4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
condemned to seek adequate representation of its existence with a
system that is constitutionally incapable of granting due recognition.In The Posthuman, Braidotti takes aim at Lacan’s structuralist determinism, and
strongly argues against his blending of psychoanalysis and structural linguistics
- which produces, she contends, an understanding of subjectivity ‘based on Lack
and Law’. Invoking Deleuze and Guattari, she writes (2013: 189): ‘Lacan’s notion of
the symbolic is as out-dated as a Polaroid shot of a world that has since moved on’.
Instead, Braidotti wants to speak up for a version of our psychic lives that stresses
possibility, pleasure, power and plenitude. This is an understanding of the psychic
subject as pure affirmation. Desire as plenitude, not lack. The passage towards a
utopic, affirmative version of the posthuman is thus opened by Braidotti.
POSTHUMAN IDENTITY, OR THE REINVENTION OF LIFE
If the very foundations of modernity are literally under fire, posthumanism in the
theoretical sense of the word may arguably seem a wholly inadequate description
of current and likely future global transformations. In an age where the boundary
between the digital universe and the actual world is dissolving, and where dramatic
transformations in robotics and artificial intelligence are moving centre stage, social
theory cannot afford to merely recount the same narratives of the end of humanism,
history and modernity, crucial though these debates may have been in the past.
Digital production, and specifically the advent of 3D printers, is especially
consequential in this connection. 3D printers can already process a diversity of
objects (including organic matter), and digital production is strongly converging with
developments in biotechnology and nanotechnology (for social-scientific analyses of
3D printing and its consequences see Giddens 2013, Urry 2014). The crucial move in
social-theoretical inquiry – irrespective of the deployment of the term posthumanism
- is the development of theoretical resources which are equal in depth, scope and
range to the transformed global landscape that social theory now confronts.
In a remorselessly transformational climate, the posthumanization of identity emerges
as a wildly popular topic – partly because the pliable, remouldable, endlessly plastic
self is increasingly everywhere on display. But beyond the power and limits of current
reinvention society, there is also a more profound sense in which the extraordinary
pace of technological change today intersects with the posthumanization of identity.
Digital technologies and other technological innovations are transforming what
‘identity’ and ‘the body’ actually mean. In addition to organ development technologies,
3D printers have been used in research to print out living human embryonic stem cells