4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
technology is taken up, adopted, coped with and reacted to in situated social
performances. In other words, as social scientists we need to be attentive to how
people perform – that is, how they ‘do’ – technology in their everyday lives. 101
EXPERIMENTAL WORLDS
Third, posthuman identity both presupposes the notion of the human and of the
recasting of human subjectivity. This is a complex point, and requires explication.
The opening of a new posthuman era has been expressed through a dazzling variety
of terms, including ‘beyond humanism’, ‘after humanism’, the ‘transhuman’ and so
on. Yet we can never be ‘after the human’, in the sense that there can be no reflective,
creative life without subjects. Subjectivity is framed in and through the human psyche
- split between consciousness, the preconscious and the repressed unconscious.
This is not to say, however, that the institutional transformations of the current era
are not in certain respects unique – distinct in form from previous types of social life
associated with modernity. There can be little doubt, I think, that the posthuman
outlook presents social theory with a fresh challenge. But the changes occurring
early in the twenty-first century, whether in biotechnology, biomedicine or
information technologies, cannot be made sense of if identity is excluded from
analytical consideration. This takes us to the core strength of the contributions from
Rose and Braidotti. Both theorists argue, though from very different conceptual
positions, that identity and subjectivity must remain central to the frame of analytic
reference in order to grasp how posthumanism (invoked variously as contemporary
science, biomedicine, information technologies) affects and recasts the very fabric
and structure of life and thus of what now counts as human. From this angle, social
theory cannot afford simply to replay the narrative of analytic posthumanism – such
as the anti-subjectivity position advanced in science and technology studies by
authors such as Latour and his followers. Rather, it needs to explore new possibilities
and consider how identity is transfigured in and through the posthuman. What is
underscored here, following Rose and Braidotti, is not simply identity but the
biopolitical dynamics of contemporary subjectivity.
Fourth, and following on from the previous point that the critique of subjectivity is
central to the advent of posthumanism, my argument is that identity is interdependent
with multiple structural forms of the posthuman that generate different possibilities for
identity – and especially the recalibration or reinvention of identity itself. A standard
response to this kind of formulation is to seek to demonstrate how identity has been
reconfigured into some kind of ‘machinic hybridization’, in which the subject is
colonized by the object. But in developing and detailing this point, I want to take a
different tack. Let me develop this point now in some more detail.