Humans of the future will be naturally artificial

We navigate in a time when a newspaper can be read as an inventory of calamities.

From the depths of the Anthropocene era the death rattles of capitalism are heard.

Resources are depleted, species become extinct, viruses proliferate, supposedly natural disasters overlap with economic and political crises, technology watches over us, wars break out.

From all corners of a global world, from different disciplines, activists, philosophers and artists search for alternatives hitherto unnoticed in liminal spaces.

The postulates of enlightened humanism, the one that put man and his reason as the measure of all things —and that by man he meant, literally, the male, in addition to being white, heterosexual and Western—,

and trans, anti-racist, anti-colonial.

The binary taxonomies from which (we) have explained reality, the opposition between feminine and masculine, person and animal, biology and technology, crumble.

New definitions are sought for life, the natural, the human.

All this is told in the books, the movies teach it.

And, perhaps above all, works of art demonstrate it.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, 'QR Identity Finder', 2022.LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON

Posthumanism has its roots in Nietzsche and its trail extends to thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, author of

(1985), a plea for hybridity.

As stated by one of its main theorists today, the Italian-Australian professor Rosi Braidotti, it is based on the conviction that the apparent nature-culture dichotomy is actually a continuum.

The author has just published

, the latest installment of a trilogy made up of

(2015) and

(2020), all in Gedisa, where she argues that feminism, particularly aspects such as the indigenous, should be considered a precursor and container of posthumanist principles.

More than establishing dogmas, his essays constitute a catalog of common proposals.

They also list examples across art and culture, from the (bad) referent of countless disaster movies and killer robots (“which only make money and depress people”) to the symbolic role of a star as Lady Gaga, emblem of a feminism emanating from pop materialism that defies “gender norms and their canons of decorum”.

For Braidotti, who has been "seeing the issue of the posthuman emerge in culture and the media for 15 years", cultural activity represents "the vanguard of what people do in real life".

Hence, it is a crucial element to illustrate his thought.

"But my decision to look at art and culture, at the real world, keeps me struggling with the purity of the discipline, which I find very patriarchal, authoritarian and masculine," he says.

Binarisms such as masculine and feminine, person and animal, natural and cultural crumble

At the forefront of that frontier, the visual arts are often a step or two ahead.

They prospect the terrain, compass and, sometimes, find a path.

For example, the one at this year's Venice Biennale, entitled

and curated by Cecilia Alemani, where the participating artists —practically all of them are women and gender dissidents— unfold a panoply of creations articulated around three thematic pillars built, precisely, on Braidotti's theories: the sense of the body and its capacity of transformation;

relationships with technology and connection with nature.

"When I started visiting artists' studios, I saw that many addressed the notion of the human," says the curator about the germ of the project, open until November 27, and which has a precedent in the 1992 Biennale, titled, precisely,

.

"But the real revelation came with the pandemic, when it became clear that these theories are coming true, that we really need to imagine other hierarchies."

Viggo Mortensen in a scene from 'Crimes of the Future', by David Cronenberg.

Alamy Stock Photos

The artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has spent decades experimenting with the cyborg, that being born from the marriage of human and machine.

His films, which speak of blind women who manage to perceive images through a computer and of individuals who become their own data (

), coexist in

with works such as

, an installation where Precious Okoyomon represents the colonialist invasion of nature through figures sculpted from plants;

and the video installation

, by Marianna Simnett, starring creatures with animal and human features reminiscent of the chimeras in The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Among the many irradiations of posthumanism, if there is one idea that prevails over the others among the artists of the Biennial, Alemani points out, it is that "our conception of the human body is crumbling."

And if there is a paradigmatic thinker in this field, it is Paul B. Preciado.

In

(Anagrama, 2022), argues that, for him, the transgender condition has nothing to do with dysphoria —considered a psychiatric disorder—, but rather with a form of dissidence against the “petrosexoracial” system.

“We are not simple witnesses of what happens.

We are the bodies through which mutation comes to stay,” he declares in the essay.

"The question is no longer who we are, but what we are going to become."

When Wynnie Mynerva, gender non-binary artist and latest Arc sensation, sewed up her vagina to “gain freedom” and showed off the operation in a video, he was channeling those ideas through art.

Inhabiting the same planet, there are species with which we may share more than we thought.

Human exceptionality is being reviewed and questioned from the animal point of view, a realm where we are no longer sovereign.

The implications, from food to affections, from science to ecology, branch out.

essay is about

(Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022), in which Marta Segarra uses fiction (each chapter begins with a brief story) and artistic references to illustrate her theses.

"One thing I suggest is that definitions vary over time, and that can also apply to what we understand by art and culture," says the researcher.

It refers not only to what some species might be able to create aesthetically, but also to the fluidity of what we understand as such.

Culture can be both the video of a pop song like

(2022), where Rigoberta Bandini sings that she would like to become one, and the books of a Nobel laureate like Olga Tokarczuk.

Titles such as

(Siruela, 2009; which has a film adaptation,

, from 2017) represent the posthumanist vision of the unity of all beings embodied in the thought of Bruno Latour.

The transhuman seeks the superman;

the posthuman wants to overcome anthropocentrism

Perhaps the issue that has caused the greatest fascination in the collective imagination is that of the communion of the flesh with the machine.

It is not a new purpose —wearing glasses implies improving the body with technology—, but an expanded one.

Transhumanism comes into play here, a current generated in Oxford by theorists such as Nick Bostrom who, although in certain sections touches with posthumanism, in others they repel.

“In both cases we are talking about modifying the traditional figure of the human being”, explains the philosopher Fernando Broncano, author of

(Herder, 2009), "but transhumanism is a way of transcending upwards, to reach a superhuman state, while critical posthumanism is a way of transcending downwards, leaving behind the anthropocentric vision".

Faced with the techno-capitalist and quasi-religious promises of an eternal life with the mind downloaded to the cloud, it is about reformulating our position in relation to what surrounds us.

And we're not just talking about the possibilities of technology (the

, writes Paul B. Preciado, has already created "a new form of cyborg existence"), but about science in its broadest sense: artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, reproduction assisted…

'Tunnel Boring Machine', (2022), by Teresa Solar Abboud.

Robert Marossi

A whole lineage of artists has been bringing these ideas to the surface of the sensible.

From classics like Stelarc, the body modification

who warned that the body is becoming obsolete, to directors like Julia Ducournau and her amazing

(2021), a dark and ventral fable that explores the potential of the confluence between genres and between people and machines inspired in part by another master of posthuman cinema, David Cronenberg.

In narrative, Dave Eggers offers in

(Random House, 2014) and

(Random House, 2022) a devastating critique of the dependence on technology and the vulnerability it generates.

Although, perhaps, nobody like the Don DeLillo of

and

has been able to capture and question the process of posthumanization.

His latest novel,

Seix Barral), came out in 2020 but is set in 2022. More than a novel, it is a sign of ellipses: what would happen if technology disappeared from one day to the next?

Would we even be able to communicate?

Metamorphosis, mutations and hybrids

Motherhood as a wild state.

in

(Blackie Books, 2022), a novel by Rachel Yoder, the concept of bodily mutation opens its borders to the world of animals.

Or, rather, of the other animals.

The book tells the story of a woman and recent mother who metamorphoses into a dog.

She eats with relish burying her head in the plate, she prowls the night streets hunting rodents, she grows hair like bristles.

Beyond the literal, the plot can be interpreted in a posthumanist key.

That woman and mother —relevant fact, because it alludes to one of the most intricate facts with the very notion of animality, that of reproduction— accepts her side, let's say, wild.

Raised in a Mennonite community, Yoder grew up oblivious to the Western premise that "we are separate from nature."

“The pandemic has served to rewire my brain,” she adds,

Life in the ruins of the future.

If in his classic

(1996) David Cronenberg recreated a group of visionaries whose erotic pleasure is unleashed by witnessing traffic accidents, in the disturbing

(2022) his futuristic characters derive aesthetic and sexual satisfaction from surgery.

After a mutation process, certain people develop organs never seen before.

The protagonists, one of those neobodies and his partner, a surgeon, produce art from that evolutionary anomaly.

Meanwhile, the transformation process bifurcates and other individuals adapt their digestive systems to the plastic that causes the degradation of the biosphere.

New corporalities, alternative forms of pain and pleasure, and radical ecology in a world in ruins.

Posthumanism in its purest form. 

real fictions.

Between the human and the animal, the contemporary and the atavistic, Teresa Solar Abboud's sculptures “hybridize the natural world with that of work, with technology and with fragments of ourselves”.

His series Tunnel Boring Machine (2022), selected for the Venice Biennale, highlights another of the exhibition's premises, which takes its title, The Milk of Dreams, from a children's book by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington: that fiction and dreams also form 

readings

Posthuman Feminism

,

Rosi Braidotti.

Translation of Sion Serra Lopes.

Gedisa, 2022. 288 pages, 24.90 euros.

Dysphoria mundi.

Paul B. Precious.

Anagrama, 2022. 560 pages, 21.90 euros. 

Humanimals,

Marta Segarra.

Gutenberg Galaxy, 2022. 240 pages, 21 euros. 

The whole,

Dave Eggers.

Translation by Carlos Milla Soler.

Random House, 2022. 528 pages, €24.90.

Silence,

Don DeLillo.

Translation by Javier Calvo.

Seix Barral, 2020. 112 pages, 10.95 euros. 

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