I haven't moved part two if you're tired
of starchy old humanism you can mix up
your intellectual diet with some post
humanism post humanism is not a great
term as it encompasses a breadth of
theoretical constellations as does
humanism but the post doesn't
necessarily mean it comes after humanism
in an epochal sense it's sort of an
undercurrent within humanism that
doesn't buy into the height like maybe
humanism was always wrong and no one
noticed what is common among posthuman
theory is that this human exceptionalism
thing is a no it's a conceit that we've
made up and of course it's easy to talk
about how important and special humans
are if you are a human but you have to
create a lot of artificial and
contingent divisions to get there
between nature and culture human and
animal and human and machine to name a
few nevertheless the post humanist line
of thought seems to be accelerating
today mostly due to the historical
context of late capitalism it's massive
data maps and predictive models and it
seems less and less like human free will
and consciousness as all it's cracked up
to be
once you zoom out just a bit we look
predictable following rules unable to
change anything on our own irrational
and not all that different from many
other supposedly natural or
technological processes
not to mention all the non-human
processes that are getting better at
stuff that was supposed to be our
special domain of reason I'm more or
less spitballing theory in this video
but this vocabulary is gonna be
significant for what's coming up later
on the channel so without further ado
Nietzsche was the first posthumanist
shut up Toulouse you were ruling my
narrative Nietzsche was the first post
humanist there I said it you can argue
with me in the comments he showed up and
was like wTF is this then WTF is
this
became the motto of continental
philosophy in the 20th century Bergson
who Cyril
Heidegger Foucault Derrida phanong de
Beauvoir bell hooks so Nietzsche kicked
off this trend here is a long-ass
quotation but it shows how he identifies
an end of the humanists future and it
shows how his famous proclamation of the
death of God is actually a proclamation
of the death of the human at least the
humanists human no one gives man his
qualities neither God nor society nor
his parents and ancestors nor he himself
no one is responsible for man's being
there at all
for his being such and such or for his
being in these circumstances or in this
environment and is not the effect of
some special purpose of a will or an end
nor is he the object of an attempt to
attain an ideal of humanity or an ideal
of happiness or an ideal of morality
it's absurd to wish to devolve one's
essence on some and or another we have
invented the concept of end in reality
there is no end
so whereas human isms emphasize
responsibility exceptionalism and free
will as part of human being working for
some future Nietzsche is like nah
wherever responsibilities are sought
quote it is usually the instinct of
wanting to judge and punish which is at
work becoming has been deprived of its
innocence when any being such-and-such
is traced back to will two purposes two
acts of responsibility the doctrine of
the will has been invented essentially
for the purpose of punishment so for
Nietzsche from Judaism to Christianity
to modern liberal democracy the
individual being bestowed with
responsibilities is ultimately just a
creation of weak people celebrating
their mediocrity and imposing it
universally humans are at their best
vital creative powerful forces which
have now been domesticated and shackled
by rules the desire to fit in and
imposed passivity all the while thinking
they are literally God's gift to the
world creativity vitality art music and
even violence come from within
whereas rules rights and
responsibilities all come from without
the concept of the posthuman then is a
post humanist reaction to the humanists
human the first example of the
conceptualization of the posthuman by
Nietzsche is the over man
the uber mage who rises above the herd
and their ordinary silly rules the
people that are to come
instead make the world in their image as
artists would after the transvaluation
of values and there's also the will to
power and the will to power is an
irrational sort of drive a vital force
by which humans create and extend
themselves but the will to power is not
exclusively or especially human at all
it's a feature of life itself
this distinction should not be so rigid
and moving on a more contemporary figure
of post humanism is Deleuze and his
concept of the plane of imminence
imminence in this context is opposed to
the humanist transcendence whereby
humans are set in a substantive set over
and against nature over and against
history and over and against tools or
techniques humans are one source of
vitality a creative drive among other
forces but not one that is particularly
exceptional in the sense of
transcendence escape or representation
there are words that Deleuze uses for
humans or aspects of human potential
such as desiring machines or larval
cells that blur the boundaries of
transcendence across the technical and
animal domains elsewhere Deleuze with
guitar II writes that a body without
organs is made in such a way that it can
be occupied populated only by
intensities only intensities pass and
circulate still the body without organs
is not a scene a place or even a support
upon which something comes to pass see
this would again be essential izing the
human being but instead quote we treat
the body without organs as the full egg
before the extension of the organism and
the organization of organs before the
formation of the strata it is
constructed piece by piece and the
places conditions and techniques are
irreducible to one another the question
rather is whether the pieces can fit
together and at what price inevitably
there will be monstrous cross breeds so
there is not an essence of the human
where the human used to be as a concept
is now marked by ongoing processes of
forces of histories of judgments of
desires and even technologies that have
all come to cohabitate with us and shape
our history
rites don't make you who you are reason
does not make you one rather your
particular expressions of will from this
ongoing potentially
like an egg means you can continually
carve yourself out of the world just
like an artist carves a form out of
stone working with that particular
stones particular qualities now it's
only at a very advanced stage of
representation that you can become
something like an essence under a
signifier and this signifier is a
procrustean bed that cuts off your
potential for action in the world
creative acts are called lines of flight
by their lives other scholars have
picked up on this idea of a posthumanist
line of flight donna haraway for example
claims that humans are always already
cyborgs in a cyborg manifesto what this
means is that there is never being a
human being that was distinct from the
nonhuman world fully particularly that
of tools and machines human isms for
example create images of math like these
out of writing and other material
natural material there are always Donne
human supplements that Balai human
interdependence with the world from the
outset we can't think of ourselves as if
from the outside except by using the non
human a proxy means of thinking this
always already cyborg means that by the
time you can consider yourself special
or distinct you are already imbricated
with these non-human supplements so you
see what this means there's no line here
as this stuff is always what enables the
hypothesis that there is a line here sad
words I'm gonna focus on this one
variant which is called technological
post humanism and although there are
others this one is most interesting to
me consider this your memory is outside
your body your thought is outside your
body your conception of yourself is
generated by interaction with what isn't
you and what isn't human
let's introduce a new theorist here to
help us out
bernard Stiegler claims that we humans
are not exceptional from other animals
because we have a special
essence or divine investment but simply
because we've learned the skill of
incorporating the world into our bodies
this process begins with tools but we
are not special just because we use
tools as both animals and machines can
do this as well we do use them
differently however and in a way they
almost seem to use us almost as
parasites live off of a host the
invention of the human without our
needing to be complacent with the double
genitive its ambiguity signals a
question that breaks down into two who
or what does the inventing who or what
is invented the ambiguity of the subject
and in the same move the ambiguity of
the object of the verb in bit translates
nothing else but the very sense of the
verb so who invents the human well
humans do but they don't invent it X
Neil oh they use tools to invent
themselves for Stiegler it is most
significant that we use tools for memory
and thought in this case writing an art
writing an art outsource our memory
agency and thought to a material outside
of our brain which is relatively
short-term and unreliable to these
external media these are long memories
and what allow us to have history one
must then ask what the closure of the
cortical evolution of the human implies
from the vantage of the general history
of life the closure the cortical
evolution of the human and therefore the
pursuit of the evolution of the living
by other means than life which is what
the history of technics consists in from
the first flake pebbles to today a
history that is also the history of
humanity technics or this deployment of
technology and tools has literally
steered our evolution and this was not
an agenting or rational decision for
Stiegler this is more of an accident
maybe a lucky accident boa we'll have to
see if the biosphere collapses as a rule
while we use written language in its
materiality it gets more complex more
developed and even though it is not
conscious it impels our philosophy and
self-concept
in directions activated by this medium
itself the human conception of self and
society as well as what can be built or
invented increase in complexity as our
media increases in complexity we can
think of a long book of subjectivity or
the blueprint for a complex machine that
saved the history of that form for
posterity we have become apparently
distinct from nature only because we
never start at square one
since our memory is outside of our
bodies as it turns out we use these
media and they develop as a part of a
symbiotic relationship you may be able
to consider language in this sense a
living organism distinct and yet
dependent upon us this analogy also
carries over as we talk about living
dead and endangered languages
furthermore writing comes to affect us
our emotions our memory our
relationships and even our sense of time
as a continuous process
history is kept by the nonhuman and
history is paradoxically that which
differentiates humans from nonhumans so
the division between the special human
and the unspecial non-human is in fact
contingent upon there not being a
division between the two extending this
argument to its inevitable conclusion
our being in the world is special
because of the world not because we are
self-conscious as the world is always
supplementing self-consciousness and
consciousness is never on its own thanks
as well what is special about us is not
within us in our soul but it's in our
history of technics so here's the
posthuman reversal humans do not make
art and write because they are rational
and free rather humans are rational and
free because they write and make art
which depends upon our technical
appropriation of the material world from
clay tablets to tablets the reason that
you can think the way you do is because
the nonhuman world
already cleared a space for you to think
so now circling back what does this say
about humanism if the hypothesis is
correct well it says that human isms are
made possible by some forms of writing
theology philosophy constitutions
declarations of rights etc modern human
isms emerge from modern writing a claim
that coincides with what Marshall
McLuhan theorized Western man acquired
from the technology of literacy the
power to act without reacting and quote
and this is where you get this aloof
transcendence of rational man that is
wholly separate from nature but it's a
sleight of hand to erase the material
contingency of this construction after
the fact covering your tracks most
humanism does not claim that we are
moving past humanism necessarily but it
claims that humanism was always already
blind to its own biases which came from
technics in a history that was always in
front of our face but we forgot to think
about we think the way we do because we
have evolved alongside media which
itself evolves and this process is
mutualistic today in a world of
processes and programs we now come to
think of ourselves in terms of processes
and programs rather than perhaps
substances or consciousnesses that can
act with relative independence from
nature or our own history this flies in
the face of every humanism from
Christianity to liberal humanism to
existentialism each of which holds out a
certain premise of our specialness just
because we were born that way this
perspective is gaining steam and I
hypothesize it's because the world seems
ever less beautiful to individuals it's
comprised of these massive unstoppable
forces systems markets and no matter how
much anyone tries it all seems to keep
going and to accelerate indifferent to
our decisions and choices in the face of
this massive indifference to us it seems
rather silly to plead
with the cosmos hoping that it's gonna
give us some special purpose or end
because we have for millennia made moral
aesthetic religious demands on the world
looked upon it with blind desire passion
or fear and abandon ourselves to the bad
habits of illogical thinking this world
has acquired of color but we have been
the colorists all along
now this cold absolute indifference of
the cosmos and the fact that God is now
unconscious is only half cause for
despair it may also have emancipatory
potential you can do anything that you
can do and it's not because of your soul
or free will or god-given rights it's
because a whole accidental history of
technics signs drives and intensities
has led to you actions similarly do not
have value because they are just
rational or moral or free they can
attain value simply because you did it
they are expressions of force and
allowing the cop not something that
belongs to you but something that you
can become at any given moment post
humanism is about imagining what we are
in an imminent context shedding our
special transcendence and finding out
where the happy bright utopian futures
west and why we are instead left with
all these cancelled futures
you
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