Rick: Welcome to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. I’m Rick Lee, and as usual, I’m joined by my co-hosts Leigh Johnson and David Gunkel. And today we are talking about the posthuman. But before we do that, I’m definitely going to need a drink, and I’m sure you all do too. So, David, let me start with you.

David: I think I’m going to go slumming today and have a Huber Bock out of Monroe, Wisconsin. We used to drink this stuff when we were undergraduates, and it was like 50 cents a can. So I’ve got a 12-pack, and it’s still really cheap and still tastes just as good as it always did.

Leigh: I’m not sure how good that is. But it’s got a really nice personality.

David: It does. And I will be ranting about the Ship of Theseus problem for rock and roll bands. So, you know the Ship of Theseus dilemma recounted in numerous sources from the ancients—you have the Ship of Theseus, which is a famous ship for the Athenians. As the ship starts to decay over time, they replace parts of it. The question then becomes, well, when is it no longer the Ship of Theseus? When have you replaced so much of it that it is no longer the original ship? And I think this is a problem we have with rock and roll bands. I mean, you look at bands like the Beach Boys, where Mike Love is the only member of the band who is still there, and they’re still called the Beach Boys. Or with Ministry and Al Jourgensen, or The Cure, where only one member remains. When does a band stop being that band and become a tribute to that band? So I think this is the big Ship of Theseus problem in popular music.

Rick: Now I want a band at some point to switch their name from, like, Ministry to Ship of Theseus.

David: There you go.

Rick: Leigh, what about you?

Leigh: I’m just going to have two fingers of Buffalo Trace, and today I’m ranting about subscription services. So, first of all, I’m ranting about the fact that everything is a subscription service now. You can’t just outright buy any products anymore. But in particular, I’m frustrated with how hard it is to unsubscribe from them. And I’m really glad to hear that there’s a move, I think, in Congress to make it so that it’s just as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe. So if you can subscribe with one click, you should be able to unsubscribe with one click. I think this would be a huge improvement in my life—not to mention my bank account—and maybe make it easier for a lot of people to keep track of where their money’s going.

Rick: Today I am ranting about campaign phone calls. I don’t know what the psychology is behind this, but I find these calls way more offensive now that they come to my cell phone compared to when they used to come to my landline—which I don’t have anymore—but people, just make it stop. I think there should be a law that you can’t call me unless I call you. You know, Android is very good right now at filtering these out, and they can detect spam phone calls, but still, some of them get through, and so do their text messages. So I just want to make it stop.

Leigh: Rick, I don’t think you ordered a drink.

Rick: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m going to have another Manhattan, obviously.

So, David, I know we’re talking about the posthuman. What did you have in mind?

David: So, in the book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault offers the following somewhat unsettling statement. He writes, “The human is an invention of recent date, and one perhaps nearing its end.” Now, it sounds apocalyptic, but what Foucault identifies here is not the end of what we would call the human species. What he’s on about is the fact that what is meant by the term “human” is not some eternal platonic form. It is a socially constructed artifice that is the product of a particular time and culture. Thus, the closure that is announced by Foucault concerns not the termination of the human species, but the terminal limits of a particular Western philosophical subject position that has a history and, perhaps, as Foucault says, has run its course.

So, if that is the case, then what comes next? Who or what are we after the era of the human and the epoch of humanism? Ecce post human. Like the human, the posthuman is also a philosophical concept, which intervenes in the ethnocentrism of European humanist thought and seeks to identify what comes after and beyond the limited horizons, or the restricted economy, of the human subject.

So today, we are going to be talking about the posthuman—what it is, what it means, and why it matters.

So let’s get started here by getting a handle on the problems with the concept of the human and humanism. And I think Heidegger can be a guide here.

Rick: Really?

David: Yeah, I think so. In Letter on Humanism, which he writes shortly after the war, Heidegger provides the following: “You ask, how can we restore the meaning of the word humanism? This question proceeds from your intention to retain the word humanism. I wonder whether that’s necessary, or is the damage caused by all such terms still not obvious?” So, what, we could ask, is this damage that has been caused by the seemingly nice-sounding words human and humanism, and how is the posthuman then a response to this?

Rick: I wonder if there are two issues here that might be separate but could also be related—or maybe they’re not two issues at all. It seems to me that one problem a philosopher like Heidegger has—and many others—is with this notion of humanism as a way of conceiving all things such that the human is at the center, and we’re thinking about all reality from the human being at the center. One could read both Heidegger and Foucault as saying, look, we need to get the human out of the center—not get rid of the human, but get it out of the center of thinking. And I’m wondering if that’s different than talking about the end of the human as either a reality or a concept.

David: I think that’s a good way of saying it. Now, Foucault would talk about decentering the human subject we’ve inherited from Enlightenment Inc.—this idea of the Cartesian individual who, therefore, becomes the center of the universe, and everything is organized around him. And the word him, that gender-specific pronoun, is very deliberate, right? I mean, there’s a very deliberate way in which this is organized. The subject is gendered male, and that has organized an entire way of thinking about the world and the others we encounter here from a very centric position that is defined in this very specific way.

Leigh: I think that distinction you’re making there, Rick, is really important. I would bring those two things back together, though, by saying that one of the reasons we are so invested in retaining the human, either as a concept or as a species, is because of humanism. We get a lot more than just “man is the center of all things” from humanism. We’ve also made tremendous progress in terms of rights and morality because of this idea of the human as having an intrinsic value that is different and distinct from anything else.

Rick: Well, and so then the task would be not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In other words, if we want to insist on the necessity of a discourse about rights, political representation, empowerment, and so on, it seems like attaching that to something like humanity is really helpful, and we don’t want to throw out the rights and the empowerment at the same time as we throw out the notion of the human.

David: But let me challenge that just a bit. I’m mainly thinking of feminist philosophers in the late 20th century who used this challenge to the human as an effort to gain some traction on postcolonial thinking and post-Enlightenment thinking. Historically, the human has been used as a way of marginalizing others. We would like to think about it as inclusive, but more often than not, the human has been used as a cudgel to say, “we’re the in-crowd and you’re out.” Therefore, we’ve dehumanized people by declaring that we are the human, and these other things are not. That’s where the pushback on the concept comes from.

Rick: I’ve been really influenced in thinking about this lately by Sylvia Wynter’s essay, Unsettling the Coloniality of the Mind, in which she argues that what used to pass as the human was actually man. Historically, there were two versions of man, what she calls man-one and man-two. One of them is fundamentally tied to a certain kind of homo economicus, which would include Descartes, I think. The other is related to issues of race. Her call in that essay is to deconstruct and eliminate these versions because there’s an over-representation of white Western men in that concept. She argues that we need to move toward what she calls the human. She’s someone who is not willing to give up on the need for thinking the human, all the while recognizing these problems that we’ve seen.

David: Right, so I think this is a question of strategy. This is the way Derrida would talk about it. In any form of deconstructive activity, it’s a strategic choice as to what term is selected as the interventionist category. You can either use paleonymy, as he says—you can go to an old term like the human—or you can create a new term, a neologism like posthuman. And I think you see different efforts at trying to resolve this puzzle and address this question by taking different strategic approaches. Either, like Rosi Braidotti does, aligning yourself with the posthuman, or, like others, trying to rehabilitate the concept of the human. It’s less a matter of one being better than the other. I think it’s just a matter of which one is more strategically effective in creating this intervention and this deconstruction you mentioned.

Leigh: I think we also have to keep in mind that one of the functions of the concept of the human in humanism is, of course, to point out the unique value of this particular thing, the human, and that’s where we get, as we’ve already been talking about, the discourse on rights and representation and how those sorts of things are denied when we say that someone is subhuman or not human. But it’s also to say there are certain beings that we can expect things from. They have responsibilities. And I think sometimes denying other beings the category of human, or something like human, or at least being more expansive with our understanding of the concept of the human, is harmful in that we’re not capable of assigning responsibility to other things. So it’s one thing to say, you know, my dog is not a human, a tree is not a human. But when we get to the LLM, it’s a little bit harder, because I think we do need to be able to assign responsibility to LLMs in ways that we quite literally assign to nothing else in the universe except for human beings.

Rick: I want to say two things. One, just very quickly, in case anyone might be confused about this, there is this historical movement primarily associated with the Renaissance called humanism, and that’s not really what we’re talking about here. That movement is mostly about cultivation of the humanities, like a recovery of history going back to ancient Greek philosophy and so on. So humanism, as we’re talking about it, is really this way of thinking with the human at the center. So I think we should probably be clear about that. But secondly, Leigh, what you said really strikes me because right now, in my Intro to Philosophy class, we’re reading some sections of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Not the Groundwork, but the larger work where he talks about duties. And I don’t know why this never struck me before. But he, like you just did, explicitly links the notion of right to the notion of duty. If I have a right, others have a duty. We often forget about that when we talk about rights. So when we talk about, for example, the right to free speech, all of this seems to be about me. And we never think about, well, wait a second, that right entails duties on others, and we don’t like to talk about those duties. And I think your emphasis on this is really important. You show that it becomes more important as we, for good reason, want to expand the notion of either the human or rights bearers beyond what typically and empirically might go for a human or the human.

David: Let me say two things in response, because this is really interesting and, I think, important. In legal philosophy, this is developed by Hohfeld, this idea that all rights are paired with duties, and that if somebody has a right, there’s another entity that has a duty to respect that right. The Hohfeldian way of thinking about rights is always to pair them with obligations. So, someone who lives alone on a desert island without any others around doesn’t have any rights because there’s no paired duty that could be respected by another entity living in isolation like that. But I think, more importantly here, we have to be clear that there’s a difference between human and person, right?

So, person is a right-holder, especially in legal philosophy. You either are a person with rights and responsibilities—a subject of the law—or you’re a thing, which is just an object that can be possessed as property. Over time, some humans have been persons, and other humans have not been persons and have been regarded as things. So, I think we have two different categories operative here. There’s the category of the human, which sometimes overlaps with person, but it doesn’t necessarily map exactly onto what we call person. I mean, we have persons that are legally bound by obligations and rights who are not humans—like corporations.

Rick: So here, I’m going to let my inner Kantian out of the closet. Because I agree with what you’re saying to a certain extent, but I’m a Kantian in the sense that I think there is a notion of right that is not merely legal or doesn’t belong to the realm of jurisprudence. When I was talking about rights, for example, everyone has a right to their own life. For Kant, that’s not something that is merely a legal right; that is a right that belongs to me. As I think Leigh was pointing out, simply because I am human in that sense. I’m not confusing human with person—I want to separate this ethical realm from the merely legal realm.

Leigh: Even in the ethical realm, I think David’s point still holds. I mean, we talk about moral personhood in many of the same terms that we talk about legal personhood, and there are some humans that we don’t consider full moral persons—like infants, for example. And we can make a distinction between the human and the person, the moral human—sorry, not the moral human, well, the moral human—but the human and the moral person.

But just to maybe put this in an example for listeners who might be wondering, who gives a shit, I’m just going to use large language models (LLMs) as an example. Right now, we have this problem where we have non-humans that are very much acting like moral persons, very much acting like humans, but in particular, acting like beings that ought to have responsibilities and rights similar to the way that we do. And, before everyone freaks out that I’m proposing robot rights—which, you know, I would not be against, and I encourage you to read David Gunkel’s book by that exact title if you want an argument about that—one of the things that happened to me just this past month was that there was a young boy, I think about 14 years old, in Florida who had been interacting with these chatbots on Character.AI, which is a platform that allows you to interact with characters that you create or that others create.

You can probably see where this is going—and trigger warning, this does involve this young boy, unfortunately, taking his own life—but he fell in love with one of these chatbots. And now that they’re going back through the logs, it does appear that the chatbot was encouraging this boy to kill himself and join her in whatever realm chatbots exist in.

Now, there’s this thing called Section 230 that allows platforms to not be held responsible for the content that’s posted on those platforms. So, for example, you can’t hold Facebook responsible for what your crazy uncle posted on Facebook. That’s your uncle’s content; it’s not Facebook’s content. Facebook is just the platform. But here, you have a platform that is creating its own content, that is creating its own users who are driving the content of the platform. So it’s a lot harder to say there’s a difference between the platform as this sort of neutral place where agents interact and the platform as itself an agent. And if it is an agent, then in general, we want to say, all right, what comes with agency? Personhood. What comes with personhood? Rights and responsibilities.

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Rick: If I think about other non-humans, let’s say a lion—if I fall into the lion exhibit at the Lincoln Park Zoo and the lion eats me, nobody claims the lion acted immorally. And so the question is, what is it about the chatbot AI in this case that makes us willing to extend this realm of morality to it? I think it’s going to turn out to be something like what Kant would call reason. It has something like the ability to be independent of emotions, empirical considerations, and inclinations, and therefore could understand something like a moral law and violate it. So I misspoke. For Kant, it’s not only humans that are moral beings or that belong to the realm of morality—it’s all rational beings that belong to the realm of morality, whether they be human, angel, or the people living on Jupiter.

David: This is the reason why Kant thinks that your dog is not able to be a moral subject, right? But before we change the subject matter of today’s conversation and start talking about animal rights and everything else, I want to draw things back to the posthuman and do a little more historical work on what this concept is and why it’s important.

So, the posthuman and even posthumanism have often been associated with feminist philosophy. And I’m thinking in particular of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, and Rosi Braidotti’s books The Posthuman and Posthuman Knowledge. And I want to ask: how and why is the posthuman a feminist subject in both senses of the term? That is, the subject matter of feminist thought on the one hand, and an interventionist feminist subject position that can disturb, disrupt, or decenter patriarchal humanist thought that we inherit from the Western philosophical tradition.

Leigh: Well, I suppose this probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Feminists come in all flavors—not all feminists are posthumanists—but I agree with you that perhaps some of the best arguments about posthumanism have come from feminist thinkers. I think it’s true in any oppositional discourse that the first thing that discourse is going to do is try to deconstruct the center of the power structures.

Here, that’s the human—and the human figured as white, male, Western, wealthy, educated, et cetera, et cetera. And so, because women have, for so long—forever, quite literally—been excluded from the benefits of that position, there’s reason to critique it and to try to open up other pathways for either recognition, creation, or relation, whatever. So, I mean, that, to me, ought not be surprising.

Rick: But I wonder, especially in the case of the philosopher Donna Haraway, if there’s another dimension to what Leigh was pointing out. If we think about the way Enlightenment Inc. has centered the human primarily as male and white, it goes back to this thing I praised earlier in relation to Kant—namely, reason and rationality. The model of the human becomes a kind of disembodied, dispassionate subject who speaks from nowhere and, therefore, takes on a certain kind of universality. Now, one way to critique that is to insist on the human’s embodiment and the materiality of the subject. If that notion of the human—as the rational, disembodied subject—was figured as masculine, then the critique, in a way, traps women in bodies. And along comes Donna Haraway, who rethinks the very notion of the body from within our actual embodiment. She critiques this Enlightenment Inc. disembodied subject while still being a materialist and talking about the importance of a way of being embodied within the world. And I think that’s an incredibly powerful critique of the role of the human, at least in the history of philosophy.

David: And to go back to something that Leigh pointed out, there’s not a feminism—there are feminisms, right? There are many different forms of feminism. One of the motivations for Haraway writing The Cyborg Manifesto in 1984 was that she wanted to interrupt what she saw as goddess-worship, back-to-nature, hippie feminism that was predominant in the academy during that period. Her alignment with technology, cybernetics, and the cyborg was seen as a very abrasive confrontation with a certain form of feminism that had essentialized the natural. She was concerned because it inherited a lot of Enlightenment thinking, repackaging it as a way of rethinking the body as more natural and more connected to the earth and things like this.

There’s a very famous line where she says, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

Leigh: Same.

Rick: But Leigh, you’re already partly a cyborg.

Leigh: I know. I think that’s another part of Haraway’s argument—that in ways we haven’t fully acknowledged, we’re all cyborgs. We tend to ignore that, and it gives us a skewed vision of what it is to be human.

Leigh: Yeah, before we get too deep into this, it’s probably worth defining what a cyborg is.

David: Right. Cyborg actually comes from a paper that was written in 1961 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline about refashioning the human body for survival in space. It was a way of taking the notion of the feedback mechanisms of cybernetic homeostasis systems and combining it with a living organism, thereby modifying the organism to survive in environments it was not originally designed to survive in. The term sort of falls off the radar in the latter part of the 20th century, and Haraway resurrects it. She digs it out of the dustbin, sort of like a crate-diving DJ. She finds a deep cut in the history of Western thought and says, You know, there’s a way that I can repurpose this as an interventionist subjectivity for a late 20th-century feminism, in an era that is increasingly technologically mediated for the information age.

And so for her, the cyborg represents two crucial boundary breakdowns: the boundary between the human and the animal, and the boundary between the animal and the machine. What the cyborg represents is the way in which the mechanisms by which we distinguish ourselves from animals, and distinguish ourselves from our machines, are becoming increasingly blurry. At this period of time, this is not only changing the subject positions that we allow for ourselves, but it’s also encroaching on what we consider to be a very sacred self-identity of the human. That is, what makes us human is that we’re not animals, and what makes us human is that we’re not machines.

Crucially—and I think very importantly—when Descartes wants to define the human, he defines it in opposition to animals and machines. In fact, for him, animals are just machines. And Haraway wants to level that playing field and say, No, there’s a kinship that we share across these boundaries that blends one with the other, but in ways that could be very productive.

Leigh: You know, there are more and less expansive understandings of what counts as a cyborg. In my classes, when we talk about this, I try to use a really expansive notion of a cyborg. Typically, we think of examples of cyborgs as somebody like Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who was a double amputee and ran on these blades. He became known as the Blade Runner, and we say, okay, here is a human being—or something that we would clearly recognize as a human being—but with technological add-ons that the rest of us don’t have. He’s technologically adjusted his body to expand beyond what its natural capacities were. So, I try to say to my students, We’re actually surrounded by cyborgs all the time.

I mean, probably in this room, maybe somebody has an insulin pump—that would make you a cyborg. Maybe you’ve had a shoulder replacement or knee replacement—that would make you a cyborg. Maybe you wear glasses—that would make you a cyborg. So the idea that we’re walking around the world with cyborgs is not at all uncommon.

Now I situate this against androids, which I think a lot of people worry about. A cyborg, of course, is a human being who has merged in some way with technology that allows it to extend its own capacities beyond what it would naturally have. An android, on the other hand, is a machine that usually has the movements and appearance of a human being. I think people are worried about mistaking a machine for a human being; they’re not as much worried about cyborgs. There are many good reasons to be worried about cyborgs—not all cyborgs, but the ways in which we are manipulating not just our understanding of what it means to be human, but also the human body. And I think the number one example I would give of a deeply problematic technology here is CRISPR.

David: This is a point that N. Katherine Hayles makes in her book, How We Became Posthuman. She says there are certain levels of cyborg. There’s the literal cyborg, like a person with an insulin pump—someone with a mechanism incorporated into their body. There are metaphorical cyborgs, like teenagers playing video games who lose themselves in their virtual environment. But then there’s this level at which Haraway, I think, is working, which involves a kind of conceptual erosion. This is where both Hayles and Haraway can say, “We’ve always already been cyborg.”

This boundary breakdown between the human, the animal, and our technological artifacts has already been underway well before all of these technological things we can put on or in our bodies. I think maintaining that distinction is important, but it’s hard to do because when you use the word cyborg, people immediately jump to science fiction, thinking of the Borg or Terminator.

Leigh: And just to make it explicit for the listeners, the relationship between the cyborg and the posthuman is that what the cyborg does is fundamentally change the way we understand what we recognize as a human being. The example I often give to students is that if you took someone like Oscar Pistorius—the Blade Runner—and went back to, I don’t know, the 12th century, I think that the people in the 12th-century village would say, “That is not a human being.” So, what we have now is something post the old conception of the human.

Rick: What’s interesting about that example, though, is I think if you brought Oscar Pistorius to a medieval village, Oscar would not be called a machine or an animal—Oscar would be called a monster.

Leigh: Oh yeah, definitely.

Rick: And that’s another category that might figure into this discussion at some point. Back to this conception of the human as fundamentally a disembodied intellect, we’re now beginning to see—and, in other ways, have known for a long time—that my body is not limited by the flesh that seems to be its external boundary. Rather, my body is incredibly porous, and things are coming in and out all the time; I rely on all sorts of things.

For example, I couldn’t be alive without heat in the winter or shelter in the winter—something to keep me warm in Chicago when it’s 14 below zero. Now, is that shelter part of my body? In some ways, we want to say no, but it’s working with what we normally call my body in such a way that it seems an awful lot like an organ outside of my body.

Then we can flip this around. We’re now learning that there are a lot of others inside my body. I’m thinking here of the human biome, right? There are colonies of bacteria and so on, which in many ways are not me, but I couldn’t be me without them. Even on the inside, my body is reliant on other things. And so I think that’s one way to insist that we have always been cyborgs. But it also starts to call into question the emphasis on the rational, disembodied notion of the human when we think about the human.

Leigh: Yeah, and just to use an example that probably most people will identify with—I feel the same way about my phone as you’re talking about your house. Sure, I mean, I frequently say I’d rather just have my phone implanted in my arm because at least then I’d have use of both of my hands. I mean, I basically have it in my hand all the time. I carry it around all the time. It functions as an extended mind in many ways.

Rick: A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine came to visit me and landed at Midway, and he’s like, “Okay, could you tell me how to get to your house?” I’m like, What the fuck are you talking about? Just Google it!

David: The posthuman is often confused with another term—the transhuman—which is something that’s frequently associated with the “Californian Ideology” we get out of Silicon Valley. Some transhumanists will say, “I’m not a posthumanist; I’m a transhumanist.” And posthumanists will say, “I’m a posthumanist, but not a transhumanist.” So we’ve got these two different terms circulating, but they seem to be talking about similar kinds of things.

Rick: I’d say that our emphasis just now on the cyborg leads directly into this kind of confusion, because what many Silicon Valley transhumanists are talking about are various ways to augment our organism with inorganic and machine parts so that we can perform better. And I just want to say that, at least from my perspective, Donna Haraway’s emphasis on the cyborg is not about ways in which we can be, you know, higher, stronger, faster, but rather ways in which the very notion of what it means to be human can be deconstructed. So I see why these terms get confused. You can help me figure out how to de-confuse them.

Leigh: I think we could easily imagine a timeline going into the future where we see more and more technological inventions that allow us to enhance our organism—whether that’s our bodily capacities, cognitive capacities, or whatever. And as those become more commonly incorporated into people’s lives and bodies and into our societies, we become closer and closer to machines. This really goes back to the Ship of Theseus problem. You know, how many parts of the so-called natural human being can you replace before we’re no longer a natural human being? We’re basically a robot, or a cyborg.

I think at some point there’s going to have to be a marker where we say, All right, this is the difference between a human being, a human cyborg, a transhuman, and something entirely different. I mean, this is the bread and butter of science fiction, right? Figuring out where exactly that mark is. But I don’t think we’ll be able to see it in advance. We’ll only be able to see it in retrospect. I don’t think it’s outlandish to say that, for example, college students today will most likely have children who will be what we today would call posthumans.

David: So I think we see this not just in science fiction, but we actually see it in social reality with the debate about how augmented a person can be and still compete in sports against other human beings. That’s where the boundary is right now. We see it in these contests where the augmented human is no longer able to compete on the same level playing field with the unaugmented.

Leigh: Yeah, they’re superhuman.

David: Yeah. Correct.

Rick: Leigh, you’re dropping the term superhuman there, and it just made me think that perhaps one way to distinguish the transhuman from the posthuman is that those who are interested in transhumanism are still clinging to the notion of the human—the old-fashioned notion of the human—and it’s about intensifying that very notion. For example, one reason to augment our organic capacities is because we’re killing the planet, and we might want to find either other places to live or other ways to breathe. And so that still emphasizes the centrality of the human in thinking, whereas posthumanism is calling that very centrality into question.

David: I think that’s a really good point. If you look at some of the leading voices in transhumanism, like Ray Kurzweil and others who talk about augmenting themselves to live forever, their language is very much Enlightenment philosophy language. The human is still very central to their way of thinking about what the transhuman is and why.

Rick: And what a pointer to a site of privilege, right? Because you can imagine or experience ways of living as a human that, if someone were to say, “Well, you could do this forever,” you would think, no fucking way. It points to the privilege in which one is living for someone to say, “Oh yeah, I want to do this forever.”

Leigh: I also want to return to this CRISPR-Cas9 technology, because one of the things I think is worrisome about CRISPR technology—so this is basically a gene-editing technology, only discovered like seven or eight years ago, and largely banned across the world. Well, not completely banned, but banned in some uses. One of the dangers of CRISPR-Cas9 technology is that it allows us to basically edit at the germ level of our genetic code, meaning we are making changes in the human genetic sequence that are themselves heritable. And of course, we know that we don’t predict genetic mutations very well. So whatever changes we’re making are quite literally changing at the cellular level what it means to be a human being, to belong to the human species. And we don’t know how those changes are going to play out over the next 10, 20, or even 100 years.

So I think when we’re talking about CRISPR, it’s possible that the transhuman or the posthuman is something that’s going to happen without our wanting it or not wanting it—without our investment in augmenting ourselves or living forever, or whatever. It’s just going to be something that some yahoo in his trailer park is playing around with too much, with this CRISPR technology, which, by the way, anyone can do. He lets the cat out of the bag, or opens Pandora’s box, or whatever metaphor you want to use, and next thing you know, it’s 50 years later and we’ve all got tails growing out of our foreheads.

David: And this is why transhumanism is often criticized for leaning toward, if not totally embracing, a kind of eugenics—this idea of perfecting the human species through carefully selecting the very genes that comprise the species of Homo sapiens. So, unlike the posthuman, transhumanism has this affiliation with a eugenics tradition that I think disturbs a lot of people, and rightly so.

Rick: But Leigh, you point out a tremendous difficulty. I mean, the technology is here. It’s not going anywhere. It’s going to, so to speak, slip out of the lab at some point. I don’t see enough people reflecting on this fact—that the possibility is already here, and if the possibility is here someday, the actuality will be here.

Leigh: You know, I remember having this conversation with Jack Caputo—it was probably like 20 years ago now—about whether or not there is any such thing as an unthinkable thought. Not a thought that can’t be thought, but a thought that ought not be thought or ought not be pursued. And I remember Jack saying, “If we can think it, we will think it, no matter how bad it is.” And there’s a certain strain of technological determinism that basically sees technology the same way. If we can build it, we will build it. So there’s sort of no point in trying to stop it. The best we can do is regulate it. But if we can come up with something, we’re going to build it, and it’s going to, as you say, slip out of the lab.

I’m not so sure that’s necessarily the case. I’m not so sure I think technological advancement is that deterministic. But I do think it’s probably more true than not that, if we can build it, we will build it.

Rick: And I guess it depends on the we. It’s interesting that we’re all using examples from science fiction, but the origin of Khan in Star Trek, the original series, was precisely out of a fairly well-meaning attempt—though it had to do with warfare—to create a superior human to be able to fight battles, and so on. And I think that as long as that’s on the table, someone is going to do it. At some point, world bodies could get together and legislate it, and so on. But I think I’m with Jack on this. If we can do it, someone is going to do it.

David: So this gets us back to something that Haraway is very sensitive to, and that’s the way in which she thinks, in her own proposal, that the thought of the cyborg, the thought of the posthuman, is a way to interrupt hegemony and power. Because, Rick, you asked the question, Who is included in this we? Haraway tries to position the cyborg idea and the posthuman as ways of interrupting Western power structures that come from this long tradition. I don’t know how successful it is, but I do know that that’s something that very much concerns her. She wants the cyborg to be seen as a liberating figure that could interrupt the hegemony of Western logos and rationality, and all these things that feed into eugenics projects and the creation of Khan.

Rick: Well, and that just shows that we often think about liberation from, but the other side of that is for what—what then could happen? Often it’s difficult to liberate from while still thinking, well, wait, what’s going to happen with that?

Leigh (voiceover): Hey Hotel Bar listeners, are your hot takes piling up with nowhere to go? Don’t let them go cold—bring them to us! You can find us on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and the ex formerly known as Twitter. Every week we’re throwing out big questions, hot debates, deep insights, and let’s be real—some arguments we may have regretted recording after we were done. So jump into the comments, tag us, or hit us up with your own takes. We might even feature them on an upcoming episode. And if you’ve got a rant, a rave, or a brilliant idea, email us anytime at hotelbarpodcast@gmail.com. Come on, don’t just eavesdrop—grab a barstool and join us.

Leigh: So I’m curious, both of you, how far you would go towards the posthuman or the transhuman. I know only because we’ve had this conversation before that Rick doesn’t wanna be immortal, but how many changes—technological changes—would you be willing to make to your own organism?

David: So let me answer the question two ways. One is I would go more in the direction of Haraway and think about ways in which the boundary between me and the other is already eroded without technology in terms of the way that I think about myself in comparison to—and to the exclusion of—the “others” of the human, which would be the animal and the machine. And that doesn’t require any augmentation whatsoever. It requires that we challenge a way of thinking about boundaries, to go back to what Rick was saying. Why am I the rational being, as opposed to the colony of microbes that occupy my gut? Where is the boundary between where I end and the microbes begin? And if we begin to think in this more holistic way about our embeddedness in a world in which we share kinship with all kinds of others, that I think is the much more radical thought of the cyborg as opposed to the inclusion of technological features in our bodies.

Leigh: I agree with you, yet that was not the question I asked.

David: I know.

Rick: I’ll answer the question you asked. I think I would be willing to augment my body with inorganic parts and machines, for example, to eliminate pain. I suppose, okay, if someone could develop a better morphine pump, that’s maybe what I’m looking for, and just extend that out. I do want to reiterate, I don’t want to do this in order to live forever, because I don’t want to live forever. I also think about various ways in which I would like my phone, as you said, Leigh, to be more intimately connected to me, and be a little bit smarter than it is. Because I’ve noticed that recently I am losing people’s names, and it would be really nice to have like a heads-up display that just tells me someone’s name.

David: I am on the fast track for knee replacement because my family has bad knees, and I ran for years and years. I would definitely be in favor of joint replacement, especially for joints like hips and knees that are very fragile. And that doesn’t mean you’re living forever—it just means you’re able to walk down the street and get groceries. Right.

Leigh: Yeah. And as a diabetic, I would say I’m a hundred percent on board with artificial organs. I mean, as soon as somebody can get me a pancreas, I’ll run to Walmart and buy it. Can you imagine the packaging on this? I’m just thinking of the box on the shelf, you know? Yeah, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are going to completely rip off these ideas and start producing really crappy versions of artificial organs, selling them on Amazon. Recommended products. But Rick, you mentioned that you would be interested in technological developments that would manage pain or eliminate pain. And it was pretty clear that you were talking about physical pain there, but you know, another thing that people talk about—and there’s actually research going on right now with this—is using technological manipulations of the mind, neurotechnology, to help people with, for example, PTSD. So I’m wondering, if you could eliminate psychological pain or emotional pain, would you be willing to incorporate technologies that made that possible?

Rick: Okay. So my answer is no, but as I give that answer, I’m realizing that I don’t think I could answer no to psychological pain and still maintain my yes answer to physical pain. Because my answer was going to be something like, I don’t know the consequences of eliminating certain experiences of psychological pain that I had and have, without making me something other than me. Then I start wondering, well, that might also be the case with physical pain. And so maybe I was drawing too strict a boundary between the two. As painful as various forms of psychological pain are, I just don’t know the effects that it would have to eliminate and/or prevent those.

David: So we’re back to a ship of Theseus problem, right? I mean, how much of the human biology can be augmented or replaced before you are crossing the line into something that would be other than what we would recognize as being human in this case?

Leigh: That’s exactly right. This is a  problem. I wanted to say why I asked you both this question—why I brought this up—and that’s because, for people who are wary of, or opposed to, the idea of the posthuman or the transhuman, I think we have to take seriously that these types of progressions are already being made. And we might want to say, well, no, I would never do that. I would never implant my phone into my body in some way, or I would never technologically alter my brain’s functions, or, you know, whatever, fill in the blank. But there is going to come a time, right? Where more and more and more people are doing that. And I think this is where the rubber is going to hit the road, because if you’re looking around at the workforce or other people’s lives, and you’re realizing that you’re clinging on to this old idea of the human is leaving you behind, and it’s quite literally making it harder for you to interact with others, I think a lot of people are going to say, okay, you know, plug me in.

David: Yeah. And I think when we focus on the science fiction scenario of the brain implant or some other big technological change like this, we’re missing the way in which we’ve already been doing this to ourselves for a long time.

Leigh: Of course.
David: Think about vaccinations. What do vaccinations do? They reprogram your immune system by introducing a foreign agent into your body. Right. It trains your immune system to identify a pathogen and knock it out of commission. You know, that’s been around for over a hundred years. So we’ve already been doing this. And I think it’s a matter of recognizing, as Leigh, you asked, where would you draw that line? How far do you go to when we’re already doing this to ourselves?

Rick: This shows, I think, a side of why the question of the posthuman makes people uneasy. I know a couple of people who, when it came to the COVID vaccine, were a little bit hesitant—not because they were anti-vaxxers, but because they were like, Uh, you know, this mRNA business, it seems really technological. And who knows what those things… like, I think they were imagining little nanobots being injected, and to some extent, that’s not totally wrong, but it was the technological aspect of it that seemed, for some people I know, fundamentally different than me being injected with a dead smallpox vaccine in order to, as you said, David, reprogram my immune system. That seemed more natural, whereas the mRNA vaccines—again, I know some people who think, well, that’s just unnatural.

Leigh: Well, and all of us are going to be long dead and gone before we actually know anything about what the long-term effects of this vaccine were on the human population. I mean, we still don’t even really know what the long-term effects of COVID are on the population. It’s only been four years. I mean, it seems like forever ago, but it hasn’t been very long.

David: You know, declaring what is natural is some attempt to assert power. Whoever gets to decide what is natural versus what is a deviation from nature or the unnatural… that’s a maneuver that allows someone to speak with a certain kind of authority. And so what we see here are two very different ways to chart a course into the future after the devastating violence of the 20th century. One, developed by Sartre, seeks to assert the truth of humanism and the dignity of the human person. The other, the one provided by Heidegger, sought to challenge the legacy of the human and the epoch of humanism by pointing in the direction of what we now call the posthuman. So, which approach here is the best? I don’t know the right approach. What’s the best way forward as we try to grapple with these big challenges to our own sense of who we are and what it is that makes us unique in the world?

Rick: One of my professors from graduate school, Reiner Schürmann, was, to the extent that he was well known, known for his anti-humanism. And it’s interesting that we’re not talking about anti-humanism but rather posthumanism. It seems to me that the logic of posthumanism does hold on to something important about what it is to be human by insisting on posthumanism and not anti-humanism. I see the benefits of expanding the notion of human, breaking down its borders, making it more porous, more like an assemblage than this integral whole that is bounded by my skin. To the extent that I say that, I guess I’m shading more towards Sartre in this debate, but I’m not so sure.

Leigh: Well, it’ll come as no surprise that I’m on team Sartre here.

Rick: What?

Leigh: Again, to go back to the ship of Theseus—if we start replacing the planks of humanism, when we get to the plank that is the freedom plank and we take that out, then we’re no longer talking about the human being. I want to keep that in because, again, for me, whether it’s true or not, whether it’s actually the case that we’re free or not, our experience of ourselves is that we’re free. And that is the basis of morality and value systems and our ability to judge—not just make moral judgments and political judgments, but aesthetic judgments. And I think if being anti-humanist means being willing to give that up, no, I’m not willing to give that up. And the limit of what I would accept as a technological adjustment or enhancement of the human being, the limit is when I’m not free anymore. If I simply become a calculator or a power drill—

Rick: A toaster.

Leigh: A toaster.

David: It’s always gotta be a toaster.

Leigh: It’s gotta be a toaster. That would be the limit for me. But it doesn’t surprise me that, of course, Heidegger and Sartre have these radically different visions going forward. I mean, one of them cares about freedom, and the other one doesn’t.

Rick: Or to put that in a slightly different way, one fought in the French Resistance; the other was a Nazi.

David: There you go. But I think this points to an important distinction between what Rick was calling anti-humanism and posthumanism. Anti-humanism, as Leigh, you rightfully point out, risks losing some of the planks that make the ship worth saving. I think posthumanism challenges power structures of who’s steering the ship, who built it in the first place, and what’s at stake in articulating the formation of the ship in one particular form. That’s where Haraway, Hales, and Braidotti, and the feminist tradition in posthumanism, can help us see the way in which associating the human with man, in the Western sense of that term, does tie us to some ethnocentrisms and some prejudices that we can break out of and modify. It doesn’t mean giving up on freedom, necessarily. It’s not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as Rick said earlier. But it’s a way of thinking beyond the boundaries of what we’ve declared to be the human.

Leigh: Yeah. And if freedom is ultimately what makes this ship worth saving, then the technologies that we need to be worried about are not technologies like AI or various medical technologies. The technologies that we need to be worried about that are actually making us less free are things like capitalism.

David: I was going to say one of the things I often say is that what we think is an AI problem is actually a capitalism problem.

Leigh: Always.

Rick: Isn’t that true about most problems? But I just want to point out that when I talked about the realm of morality being larger than the human, Leigh put in one term what I was struggling to say, namely, the realm of morality belongs to all those beings that are free. And it may turn out, or it might currently be the case, that we need to consider a lot more things free than just humans. To paraphrase and change slightly one of Leigh’s constant reminders—I’d rather err on the side of thinking that something is free rather than deny its freedom, only to find out later that I’ve—

Leigh: Accidentally enslaved something.

Rick: I’ve accidentally enslaved something. Yes. Yes. Well, we are being determined by the technology of the clock and the bartender. Strangely, she’s not interested in our pushing the boundaries of last call.

Leigh: Last call?

Rick: Yeah. Well, she says post-last-call is out of the bar.

David: Right. Exactly.

Rick: I want to thank you both for this conversation, and I will see you all later.

Leigh: Bye, guys.

David: Bye.