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Environment and Planning A 2004, volume 36, pages 1341 ^ 1363

DOI:10.1068/a37127

Mapping posthumanism: an exchange

Organisers Noel Castree, Catherine Nash Noel Castree, Catherine Nash Neil Badmington Bruce Braun Jonathan Murdoch Sarah Whatmore

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Introduction: posthumanism in question


Noel Castree
School of Geography, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, England; e-mail: noel.castree@man.ac.uk

Catherine Nash

Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, England; e-mail: c.nash@qmul.ac.uk Received 20 May 2004

The serried ranks of post-prefixed isms marched their way through human geography during the 1990s. To open the door to yet another may seem the habitual act of a hopelessly trendy discipline, one derivatively preoccupied with what's de rigeur in the social sciences and humanities. Yet there might be something both apposite and productive about staging a confrontation between a subject whose very title announces its determined commitment to ontological purity and a discourse that questions this kind of delusive hygiene. In one sense, of course, that confrontation has been ongoing for several years now. Since the early 1990s many `human geographers' have steadfastly questioned the adequacy of the appellation used to describe themselves, their research, and their discipline. Drawing upon the thinking of Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour, among many others, they have revealed what Sarah Whatmore, in her commentary below, calls ``more than human geographies''. The gravitational force of their work has not yet exerted a tidal pull on human geography as a whole. But it has certainly raised some profound questions about the routinised ontological beliefs that underpin research in the discipline. The full explanatory and normative consequences of this questioning will only become apparent in the years ahead, as human geography's `structure of feeling' alters or does not in response to its insistent demands. What, then, of the discourse of posthumanism? It is hardly new, nor is it unified (Braun, 2004). Like so many of the intellectual currents that have animated human geography in recent years, it originated outside the discipline, gathering momentum over the last decade. By the time Katherine Hayles published her well-known book How We Became Posthuman in 1999 there was already a sizeable literature explaining why `the human' must be compulsively draped in scare-quotes. What's more, the now not so new neologism `posthumanism' has been fleshed out in a variety of ways that, while generically resonant, are substantively irreducible. Some of these elucidations are, inevitably, demotic. Francis Fukuyama's (2002) Our Posthuman Future is part of a predictable genre of writing in which the incipient eclipse of the `human' is lamented and the `post' taken, in eschatological mode, as a decisive temporal break. Other theorisations of the posthuman are, fortunately, more sophisticated and thoughtful.

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They offer ontological, diagnostic, and prognostic insights that can productively trouble habitual ways of thinking and acting on both academia and everyday life. Whether these insights `add value' to the work of the strong minority of human geographers mentioned above is the subject of this exchange. Does the discourse of posthumanismin its more rigorous incarnationsmerely replay the insights of Deleuze, Guattari, Latour, and others in a different idiom? Does it offer additional leverage in the ongoing project of those geographers who wish to shift disciplinary research into new registers? Or is tainted by the semantic surety of the `post' that prefixes its name despite the efforts of Hayles and others to deploy the term in a far from literal mode? To answer these questions a metaphorical and literal mapping of posthumanist discourse is required. Neil Badmington's essay and the three commentaries that follow it survey the discursive landscape of posthumanism.(1) Badmington has eloquently and intelligently sorted the wheat from the chaff in his several writings on the posthuman which include Posthumanism (2000) and Alien Chic (2004). Turning his gaze to geography, he looks for resonances between his own project and that of fellow-travellers in a discipline that is foreign to most of the authors who have breathed life into what so easily could be the latest in a long line of slogans rather than a worked-up intellectual position. Specifically, he identifies a scission within the literature on posthumanism and affirms the value of a `critical posthumanism' that is endlessly vigilant about the ineluctable power but constitutive inadequacy of the signifier `human'. In their commentaries Bruce Braun, Jonathan Murdoch, and Sarah Whatmore use Badmington's reflections to identify what, if any, substantive appropriations of posthumanist thinking might be analytically and politically productive at this time. Between them, they usefully distinguish three modalities of posthumanist thought. The first is the kind of lazy but not inconsequential thinking mentioned above: namely, the kind of Fukuyaman apocalyptics whose hyperbole is ultimately so incantatory as to dull the senses. Against this notion of the posthuman as an incipient historical condition, two others are arguably more productive. One sees posthumanism as a set of ontological theses about the human that never was and will never be. These theses posit not an historical break precipitated by technoscience, genomics, or what-have-you. Instead, they call for a recognition that `we have never been human' (compare Latour, 1993). Relatedly, a third modality of posthumanist thinking takes the form of a ceaseless scepticism about the claims made in the name of either the human or its notional transcendence. This is posthumanism as a `both/and' form of deconstructive reading of the kind Badmington inclines towards. Standing back from these three renditions of the posthuman, we might add that it can be seen as either an object of analysis (for example, we might analyse the nature and provenance of arguments like those of Fukuyama) or an analytical ^ philosophical position (as in the latter two modes of posthumanist thinking identified above). In all this, whether there is anything specific about the human to be defended, supplemented, or erased is an open question. For some, the discourse of posthumanism no doubt seems little different from those various discourses that question the many collateral concepts and their antimonies that adjoin the human: like culture/nature, society/environment, civilisation/savagery, and so on. This might, perhaps, explain why formal appropriations of the term `posthumanism' have thus far been virtually
exchange of views began life as a session at the 2003 RGS ^ IBG conference in London. Neil Badmington was a research guest of the Social and Cultural Geography and the History and Philosophy of Geography research groups of the RGS ^ IBG.
(1) This

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nonexistent in geography.(2) As we said above, we have no intention of appropriating the latest `post' simply because intellectual fashion demands it. Whether posthumanist thought ultimately has any substantive role to play in creating a more-than-human geography remains to be seen. This published exchange can hardly force the issue. But it can open to formal scrutiny the question of whether posthumanist discourse should engage the critical energies of those geographers who wish to make human geography less resolutely human.
References Badmington N (Ed.) 2000 Posthumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hants) Badmington N, 2004 Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (Routledge, London) Braun B, 2004, ``Querying posthumanisms'' Geoforum 35 269 ^ 273 Fukuyama F, 2002 Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Profile Books, London) Hayles N K, 1999 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) Latour B, 1993 We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)

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her several writings Kay Anderson is almost alone in geography in attending to the performative force of `the human', `humanity', and their antinomies. Interestingly, she has made little or no use of the literature that formally discusses posthumanism, though she does employ the term posthuman in some of her published essays.

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Mapping posthumanism
Neil Badmington
Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF10 3XB, Wales; e-mail: Badmington@Cardiff.ac.uk Received 20 May 2004

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. I am referring to the predicament of posthumanism. On the one hand, things look extremely promising. Although there is nothing new about the conceptH P Blavatsky (1952, volume 2, page 684) wrote of the ``post-Human'' as long ago as 1888recent years have seen it become a genuinely noticeable presence in Western culture.(1) So much so, in fact, that by 2002, the Modern Language Association of America had taken an interest, announcing in one of its newsletters that ``the future may hold more interest in an environment entirely without human beings: the subject term `the posthuman' is currently under evaluation [for inclusion in the MLA International Bibliography] after appearing six times since 2000'' (Grazevich, 2002, page 6). Meanwhile, at approximately the same moment (and, moreover, beyond the walls of the university), the audience of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week programme was being invited by Francis Fukuyama to consider the possibility that the future would be inhabited by posthuman beings. Such creatures, but perhaps not Radio 4 listeners, would probably be happy dancing to the latest release from Posthuman Records, the label set up several years ago by Marilyn Manson. Posthumanism, in short, would seem to be enjoying considerable success, and its growth seems to have little respect for traditional disciplinary boundaries. It has certainly made an impact in my own field, which is probably best described as an uneasy hybrid of cultural criticism and English literature. But it has made waves in other places, too, for scholars working in science studies, theology, visual culture, geography, architecture, philosophy, political theory, gender studies, media studies, and computer science, have all recently begun to discuss and discuss with each other the possibilities of the posthuman. Mapping the movements of this unruly `post' has, accordingly, become somewhat difficult. In this respect, the title of my essay identifies a problem rather than a project. An attempt to provide a complete overview, an A ^ Z, an encyclopaedia of posthumanism, could only lead, I feel, to the situation described in ``On exactitude in science'', the short story by Jorge Luis Borges which is, no doubt, well known to geographers. The tale is told, he writes, of an empire that devoted so much time and energy to producing comprehensive maps of its territory that the map of the empire eventually became as big as the empire itself, leading future generations to see the pointlessness of the activity and turn their backs on maps and those who make them. The story ends on an ominous note: ``In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography'' (Borges, 1999, page 325). But if I am not offering a perfect map, I want nonetheless to chart the way in which, as the concept of posthumanism becomes increasingly commonplace, there
(1) There were, of course, occasional sightings at earlier moments Ihab Hassan's ``Prometheus as performer'' (1977), for example but as the new millennium approached and then receded, a whole chorus of critics explicitly raised the question of posthumanism. See, for instance, Haraway (1992), Hays (1992), Spanos (1993), Halberstam and Livingston (1995), Foster (1996), McCracken (1997), Pearson (1997), Pepperell (1997), Farnell (1998), Hayles (1999), Rutsky (1999), Badmington (2000), Waldby (2000), Gray (2001), Graham (2002), Fernbach (2002), Fukuyama (2002), Lecourt (2003), and Wolfe (2003).

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simultaneously emerges a neohumanist backlash against the posthuman, a call to get back to basics, back to reality, back to nature. What worries me is that this backlash, this reactionary retreat, might come to undermine or even eclipse the critical advances that have been made in recent years. From this perspective, there is a sense in which it is the worst of times. It is not all bad news, of course. I really do believe that, on the one hand, it is the best of times, for the present moment is one in which humanism finds itself in a state of crisis that is more acute than ever. I should, perhaps, be clear about how I am using the term `humanism'. Like many other `isms', it tends to be a little slippery. As I understand it, humanism is a discourse which claims that the figure of `Man' (sic) naturally stands at the centre of things; is entirely distinct from animals, machines, and other nonhuman entities; is absolutely known and knowable to `himself'; is the origin of meaning and history; and shares with all other human beings a universal essence. Its absolutist assumptions, moreover, mean that anthropocentric discourse relies upon a set of binary oppositions, such as human/inhuman, self/other, natural/cultural, inside/outside, subject/object, us/them, here/there, active/passive, and wild/tame. In recent years, however, principally in the wake of the work of Jacques Derrida, many critics have begun to attend to the ways in which such binary oppositions are never as certain as they seem. This, of course, has major implications for a discipline such as geography, which has historically tended to rely upon a series of binary oppositions (above all, perhaps, human/physical).(2) And from this scene of uncertainty has emerged some adventurous thinking. Reading Sarah Whatmore's Hybrid Geographies (2002), for instance, I was heartened by her insistence that clinging to anthropocentric assumptions just is not good enough anymore, cannot hope to do justice to the way of the world. With that in mind, Hybrid Geographies relates a fascinating series of stories about the shortcomings, the slippages, and the drifts of humanism. And what makes Hybrid Geographies such an important intervention, I think, is its refusal to shy away from these implications, its embrace of the in-between spaces, the moments of uncertainty, the complications and crossings that geography has often repressed. My background in literary studies drew my gaze to the language with which Whatmore inscribes her position. At various moments in the text, she professes a commitment to what ``exceeds'' (page 69), what comes to ``overspill and undermine'' (page 68), ``the porous'' (page 117), the ``unsustainable'' (page 33), and that which ``disturbs'' (page 116), ``perverts'' (page 162), ``unravels'' (page 9), or ``complicate[s]'' (page 1). This, in other words, is a book that hones and honours ``the messy heterogeneity of being-in-the-world'' (page 147), in the fault-lines of which histories and geographies are made by more than human subjects. Walter Benjamin once remarked that the task of the dedicated historical materialist is ``to brush history against the grain'' (1969, page 257), and it seems to me that Hybrid Geographies adopts a similar approach to humanist discourses of nature, wilderness, species, and spaces. Established geographical knowledges are, accordingly, disturbed. One chapter of the book, for instance, examines how ``the determination to fix the wild in the geographical and bodily spaces of animals untouched by history is intellectually and practically unsustainable'' (page 33), even if everyday life often insists otherwise. If, that is to say, you really think that you can find the purely wild, then you are purely, wildly wrong. The humanist opposition between wild and domesticated is simply not
(2) This

is not for one moment to forget the somewhat overlooked tradition of research that has deconstructed the opposition between the human and the physical, insisting instead upon a `middle ground' (see, for instance, Zimmerer, 1996). I owe this point to Noel Castree.

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sustainable, for things refuse to fit smoothly, silently, and submissively into the spaces carved out for them by traditional anthropocentric thought. As Whatmore points out, to see the elephant Duchessone of the attractions at Paignton Zooas a wild animal would be far too simple. Her history makes a differencemakes her difference, in factfor, ``Taxonomically, she certainly belongs to Loxodonta africana, but the elephant she has become through her life at Paignton Zoo bears only distant relation to those of her kind at home in the African bush, even as such living spaces are themselves being increasingly reconfigured in the same patterning of foresight in which she is caught up'' (page 47). Perhaps it makes more sense, Whatmore concludes, to understand animals as ``strange persons, rather than familiar or exotic things'' (page 32). This startling propositionan example, perhaps, of what Donna Haraway has recently called ``ontological choreography'' (2003, page 51)makes it clear that Hybrid Geographies does not tell a humanist tale. Being becomes becoming, and the ``messy heterogeneity of being-in-theworld'' upsets the homogeneity and ``ontological hygiene'' (Graham, 2002) of humanism. Nature is not what it used to be, and culture cages less than its claim. This is not for one moment to suggest that humanism no longer exists, no longer seeks to have its day and its way. Whatmore is attentive enough an observer to see that humanism still calls out, still enjoys a certain degree of credibility in some quarters, even when what is actually happening in the present stands as evidence to a radically different story. Those familiar, long-established ``commonsense accounts of the world'' (page 117), she notes, are still in circulation, part of the terrain, part of the map. For proof of this, it is necessary to look no further than Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future (2002), a text which appeared within months of the publication of Hybrid Geographies. Here, I think, is a striking example of the other side, a hint of why it might also be the worst of times for posthumanism. Fukuyama opens his book with an allusion to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, noting that ``Many of the technologies that Huxley envisioned, like in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, psychotropic drugs, and genetic engineering for the manufacture of children, are already here or just over the horizon'' (page 5). Fiction has become fact, or something very close to fact. This, for Fukuyama, is a cause for great concern, and Our Posthuman Future paints a picture of ``bio-catastrophe'' (Lecourt, 2003, page 11) that takes up where Huxley left off. ``The aim of this book'', Fukuyama declares: ``is to argue that Huxley was right, that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a `posthuman' stage of history. This is important ... because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species. It is, conjointly with religion, what defines our most basic values. Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself'' (page 7). Human nature exists and is a meaningful concept; biotechnology threatens to change human nature, which, Fukuyama adds, is ``flexible'', but not ``infinitely malleable'' (page 128). And human nature is precisely what Fukuyama, unlike Whatmore, wants to defend, to preserve from the ``threat'' of a posthuman future. But what exactly does Fukuyama understand human nature to be? The secret is not revealed until the eighth chapter of the book, where a definition is finally offered. ``Human nature'', he now proposes, ``is the sum of the behaviour and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors''

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(page 130). Perhaps sensing that he is using somewhat problematic vocabulary, Fukuyama immediately adds that the word ``typical'' requires ``some explanation'': ``I use the term in the same way that ethologists do when they speak of `speciestypical behaviour' (for example, pair-bonding is typical of robins and catbirds but not of gorillas and orangutans). One common misunderstanding about the `nature' of an animal is that the word implies rigid genetic determination. In fact, all natural characteristics show considerable variance within the same species; natural selection and evolutionary adaptation could not occur were this not so. This is particularly the case with cultural animals like human beings: since behaviours can be learned and modified, the variance in behaviour is inevitably greater and will reflect the individual's environment to a greater extent than for animals incapable of cultural learning. This means that typicality is a statistical artifactit refers to something close to the median of a distribution of behaviour or characteristics'' (page 130). Nature, that is to say, is purely a question of statistics. The median secretes the truth of the human. In order to explain his proposition in more detail, Fukuyama offers a series of charts. If, he suggests, the heights of current male and female residents of the United States were plotted, a bell curve would emerge (page 131). From this, it would immediately become clear that there is no such thing as ``a `normal' height'' (page 130). But, Fukuyama continues, there are nonetheless a median and a mean, and it follows that it is not ``meaningless to talk about species-typical heights for a population of human beings'' (page 131). These, he adds, would clearly be different from those of chimpanzees and elephants. The human frame has changed significantly over time, of course, and Fukuyama accordingly reveals a more complex chart, which shows height distributions from ``a typical European country between the years 1500 and 2000'' (page 132). In other words, Fukuyama readily acknowledges that there is variation, change, and difference. But even this does not lead him to abandon his belief in the universal. ``A characteristic'', he insists, ``does not need to have a variance (standard deviation) of zero to be considered a universal, since almost none exist ... . For a characteristic to be considered universal, it needs rather to have a single, distinct median or modal point, and a relatively small standard deviation'' (pages 134 ^ 135). In the sum of the universals lies the familiar figure of ``Man'', who is the sole author of history and subject of politics, whose absolute and hierarchical difference from the inhuman must be preserved at all costs, and whose relationship to technology should be one of ``master'' rather than ``servant'' (page 10). This, of course, is a classically humanist narrative, and Fukuyama believes that anthropocentrism will save the human race from the terrifying ``moral chasm'' (page 17) that opens with the coming of posthumanism. Humanism guarantees ``True freedom'' (page 218). Jean-Franc ois Lyotard, however, repeatedly warned of the terror that can follow from the flattening out of differences for the sake of the same.(3) War, he insisted, must be waged on totality and the desire to deactivate differends (1992, page 25). ``[N]ostalgia for the all and the one'' (page 24) is to be avoided at all costs. Fukuyama, meanwhile, as a nostalgic believer in liberal democracy, consistently privileges the sameness of consensus (how could he not?) But what can be seen in his statistical turn is precisely the terror of consensus, how it can only ever be produced, forced from a spray of difference (or, to use Lyotard's vocabulary, differends). There is, I think, something remarkably fascistic about Fukuyama's sense of the universal, of human nature, for he begins his
(3) This is a theme that runs throughout much of Lyotard's work (see, in particular, Lyotard, 1988; 1992).

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account by openly admitting that it is not all that there is. It is, rather, merely a median, and a median is inherently partial. In the beginning there is difference Fukuyama would accept that much, at leastbut he is not at all interested in preserving this alterity beyond a beginning. On the contrary, Our Posthuman Future sets its sights upon identity, the single, the simple, the same. And to reach such a destination, the text must cancel out, silence, exterminate whatever deviates. On closer inspection, however, Fukuyama's humanism does not quite hold together. Although the book seeks to define and defend human nature, it actually calls its own project into question. And if Our Posthuman Future is, to take a phrase from Karl Marx, ``pregnant with its contrary'' (Marx 1973, page 299), the task of the critic, as I see it, is to induce a long-overdue birth that will open up spaces of, for, and to posthumanist alterity. I would normally be inclined to say following Jacques Derridathat Fukuyama's argument deconstructs itself, but it would equally be possible, following Whatmore, to cast matters in a Deleuzian tone, and to attend to the hidden deterritorialisations, the secret flows and lines of flight, that prevent Fukuyama's text from observing ``the divisions that [it is] explicitly called upon to witness'' (Whatmore, 2002, page 114). Humanism's plenitude and coherence, it transpires, are consistently deferred, deflated, and defrocked by a network of faults that riddle Fukuyama's sense of human nature. Although the series of bell curves might initially convey a sense of scientific authority, of exactitude, they are actually remarkably casual, complacent, approximate affairs. If the sources of Fukuyama's informationthe statistics upon which the graphs are basedare pursued, it soon becomes apparent that he has not drawn upon any kind of official report. He has, rather, based his charts upon what he thinks the figures might be. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the phrase ``something like'' has a habit of appearing whenever Fukuyama is describing his diagrams. When he introduces the first graph, for instance, he writes: ``If we were to plot male and female heights for the United States today, they would look something like Figure 1 (the lines are meant to be illustrative only)'' (page 130). That vagueness continues when Fukuyama unveils the second graph, about which he writes: ``If we compare the height distributions for a typical European country between the years 1500 and 2000, we come up with a set of curves something like the ones in Figure 2'' (page 132). Something like ... The graphs, that is to say, are ultimately useless. They prove absolutely nothing, for the argument hinges upon ``something like'' these curves, and not, therefore, the curves themselves. Meanwhile, even typicality itselfwhich is, of course, supposed to be the foundation of Fukuyama's discourse is typically imprecise. It is, he suggests, ``a statistical artifact it refers to something close to the median of a distribution of behaviour or characteristics'' (page 130). The troublesome ``something'' has returned: something close to the median. But where, exactly? Like the lines of the graphs, the median turns out to guarantee nothing: the truth lies in ``something like the median'', but Fukuyama is no more precise than this. Here, at the moment when he is writing about the very centre and support of his system, Fukuyama repeatedly takes refuge in remarkable vagueness. The centre, in fact, is devastatingly absent. It seems to me that Fukuyama can be this casual, this complacent, simply because, as far as he is concerned, such matters are simply common sense. There is no need to be precise: things are perfectly obvious. My choice of signifier here is deliberate. In an essay written in the mid-1960s, Louis Althusser remarked that humanism had been ``obviousness itself'' (1996, page 227, translation modified) until the work of the mature Marx finally allowed this obviousness to be interrogated by ``a new problematic, a new systematic way of asking questions of the world, new principles and a new method'' (page 229). Only when ``the philosophical (theoretical) myth of Man is reduced

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to ashes'' (page 229) will it be possible ``to know anything'' (page 229) about the way of the world. Humanism is an obstacle, an ideology, a myth. Althusser never claimed that humanism simply disappeared after Marx, however. On the contrary, he stressed that ``theoretical humanism has a long and very `bright future' ahead of it'' (2003, page 233), and that any struggle against it would inevitably be an ongoing affair. While I am not for one moment proposing a simple revival of Althusserian Marxism, I do think that his recognition of humanism's longevity is worth remembering today. If, as Fukuyuma's book confirms, anthropocentric thought is still at large, still enjoying a certain degree of credibility, then posthumanism is probably not to be understood as marking or making a clean and clear break from the legacy of humanism. Near the beginning of Humain, posthumain, Dominique Lecourt expresses some reservations about certain uses of the term ``posthuman'', not merely because the prefix ``post'' is ``so popular on North American campuses (think of the glory of the postmodern!)'' (2003, page 3), but also because it is often taken apocalyptically, teleologically to mark an absolute end, ``the end of ends'' (page 3). But, as I have argued elsewhere (Badmington, 2003; 2004), there is another way to imagine the `post'. Drawing upon Lyotard's later work on postmodernity particularly the essays collected in The Postmodern Explained to Children (1992) and a related piece entitled ``Rewriting modernity'' (1991) it is possible to read the prefix in question not as the sign of apocalypse or teleology, but rather as a gradual working through of tradition. Posthumanism, that is to say, can be something very different from an ending. The work, rather, is just beginning. An unfinished working through is underway, and it seems to me that books such as Hybrid Geographies make an important contribution to this very task. The posthuman and the postnatural press upon the present because the beginning of the 21st century is a moment at which humanism finds itself in a state of radical uncertainty. As the opening lines of Hybrid Geographies note: ``Barely a day passes without another story of the hyperbolic inventiveness of the life sciences to complicate the distinctions between human and non-human; social and material; subjects and objects to which we are accustomed'' (page 1). Cyborgs multiply (Haraway, 1985), death appears to be dying (Baudrillard, 2000), animals have cultures and languages (Wolfe, 2003, page 2), nature seems unnatural (Robertson et al, 1996), bodies are erased as `Man' comes to see `himself' as pure information (Hayles, 1999), and ``science-fiction science'' proliferates (Habermas, 2003, page 42). Humanism cannot possibly survive such transformations, can it? Yes and no. The uncertainty of the human, as Whatmore recognises, exists alongside continued claims of certainty. The binary oppositions of the past tremble but continue to inform everyday decisions, assumptions, and activities. Tradition does not necessarily fall into silence with its deconstruction; its sounds still ground, even if they at once find themselves in discordance with other voices that flow from the fractures of humanism. And it is precisely this contradictory condition, this strange way in which anthropocentric discourse both ``holds sway'' (Whatmore, 2002, page 117) and sways wildly from itself, with which a ``critical posthumanism'' (Didur, 2003) must now endlessly engage. Geography, after all, is etymologically earthed in writing, and a posthumanist or postnatural geography might, I think, concern itself with rewritings of the persistent past. Humanism may be acknowledged but not accepted. No simple story is enough, no single position just. This is not the end. Not yet.

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orie'' conference, Acknowledgements. Versions of this paper were presented at the ``Ou va la the University of Paris X (Nanterre), June 2003, and at the ``Post Human/Post Natural Geographies'' session of the annual RGS ^ IBG conference in London, September 2003. I owe thanks to all those who commented, particularly Noel Castree, Michael Gallagher, Catherine Nash, Ailbhe Thunder, and my copanellists in London. References Althusser L, 1996 For Marx translated by B Brewster (Verso, London) Althusser L, 2003 The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings Ed. F Matheron, translated by G M Goshgarian (Verso, London) Badmington N (Ed.), 2000 Posthumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hants) Badmington N, 2003, ``Theorizing posthumanism'' Cultural Critique 53 10 ^ 27 Badmington N, 2004 Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (Routledge, London) Baudrillard J, 2000, ``The final solution: cloning beyond the human and inhuman'', in The Vital Illusion (Columbia University Press, New York) pp 1 ^ 30 Benjamin W, 1969 Illuminations Ed. H Arendt, translated by H Zohn (Schocken Books, New York) Blavatsky H P, 1952 The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, CA) Borges J L, 1999, ``On exactitude in science'', in Collected Fictions translated by A Hurley (Allen Lane, London) page 325 Didur J, 2003, ``Re-embodying technoscientific fantasies: posthumanism, genetically modified foods, and the colonization of life'' Cultural Critique 53 98 ^ 115 Farnell R, 1998, ``Posthuman topologies: William Gibson's `architexture' in Virtual Light and Idoru '' Science-Fiction Studies 25 459 ^ 480 Fernbach A, 2002 Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Post-human (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh) Foster T, 1996, `` `The sex appeal of the inorganic': posthuman narratives and the construction of desire'', in Centuries' Ends, Narrative Means Ed. R Newman (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA) pp 276 ^ 301 Fukuyama F, 2002 Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Profile Books, London) Graham E L, 2002 Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester University Press, Manchester) Gray C H, 2001 Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (Routledge, New York) Grazevich G M, 2002, ``Emerging terminology in the MLA International Bibliography '' MLA Newsletter 34(1) 6 Habermas J, 2003 The Future of Human Nature translated by W Rehg, M Pensky, H Beister (Polity, Cambridge) Halberstam J, Livingston I (Eds), 1995 Posthuman Bodies (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN) Haraway D J, 1985, ``A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s'' Socialist Review 80 65 ^ 108 Haraway D J, 1992, ``Ecce homo, ain't (ar'n't) I a woman, and inappropriated others: the human in a post-humanist landscape'', in Feminists Theorize the Political Eds J Butler, J W Scott (Routledge, New York) pp 86 ^ 100 Haraway D J, 2003 The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, IL) Hassan I, 1977, ``Prometheus as performer: toward a posthumanist culture? A university masque in five scenes'' The Georgia Review 31 830 ^ 850 Hayles N K, 1999 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) Hays K M, 1992 Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) Huxley A L, 1932 Brave New World (Chatto and Windus, London) Lecourt D, 2003 Humain, posthumain: La technique et la vie (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris) Lyotard J-F, 1988 The Differend: Phrases in Dispute translated by G Van Den Abbeele (Manchester University Press, Manchester) Lyotard J-F , 1991, ``Rewriting modernity'', in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time translated by G Bennington, R Bowlby (Polity, Cambridge) pp 24 ^ 35

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Lyotard J-F, 1992 The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982 ^ 1985 translated by J Pefanis, M Thomas (Turnaround, London) McCracken S, 1997, ``Cyborg fictions: the cultural logic of posthumanism'', in Socialist Register 1997 Ed. L Panitch (Merlin, London) pp 288 ^ 301 Marx K, 1973, ``Speech at the anniversary of the People's Paper '', in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, Volume 2 Ed. D Fernbach (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middx) pp 299 ^ 300 Pearson K A, 1997, ``Life becoming body: on the `meaning' of post human evolution'' Cultural Values 1 219 ^ 240 Pepperell R, 1997 The Post-human Condition 2nd edition (Intellect Books, Exeter, Devon) Robertson G, Tickner L, Bird J, Curtis B (Eds), 1996 FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture (Routledge, London) Rutsky R L, 1999 High Techne : Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) Spanos W V, 1993 The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) Waldby C, 2000 The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (Routledge, London) Whatmore S, 2002 Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (Sage, London) Wolfe C, 2003 Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) Zimmerer K, 1996, ``Ecology as cornerstone and chimera in human geography'', in Concepts in Human Geography Eds. C Earle, K Mathewson (Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD) pp 161 ^ 188

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B Braun

Modalities of posthumanism
Bruce Braun
Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; USA; e-mail: braun@atlas.socsci.umn.edu Received 20 May 2004

In ``Mapping posthumanism'', Neil Badmington brings much needed clarity to what has been a diverseand often confusedset of debates about the `posthuman' in the social sciences and humanities, including geography. My comments are meant less as critique than as an extension of Badmington's mapping project, in order to register both the plurality of posthumanisms currently at play, and to identify what is at stake in different ways of querying the human.(1) For purposes of brevity, I will offer two readings of posthumanism: as a form of `deconstructive responsibility', and as a type of `ontological play'. These are related, but not the same. For the most part, Badmington frames his discussion in terms of the former, although arguably the latterontological playgives him his conceptual `ground' (albeit, a `groundless ground', in the sense that it is not an ontology of fixed forms). His primary concern lies in countering a neohumanist backlash to posthumanism, as evident in Francis Fukuyama's (2002) apocalyptic Our Posthuman Future. Fukuyama is merely the most recent in a long line of humanists who have sought to establish the human as an essence or norm. Fukuyama's project, in other words, is to delimit the human, to `fix' it. Thus, the human is defined statistically, in the language of norm, variation, and deviance. That this echoes the kind of normalising knowledges and disciplinary practices explored by Foucault should be clear. By fixing the human one immediately produces a distributed difference that can be measured in terms of distance from a norm, and an `inhumanity' that can be a project in itself (to be modified, trained, or eradicated). In this sense there is great irony in Fukuyama's project, for if what he fears is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, he produces nothing less than the conceptual scaffolding needed for exactly such a project. Badmington counters Fukuyama's ontological hygiene with Jean-Franc ois Lyotard's differend, a concept that reminds us of the violence of consensus that the flattening of differences, or the demand for a norm (`human nature'), carries within it its own forms of terror. In the face of calls to ``get back to basics, back to reality, back to nature'', and against anxious returns to ``identity, the single, the simple, the same'', Badmington insists on ``posthumanist alterity'' as a reminder that the centre of the human is ``devastatingly absent''. Here he writes in close proximity to a series of insightful and refreshing essays by Jaques Derrida (2002; 2003) and Giorgio Agamben (2004) that query the `human' by exploring how humanism produces this figure through another figure: the animal. What is significant about this work, and why it adds something more to Badmington's critique of Fukuyama, is that it reveals humanism to be always already founded on a `fundamental anthropology' (Derrida, 2003) that anxiously differentiates the human from the animal (see also Wolfe, 2003). Without this distinction, humanism has no foundation. Derrida shows this fundamental anthropology at work across the spectrum of Western philosophyin Descartes, Freud, Heidegger, and Lacan, among othersin order to reveal not only how the space of the `human' is differentially produced, but also how the `properly human' comes to be defined within, and is dependent upon, this system of difference. Derrida gives us a neologism animot that brilliantly captures his point. The word phonetically singularises the plural for animal (animaux) and combines it with the word for `word' (mots), thereby
(1) These

comments draw in part on Braun (2004).

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calling attention to the habit of rolling all animal species into one, producing an undifferentiated `other' against which the `human' can be juxtaposed and defined. This animal-word at once founds and grounds humanism. Of course, Derrida goes on to explain that this `fundamental anthropology' deconstructs itself. Humanism's founding differencethe differentiation of human from animalis, ultimately, unstable; a supplement is always required to fix the difference (language, reason, tool-making), yet each and every supplement is inadequate to the task. Agamben (2004) makes a similar argument, suggesting that the figure of the animal, and this ongoing labor of division, is essential to the workings of what he calls the `anthropological machine'. As he explains in a passage that emphasises the political stakes, ``Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/ inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside'' (2004, page 37). The significance of this `zone of indeterminacy' is that it allows for the animalising of man and the isolation of the `nonhuman' within the human. This occurred not only in certain 19th century sciences, which offered up figures such as Homo alalus (ape-man), but throughout the 20th century as well, during which a host of other figures were nominated to fill the slot: the Jew, the slave, the barbarian, the foreigner. If, as Agamben suggests, this humanist discourse which separates and expels the nonhuman within the humanis fundamental to the working of sovereign power, we have every reason to react strongly against Fukuyama's desire to recentre `man'. Although in this short essay Badmington draws on Lyotard, I take his posthumanism to be consistent with this sort of `deconstructive responsibility' that watches vigilantly over the figure of the human as it is continuously deployed and defined within culture, politics, and philosophy. Vigilance, rather than transcendence, for if we assume that we have left humanism behind, discredited and abandoned for all time, we risk being blind to its traces, to how it haunts the posthuman. As he is at pains to explain, posthumanism must proceed as a ``gradual working through of tradition''; it must not assume that it simply steps outside its terms, for ``tradition does not necessarily fall into silence with its deconstruction.'' Badmington is surely right. The past is persistent; it can only be rewritten, not rejected. Yet, I wonder whether he has been vigilant enough in his own rewriting. To the extent that his attention to `posthumanist alterity' worries over the reduction of human nature to the `single' and `same', and leaves unexamined the distinction human/animal that grounds humanism's fundamental anthropology, we might ask whether his posthumanism goes far enough in dismantling the anthropological machine. Let me move quickly to a second reading of posthumanism. If Badmington turns the volume up on posthumanism as `deconstructive responsibility', he also gestures at points to a reading that finds in posthumanism another name for `ontological play', or, in Donna Haraway's (2004) felicitous phrase, `ontological choreography'. I want to expand on this reading of posthumanism for two reasons. First, because it strikes me that posthumanism's deconstructive impulse has affinities to, although it is not identical with, certain ontological stances that emphasise the `open-ended becoming' of the world (DeLanda, 1999) and that provide a sort of `groundless ground' from which the `fixing' of the human comes into view as a problem. But also because attending to the question of ontological play may explain how some posthumanisms

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allow for, even encourage, the kind of reactive responses that Fukuyama is only too happy to provide. Let me explain. If writers such as Derrida and Agamben focus on the figure of the humanthat is, how it is established as an identity differentiated from other classes of beinga number of other writers have taken the making of the human, and the human body, as their central concern. This is the posthumanism with which we are perhaps most familiar, since it has become the staple fare of science fiction novels and movies, and has entered theory in the celebrated figure of the cyborg, that being which combines the human and machine and whose humanity is always, and necessarily, ambivalent (see Haraway, 1991). This figureand the notion that posthumanism names a condition of `ontological play' has been taken up widely, but often in problematic ways. Most disturbing, I think, has been the frequent attachment to this `cyborg' ontology of a sense of temporality. Indeed, one finds in much posthumanist literature an almost breathless excitement about having entered a new age, about having emerged into a time, or a condition, where the body has become no longer entirely or fully human. These posthumanisms emphasise rupture, the shift from nature to postnature, pure to modified, pristine to worked up. This is reflected in phrases that have by now become commonplace. How often do we hear that technoculture has ushered in an age in which boundaries are `blurred', beings are `hybrid', and the human and nonhuman are `stitched together'? Implicit in such statements is an assumption that, once upon a time things were not this way, that at an earlier moment the boundaries really did exist and the human was purely, simply, `itself'. What often goes unnoticed is that by historicising the posthuman we end up recentring the human: the human is that being that `once was', but which has been `eclipsed' or `transcended'. Here's the crux: such posthumanisms require the figure of `Man', and in so doing, become humanisms with a vengeance, for they produce as a historical fiction precisely that which they imagine to have left behind. In this sense, posthumanism's fevered celebration of the posthuman is of a kind with humanism's mourning of the passing of `Man'. We must ask, then, whether our posthumanisms have themselves become `anthropological machines', unwittingly accepting the same story of the human and its passing as put forward by conservatives like Fukuyama, merely coding positive what they code negative? It is precisely to avoid such unintentional returns to the `human itself' that many scholars in the social sciences and humanitiesgeographers includedhave turned to philosophers such as Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, and Serres (see Whatmore, 2002). What these writers offer is an understanding of bodies, including `human' bodies, as always already an effect of their composition in and through their relations with the world. In this sense, the human has no essence, and never did, but is rather understood as an `in-folding' of the world, an effect of ongoing and ceaseless ontological play (Harrison, 2000). The human, then, was `post' from the beginning. From this emerges a different politics, no longer a celebration of transcendence, nor a politics of recovery (both ultimately work with the same assumption about `Man' and his passing), but a politics attuned to humans as always in the middle of multiple becomings, always an effect of politics, rather than that which grounds politics. The lesson here, I think, is that we have to forget about beginnings and ends, and instead attend to the middle that place where everything happens, where everything picks up speed and intensity. It suggests the possibility of, and necessity for, a political cartography of bodily formation that attends to how bodies are imbued with the capacity for affect the capacity to be acted upon, and the capacity to act. It means accepting that politics comes before being, not the reverse. Here the differences

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become stark. Fukuyama's nostalgic attempt to fix the human does so by banishing politics, even as it produces a most political figure of the human. Writers such as Sarah Whatmore (2002) and Jane Bennett (2001) suggest that we need a different `ontostory', one that recognises that politics does not conserve being, but produces it. Only then will we be prepared for the task of attending to `human becomings' in such a way to acknowledge ontological play as, inevitably, the meeting place of danger and hope. Only then will we be able to see that the (post)human names neither a median nor a distribution around a norm, neither a universal (of which we are so many particulars) nor a biological essence threatened by technology, but rather the ongoing differentiation of ways of life and modes of being. Perhaps then we can evaluate human becomings in terms of their affirmation of life, rather than their distance from what has always been an historical fiction.
References Agamben G, 2004 The Open: Man and Animal translated by K Attell (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA) Bennett J, 2001 The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ) Braun B, 2004, ``Querying posthumanisms'' Geoforum 35 269 ^ 273 DeLanda M, 1999, ``Deleuze, diagrams and the open-ended becoming of the world'', in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures Ed. E Grosz (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, IN) pp 29 ^ 41 Derrida J, 2002 ``The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)'' Critical Inquiry 28 369 ^ 418 Derrida J, 2003, ``And say the animal responded?'', in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal Ed. C Wolfe (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) pp 121 ^ 146 Fukuyama F, 2002 Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Profile, London) Haraway D, 1991 Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York) Haraway D, 2004 The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, IL) Harrison P, 2000, ``Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday'' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 497 ^ 517 Huxley A L, 1932 Brave New World (Chatto and Windus, London) Whatmore S, 2002 Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces (Sage, London) Wolfe C, 2003 Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)

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J Murdoch

Humanising posthumanism
Jonathan Murdoch
School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, Wales; e-mail: Murdoch@cardiff.ac.uk Received 20 May 2004

The terms `humanism' and `posthumanism' seemingly describe distinct social conditions. `Humanism' arguably depicts a way of being that is oriented towards the human actor and human rationality, to the way that human society can be liberated from underlying natural constraints. Though humanism comes in various shapes and sizes, its common features are summed up by Keenan Malik (2000, page 2) as the attempt ``to place human beings at the centre of philosophical debate, to glorify human abilities and to view human reason as a tool through which to understand nature.'' In the humanistic worldview, reason progressively dominates nature and permits the human realm to be increasingly demarcated and separated from the natural realm. The `human' can thus be liberated from the `natural' with the effect that human beings come to inhabit more fully a world of pure rationality, that is, a world ordered by science and scientific modes of reasoning. As Malik again puts it, ``all [versions of humanism] hold to the idea of humans as conscious agents, who realise themselves only through projects to transform themselves and the world they inhabit. At the heart of humanism, therefore, is a belief in emancipationthe faith that humankind can achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny of Man, through the agency of his own efforts.'' In Malik's view, this belief in some form of emancipation from both nature and society can be discerned in all the major manifestations of humanistic thought Rennaisance science, Enlightenment philosophy, Marxist politics, and so on. We find, then, at the heart of humanism a laudable aimemancipation, a concern to free humans from onerous and harmful relationships. Yet, this concern has its dark side as the movement towards emancipation frequently carries along its opposite domination and tyranny. As a consequence, efforts to carve out extensive zones of freedom too often result in ever more intensive modes of subjugation. In Malik's view, an acceptance of humanism's `dark side' has come to engender widespread pessimism and he quotes the deep ecologist Murray Bookchin who says: ``we now seem to be afraid of ourselvesof our uniquely human attributes. We seem to be suffering from a decline in human self-confidence and in our ability to create meaningful lives that enrich humanity and the non-human world'' (quoted in Malik, 2000, page 359). Thus, `humanism' comes to be regarded as at best na| ve and as at worst dominating and tyrannical. Clearly this alternative view of humanism is gaining the upper hand in academic circles where the term `humanist' is more often than not used as a form of intellectual abuse. For instance, in a recent issue of Cultural Critique Bart Simon (2003, page 4) writes: ``the emancipatory impulse of liberal humanism has come to be understood as being unwittingly complicit in colonialist, patriarchal and capitalist structures.'' In this view, anyone unfortunate enough to be labelled `humanist' (or even worse, `liberal humanist') can be seen as somehow complicit in the maintenance of such obviously harmful sociopolitical arrangements. Simon conjures up humanism in this way in order to usher in the discourse of `posthumanism'. Where humanism arrogantly places the human and human rationality at the centre of all deliberations, posthumanism disaggregates, distributes, and dislodges the human subject. As Simon puts it, the subject becomes ``local, fluid,

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contingent'' (page 4); it is situated within complex matrices of human and nonhuman relationships so that the traditional hierarchies of nature/culture, self/other, centre/ periphery come to be progressively dissolved. In the process, human rationality loses its pole position and new oppositional subjects are created. Discussions such as those quoted above tend to produce hard and fast distinctions between `humanism' and `posthumanism'. And as these distinctions consolidate within academic discourse so texts, literatures, worldviews, arguments, and ultimately people become sifted into two sharply divided domains; thus, we find rather crude versions of `humanism' (as perhaps described by Simon, 2003) set against rather crude versions of `posthumanism' (as perhaps described by Fukuyama, 2002). Yet, as always when binaries are at issue, the world turns out more complex and nuanced than any such clear divisions allow. We need only look a little more closely at posthumanism itself to see that this is so. In general terms, academic posthumanism derives from two main sources: first, the presumed emergence of a posthuman condition, that is, a world made up of hybrid objects, heterogeneous networks, and fluid identities (this world is most often described using such examples as xeno-transplantation, biotechnology, and information networks); second, a form of theorising that aims to deliver new critical insights into contemporary social conditions so that new (`distributed') forms of subjectivity might be established. These two strands of posthumanist discourse apparently draw away from humanism. However, at the same time, they also draw upon humanism, notably the idea that critique can facilitate (some form of) emancipation within the posthuman social context. For instance, Donna Haraway's (1985) famous use of the `cyborg' metaphor in her rich description of contemporary technoscience seemingly conjures up a world of posthuman assemblages. But in a recent interview Haraway (2003) explains that her adoption of this metaphor was also an effort to utilise the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School. For her the `cyborg' is a critical figure, one that can disturb or `brush up against' the prevailing technoscientific consensus; it is ``an act of resistance, an oppositional movement of a pretty straightforward kind'' (2003, page 47). Here, this most prominent of posthumanist writers makes clear the value of the humanist legacy. These observations serve mainly to bolster Neil Badmington's argument that more circumspection is required towards both the emergence of a posthuman condition and the salience of posthuman critique. As he suggests, posthumanist critics and commentators have been rather too hasty in jettisoning humanistic perspectives. In consequence they have paid too little attention to critical and emancipatory practices that occur inside humanism. In this view, the posthumanist condition can best be understood by working through humanist discourses; as Badmington puts it: ``posthumanism ... can be something very different from an ending''. In a similar vein, Kathrine Hayles (2003, pages 135 ^ 136) remarks that ``the more one insists on absolute boundary lines between the human and non-human, the more the two become entwined.'' We could perhaps say the same about humanism and posthumanism: the more we insist on their distinction the more entangled they become, a point that Badmington makes quite clear when he refers to posthumanism as an ``unfinished working through'' of humanism. Yet, if we accept that no clear distinction between humanism and posthumanism can or should be drawn then how do we attempt to understand the entangled nature of the two conditions? How should we speak of any entwinement between the two? Do we need to jettison all humanistic vocabularies or should they simply be refined to study the posthuman world that gradually emerges around and within us? For all its virtues, Badmington's animadversions fail to tackle these questions and do not really explain how humanism and posthumanism might be made to work together.

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In order to address some of the key issues very briefly, I wish to refer to a debate that recently took place in the pages of Social Studies of Science between Fernando Elichirigoity and Andrew Feenberg as this illustrates some of the things at stake in the distinctions frequently drawn between humanism and posthumanism. The debate revolves around the theoretical standpoints taken by Feenberg in his (1999) work Questioning Technology. In reviewing the book, Elichirigoity (2000) suggests that Feenberg fails to escape the Manichean taxonomy of humanist discourse whereby technology and society are both essentialised and differentiated from one another. This failure, it is argued, derives from Feenberg's wish to retain broad conceptual tools such as `social forces', `capitalism', and `technocracy' in the study of technology. For the reviewer, these tools prevent any full appreciation of the complex interrelationships that now exist across divisions such as the `human' and the `technical'. Elichirigoity believes that embodied in Feenberg's arguments ``is an unexamined formulation of the `human', as the vessel of goodness'' (2000, page 147). He sees problems in this formulation. In particular, ``the desire to keep `pure' forms of modernity, where we can always locate the enemy (technocracy, capitalism) even before we do empirical research, leads to an inability to understand the post-human world we increasingly live in, where nature, humanity and technology are emerging in novel assemblages that do not respect the boundaries between the organic and the technological, the human and the natural'' (page 148). Elichirigoity thus turns approvingly to the work of Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, and Donna Haraway. In his view, these authors ``invite us to think about technology as co-emergent with social and natural worlds, and not as something alien to them'' (page 147). He goes on to say: ``I believe that this form of knowledge production opens up the possibility of novel forms of democratic practice because it is not engaged in fighting a pre-defined enemy, but is open to strategies of looking for spaces of possibility and freedom.'' In response, Feenberg (2000)in a piece entitled ``Will the real post-human please stand up''takes issue with the notion that ``novel forms of democratic practice'' will inevitably emerge from ``post-human assemblages''. In particular, he suggests that technological trajectories and developments can only be challenged when ``the contingency of the social can be distinguished from the necessity of the natural'' (page 153). Moreover, such contingency is only to be apprehended by `reflexive' human actors. Although Feenberg is willing to admit that these actors are enmeshed within posthuman assemblages, he argues that part of the human actor (the reflexive part) ``overflows any particular network involvement and provides a basis for distancing and criticising the construction of the networks'' (page 155). In Feenberg's view, humans may be enmeshed in complex sets of relations but they remain capable of distinct and definitive actions. And such actions, he suggests, often take the form of an ``anti-programme that may challenge or disrupt the networks in [their] dominant configurations'' (page 155). Moreover, the anti-programme is usually defined ``in terms of transcending concepts, such as nature, justice, humanity.'' As he says, ``I am not merely advocating this, but observing that it is generally true of struggles by the weak at least over the last few hundred years down to our supposedly postmodern era.'' So here we have humanism pitched firmly against posthumanism. On the one hand, Elichirigoity claims that the relentless emergence of posthuman assemblages such as the biosphere, cyborgs, and computer-mediated intelligence problematises the abstract and reified categories delivered to us by humanist frameworks. On the other hand, Feenberg believes it is only by mobilising historically and humanistically consolidated

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oppositional values that any critical or emancipatory stance can be taken in relation to specific technological developments. The debate between Elichirigoity and Feenberg usefully stakes out the two positions of humanism and posthumanism as they occur within much contemporary social science. On the surface it seems that these are two rival accounts, mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic. Yet, interestingly, beneath the surface there is a lot of common ground: both agree that humans are enmeshed in complex sets of heterogeneous relationsElichirigoity talks about ``post-human assemblages'', Feenberg talks about ``networks''and both agree that humans, natures, and technologies are coemergent, that all develop in parallel with one another. Likewise, they concur that oppositional movements develop in tandem with technological possibilities and potentialities and that these movements draw upon historically constructed value positions. The thing that divides them is the status of the `human'. Feenberg holds to the view that the human retains the potential to `overflow' the network in order to gain some critical distance from heterogeneous relationships. This critical distance permits reflexive assessments of these relationships and can result in a conscious and coherent `anti-programme'. Elichirigoity, on the other hand, sees Feenberg's reliance on this `overflow' as dependent on a false dichotomy between the human and the nonhuman, one that undermines the political potential of new hybrid sociotechnical forms and the spaces of freedom and possibility that circulate within them. The way this is described makes it seem that we should either focus on the humanistic development of anti-programmes or follow the posthuman assemblages into whatever domains they might lead us. But the evident commonalities between the two views suggest some scope for reconciliation. If this were achieved we could then perhaps begin to develop a rationale for a `humanised' posthumanism, an approach that situates reflexive emancipatory impulses within heterogeneous matrices (Murdoch, 2001). In order to be effective this `humanised' posthumanism would aim to develop forms of critical reflection (that is, reworked notions of justice, nature, and humanity) that are appropriate to the entangled ecologies in which we now find ourselves. And it is to be hoped, in turn, that such reflection would avoid slipping into binary simplicities so that we humans can gain access to the considerable resources of both humanism and posthumanism as we seek to navigate our way through the complex relations that comprise our posthuman world.
References Elichirigoity F, 2000, ``On failing to reach escape velocity beyond modernity'' Social Studies of Science 30 145 ^ 150 Feenberg A, 1999 Questioning Technology (Routledge, London) Feenberg A, 2000, ``Will the real post-human please stand up'' Social Studies of Science 30 151 ^ 157 Fukuyama F, 2002 Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (Profile Books, London) Haraway D, 1985, ``A cyborg manifesto'' Socialist Register 80 65 ^ 108 Haraway D, 2003 ``Interview'', in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality Eds I Ihde, E Selinger (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN) pp 47 ^ 57 Hayles N K, 2003,``Afterword: the human in the post-human'' Cultural Critique number 53 (Winter), pp 134 ^ 137 Malik K, 2000 Man, Beast, Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London) Murdoch J, 2001,``Ecologising sociology: actor-network theory, co-construction and the problem of human exemptionalism'' Sociology 35 111 ^ 133 Simon B, 2003, ``Introduction Cultural Critique number 53 (Winter) 3 ^ 8

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S Whatmore

Humanism's excess: some thoughts on the `post-human/ist' agenda Sarah Whatmore

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB, England; e-mail: sarah.whatmore@ouce.ox.ac.uk Received 20 May 2004

``... it is not enough to decide to include nonhumans in collectives or to acknowledge that societies live in a physical and biological world as useful as these steps may be. The crucial point is to learn how new types of encounter (and conviviality) with nonhumans, which emerge in the practice of the sciences over the course of their history, can give rise to new modes of relation with humans, ie to new political practices.'' Paulson (2001, page 112) In his ``Mapping posthumanism'', Neil Badmington demonstrates some of the promise and challenge of engaging the many intellectual and cultural cross-currents that have rapidly gathered force in the face of a disconcertingly molten moment in human history. From the off, this gathering is fractured by a tension between its `posthuman' and `posthumanist' imperatives. The one fuelled by the intensifying bio/informatic promiscuity of the life sciences that populates the body politic in mundane and monstrous ways (see Hayles, 1999). The other, the latest in a line of contrapuntal intellectual energies that ostensibly work against the philosophical legacy of the enlightenment but in which the `after' surpasses and sustains in the same breath whatever went `before' (see Simon, 2003). However, this fracturing does not just reiterate a faultline between `real' and `ideal' manifestations of human-ity, in which divisions between practice and theory, fact and fiction; life and thought assume their familiar postures. Coming at these issues from what he describes as ``an uneasy hybrid of cultural criticism and English literature'' Badmington nicely captures the unsettling ambivalence of this moment, bringing the provocative embrace of Marilyn Manson's Posthuman Records label into unlikely communion with the apocalyptic technophobia of Francis Fukuyama's (2002) Our Posthuman Future. Mixing wild imaginings with routine inventiveness, the posthuman heralds a politicisation of the technologies of life in which intellectual disputes and public controversies become inextricably entangled in the event of food scares, organ harvesting, genetic profiling and any number of other bio-political controversies. Such events have witnessed all manner of suppressed `things'animals, bodies, codes, devices, information, documents, proteins, and screens among them, forcing their way into the company of the social in ways that disturb the accepted terms of engagement between science and politics quite as much as those between the human and the nonhuman (see Callon et al, 2001). In this sense, as Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston noted nearly a decade ago the posthuman ``does not necessitate the obsolescence of the human ... rather it participates in re-distributions of difference'' (1995, page 10). What gives the posthuman moment bite is the fact that mapping its emergence at the feverish borders of animal/machine (Dyens, 2001), social/material (Scott, 2002), flesh/information (Thurtle and Mitchell, 2002), cultural/natural (Whatmore, 2002) is a diffuse activity. It is practised as much in everyday negotiations with, say, foodstuffs and healthcare as in the generative spatial metaphors of the humanities or the biocomputational models of the life sciences. In other words, the posthuman moment testifies to a Deleuzian sense of philosophy as a `mechanics' for living (see Murphy, 1998, page 213), a means of going on rather than a cerebral, ivory tower pastime. Badmington's generous positioning of my book Hybrid Geographies (2002) in relation to this intellectual/cultural moment is instructive for a number of reasons. Not least

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of these is the light it throws on the distinctive investments that a geographical engagement brings to bear on `mapping posthumanism', even as it works through some of the same philosophical curiosities and resources as those mobilised in his own paper and the diverse literature that it cites. The most significant features of this disciplinary demeanour that he has helped me to recognise, with hindsight, in my own work are twin commitments to an academic habitus at odds with the now taken-forgranted division of labour between social and natural sciences and to an empirical rigour that reflects and sustains an insistent worldliness. To this extent, geography's encounter with, and contribution to, a posthuman project has little to do with learning (or, indeed, unlearning) a particular disciplinary canon, still less with following some new theoretical fashion. It is rather, to my mind, the latest outcropping of a recalcitrant current running through geography, anthropology, and archaeology that rubs against the grain of the polar tendencies in their own disciplines and has never been comfortable with the all-too-human worlds of social science. In similar vein, geography's empirical commitment (too often perverted by disciplinary insecurities into an urge to be more `abstract' like a proper science or more `relevant' in the service of policy) strikes me as harbouring the kind of attentiveness to the commotion and heterogeneity of the world variously promulgated by some of posthuman/ism's most potent philosophical influences, including Friedrich Nietzsche's `transhuman' (1986); lix Guattari's `becoming animal' (1988), and Jacques Derrida's Gilles Deleuze and Fe `trace beyond the human' (1982). It should be clear from the foregoing that I think there is considerable intellectual and political promise in the kind of project mustering in the name of posthuman-ism. It is a promise that is risky, both in the sense of being multivalent and without guarantee, as any promise worth setting store by must be. But it is a promise imperilled by the name that is becoming more adhesive as it travels. Alarm bells should be ringing at the seduction of the `post' tag from those weary and wearying disputes about postmodernism. The periodisation it signals, condemns its users to the kind of `epistemo-political fascism' that Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and others have associated with certain kinds of historicism (see Cohen et al, 2001, page ix). More than this though, as even Cary Wolfe's often intelligent commentary (2003) attests, there is a suspect coupling of the `after' of the posthuman with a technological accomplishment (in this case biotechnologies associated with the life sciences), as untainted by precedent or memory as all the other brave new worlds that have gone before time out of mind. Thus, he confidently asserts that the context we have to deal with is now thoroughly posthuman `insofar as the ``human'' is inextricably entwined as never before in material, technological and informational networks of which it is not the master and of which it is indeed in some radical sense `merely' the product (page 6)'. As I sought to argue in Hybrid Geographies it is what exceeds rather than what comes after the human, however configured in particular times and places, that is the more promising and pressing project. It is for this reason that I advocated there, and continue to work with, a different signaturepreferring the `more-than-human' to the `posthuman'; a signature that conjures a different kind of historicity. Using various devices to push hybridity back in time, I sought to demonstrate that whether one works through the long practised intimacies between human and plant communities or the skills configured between bodies and tools, one never arrives at a time/place when the human was not a work in progress (see also Sheehan, 2003). As an advocate of geographies attentive to, and sustaining of, more-than-human worlds, I want to indicate some trouble-spots in the midst of this project's political and ethical challenge to the self-evidently human subject cherished and nourished by the social sciences, not least those that style themselves `critical' or progressive. In the space

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available I will restrict these to the touchstone of `life' that recurs in various guises through the weave of the posthuman, from feminist concerns with corporeality (for example, Diprose, 2002); the interferences of the animal (for example, Lippit, 2000); to nonrepresentational interests in affect (Thrift, 2004). In the first place, `life' has been a stranger to large parts of the social sciences. Consequently, they can be ill-equipped to resist the pied-piper effect of the hyperbolic inventiveness of the life sciences; too often following and too rarely setting the terms of engagement. At its worst, this degenerates into a tabloid fixation with some kind of technological apocalypse that harbingers the end of `man'; and/or `nature'; and/or `life as we know it'. Still not enough energy is being invested in the much harder and less eye-catching work of contextualising the biotechnologies that are making the headlines in the variegated histories and geographies through which life and knowledge have been co-fabricated. An undertapped resource here, are those biophilosophies that place earth life rather than human being at their centre and the traffic between of the working practices of biology (for example, Barbieri, 2002) and philosophy (for example, Ansell-Pearson, 1999) that sustain them. Another, are the legal devices and practices that are as instrumental as those of science in (re)configuring life and the precarious privilege of the human carved out of it (see Delaney, 2003). Only by attending to practised conversations like these, will social scientists get a serious purchase on the specificity (as against the originality) of the life-knowledge objects, like artificial life forms, that are now startling our habitual assumptions about what life is (see Doyle, 2003). But this is decidedly not to suggest that there are some custom-made tools for dealing more effectively with `life' if only we look in the right place. Rather, one of the greatest challenges of `more-than-human' styles of working as I see it is the onus they place on experimentation and, by implication, on taking (and being allowed to take) risks. Let me dwell momentarily on just two aspects of this experimental imperative. First, is the urgent need to supplement the familiar repertoire of humanist methods that rely on generating talk and text with experimental practices that amplify other sensory, bodily and affective registers and extend the company and modality of what constitutes a research subject. I have found the research practices of science studies as elaborated by Bruno Latour (1999) and Isabelle Stengers (1997) in their shared commitment to research as a co-fabrication or `working together' with the worldly phenomena enjoined in the research process particularly instructive (see Whatmore, 2003). Others have found equally rich methodological resources in the practices of performance studies (see Dewsbury et al, 2002). A second aspect of the experimental demands of `more-than-human' styles of working is the onus they place on actively redistributing expertise beyond engaging with other disciplines or research fields to engaging knowledge practices and vernaculars beyond the academy. Here, the friction generated by bringing incommensurable knowledge practices to bear on each other is harnessed to the production of new political practices. Such experimental forums are gathering pace with the proliferation of socio-technological controversies, such as the `GM Nation' roadshow (http://www.gmnation.org) or the `deliberative mapping' exercise pioneered by Gail Davies and her collaborators in relation to xeno-transplantation (Davies et al, 2004). If the `more-than-human' project is to make a difference, those of us who pay it allegiance are obligated to participate in the kinds of experimental forums envisaged by William Paulson in the quotation with which this commentary opened.

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2004 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

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