Badminton Posthumanism
Badminton Posthumanism
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THEORIZING
POSTHUMANISM
Neil Badmington
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISMI 11
made its neck stronger than ever" (1955, 203). Apocalyptic accounts
of the end of "Man," it seems to me, ignore humanism's capacity for
regeneration and, quite literally, recapitulation. In the approach to
posthumanism on which I want to insist, the glorious moment of
Herculean victory cannot yet come, for humanism continues to raise
its head(s).
N. Katherine Hayles has, of course, done much to reveal the
dangers of what might be called apocalyptic or complacent posthu-
manism.2 This, in fact, is precisely where How We BecamePosthuman
commences:
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12 | NEIL BADMINGTON
view of the self" (286-87). What remains to haunt the book, however,
is the possibility that humanism will haunt or taint posthumanism,
and it is precisely this problem that will concern me here-a problem
of what remains, a problem of remains.4 If Hayles's project is to imag-
ine a posthumanism that does not fall into the kind of trap that
ensnares Moravec, mine is slightly different (though not unrelated),
involving instead an attention to what of humanism itself persists,
insists, and ultimately desists.5I want, in short, to ask an apparently
straightforward question, with deliberately Leninist overtones: if
traces of humanism find their way into even the most apocalyptic
accounts of the posthumanist condition, what is to be done?
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14 | NEIL BADMINGTON
Alone, however, this is still not enough, and Derrida goes on to sug-
gest that there is no "simple and unique" (135) choice to be made
between the two methods of challenging humanism. A "new writ-
ing," he concludes, "must weave and interlace the two motifs"
(135),14and the apocalyptic desire to leap wholly beyond needs to be
married to the recognition that "[t]he outside bears with the inside
a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority" (1976,
35). This, in short, "amounts to saying that it is necessary to speak
several languages and produce several texts at once" (1982, 135).15
The ease of speed and the speed of ease had found themselves called
into question.
Given the unfashionable status of antihumanist theory at the pre-
sent moment, it would be easy to argue that "we" do not really need
Derrida to tell "us," in an essay written some time ago, that the anti-
humanists were somewhat wide of the mark. Their moment, the story
so often goes, has passed. Why would cultural critics interested in
posthumanism want to bother with Derrida's dense and difficult prose
when they have the thrilling, far newer work of Donna J. Haraway,
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISM | 15
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16 | NEIL BADMINGTON
How might this somewhat abstract theory actually be put into prac-
tice? I have tried elsewhere to work through some of the implications
of my approach with reference to Marge Piercy's Body of Glass (also
known as He, She, and It) and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers (Badmington 2000, "Posthumanist"; 2001). Here, however, I want
to travel further back in time, to the seventeenth century and a figure
who might well be called one of the founders of humanism.
When Descartes writes about what it means to be human, his
words exude certainty, security, and mastery. Near the beginning of
the Discourse on the Method, for instance, reason is held aloft as "the
only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts"
(1988, 21). This essential "power of judging well and distinguishing
the true from the false ... is naturally equal in all men" (20), and it is
precisely this ability to determine the truth that convinces Descartes
of his human being: "I think, thereforeI am" (36).21
The truth of the human, of what it means to be human, lies, that
is to say, in the rational mind, or soul,22which is entirely distinct from
the body:
Next, examining attentively what I was, and seeing that I could pretend
that I had no body and that there was neither world nor place where I
was; but that I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist; and that
on the contrary,simply because I was thinking about doubting the truth
of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed;
whereas, if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had
imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I
existed; I knew from there that I was a substance whose whole essence
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISM | 17
or nature is solely to think, and who, in order to exist, does not require
any place, or depend on any material thing. So much so that this "I,"
that is to say the soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from
the body. (Descartes 1988, Discourseon theMethod,36)23
The first of these is that they could never use words or other signs, com-
posing them as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we
can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words,
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18 1 NEIL BADMINGTON
and even utters some regarding the bodily actions that cause certain
changes in its organs, for instance if you touch it in one spot it asks what
you want to say to it; if in another, it cries out that you are hurting it,
and so on; but not that it arranges them [the words] diversely to
respond to the meaning of everything said in its presence, as even the
most stupid [hebetes]of men are capable of doing. Secondly, even
though they might do some things as well as or even better than we do
them, they would inevitably fail in others, through which we would
discover that they were acting not through understanding [connaissance]
but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a
universal instrument which can be of use in all kinds of situations, these
organs need some particular disposition for each particular action;
hence it is impossible to conceive that there would be enough of them in
a machine to make it act in all the occurrences of life in the way in which
our reason makes us act. (44-45)25
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISM | 19
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20 [ NEIL BADMINGTON
Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the fea-
tures claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground
its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through
science and technology. But as I have said, that rewriting has been at
work, for a long time now, in modernity itself. (1991, 34)
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISM | 21
allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance
with which he has now become acquainted, to workthroughit, to over-
come it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to
the fundamental rule of analysis. Only when the resistance is at its
height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover
the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance;and
it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence
and power of such impulses. The doctor has nothing else to do than to
wait, and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided
nor always hastened. (Freud 1953-74, 155; emphasis in original)
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22 | NEIL BADMINGTON
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Notes
Earlier versions of this paper were given at the University of Warwick, the Uni-
versity of Oxford, and at the Third Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference,
University of Birmingham, in 2000. I owe special thanks to my copanelists in
Birmingham,particularlyBartSimon. lain Morland and Julia Thomas generously
commented on previous drafts.
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24 | NEILBADMINGTON
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISM | 25
31. Since this essay was written, lain Chambers has published Cultureafter
Humanism:History,Culture,Subjectivity(2001), a wonderful book that also works
with (and through) the theories of Lyotardand Freud in an attempt to rethink the
relationship between humanism and posthumanism.
32. I take this beautiful phrase from de Certeau (1988, 2).
33. For more on Derrida's remarkablepatience, see Easthope (2002, 140).
34. I thank Malcolm Bull for encouraging me to "work through" this aspect
of my argument in more detail.
35. I am thinking here of the now archaicuse of the term to mean, in phrases
such as "Send me good speed," prosperity or success. Posthumanist cultural crit-
icism needs, I think, to remember and repeat this very obsolescence.
WorksCited
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26 | NEIL BADMINGTON
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THEORIZINGPOSTHUMANISM | 27
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