During the research phase of this book I benefited greatly from the stimulating intellectual environment at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London that Tamar Garb and her team set up and where I was Distinguished Visiting Professor in 2017. I am also grateful to Henrietta Moore, Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, who invited me as an active Honorary Visiting Professor as of 2017.

I spent two very productive months as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), at the Bauhaus University Weimar in Germany. I am grateful to Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert for their research leadership, and to my research assistant Eduard Kolosoff for his devoted support.

Part of this material was first presented in my Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Yale University in 2017. I want to thank the Tanner Foundation in Utah and the Tanner Lectures Committee at Yale University for their invitation, and especially Yale University President Peter Salovey for his warm and witty welcome. Sincere thanks to Professor Gary Tomlinson and his colleagues and staff at the Whitney Centre for the Humanities for their splendid hospitality. I am grateful to my respondents Joanna Radin and Rüdiger Campe for their insightful contributions during the open discussion, and to many colleagues and students for their formal and informal comments during the sessions. I am also grateful to my friend Moira Fradinger for her moving public introduction.

My sincere thanks to Genevieve Lloyd for her wise and enlightening guidance throughout the drafting process of this book. Thanks also to Matthew Fuller and Keith Ansell-Pearson for their generous insights, theoretical advice and bibliographical details. I am much indebted to Marlise Mensink for her warm friendship. I also wish to thank my personal research assistants Gry Ulstein, Evelien Geerts and Lauren Hoogen Stoevenbeld for their unfailing logistical and organizational assistance. I am indebted to Linda Dement for introducing me to Jessie Boylan’s photograph of the 2015 ‘Ngurini’, an immersive installation by the Nuclear Futures Arts Program with the Yalata Aboriginal Community.

Sections of this book were published in my chapter in the volume Conflicting Humanities, which I co-edited with Paul Gilroy in 2016, and in the Introduction to The Posthuman Glossary, which I co-edited with Maria Hlavajova in 2018. I acknowledge them both warmly here. An earlier draft of the theoretical framework for the PostHumanities was published in Theory, Culture & Society in May 2018.

This book would not have been possible without the loyal support of my publisher John Thompson; I truly thank him for his enduring commitment to my posthuman project.

Finally, my eternal gratitude to my life partner Anneke Smelik for her intellectual, emotional and moral support, and because living together is so much fun.

Acknowledgement of the Cover Image

Ngurini, immersive installation by the Nuclear Futures Arts Program with the Yalata Aboriginal Community, 2015. Photo by Jessie Boylan.

It is not at all uncommon for users of any kind of websites or digital services to be requested to prove their humanity on a daily basis. The prompt usually reads something like: ‘Before We Subscribe You, We Need To Confirm You Are A Human’. And it looks like this:

Having to demonstrate one’s humanity assumes as the central point of reference the algorithmic culture of computational networks – not the human. This mundane example demonstrates that in contemporary society the human has become a question mark. Who or what counts as human today?

This is not a simple question and it is best answered in the context of our posthuman times. What or who is the human today can only be understood by incorporating the post-human and non-human dimensions. By posthuman I mean both a historical marker of our condition and a theoretical figuration. The posthuman is not so much a dystopian vision of the future, but a defining trait of our historical context. I have defined the posthuman condition as the convergence of posthumanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other, within an economy of advanced capitalism (Braidotti 2013, 2017). The former focuses on the critique of the Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal measure of all things, while the latter criticizes species hierarchy and anthropocentric exceptionalism. Although they overlap and tend to be used interchangeably in general debates, they are rather discrete and separate events, both in the intellectual genealogies and in their social manifestations.

As a theoretical figuration, the posthuman is a navigational tool that enables us to survey the material and the discursive manifestations of the mutations that are engendered by advanced technological developments (am I a robot?), climate change (will I survive?), and capitalism (can I afford this?). The posthuman is a work in progress. It is a working hypothesis about the kind of subjects we are becoming. Who that ‘we’ is, and how to keep that collectivity open, multiple and non-hierarchical, will be constant concerns in this book.

Though I can barely conceal my fascination for the posthuman, I do inhabit it with critical distance. The posthuman condition implies that ‘we’ – the human and non-human inhabitants of this particular planet – are currently positioned between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction. Yes, we are in this together: between the algorithmic devil and the acidified deep blue sea. The Fourth Industrial Revolution involves the convergence of advanced technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the Internet of Things. This means that digital, physical and biological boundaries get blurred (Schwab 2015). The Sixth Extinction refers to the dying out of species during the present geological era as the result of human activity (Kolbert 2014). More specifically, this conjuncture positions us between two parallel and to a certain extent specular forms of acceleration: the systemic accelerations of advanced capitalism and the great acceleration of climate change. Striking a balance between these conflicting forces, so as to keep the broader picture in mind, is the current posthuman challenge.

At the core of our predicament – but not its sole cause – is the unprecedented degree of technological intervention we have reached, and the intimacy we have developed with technological devices. And yet, the posthuman condition cannot be reduced simply to an acute case of technological mediation. This convergence, with its distinctive combination of speedy transformations and persistent inequalities, is planetary and multi-scalar (Banerji and Paranjape 2016). It affects social and environmental ecologies as well as individual psychic and shared emotional landscapes. It is not a linear event.

My argument is that we need to learn to address these contradictions not only intellectually, but also affectively and to do so in an affirmative manner. This conviction rests on the following ethical rule: it is important to be worthy of our times, the better to act upon them, in both a critical and a creative manner. It follows that we should approach our historical contradictions not as some bothersome burden, but rather as the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative and hopeful future, even if this approach requires some drastic changes to our familiar mind-sets and established values.

To describe the posthuman location as a convergence of several contradictory speeds of transformation does not even begin to approximate the tensions and paradoxes it generates, nor the pain and anxiety it evokes. In such a context, neither universalistic notions of ‘Man’ nor exceptional claims for ‘Anthropos’, are sufficient to explain how we are supposed to cope with this challenge. Such outdated positions do not help us understand how knowledge is being produced and distributed in the era of high technological mediation and ecological disaster, also known as the Anthropocene.¹ Humanistic hubris aside, unless one is at ease with multi-dimensional complexity, one cannot feel at home in the twenty-first century.

The posthuman condition may strike the reader as catastrophe-prone at first sight, but in this book, I hope to balance this negative assessment with a more complex and insightful account of the situation. The book highlights the positive potential of the posthuman convergence and offers tools for coping with it affirmatively. Despair is not a project; affirmation is. This book is about the forms of self-understanding and new ways of knowing that are emerging from the convergence of posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approaches. While maintaining the analytical and genealogical distinction between these two components, I argue that their convergence is currently producing a qualitative leap in new directions: posthuman knowledge production. This is not a single development, but a zigzagging set of pathways, which includes a range of posthumanist positions and also a revision of a variety of neo-humanist² claims. A full overview of contemporary enquiries about what constitutes the basic unit of reference for the human exceeds the scope of this study; I have explored it elsewhere (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018).

In this book I want to focus on a double target: first to outline the features of emergent posthuman subjects and second to explore the new scholarship they are producing within and across the fields of the (Post) Humanities. I will present cartographies that detect a number of operative principles and discursive meta-patterns and will attempt to provide a critical framework for analysing and assessing them. The underlying conviction of this book is that the posthuman convergence, far from being a crisis – let alone an indicator of extinction – marks a rich and complex historical transition. Full of risks, it also affords huge opportunities for both humans and non-human agents, as well as for the Humanities, to reinvent themselves. Like all transitions, however, it requires some vision and experimental energy as well as considerable doses of endurance.

The aims of this book are the following: to ground the posthuman in real-life conditions; to detect alternative formations of posthuman subjects; to assess the fast-growing volume of posthuman knowledge production; and to inscribe posthuman thinking subjects and their knowledge within an affirmative ethics.

In chapter 1, I will outline the extent of the posthuman convergence in both theoretical and affective terms. Chapter 2 addresses the question of what counts as a posthuman subject and traces emerging patterns of posthuman subjectivity. Chapter 3 assesses the advantages of posthumanist knowledge production. Chapter 4 looks at the rise of the Critical PostHumanities and situates them in the fast-moving landscapes of cognitive capitalism. Chapter 5 analyses established patterns of posthuman thought and discusses concrete practices to evaluate them. Chapter 6 delves deeper into affirmative ethics and what changes of temporal and spatial scale it requires. In a shorter final chapter, I return to the affective mood of the posthuman convergence. The book finishes with the endless potentialities of posthuman resistance and the inexhaustible quality of life itself.

Perhaps here, at the end of the Introduction, I should answer the question whether I’m a robot. No, I’m not, but some of my best friends are! I am posthuman – all-too-human. This means that I am materially embodied and embedded, with the power to affect and be affected, living in fast-changing posthuman times. What all of that entails will be explained in the pages that follow.