Extended version of the posthumanist manifesto

Earlier this year, I wrote a manifesto for too little beast, a revised & posthuman version of the shorter antinatalist manifesto for too much human, a chapbook that I had written a few years previously. Now this present text is an addendum, an extension, & a clarification of parts of that earlier manifesto. I shall not supply a list of references, & I do not think that footnotes are very appropriate in a book of poems; they are fine in novels, not poems, but I have used them anyway in case the reader wants to find out more about the subject. Basically, what I add here boils down to the observation that posthumanism, allied to new materialism, is an extension of the liberatory effect of feminism that adds the whole relational context of animal & vegetable being to the agents & patients to be taken into account in discourse.

By "posthuman", I do not want to lead the reader to thoughts of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, whatever, which are a part of transhumanism, since I myself am inclined to interpret posthumanism as more of a focus on the nonhuman after the end of humanism, which has very much overstayed its welcome. In Francesca Ferrando's terminology,¹ I would probably count as belonging to the post-anthropocentric wing of the posthuman, which is actually, according to Ferrando, more radical. As she points out, transhumanism is a sort of ultra-humanism. Posthumanism, on the other hand, originated in feminist discourse in the eighties & nineties; it is opposed to speciesism, it is opposed to exceptionalism, & it is anti-exclusionary. There is a metahumanism that bases itself on the writings of Deleuze, & that emphasizes the significations of relational embodiment, but I shall not discuss this further here

In general posthumanism is a rethinking of what humanity & humanism's place, if any, should be in the world. Here, as elsewhere, I always mean "world" as something very much like Welt in Heidegger, as opposed to Erde, or "earth". The world is the framework of meaning & definitions by which we who use language understand things in the world; it is human & verbal. The earth is being as such, presencing, & it sustains, shelters, & protects. It cannot be grasped or exhausted by the world, it is pre-verbal:

The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through the world. …The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
(Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art)²

The earth in all of my books for Emma, & in this one too, is something sacred given by goddess, the fire & love at the heart of being, it is beast who lives there alone, poor in world.

Now Heidegger was an opponent of humanism, as a relic of essentialist metaphysics, & his work has been seen as eminently suitable to ground a deep ecological understanding of the predicament we now face.³ Both Arne Naess, who founded deep ecology, & the later Heidegger argue that ethics, the world around us, & human beings must be understood in new ways in order to save the environment. The natural environment should be seen as a value in itself, not just as framework for resources.⁴ Mankind is not the sovereign, at best a shepherd of being for Heidegger, a subject who must widen & deepen her narrow isolation to become the deep self for Naess, & in both cases what is called for is a radical transmutation. There is a releasement for Heidegger & Naess, there is a becoming & a conversion for me.

In all cases a surrender to the self-giving of poiesis, both as phusis & through our techne, which waits respectfully for what is given us, takes place. Cost benefit analysis will never get us there. Part of respecting deep ecology or earth, however, is a posthuman perspective. So I see the Heidegger/Naess deep ecological perspective as a natural way of applying this posthumanist perspective, an allied philosophy that calls for a transformation & a questioning of how subjectivity is understood.

Now, as noted, many people understand posthumanism as something to do with AI or robotics, whatever, some form of transhumanism, an extension of the human. I am not espousing this. Far from it, I instead would refer the reader to Lyotard, & the case of his postmodernism, understood as a detachment from the grand narratives of modernism. Postmodernism is also something that precedes modernism, it's a crisis state of modernism itself, & the "post" should not be taken as implying a strict & sequential evolution from modernism to postmodernism, the latter understood as a successor state to the less developed former state.

For me, posthumanism also implies a de-evolution, a reevaluation of evolutionary "priorities", & a variegated becoming-beast. As in Deleuze & Guattari & becoming-animal, it is a real becoming that does not necessarily involve an actual end state with some physical animal body. Now it just so happens that I am a shapeshifter, Emma made this start, it is she who first made this change happen in me, & I might have inadvertently scared other people on occasion by changing at heightened or excited moments. It is not, however, the case that becoming beast necessarily involves this actual change. I would, however, advocate it; we are not all permitted to evolve, but it is possible to switch allegiance, to identify as something better, to not let whatever it is that screams our passion & desire be stifled & restricted any more by our genetic identity than it should be by an outdated set of gender roles.

Now valuing the beast is not to be misunderstood as idealizing the cute animal, or ignoring the savagery & violence of nature. I do not have issues with pain, violence, predators predating. I myself am a vegan for moral & ecological reasons, but that is another issue, I'm just not biologically a carnivore. Wolves or cats predating is not a moral issue, they are moral patients, not moral agents. Me eating meat would be a moral issue, & for a great number of reasons. The complaint of the carnist is a disgusting echo of the past: "Don't worry about slaves." "Don't worry about women." "Don't worry about animals."

As i said in the earlier manifesto, humanism used to have a point. It was a grand narrative or meta-narrative that established science & empiricism, broke away from the religious control of everything. This was because theology was the principal enemy then, & the proper study of mankind, according to humanism, was "man".

As I wrote in the first manifesto: "Posthumanism does not only or necessarily involve hybrids & AI. It can be a return to a prehuman animal identity, as the postmodern precedes the modern. The beast precedes the human both in the order of chronology &, now, let's be realistic, in the order of priority. I am animal: not subhuman or superhuman, just different." We need to shake off the old identifications, as well as the belief that the earth that shelters & protects us is of any less value than the cultural worlds that goddam humans inflict upon that earth.

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately, every "thing " - even materiality - is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.⁵

Barad is a new materialist. For new materialism, there is no clear line between matter & culture. As biology is mediated by culture, so is culture a product of biological organisms. The problem with radical constructivism is that, as Barad points out, one pays attention to everything but nature & matter. "the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter."⁶ To posthumanism & new materialism, it all matters. Ferrando describes the work of Butler as creating a lack of balance, where only language & culture was recognized. Butler's Bodies that Matter does not recognize the influence of the actual matter in the body, & how socially constructed biology is reciprocally constructed by the matter that Butler sometimes seems to think does not matter.⁷

I shall here quote the end of the last manifesto:

The Anthropocene is leaving terrible scars on this planet, on this Earth that shelters & protects. It is a relic of an obsolete humanism to pretend that the human race deserves any special consideration compared to other sentient beings, & even worse to believe with the religions of the disgusting book that any god has given humanity the right or duty to consume the flesh of animals & possess them as chattels. The only beast, mankind, with a whole history of being scumbags, polluting everything else with their dreadful excess.

There is too little beast. There is too much human.

We have to see that all sentient life is of value. Compassion for all sentient beings, & respect for the ecosystems of the earth that they need to flourish, shows us that deep ecology, based on evaluating all aspects of animal & plant life positively since it all fits together & nature functions as a whole, should lead to a reduction, at the very least, of the drastic human overpopulation. The reduction should be probably be very large. Not only sentient life, but all life, is morally significant, at least in part because all sentient life is part of the whole earth & relies on non-sentient life to sustain it.

There is certainly something that Ferrando would describe as an antihumanist tendency that is discernible in my work, but this is, as she points out, not really part of posthumanism, which is about the deconstruction of the humanist ideal rather than a destructive declaration of the "death of man" in any Foucauldian or Nietzschean sense. In the same way, my antinatalism does not extend to total pessimism & a desire for the total extinction of humanity, just much more restraint in reproduction.

More nature, more animals, more beast; less human, fewer humans. As Ferrando says close to the end of her piece:

As the anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, the posthuman focuses on de-centering the human from the primary focus of the discourse. In tune with antihumanism, posthumanism stresses the urgency for humans to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged, negatively affects the human condition as well. In such a framework, the human is not approached as an autonomous agent, but is located within an extensive system of relations.⁸

Goddess gave us earth. Stop fucking it up. She put other creatures there to share it with "us". Stop driving them to extinction. No species is more important than any other. Even bugs that might gross me out have a goddess-given right to live. Posthumanism is not denying anything; we're just pointing out that a lot of other things are equally important. You can have ten million people in Sweden but you can't have twenty thousand wolves like Spain does? Get over yourselves, humans.

1I lied about footnotes. Francesca Ferrando (2013) "Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms Differences and Relations". Existens Volume 8, No 2, Fall 2013

2Martin Heidegger (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper & Row.

3Matthew Antolick (2002) "Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology" Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1326

4Martin Heidegger (1997) The Question Concerning Technology (New York, Harper and Row; Arne Naess (1995) “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects.” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. (Boston, Shambhala Press)

5Karen Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28/3 (2003), pp. 801-31.

6Op. cit.

7Judith Butler (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge

8Ferrando 2013