“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


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Proverbs of a Post-Posthumanist

horreo ergo sum

Donna Haraway gave up the term "posthumanism" in 2006. Why haven't you?
You're not supposed to leave Videodrome thinking "Long Live the New Flesh."
When you are cut, you bleed.
You are really a correlationist in disguise if you are fixated on the flesh creeping demise of humanity.
Foucault's face in the sand requires an ocean to erase it. What makes you think you are part of that ocean?
Isn't the quintessence of humanism to be horrified? Pascal, Descartes, Zizek.
Isn't horror fundamentally idealist? Esse est horrere.
The "tear-jerking modern rift"* of subject-object dualism wasn't stimulating enough. You require more of the same stimulation.
Yours is the latest in a series of sadistic consumerist pleasures that situate part of your experience at an infinite distance from the object of experience. As Julia says in Hellraiser, “You wanted to see. You wanted to know.”
How many more reruns of Frankenstein before we get it?
Humanism is already a fractured relationship with the inhuman. That's the problem, not the solution.
You laugh at the poor deluded lab rats in their cages when you laugh at humans as poor deluded lab rats in their cage of science. In so doing, you only laugh at yourself. Same old same old. Down with the weak. Down with the abject other.
The thrill of the “post-” is predicated on the abjection of the “sub-.”
One second of compassion is more disturbing than 2000 years of sadomasochistic thrills.
You have not yet learnt that "There is no metalanguage," for all your cynicism.
You are not yet human.


“When you're finished playing with your box, can you please help us? Love, 20 000 polar bears.”


*Graham Harman



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've always thought the anti-humanisms and post-humanisms were a bit odd precisely for the reason at the end of this text. Somewhere in Marx's early writings he speaks of communism as the birth of history, not the end of it...and at the same time as the emergence not of 'the new man' but of humanity as such.

'Human' history is always the pre-history of humanity from that perspective. Isn't that also the point of someone like Beckett in his 'fail again. Fail better'?