Architecture readings and a 300-word comment

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 81

anthropocentric humanism, which predicates the sovereignty of Sameness in a falsely universalistic mode, my sex fell on the side of ‘Otherness’, understood as pejorative difference, or as being-worth-less-than. The becoming-posthuman speaks to my feminist self, partly because my sex, historically speak- ing, never quite made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable and never to be taken for granted.

The Posthuman as Becoming-earth

The displacement of anthropocentrism results in a drastic restructuring of humans’ relation to animals, but critical theory may be able to adjust itself to the challenge, mostly by building on the multiple imaginary and affective ties that have consolidated human–animal interaction. The post- anthropocentric shift towards a planetary, geo-centred per- spective, however, is a conceptual earthquake of an altogether different scale than the becoming-animal of Man. This event is sending seismic waves across the fi eld of the Humanities and critical theory. Claire Colebrook, with her customary wit, calls it a ‘critical climate change’.5

In the age of anthropocene, the phenomenon known as ‘geo-morphism’ is usually expressed in negative terms, as environmental crisis, climate change and ecological sustain- ability. Yet, there is also a more positive dimension to it in the sense of reconfi guring the relationship to our complex habitat, which we used to call ‘nature’. The earth or planetary dimension of the environmental issue is indeed not a concern like any other. It is rather the issue that is immanent to all others, in so far as the earth is our middle and common ground. This is the ‘milieu’ for all of us, human and non- human inhabitant of this particular planet, in this particular era. The planetary opens onto the cosmic in an immanent materialist dimension. My argument is that, again, this change of perspective is rich in alternatives for a renewal of subjectiv- ity. What would a geo-centred subject look like?

5 This is the title of the on-line book series that Colebrook edits for the Open Humanities Press.

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The starting point for me remains the nature–culture con- tinuum, but by now we need to insert into this framework the monistic insight that, as Lloyd put it, we are all ‘part of nature’ (1994). This statement, which she frames in a monis- tic ontology based on Spinoza’s philosophy, is sobering as well as inspiring. It is further complicated, for us citizens of the third millennium, by the fact that we actually inhabit a nature–culture continuum which is both technologically mediated and globally enforced. This means that we cannot assume a theory of subjectivity that takes for granted natu- ralistic foundationalism, nor can we rely on a social construc- tivist and hence dualistic theory of the subject which disavows the ecological dimension. Instead, critical theory needs to fulfi l potentially contradictory requirements.

The fi rst is to develop a dynamic and sustainable notion of vitalist, self-organizing materiality; the second is to enlarge the frame and scope of subjectivity along the transversal lines of post-anthropocentric relations I outlined in the previous section. The idea of subjectivity as an assemblage that includes non-human agents has a number of consequences. Firstly, it implies that subjectivity is not the exclusive prerogative of anthropos; secondly, that it is not linked to transcendental reason; thirdly, that it is unhinged from the dialectics of rec- ognition; and lastly, that it is based on the immanence of relations. The challenge for critical theory is momentous: we need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encom- passing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language.

Let us pause on the latter for a minute, as it raises the issue of representation, which is crucial for the Humanities and for critical theory. Finding an adequate language for post-anthropocentrism means that the resources of the imag- ination, as well as the tools of critical intelligence, need to be enlisted for this task. The collapse of the nature–culture divide requires that we need to devise a new vocabulary, with new fi gurations to refer to the elements of our posthuman embodied and embedded subjectivity. The limitations of the social constructivist method show up here and need to be compensated by more conceptual creativity. Most of us who were trained in social theory, however, have experienced at

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least some degree of discomfort at the thought that some elements of our subjectivity may not be totally socially con- structed. Part of the legacy of the Marxist Left consists, in fact, in a deeply rooted suspicion towards the natural order and green politics.

As if this mistrust of the natural were not enough, we also need to reconceptualize the relation to the technological arte- fact as something as intimate as close as nature used to be. The technological apparatus is our new ‘milieu’ and this intimacy is far more complex and generative than the pros- thetic, mechanical extension that modernity had made of it. Throughout this change of parameters, I also want to be ever mindful of the importance of the politics of locations and keep investigating who exactly is the ‘we’ who is positing all these queries in the fi rst place. This new scheme for rethinking posthuman subjectivity is as rich as it is complex, but it is grounded in real-life, world-historical conditions that are confronting us with pressing urgency.

Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) addresses some of these con- cerns by investigating the consequences of the climate change debate for the practice of history. He argues that the scholar- ship on climate change causes both spatial and temporal diffi culties. It brings about a change of scale in our thinking, which now needs to encompass a planetary or geo-centred dimension, acknowledging that humans are larger than a biological entity and now wield a geological force. It also shifts the temporal parameters away from the expectation of continuity which sustains the discipline of history, to contem- plate the idea of extinction, that is to say, a future without ‘us’. Furthermore, these shifts in the basic parameters also affect the content of historical research, by ‘destroying the artifi cial but time honoured distinction between natural and human histories’ (Chakrabarty, 2009: 206). Although Chakrabarty does not take the post-anthropocentric path, he comes to the same conclusion as I do: the issue of geo-centred perspectives and the change of location of humans from mere biological to geological agents calls for recompositions of both subjectivity and community.

The geo-centred turn also has other serious political impli- cations. The fi rst concerns the limitations of classical Human- ism in the Enlightenment model. Relying on post-colonial

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theory, Chakrabarty points out that the ‘philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequal- ity or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems’ (2009: 208). Their anthropocentrism, coupled with a culture-specifi c notion of Humanism, limits their relevance today. The climate change issue and the spectre of human extinction also affect ‘the analytic strategies that postcolonial and postimperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the postwar scenario of decol- onization and globalization’ (Chakrabarty, 2009: 198). I would add that the social constructivist approach of Marxist, feminist and post-colonial analyses does not completely equip them to deal with the change of spatial and temporal scale engendered by the post-anthropocentric or geo-centred shift. This insight is the core of the radical post-anthropocentric position I want to defend, which I see as a way of updating critical theory for the third millennium.

Many scholars are coming to the same conclusion, through different routes. For instance, post-anthropocentric neo- humanist traditions of socialist or of standpoint feminist theories (Harding, 1986) and of post-colonial theory (Shiva, 1997) have approached the issues of environmentalism in a post-anthropocentric, or at least non-androcentric, or non- male-dominated, manner, as we saw in the previous chapter. This critique of anthropocentrism is expressed in the name of ecological awareness, with strong emphasis on the experi- ence of social minorities like women and of non-Western peoples. The recognition of multicultural perspectives and the critique of imperialism and ethnocentrism add a crucial aspect to the discussion on the becoming-earth, but nowadays they also fall in their own internal contradictions.

Let us take, for instance, the case of ‘deep ecology’. Arne Naess (1977a, 1977b) and James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypoth- esis (1979) are geo-centred theories that propose a return to holism and to the notion of the whole earth as a single, sacred organism. This holistic approach is rich in perspectives, but also quite problematic for a vitalist, materialist posthuman thinker. What is problematic about it is less the holistic part than the fact that it is based on a social constructivist dualistic method. This means that it opposes the earth to industrializa-

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tion, nature to culture, the environment to society and comes down fi rmly on the side of the natural order. This results in a relevant political agenda that is critical of consumerism and possessive individualism, including a strong indictment of technocratic reason and technological culture. But this approach has two drawbacks. Firstly, its technophobic aspect is not particularly helpful in itself, considering the world we are living in. Secondly, it paradoxically reinstates the very categorical divide between the natural and the manufactured which it is attempting to overcome.

Why do I not agree with this position? Because of two interrelated ideas: fi rstly, because of the nature–culture con- tinuum and the subsequent rejection of the dualistic method- ology of social constructivism – the post-anthropocentric neo-humanists end up reinstating this distinction, albeit with the best of intentions in relation to the natural order; sec- ondly, because I am suspicious of the negative kind of bonding going on in the age of anthropocene between humans and non-humans. The trans-species embrace is based on the awareness of the impending catastrophe: the environmental crisis and the global warm/ning issue, not to speak of the militarization of space, reduce all species to a comparable degree of vulnerability. The problem with this position is that, in fl agrant contradiction with its explicitly stated aims, it promotes full-scale humanization of the environment. This strikes me as a regressive move, reminiscent of the sentimen- tality of the Romantic phases of European culture. I concur therefore with Val Plumwood’s (1993, 2003) assessment that deep ecology misreads the earth–cosmos nexus and merely expands the structures of possessive egoism and self-interests to include non-human agents.

Signifi cantly, while the holistic approach also makes refer- ence to Spinoza’s monism, it steers clear of contemporary re-readings of Spinoza by the likes of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, or other radical branches of Continental philoso- phy. Spinoza’s idea of the unity of mind and soul is applied in support of the belief that all that lives is holy and the greatest respect is due to it. This idolatry of the natural order is linked to Spinoza’s vision of God and the unity between man and nature. It stresses the harmony between the human and the ecological habitat in order to propose a sort of syn-

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thesis of the two. Deep ecology is therefore spiritually charged in an essentialist way. Because there are no boundaries and everything is interrelated, to hurt nature is ultimately to hurt ourselves. Thus, the earth environment as a whole deserves the same ethical and political consideration as humans. This position is helpful but it strikes me as a way of humanizing the environment, that is to say, as a well-meaning form of residual anthropomorphic normativity, applied to non-human planetary agents. Compensatory Humanism is a two-faced position.

In contrast with this position, but also building on some of its premises, I would like to propose an updated brand of Spinozism (Citton and Lordon, 2008). I see Spinozist monism, and the radical immanent forms of critique that rest upon it, as a democratic move that promotes a kind of ontological pacifi sm. Species equality in a post-anthropocentric world does urge us to question the violence and the hierarchical thinking that result from human arrogance and the assump- tion of transcendental human exceptionalism. In my view, monistic relationality stresses instead the more compassion- ate aspect of subjectivity. A Spinozist approach, re-read with Deleuze and Guattari, allows us to by-pass the pitfalls of binary thinking and to address the environmental question in its full complexity. Contemporary monism implies a notion of vital and self-organizing matter, as we saw in the previous chapter, as well as a non-human defi nition of Life as zoe, or a dynamic and generative force. It is about ‘the embodiment of the mind and the embrainment of the body’ (Marks, 1998).

Deleuze also refers to this vital energy as the great animal, the cosmic ‘machine’, not in any mechanistic or utilitarian way, but in order to avoid any reference to biological deter- minism on the one hand and overinfl ated, psychologized indi- vidualism on the other. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) also use the term ‘Chaos’ to refer to that ‘roar’ of cosmic energy which most of us would rather ignore. They are careful to point out, however, that Chaos is not chaotic, but it rather contains the infi nite expanse of all virtual forces. These potentialities are real in so far as they call for actualization through pragmatic and sustainable practices. To mark this close connection between the virtual and the real, they turn to literature and borrow from James Joyce the neologism ‘chaosmos’. This is

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 87

a condensation of ‘chaos’ and ‘cosmos’ that expresses the source of eternal energy.

Again, the issue of language and representation comes up in this seemingly abstruse choice of terms. What I fi nd praise- worthy on the part of my critical theory teachers is the extent to which they are willing to take the risk of ridicule by experi- menting with language that shocks established habits and deliberately provokes imaginative and emotional reactions. The point of critical theory is to upset common opinion (doxa), not to confi rm it. Although this approach has met with hostile reception in academia (as we shall see in chapter 4), I see it as a gesture of generous and deliberate risk-taking and hence as a statement in favour of academic freedom.

I consequently experiment with my own alternative fi gura- tions, ranging from the nomadic subject to other conceptual personae that help me navigate across the stormy waters of the post-anthropocentric predicament. Rigorously material- ist, my own nomadic thought defends a post-individualistic notion of the subject, which is marked by a monistic, rela- tional structure. Yet, it is not undifferentiated in terms of the social coordinates of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race. Nomadic subjectivity is the social branch of complexity theory.

Where does this leave our becoming-earth? Actually, we are in the middle of it. Let us resume the argument from the idea of the posthuman subject. You may remember that the recomposition of a negatively indexed new idea of ‘the human’ as an endangered species, alongside other non-human categories, is currently celebrated by post-anthropocentric neo-humanists of all sorts, from animal rights activists to eco-feminists. They take the environmental crisis as evidence of the need to reinstate universal humanist values. I have no real quarrels with the moral aspiration that drives this process and share the same ethical longing. I am, however, seriously worried about the limitations of an uncritical reassertion of Humanism as the binding factor of this reactively assumed notion of a pan-human bond. I want to stress that the aware- ness of a new (negatively indexed) reconstruction of some- thing we call ‘humanity’ must not be allowed to fl atten out or dismiss all the power differentials that are still enacted and operationalized through the axes of sexualization/racializa-

88 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

tion/naturalization, just as they are being reshuffl ed by the spinning machine of advanced, bio-genetic capitalism. Criti- cal theory needs to think simultaneously the blurring of cat- egorical differences and their reassertion as new forms of bio-political, bio-mediated political economy, with familiar patterns of exclusion and domination. For instance, in his analysis of the double limitations of both classical Humanism and Marxist oriented and post-colonial theory, Dipesh Chakrabarty raises a very pertinent question: if you consider the difference in carbon print between richer and poorer nations, is it really fair to speak of the climate change crisis as a common ‘human’ concern? I would push this further and ask: is it not risky to accept the construction of a negative formation of humanity as a category that stretches to all human beings, all other differences notwithstanding? Those differences do exist and continue to matter, so what are we to make of them? The process of becoming-earth points to a qualitatively different planetary relation.

The question of differences leads us back to power and to the politics of locations and the necessity of an ethical-polit- ical theory of subjectivity, namely, who exactly is the ‘we’ of this pan-humanity bonded in fear of a common threat? Chakrabarty puts it lucidly: ‘Species may indeed be the name of a pace-holder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that fl ashes up the moment of the danger that is climate change’ (2009: 222). As a result, I would argue that critical theorists need to strike a rigorous and coherent note of resistance against the neutralization of difference that is induced by the perverse materiality and the tendentious mobility of advanced capitalism.

A more egalitarian road, in a zoe-centred way, requires a modicum of goodwill on the part of the dominant party, in this case anthropos himself, towards his non-human others. I am aware, of course, that this is asking a lot. The post- anthropocentric shift away from the hierarchical relations that had privileged ‘Man’ requires a form of estrangement and a radical repositioning on the part of the subject. The best method to accomplish this is through the strategy of de- familiarization or critical distance from the dominant vision of the subject. Dis-identifi cation involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 89

for creative alternatives. Deleuze would call it an active ‘deterritorialization’. Race and post-colonial theories have also made important contributions to the methodology and the political strategy of de-familiarization (Gilroy, 2005). I have defended this method as a dis-identifi cation from famil- iar and hence normative values, such as the dominant institu- tions and representations of femininity and masculinity, so as to move sexual difference towards the process of becoming- minoritarian (Braidotti, 1994, 2011a). In a similar vein, Spi- nozist feminist thinkers like Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999) argue that socially embedded and historically grounded changes require a qualitative shift of our ‘collective imaginings’, or a shared desire for transformations. The con- ceptual frame of reference I have adopted for the method of de-familiarization is monism. It implies the open-ended, inter- relational, multi-sexed and trans-species fl ows of becoming through interaction with multiple others. A posthuman subject thus constituted exceeds the boundaries of both anthropocentrism and of compensatory humanism, to acquire a planetary dimension.

The Posthuman as Becoming-machine

The issue of technology is central to the post-anthropocentric predicament and it has already come out several times in the previous sections. The relationship between the human and the technological other has shifted in the contemporary context, to reach unprecedented degrees of intimacy and intrusion. The posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufac- tured, fl esh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems.

As in the case of human–animal relations, the move is beyond metaphorization. The metaphorical or analogue func- tion that machinery fulfi lled in modernity, as an anthropo- centric device that imitated embodied human capacities, is replaced today by a more complex political economy that connects bodies to machines more intimately, through simu-

90 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

lation and mutual modifi cation. As Andreas Huyssen (1986) has argued, in the electronic era, wires and circuitry exercise another kind of seduction than the pistons and grinding engines of industrial machinery. Electronic machines are, from this angle, quite immaterial: plastic boxes and metal wires that convey information. They do not ‘represent’ any- thing, but rather carry clear instructions and can reproduce clear information patterns. The main thrust of micro-elec- tronic seduction is actually neural, in that it foregrounds the fusion of human consciousness with the general electronic network. Contemporary information and communication technologies exteriorize and duplicate electronically the human nervous system. This has prompted a shift in our fi eld of perception: the visual modes of representation have been replaced by sensorial-neuronal modes of simulation. As Patri- cia Clough puts it, we have become ‘biomediated’ bodies (2008: 3).

We can therefore safely start from the assumption that the cyborgs are the dominant social and cultural formations that are active throughout the social fabric, with many economic and political implications. The Vitruvian Man has gone cybernetic (see fi gure 2.4). Let me qualify this statement by adding that all technologies can be said to have a strong bio- political effect upon the embodied subject they intersect with. Thus, cyborgs include not only the glamorous bodies of high- tech, jet-fi ghter pilots, athletes or fi lm stars, but also the anonymous masses of the underpaid, digital proletariat who fuel the technology-driven global economy without ever accessing it themselves (Braidotti, 2006). I shall return to this cruel political economy in the next chapter.

What I want to argue next is that technological mediation is central to a new vision of posthuman subjectivity and that it provides the grounding for new ethical claims. A posthu- man notion of the enfl eshed and extended, relational self keeps the techno-hype in check by a sustainable ethics of transformations. This sober position pleads for resistance to both the fatal attraction of nostalgia and the fantasy of trans- humanist and other techno-utopias. It also juxtaposes the rhetoric of ‘the desire to be wired’, to a more radical sense of the materialism of ‘proud to be fl esh’ (Sobchack, 2004). The emphasis on immanence allows us to respect the bond of mutual dependence between bodies and technological

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 91

others, while avoiding the contempt for the fl esh and the trans-humanist fantasy of escape from the fi nite materiality of the enfl eshed self. As we shall see in the next chapter, the issue of death and mortality will be raised by necessity.

I want to argue for a vitalist view of the technologically bio-mediated other. This machinic vitality is not so much about determinism, inbuilt purpose or fi nality, but rather about becoming and transformation. This introduces a process that Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becoming-machine’, inspired by the Surrealists’ ‘bachelor machines’, meaning a playful and pleasure-prone relationship to technology that is not based on functionalism. For Deleuze this is linked to the project of releasing human embodiment from its indexation

Figure 2.4 Victor Habbick (Maninblack), Robot in the style of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man Source: Clivia – Pixmac

92 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

on socialized productivity to become ‘bodies without organs’, that is to say without organized effi ciency. This is no hippy- like insurrection of the senses, but rather a carefully thought- through programme that pursues two aims. Firstly, it attempts to rethink our bodies as part of a nature–culture continuum in their in-depth structures. Secondly, it adds a political dimension by setting the framework of recomposition of bodily materiality in directions diametrically opposed to the spurious effi ciency and ruthless opportunism of advanced capitalism. Contemporary machines are no metaphors, but they are engines or devices that both capture and process forces and energies, facilitating interrelations, multiple con- nections and assemblages. They stand for radical relationality and delight as well as productivity.

The ‘becoming-machine’ understood in this specifi c sense indicates and actualizes the relational powers of a subject that is no longer cast in a dualistic frame, but bears a privileged bond with multiple others and merges with one’s technologi- cally mediated planetary environment. The merger of the human with the technological results in a new transversal compound, a new kind of eco-sophical unity, not unlike the symbiotic relationship between the animal and its planetary habitat. This is not the holistic fusion that Hegel accused Spinoza of, but rather radical transversal relations that gener- ate new modes of subjectivity, held in check by an ethology of forces. They sustain a vitalist ethics of mutual trans-species interdependence. It is a generalized ecology, also known as eco-sophy, which aims at crossing transversally the multiple layers of the subject, from interiority to exteriority and every- thing in between.

This process is what I mean by ‘post-anthropocentric posthumanism’, which I defend throughout this book. It involves a radical estrangement from notions like moral ratio- nality, unitary identity, transcendent consciousness or innate and universal moral values. The focus is entirely on the nor- matively neutral relational structures of both subject forma- tion and of possible ethical relations. The elaboration of new normative frameworks for the posthuman subject is the focus of collectively enacted, non-profi t-oriented experimentations with intensity, that is to say with what we are actually capable of becoming. They are a praxis (a grounded shared project),

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 93

not a doxa (common sense belief). My own concept of nomadic subject embodies this approach, which combines non-unitary subjectivity with ethical accountability by fore- grounding the ontological role played by relationality.

According to Felix Guattari, the posthuman predicament calls for a new virtual social ecology, which includes social, political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions, and transversal links between them. To clarify this vision, Guattari proposes three fundamental ecologies: that of the environment, of the social nexus, and of the psyche. More importantly, he empha- sizes the need to create transversal lines through all three of them. This clarifi cation is important and I would connect it to the theoretical reminder I issued earlier, namely that we need to practise de-familiarization as a crucial method in posthuman critical theory and learn to think differently.

It is crucial, for instance, to see the interconnections among the greenhouse effect, the status of women, racism and xeno- phobia and frantic consumerism. We must not stop at any fragmented portions of these realities, but rather trace trans- versal interconnections among them. The subject is ontologi- cally polyvocal. It rests on a plane of consistency including both the real that is already actualized, ‘territorialized exis- tential territories’, and the real that is still virtual, ‘deterrito- rialized incorporeal universes’ (Guattari, 1995: 26). Guattari calls for a collective reappropriation of the production of subjectivity, through ‘chaosmic’ de-segregation of the differ- ent categories. You may remember that ‘Chaosmos’ is the universe of reference for becoming in the sense of the unfold- ing of virtualities, or transformative values. A qualitative step forward is necessary if we want subjectivity to escape the regime of commodifi cation that is the trait of our historical era, and experiment with virtual possibilities. We need to become the sorts of subjects who actively desire to reinvent subjectivity as a set of mutant values and to draw our plea- sure from that, not from the perpetuation of familiar regimes.

The work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1972) is a great source of inspiration in redesigning this type of environmentally bound post-anthropocentric and non- Kantian ethics of codetermination between self and other. The notion of codependence replaces that of recognition, much as the ethics of sustainability replaces the moral phi-

94 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

losophy of rights. This reiterates the importance of grounded, situated and very specifi c and hence accountable perspectives in a move that I call zoe-centred egalitarianism.

In his analysis of the ‘collective existential mutations’ (1995: 2) currently taking place, Felix Guattari refers to Varela’s distinction between autopoietic (self-organizing) and allopoietic systems. Guattari moves beyond the distinction proposed by Varela by extending the principle of autopoiesis (which for Varela is reserved for the biological organisms) to cover also the machines or technological others. Another name for subjectivity, according to Guattari, is autopoietic subjectivation, or self-styling, and it accounts both for living organisms, humans as self-organizing systems, and also for inorganic matter, the machines.

Guattari’s machinic autopoiesis establishes a qualitative link between organic matter and technological or machinic artefacts. This results in a radical redefi nition of machines as both intelligent and generative. They have their own tempo- rality and develop through ‘generations’: they contain their own virtuality and futurity. Consequently, they entertain their own forms of alterity not only towards humans, but also among themselves, and aim to create meta-stability, which is the precondition of individuation. The emphasis on self-orga- nization and metastability frames the project of becoming- machine of the posthuman subject. It helps us rethink transversal technologically mediated subjectivity while avoid- ing scientifi c reductionism. In his critique of the rhetoric of bio-technological vitalism (1997), Ansell Pearson warns us against the pernicious fantasy of a renaturalized notion of evolution mediated by advanced bio-technological capital- ism. I think that the point of the posthuman predicament is to rethink evolution in a non-deterministic but also a post- anthropocentric manner. In opposition to classical, linear teleological ideas of evolution (Chardin de Teillard, 1959), I want to emphasize instead the collective project of seeking a more adequate understanding of the complexity of factors that structure the posthuman subject: the new proximity to animals, the planetary dimension and the high level of tech- nological mediation. Machinic autopoiesis means that the technological is a site of post-anthropocentric becoming, or the threshold to many possible worlds.

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 95

The key notion is the transversality of relations, for a postanthropocentric and posthuman subject that traces trans- versal connections among material and symbolic, concrete and discursive lines of relation or forces. Transversality actu- alizes zoe-centred egalitarianism as an ethics and also as a method to account for forms of alternative, posthuman sub- jectivity. An ethics based on the primacy of the relation, of interdependence, values zoe in itself.

I also refer to these practices of becoming-machine as ‘radical neo-materialism’ (Braidotti, 1991), or as ‘matter- realism’ (Fraser et al., 2006). These ideas are supported by and intersect with changing understandings of the conceptual structure of matter itself (De Landa, 2002; Bennett, 2010), under the impact of contemporary bio-genetics and informa- tion technologies. The Spinozist switch to a monistic political ontology stresses processes, vital politics and non-determin- istic evolutionary theories. Politically, the emphasis falls accordingly on the micro-politics of relations, as a posthu- manist ethics that traces transversal connections among mate- rial and symbolic, concrete and discursive, lines or forces. The focus is on the force and autonomy of affect and the logistics of its actualization (Massumi, 2002). Transversality actual- izes an ethics based on the primacy of the relation, of inter- dependence, which values non-human or a-personal Life. This is what I call posthuman politics (Braidotti, 2006).

Difference as the Principle of Not-One

Let me take stock of how far we have come in the complex debate opened by the demise of anthropos. Firstly, I have argued that contemporary capitalism is ‘bio-political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives. It has already turned into a form of ‘bio-piracy’ (Shiva, 1997), because it exploits the generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells. Secondly, this means that human and anthropomorphic others are relocated in a continuum with non-anthropomor- phic, animal or ‘earth’ others. The categorical distinction that separated the Human from his naturalized others has shifted, taking the humanist assumptions about what constitutes the basic unit of reference for the ‘human’ into a spin. Thirdly,

96 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

this anthropocentric process produces a negative category of the human as an endangered species bound by fear of extinc- tion. It also forces a new unity among the human and other species, in the form of compensatory extension of humanist values and rights to the non-human others. Fourthly, the same system perpetuates familiar patterns of exclusion, exploitation and oppression. In order to ground my claim about the advantages of a posthuman subject position based on relationality and transversal interconnections across the classical axes of differentiation, the next step of the argument needs to address the question of difference. I will look criti- cally at the status and function of difference in this new post- anthropocentric landscape.

As I argued in the previous chapter, the most striking feature of the current scientifi c redefi nition of ‘matter’ is the dislocation of difference from binaries to rhizomatics; from sex/gender or nature/culture to processes of sexualization/ racialization/naturalization that take Life itself, or the vitality of matter as the main target. This system engenders a deliber- ate blurring of dichotomous differences, which does not in itself resolve or improve the power differences and in many ways increases them. In other words, the opportunistic post- anthropocentric effects of the global economy engender a negative cosmopolitanism or a sense of reactive pan-human bonding by introducing the notion of ‘Life as surplus’ and of a common human vulnerability.

The political line of questioning has to start from this fi rm location to raise some key questions about subjectivity. For instance, Katherine Hayles argues, ‘What do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subse- quent merging of machine and human intelligence in the fi gure of the cyborg?’ (Hayles, 1999: xii). In a similar vein, Balsamo, who believes that bodies are always and already marked by gender and race, asks (1996: 6), ‘When the human body is fractured into organs, fl uids and genetic codes, what happens to gender identity? When the body is fractured into functional parts and molecular codes, where is gender located?’ Let us trust women, gays, lesbians and other alter- native forces, with their historically ‘leaky bodies’ (Grosz, 1994) and not fully human rights, to both reassert the powers and enhance the potentiality of the posthuman organism as generative ‘wetware’.

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Genetic engineering and biotechnologies have seen to it that a qualitative conceptual dislocation has taken place in the contemporary classifi cation of embodied subjects. As I argued previously, bodies are reduced to their informational substrate in terms of materiality and vital capacity. By impli- cation, this means that the markers for the organization and distribution of differences are now located in micro instances of vital materiality, like the cells of living organisms and the genetic codes of entire species. We have come a long way from the gross system that used to mark difference on the basis of visually verifi able anatomical differences between the empirical sexes, the races and the species. We have moved from the bio-power that Foucault exemplifi ed by comparative anatomy to a society based on the governance of molecular zoe power of today. We have equally shifted from disciplinary to control societies, from the political economy of the Pan- opticon to the informatics of domination (Haraway, 1990, 1992, 2003). The question of difference and power disparity, however, remains as central as ever.

This posthuman political landscape is not necessarily more egalitarian or less racist and heterosexist in its commitment to uphold, for instance, conservative gender roles and family values, albeit – in the case of the Hollywood blockbusters like Avatar (2009) – of the intergalactic and alien kind. The power of contemporary techno-culture to destabilize the categorical axes of difference exacerbates power relations and brings them to new necro-political heights, as we shall see in the next chapter. It also results in some misleading tendencies like techno-transcendence that, coupled with a consumer-oriented brand of liberal individualism, emerge as one of the traits of the social imaginary of global capitalism.

What are the consequences of the fact that technological apparatus is no longer sexualized, racialized or naturalized, but rather neutralized as fi gures of mixity, hybridity and interconnectiveness, turning transsexuality into a dominant posthuman topos? If the machine is both self-organizing and transgender, the old organic human body needs to be relo- cated elsewhere. Ever mindful of Lyotard’s warning about the political economy of advanced capitalism, I think we should not trust the blurring effects and states of indeterminacy it engenders. However tempting, it would be misguided to assume that posthuman embodied subjects are beyond sexual

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or racialized difference. The politics of representation and hence the location of sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences are still strongly in place, though they have shifted signifi cantly (Bukatman, 1993). In the electronic frontier, as we saw earlier, the technologically mediated point of refer- ence is neither organic/inorganic, male/female, nor especially white. Advanced capitalism is a post-gender system capable of accommodating a high degree of androgyny and a signifi - cant blurring of the categorical divide between the sexes. It is also a post-racial system that no longer classifi es people and their cultures on grounds of pigmentation (Gilroy, 2000), but remains nonetheless profoundly racist. A strong theory of posthuman subjectivity can help us to re-appropriate these processes, both theoretically and politically, not only as ana- lytical tools, but also as alternative grounds for formations of the self.

Sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences, from being categorical boundary markers under Humanism, have become unhinged and act as the forces leading to the elabora- tion of alternative modes of transversal subjectivity, which extend not only beyond gender and race, but also beyond the human. In my view, posthuman eco-philosophy functions as an attempt to rethink in a materialist manner the intricate web of interrelations that mark the contemporary subjects’ relationship to their multiple ecologies, the natural, the social and the psychic, as Guattari indicates. More importantly for the sake of the current argument, they do not abolish but profoundly restructure the processes of sexualization, racial- ization and naturalization which provided the pillars of bio- political governmentality.

In terms of feminist politics, this means we need to rethink sexuality without genders, starting from a vitalist return to the polymorphous and, according to Freud, ‘perverse’ (in the sense of playful and non-reproductive) structure of human sexuality. We also need to reassess the generative powers of female embodiment. In this vision, gender is just a historically contingent mechanism of capture of the multiple potentiali- ties of the body, including their generative or reproductive capacities. To turn it into the transhistorical matrix of power, as suggested by queer theory in the linguistic and social con- structivist tradition (Butler, 1991), is quite simply a concep-

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 99

tual error. From the perspective of a posthuman monist political economy, power is a not a static given, but a complex strategic fl ow of effects which call for a pragmatic politics of intervention and the quest for sustainable alternatives (Braid- otti, 2006). In other words, we need to experiment with resistance and intensity in order to fi nd out what posthuman bodies can do. Because the gender system captures the com- plexity of human sexuality in a binary machine that privileges heterosexual family formations and literally steals all other possible bodies from us, we no longer know what sexed bodies can do. We therefore need to rediscover the notion of the sexual complexity that marks sexuality in its human and posthuman forms. A post-anthropocentric approach makes it clear that bodily matter in the human as in other species is always already sexed and hence sexually differentiated along the axes of multiplicity and heterogeneity.

I have argued that matter-realist or posthuman vitalist feminism, resting on a dynamic monistic political ontology, shifts the focus away from the sex/gender distinction, bring- ing sexuality as process into full focus. This means by exten- sion that sexuality is a force, or constitutive element, that is capable of deterritorializing gender identity and institutions (Braidotti, 1994). Combined with the idea of the body as an incorporeal complex assemblage of virtualities, this approach posits the ontological priority of difference and its self-trans- forming force. Claire Colebrook (2000), for instance, argues that sexual difference is not a problem that needs a solution but a productive location to start from. Patricia MacCormack (2008) similarly draws attention to the need to return to sexuality as a polymorphous and complex, visceral force and to disengage it from both identity issues and all dualistic oppositions. Posthuman feminists look for subversion not in counter-identity formations, but rather in pure dislocations of identities via the perversion of standardized patterns of sexualized, racialized and naturalized interaction.

These experiments with what sexed bodies can do, however, do not amount to saying that in the social sphere differences no longer matter or that the traditional power relations have actually improved. On the contrary, on a world scale, extreme forms of polarized sexual difference are stronger than ever. They get projected onto geo-political relations, creating bel-

100 Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species

ligerent gendered visions of a ‘clash of civilizations’ that is allegedly predicated in terms of women’s and GLBT people’s rights, as I argued in the previous chapter. These reactionary manifestations of gender dichotomies are only part of the picture.

The broader picture indicates that the dislocation of the former system of marking differences makes it all the more urgent to reassert the concept of difference as both central and non-essentialistic. I have stressed difference as the prin- ciple of not-One, that is to say as differing (Braidotti, 2002), as constitutive of the posthuman subject and elaborate post- anthropocentric forms of ethical accountability to match it. In my view, posthuman ethics urges us to endure the principle of not-One at the in-depth structures of our subjectivity by acknowledging the ties that bind us to the multiple ‘others’ in a vital web of complex interrelations. This ethical principle breaks up the fantasy of unity, totality and one-ness, but also the master narratives of primordial loss, incommensurable lack and irreparable separation. What I want to emphasize instead, in a more affi rmative vein, is the priority of the rela- tion and the awareness that one is the effect of irrepressible fl ows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of.

This humbling experience of not-Oneness, which is consti- tutive of the non-unitary subject, anchors the subject in an ethical bond to alterity, to the multiple and external others that are constitutive of that entity which, out of laziness and habit, we call the ‘self’. Posthuman nomadic vital political theory stresses the productive aspects of the condition of not- One, that is to say a generative notion of complexity. At the beginning, there is always already a relation to an affective, interactive entity endowed with intelligent fl esh and an embodied mind: ontological relationality. A materialist poli- tics of posthuman differences works by potential becomings that call for actualization. They are enacted through collec- tively shared, community-based praxis and are crucial to support the process of vitalist, non-unitarian and yet account- able recomposition of a missing people. This is the ‘we’ that is evoked and actualized by the postanthropocentric creation of a new pan-humanity. It expresses the affi rmative, ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman as a gesture of collective

Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species 101

self-styling. It actualizes a community that is not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt of ancestral communal violence, or the melancholia of unpayable onto- logical debts, but rather by the compassionate acknowledge- ment of their interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of anthropocene, are quite simply not anthropomorphic.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have pursued a dual aim: I provided an answer to the question of what the posthuman might be in a post-anthropocentric perspective and argued the case for a posthuman theory that takes into account subjectivity.

The most serious political problems in post-anthropocen- tric theory arise from the instrumental alliance of bio-genetic capitalism with individualism, as a residual humanist defi ni- tion of the subject. My view of posthuman thought is instead profoundly anti-individualistic and it consists in working within the belly of the beast, resisting the myth of organicism and holistic harmony, but also capitalist opportunism. Kath- erine Hayles (1999: 286) makes a powerful intervention on contemporary posthuman bodies:

But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human [. . .]. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self [. . .] Located within the dialectic of pattern/randomness and grounded in embodied actuality rather than disembodied information, the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines.

Hayles attacks the classical humanistic notion that subjectiv- ity must coincide with conscious agency, in such a way as to avoid some of the mistakes of the humanist past, notably the liberal vision of an autonomous subject whose ‘manifest destiny is to dominate and control nature’ (Hayles, 1999: 288).

One of the risks of the ‘hype’ that surrounds the post- anthropocentric body-machines is indeed that of recreating a

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hard core, unitary vision of the subject, under the cover of pluralistic fragmentation. We run the risk of reasserting tran- scendence via technological meditation and of proposing a neo-universal machinic ethos. In the language of posthuman critical theory, this would produce the deception of a quan- titative multiplicity which does not entail any qualitative shifts. To avoid this pitfall, which fi ts in with the neo-liberal euphoria, and in order to enact qualitative transformations instead, we need to be equally distanced from both hyped-up disembodiment and fantasies of trans-humanist escape, and from re-essentialized, centralized notions of liberal individu- alism. I propose to reinscribe posthuman bodies into radical relationality, including webs of power relations at the social, psychic, ecological and micro-biological or cellular levels. The post-anthropocentrism of our science and our globalized and technologically mediated times makes it urgent to work towards ‘a new techno-scientifi c democracy’ (Haraway, 1997: 95).

The status and the location of Humanism, which was the theme of the previous chapter, are central to this discussion of post-anthropocentrism. I tend to resist the political neu- trality of critical, social and science theorists who support an analytic form of post-anthropocentrism and avoid or dismiss the question of subjectivity. I maintain that the post- anthropocentric subject rests also on the anti-humanist project, which means that I want to keep an equal distance from both the humanistic assumptions of the universal value of the unitary subject and the extreme forms of science- driven post-humanism which dismiss the need for a subject altogether.

One needs at least some subject position: this need not be either unitary or exclusively anthropocentric, but it must be the site for political and ethical accountability, for collective imaginaries and shared aspirations. Philosophical investiga- tions of alternative ways of accounting for the embedded and embodied nature of the subject are relevant to develop an approach to subjectivity worthy of the complexities of our age. As I will argue more extensively in chapter 4, this discus- sion reopens the question of the relationship between the two cultures, the Humanities and Science. My point is that the social studies of science (Latour, 1993) are not the only, or

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even the most useful, tools of analysis for the complex phe- nomena surrounding the postanthropocentric technobodies of advanced capitalism.

Let me get to this from another angle. I have argued that zoe-egalitarianism expresses the simultaneously materialist and vitalist force of life itself, zoe as the generative power that fl ows across all species. The new transversal alliance across species and among posthuman subjects opens up unex- pected possibilities for the recomposition of communities, for the very idea of humanity and for ethical forms of belonging. These are not confi ned to negative bonding in terms of sharing the same planetary threats: climate change, environmental crisis or even extinction. What I propose is a more affi rmative approach to the redefi nition of posthuman subjectivity, as in the counter models of transversal, relational nomadic assem- blages we saw earlier in this chapter or the extended nature– cultural self as an alternative to classical Humanist subjectivity in the previous chapter. Many more models are thinkable and feasible, if we collectively choose to experiment systemati- cally with the project of what ‘we’, the differently located posthuman subjects of the anthropocene era, might be capable of becoming.

We all stand to gain by the acknowledgment of a post- anthropocentric, transversal structural link in the position of these embodied non-human subjects that were previously known as the ‘others’ of the anthropocentric and humanistic ‘Man’. The ethical part of the project concerns the creation of a new social nexus and new forms of social connection with these techno-others. What kinds of bonds can be estab- lished within the nature–culture continuum of technologically mediated organisms and how can they be sustained? Both kinship and ethical accountability need to be redefi ned in such a way as to rethink links of affectivity and responsibility not only for non-anthropomorphic organic others, but also for those technologically mediated, newly patented creatures we are sharing our planet with.

In opposition to the nostalgic trend that is so dominant in contemporary politics, but also opposing a tendency to mel- ancholia on the part of the progressive Left (Derrida, 2001b; Butler, 2004a; Gilroy, 2005), I want to argue that the posthu- man emphasis on life/zoe itself can engender affi rmative poli-

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tics. Critical post-anthropocentrism generates new perspectives that go beyond panic and mourning and produce a more workable platform. For one thing, it produces a more ade- quate cartography of our real-life conditions because it focuses with greater accuracy on the complexities of contem- porary technologically mediated bodies and on social prac- tices of human embodiment. Furthermore, this type of vital materialism, unconstrained by clear-cut distinctions between species composes the notion of zoe as a non-human yet gen- erative life-force. This posthuman approach moves beyond ‘high’ cyber studies (Haraway, 1985; Hayles, 1999) into post- cyber materialism (Braidotti, 2002) and posthuman theory (Braidotti, 2006). A nomadic zoe-centred approach connects human to non-human life so as to develop a comprehensive eco-philosophy of becoming.

This posthuman and post-anthropocentric sensibility, which draws on deep affective as well as intellectual resources, also expresses my rejection of the principle of adequation to the doxa, or commonly received normative image of thought. The posthuman predicament, in both the post-humanist and the post-anthropocentric sense of the term, drives home the idea that the activity of thinking needs to be experimental and even transgressive in combining critique with creativity. As Deleuze and Guattari teach us, thinking is about the inven- tion of new concepts and new productive ethical relations. In this respect, theory is a form of organized estrangement from dominant values. More clinical than critical, posthuman theory cuts to the core of classical visions of subjectivity and works towards an expanded vision of vitalist, transversal relational subjects. Theory today is about coming to terms with unprecedented changes and transformations of the basic unit of reference for what counts as human. This affi rmative, unprogrammed mutation can help actualize new concepts, affects and planetary subject formations. Just as we do not know what posthuman bodies can do, we cannot even begin to guess what postanthropocentric embodied brains will actu- ally be able to think up.