4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
The central tension or contradiction in self-experiencing is therefore reinscribed in
every process of object selection: an unconscious immersion in units of experience
which are only partly thinkable (since that immersion is itself a dense condensation
of self and object world), and a reflective lifting of such unconscious experience into
thinking and articulation.
Following Bion and Bollas, it can be said that the recovery of affects ‘stored’ in the
object-world facilitates the proliferation of experience as well as possible
transformations in pleasure, creativity and fulfilment. The use of an object as
transformational – from the pre-Oedipal maternal object on the one hand to
technological or bio-medically engineered objects on the other – opens the self to
the sheer multiplicity of experience. Likewise, in the context of posthuman lives, the
investment of affect in scientific and technical objects such as robotics, prosthetics,
nanotechnology or artificial intelligence can function as a form of emotional
containment – that is, the storing of affect (available for subsequent retrieval) in terms
of emotional processing or thinking. Such a psychoanalytically informed account of
subject-constitution captures how actions and objects (both human and non-human)
cross, tangle and synchronize across diverse configurations of the posthuman –
extending, enhancing and redefining the very fabric of identities in the process.
Sixth, and following directly from the previous point, the interpenetration of
posthuman identities and objects (information technologies, biomedicine, artificial
intelligence and so on) occur through non-linear points of transformation, complexity,
feedback loops and dynamic change which reconfigure and transform social
inequalities and unequal relations of power. The advent of posthumanism in relation
to inequality and power should not be thought of as constituted through technology
alone; what is opening up today, rather, is the examination of social inequalities
through the lens of posthumanism. This is a development which significantly alters
what inequality is, how it operates and how societies might seek to redress its
impacts. As the new posthuman enhancement divide becomes deeply layered within
the existing digital divide, the posthumanization of identities becomes a central
stratifying factor of contemporary societies – particularly in the rich North. We have
seen that posthumanism reinvents identity: one avenue is through the advent of
genetically modified (GM) posthumans; the other avenue is through the advent of
technologically enhanced (TE) posthumans. Such GM and TE posthumans require
economic resources in order to embrace these very identities and negotiated spaces;
this is a constraint which operates from within already existing social inequalities.
But there are additional ramifications, as these very GM and TE posthumans then
interact, relate, engage, respond and cope with other people, social settings and