In Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Peter Mahon goes beyond recent theoretical approaches to 'the posthuman' to argue for a concrete posthumanism, which arises as humans, animals and technology become entangled, in science, society and culture. Concrete posthumanism is rooted in cutting-edge advances in techno-science, and this book offers readers an exciting, fresh and innovative exploration of this undulating, and often unstable, terrain. With wide-ranging coverage, of cybernetics, information theory, medicine, genetics, machine learning, politics, science fiction, philosophy and futurology, Mahon examines how posthumanism played-and continues to play-a crucial role in shaping how we understand our world. This analysis of posthumanism centers on human interactions with tools and technology, the centrality of science, as well as an understanding of techno-science as a pharmakon-an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both poison and cure. Mahon argues that posthumanism must be approached with an interdisciplinary attitude: a concrete posthumanism is only graspable through knowledge derived from science and the humanities. He concludes by sketching a 'post-humanities' to help us meet the challenges of posthumanism, challenges to which we all must rise.
Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed provides a concise, detailed and coherent exploration of posthumanism, introducing key approaches, concepts and themes. It is ideal for readers of all stripes who are interested in a concrete posthumanism and require more than just a simple introduction. (amazon) (kindle 2018-7-6)
Digital and genetic technologies and tools, in other words, are effectively what tipped humanism over into posthumanism. (p. 6)
... it seems impossible to say that posthumanism is simply ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Perhaps the best way to think of it is as an example of what the philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his book Dissemination, calls a pharmakon: ‘If the pharmakon is “ambivalent”, it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.).’ (p. 23)
Science fiction—the good stuff, anyway, by the likes of Mary Shelley, Isaac Asimov, Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick and others—will, I think, remain an especially useful shorthand for introducing people to the pro and cons of our posthuman condition. (p. 24)
