After shocks: Posthuman ambivalence

When I began writing How We Became Posthuman (1999), I was drawn to the topic in part because of the intense ambivalence I felt toward the idea of the posthuman. I thought, no doubt naively, that writing would help me resolve it. Far from overcoming mixed feelings, the writing intensified my emotions by bringing the issues into sharper focus. As David Gary Shaw rightly observes, the book is drenched in feelings – feelings of dread, possibility and hope. More than a decade later, my ambivalence remains unresolved. I do not doubt that coming decades will see us plunging deeper into what I have elsewhere called the regime of computation, creating more intelligent machines and more pervasive data systems that, having already transformed the meaning of ‘human,’ will continue to do so with increasing urgency and momentum. What are we to make of this trajectory, and what are the possibilities for constructive interventions? While I have not escaped dread in contemplating these questions, I want to focus in this inaugural issue of postmedieval on what posthumanism can offer to premodern studies, and what premodern studies can offer to posthumanism. In my view, we cannot prevent the regime of computation from continuing to expand, but we have an opportunity to interpret it in ways that may help to maximize its positive potential and minimize its risks. With this objective in mind, I want to focus on three areas that seem to me particularly promising, richly explored in the essays in this collection: futurity, non-human others and distributed cognition.