4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
and I will now summarize these consequences in six key points. First, there is the
widespread sense that the ‘posthuman’ is an idea whose time has truly arrived.
This emergent ‘structure of feeling’, to invoke Raymond Williams, involves a
greater appreciation of the non-naturalistic or nonbiological dimensions of human
subjectivity, a breakdown in categorical distinctions between humans and various
‘earth others’ (including animals, species, bacteria and plants), as well as the
consequences of post-anthropocentric philosophy and social thought. The intellectual
consequences of this emergent posthuman structure of feeling are ambivalent. While
some academics and public intellectuals applaud the posthuman turn as the next
frontier in social, political and philosophical thought, other critics have been quick
to dismiss posthumanism as simply radical posturing or a passing theoretical fad.
Even so, the posthuman turn has already had a large impact upon a considerable
range of social practices and intellectual discourses, including biotechnology and
bioinformatics, art and architecture, future studies and forecasting, robotics, science
fiction, consumer design, artificial intelligence, literary and social theory,
nanotechnology, computing and so on. However, while many intellectual discourses,
especially in the social sciences, humanities and creative arts, are in the process of
undertaking the posthuman turn, there are serious conceptual limitations to an
uncritical adoption of the term ‘posthuman identity’ – or so I shall propose
subsequently in this chapter.
Second, the scientific and technological advances linked to the posthuman turn
need to be situated within an institutional analysis of modernity. That is to say,
the institutional drivers of the posthuman condition include – amongst others –
globalization and the new global electronic economy, information and communication
technologies, biomedicine and advances in artificial intelligence. These institutional
transformations form the backdrop for claims advanced in posthumanist social
thought that we stand at the opening of a new era, one in which nonbiological
intelligence will come to match the capability and subtlety of human intelligence and
is thus radically transformative of the interrelations between the human and the
non-human. In this connection, the continuing acceleration of information-based
technologies coupled with the unprecedented intrusion of globalized, technologically
mediated processes into the very structure of our lives and our identities will carry
far-reaching consequences for the shape, direction and complexity of future
identities, societies, politics and global governance. Crucially, however, these
transformations should not be understood as somehow predetermined by technology
alone. Technology is a powerful social force, certainly. But the power of technology
arises as a result of complex social practices, and in particular the ways in which