Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco).11

There are also of course some notable contrasts between these various thinkers, and in that sense it
may be misleading to assimilate them under some general ‘posthumanist’ umbrella. But certain themes
do emerge as held in common: the decentering of the ‘humanist’ subject; the problematization of the
human-animal distinction as capable of providing ethical guidance on the treatment of non-human
animals; and a resistance to allowing that attributes, notably language use, traditionally viewed as
confined to humans, are to be theorized as exclusive to us. A resistance, if you like, to the idea of any
definitive ‘exceptionalist’ stance.

Now I should make clear that I am not taking issue with every component of this ‘posthumanist’
spectrum of thought, and indeed accept the importance of certain forms of its critique of the ‘humanist’
subject. In defending ‘human exceptionalism’ I am not defending a Cartesian conception of the human
subject as exhaustively self-knowing and autotelic (self-directing). I accept the wisdom of a great deal of
what follows from the Nietzschean-Marxian-Freudian and, more recently, Foucauldian-Derridean-
Deleuzian post-structuralist critique of the ‘humanist’ subject conceived as an epistemologically self-
transparent all-knowing, all-seeing agent of history. Human persons, like other creatures, are subject to
trans-individual systemic processes and pressures, not least language and other semiotic systems, that
are presupposed to their forms of consciousness and communication rather than purely expressive tools
of them; and these structures are in many ways beyond their ken or controlling intervention.
Posthumanists are right in that sense to point to the ways in which modes − and the very means of −
communication are involved in what it means to be human at any given point in time. As Derrida puts it
in speaking of the transition from paper use to electronic media, the ‘history of paper’ is