The Art of Being Posthuman

In this volume, editors S. E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė curate an eclectic collection of critical posthuman responses to the Anthropocene. The book is the outcome of a 2019 conference entitled "Art in the Anthropocene" hosted at Trinity College Dublin, with the editors sitting on the conference's committee. Therefore, many of the book's interventions are situated in a broad and well-established literature that seeks to bring art and cultural artifacts into dialogue with posthumanist thought, developing insights pertaining to the ethical and political dimensions of our unavoidably ecological present (e.g., Barad 2017; Cohen, Colebrook, and Miller 2016; Demos 2017; Parikka 2015; Ramírez-D'Oleo 2023).In their introduction to the book, Wilmer and Žukauskaitė note that posthumanist theory is "more like a patchwork of insights than a unified or coherent theory" (4). This creative plurality is reflected in the huge array of perception-altering questions, inquiries, and objects mobilized across the book's fourteen chapters, loosely collated into three distinct parts. In the first part, "Life beyond the Anthropocene," the authors are connected by their search for imaginaries alternative to that of the Anthropocene. Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Małgorzata Sugiera), the postapocalyptic plays Ludic Proximity and The Unplugging (Patricia Ybarra), the accumulated plastics that form the Great Pacific garbage patch (Mintautas Gutauskas), and James Lovelock's Gaia theory (Bruce Clarke) all provide opportunities to displace the hegemonic rationalities that compose the Anthropocene imaginary, posing alternative modes of world building, interrelation, and phenomenological reflection. T. J. Demos's critical engagement with a Forensic Architecture video about tear gas is particularly charged. Centering tear gas rather than carbon in conceptualizing the climate emergency displaces the diffuse sense of responsibility that fossil fuels seem to elicit. Instead, tear gas politicizes by summoning the actors, violence, and "climate control" of petro-capitalist governance. In shifting our view, Demos argues for the political fangs—both decolonial and anti-capitalist—necessary to resist and overcome the conditions of the Anthropocene.In the second part, "Human and Non-Human Interactions," the work of little-known philosopher Helmuth Plessner (Graham Harman), the creative activities of spiders (Jussi Parikka) and beavers (Agnė Narušytė), and multispecies translation projects like the Earth Species Project (Anna Barcz and Michael Cronin) become opportunities to further engage critical problems of accounting for our more-than-human world via modes of categorization and interconnection. Narušytė's contribution is particularly pointed, demonstrating that beavers are creative and politically resistant subjects who actively confront and efface anthropocentric boundaries. Elsewhere, Barcz and Cronin produce a timely critique of emerging, nonrelational ethico-political frameworks (e.g., MacCormack 2020), which they argue reduce all relationality to exploitation, inducing only further alienation. Instead, they argue for the "emancipatory possibilities of translation" (140), which make us sensitive and responsive to the more-than-human catastrophe of the present.In the last part, "Forms of Life and New Ontologies," Cary Wolfe, John Ó Maoilearca, Thomas Nail, Audronė Žukauskaitė, and Catherine Malabou are connected by provocative new forms of ontological theorizing. Here the work is perhaps the most theoretically abstract, but it often rewards patient readers by overturning conventions with a close attention to the political stakes. Žukauskaitė's "morphing ontology" draws on Malabou's conception of plasticity to open out a biological and subjective potentiality that transgresses the necessary fixity of biopolitical governance. Nail's ontology of motion counteracts what he sees as an unwarranted assumption of material vitality in many new materialist strains of theory. Trading it in for a historically situated account of matter in motion, Nail argues that this frees us from unnecessary metaphysical baggage and suspect ethico-political stakes. In a theoretically rich argument, Wolfe challenges the prevailing posthuman imaginary of flat ontologies, with their assumptions of connection and openness. Wolfe arrives instead at a "jagged" conception of ontology, which recenters the importance of closure. This is cashed out in crucial ethical questions about boundary relationships—positionality, inclusion and exclusion, identity and difference—that make an important contribution to emerging debates on the political stakes of worlding and worldlessness (Dekeyser 2022; Pugh 2023).While this volume is consistently rigorous and high quality, some contributions occasionally side-step important political questions. For example, Clarke's use of Gaia theory in the first section of the book veers into an almost sanguine, prophetic account of "Gaian being" as the ultimate and futural figure of ecological attunement. Here the importance of political struggle, its concrete terrain, and the cost of realizing Gaian being are glossed over too quickly—along with a legion of ethico-political quandaries—in the search for antiapocalyptic hope. Similarly, in Barcz and Cronin's attempt to summon the emancipatory potential of eco-translation, some of their analysis leaves aside the socioeconomic terrain within which translation is performed. For example, the Interspecies Internet is cited as an important instance of eco-translation, but its material support from the tech giant Google is mentioned only as an aside. Here the question of emancipatory possibility could have been more fully engaged with the particularities of translation under capitalism. Without this, their own answer to the critique they produce doesn't entirely evade the accusation that translation is intertwined with exploitation and alienation. In sum, while there is real strength in the diversity of approaches on display here, a minor weakness is that very occasionally Life in the Posthuman Condition forgets that this condition is in part constituted by a malignant singularity: capital.