The story of humanity and the challenge of posthumanity

Abstract

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the fate of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal.

Between responsibility and escape: The future as an object of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences

“…As such, the ‘posthuman’ was addressed by Haraway as a full-of-potential, but also incomplete subject, which had a kind of future imminence in technological liberation. Haraway has often been praised as an emancipatory thinker of queer, and there is no reason to dispute that, but Zoltan Simon proposes, and I think he is right, that there is a definite link between posthuman understandings in the current day humanities and social sciences, and so-called transhumanist concerns with the future of human enhancement (Simon, 2019). This is not dissimilar to how a vulgar kind of futurist activity in consultancy, space travel and so on could proliferate in the Cold War era around some of the postulates of futurism as social theory – for instance the idea of rejecting all limits as ‘future determinism’ or ‘colonization of time’.…”

“…In the words of Zoltan Simon, the challenge of posthumanity is a weirdly dialectical one: posthumanism postulates a key break with Enlightenment legacies all the while apparently reproducing some of the very worst aspects of Enlightenment thinking: the hyperrationality of technological engineering, eugenics and species annihilation. As such, ‘there is no such thing as humanity’ makes human history impossible and opens the question of whether it is even possible to engage with the future without a clear anchoring in the history of what it is to be human (Jordheim, 2022; Simon, 2019). Arguably, the discomfort with the idea of a human future makes the humanities and social sciences badly equipped, in the present, to participate in a democratic dialogue with the problem of the future.…”

Westworld: “Los placeres violentos poseen finales violentos”

“…Así, el prefijo del poshumanismo no alude necesariamente a un momento posterior en el sentido de avance; es un nuevo comienzo que nos devuelve al principio, a las tensiones y contradicciones del humanismo, a superar lo humano reconociendo las cualidades propias de la condición humana y las posibilidades que ofrece la tecnología (Simon, 2019). Las máquinas de Westworld están creadas para satisfacer a los humanos y dar forma a sus fantasías, renovando el mito de Pigmalión con unas consecuencias parecidas: lo simulado supera a lo real, las copias sustituyen en el deseo a los referentes (Seaman-Grant, 2017 Westworld: "Los placeres violentos poseen finales violentos" enlaza también con ideas más optimistas, como las de Donna Haraway, quien establece en su manifiesto cíborg (1990) que el desarrollo tecnológico permite imaginar versiones alternativas de lo humano, con una ética renovada que surge de la reconfiguración o fusión de algunas categorías modernas, como el género o las dualidades entre lo natural y lo artificial o la ficción y la realidad.…”

The Transformation of Historical Time

“…They can be optimistic and utopian not only when they evoke the modern time regime in connection with a retained hope of human betterment, but also when they claim to escape its confines. Sometimes even transhumanists are not aware of the difference between improving on already existing human capacities and aiming at better-than-human capacities (Simon 2018c). They tend to claim compatibility with Enlightenment ideals of progress in the human condition and simultaneously announce much stronger programs "to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage" (More 2013: 4).…”