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Naomi Savage, Emeshed Man, 1966.Credit...Francis M. Naumann Fine
This is the tenth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on the question of violence. This conversation is with Cary Wolfe, who is the director of the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University and the founding editor of the Posthumanities book series at the University of Minnesota Press.

Natasha Lennard: “Posthumanism” could mean a variety of things. What is it for you, and how does it challenge the standard, liberal humanism we’re familiar with?
Cary Wolfe: Well, let’s start by acknowledging that the subject of “humanism” itself is a vast one, and there are many different varieties of it — liberal humanism, the humanism associated with the Renaissance, “secular humanism,” so on and so forth. “Posthumanism” doesn’t mean “anti-humanism” in any of these senses, nor does it simply mean something that comes historically “after” humanism, as if in 1968 or 1972 or whenever, the scales suddenly fell from our eyes and we realized the error of our ways.
There is, in fact, a genealogy of posthumanist thought that stretches back well before the 21st or even 20th century. You find hints of it in anything that fundamentally decenters the human in relation to the world in which we find ourselves, whether we’re talking about other forms of life, the environment, technology or something else. Perhaps more importantly, you find it in the realization that when you don’t allow the concept of the “human” to do your heavy philosophical lifting, you are forced to come up with much more robust and complex accounts of whatever it is you’re talking about. And that includes, first and foremost, a more considered concept of the “human” itself.
 
The sketches of the “human,” “the animal” or “nature” that we get from the humanist tradition are pretty obviously cartoons if we consider the multifaceted, multidisciplinary ways in which we could address these questions. Humanism provides an important cultural inheritance and legacy, no doubt, but hardly the kind of vocabulary that can describe the complex ways that human beings are intertwined with and shaped by the nonhuman world in which they live, and that brings together what the humanist philosophical tradition considered ontologically separate and discrete domains like “human” and “animal,” or “biological” and “mechanical.”
Darwinian thought was a huge step in this direction. So was Marx’s historical materialism or the Freud of “Civilization and Its Discontents.” For me, one of the big breakthroughs was the emergence at mid-20th century of the wildly interdisciplinary type of thought known as systems theory, where fundamental processes such as the feedback loop allow you to describe how cruise control in a car works, but also how thermoregulation in warm-blooded animals happens — without ever invoking (or really even being interested in) the old humanist taxonomies that would have separated such questions.
It’s given us a language where we can now describe much more intricately and robustly how human beings — not just their minds but their bodies, their microbiomes, their modes of communication and so on — are enmeshed in and interact with the nonhuman world.
Gregory Bateson’s work on human and animal communication is a wonderful example. He once wrote that when a guy says to a woman “I love you,” she would do well to pay more attention to his body language, the dilation of his pupils, the tone and timbre of his voice, whether his palms are wet or dry, and so on, than to the denotative content of his words. That’s because communication is a multilayered phenomenon that requires attention to both its “human” and “nonhuman,” or evolutionarily inherited, involuntary elements. Bateson said that’s why we don’t trust actors, and I tell my students that’s what makes email such an incendiary form of communication: all those dampening and texturing dimensions of the communication go away, and so the communication becomes all the more thin and brittle, and to try and get some of it back we start inserting emoticons, and so on. In all this, the properly “human” is only part of the story; it’s nested in a larger, and in many ways nonhuman, set of contexts and forces.
 
N.L.: Your work emphasizes that humanism — the hierarchical distinguishing between human and nonhuman animals based on a certain notion of “knowledge” or “intelligence” — is inherently oppressive and violent. Many would agree, but see a solution within humanism itself, for example in talk of human rights and the inclusion of animal rights and environmental protections. Many people may be skeptical of the inherent oppressiveness of humanism, given the historic victories won by appeals to a human rights discourse and in appeals to “humanity.” Indeed, in this political moment, in response to Donald J. Trump’s ascendance and the attendant upsurge in racist nationalism in the U.S. and Europe, there seems to be a renewed urgency in defending hard-won human rights and liberties. How would you respond?
C.W.: I agree entirely that these should be vigorously defended, now more than ever, but for me these are not mutually exclusive projects, because of the different terrains and contexts in which these projects are carried out. On the one hand, rights discourse is Exhibit A for the problems with philosophical humanism. Many of us, including myself, would agree that many of the ethical aspirations of humanism are quite admirable and we should continue to pursue them. For example, most of us would probably agree that treating animals cruelly, and justifying that treatment on the basis of their designation as “animal” rather than human, is a bad thing to do.
But the problem with how rights discourse addresses this problem — in animal rights philosophy, for example — is that animals end up having some kind of moral standing insofar as they are diminished versions of us: that is to say, insofar as they are possessed of various characteristics such as the capacity to experience suffering — and not just brute physical suffering but emotional duress as well — that we human beings possess more fully. And so we end up reinstating a normative form of the moral-subject-as-human that we wanted to move beyond in the first place.
So on the other hand, what one wants to do is to find a way of valuing nonhuman life not because it is some diminished or second-class form of the human, but because the diversity and abundance of life is to be valued for what it is in its own right, in its difference and uniqueness. An elephant or a dolphin or a chimpanzee isn’t worthy of respect because it embodies some normative form of the “human” plus or minus a handful of relevant moral characteristics. It’s worthy of respect for reasons that call upon us to come up with another moral vocabulary, a vocabulary that starts by acknowledging that whatever it is we value ethically and morally in various forms of life, it has nothing to do with the biological designation of “human” or “animal.”
Having said all that, there are many, many contexts in which rights discourse is the coin of the realm when you’re engaged in these arguments — and that’s not surprising, given that nearly all of our political and legal institutions are inherited from the brief historical period (ecologically speaking) in which humanism flourished and consolidated its domain. If you’re talking to a state legislature about strengthening laws for animal abuse cases, let’s say, instead of addressing a room full of people at a conference on deconstruction and philosophy about the various problematic assumptions built into rights discourse, then you better be able to use a different vocabulary and different rhetorical tools if you want to make good on your ethical commitments. That’s true even though those commitments and how you think about them might well be informed by a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the problem than would be available to those legislators. In other words, it’s only partly a philosophical question. It’s also a strategic question, one of location, context and audience, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we can move more quickly in the realm of academic philosophical discourse on these questions than we can in the realm of legal and political institutions.
N.L.: So much contemporary cultural emphasis and investment is focused on the importance of “self” realization, “finding” ourselves and so on, despite the fact that this self isn’t even necessarily something completely embodied anymore, considering the prevalence of social media and other technologies that have lately influenced our practical experience of identity. How does this relate to your critique of humanism?
C.W.: I think the simplest, most mundane answer to the question of why the Enlightenment idea of the self has been so hard to budge is that everything in our culture encourages us to invest in it, for economic and legal reasons that are not far to seek. We’re encouraged more and more to develop our “brand,” as it were, whether by accruing more and more friends on Facebook or by perfecting the kind of balanced “portfolio” between academic, athletic, and nonprofit work that university admissions committees want to see. So your term “investment” is to be taken quite literally at this moment in late, neoliberal capitalism.
 
Having said all that, however, social media merely dramatizes something that has always been true of the “self” — that it is, in fact, a prosthetic entity, a distributed, dispersed “assemblage” constituted by many elements, some of them physical and material and biological, some of them not, the constitution of the self by language and how it rewires the brain being the most obvious example. That is, if you like, the “truth” of the self: that it exists nowhere as a totality.
As Gregory Bateson put it, the bioenergetic physical entity called “Socrates” ceased to exist a long time ago. But “Socrates” understood in a more complex way, as a network of texts, readers, cultural legacies, the institutions they depend on and so on, is still alive and exerts a powerful influence on the world, every day, to this day. The false move — or false desire, would be more apt — is to think that “it,” that “self,” exists as a totality somewhere. There is no “self” in that sense, even though the tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon called “consciousness” encourages us to think that there is, and understandably enough.
N.L.: How might a posthumanist approach to undoing interspecies hierarchies intervene with structures of violence among humans themselves? Trump’s election reflects and emboldens white supremacy and misogyny to a frightening degree. Could a posthumanist intervention risk moving focus away from a direct and much-needed struggle against these things, or could it help?
C.W.: Oh, I think it can help enormously, by drawing out more clearly the broader base that these struggles share in what I’ve called a posthumanist ethical pluralism. My position has always been that all of these racist and sexist hierarchies have always been tacitly grounded in the deepest — and often most invisible – hierarchy of all: the ontological divide between human and animal life, which in turn grounds a pernicious ethical hierarchy. As long as you take it for granted that it’s O.K. to commit violence against animals simply because of their biological designation, then that same logic will be available to you to commit violence against any other being, of whatever species, human or not, that you can characterize as a “lower” or more “primitive” form of life. This is obvious in the history of slavery, imperialism and violence against indigenous peoples. And that’s exactly what racism and misogyny do: use a racial or sexual taxonomy to countenance a violence that doesn’t count as violence because it’s practiced on people who are assumed to be lower or lesser, and who in that sense somehow “deserve it.”
That’s why the discourse of animalization is so powerful, because it uses a biological or racial taxonomy to institute an ethical divide between who is “killable but not murderable,” those who are “properly” human and those who aren’t. So the first imperative of posthumanism is to insist that when we are talking about who can and can’t be treated in a particular way, the first thing we have to do is throw out the distinction between “human” and “animal” — and indeed throw out the desire to think that we can index our treatment of various beings, human or not, to some biological, taxonomic designation. Does this mean that all forms of life are somehow “the same”? No, it means exactly the opposite: that the question of “human” versus “animal” is a woefully inadequate philosophical tool to make sense of the amazing diversity of different forms of life on the planet, how they experience the world, and how they should be treated.
Natasha Lennard contributes regularly to The Intercept, The Nation and Al Jazeera America. She is an editor at large for The New Inquiry.