Reading Thoughts and Notes
Posthuman Humanities: Life Beyond Theory, Rosi Braidotti

• How will this vision of multi-versities change in the face of collapsing capitalism and deglobalization
  • Do we need to have the internet to achieve this nomadic thought? Were we condemned to misguided humanism without it?
  • How does globalization and inundation of information force us to rely more on our biases and instead limit our knowledge?
• Or how will it hold up in a world where capitalism reproduces, but reproduces systems that positively reinforce their own biases (e.g. bias in datasets that predict who will do well in school, so those kids get more attention, thus doing well in school…)
• Physical nomadism, destroyed by the enabling stability of climate and civilization, ironically enabled increasingly uncomfortable rates of change of thought – cognitive nomadism
• Why must posthuman humanities rely on technology to achieve posthumanism? Are biologically and evoluationarily encoded constructs not sufficient for the quest of ‘better understanding’… (truth, one might say…)

Summary
Braidotti highlights the turbulent evolution of the field of the humanities, the contradictory angst wrought by posthumanism, and increasing need for unifying discourses through the humanities and sciences. As humanities have endeavored to reimagine and deconstruct anthropomorphic humanism, the basic premise upon which humanities were founded is dissolved beneath it, and maroons its passengers at the mercy of an aqueous orientation. In light of technology that blurs the lines distinguishing human and cyborg, of information flow that tears through boundaries of us and them, of lenses in ecology, art, philosophy, and more that gradually lose focus on the Vitruvian Man, no longer can we align our thought to the deceptive pull of anthropic exceptionalism. Thus, Braidotti formulates a vision of a posthuman humanities to precipitate once more a vessel on which we can travel seas of knowledge.

A refreshing use of concrete examples of her framework give a sense of posthuman humanities. One example she cites is posthuman environmentalism found in calls for ‘Deep History’ analyses of long term cultural and geological impacts on the Earth.

Compelling Points

• Humanities face grave contradictions which it struggles to reconcile
• Humanities can give up anthropogenic favoritism for posthuman viewpoints without conceding that the study of humans is unnecessary
• Interdisciplinary conversations between science and humanities is probably a more complete way to pursue knowledge
• Practice purposeful defamiliarization

Implications
I will have to assume that the goal of the humanities, the sciences, philosophy, et. al is to know more. Concretely, to predict better. This is not always the de facto purpose (I vehemently argued this can be seen in the incestuous reproduction of dominant narratives in the Parisian brand of philosophy. Science often rightly faces similar criticisms – institutions that have long since forgotten their intended purpose of the pursuit of knowledge and instead reproduce for the sake of reproduction, growth, power, e.g. the field of eugenics, modern industry-driven computer science curriculums, areas of economics…). But no one consciously, à haut voix, admits to themselves or to others that they live to reproduce without a purpose. That conscious concession would submit to nihilism. Rather we defer to the pursuit of knowledge to save us. Let’s, then; se mentons.

A multi-versity is not the answer to forming a more complete posthuman epistemology, but moreover will never exist in circumstances where time, among other things, is limited, ethicial bases are orthogonal, and discourse does not converge.
The open source wave of software has crested and ebbed, but has not achieved its goals of radically shifting the structure of power formulated by the production of technological epistemologies. Despite unending dearths of opensource code, free, university quality massive open online courses for almost any field, and limitless, often free scientific literature, we still find ourselves mired in our own beliefs. Inundation is not freedom. It simply shifts the burden of processing more towards the unconscious, which predicates itself on existing beliefs and the already territorialized. We don’t need more data, fewer boundaries, and more discussion. We need carefully crafted boundaries, brimming with as many orthogonal datapoints as it can hold, and we need time and space to allow for practiced deterritorialization.

But let’s return to reality: no one really wants that; no one really wants knowledge.

This is the root of the issue. Arguing over what we need as if instantaneous changes could remain frozen in time is, to a degree, futile. In actuality, we need to reshape our values such that they perpetuate systems of change, rather than arguing over instantaneous changes. But we’ve arrived at our mortal fleshy curse – we can’t simply seek knowledge for the sake of itself as the revisionist purified motives of education imply because the only global optimization function directing our values is the reproduction of genes, shaping the basis of all levels of interaction. Desiring knowledge is a corollary, not an axiom, and self-deception is all but guaranteed.