Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1

Death the of PostHuman Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary supposedly posthuman aftermath. There can be no redemptive posthuman future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit Death of the PostHuman and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human—despite its normative intensity—can provide Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and Claire Colebrook seemingly posthuman futures. Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She has written many articles and books on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture, including most recently Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (2011). Colebrook Cover Image: “Shriek & Flash” (detail) Dominic Minichiello © Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA Oil on board, 2009 Series: Critical Climate Change Death of the PostHuman Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of deple- tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re- alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor- phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo- political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Death of the PostHuman Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 Claire Colebrook OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS with Michigan Publishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 2014 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12329362.0001.001 Copyright © 2014 Claire Colebrook This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restric- tions. Please see the Permissions section at the back of this book for more information. ISBN-13 978-1-60785-299-5 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 1. Extinct Theory 29 2. The ustainabilityS of Concepts: Knowledge and Human Interests 46 3. A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth 59 4. Earth Felt the Wound: The Affective Divide 73 5. Destroying Cosmopolitanism for the Sake of the Cosmos 96 6. Time And Autopoiesis: The Organism has No Future 116 7. Face Race 140 8. Posthuman Humanities 158 9. Why Saying ‘No’ to Life is Unacceptable 185 10. The oysJ of Atavism 208 Works Cited 230 Permissions 245 Acknowledgements I am grateful for the patience, dedication and support of Open Humanities Press, and Sigi Jöttkandt in particular. For ongoing intel- lectual stimulus and friendship I thank Tom Cohen, Jami Weinstein and J. Hillis Miller. Introduction Framing the End of the Species: Images Without Bodies Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae’s behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken all the pros and cons, know that ah’m gaunnae have a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won’t let yae do it, because it’s seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose to reject whit thae huv to offer. Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars’ choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffin fucking junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fucking embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life. Well, ah chose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it’s thair fuckin problem. (Irvine Welch, Trainspotting, 187-88) There are three senses of extinction: the now widely discussed sixth great extinction event (which we have begun to imagine and witness, even if in anticipation); extinction by humans of other species (with the endan- gered species of the ‘red list’ evidencing our destructive power); and self-extinction, or the capacity for us to destroy what makes us human. All three senses of extinction require a nuanced conception of climate. Climate is at once an enclosing notion, imagined as the bounded milieu that is unavoidably ours, and a disturbing figure, for it is with the recogni- tion that there is climate, or that the human species is now recognizable as 10 Introduction a being that for all its seeming diversity is nevertheless bound into a unity of destructive power. (This is so much so that geologists are arriving at consensus regarding an ‘Anthropocene epoch’ where man’s effect on the planet will supposedly be discernible as a geological strata readable well after man ceases to be, even if there are no geologists who will be pres- ent to undertake this imagined future reading (Crutzen 2000). Climate is not only, then, the surface or terrain upon which we find ourselves, but something that binds us to this time on the earth, with its own depletions and limits.) There is, of course, the standard meteorological notion of climate which increasingly attracts our already over-taxed attention; but this concept of climate is only possible because of a broader thought-event where humans begin to imagine a deep time in which the human species emerges and withers away, and a finite space in which ’we’ are now all joined in a tragedy of the commons. I would suggest that just as Darwinian evolution altered the very modes of scientific and imaginative thinking, such that new forms of narrative and knowledge were required to think of man as a species emerging within time (Beer 1983), so global climate change is similarly catastrophic for the human imaginary. It becomes possible to think of climate as the milieu that is necessary for our ongoing life, and as the fragile surface that holds us all together in one web of risked life, even if we cannot practically grasp or manage the dynamics of this totality (Gardiner 2006). The concept of climate is also split between knowledge and denial: on the one hand talk of climate draws all bodies (organic and otherwise) into a single complex, multiply determined and dynamic whole; on the other hand, any brief glance at climate change policy and politics evidences a near psychotic failure to acknowledge or perceive causal connections with dire consequences. In this respect we need to embark on a notion of climate change that includes the radical alteration of knowledge and affect that accompanies the very possibility of climate. It is only possible to think of climate change in the meteorological sense—with humans now bound to volatile ecologies that they are at once harming and ignoring—if some adjustment is made to the ways in which we think about the relations among time, space and species. A necessarily expansive sense of climate change encompasses a mutation of cognitive, political, disciplinary, media and social climates. The fact that Framing the End of the Species: Images Without Bodies 11 we start to think about climate as a general condition that binds humans to an irreversible and destructive time means both that climate becomes an indispensable concept for thinking about the new modes of knowledge and feeling that mark the twenty-first century in terms of our grow- ing sense of precarious attachment to a fragile planet,and that climate is an alibi. We talk about climate, ecology, globalism and even environment (as that which environs) even though the experience of climate change reveals multiple and incongruent systems for which we do not have a point of view. We are at once thrown into a situation of urgent intercon- nectedness, aware that the smallest events contribute to global mutations, at the same time as we come up against a complex multiplicity of diverging forces and timelines that exceed any manageable point of view.

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