Posthuman Knowledge by Rosi Braidotti;

Author:Rosi Braidotti;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Second-Generation Studies

What emerged around the turn of the millennium is a second generation of Studies that addressed more directly the issue of anthropocentrism. Genealogically indebted to the first generation in terms of critical aims and political affects and commitment to social justice, they adopt different objects of study. Significant examples are: animal studies; eco-criticism; plant studies; environmental studies; oceans studies; Earth studies; food and diet studies; fashion, success and critical management studies. New media proliferated into sub-sections and meta-fields: Software, Internet, Game, Algorithmic and critical code studies and more. An equally prolific field of research concerns the inhuman(e) aspects of our historical condition: conflict and peace research studies; post-Soviet/communist studies; human rights studies, humanitarian management; migration, mobility, human rights studies; trauma, memory and reconciliation studies; security death, suicide studies; extinction studies. And the lists are still growing.

The proliferation of second-generation Studies accelerated with the posthuman turn, when ‘Man’ came under further criticism as Anthropos, that is to say as a supremacist species that monopolized the right to access the bodies of all living entities. The anthropocentric core of the Humanities was also challenged by the ubiquity and pervasiveness of technological mediation and new human–non-human linkages of biological ‘wetware’ and non-biological ‘hardware’.

As I argued in the previous chapter, decentring anthropomorphic thinking and anthropocentric patterns of thought has difficult implications for the Humanities in particular. Their structural anthropocentrism means that the Humanities suffer from a lack of adequate concepts to deal with the ecological environment, media-nature-culture continuums, and non-human others. At the same time, it is paradoxical that the Humanities provide most of the terminology, metaphors and representations for posthuman agents and objects. There is a methodological issue at stake here as well, because the dominant model, both for traditional Humanities and most of the critical Studies areas alike, is the social constructivist approach based on a nature–culture divide. This method does not always help to deal with the challenges of our eco-sophical, post-anthropocentric, geo-bound and techno-mediated milieus.

A change of perspective is needed if ‘we’ – posthuman critical theorists – want to bring all those ‘others’ into posthuman knowledge production. This means repositioning terrestrial, planetary, cosmic concerns, the naturalized others like animals and plants, and the technological apparatus, as serious agents and co-constructors of transversal thinking and knowing. This achieves a veritable zoe/geo/techno-bound perspective indeed. Such new ways of knowledge production may sound counter-intuitive, and of course there is a qualitative difference between accepting the structural interdependence among species and actually treating the non-humans as knowledge collaborators. But my point is that, in the age of computational networks and synthetic biology on the one hand, and climate change and erosion of liberties on the other, this is precisely what we need to learn to do, in addition to all that we know already. We need to embrace the opportunities offered by the new technologies and steer them towards new forms of solidarity and democratic debate and dissent.

What both the first and the second generations of Studies have in common is the commitment to voice the experiences, insights and understandings produced by the excluded and marginalized.

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