Yesterday a friend of mine related a criticism of posthumanism often heard from colleagues: What is the point of posthumanism if the analysis is still conducted by humans? I think this is a good question. The term postmodernism is itself a highly contested term, meaning a variety of different things, so the question is difficult to answer in a way that will satisfy everyone. For example, there are the posthumanisms of the transhumanists that imagine fundamentally transforming the human through technological prostheses and genetics. More recently, David Roden has imagined a pre-critical posthumanism that entertains the possibility of the emergence of a new type of intelligent species altogether that would arise from humans, but would no longer be human. Such a posthumanism would be genuinelyposthuman.
While I am intrigued by both of these conceptions of posthumanism, this is not the way in which I intend the term. As I understand it, a position is posthumanist when it no longer privileges human ways of encountering and evaluating the world, instead attempting to explore how other entities encounter the world. Thus, the first point to note is that posthumanism is not the rejection or eradication of human perspectives on the world, but is a pluralization of perspectives. While posthumanism does not get rid of the human as one way of encountering the world, it does, following a great deal of research in post-colonial theory, feminist thought, race theory, gender theory, disability studies, and embodied cognition theory, complicate our ability to speak univocally and universally about something called the human. It recognizes, in other words, that there are a variety of different phenomenologies of human experience, depending on the embodied experience of sexed beings, our disabilities, our cultural experiences, the technologies to which our bodies are coupled, class, etc. This point is familiar from the humanist cultural and critical theory of the last few decades. Posthumanism goes one step further in arguing that animals, microorganisms, institutions, corporations, rocks, stars, computer programs, cameras, etc., also have their phenomenologies or ways of apprehending the world.
I think this is a point that is often missed about OOO. OOO is as much a theory of perspectives, a radicalization of phenomenology, as it is a theory of entities. While the various strains of OOO differ amongst themselves, they all share this thesis in common. There is a phenomenologyfor, notof, every type of entity that exists. One of Graham Harmans central claims is that the difference between a Kantian subject and any other object is a difference indegree, not a difference inkind. When Harman claims this, his point is that just as Kantian subjects structure the world in a particular way such that they never encounter things-as-they-are-in-themselves, the same is true for all other entities as they relate to the world. Atoms structure the world in a particular way, just as red pandas structure the world in a particular way. No entity directly encounters the other entities of the world as they are. InThe Democracy of Objects I argue that every object is anobserver or particular point of view on the world, and propose, following Niklas Luhmann, that we need to engage in second-order observation or the observation of how other observers observe or encounter the world about them. InAlien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost proposes a new type of phenomenology, not unlike Jakob von Uexkulls animal ethology, that investigates how nonhuman entities such as cameras and computer programs encounter the world. In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton formulates a similar idea with his account of strange strangers.
This is one of the things that makes the realism of OOO weird. Far from defending one true perspective on the world, OOO instead pluralizes perspectives infinitely, arguing that each entity has its own way of encounter the world about it. It is a radicalization of perspectivism. It is an ontology that is fascinated by how bats, cats, shark, tanuki, NASA, quarks, computer games, and black holes experience or encounter the world around them. The realism of OOO is thus not a realism that says this is the one true way of encountering things, but rather is a realism that refuses to reduce any entity to what it is for another entity. The tanuki or Japanese raccoon dog (right) cant be reduced to how we encounter it. It is an irreducible and autonomous entity in its own right that also encounters the world about it in a particular way.
Hence the all important distinction between phenomenology-of and phenomenology-for. A phenomenology-of investigates how we, us humans, encounter other entities. It investigates what entities are for-us, from our human perspective. It is humanist in the sense that it restricts itself to our perspective on the beings of the world. Though phenomenology has made significant strides in overcoming these problems, it is nonetheless problematic in that it assumes a universality to human experience. For example, this phenomenology tends to gloss over the worlds of autistics like Temple Grandin, blind people, gendered bodies and how the world is experienced differently by different sexed bodies, people from different cultures, etc. Even though it talks endlessly about perspectives (horizons), it nonetheless tends to universalize the perspective of its own lived experience. Luhmann explains well just why this is so, insofar as all observation is based on a prior distinction that contains a blind spot that is unable to mark what it excludes.
By contrast, phenomenology-for is a phenomenological practice that attempts to observe the manner in which another entity experiences the world. Where phenomenology-of adopts the first person perspective of how I experience the world, where phenomenology-of begins from the unity of that first person perspective on the world and what things are in the world for me, phenomenology-for begins from the disunity of a world fractured into a plurality of perspectives and attempts to enter into the perspectives of these other entities. In Luhmannian terms, it attempts to observe the other observer or observe how another observer observes the world. It begins not from the standpoint of the sameness of experience, but from the standpoint of the difference of experience.
The plate to the left drawn from Jakob von UexkullsForay into the Worlds of Animals and Humans gives a sense of this alien phenomenology. The top picture depicts how humans experience a field of flowers, while the bottom picture depicts how bees experience a field of flowers. Von Uexkull doesnt ask what are bees like or for us?, but instead asks the question what is the world like for bees? In other words, von Uexkull adopts the perspective of thebee and attempts to infer how bees experience the world. He is able to learn something of the experience of bees through a knowledge of their physiology and optics that allows him to infer what their vision is like, through observation of their behavior, through observation of their responsiveness in situations where we can discern no stimuli that they would be responding to (thereby allowing him to infer that theyre open to stimuli that we cant sense), etc. Alien phenomenology thus practices a different transcendental epoche. Rather than bracketing belief in the natural world to attend to the givens of our intentional experience alone, he instead brackets our intentionality, so as to investigate the experience of other entities. This is a practice that can be done with armies, stock markets, computer programs, rocks, etc.
It is natural, of course, to ask how this is evenpossible. Arent we still the ones examining the experience of other beings and thus arent we ultimately talking about the experience of ourselves and not the experience of other beings? To be sure, we are always limited by our own experience and, as Thomas Nagel pointed out, we cant know what it is like to be a bat. However, all this entails is that we cant have the experience of a bat, not that we cant understand a great deal about bat experience, what theyre open to, what theyre not open to, and why they behave as they do.
The problem is not markedly different from that of understanding the experience of another person. Take the example of a wealthy person who denounces poor people as being lazy moochers who simply havent tried to improve their condition. Such a person is practicing phenomenology-of, evaluating the poor person from the standpoint of their own experience and trying to explain the behavior of the poor person based on the sorts of things that would motivate them. They reflect little understanding of poverty. They are blissfully unaware of the opportunities that they had because of where they are in the social field, of the infrastructure they enjoy that gives them opportunity, the education they were fortunate enough to receive, etc., etc., etc. All of this is invisible to them because, as Heidegger taught us, it is so close it is not seen at all. As a consequence, the wealthy person assumes that the poor person has all these things. However, we can imagine the wealthy person practicing something like alien phenomenology or second-order observation, thereby developing an appreciation of how the world of poverty inhibits opportunity. Prior to developing this understanding, the wealthy person behaves like the person with vision who berates a blind person for not seeing a sign.
Clearly there is a difference between the person who is completely blind to the experience of others, assuming their experience is identical, and the person who has some understanding of others. Take the example of the man who screams at his infant child for crying and beats her. If we look at this person with disgust and contempt, then it is not simply because this person beats the infant, but also because his abuse is premised on the idea that infants can understand screaming and yelling and modify their action accordingly. This person is unable to adopt the perspective of the infant and is unaware of how infants experience the world. As a result, he relates to the infant in brutal and cruel ways.
Link:
Thoughts on Posthumanism | Larval Subjects .
