McKittrick Katherine McKittrick

Antennae #57 Beyond Posthumanism McKittrick Katherine McKittrick

What is posthumanist subjectivity? Which institutions, historical events, and philosophies continue to define its cultural coordinates? And how can we move towards new Posthumanism(R)(TM) approaches which disinherit the cultural strictures from continental philosophy and western art practices that subliminally privilege a very specific conception of the Human as universal human? The reconfiguration of methodologies, approaches, and optics demanded by this new ontological turn situates art as the most productive multidisciplinary forum by which to address the truly universal challenges posed by the Anthropocene.




Posthumanist discourses, and subsequently conceptions of the Anthropocene, have been substantially shaped by implicitly unacknowledged structural omissions. A foundation level endemic confusion of the specific with the universal critically compromises any anticipated radical paradigm shifts to, as philosopher Sylvia Wynter (2015) would have it, "give humanness a different future". Again, according to Wynter, it is important that we urgently shift the hollow universalizing terms that obscure the subjective positions of the "we" at the center of popular Anthropocene discourse. This reference point "is not the referent-we of the human species itself", a fungible planetary human figure, but rather a culturally discreet Human (or Human(R)(TM)) with specific anthropogenic activities and relations, both structurally and conceptually.

Which new conceptions of the Anthropocene may arise when geographical time collapses with historical time? What new thoughts on the Anthropocene can be revealed when we acknowledge that neither the responsibility nor the vulnerability of climate change, are evenly/universally distributed? How do we disrupt the narratives of the Anthropocene(s) that erase the roles and realities of the non-Human(R)(TM)?
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