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The CRITICAL POSTHUMANITIES; Or, IS MEDIANATURES to NATURECULTURES As ZOE IS to BIOS?

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The CRITICAL POSTHUMANITIES; Or, IS MEDIANATURES to NATURECULTURES As ZOE IS to BIOS? Special Section on Mediated Geologies The CRITICAL POSTHUMANITIES; or, IS MEDIANATURES to NATURECULTURES as ZOE IS to BIOS? Rosi Braidotti Abstract This article situates the geological turn in media theory within the critical posthumanities, defining them in both quantitative and qualitative terms. They can be assessed quantitatively by reviewing the proliferation of interdisciplinary “studies” areas — such as media and gender studies — that have transformed the modes of knowledge production within the academic humanities and beyond. They are framed qualitatively by the neomaterialist, vital philosophy proposed by Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozism, based on the concepts of monism, radical immanence, and relational ontology. They not only support the idea of a nature- culture continuum but also provide the philosophical grounding for technological mediation to be defined not as a form of representation but as the expression of “medianaturecultural” ethical relations and forces. Keywords posthuman, critical posthumanities, monistic vital materialism, affirmation Introduction hat happens when technological mediation becomes W the founding principle for the critical practice of the humanities, in alliance with a relational ontology that does not 380 Cultural Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, © 2016 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-3648930 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/12/3/380/676013/0120380.pdf by UNIV LIBRARY UTRECHT - LB SERIALS user on 18 September 2019 The CRITICAL POSTHUMANITIES rest on anthropocentric premises? As the often unperceived boundaries between articles gathered in this special section Man and the multiple others are exposed clearly show, what happens is a shift of and challenged. Thus, if the multifaceted paradigm in thinking about both the sub­ critiques and revisions of humanism ject of the humanities as an academic field empowered the sexualized and racialized and the human knowing subject. Where a human others to emancipate themselves The CRITICAL humanist, anthropocentric humanities used from the dialectics of oppositional hierar­ to be, a materialist and ecosophical — an chical master-­slave relations, the crisis of POSTHUMANITIES; embodied and embedded — critical post­ Anthropos relinquishes the forces of the humanities is coming into being. naturalized others, instituting a zoonto­ logical turn (Fontenay 1998; Wolfe 2003). or, IS MEDIANATURES The Humanities in the Anthropocene Animals, insects, plants, cells, bacteria — in The academic humanities have been fact, the planet and the cosmos, as a to NATURECULTURES criticized because of two major flaws: whole — are called into play in a planetary structural anthropomorphism on the one political arena. as ZOE IS to BIOS? hand and in-­built Eurocentrism on the The Anthropocene also happens to other. Feminist and postcolonial theories coincide with an era of high technological have argued, for instance, that human­ mediation, which challenges anthropo­ Rosi Braidotti istic Man — as the universal measure of centrism from within. The decentering all things — defined himself as much by of Anthropos challenges therefore the what he excluded as by what he included separation of bios, life, as the prerogative in his rational self-­representation. History of humans, from zoe, the life of animals shows that this humanist vision of the and nonhuman entities. What has come subject also justified violent and belligerent to the fore, instead, in the past decades exclusions of the sexualized, racialized, and is a nature-­culture continuum that affects naturalized “others” — women and LBGT+, not only the perception of scientific and indigenous people, animals and earth cultural practice but also the vision of others — that occupy the slot of devalued the embodied, embedded, relational, difference in relation to the humanist nor­ and affective structure of the nonunitary, mative standard. They embody difference nomadic, and extended self (Braidotti as pejoration, and their differences get 2011a). This shift can be seen as a sort of organized on a hierarchical scale of decreas­ anthropological exodus from the dominant ing social and symbolic worth. These others configurations of the human as the king of become socially marginalized at the best of creation — a colossal hybridization of the times and reduced to the subhuman status species (Hardt and Negri 2000: 215). of disposable bodies in worst-­case scenar­ The emergence of geology as a ios (Braidotti 2002, 2006). term of reference for media and cultural In the Anthropocene, Man comes criticism is emblematic of this shift of under further criticism from another angle, paradigm. It foregrounds not just any form POLITICS namely as Anthropos, that is to say as the of materiality, but rather — through the allegedly rational member of an excep­ emphasis on plastic, metal, and heat — the tional species that has granted himself the earthbound, terrestrial kind of materialism right to access the bodies of all other living (Protevi 2013). CULTURAL entities. Once the centrality and the excep­ As I have argued elsewhere (Braidotti tionalism of Anthropos are challenged, the 2016), over the last thirty years the core of 381 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/12/3/380/676013/0120380.pdf by UNIV LIBRARY UTRECHT - LB SERIALS user on 18 September 2019 Rosi Braidotti theoretical innovation in the humanities has the critical posthumanities are emerging as emerged around a cluster of new, often transdisciplinary discursive fronts not only radical, and always interdisciplinary fields around the edges of the classical disci­ of inquiry that have called themselves plines but also across the established stud­ “studies.” Gender, feminist, queer, race, ies areas, as evidenced by environmental, postcolonial, and subaltern studies, along­ digital, neural, bio genetic, and medical side cultural studies and film, television, humanities. They rest on postanthropocen­ and media studies, are the prototypes of tric premises and a technologically medi­ the radical epistemologies that have voiced ated emphasis on life as a zoe-­centered the situated knowledges of the structural system of species egalitarianism (Braidotti others of humanist Man and Anthropos. 2006). They embrace creatively the chal­ Situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) have lenge of our historicity without giving in to resulted in the production of theoretical cognitive panic and without losing sight of cartographies and discourse analysis as the perpetuation of patterns of oppression. diagrams of power, combining philosophi­ These new ecosophical, posthumanist, cal critiques with political reconstructions and postanthropocentric dimensions are of both knowledge and social relations the building blocks for what I call the criti­ (Braidotti 2015). cal posthumanities. These critical studies areas have These critical posthumanities are provided a range of new methods and expressed by a second generation of innovative concepts that have contributed studies areas. Within the environmental to a rigorous revision of the often implicit humanities, for instance, the growth has assumptions about humanism and Euro­ been remarkable, notably in animal studies centrism, as well as to the implosion of and ecocriticism, and so well articulated anthropocentrism. They caused both inter­ that it is impossible to summarize them.1 nal fractures and the dislocation of outer Cultural studies of science and society, disciplinary boundaries in the humanities. religion and postsecular studies, disabil­ Institutionally, they are placed in between, ity studies, fat studies, success studies, across, and beyond the traditional dis­ celebrity studies, and globalization studies ciplines. They do not, however, merely are further significant examples of the oppose humanism but also create alterna­ exuberant state of the new humanities tive visions of the self, the human, knowl­ in the twenty-­first century. New media edge, and society. Their insights and the have proliferated into a whole series of new concepts they created have lasting subsections and metafields: software 12:3 November 2016 consequences for the academic practice studies, internet studies, game studies, • of the humanities. Although popular with algorithmic studies, and more. This vitality students, these studies areas have usually justifies certain optimism about the future been underfunded in terms of research. of the post humanities, driven by ecosoph­ POLITICS ical perspectives, on the one hand, and The Critical Posthumanities digital media theories, on the other. These The obvious question that arises is what perspectives provide the new ontological the humanities can become in the post­ grounds for knowledge production, while CULTURAL human era and after the decline of the the curriculum of the traditional human­ primacy of universalist Man and of suprem­ ities disciplines continues to resist inter­ 382 acist Anthropos. My argument is that today disciplinary contamination. In other words, Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article-pdf/12/3/380/676013/0120380.pdf by UNIV LIBRARY UTRECHT - LB SERIALS user on 18 September 2019 The CRITICAL POSTHUMANITIES the switch of emphasis toward “nature­ measure — have an inspirational role to cultures” (Haraway 1997, 2003) has now play, both institutionally and theoretically, evolved into millennial “medianatures” in relation to the posthuman context we (Parikka 2015) or even into what I would inhabit. If
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