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Posthuman Ethics : Embodiment and Cultural Theory

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Posthuman Ethics : Embodiment and Cultural Theory Posthuman Ethics Embodiment and Cultural Theory Patricia MacCormack POSTHUMAN ETHICS For my real life Watcher, Gabriel Shinari. Posthuman Ethics Embodiment and Cultural Theory PATRICIA MACCORMACK Anglia Ruskin University, UK © Patricia MacCormack 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Patricia MacCormack has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data MacCormack, Patricia. Posthuman ethics : embodiment and cultural theory. 1. Human body (Philosophy) 2. Humanistic ethics. I. Title 128-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacCormack, Patricia. Posthuman ethics : embodiment and cultural theory / by Patricia MacCormack. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3454-2 -- ISBN 978-1-4094-3455-9 (ebook) 1. Ethics, Modern--21st century. 2. Philosophical anthropology. I. Title. BJ320.M33 2012 170--dc23 2012019360 ISBN 9781409434542 (hbk) ISBN 9781409434559 (ebk-PDF) ISBN 9781409471783 (ebk-ePUB) III Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK. Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Posthuman Ethics 1 2 The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin 19 3 Art: Inhuman Ecstasy 43 4 Animalities: Ethics and Absolute Abolition 57 5 The Wonder of Teras 79 6 Mystic Queer 101 7 Vitalistic Ethics: An End to Necrophilosophy 115 Epilogue: After Life 139 Bibliography 149 Index 157 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements This book has been developed across many lands with the assistance of many inspiring people. My thanks to Rosi Braidotti, Angel Phoenix Burnette, Steve Andrew Cain, Carrie, Damien Cody, Felicity Colman, Maria Desposito, Mark Ferelli, Fitzy Fitzpatrick, Colin Gardner, Noreen Giffney, Phil Hine, renee hoogland, Jane, Neil Jordan, James Lowry, Katalin Lowry, Jacinta MacCormack, Ruth McPhee, Tony Moleta, Christina Oakley-Harrington, Michael O’Rourke, David Rischmiller, David Rodowick, Ester Segarra, Ivana Selebran, Charlie Stivale, Leon Tencer, Mark Tudor-Williams, Alexy Unku, Nigel Wingrove, Barbie Wilde, to the memories of Lizzie and Charlotte, and to the shining James Fowler. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 1 Posthuman Ethics Posthuman theory asks in various ways what it means to be human in a time where philosophy has become suspicious of claims about human subjectivity. Those subjects who were historically considered aberrant and our future lives becoming increasingly hybrid show we have always been and are continuously transforming into posthumans. What are the ethical considerations of thinking the posthuman? Posthuman Ethics asks not what the posthuman is, but how posthuman theory creates new, imaginative ways of understanding relations between lives. Ethics is a practice of activist, adaptive and creative interaction which avoids claims to overarching moral structures. Inherent in thinking posthuman ethics is the status of bodies as the site of lives inextricable from philosophy, thought, experiments in being and fantasies of the future. Posthuman Ethics examines certain kinds of bodies to think new relations that offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of power which have been exerted upon bodies. The privileged site of Posthuman Ethics is historically and philosophically the oppressed site of life which does not register as entirely viable within humanist operations of knowledge, power and majoritarian systems. Michel Foucault states: ‘I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn’t be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it’ (1980, 58). Posthuman Ethics could have been called Posthuman Bodies in reference to the crucial status of bodies in posthuman philosophy. The body, reconfiguring relation and ethical emergences of bodies beyond being received through representation, external and within consciousness negotiating reality through representative perception, is the foundation and the site of the event of the posthuman encounter. Thought and flesh, the distance between bodies, and ethics constituted through aesthetics are three trajectories along which Posthuman Ethics attempts to delimit prescriptive relations to formulate joyous extensions of expression and force by encounters with and events of alterity. Benedict Spinoza’s ethics directly challenges the Cartesian necessitation of the bifurcation between mind and body which act upon each other in turn. Whichever turn precedes the other, their alienation is complete and thus the distribution from internal body to the body of the polis as the state imposing upon docile bodies and obedient or resistant bodies acting upon the state failed to account for some basic but foundational tenets of the post-human: that there is no body without the mind and that they are not separate, because they are not separate they cannot be ordered hierarchically, that the mind as corporeal thus proves consciousness is not given, thereby will and affects are never entirely accounted for, predictable or discrete. Spinoza pre-empts the posthuman body which exceeds humanism, metaphysics 2 Posthuman Ethics and God but in its most ethical emergence reminds us all we are is bodies with the capacity for experiencing more and less beneficial affects and degrees of appetite. In Spinoza, will comes from the mind, appetite from the body, but these are different ways of expressing the interactions which occur within and uniquely for each thing. The desire to persist is all that constitutes a thing and that which makes the thing unlike any other, which gives the thing its essence. Between things there is no commonality except a harmony which enhances joy or exercises destruction. Things are specific unto themselves and each interaction between things creates further specificity. The endeavour to exist defines the existence of the thing but the nature of its existence is not transparent. Taking the central notion of desire around which much Continental Philosophy resonates, will of the mind – at once clear, distinct and confused – and appetite of the body: is, in fact, nothing else but man’s essence, from the nature of which necessarily follow all the results which tend to its preservation … further, between appetite and desire there is no difference … whatever increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of activity in our body, the idea thereof increases or diminishes, helps or hinders the power of thought in our mind. (Spinoza 1957, 36) Gilles Deleuze summarizes Spinoza’s contribution by stating ‘what is action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well, and what is a passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the mind. There is no primacy of one series over the other’ (Deleuze 1988b, 18). A thing’s essence comes from its capacity to act as a form of preservation. Preservation is developed by a thing’s sustenance of its essence. Preservation is essence and the capacity to act the freedom of the thing as an involution of flesh and mind. The tendency to preservation is what makes each thing a singular event of life, but preservation is of life alone, over its inherent nature or quality. Preservation is active as expressive and is separate from any notion of the preservation of a thing’s sameness to itself. For Spinoza thought is a thing’s power to increase, that is, to alter, transform, develop and expand, so the differentiation of the thing directly correlates with its liberty. Ethics as a system of relation makes each thing’s essence come from preservation irreducibly independent from confirmation of similarity to itself at each moment. The gift of liberty is allowing the power of the other to expand toward unknown futures. To diminish the other’s capacity to multiply and extend its capacities is in Spinoza hate. Hate is a form of pleasure – ‘he who conceives the object of his hate is destroyed will feel pleasure’ (1957, 41). Thus all force, both love and hate, is desire. And all force is affect.1 But further Posthuman Ethics will base ethics on 1 Seigworth points to the mistranslation of affect, which, in most English editions of Spinoza translations is ‘emotion’. He describes the failure of singular emotion to account for affectio and affectus and then the soul, which, from two to three become ‘multitudinous affectivity’ (160) as described by Deleuze. Spinoza defines desire (from which all affects come) as already at least three by which all other emotions arise (1957, 37). It is clear Posthuman Ethics 3 the premise that all conception is hateful ethics, in a deliberate truncated reading of Spinoza’s claim this book will claim that ‘he who conceives the object destroys the object’, imposing a claim upon a body conditional on monodirectional exertions of perception as conception, limiting expressivity without limit. Ethical encounters are different to Kant’s morality of benevolent totalizing ascension without qualification for which aesthetics (and thereby a certain definition of representation and perception) is responsible. The distance, even though unknowable, between things by which Kant and Hegel operate, even taking into account Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s claim natural beauty is co equivalent with spiritual and artistic, is closed with Spinoza’s intimacy of organisms liberated or oppressed by expression of the other by the self and the openings to joy which seek to expand through thought without knowledge.2 Serres opposes perception as a war waged against creation as an act of love: ‘The text on perception ends with conception’ (Serres 2000, 38–39). Further to this Spinoza says ‘the world would be much happier if men were as fully able to keep silence as they are to speak’ (1957, 30 original emphasis).
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