The Struggle to be Human in a Posthuman World

Abstract

Over the preceding chapters, we have discussed many possibilities for new world orders, some utopian but more often dystopian. One of the possibilities facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the prospect that we are entering a posthuman era in which many of the binary concepts used to make sense of experience in the past will no longer function. Western culture, dominated as it has been by liberal humanist principles, has traditionally been underpinned ideologically by binary oppositions between concepts such as natural and artificial, organic and technological, subject and object, body and mind, body and embodiment, real and virtual, presence and absence, and so on. Such binarisms have been increasingly critiqued, first by post-modernist deconstruction of how they function within Western culture as strategies of inclusion and exclusion, and second, through posthumanist reconceptualisations of the oppositional boundaries underpinning dominant conceptual paradigms. Thus, during the last few years a new range of concepts has begun increasingly to enter children’s literature — the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, cloning, and genetic engineering. In short, children’s books and films have begun responding to the posthuman, the focus of this chapter.

Without relation, existence (if it is conceivable at all) would be a mean and miserable thing. We do not exist in order to relate; rather, we relate in order that we may exist as fully realized human beings.

N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Flesh and Metal’, 2002, p. 320

We live in a very peculiar time, in which more media circulate more information to more people than ever before, and yet when the phenomenon of ‘disconnection’ has never been more dramatically evident.

W. T. J. Mitchell, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction’, 2003, p. 490