The title of What Is Posthumanism? may be a little bit misleading. Wolfe's book isn't exactly a primer in the idea or methodologies of posthumanism. (With the possible exception of the introduction, I have a hard time imagining assigning this book, or most selections from it, in an undergrad course on the topic.) What it is instead is a collection of essays roughly divided into two sections.
The first section examines the way that posthumanism and systems theory fit within academic and philosophical debates of the last fifty years or so. I can't emphasize enough how useful this was to me. I don't come from a theory-heavy background, and most of the thinkers branded "post-structuralist" and associated with deconstruction--e.g., Derrida, Deleuze, etc.--have always left a bad taste in my mouth. They are obscurantists; they use densely packed jargon and flirtatious French puns to camouflage the generally unremarkable character of their thought.
Wolfe has me seriously questioning that dismissal. Derrida is a cornerstone of the first half of his book, and he successfully shows how Derrida's formulations, which seem so inaccessible, are actually struggling with the same problems that systems theory is trying to tackle. It's hard to paraphrase these problems briefly, but I'll try. They center on the question of how, in a world of largely arbitrary distinctions (the arbitrariness of language, for example, or the arbitrariness of species divisions), meaning can be generated in anything like a stable fashion. In the process of showing how Derrida and systems theorists are both working toward the same answer from opposite directions, Wolfe implies--I think--that so-called post-structuralists and systems theorists are both still striving after the dream of a theory of everything, a theory that might unite all fields of study along some common principles. That idea is one I associate with structuralism, as Robert Scholes outlines it in his 1975 book Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. All of which means that cultural studies since 1970--which is often attacked for growing increasingly chaotic and directionless, always chasing after the "next big thing"--may actually have a more coherent and defensible story of development than is normally thought.
Wolfe's other meditations on disciplinarity are also useful. His division of various famous critics and philosophers in terms of their concerns (humanist or posthumanist) and their disciplinary relations/knowledge organization (humanist or posthumanist) is really thought-provoking. According to this rubric (which comes with its own handy chart), it's possible to tackle supposedly revolutionary posthumanist subjects--the ethics of our treatment of animals, for instance--in humanist ways that dampen or nullify what might be most interesting about the topic. Thus, someone like Peter Singer practices a humanist take on posthumanist concerns (a humanist posthumanism), whereas someone like Bruno Latour practices a posthumanist posthumanism. This seems like a crucial distinction to me, and I don't know of anyone else theorizing it as clearly as Wolfe. My one major complaint here centers on Wolfe's ideas about animal studies. He never even mentions what seems, to me, like an obvious question: if we're going to question the way we use arbitrary distinctions like species barriers, why does that questioning implicitly stop at the animal kingdom? What about our understanding of plants, fungi, etc.? And if those seem like absurd questions, I'd like to hear someone as clear-minded as Wolfe explain why that should be the case.
The second half of the book consists of studies of individual works of art--the theory of the first section put into practice. Most of Wolfe's readings consist of syntheses of a few key thinkers (Derrida, Luhmann) to overturn previous consensus about the meaning of, say, Dancer in the Dark or Emerson's idea of the self. These applications often rehash the same theoretical ideas, but not in a bad way: posthumanism and systems theory can be abstract and counterintuitive, so it helps that the ideas are repeatedly hammered home. Especially nice is the critique of visuality that bubbles, submerged, through most of these readings. Key insights or definitions pop up in these readings in ways that might be better organized, but that just makes reading the book in its entirety more vital. For example, here's a definition of systems theory (which is always hard to explain) from a chapter on architectural proposals:
[T]he conceptual apparatus of systems theory . . . is based on the central innovation of replacing the familiar ontological dualities of the philosophical tradition--chiefly, for our purposes, culture and nature--with the functional distinction between system and environment. (205)Yes, it's still wordy, and it requires examples to explain why it's so useful in understanding the world--but it's a great start. So is the rest of this book. It may not be organized as an ideal introduction, but it works as a good point of entry for someone roughly familiar with current ideas in literary study. I expect I'll be combing through its references and footnotes for a long time to come.
