4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
But there are serious conceptual limitations here, especially as regards the
analysis of identity. Whilst science and technology studies correctly stipulate
that identity is not opposed to science, nor to technological mediation, and whilst
it suggestively seeks to capture how the human is rendered continuous with
socio-technical systems, it fails to address how patterns of posthuman social
development necessitate a revised vision of identity. Most constraining of all, as
Braidotti argues (2013: 41–43), science and technology studies displace questions
concerning intentionality and thus ethics onto the side of technology itself. What is
displaced is the whole question of human autonomy. Transformations of identity
arising in and through posthumanism are thus squeezed to the sidelines. The
analytical task, by contrast, concerns grappling with how the posthuman organization
and consequences of the flows of various scientific and technological materials
- especially energy, genes, information and data – fuse to produce complex
combinations of identity, imagination and innovation.
Before considering how the flows of scientific and technological materials
interpenetrate with identity, it is necessary to complement the preceding point with
an analysis of the creativity of identity rather than of systems. Fifth, this brings us to
issues to do with the psychic investment of objects – both human and non-human.
Grasping the complex ways in which new information technologies and biomedical
developments become emotionally imprinted upon the psyche, as well as the
simultaneous re-grooving of the psyche around both human and non-human objects,
is crucial for the analysis of identity in conditions of posthumanism. This is a point,
I argue, that neither Rose nor Braidotti satisfactorily resolve. In a Foucaultian vein,
Rose sees biomedicine inaugurating a new order of discourse by constituting the
order of ‘biocapital’, articulating novel kinds of subjectification and vitalities of the
human. And like Foucault, Rose harbours a suspicion of creative agency, which in
typically post-structuralist fashion he sees as an outcrop of discourse. Braidotti’s
case carries a more refreshing tone as concerns the centrality of subjectivity, and
explicitly acknowledges the role of fantasy, affect and desire in configurations of the
posthuman. But beyond various neo-Nietzchean formulations on the productivities of
desire, her analysis lacks specificity concerning the diffusion of posthuman scientific
and technical systems at the level of identity.
Braidotti’s emphasis on fantasy, desire and affect is important, but it needs to be
extended and radicalized. I argue this is best done through a psychoanalytic frame of
reference, and I turn to consider the import of some strands of post-Freudian theory
for the analysis of identity in the context of posthumanism. The work of Wilfred Bion
provides a major source of insights into the intertwining of identities and objects