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How to tell the story of the posthuman? One way is to trace a linear trajectory from the regime of the human to the posthuman, as Hans Moravec does in anticipating a postbiological future of humanity or Ray Kurzweil in seeing intelligent machines as our evolutionary descendents. The essays in this special issue take another route, complicating linearity by enfolding binary distinctions into more complex topographies. In the process, they show with clarity and insight that the posthuman should not be depicted as an apocalyptic break with the past. Rather, it exists in a relation of overlapping innovation and replication, a pattern that in How We Became Posthuman I called seriation, borrowing the term from archaeological anthropology.
N. Katherine Hayles (Wed,) studied this question.