“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
7 comments:
One wonders if the trouble with post-teleological thought is that its teleological?
http://www.scitalk.org.uk/
-Just listening to your lectures on iTunes. This website sounds like the one you fantasised about where humanities people and scientists get together to share ideas.
- The trouble with posthumanism is the same as with "The Trouble with Harry", it's a massive pile of wank. Anything with a "post" in it is teleological: fences, telegraph pylons, the postal service. If the only way you can articulate a radical break is by artificially prefixing your antecedents' name with a "post" then you're in trouble. It's too much of a disavowal and traps you into the same modes of thought. Anything more teleological than "pre" and "post" anything?
I always find that accusing some theory or school of thought as teleological reveals a very teleological leaning in itself. The pursuit of a non-teleological thinking seems to me an attempt to find the "ultimate" theory which would be ideally open-ended and, thus, appliable for the rest of History. In its turn, theories with very specific goals assume (deep down) that they are contingent and expect that other ways of thinking will interrupt them and change them.
Perhaps its strongest teleology comes from the assumption that we were once pre-human, then human, and now past all that with the posthuman. I would like to argue, like Latour and Harraway, that we were never human to begin with. Therefore, the posthuman is not a particularly useful category for creating interesting new questions about our world and our place in it.
But only if you actually take the "post" preffix as a real marker of temporality and sequentiation, which, as Cary Wolfe puts it, is not necessarily so. Posthumanism comes both before and after humanism, and doesn't necessarily have to be seen as an "ism" of the posthuman, but it can rather be a "post" to humanism.
It is indeed a question of whether you're going to look at it as a posthuman-ism or a post-humanism, but on both cases I like to think of the "post" as a crisis rather than an after.
That is precisely my issue with it, J Rodolfo. Posthumanism suffers from the same hubris that postmodernism suffered vis a vis Romanticism: assuming that Romanticism was a naive metaphysics of presence was a huge rookie mistake (easily avoided by reading a few Romantic poems). To this extent Romanticism is already postmodernism, even more so than postmodernism as such.
Likewise humanism is already the crisis of which you speak. Claiming that you are "post" humanism is precisely the problem. Humanism is already not a naive anthropocentrism.
More succinctly: claiming that a phenomenon comes "before and after" another one is precisely teleological.
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