Geoforum 35 (2004) 269273

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Editorial

Querying posthumanisms

What is man, if he is always the placeand, at the

same time, the resultof ceaseless divisions and
caesurae? Giorgio Agamben
The history of geography is replete with announcements of new lines of inquiry, new methodologies, and
new theoretical and philosophical approaches. Few, if
any, are entirely new; most return to themes that have
occupied thought for centuries, albeit with new urgency
and as more than mere repetition.
Such is the case with posthumanism. The questions
are old. What makes us human? How are boundaries
between humans and animals, bodies and machines
drawn? How are human bodies produced and transformed? What does it mean to admit non-humans into
our understanding of humanity and society? And what
are the consequences of doing so for ethics and politics?
Such questions suuse Western philosophy. Descartes
gave us the body-as-machine, and conjured the human
through addition (mind, will). Spinoza dened the body
in terms of aect, and thus made its capacities emergent
rather than innate. Marx for the most part agreed, but
tracked the bodys deformation and degradation in
processes of capitalist production. Bergson gave us
bodies that were the contraction of elements, and complained that in most accounts the human was merely a
badly analyzed composite. Everywhere, bodies made
and transformed, the human dened and dissolved.
Yet, while its questions may be old, posthumanism is
far more than mere repetition. To borrow from Serres
(2002) we have new bodies, a new world, and a new
universe. Within this world the human is again up for
grabs, but in ways, and with consequences, that are as
novel as they are complex. Genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, and pharmaceuticals have made projects
of organisms. Ecology and cybernetics have given us
bodies understood in terms of exchange and circulation.
New information technologies and intelligent machines
have articulated mind, body and machine in ever-new
ways. Here in the United States, evening news broadcasts mess up the category further: barely human
others (Iraqis, Rwandans, Muslims), and almost
human companions (monkeys, dogs and cats), are dis0016-7185/$ - see front matter 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.03.002

cussed alongside accounts of inter-species exchange

(bird u, SARS) in which the boundaries of the human
are suddenly porous and mobile. Conversely, the ascendance of rights discourse has produced a demand to x
the body, to give the human determinate form and
content, confronting the continuous dierentiation of
bodies with an earnest desire for reassembly, consistency, and universality.
No surprise, then, that the human has become such
a fraught entity, for we seek to x it even as we dissolve
it. And no surprise, either, that posthumanism has
become a buzzword across the humanities and social
sciences (see Graham, 2002; Gray, 2001; Wolfe, 2003;
Badmington, 2003), and in geography (as evident at the
2003 RGS/IBG meetings, and in the growing number of
articles on the topic). But to what does posthumanism
refer? A glance through the literature suggests that this
isnt immediately clear, which perhaps makes this a
propitious moment to reect on some of the dierent
ways that the question of the posthuman has been
posed, and to gesture toward the ethics and politics of
each.

1. Posthumanism as deconstructive responsibility

A rst kind of posthumanist writing asks how the
human is dened. What dierentiates the human from
the non-human? What must be excluded to make the
human properly human? And what does the gure of the
humanabstracted and puriedsanction in the realm
of ethics and politics?
On this matter Derridas (2002, 2003) recent essays on
the question of the animal merit our attention. The topic
may come as a surprise from someone whose recent
work has dealt with such topics as law, justice and
responsibility, but for Derrida the question of the animalthat is, how the animal is gured within Western
thoughthas everything to do with what qualies as
properly human. Humanism tracs in animals; it produces man through producing its animal other. We
know this to be true of Descartes, but Derrida shows the
same thing at work in the writing of Freud, Heidegger,

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and Lacan, among others. As he so often does, Derrida

gives us a clever neologismanimotthat phonetically
singularizes the plural for animal (animaux) and combines it with the word for word (mot), thereby calling
attention to the habit of rolling all animal species into
one, and setting this undierentiated and singularized
class of being against the human (see Derrida, 2003,
143n2). This animal-word (animot) thus grounds a
fundamental anthropology.
Derridas treatment of the human/animal couplet is
predictable, although no less important for being so.
Like other binariesnature/culture, self/other, male/
femalehe nds that each identity in the pair is internal
to the other, and that a supplement is necessary to x
the dierence (in this case reason, tool-making, or the
ability to respond rather than react). As it turns out,
the supplement never quite settles the matter once and
for all time. Thus, as Derrida (2003, 138) explains,
It is less a matter of asking whether one has the
right to refuse the animal such and such a power. . .than of asking whether what calls itself human
has the right to rigorously attribute to man, which
means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever posses
the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of
that attribution.
For Derrida, it becomes essential to examine how
lines are drawn between humans and their others, and to
consider the ethical and political consequences of such
labors of division, for these lines are homologous with
ethics and politics. The question, what is animal? is,
ultimately, not unrelated to the question, who is my
neighbor?
If Derrida merely gestures to some of the ethical and
political implications, both for our treatment of animals
and each other, Giorgio Agamben (2004) makes them
explicit. Writing of what he calls the anthropological
machine, he explains:
Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake
here, the machine necessarily functions by means
of an exclusion (which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the
human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception,
a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is
nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside
is in turn only the inclusion of an outside (37).
For Agamben, the distinction man/animal is part of
the conceptual scaolding for sovereign power, and part
of how bare lifeand the gure homo saceris dened

and set apart (as that person who can be killed but not
sacriced). Agamben nds one source for this in the
sciences of the late 19th century. In these sciences, the
anthropological machine functions by excluding as not
(yet) human an already human being from itself, that is,
by animalizing the human, by isolating the non-human
within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape-man. And,
he continues, one only needs move forward a few decades to nd in the place of Homo alalus the Jew, that is,
the non-man produced within the man, or the n
eomort
and the overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body itself or, for that matter,
the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as gures of
an animal in human form (37).
The human is divided, the non-human separated
within the human, at once included and excluded. The
geographer Kay Anderson (2001) argues along similar
lines. For Anderson, the distance between animal and
human is fraught with politics because we have learned
from evolutionary science that the human is most fully
itself the more it has traveled from the animal state into
a state of its own. Here the issue isnt essential or eternal
dierence, but historical dierence qua racial dierence,
that is, race understood in terms of an evolutionary
discourse that produces a gradation of bodies between
the truly human, less human and non-human (that is,
bodies that are more or less animal). For Anderson,
race turns on the assumption that the human is measured in terms of a distancing from the animal (or
nature), which, to recast Andersons argument in
Agambens terms, does more than divide the world into
nature and culture, it divides the human into the human
and inhuman.
Neither Derrida nor Agamben embraces the term
posthumanist, for the dichotomy human/animal is not
as easily displaced as the term suggests. We are hardly
post humanist. I include them here because they seek to
disturb our ease with the human as a coherent category. They are post human to the extent that they shift
our attention from static ontological dierence to the
play of di
erance. In the face of rights discourse this
may seem a risky move, but each suggests that the gure
of the human, far from giving us an unambiguous
foundation for human rights, provides instead the basis
for violent and bloody exclusions. One solution might be
to widen the category, to include more beings within its
bounds. But this would remain within a humanist and
racist metaphysics, with its desire to x the human
through casting o the inhuman. The solution preferred by Derrida is a deconstructive responsibility (see
Spivak, 1994), a vigilant attention to the bounding of
the human, to the supplemental logic that is at work in
each and every eort to set o the human as its very own
kind. Agamben aims for something slightly dierent.
Writing with the relationship between the anthropological machine and the horrors of Auschwitz rmly in

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271

mind, his posthumanism imagines the destruction of the

machine altogether:

master, and of which it is indeed in some radical

sense merely the product (2003: 7, italics added).

Faced with this extreme gure of the human and

the inhuman, it is not so much a matter of asking
which of the two machines. . .is better or more eectiveor, rather, less lethal and bloodyas it is of
understanding how they work so that we might,
eventually, be able to stop them (38).

The problem here is not his analysis of the present.

We are, indeed, entangled with non-human assemblages,
of which we are not masters. The problem lies in the
temporalizing mode of his statement. For what does it
mean to say that our context is now posthuman? What
does it mean to say that the human is intertwined with
non-humans as never before? When was the human not
inextricably entwined in material, technological and
informational networks? When was the human ever just
itself?
Historicist statements are so common that we hardly
give them a second thought. Yet, they require immense
caution, for in putting forth the posthuman as a historical momentas a unique conditionwe risk recentering the gure of man, and by so doing, reinstalling
humanism with a vengeance. To talk about the present
as a time when the boundaries between the human and
the non-human are blurred, to imagine that now, more
than ever before, our lives are entangled with things, is to
produce the historical ction of the autonomous man,
the human before its entanglements. In this temporalizing mode, posthumanism requires the human, it
relentlessly calls it into being. And, thus, it risks
becoming yet another anthropological machine that, in
reimposing the human/inhuman binary, divides the
human against itself.
Equally as problematic are the politics that historicist
posthumanisms underwrite. On the one hand they allow
for a nihilistic politics of free play. Now that the body
is no longer itself perhaps any and all experimentation
is acceptable. Conversely, it can give rise to a nostalgic
politics of purity, one that ghts any and all transformations in the name of recovering a prior essence and a
lost unity. Free play or purity: neither is particularly
helpful for negotiating the complex ethical-political
terrain of technoscience. Both depoliticize: the rst by
positing a realm beyond politics, the second by imagining a realm before politics.
It is in part to avoid the recentering of man that
some posthumanists have sought to interrogate the human through excavating a tradition of ontological
speculation that rejects dierence in favor of ongoing
processes of dierentiation. This is one explanation for
the growing popularity of the work of such writers as
Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze and Serres, who understand
the composition of lifethe making of bodiesto occur
on a plane of immanence in which thingsobjects,
beingsare understood not in terms of eternal and
immutable essences, but in terms of relations and aect.
Deleuze (1970, pp. 12324) puts it thus:

2. Posthumanism as ontology
If Derrida and Agamben focus on the gure of the
human, others have focused on the making of the human, and in particular, the making of (human) bodies.
This kind of posthumanism is therefore concerned with
questions of ontology, on being and becoming. At rst
glance, this may seem diametrically opposed to the position I just discussed, since the interest of the former
was to contest the ontologizing of the human. But here
we may wish to introduce a distinction between essentialist and non-essentialist ontologies (see DeLanda,
1999). The former presupposes a world of xed entities
and essential dierences (which deconstruction displaces), whereas the latter imagines a world in the
making, in which bodies and entities are continuously
composed, dissolved and recomposed in the practices of
everyday life. Such an ontology is dynamic and openended.
Claims about bodies-in-the-making are familiar to
geographers. Donna Haraway popularized the notion
through her metaphor of the cyborg in the 1980s, and it
has been taken up since by countless writers. Yet, amid
the bourgeoning literature on the topic, and the palpable
excitement that it has generated, there is much muddled
thinking. One notices, for instance, a continuous
emphasis on the posthuman as a new and novel condition, as if it names an epochal shiftthat moment when
the body became no longer entirely or fully human. The
emphasis here is on rupture, on a shift from natural to
articial, pure to modied. Variations on this theme are
ubiquitous: there is endless talk of the blurring of
boundaries, of hybridity, of the stitching together of
the human and non-human. Even sophisticated writers
like Cary Wolfe occasionally fall prey to this sort of
historicism. In his otherwise excellent introduction to
Animal Rites he explains that,
At the present moment. . .cultural studies and theory are engaged in addressing a social, technological, and cultural context that is now thoroughly
posthuman. . .insofar as the human is inextricably
entwined, as never before in material, technological,
and informational networks of which it is not the

The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development

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of form, but as a complex relation between dierential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and
slownesses on a plane of immanence. . .. It should
be clear that the plane of immanence, the plane of
Nature that distributes aects, does not make any
distinction at all between things that might be
called natural and things that might be called articial. Artice is fully a part of Nature, since each
thing, on the immanent plane of Nature, is dened
by the arrangement of motions and aects into
which it enters, whether these arrangements are
articial or natural.
Deleuze notes that this approach is as valid for humans as it is for animals: each can be understood ethologically, that is, in terms of the relations that compose
it. We must always think beyond the human.
We should perhaps not be surprised that it is precisely
at this moment that Deleuze turns to geographical
metaphors:
Borrowing terms from the Middle Ages, or from
geography, we will dene (bodies) by longitude
and latitude. A body can be anything; it can be an
animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it
can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity. We call longitude of a body the set of relations
of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between
particles that compose it from this point of view,
that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude
the set of aects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous
force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). In this way we construct the map of the
body. The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature, the place of immanence or consistency,
which is always variable and is always constantly
being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.
Deleuzes bodies are multiple. They are not simply
human bodies. More important, the human body is
not, never was, and never can be, simply itself.
These insights are not specic to Deleuze. Marx
understood bodies along similar lines, as the outcome of
our connections to the world, the outcome of sense, and
not as objects that exist prior to their connection with
and to things.
To be sensuous, i.e., to be real, is to be an object of
sense, a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous
objects outside oneself, objects of ones sense perception. To be sensuous is to suer (to be subjected
to the actions of another) (quoted in Pietz, 1993,
p. 144)

For both Marx and Deleuze subjects and objects are

not easily demarcated. Bodies cannot be separated from
their relations with the world. They are always in composition with the world, composed through the world.
The bodys interiorwhich we too quickly imagine in
terms of static formis only a selected exterior, and the
exterior, a projected interior. Beingsbodiesare
nothing more, but also nothing less, than an in-folding
of the world, the subject and outcome of ontological
play (see Harrison, 2000).
Why posit such an ontology? It suggests an analytics
of bodies, the possibility of writing a political cartography of bodily formation. It is also consistent with
even necessary foran ethics and politics other than
nostalgic returns or celebratory transcendence. It attunes us to the continuous becoming-other of the
(human) body, to which we must be responsible. Such
an ontology refuses any ethics or politics based on the
body as a xed form. It refuses morality and the judgment of God. It replaces these with an ethological ethics,
an ethics of immanent modes of being, an ethics attuned
to becomingwith all its dangers and all its hope. There
is no beginning to the body, no origin and no end. We
are only, always, in the middle of human becomings of
many dierent types. Deleuze insists that it is in terms of
this middle that we must install ourselves, devise ways
of life, imagine and make beings and bodies. When it
comes to the human, there is no realm before politics,
and no realm beyond politics. Cary Wolfe ultimately
gets it right: precisely by taking embodiment seriously,
he argues, we come to the theoretical conclusion that the
human is not now, and never was, itself (2003: 9).

3. Posthumanism as non-anthropocentrism
The ontological position set out in the preceding
section opens onto a third understanding of posthumanism that requires far less introduction to geographers. This is a posthumanism that understands the
social world as a more than human world. I take the
phrase from Whatmore (2002), who has perhaps most
insistently demanded that we think our worlds in terms
of connections, and thus admit into the social all
manner of non-human entities and actors. In this sense,
posthumanism is attuned less to the composition and
transformation of the human, than to the problem of
anthropocentrism. The two converge, of course, because
anthropocentrism teaches us to imagine that the production of the humanand social lifeis something to
which only we, as humans, contribute.
Geography journals, including Geoforum, have
increasingly devoted space to this issue, often framed in
terms of the place of materiality in the analysis of social life. Contributors have drawn on diverse resources,
from Marxs analysis of commodities to Latours actor-

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network theory, but what is held in common is the

assumption that social lifeindeed all lifeis an outcome of complex assemblages in which humans are not
the only actors. Thus, it becomes possible to understand
cities, for example, as posthuman assemblages in ways
that both vastly expand our understanding of the actors
shaping the urban experience, and that confound our
usual understandings of the space and time of urban life.
Space is understood topologically rather than geometrically, time seen as an eect of assemblages rather than
an external measure. Thus, we might say that writing the
SARS virus into a posthuman Toronto explodes the
time-space of the city, folding people and animals in
China and Thailand into bodies on Queen Street, and
revealing time to be multiple and rhythmicthe time of
circulation of people and capital but also molecules.
Although this understanding of posthumanism may be
the most prevalent in geography, there is still much
work to be done tracing the vital topologies (Whatmore, 2002) of our posthuman worlds, and geographers
have only begun to grapple with the challenge it poses to
the discipline. How are we to understand the organization and dissolution of such worlds? What does posthumanism qua non-anthropocentrism mean for our
understandings of space and time? How might topological understanding of a more-than-human space
inform ethical consideration and political strategy? We
have only begun to understand what it means not to
posit either a singular source (humans), or a transcendental realm (God), which grounds our posthuman
worlds.
What, then, does posthumanism name? We need not
answer this in the singular, and we must also avoid
collapsing any one into the others. On the one hand, it
inquires after the gure of the human, its xing and
bounding. It is thus another name for vigilance, for a
deconstructive responsibility. Like postcolonialism, it
does not name a historical moment, or an empirical
condition, so much as a way of reading that, in this case,
attends to the division of the world, to the separation of
the human from the inhuman. From another position it
names the emergence of the human, the human as project and practice, the body as an outcome of the infolding of the world. It attends to the capacities of
bodies, and how these are formed through relations with
other bodies, both human and non-human. From a
third perspective it is another name for non-anthropocentrism, for recognizing a vital topology that extends

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far beyond us, and that is not of our making alone. It

does not so much name vigilance as modesty, it is focused less on human becomings than on becoming
otherwise, on displacing the hubris of humanism so as
to admit others into the calculus of the world.

References
Agamben, G., 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University
Press, Stanford.
Anderson, K., 2001. The nature of race. In: Castree, N., Braun, B.
(Eds.), Social Nature: Theory, Practice, Politics. Blackwell, Oxford.
Badmington, N., 2003. Theorizing posthumanism. Cultural Critique
53, 1027.
DeLanda, M., 1999. Deleuze, diagrams and the open-ended becoming
of the world. In: Grosz, E. (Ed.), Becomings: Explorations in Time,
Memory and Futures. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp. 2941.
Deleuze, G., 1970. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights, San
Francisco.
Derrida, J., 2002. The animal that therefore I am (more to follow).
Trans. D. Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, 2.
Derrida, J., 2003. And say the animal responded. In: Wolfe, C. (Ed.),
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 121146.
Graham, E.L., 2002. Representations of the Post/human: Monsters,
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Press, Manchester.
Gray, C.H., 2001. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age.
Routledge, New York.
Harrison, P., 2000. Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of
the everyday. Society and Space 18, 497517.
Pietz, W., 1993. Fetishism and materialism: the limits of theory in
Marx. In: Apter, E., Salemink, O. (Eds.), Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Serres, M., 2002. The art of living. Interview with Mary Zournazi. In:
Zournazi, Mary (Ed.), Hope: New Philosophies for Change.
Routledge, London, pp. 192209.
Spivak, G., 1994. Responsibility. Boundary 2 21, 2264.
Whatmore, S., 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces.
Sage Publications, London.
Wolfe, C., 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of
Species, and Posthumanist Theory. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.

Bruce Braun
Department of Geography
University of Minnesota
414 Social Sciences Building
267-19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
USA
E-mail address: braun@geog.umn.edu