Humanity under duress

Introduction to 'Humanity under duress'

In June 2019 a number of international researchers came together for a two-day symposium convened by iHuman and the Inclusive Societies group, both based within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield.

The brief given to our invited scholars was clear; write 1500 words (no more), share this with us two weeks before the event (no later) and prepare a 10 minute synopsis of the paper in readiness for some debate and discussion (no worries).

Some prompts were provided:

● What does it mean to be human in a post-welfare, post-social, austerity society?

● What does it mean to flourish as a human and who gets to flourish and who does not?

● What are the social, political and economic implications and feedback effects of compressed and damaged flourishing among particular social strata and geographies?

● What kinds of non-human connections are necessary in the time of the anthropocene?

● Can we celebrate the human category and also embrace non-humans such as animals and tech?

● Are we living in a time of the posthuman and, if so, what does this mean in practice, politics and theory?

● Are new vocabularies of winning, losing-out, difference or class required to understand the complex forms of social and (non)human problems as we move forward?

Their responses were dynamic, eclectic, theoretical and political. And we share their papers below in the spirit of ongoing debate and dialogue.

Photo credit: Charlotte Atkinson.

The contributions

Rowland Atkinson attends to the political economy of inhumanity found in common encounters of humans and digital life. His idea of the murder box explores gaming, leisure and pornography where the digital human’s desires are played out in deeply disturbing ways. Atkinson asks us to think again about the assemblages of human-digital worlds and to consider the possibilities for dehumanisation that are constituted in the name of pleasure and play. Too often the posthuman condition – embodied in the very idea of the digital human – is bandied around as a benign, inevitable and productive phenomenon. Atkinson encourages to consider the possibilities for constituting the inhumane through our pleasure-seeking activities.

Taking a cross-cultural frame of reference, Jamie Coates offers an analysis of humanness via a discussion of the ‘person’. Here he engages Chinese and Japanese linguistic formulations of personhood as a means of unpacking how different cultures approach the idea of the (human) individual. As an enlightenment concept the category of the human offered not necessarily meaning to capture all experience but the new capacity to distinguish between those to be included in this category and those or were not or were less than human. What can we do or think differently when we consider the idea of human bodies as persons, rather than folding them into the category of the human? As Coates shows, many non-human actors become part of a much broader pantheon and this may have value and resonance at a time of environmental and social change. Can we or should we embrace the person if we wish to move beyond some concept of the human?

Nadena Doherty and Reza Gholami offer a critical race perspective on questions of the human. Their contribution maps out the continuation of a racist white supremacy landscape across our institutions of society. Any engagement with the human must, they argue, recognise from the outset that racism is endemic and undercuts any discussions of inclusion, extension and community. They push us to question the whiteness of theorisation – especially that written in the critical posthumanities – and to counter this with a sensitisation to the politics of race. Such a politics enters the ontologies and epistemological of human/posthuman life and therefore requires our immediate attention.

Nick Game discusses the way that varying economic logics and perspectives have been developed by a range of thinkers. These have become enormously influential ways of framing economic activity that is itself often antagonistic to human capacity – generating forms of market orientation that generate divisions and inequalities that have yielded intense exclusion and damaged capacities among many. Gane traces these disparate forms of thinking, including a brief history of neoliberal thinking and influencers that brings us to the current focus on algorithms and ‘nudge’ thinking designed to create compliance and monitoring as much as improved social outcomes. The answer, Gane contends, is to move from nudging better consumers and to reject the triumph of markets and to regain a sense of the human in doing so.

Dan Goodley focuses on race and disability as entry points into a discussion of how we might begin to move from the exclusive and excluding conceptions of humanity generated in the male/Western tradition. Like Gane, below, Goodley identifies a strongly economic, rational and male core to conception of humanity that need to be teased apart to achieve a more effective and inclusive impression of humanness. Yet the move to a posthumanism also generates potential problems, the sense that in throwing out or reworking ideas of the human through technophile understandings may ‘flatten’ our understanding of what it means to be human. Locating a series of ways forward one focal point becomes how education systems impose ways of understanding as ‘less than human’ on black and disabled children.

Alexandra Hall offers an insight into the world of body modification via ethnographic work among women adopting new methods of beautification and modification – injectable, pill-form and other techniques that have rapidly risen alongside internet distribution models that circumvent traditional methods of control and regulation. On this circuit Hall locates these consumption practices as part of a regressive capitalism that now invades, and potentially damages, the bodies and minds of those who become subscribed to ideas of their bodies and faces as primary indexes of their sexual and social value. Here there is fun and mutual admiration but also an emerging set of risks that are propelled by the desire to be, in some sense, more than and better than.

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein considers the varying conceptions of the child, a body or figure that can be variously cast as occupying a range of complex positions – such as being in some sense pre-human/adult, or being in some sense more disabled. She highlights how thinking about children has tended to identify them as a kind of commonsense category of being when, in reality, they occupy intensely complex and ambivalent positions. Here the sciences of mind keep looking ever-deeper for clearer and more incisive impressions of the workings of the brain, while also recognising the non-unity and complexity of personal psychological development and experience.

Paul Martin brings a Science and Technology perspective to a discussion of the condition of the posthuman. He argues that we need to engage more readily – conceptually and empirically – with the more pernicious elements of biocapitalism. These might include the routinisation of genetic engineering of life, a revitalisation of evolutionary knowledge that downplays the uniqueness of humans and the increased surveillance of populations through their biometrics. He argues that posthuman thinking creates a strange irony; that in critiquing humanism and opening new decentred understandings of the human this risks laying the ground for an uncritical acceptance of the promise of biocapitalism. Martin is clear that any move to the posthuman must be mindful of the complex practices and ramifications of contemporary modes of capitalist reproduction.

Rod Michalko asks to consider the match or mismatch of theoretical communities to the experience of humanity that those communities purport to understand. His contribution focuses on disability studies literature and research but his discussion has much wider reach. Michalko offers a number of provocations about the utility of theory and its relative lack of engagement with a host of phenomenological experiences associated with the human condition. He wonders to what extent theorisation has actually become dehumanising due to its dislocation from the everyday experiences of living in the world. His contribution offers us an opportunity to attend to the uncertainties and failings of scholarship.

Rebecca Maskos pitches posthuman thinking and strategic humanism against one another as a useful oppositional strategy. As a disabled activist and scholar she worries about the potential erasure of disabled people that can occur through some posthuman scholarship that, understandably, seeks to make some inter-species alliances. While sensitive to animal rights and human-animal assemblages (leitmotifs of contemporary posthuman scholarship) she is also keen to engage with a strategic form of humanism that upholds the humanity of disabled people. Maskos reminds us that the fight for recognition in the humanist mirror remains a major political and ontological ambition of groups of human beings who have historically been dehumanised.

Javier Monforte merges materialist and narrative social sciences in his brief dalliance with the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. His argument is a methodological but also as theoretical one; that in order for us to make sense of the stories of humans under duress we need to attend equally to the material conditions that accompany and sit alongside our stories. Too often the ‘materialist turn’ has shifted scholars interests to some kind of bare materialism that lacks an engagement with the stories we tell about our lives. Monforte makes a strong case for a dual pronged analysis: let us acknowledge our narratives as humans just as we acknowledge the significance of non-human others to our very existence.

AbdouMaliq Simone turns to the question of cities and urban life, making a broad and nuanced case for the consideration of the extending, planetary nature of our urban condition. Within that spatial framing Simone discusses the degree to much hybrid, multiple, damaged and ordinary lives are played-out in ways that are both circumscribed by, but which also rise above, the urban contexts in which they are often located or delimited. Among other questions he considers, what aspects of human social life in urban contexts is somehow ‘disobedient’ to the logic of its circumstances, how does it challenge, reframe and rework the material of that urban life.

Tanya Tichkosky take us to the gym. She recalls a moment in her local gym where a group of fellow humans are reacted to in terms of well-rehearsed and well-known ideas that already exist about particular kinds of humans. As a disability studies scholar she is interested in asking how the presence of disability actually creates a movement of opportunity and reflection; a politics of wonder as she terms it. Titchkosky reminds us that certain human categories are immediately known and they are known as humans in need of fixing. We must be wary of this tendency of some human beings to seek failure and cure in their engagements with other human beings.

Katherine-Runswick-Cole, Yvonne Wechuli and Antonios Ktenidis offer us a welcome reflection on the feel of the contributions to the Humanity under Duress symposium. We thank them for giving us critical feedback on the papers we have presented. They raise questions about the kinds of human beings that we might implicitly have in mind when we are enacting scholarship; about the tension of theorisation devoid of a concern with potential applications of that theory-work; about the tensions between particular ‘studies of ..’ (in this case disability and animal studies). Their writing pushes us to revisit our assumptions when we think together and to consider the alliances and communities we have in mind.

Download the papers

Download the papers here (PDF, 0.99MB)