4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
The traditional consensus about identity in the social sciences, at least up until the
transformations unleashed in the first instance by globalization and more recently
the advent of posthumanism, has been focused upon the interconnections between
individual agents (usually cast with limited powers) and social structures (usually
cast as all-powerful and determining). From this angle, capitalism as a structure has
been understood as constituting class identities; or, patriarchy as a structural feature
of modern societies has been understood as generating oppressive gender identities.
In such social science, identity is conceived as a property of the individual agent – a
‘location’ from which the self seeks to navigate opportunities and constraints in the
wider mix of social relations. Against the backdrop of the agency and structure
couplet, individuals exercise agency in the context of constraint appearing primarily
from external or structural forces, conceived largely in terms of the limitations of the
actions of other human agents or interpersonal relations on the one hand and the
constraints of socio-structural forces of large-scale institutions or cultural forces on
the other.
However, the advent of posthumanism (as described in this chapter) subverts such
conventional distinctions between agency and structure, or the individual and society.
The arrival of the posthuman – from genomics and nanotechnology to information
technologies and robotics – transfigures the orthodox division between the agency of
identity and the determinism of structures. As current scientific and technological
advances have come to penetrate or invade the very structure of living matter itself,
the posthuman transfigures the manner in which identity has been constituted as
agency. But once this is recognized, what then should comprise a critically reflexive,
posthumanist approach to identity?
Contemporary science and technology studies, as advanced by Latour and developed
by writers such as Law and Franklin, have proffered a conceptualization of the human
and non-human environment in which society and culture are cast within the
biotechnologically mediated world of posthumanism. Broadly speaking, this is an
approach which views the scientific and technological as invading the human and
simultaneously sees the human as a grafted extension of technological artefacts.
Thus, technological devices such as Google Goggles or the Apple Watch can be
seen as an extension of the individual’s body, creating new hybridizations of the
subject-object. On this view, there is no need to analytically keep apart subject and
object, or identity and culture, since the complexity of the humanmachine hybrid
generates a form of ‘machinic intentionality’ which is grounded and productive of
the social field itself. The strength of this standpoint lies in its recognition of the
complexity of scientific worlds that are involved in various technological systems.