4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
techno-scientific systems. Today’s enhanced identities – that is, GM and TE
posthumans – are becoming increasingly differentiated, distant and socially marked
off from unenhanced persons. Inequality of power does not, therefore, just depend on
material inequality, but is also created and sustained through techno-biological
bodies and genetically modified identities. The ability of people to access the services
and facilities surrounding the advent of posthuman identities depends upon
economic, socio-cultural, organizational and temporal factors, and are in turn
distributed and redistributed through engagement with very different kinds of
scientific and technological systems (Thrift 2008). As a result, very many identities are
produced and performed within this diffusion of complex technical-scientific systems.
But all such productions of posthuman worlds are, from this angle, identity
productions – resulting from the joint fusings of individual and collective imaginings
on the one hand and orchestrated processes of scientific and technological innovation
on the other. Such forms of institutional innovation involve creative and reflective
agents (individuals, groups and organizations) who play a central role in the multiple
landscape of posthuman relations of power and social order.
This standpoint again contrasts directly with analytic posthumanism – specifically, that
version of posthumanism elaborated by science and technology studies – which renders
the question of intentionality on the side of technology itself. By neglecting new forms of
identity experimentation created out of the fusing of human and non-human forces
occurring within posthuman configurations, science and technology studies result
(as Braidotti correctly identifies) in a moralization of machines. It is as if the advent of
various smart technologies – predicted by authors such as Kurzweil to become
exponentially smarter in the next few decades – strips human agents of creative agency
altogether. Whether the discourse is that of ‘bio-sociality’, ‘actants’ or ‘machinic
intentionality’, this brand of posthumanism demonstrates a curt rejection of the whole
concept of identity, which is imagined as merely a hangover from the era of humanism.
But it is only because science and technology studies reduce identity to the straw target
of an individualized self exercising voluntary agency in the social world that it declares the
concept of subjectivity wholly unacceptable. Yet there is no valid reason to accept such a
backwardlooking rendition of the notion of identity. With the launch of a new global
narrative of posthumanism, the more interesting challenge is to explore the complex,
contradictory interconnections or assemblages of human and non-human forces which
are reconstituting and transforming the contours of identity today.
Finally, let me note some implications for current and future identity profiles of
posthumanism arising from the foregoing discussion: