Chapter 2
Posthuman Subjects

All differences notwithstanding, most posthumanists would agree that we currently need an enlarged, distributed and transversal concept of what a subject is and of how it deploys its relational capacities. Moving beyond humanist exceptionalism, subjectivity has to include the relational dependence on multiple non-humans and the planetary dimension as a whole. Transversality is the operational concept that helps to conceptualize the subject across multiple axes. Yet, scholars in the posthuman field differ as to how far it can be pushed: trans-sex and transgender are by now well-known categories (Stryker and Whittle 2006; Stryker and Aizura 2013), but trans-species (Tsing 2015), multi-species (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) and trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2010) may be a step too far for the Humanities. Is subjectivity still an adequate notion in response to the posthuman convergence?

To find some answers, I turn to the empirical evidence provided by the collaborative discursive production of posthuman research and scholarship. Clearly, a new array of distinctly 'smart' objects has entered our existence, as well as the fields of academic research. They emerge from the fast-expanding universe of digital data, that is now coterminous with so many aspects of our daily lives, through 'the Internet of Things',1 in the fast-devolving world of the Anthropocene.

The themes of current research in the Humanities reflect this conflictual non-human diversity of object of enquiry: today we have animal studies, critical plant studies and eco- and geo-criticism, as well as algorithmic studies, to mention just a few. Humanities scholars nowadays are dealing with objects such as forests, fungi, dust and bio-hydro-solar-techno entities, but also codes, software and digital waste. The wealth of posthuman and neo-materialist scholarship is such as to prevent any synthesis. The best we can do for now (see the next chapter) is to offer a comprehensive cartography of what posthuman knowledge is in the process of producing and becoming (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018).

For many working in the field, however, the issue of subjectivity sits uncomfortably with the posthuman predicament. The scholarship tends to be polarized between on the one hand vehement dismissals of the need for a theory of subjectivity at all, and on the other a tendency to reinscribe subjectivity into the humanistic tradition, albeit it with a few revisions and corrections. I am rather uncomfortable with such a polarization and seek some middle ground. We need a subject position worthy of our times. This means to prioritize issues linked to social justice, ethical accountability, sustainability and to trans-species and intergenerational solidarity (Braidotti 2006, 2013). By 'posthumanizing' subjectivity, it can be re-positioned as a dynamic convergence phenomenon across the contradictions of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. Highlighting the advantages and potentials of this shift of perspective helps develop a suitable ethical framework to do justice to its multi-layered complexity. My affirmative vision of the subject offers a useful platform to construct the kind of transversal non-human alliances required for a posthuman subject.

The posthuman predicament requires even more diversified relational skills. Posthuman subjects are a work-in-progress: they emerge as both a critical and a creative project within the posthuman convergence along posthumanist and post-anthropocentric axes of interrogation. They interrogate the self-representations and conventional understandings of being human, which 'we' have inherited from the past. In doing so, they explore the multi-faceted and differential nature of the collective 'we'.

What constitutes subjectivity is a structural relational capacity, coupled with the specific degree of force or power that any one entity is endowed with: their ability to extend towards and in proximity with others. They compose a subjectivity without a centralized subject and 'his' ancestral tree of knowledge. No arborescent subjects, but rhizomic ones (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Bodies are both embedded and embodied, and have relational and affective powers. As such they are capable of different things and different speeds of becoming. Subjects defined as transversal relational entities do not coincide with a liberal individual, but are rather a 'haecceity' - that is to say a degree of power in the affirmative sense of potentia, which means an event of complex singularities or intensities (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Subjectivity is thus both post-personal and pre-individual, relational and hence in constant negotiation with multiple others and immersed in the conditions that it is trying to understand and modify, if not overturn.

A philosophy of immanence, or of situated perspectives, implies an epistemological obligation to reach adequate understandings of the conditions of one's existence. This entails, in turn, the ethical duty to be worthy of one's own times so as to account for, and interact affirmatively with them, in response to changing circumstances. What this practical philosophy offers is the field of problems and questions themselves, that is to say the cartography of the power relations that are currently re-shaping the formulation of the problem of subjectivity and call for new concepts (Deleuze 2006).

But how does the posthuman impact on the question of subjectivity? Is posthuman subjectivity not a contradiction in terms? Is the human still the necessary point of reference to define the knowing subject and if so, how exactly? What does it mean to be a subject in an era that claims to be simultaneously more-than-human and less-than-human? More than human because of its multi-scalar transformations and technological advances, and less than human in its inhumane economic and social polarizations and irreversible environmental devastation. So the question is: who are 'we'?

In geo-political terms 'we posthuman subjects' are situated across multiple fractures and seemingly irreconcilable power differences. These include different degrees of access to the benefits of technological advances. Global flows of migration and the displacement of populations, growing economic disparities, mass evictions, rising racism and xenophobia, extensive warfare and climate change are the markers of our historicity. In this respect it is more productive to think of ourselves as planetary subjects rather than as global agents (Spivak 1999, 2003). The question therefore is both conceptual and ethical: what kind of subjects are 'we' - the human and inhuman inhabitants of this planet - positioned within a technologically driven 'second life', genetically modified food, robotics, synthetic biology, the acidification of the seas and the desertification of the earth? How can we develop a posthuman theoretical framework that aspires to justice, but is made outside the history of society, encompassing instead what we used to call the natural? (Chakrabarty 2009).

As a feminist, I have always been painfully aware that both the production of scientific knowledge and the institutionalized form of political power defended by liberalism and Marxism foreground a notion and a practice of the subject that is still dominated by Eurocentric humanistic assumptions. As an anti-racist, I acknowledge the important contribution of postcolonial and decolonial theories as well as the alternative, more ancient indigenous traditions of Humanism than the European. They offer a painstaking critical analysis of the extent to which racial assumptions and white supremacy have shaped the philosophical discussions about the human, that Western philosophers have come to take for granted (Whyte 2013; Todd 2016).

The challenge then is how to re-define the subject of knowledge and power without reference to that unitary, humanistic, Eurocentric and masculinist subject. Firmly committed to ontological pacifism, I aspire to a politics that opposes violence, while supporting critical contestations. The state's monopoly over violence, military power and the right to kill - key elements of contemporary necropolitics - need to be counteracted by community-driven mobilizations and activities that empower us to act affirmatively.

These operating principles are also concrete ways to apply my opening assumption, namely that the paradigm shift towards the posthuman is already taking place. The posthuman is not a utopian position to come, nor will it emerge from Silicon Valley, profit-driven futuristic programmes of enhancement that aim at transcending human biology and defying mortality (Kurzweil 2006). The transformation towards the posthuman is neither linear nor one-directional, but is rather a multi-faceted experimentation with what 'we' are capable of becoming. It is undeniable that the combined impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction is altering the terms of our embodied existence, as well as our self-understanding, but changes and adjustments on this scale are both gradual and constant. We are not in a position yet to fully grasp the complexity of these internally contradictory phenomena. We need much more research on the material aspects that compose those phenomena, on their assumptions and implications. The material aspects refer to zoe, but also to the geological and technological aspects of transformation; I call it the zoe/geo/techno assemblage. This process, with its social-economic...