Ecological Posthumanism

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

By highlighting the intersections between material ecocriticism and posthumanism,this chapter explores how ecocriticism is becoming more post-human and post-natural in its questioning of the entrenched notion of the human, as well as the blurred boundaries between inorganic and organic matter. Posthuman ecocriticism expands the material ecocritical vision of storied matter to critically discern the cultural implications of currently emerging posthuman agencies – such as synthetic matter responding to stimuli and exhibiting signs of spontaneous activity – that ostensibly transfigure human ecologies and material-discursive practices. With selected literary texts that are labeled posthuman novels, and bio-technological examples, the chapter aims to shed critical light on how posthuman ecologies accentuate the impact of bios-zoe-techno-eco-cultures in re-imagining what it means to be human, or nonhuman, in a world of hybrid configurations, strange natures, and stories.

Disclosing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman bodies, understood here as more/than/human entanglements, this book makes a crucial intervention into the field of contemporary artistic studies, exploring how art can conceptualize material boundaries of entangled beings/doings. Drawing on critical posthumanist and new materialist thought, in this book, nonhumans become subjects of ethics, aesthetics, and politics that produce equally relevant meanings. Designed to include multiple artistic perspectives and forms of expression, which range from sculptures to bio-art and performative practices, the book argues that we are entangled with other organisms around us not only by our socio-cultural connections but predominately by the transformations that we all undergo with the world's materiality. Thus, the artistic works discussed do not merely reflect the world but transform it, offering solutions for practising alternative ethical values and acting better with and for the world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, media studies, body studies, performance studies, animal studies, and environmental studies.

This chapter maps the emerging conceptual terrain of posthumanism and its relevance for discourse studies, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics and applied linguistics work. Posthumanism is a label applied to a range of theoretical and methodological approaches across the humanities and social sciences that are calling into question dominant assumptions generated by Western Enlightenment thinking about the human by giving greater consideration to the role of material objects, animals and the environment in understanding the social world. Posthumanism thus considers the implications of the central role of materialism in our understandings of human agency, language, cognition and society. For discourse studies, a turn to posthumanism requires us to examine the role of discourse in how humans become entangled with the material world through their everyday embodied interactions with objects, artifacts, technologies, plants, animals, and the built and natural environment. Through embracing an activity-oriented perspective toward these human–nonhuman entanglements, the implications are that we must rethink modernist categorical boundaries between subject/object, human/nonhuman and society/nature, both within metadiscourses about these dichotomies and through a more microanalytic lens in the analysis of text and talk.