What Is Posthumanism?

(review)
Catherine Ingraham

Future Anterior, Volume 7, Number 1, Summer 2010, pp. 96-103 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press DOI: 10.1353/fta.2010.0003

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/fta/summary/v007/7.1.ingraham.html

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Book Review Catherine Ingraham

What Is Posthumanism?
Cary Wolfe Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Future Anterior Volume VII, Number 1 Summer 2010

From Cary Wolfes introduction to What Is Posthumanism? 1 we gather that the nature of the authors question is to locate and revise the capacity of humanism the word and its multiple meanings to act like itself once prefixed with post. Wolfe takes some care, therefore, to articulate humanist assumptions that we still harbor in the early twenty-first century. We are deeply familiar with most of these: humanism affirms the dignity and worth of all people; it is committed to the search for human truth and morals through secular means; and it professes rationality and emphasizes self-determination and the commonality of the human condition. Posthumanism could have meant, in such a project, either an evolution beyond or a devolution from such humanist ideals. In this case, Wolfe, borrowing a tactic from Jacques Derrida, wishes to critique humanism while acknowledging that we cannot, nor would we want to, fully turn the page on its claims. Wolfe, a professor of English at Rice University, is particularly interested in defining posthumanist practices in art, poetry, and literature. He is the founding editor of the University of Minnesota series entitled Posthumanities and has several earlier collections of essays on the subject of posthumanism. His particular interest here is to find a more contemporary and consolidated domain for thinking about posthumanism, and he finds it by combining poststructuralist speculative theory with systems theory advanced by the controversial German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Wolfe also ventures, along the way, into architecture. What is at stake in this book? In philosophical terms, the book strives to deontologize oppositional thinking most notably, for our purposes, to take that most darling of all oppositions, culture/nature, and convert it to the non-oppositional pairing of system/environment. At stake in this substitution are ontologies of presence and absence, longstanding questions of representation, as well as theories of temporality, transformation, and emergent order (second-order systems theory). As Deleuze said, Wolfe writes in his Introduction, dualisms are the enemy, the altogether necessary enemy (xx). The philosophical beginnings of posthumanism reside in work by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and Etienne Balibar. Humanism is its own dogma, as Foucault suggested (xiv). It is Derrida whose influence is most felt in Wolfes book. Derridas
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1. Destruction of the Blur Pavilion, on Lake Neuchatel, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. The pavilion, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, served as centerpiece of the 2002 Swiss National Expo. While in place, the structure emitted an enshrouding fog that enveloped participants in mist. From afar, the building appeared as a cloud floating over the lake. Photographs courtesy Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects

continuous critique of humanism, from his doctorat dtat thesis in the 1960s, The Origin of Geometry, to his almost-final work on animality, substantially altered our ability to take the complex amalgam that is humanness at face value. In addition to poststructural philosophical influences, Wolfe is also interested in cybernetics, the social sciences and humanities, biology and ecology, and the development of systems theory. Theorists of technology and science, such as Katharine Hayles, who wrote How We Became Posthuman (1999), have used the term in a different sense.2 Wolfe points to the work of Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Manturana, and Francisco Varela, in particular, as pivotal in understanding the self-referential closure, or autopoiesis, of biological systems and the emergence of a linguistic domain that are used by some autopoietic systems to reduce environmental complexity. As Wolfe describes his own project in relation to his earlier work: [T]his book weaves together . . . two different senses of posthumanism . . . : posthumanism as a mode of thought . . . (explored . . . on the parallel terrains of pragmatism, systems theory, and poststructuralism) and . . . posthumanism as engaging directly the problem of anthropocentrism and speciesism and how practices of thinking and reading must change in light of their critique. (xviiixix)3 What might such a set of issues have to do with historic preservation? On the face of it certainly in any pragmatic sense very little. Wolfes primary audience is neither architects nor
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historic preservationists, and he has no particular obligation, in my view, to address internal debates specific to our fields. Yet it is fruitful to look into possible connections between Wolfes discussions and discourse and architecture and preservation. Philosophical discourse is a high-wire act based on keeping a certain conceptual integrity afloat in an almost infinite array of challenges to that integrity; thus it is fair to ask how Wolfes discussions are relevant to what architects, or preservationists, do. Right off the bat, however, we are on shaky ground, because architects and preservationists share surprisingly little common ground. And yet historic preservation sprang, at least in part, from architecture. Both disciplines and practices concern themselves with buildings and, in the more inquisitive sectors of each domain, both contain a fairly broad spectrum of views on what constitutes a significant cultural or architectural work. Further, both architecture and historic preservation are equally committed, each in their own ways, to an archaic humanism. Architecture, in particular, which often begins with probes into presuppositions about life, form, and technology, almost always ends conservatively, in a blunted philosophical mode. Historic preservation, whose very nature is to conserve what already exists, is not in the business of probing. One could say that the two disciplines find their convergence precisely within a commonly held conservatism. There is, of course, much more to say about this. What to save, what to destroy? How can we embody or engender history, ideology, political meaning, in material objects? How
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should we design systems in the face of complex environmental constraints? These questions have been on architects minds, in some form, for centuries. Wolfes discussion may be particularly relevant to contemporary debates in digital architectures, which are pushing against biological forms and systems in a way that is still insufficiently theorized. Yet even from a strictly historical preservationist standpoint, Wolfes book touches on themes that are part of everything we might claim for historic preservation. Architectural buildings, historic landscapes, period rooms, and artifacts of all kinds are preserved according to specific ideas about history and meaning, humanist values, and ideas of the public good. Historic preservation of architecture makes assumptions about material realities and environmental conditions, about time and space, and the relation of these things to existence. Historic preservation is not simply based on a coalescence of traditional humanist ideals, but it is a direct expression of those ideals through the maintenance of an artifactual record. It is therefore somewhat surprising that posthumanist critiques, which point to the multiplicity of values, and complex, discontinuous histories that compose any artifact, have only occasionally cropped up in the discipline of historic preservation in the form of acknowledgments of an uncertain past, a refusal to restore completely, use of layering and palimpsests, and the emergence of historiography. Preserving modernist buildings, in particular, has forced open a series of paradoxes that even the most dedicated preservationist might find hard to ignore. How do we preserve
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modernity in a classical historical framework when the very tenets of modernism were, precisely, to obliterate that framework? Historiography entails the application of historical reasoning to history itself, rationality to rationality itself.4 For the most part, historic preservation preserves the orthodoxies of historical time and place in the interest of stabilizing specific acts of culture. To preserve anything is to wrestle with time on behalf of an imputed future when our own memory will fail, and we will desire some fixed recovery of the past, for ourselves and for subsequent generations. This is, in part, a desire for an induction of stable historical evidence into an ever-changing cultural development. Such practices are often laudatory and, simultaneously, deeply vulnerable to various forms of falsification of the historical record. Wolfe has several theories about how architecture in particular should compose itself as a system. In Chapter 8 of his book, entitled Lose the Building, he discusses Luhmanns view that autopoietic systems, through their very systematic nature, remain open to the environments they require but have removed themselves from. The very selectivity that creates an art system in the midst of a complex field of objects, for example, also creates an opening in that system to its outside environment. Every environment, Wolfe writes, is infinitely more complex than any given system and yet, as Luhmann remarks, the environment receives its unity through the system and only in relation to the system (205). Wolfe is interested in the Blur (or Cloud) building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Maus
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proposal Tree City for Torontos Parc Downsview Park competition in 2000. In both cases the architects proposed an infrastructure subject to the effects of time rather than a building that corrals space (Figure 1). The architectural medium of the Blur project, Wolfe writes, is thereby submitted to a kind of dematerialization or decomposition by the problem of time (207). Koolhaas and Maus project is, in Wolfes view, working in the same territory. Once we pay attention to specific media, he writes, the problem of time in relation to design becomes a question of specific speeds and velocities and how to coordinate them; biological and ecological elements and systems have certain rates of development (trees for example), change and decay, of course, but so do buildings and other structures, which are subject to quite different speeds (208). Koolhaas and Maus project provides a relatively loose coupling between different developmental paths so that the complexity of internal relations of the parks elements can remain responsive over time to changing and unanticipated demands from its surrounding environment. Wolfe describes, by way of contrast, Bernard Tschumis project for the same competition as producing a tight coupling of temporal horizons and possible scenarios with relatively hard-wired structural commitments up front, ones that predispose some temporal horizons and not others (208). The anti-aesthetic of Koolhaas and Maus solution may be seen as a refusal of design, composition, pictorialism, and the like in favor of a strategy of production and temporalization (208). This is part of its system a social system of art that, nevertheless, has been left open to the large-scale environmental and social complexity into which it is inserted. The designs weakness its underspecification in terms of architectural design is precisely its strength, in Wolfes view, and makes it more available to the autopoiesis of other systems in ways not precluded up front, by choices made now. The nature/culture distinction is thus replaced, as mentioned earlier, by system/ environment, and instead of a simple, yet harsh, dualism, this project fosters greater or lesser degrees of complexity that are open to each other (21011). These architectural systems are, according to Wolfe, framed by second-order systems theory complexity, contingency, and emergence. First-order systems are concerned with homeostasis and positive feedback. Time and temporalization, Wolfe writes, are thus introduced into the spatial practice of architecture and become the constitutive components. Historic preservation, were it faced with restoring the Blur building, would be called upon to represent neither a building nor an infrastructure, neither the architectural work-as-process in a benign sense, nor the architectural work-as-apparatus in
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an active sense. Giorgio Agamben (whose seminal work I was surprised to find largely absent from Wolfes argument) reworks the word apparatus, in light of Foucault, to mean a heterogeneous set of purportedly useful mechanisms that surround living beings and whose purpose is to control, manage, and govern life.5 We have thought of architecture as a machine but not necessarily as an apparatus. Posthumanism, and some of its space/time conundrums, are not new concepts in architecture, although they are, so to speak, conceptually incomplete. The very nature of posthumanism, however, is to defend against a false legibility and completion. Michael Hays wrote, as an epigraph to his 1992 book Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject that, in the words of Louis Althusser, [it] is possible to define humanisms status, and reject its theoretical pretensions while recognizing its practical function as an ideology.6 In defining humanist thought in architecture, Hays argued that in addition to the modern valorization of humanness and rationality, there is also a concept of humanism that dates from Renaissance theory and concomitant epistemologies of the human body, perspective, and harmony, that has its corollaries . . . in present-day architecture.7 Art surrealism and Russian constructivism in particular and mathematical logic such as Gdels Incompleteness paper, as well as Lacans theory of the dispersed and variable character of identity, have all been crucial to what we have noted, in architecture, as the opening of a gap between the subject and the object. Across this gap, architecture has traditionally offered reassuring bridges and stabilizing ideologies. Hayss project was to reveal, and articulate, the meaning of such a centralization of the subject in architectural modernism in order to detect, in it, posthumanist subject positions.8 In architecture now we are also increasingly interested in theories of biological systems and forms, as mentioned earlier, cyborgian aesthetics and potentials, and, to some degree, the questions of agency outlined by sociological theory. As usual, however, architecture is rarely well served by theoretical discourses that ask of it that it lose the building. The Blur building was stunning, both in its poignancy and its hardcore response to our desires for dematerialized architectural structures. And Rem Koolhaass work is, in truth, the most investigative and powerful work underway in architecture today. But neither Diller Scofidio + Renfro nor OMA would agree to losing the building on a regular basis. It is always, still, from the purgatory of designing and building buildings that architects win their entitlement to brilliant ephemera. In a less grandiose mode, one might ask why architecture should get so routinely slammed by philosophys internal
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debates about the nature of reality? Architecture is one of a handful of disciplines that actualizes systems of every kind on a daily basis in the midst of serious forces that continue to persuade us, with a degree of irrefutable intensity and force, of what most people still call reality. Architecture knows systems, open and closed, living and dead, dynamic and static. And if it has happened, in modernity, that such systems in architecture have become inert and self-satisfied, it is also the case that architecture has always courted avidly, and in multiple ways, forces of contingency. So architecture is all too familiar with battles between necessary enemies, culture versus nature or space versus time. Wolfes book, without a doubt, supplies important insights into what this might mean in theoretical terms for architecture the pitfalls, a cultivation of recursive loops, the nature of an open. His book will also, collaterally, speak to historic preservations ability to preserve dynamic structures, which, under any circumstances, is, and will be, a neat trick.
Author Biography Catherine Ingraham is a professor of architecture in the graduate architecture program at Pratt Institute in New York City. Her most recent books are Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (2006) and Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (1998). From 1991 to 1998, Ingraham was an editor, with Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, of Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture. Dr. Ingraham has published extensively and lectured nationally and internationally. She has been a guest professor at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton Universities, and the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants. In 2001, Ingraham was the winner, with architect Laurie Hawkinson, of a design competition and building commission for the Museum of Womens History in New York. Endnotes 1 Wolfes title echoes Kants 1784 essay What Is the Enlightenment? and Foucaults essay of 1984 with the same title. In his book, he cites Foucaults remark that the humanist thematic is in itself too supple, too diverse, too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection (xiv.) 2 Hayles, Wolfe remarks, seems to associate the posthuman with a kind of triumphant disembodiment (xv). His own project is the reverse: posthumanism in my sense isnt posthuman at allin the sense of being after our embodiment has been transcendedbut is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself. 3 For Manturana and Varela, autopoietic beings . . . share a consensual domain. First there is noise, multiplicity, complexity . . . Second, there are the autopoietic systems that . . . respond to this overwhelming complexity by reducing it in terms ofa . . . self-referential selectivity or code. 4 Wolfe quotes Foucaults well-known remark that Enlightenment rationality is not, as it were, rational enough, because it stops short of applying its own protocols and commitments to itself (xx). 5 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 812. An apparatus, according to Agamben, is a set of practices and mechanisms (both linguistic and nonlinguistic, juridical, technical, and military) that aim to face an urgent need and to obtain an effect that is more or less immediate . . . What is common to all these terms is that they refer back to . . . oikonomia, that is, to a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orientin a way that purports to be usefulthe behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings. Foucault included architectural forms in his definition of apparatus in a 1977 interview. 6 K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 3. 7 Ibid., 5. 8 Ibid., 13. 103