4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
emergent and novel blendings of human and non-human actors should be
celebrated, criticized, resisted or rejected.
Notwithstanding the remarkable plurality of voices in the debate over posthumanism
and its consequences for understanding forms of contemporary subjectivity, I want to
focus in what follows on two major strands of social thought associated with such
transformations of the social landscape. The first significant posthuman development
comes from contemporary transformations in biomedicine and associated mutations
in bio-identities. Here I shall briefly review the contribution of sociologist Nikolas
Rose and how the Foucaultian inspired conceptualization of what he terms
‘bio-sociality’ is transforming structures of subjectivity and the conduct of life. Rose’s
work is sociologically interesting because he addresses the complex ways in which
biotechnologies and biomedicine are producing new molecular understandings of
minds, bodies and identities – even though he questions the explanatory purchase of
the very concept of the posthuman itself. The second strand of thought I shall
consider proposes an affirmative posthumanism, one that underscores the new
opportunities and exciting possibilities, as well as the ethical and cultural challenges,
arising from the advent of posthuman forms of subjectivity and identity. Here I shall
review, in a selective and partial manner, the work of the philosopher and feminist
Rosi Braidotti on the posthuman subject.
Nikolas Rose, in his The Politics of Life Itself (2007), argues that the twenty-first
biotech century represents an emergent mixture of biomedicine, bio-sociality and the
appearance of new forms of ‘biopower’ governing the conduct of identities. As the
reference to biopower suggests, Rose’s work is strongly indebted to the late French
historian, Michel Foucault. Rose takes his cue from recent advances in the life
sciences and biomedicine – with reference to the biomedical techniques of genetic
manipulation, organ transplants, reproductive technologies and the spread of
psychopharmacological drugs. The age of human genome sequencing opens a world
of biological reengineering and the redesign of people, although Rose himself does
not equate this unprecedented mediation of biomedicine into the fabric and structure
of human identity with the advent of posthumanism. Rather, the complex, intricate
association between biomedicine and human subjects is for Rose constitutive of a
new way of understanding the biological sphere – in which processes of isolation,
storage, delimitation, mobilization, accumulation and exchange comes to the fore.
Rose holds that the age of biomedicine and biotechnology has unleashed an action
of universal import involving new fabrications of identity and new sets of social
relations. Medical technologies, or technologies of health, are geared to the goal of