4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
posthuman are distinctly gloomy. Fukuyama, for instance, sees potentially terrible
political consequences in posthumanism. By contrast, Kurzweil’s analysis is
supremely positive – with brain circuit expansion, ecological harmony and cybernetic
immortality as key themes. Yet it is a matter of some puzzlement that predications of
the posthuman future – whether utopian or dystopian – have very little to say about
the transfiguration of the human itself, especially of how identity will change as a
result of the exponential expansion in information technology, bioinformatics and
biotechnologies. It is partly with the objective of filling this omission in contemporary
debates on posthumanism that I set out in this chapter to critically examine the
notion of posthuman identity and consider its wider personal, social, cultural and
political consequences.
The notion of posthuman identity is one that emerges from various fields, ranging
across social theory and philosophy to contemporary art, futurology and science
fiction. My focus in what follows will be concentrated primarily on recent social
theory. I seek to explore in this chapter our hopes, our fascination and our fears
concerning the drafting of posthuman identities in recent social theory. In turning
to some of the most compelling and sophisticated accounts of posthuman identities
in the literature of recent social theory, the first part of the chapter explores the
cultural and political factors that have brought posthumanism to prominence in the
academy and in wider public debate. The second part of the chapter develops a
critique of the gains and losses of posthuman social theory, focusing especially on
the theme of identity and its possible transformations as a result of the impacts of
information technology, genetics, nanotechnology and so on and so forth. I shall be
concerned to show that, notwithstanding various reservations concerning the manner
in which posthumanism has been theorized in the literature of social theory, the
consequences of the advent of posthuman identities are far-reaching.
CURRENT CONTROVERSIES ON POSTHUMAN IDENTITIES
Debates about posthuman identities and their social, cultural and political
consequences are informed by two key axes of orientation. The first axis concerns the
challenges presented by contemporary processes of globalization, biotechnologies
and information technologies for the development of posthuman social thought.
This axis is, then, principally concerned with the descriptive, analytic and conceptual
adequacy of posthumanism for understanding transformations in the dynamics of
contemporary subjectivity. The second axis concerns the development of a normative
frame of reference to the critique of posthuman identities today. Here the focus is
centrally on the desirability or otherwise of the posthuman turn, and of whether