Desiring new humans

This brief paper articulates a desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic, political and global context that has been described as posthuman. Whilst sympathetic to the potentiality of posthuman thought I grapple with the imperative to embrace new humanisms that historicise and recognise global inequalities that concurrently exist in relation to a myriad of human categories including class, age, geopolitical location, gender, sexuality, race and disability. I am especially interested in the latter two categories and draw on ideas from postcolonial, posthuman, feminist and critical disability studies.

‘The story of humanism’, Scott (2000: 119) writes, ‘is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story’. ‘Humanity’ Braidotti (2013,: 24) notes, ‘is very much a male of the species: it is a he’. Moreover, ‘he is white, European, handsome and able-bodied’ (ibid: 24), ‘an ideal of bodily perfection’ (Ibid: 13), ‘implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognised polity’ (ibid: 65), ‘a rational animal endowed with language’ (ibid: 141). This means that while all citizens are (potentially) considered to be human some or deemed ‘more mortal than others’ (ibid: 15) and, conversely, some are more disposable than others. This humanism has a Eurocentric core and Imperialist tendencies, meaning that many of those outside of Europe (including many in the colonies) became known as less than human or inhuman. The very category of humanity – and the phenomenological experience of humanness – has been monopolised by a political kind of ideology: Western / neo-Colonial humanism. And this category, for Fanon (1993), invites recognition for some and negates others. Some have suggested that within the humanist condition it is as if, paradoxically, there are no humans involved (Wynter, 1992). The humanist human is an autonomous, fully evolved, eugenic or able, biocentric and homo oeconomicus human being in ‘the ethno-class terms of Darwinian Man over-presented as the human’ (Wynter, 2006: 128, italics added). This human category has been created by ‘the West’s institutionalization of itself in terms of its then epochally new self-conception or sociogenic code as Absolute Being’ (Wynter, 2006: 146). At the heart of this humanism is desire for the rational, sovereign self (read: white, able-bodied, settler, straight, entrepreneurial, colonial man) and a negation of those who are represented as its antithesis (Goodley, 2014). This latter category which Fanon described as the damned ‘defined at the global level by refugee/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich countries … with this category in the United States coming to comprise the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers —the kicked-about Welfare Moms — with both being part of the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population’ (Wynter, 2003: 260).

Normative humanness is a state of affairs that exists alongside non-normative forms of humanness. Moreover, normative humans seek to corral other kinds of human life in order to gather, control and possess in ways that strengthen further the normative centre of their humanist ethics. The stark contiguities between rich/impoverished, white/black and abled/disabled indicate that European colonial humanism is inherently an exclusionary force. Blackness and disability constitute an ‘unbearable wrongness of being’ (Wynter, 2006:114) – the direct opposite of contemporary interests of Western, White, Bourgeious Man.

The rise in posthuman theorising has, one could argue, sidelined humanism as an old fashioned relic of modernity. The rush to embrace all things posthuman has resulted in a commonly shared affect of distrust towards any intellectual or political project that appears to play with dangerous tropes of humanism. Trump’s election and the rise of Brexit, for examples, have been viewed as peculiar kinds of Anglo-American, neoliberal-ableist, self-imposed, self-sufficient isolationalism with undercurrents of racist humanism (check out Breger Bush, 2016; Harnish, 2017; Titchkosky and Goodley, 2018, Goodley, 2018). The rise of the Far and Alt Right in Europe and America are sobering reminders of exclusionary humanism. That said, I remain intrigued by the possibilities of what Gilroy (2018) terms a ‘re-enchantment with the human’. I worry that posthuman thinking is being fervently adopted without a recognition of important questions of race, class, sexuality, gender and disability that still persist today. Posthuman technophilia and the new materialist orthodoxy threaten, I feel, to flatten human life. We live in deeply dehumanising times. And these very human questions require our attention, our care and our engagement. While accepting the promise and potential of the posthuman condition (see for example Goodley, 2014; Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick-Cole, 2014) I also reach out through postcolonial and critical disability studies for new kinds of humanism.

For Rodriguez (2018: 832) the search for new humanisms is entangled within a wider rebellion against the law-like ways that the desires, interests, and world-making ambitions of the ‘capitalist neoliberal and corporate financial bourgeoisie ruling class’ are ‘represented homologously as those of our species as a whole’ (our italics). Can we, like Wynter, combine the ‘agonistic humanism of Fanon’s anticolonialism’ with the ‘embattled antihumanism of Foucault’s archaeological critique’? (Scott, 2000: 121). How might ‘we become more comprehensively estranged from the Anthropos in the Anthropocene in order to salvage a different, and perhaps re-enchanted human?’ (Gilroy, 2018:12)? Could we secure ‘the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves’? (Wynter, 2003: 260). The answer offered is a productive one ‘a cautious, post-humanist humanism capable of grasping the relationship between human and non-human is beginning to take shape’ (Gilroy, 2018: 16). And this politicisation struggles ‘to endow a sense of reciprocal humanity in Europe’s proliferating encounters with vulnerable otherness’ (Gilroy, 2018: 19). How might we contribute to ‘the ongoing work of salvaging imperilled humanity from the mounting wreckage’ (Gilroy, 2018:20)? And, specifically, what social models of excluded human kinds can be developed that build on their ‘special relation to the dark shadows’ of normative humanism?

I propose six new humanist projects that hopefully resonate with those of us engaging with Humanity under Duress. I have in mind the intersections of blackness and disability but these projects, I feel, have wider relevance and resonance.
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One. Subject the normative, the hegemonic and the taken-for-granted to sustained analysis and critique.
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Two. Endlessly acknowledge and address the ways in which educational systems impose a collective ontological sense of ‘wrongness of being’ (Wynter, 2006) upon disabled, black and other non-normative children and young people.
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Three. Promote the sociogeny of disability and education. Sociogeny is a concept developed by Fanon (1993) – and one developed by Wynter (2003) – that refers to the study of the development of a social phenomenon. In counter-distinction to phylogeny (the study of evolution of the species) and ontogeny (the biological development of an individual organism) – a sociogeny unpacks the social, historical and cultural constitution of race and humanness (see Gagne, 2007 for a helpful overview). Do not assume that education nor disability or pre-social, apolitical, objective, independent, universal phenomena.
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Four. Contest the epistemic privilege of global north disability studies through embracing a decolonising attitude and approach.
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Five. Disavow the category of the humanist human. I would suggest reading the DisHuman Manifesto (developed Goodley, Lawthom, Liddiard and Runswick-Cole-Cole, 2018a, b; see also dishuman.com) which:

● Unpacks and troubles dominant notions of what it means to be human;

● Celebrates the disruptive potential of disability to trouble these dominant notions;

● Acknowledges that being recognise as a regular normal human being is desirable, especially for those people who been denied access to the category of the human;

● Recognises disability’s intersectional relationship with other identities that have been considered less than human (associated with class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age);

● Aims to develop theory, research, art and activism that push at the boundaries of what it means to be human and disabled;

● Keeps in mind the pernicious and stifling impacts of ableism, which we define as a discriminatory processes that idealize a narrow version of humanness and reject more diverse forms of humanity;

● Seeks to promote transdisciplinary forms of empirical and theoretical enquiry that breaks disciplinary orthodoxies, dominances and boundaries;
● Foregrounds dis/ability as the complex for interrogating oppression and furthering a posthuman politics of affirmation.

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Six. Beware domesticating critical and politicised studies of disability and education. Wynter (2006) provides a damning critique of self-styled radical Black Studies academics. She argues that as soon as these activists found themselves working in the academia their original transgressive activist intentions were ‘defused’, their ‘energies rechannelled’ and their contributions ‘re-verified the very thesis of liberalism universalism’ that they originally sought to contest in white society (Wynter, 2006: 109). This, she warns, heralds the domestication of ‘studies of ____’, the mainstreaming of ‘_____ studies’ and the ‘cognitive and psycho-affective closure’ (Wynter, 2006: 110) that accompanies the move in subject positions from ‘activist to academic’. How might we – as part of our collective today, tomorrow and thereafter, remain wild and undomesticated? Humans very much involved.

Note

This paper draws upon a more developed article writing with colleagues:
Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Runswick-Cole, K., and Liddiard,K. (In press). The Desire for New Humanism. Journal of Disability Studies in Education.

References

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