Workshop “Entanglements,” organized by Dana Bönisch

Introduction

I want to start this conversation by discussing posthumanism from the perspective of its political potential and limitation. Following Jacques Derrida’s reading of Walter Benjamin, I construe the political as the practice of deciding in common. Deciding literally means performing a cut, (French, trancher, Latin, de-cidere) within a complex reality in order to determine what should or should not be; the common ground assuring the legitimacy of a political decision is itself the result of a more fundamental, institutive decision regarding what constitutes this ground. The institutive decision itself—as shown by Benjamin in Critique of Violence—is ungroundable. It has a necessarily contingent character. Therefore, every decision is grounded on an undecidable.

In posthumanist theories, the political—understood as the practice of deciding in common with regard to the commons—shifts toward questions of ethics. What I find interesting and would like to submit to your attention is that this shift is present in critical posthumanism and transhumanism alike, whereas they have very little in common—besides the term “posthuman” that they construe widely differently. However, I find it intriguing that two widely different conceptions of the posthuman subjectivity, the transhumanist one that reiterates the autonomous subject of liberal humanism, on the one hand, the critical posthumanist one marked by its questioning of autonomy and sovereignty, on the other, both lead to a privileging of ethics as a way of understanding sociality.

The commonality of the shift towards ethics begs the question as to why the political is repressed from the horizon of the Posthuman. What transhumanist and posthumanist ethics have in common is, as I would argue, a tendency to disregard the structural character of power in every sociality. For instance, questions like “who can speak?” “whose voice can be heard?” and “in whose name?” as asked by postcolonial theories need to be heard in the context of critical posthumanism. Regarding “climate-as-commons,” the indigenous anthropologist Zoe Todd criticizes the “ontological turn” in anthropology and posthumanism for being solidly anchored in Western thought and ignoring indigenous voices on these issues. What would it imply to take these voices into account besides citing them? This question is open. I limit myself here to showing how ethics supersedes the political in transhumanism and critical posthumanism in relation to their understanding of subjectivity. 

Transhumanist Subjectivity

The transhumanist subject does not conceive of itself as situated. Instead, this subject is characterized by its claim to speak from nowhere in particular yet in the name of everyone—using concepts like “human nature,” “progress,” “choice,” and “rationality.” In a recent paper I wrote on this issue, I analyze writings by Max More, Nick Bostrom, Julian Savulescu—the philosophers among the transhumanists—to argue that bare life, meaning infra-political life, is the primary object of the transhumanist discourse. Bare life has to submit to extropy as a moral principle that opposes entropy as the tendency of every system towards the dispersion of energy. Extropy is the moral obligation toward progress, optimization, life extension. 

In transhumanism, a life is “good” when it is optimal when it has deployed all its creative and productive potential. The abject of the transhumanist discourse is the life that is marked by what transhumanism sees as a lack: from illness to violence and racism, Bostrom establishes a continuum. Life is not good in relation to the social relationships of which it is part. It is good because it is a lively life, because it produces a surplus of bare life, because it has repressed its lack and negativity. When life is construed as bare life and when extropy is the moral guiding principle, the kind of discourse that dominates is bioethics. 

In her analysis of neo-liberal rationality, Wendy Brown analyzes the wariness of theorists of neoliberalism like Friedrich Hayek concerning the political and the social. Emerging after WWII, neoliberal ideology rejects the political and the social out of suspicion for the totalitarian tendencies it had shown a few decades before. Instead, in Hayek’s eyes, the regulation of society has to be limited to two principles: on the one hand, the naturalized mechanisms of the economy; on the other, conservative, heteronormative, family-focused morals. Using Wendy Brown’s analysis, I argue that free-market economy and bioethics aiming at regulating “personal” and “family” choices become the only available tools to think about the highly political question of who or what can live and who is let to die. Transhumanism bears trace of a shift away from biopolitics toward bioethics.

Here, I would like to note two things: first, the focus on bare life as a creative and productive force, as vitality, as productive desire, constitutes a troubling commonality between transhumanism and critical posthumanism à la Rosi Braidotti. Second, my impression, open to discussion, is that the current emphasis on an affirmative ethics of desire, life force, and liveliness is tightly coupled to a valorization of bare life as a vital force that is all too susceptible to be exploited and extracted by neoliberal capitalism. 

Critical Posthumanist Ethics

Critical posthumanist subjectivity has little in common with its transhumanist counterpart; it is situated and embodied. Critical posthumanist ethics is relational. Following Karen Barad, ethics is the response to and responsibility for the other with which “I” am always already intimately entangled. Such a response is particular to each given entanglement out of which human and other-than-human relata emerge and co-determine each other in intra-action. The relata in relation all share a part of agency in the process of codetermination. 

Regarding the political practice of decision, I would like to focus on the question of entanglement present in Karen Barad and Donna Haraway because it constitutes, in my opinion, the most exciting transformation induced by critical posthumanism. In the experiment on quantum physics, the observer is part of the apparatus that includes the machine. Because the relation is primary, it is not self-evident at which point the apparatus begins or ends, where the observed ends and the observer begins. However, for the experiment to produce a result, a “cut”—another word for de-cision—has to be made, which separates the subject from the object, the observer from the observed. How does this cut happen and who performs it? Critical posthumanism does not provide any answer yet. While the moment of decision, of separation, of exclusion is implied in critical posthumanism, the asymmetry of power necessary to “make a cut” stays unaccounted for, because of the symmetry implied by the concept of intra-action. While it is one thing to be responsibly entangled with more-than-human beings and machines, it is another thing altogether to make a cut, to distinguish between what will be taken into account and what will be let out of consideration. None of the scientific, social, and political phenomena can be satisfactorily described without acknowledging a certain level asymmetry in agency and power.

The Political

Decisions do occur, and not every kind of decision, response, and action has the same impact or the same legitimacy. So my question is how to reintroduce the question of power and its unequal repartition into the critical posthumanist framework. How to think about the asymmetry that is present in every intra-acting entanglement? How can we think about the political as a practice of deciding in common about the commons while upholding the posthumanist critique of the autonomous and sovereign subject inherited from Enlightenment humanism? If we maintain that every decision, be it guided by artificial intelligence, happens against the backdrop of undecidability and unknowability, there is no necessity to resort to a sovereign subject to conceive of the political practice of deciding together. One only needs to acknowledge that decisions are always limited, deficient, contingent, in short, only grounded in the ungroundable force of power.