Dark Posthumanism

David Roden

1 The Terminal Beach

Billions of years in the future, the Time Traveller stands before a dark ocean, beneath a
bloated red sun. The beach is dappled with lichen and ice. The huge crabs and insects
which menaced him on his visit millions of years in its past are gone. Apart from the
lapping of red-peaked waves on the distant shore, everything is utterly still.
Nonetheless, a churning weakness and fear deters him from leaving the saddle of the
time machine.

He thinks he sees something black flop awkwardly over a nearby sandbar; but when he
looks again, all is still. That must be a rock, he tells himself.

Studying the unknown constellations, he feels an enveloping chill. Then twilight segues
to black. The old sun is being eclipsed by the moon or some other massive body.

The wind moans out of utter darkness and cold. A deep nausea hammers his belly. He
is on the edge of nothing.

The object passes and an an arc of blood opens the sky. By this light he sees what
moves in the water. Wells writes: “It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps,
or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it. It seemed black against the
weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.”.

During the Traveller’s acquaintance with it, the creature gives no indication of purpose.
Its “flopping” might be due to the action of the waves. It might lack a nervous system,
let alone a mind replete with thoughts, beliefs or desires. In contrast, we learn much of
the Traveller’s state. He feels horror at the awful blackness of the eclipse; pain
breathing in the cold; “a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful
twilight”.

It is as if Wells’ text edges around what cannot be carried from that shore. There is no
heroic saga of discovery, cosmic exploration or “first contact”; no extended reflection on
time and human finitude. There is just a traumatic, pain-filled encounter.

When viewed against the backdrop of “Weird” literature, however, the event on the
shoreline seems more consequential. As China Miéville has argued, the Weird is
defined by its preoccupation with the radically alien. This is in stark opposition to the
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Gothic specter, that always signifies a representation in play between an excluded past
and an uncertain future (Miéville 2012).

Monsters like H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu do not put representation in play. They shred it.
As Mieville writes:

For Cthulhu, in its creator’s words, “there is no language.” “The Thing cannot be
described.” Even its figurine “resembled nothing familiar to geology or
mineralogy” (Lovecraft, “Call”). The Color Out of Space “obeyed laws that are
not of our cosmos” (“Colour”). The Dunwich Horror was “an impossibility in a
normal world” (“Dunwich”).(Miéville 2012, 379)

The monstrous reality is indicated by grotesque avatars and transformations whose

causes erode political order and sanity itself. In Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Southern
Reach trilogy a fractious bureaucracy in a looking-glass USA is charged with managing
a coastline that has been lost to some unearthly power. This proves inimical to human
minds and bodies even as it transforms “Area X” into a lush Edenic wilderness. As we
might expect, bureaucratic abstraction falters in its uncertain borders. The Reach’s
attempts to define, test and explore Area X are comically inappropriate - from herding
terrified rabbits across the mysterious barrier that encloses it, to instituting “round-the-
clock” surveillance of an immortal plant specimen from an unsanctioned expedition
(VanderMeer 2014a, b, c). All that remains to VanderMeer’s damaged protagonists is a
misanthropic acceptance of something always too distant and strange to be
understood, too near not to leave in them the deepest scars and ecstasies.

This misanthropy is implied in Wells’ earlier shoreline encounter. An unstory from a far
future that is perhaps not alive or unalive. A moment of suspense and inconsequence
that can reveal nothing because it inscribes the limits of stories.

Yet this alien is not the “gaseous invertebrate” of negative theology – but an immanent
other, or as Miéville puts it, “a bad numinous, manifesting often at a much closer scale,
right up tentacular in your face, and casually apocalyptic” (Miéville 2012, 381). It is this
combination of inaccessibility and intimacy, I will argue, that makes the Weird apt for
thinking about the temporally complex politics of posthuman becoming.

2. Speculative Posthumanism

In Posthuman Life I argue for a position I call “Speculative posthumanism” (SP). SP

claims, baldly, that there could be posthumans: that is, powerful nonhuman agents
arising through some human-instigated technological process.
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I’ve argued that the best way to conceptualize the posthuman here is in terms of
agential independence – or disconnection. Roughly, an entity is posthuman if it is an
agent that can act outside of the “Wide Human” - the system of institutions, cultures,
and techniques which reciprocally depend on us biological (“narrow”) humans (Roden
2012; Roden 2014: 109-113).

Now, as Ray Brassier usefully remind us in the context of the realism debate, mind-
independence does not entail unintelligibility (“concept-independence”). This applies
also to the agential independence specified by the Disconnection Thesis (Brassier
2011, 58).

However, I think there are reasons to allow that posthumans could be effectively
uninterpretable for humans as they are presently constituted. That is, among the class
of possible posthumans – we have reason to believe that there might be radical aliens.

3. On the Very Idea the Radical Alien

Before I consider the grounds for the including radical aliens in Posthuman Possibility
Space, though, we need to consider why the very idea of the radical alien poses a problem
for our understanding of the concepts agency and interpretation. For in entertaining the
possibility of uninterpretable agents we seem to lay claim concept of agency that could not
be applied to certain of its instances, even in principle.

This can be stated as a three-way paradox.

1) The behaviour of radical aliens is not interpretable as actions.

2) Radical aliens are agents.

3) An entity whose behaviour cannot interpreted as actions is not an agent.

Each of these statements is incompatible with the conjunction of the other two; each
seems independently plausible.

Something has to give here. We might start with proposition 3.

3) implies a local correlationism for agency.

That is to say: the only agents are those amenable to “our” practices of interpretative
understanding. 3) denies that there could be evidence-transcendent agency such
procedures might never uncover.

Have we good reason to drop 3?

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I think we do. 3) entails that the set of agents would correspond to those beings who
are interpretable in principle by some appropriate “we” – humans, persons, etc. But in-
principle interpretability is ill-defined unless we know who is doing the interpreting.

That is, we would need to comprehend the set of interpreting subjects relevantly similar
to humans by specifying essential features of interpreterhood. This would require some
kind of a priori insight presumably, since we’re interested in the space of possible
interpreters and not just actual ones.

4. Meaning in a Shared World

How might we achieve this?

Well, we might seek guidance from a phenomenology of interpreting subjectivity to

specify its invariants (Roden 2014: Ch 3).

The idea goes something like this: Interpreters differ in many ways that are irrelevant to
their interpreterhood – differences in language, embodiment, gender, etc. However, if
there are essential features shared by all interpreters these might show up in the way
subjects relate to the world and to other subjects. Phenomenology has traditionally
been viewed as a powerful method for describing such relations. So if there are
minimal conditions for being an interpreter, maybe phenomenology can help us spell
them out.

Let’s put more bones on this.

Condition 3 in the paradox of the Radical Alien corresponds to what, in “Rational

Animals” Donald Davidson calls “the observability assumption”.

This states that “an observer can under favourable circumstances tell what beliefs,
desires, and intentions an agent has.” (Davidson 2001b: 99)

In other words if x is an agent, x must be interpretable given ideal conditions.

This commitment finds its home in a pragmatist approach for which the point of
psychological discourse is to evaluate actions and behavioural dispositions in the light
of expressible reasons. Belief-desire talk, accordingly, is not a folk theory about states
of the soul or brain, but a social “craft” for evaluating and predicting other rational
agents.

This view is committed to what I call the discursive agency thesis (DAT). DAT asserts
that agents must have the capacity for public language.

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For Davidson, this is because language allows each interpreter to triangulate the
attitudes of other interpreting agents by comparing their concepts. This intersubjectivity
presupposes that the interpreters understand that there is an objective world about
which one can be right or wrong and thus renders belief possible (Davidson 1984: 163,
170; 2001b: 104)).1 Without belief there can be no other propositional attitudes -
intentions or desires. Thus language constitutes belief, which in turn constitute agency.2

DAT gives us a strong answer the problem of specifying the conditions under which any
human or nonhuman can count as an interpreter:

Interpreters must understand the possibility of error and truth concerning a

common, baseline world; a capacity that demands facility with a language whose
structure permits the differentiation between things and the senses or guises under
which they are thought.

However, if triangulating demands the idea of an intersubjective world, what is the

content of this idea? What kind of world is this and under what conditions can two or
more creatures be thought to share it?

Clearly, one way we might parse this notion of co-worldliness is through some kind of
realist ontology.

But metaphysical realism does not seem able to explain the intersubjective field we are
referring to here as a “world”. If it is ontologically specific it cannot support the
observability assumption. If charity requires us to treat the interpretees as referring to
temporal slices of rabbits rather than enduring rabbits, we will need to cash out the
truth conditions for their beliefs accordingly. So radical interpretation might require us to
revise our ontology in order to specify the content of alien beliefs. On the other hand,
an ontologically neutral realism that is merely committed to some or other transcendent
reality carries no commitment to intersubjectivity at all.

Perhaps pragmatist accounts of thought and agency require a common world that is
not an abstract metaphysical posit, but is implicated, somehow, in agency and thought

1 The world can only constitute the baseline if there is “a coherent pattern in the behaviour of an agent” - between what
agents do, believe or express and the conditions under which action and expression occurs (Davidson 1984,: 159). Were
agents systematically duped or incoherent, this pattern would be absent; their behaviour would reveal nothing about
what they wanted to say, what they believed or desired.

2 Communication depends on each communicator having, and correctly thinking that the other has, the concept of a
shared world, an intersubjective world. But the concept of an intersubjective world is the concept of an objective world, a
world about which each communicator can have beliefs. (Davidson 2001, 105)
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itself. This, it seems, is where phenomenology stands to pick up the slack left by
realism.

Here’s how this could work:

I may hear a hammer falling off a workbench as the cat knocks it over. I may think of it
as a force amplifier, as a birthday present. but (so the story goes) the hammer could
always be referred to our viewed in other ways. A thing may appear under many
aspects, but its objectivity consists of the excess of its manifestations over any single
way of taking it (Mooney 1992).3 It is not the determinate thing of realist metaphysics,
but a determinable

However, unless each perspective already implied these others, we could not be aware
of something as an objective, reidentifiable thing. So each perspective must already
implicitly refer to other non-present perspective as part of its “horizon”. Since it already
implies an indeterminate multiplicity of viewpoints, horizontality accommodates the
openness to ontological revision required by radical interpretation without sacrificing
intersubjectivity.

Davidson’s idea of a common world can thus be parsed as the implicit understanding
that all horizons overlap. As Jeff Malpas puts it: “The world-horizon embodies the
presupposition that all horizons, no matter how different, are nevertheless situated
within the overall horizon of the one and only world”.4

This is only possible, however, if any perspective or project points to an open-textured

future for which it could constitute a past. Without this “anticipatory structure” (Malpas
1992: 128) little content can be given to the claim that local contexts nest in an
intersubjective world in which they could overlap in principle (Caputo 1984: 158;
Malpas 1992, 121).

Without anticipatory structure there is no overlapping of horizons – envelopment and

temporality go together. Conversely, the denial of a world horizon implies that might be
agents who are uninterpretable given any favourable modification of my current
situation. Statement 3 in the paradox of the alien would have to be rejected.

3 As Husserl puts it: ‘‘The’ thing itself is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless
multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one’s own and those of others”.

4 Given this envelopment of interpretative projects within the world, all interpretative projects could successfully grasp
the understandings of other interpreters following some ideal extension. I might not grasp the way you think of basil as a
cooking ingredient. My stereotype of basil may be desiccated leaves on supermarket shelves, while you take it fresh
from your garden. Given the opportunity to prepare and eat salads with you, though, I could begin to see basil from your
perspective. Your relation to basil is determinable for me, given a favourable extension of my horizon.
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5. Dark Phenomenology

Now, if phenomenology is to justify the claim that horizons overlap, the structure that
permits overlapping needs to be given in some way; if only implicitly.

This constraint would not be satisfied if the phenomenology of horizons were wholly or
significantly dark. A facet of conscious experience is ‘dark’ (or intuition-transcendent) if
having it confers no understanding of its nature, or a very minimal one. If there is a dark
side it is immune to the descriptive strategies with which phenomenologists gloss the
structure of experience.5

It might seem that dark phenomenology poses little threat to the phenomenology as a
philosophical method because it is not really part of its domain. It is just a speculative
metaphysical posit, whose existence can be “bracketed”. Conversely, dark
phenomenology would be a significant impediment if it could be shown not to be
disjoint from the rest of the domain.

In what follows, I will argue that dark phenomenology is not only conjoint but implicit in
phenomenological accounts of time which (as we have seen) underwrite
phenomenological accounts of the world by furnishing the open-texture of horizontal
intentionality.6

Before this, I want to limber up by motivating the claim that there is dark
phenomenology and - in the process, I hope - pre-empting any confusions about what
the dark phenomenology hypothesis involves.

I think evidence for the presence of a dark side can be gleaned from current debates
about phenomenal overflow and related concerns about the fine-grainedness of
perceptual experience. Whoever is right, the take-home moral here is that having
experience can leave us in the dark concerning its fine structure and nature.

5 This is not to say that it must be epistemically inaccessible altogether; though this too is not ruled out of course. Dark phenomena
might causally influence the behaviour of the experiencer without ever improving her capacity to describe them subjectively. Empirical
theories of dark phenomenology could furnish explanations these effects, implying that the access conditions for dark
phenomenology are similar to those the rest of the universe. However, when evaluating the implications of dark phenomenology for
phenomenological idea of the horizon, we need to consider an adjunct claim that I refer to as the “conjointness assumption”.

6 This argument for conjointness is, in a sense, deconstructive rather than empirical. Here I take draw on Derrida’s in his early essay
“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology” where he argues that the noema (or intentional content) of experience in Husserl’s
phenomenology has a problematic status. On the one hand it is not a real part of the world or a real part of mental life, while it opens
experience up to Being and to the totality of what exists. The noema, then, does not belong to any stable ontological structure while it
is the simultaneous conditions of possibility and impossibility of any determined structure. The implication here seems to be that
something about the noema eludes any conceptualisation or description - much as he later claims of the infrastructural conditions of
meaning and experience such as iterability, the trace and differance (Derrida 1978: 163).
I will not try to unpack Derrida’s argumentation here; merely note its form. It implies that the ontological commitments of
phenomenology overreach its epistemic and descriptive resources. In short, phenomenology to talk about stuff that it is beyond its
competence. Phenomenology cannot tell us what phenomenology really is.
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According to the phenomenal overflow thesis conscious perceptual experience
contains more information than we can recall, conceptualise or report. It follows that
phenomenal consciousness does not hinge on the ability to cognitively access its
content.

The overflow thesis is supported by experiments using a “partial report paradigm” that,
to some, suggest that visual experience contains more information than can be
accessed by working memory (Cohen and Dennett 2011: 358). In the 60’s George
Sperling found that subjects reported seeing all or almost all elements of an
alphanumeric array of twelve characters presented for 50 milliseconds followed by a
blank stimulus. However, they were only able to identify around four elements of the
array following the presentation. Information about the other elements was
demonstrably active, though, because subjects could report the contents of any row in
the array if cued before the test with a high, low or intermediate sound indicating which
row to attend to (Block 2007: 487).

Suffice it to say, that the overflow thesis is attacked by theorists who hold that state
consciousness depends on its accessibility to wider cognitive functions; hence that
consciousness entails attentional availability. Their standard move is to argue that the
information accessed in the test phase of the experiments could be unconsciously
represented prior to being accessed by working memory and entering the charmed
circle of consciousness.

To make this stick the no-overflow theorist needs to explain why subjects reported
seeing the presented arrays, despite being unable to identify most of their elements.
So, as Dennett and Cohen concede, even they need to commit to there being a
degenerate or generic phenomenology outside of focal attention (Cohen and Dennett:
360)

Fineness of grain arguments assume that there is a systematic difference between our
ability to discriminate differences in continuously varying perceptual qualities - e.g.
musical pitch - and our ability to recognise or identify relations along the continuum.7

7 Thus our ability to distinguish which of two pitch intervals is the larger is fairly accurate to a limit of around 16 cents or
hundredths of a semi-tone (Burns and Ward 1999: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/cents.html#c5).
However, the identification of musical categories - as instances of the fourth, augmented fourth or fifth say - exhibit
clustering around standard interval categories even when subjects are given the opportunity to express differences
between intervals on a continuous scale (Seigel and Seigel 1977), with differences more liable to be detected at the
category boundaries. Likewise, we seem to be much better at pairwise discriminating graduated shades of colour than
recognising them.
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So if our perceptual experience is significantly fine-grained in this way at all, there
would be appear to be more to our phenomenology than we can express in category
terms like “minor third” or “dark blue”.8

Phenomenal overflow and perceptual fineness of grain claims each support the dark
phenomenology thesis since each implies there is more to our phenomenology than we
can remember or describe.

However, they are not necessary for it. There is countervailing evidence which
suggests that subjects can impute more detail to the reported phenomenology that is
informationally present. For example, as Cohen and Dennett remark, if subjects of
change blindness tests were really aware of all the elements of successively presented
scenes that gull them, they would notice the change (Cohen and Dennett 2011: 360).
So perhaps the no-overflow critics are right: the fact that subjects in Sperling-type
experiments report seeing more characters than they can describe does not imply that
the letters were ineffably there in consciousness.

But on either hypothesis, phenomenology would have proved an unreliable yardstick

for its own description. That is: phenomenology can be dark without being dense.
When I hear of Xenakis’ early granular composition Concret Ph I feel overwhelmed by
the detail of the sonic particles. But perhaps my experience is more generic or “gist-
like” than I think - more like a gloss that with peaks of detail only where significant
fluctuations in timbre or grain density occur (Philips 2015: 237).9

If experience is fine grained then, as Thomas Metzinger has argued, the simplest
perceptual discriminations cannot be intuited because our concepts do not distinguish
between them. We lack the subjective identification conditions to recognise them on
distinct occasions and thus are trapped in a purely episodic awareness of them (82).

8 In “The Persistence of Phenomenology” Diane Raffman uses the gulf between identification and discrimination to argue that any
concepts we might use to introspect our perceptual experience will fail to capture the true structure of perceptual experience. If the
concepts that track phenomenal types are coarser than the underlying grain some of this phenomenology will go unrecognised and
unremembered.

9 Consider an eight second extract from Concret Ph. While the detailed patterns cannot be recalled in the way that a tonal melody
can, we are able to discriminate alterations in the grain cloud from one moment to the next. For example, most will distinguish an
eight second sequence from Concret Ph and a loop that repeats the first one-second slice of it for eight seconds because of the
obvious repetition in pitch and dynamics in the loop. However, telling the looped sequence from the non-looped sequence is not the
same as acquiring conceptual knowledge that would allow us to recognise the additional structure in the non-looped sequence (e.g.
within the entirety of Concret Ph).
Now, suppose our auditory perceptions are generic in both cases. That is, each is an impression of granular complexity rather than a
detailed “grain map”. This does not change the fact that we are unable to give more than a cartoon account of what is missing in the
loop, whether generic or “gisty".
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However, suppose the assumption of fineness is a phenomenological delusion of
riches. This also supports the claim that our phenomenology is dark (or at least
crepuscular).

Thus the case for dark side is stronger than the claims for dense or generic
phenomenology which independently support it. There are good grounds, then, for
believing that a solely “phenomenological” account of phenomenology will be liable to
mischaracterise it (See Roden 2013; 2005).

Some might complain that this argument depends on a confusion between

phenomenology and naive introspection. Phenomenology is not primarily concerned
with an inner mental life, but with the structure of our involvement with things. Maybe
we can’t intuit directly what we hear in Concret ph, but we have clever graphical tools
that can do this for us, and such modes of presentation as much manifestations of the
world horizon of this piece as our naive audition.

And of course, this takes us back to our wider problem of interpretation and agency.
Maybe some slack in our understanding of the micro-structure of perception is ok so
long as phenomenology can capture that slack an integral feature of our world horizon.

However, I think the problem is, if anything, more fraught when we come to consider
the structure of horizons. As we have seen, horizons require that each successive
experience or interpretative project is understood in the context of the past experience
that anticipates it.

Husserl famously postulates a triplicate structure of subjective time-consciousness to

explain this unity: 1) an intending of the current phase of the object; 2) a “retention” or
primary remembrance of the previous experience; 3) a “protention” which anticipates
the content to come. Husserl’s thinks this organization must be continuous and non-
atomistic. When I listen to a melody I do not hear a set of punctual nows corresponding
to each note. Instead each note retains the awareness of the past present notes.
Otherwise, I could not hear it enduring over time.

The “source-point” with which the “generation” of the enduring Object begins is a
primal impression. This consciousness is engaged in continuous alteration. The
actual […] tonal now is constantly changed into something that has been;
constantly, an ever fresh tonal now, which passes over into modification, peels
off. However, when the tonal now, the primal impression, passes over into
retention, this retention is itself again a now, an actual existent. While it itself is

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 actual (but not an actual sound), it is the retention of a sound that has been
(Husserl 1964: 50).

However, we need to consider whether this structure as it is theorised is intuitable or

intuition-transcendent - light or dark.

• If dark, then phenomenological temporality would be a metaphysical posit, at

best on a par with the unobservable postulated in natural science.

• We would then lack phenomenological grounds for asserting that the world as
we find it is a shared one; for then horizons would not be implicit in experience.

• If that were true, then the model of interpretation that goes with the
phenomenological conception of horizon would lack any phenomenological
basis.

I think the case for arguing that Husserlian temporality is dark can be made out by
noting that it ostensibly requires continuous structure. The temporal source point,
Husserl claims, must be continuously modified into retention. Without continuous
alteration, the operation would have gaps, as on the atomistic model (62). If it
postulated gaps, phenomenology would be committed to a dark phenomenology in any
case.

However, suppose every segment of a continuum is divisible into a further segment

with the same non-discrete characteristics. Unless intuition can handle infinite
complexity - a hyper fine-grain, if you will - apprehending the structure of temporality
appears as open-ended a task as the apprehension of any physical thing. So, as in
empirical discussions of phenomenal overflow - phenomenological ontology recedes
into the dark whether it is rich or poor.

It could be objected that I am making an elementary error here in treating the

continuum of self-awareness as a complex object with an actual infinity of parts.
Perhaps intuiting the continuum is more like figuring out the rule by which
consciousness of the now comes to retain that now as immediately past.10 I can
understand the addition rule without carrying out every addition, so I can intuit how the
alteration happens without having to intuit every instance of it

10 It is probably correct to say that Husserl did not think that the temporal continuum was composed of independently subsisting bits (62).
Robert Dostal puts this well: “The present, for [Husserl], is not the nondimensional point of the instantaneous now. Rather, we might say
that the present is ‘thick’ to the extent that, within the present, we find both the past and the future; that is, we find all three dimensions of
time” (Dostal 1993: 125).
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However, the question still arises: over what regions and at what phenomenological
scales does this rule apply? There are no gaps only if the rule applies continuously, at
every scale. No finite phenomenological subject could ever complete an assay of this
nested structure. It is, as David Wood has argued, a metaphysical explanation made on
epistemological rather than phenomenological grounds (Wood 2001: 78-9).

So Husserlian temporality exceeds any plausible doctrine of phenomenological

evidence (If the Husserlian account is true, we cannot know that it is true).

But if phenomenology cannot provide an adequate account of phenomenological

temporality, it is not in a favourable position to assay the structure of horizons or
worlds; since it exceeds the limits of any plausible organ of intuition or reflection.

Otherwise put, if temporality is dark, phenomenology cannot tell us what

phenomenology is, what the structure of horizons are or, indeed, whether there are
horizons at all.11

As philosopher and science fiction writer R. Scott Bakker argues, this enveloping
darkness is just what we might expect given what he has christened “Blind Brain
Theory”. BBT states that brains are not specially adapted for understanding
themselves. This is because the informational channels through we interpret and reflect
on ourselves have to ignore the causal complexity that sustains them. We seem
supernatural, Bakker writes, “because we cannot cognize ourselves as natural, and so
cognize ourselves otherwise” (Bakker 2014).

A similar position is developed by Metzinger. He argues that the phenomenological world

is the content of a simulation that only seems to be correlated with a transcendent world
because we are incapable of experiencing it as a simulation. The world “out there” and our
“inner” life appear not to be modelled or simulated only because we are not aware of the
processes that generate them – they are transparent, to use a term coined by Michael Tye.
Metzinger calls this constraint “autoepistemic closure”. It explains selfhood and Being-in-
the-World (Dasein) as a specific computational strategy. If selfhood results from higher-

11 Obviously, it can provide speculative theories – and Husserl’s is very good one – but these are epistemologically on a par with any
scientific or metaphysical account of a transcendent reality. They do not provide transcendental constraints on experience.
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order modelling of subpersonal processes, there is a rationale for keeping the
representational load incurred by the model to a minimum.12

Thus transcendental phenomenology cannot assure us that our world is horizontally open
or shared in the sense required by Davidson, and there are naturalistic grounds for
expecting precisely this incapacity. As Bakker has put, it: “the deliverances of the
phenomenological eye cannot be ontological [as opposed to ontic]”. Thus phenomenology
cannot support the pragmatist-interpretationist line on agency articulated in the third part of
the alien paradox.

6. The Alien Shore

If transcendental phenomenology and similar post-Kantian projects (see Roden

Forthcoming) fail to delimit a priori conditions for agency we should embrace what I call
Anthropologically Unbounded Posthumanism. AUP rejects all a priori constraints on the
space of posthuman possibility.

Unbounded Posthumanism denies any warrant for assuming that a serious agent must be
a Kantian or Davidsonian "subject of discourse" able to measure its performances against
shared norms. For all anyone knows, posthuman agency could be weird. Cthulhu-weird.
Or Area X weird, but no less considerable than ours.13 Unbounded Posthumanism is, thus
a Dark Posthumanism. Following the lead of speculative realists and theorists such as
Claire Colebrook, it requires us to confront a future beyond horizons of intelligibility. What if
it does not belong to subjects for whom ethics, let alone the norms of some shared “space
of reason” is applicable? With Colebrook it asks how we orient towards “life beyond

12 Now, it might be objected that there are phenomenologies of time which do not require us to assume epistemic
super powers. Perhaps, Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s temporality is in better shape because it doesn’t require a
continuous synthesis of “nows” which causes phenomenological ontology to overreach intuition.
However, I suspect any phenomenology of time is subject to this epistemological indeterminacy. One way of seeing
this is to think about the way Derrida’s deconstructive account of temporality renders phenomenological accounts of
temporal difference metaphysically promiscuous or topic-neutral. As Martin Hägglund has argued in his book Radical
Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Derrida’s trace and differance condition time “in all fields of the living” and
perhaps in the non-living too. Paul Cilliers (again following Derrida’s lead in “Freud and the Scene of Writing” 1978:
196-231) uses this differential conception of time to complicate the geometric conception at the heart of the state
space model of representation in neural networks (Cilliers 2002; Roden 2005).
Once they allow that the present is tilled by difference – which it certainly seems to be - philosophers can postulate a
differential operator for it. But if phenomenology cannot resolve the issue of overflow or density it is hardly likely to
resolve whether this operator is subjectlike; or whether, as Hägglund has argued, the relation to different moment is
a “deferral or delay” that haunts all material becoming. The difference between phenomenology and speculative
metaphysics dissolves, or seems to, since it was never tenable
So my point is not that we should adopt a deconstructionist account of time rather than a phenomenological one. We can use our
intuition of time, such as it is, to support a Deleuzean account of the virtual or an austere naturalistic process ontology along Sellarsian
lines. Again, something like Whitehead’s account of actual occasions seems consistent with everything we have described (Shaviro
2012).

13 Bioethicists who take the long view will need to bracket any privileging of anthropoform subjects. For sure, subjects or moral persons
may deserve consideration; but we cannot preclude the existence of non-Kantian agents no less deserving of consideration.
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humanity, beyond ethics and politics” (Colebrook 2014: 148). Who, moreover, is this “we”,
the collective on behalf of which this question is being asked?

However, it must be admitted that this negation has problematic implications for
Speculative Posthumanism itself. My disconnection thesis is, after all, articulated in terms
of agential independence. There are lots of ontologically uninteresting ways things can fall
outside the human socio-technical network through being discarded or unused. Lacking
some kind of agency constraint, it seems, the disconnection thesis could accord
posthuman status to hulks, ruins and ocean born plastics.

But my preceding argument has floated the possibility of agents that would be
unamenable to our practices of ascribing agency. So one might ask what content is of a
constraint that we - even an ideal “we” - might not be able to observe?

I’ve suggested that this question can be posed against a pragmatist account of agency
that rigorously denies such a possibility. Now this also seems to imply anti-reductionist
account of the relation between mental and physical descriptions of the world. Following
Davidson, mental state ascription depend holistically on overall assessments of rationality;
whereas ascriptions of physical states and laws do not (Davidson 2001: 219-223). From
this he infers that there can be no psychophysical laws linking the two kinds of state. If this
is broadly right, then I think it helps us describe the kind of entity that would “break” radical
interpretation.

To do this I will assume that there could be agents far more capable of altering their physical
structure than current humans. If one wishes, one could envisage a kind of robot capable of
scanning its internal states and making fine alterations to them. I call such an agent “hyperplastic” if
it can make arbitrarily fine changes to its structure without compromising its agency or its capacity
for hyperplasticity (Roden 2014, 101-2; Roden Unpublished). If the pragmatist account of mental
state ascription is broadly right and implies anti-reductionism, it follows that the hyperplastic can
never predict the psychological consequences of its self-manipulations.

This follows from the denial of robust psychophysical laws. Moreover, empirical
generalisations based on the results of earlier interventions would not be much help.
These might be reliable for merely plastic creatures whose design is stable over time. But
a hyperplastic agent is protean. Psychophysical generalisations holding over one phase of
its existence are not liable to extend into another phase in which its functional organisation
might be quite different.

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Suppose that any hyperplastic agent will have a basic Agenda at a particular point in its
career. That is, it will not tinker with its internal states arbitrarily but be disposed to do so in
ways that do not kill it or undermine its capacity for hyperplasticity.

It follows that a hyperplastic Agenda cannot be psychologically expressible because no

reliable inferences can be drawn from its current physical state to its future psychology.
This constraint would apply equally to its interactions with other hyperplastics. There would
be no more point attributing beliefs and desires to other hyperplastics than there would be
in self-attributing them. If we or our wide descendants approached hyperplasticity, then,
folk psychology would not be theoretically superseded but instrumentally eliminated.

Thus a hyperplastic agent would be radically uninterpretable for creatures for whom
propositional reasoning retains an important cognitive or metacognitive role. There would
be no intelligible sense in which their horizons could overlap with ours.

Thus to “read” hyperplastics in the wild we might have to become more radically plastic
ourselves – more like the amorphous, disgusting Shoggoths of Lovecraft’s At the
Mountains of Madness. Encountering such an entity could induce the mental and body
derangements and metamorphoses that Lovecraft and VanderMeer detail lovingly in their
fictions.

Shoggothic hermeneutics is currently beyond us – if only for lack of such flexible

interlocutors. But the idea of an encounter that shakes and desolates us, transforming us
in ways that may be incommunicable to outsiders, is not. It is the unnarratable otherworldly
that the Weird tells in broken analogies, agonies and elisions. Thus, as mooted Weird
Aesthetics is perhaps more serviceable as a model for our relationship to the speculative
posthuman than a totalizing conception of agency. Does this imply that disconnection is
best parsed is an an aesthetic claim about our relationship to an uncertain technological
future, rather than an ontology of human-posthuman difference?

I think our relationship to the posthuman as conceived by the disconnection thesis needs
to be interpreted aesthetically, if only because it is designed to articulate our ignorance. It
affords no substantive understanding of posthuman possibility per se. Producing this is a
matter of engineering, not philosophy, and thus precedes indeterminately, without criteria.
Posthuman prospects can be identified or evaluated only by making or becoming
posthumans by producing the very forms of life from which their “evaluation” can proceed.
As Steven Shaviro asks:

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 ‘How can we come to terms with forms of “knowledge” whose very effect is to
change who “we” are? How do we judge these disciplines, when they undermine, or
render irrelevant, the very norms and criteria that we use to ground our judgments?
(Shaviro 2012: 15)

No current practice of assigning agency circumscribes the field of real or prospective

agents. So the agency constraint should not be viewed as laying down a constitutive
condition. It uses the concept of agency as raw material for its deconstruction and
reformatting; in so doing, exposing the lacunae in our relationship to the future. In
confronting the posthuman future, then, we are more like the broken time traveller,
encountering the alien on the terminal beach than a voyager through the space of
reasons.

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