A DEFENSE OF PRE‐CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

8/3/2019 A DEFENSE OF PRECRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

1/11

1

A DEFENSE OF PRECRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

David Roden, Open University

Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of

mind.1

Since emerging in nineties critical theory, transhumanism and cyberpunk literature,

the term 'posthuman' has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the

status of the human is radically in doubt. Two main usages or, if you will, two

distinctposthumanisms canbe discerned over this period.

Transhumanists, futurists and science fiction authors regularly concatenate or

hyphenate 'post' and 'human' when speculating about the longrun influence of

advanced technologies on the future shape of life and mind.

By contrast, for cultural theorists and philosophers in the 'continental' tradition the

posthuman is a condition in which the foundational status of humanism has been

undermined. The causes or symptoms of this supposed crisis of humanism are

various as the bioengineered 'clades' ramifying through the postanthropoform

solar system of Bruce Sterling's 1996 novel Schismatrix. Posthumanism, in this

diagnostic or critical sense, is expressed in the postmodern incredulity towards

enlightenment narratives of emancipation and material progress; the deconstruction

of transcendental or liberal subjectivities; the end of patriarchy; the emergence of

contrary humanisms in postColonial cultures; the reduction of living entities toresources for a burgeoning technoscience, or, if some theorists are to be believed, all

of the above.2

In this paper, I will argue that these two usages do not only reflect divergent

understandings of the posthuman the speculative and the critical but also reflect

a foreclosure of radical technogenetic change on the part of critical posthumanists.

This gesture can be discerned in four arguments that occur in various forms within

the extant literature of critical posthumanism:

The antihumanist argument The technogenesis argument The materiality argument The antiessentialist argument

All four, as I hope to show, are unsound.

1Sterling (1996), p. 59.

2

This appears to be the position of Rosi Braidotti in her recent plenary address to the 2009 Society forEuropean Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Conference in Cardiff.


2/11

2

Analyzing why these arguments fail has the dual benefit of preventing us from being

distracted by the antihumanist hyperbole accruing to theoretical frameworks

employed within critical posthumanism such as deconstruction and cognitive

science but, more importantly, contributes to the development of a rigorous,

philosophically selfaware speculative posthumanism.

* * *

Contemporary transhumanists argue that human nature is an unsatisfactory 'work in

progress' that should be modified through technological means where the

instrumental benefits for individuals outweigh the technological risks. This ethic of

improvement is premised on prospective developments in four areas:

Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science the

'NBIC' suite of technologies. For example, improved bionic neural interfaces may

allow the incorporation of a wide range of technical devices within an enhanced

'cyborg' body or 'exoself' while genetic treatments may increase the efficiency or

learning or memory (Bostrom and Sandberg 2006) or be used to increase the size ofthe cerebral cortex. The wired and genemodified denizens of the transhuman future

could be sensitive to a wider range of stimuli, faster, more durable, more

intellectually capable and morphologically varied than their unmodified forebears.

Just how unrestricted and capable transhuman minds and bodies can become is

contested since the scope for enhancement depends both on hypothetical

technologies and upon hotly contested metaphysical claims. Among the prospective

technologies which excite radical transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil are the use of

microelectric neuroprostheses which might noninvasively stimulate or probe the

brains native neural networks, allowing it to jack directly into immersive cognitivetechnologies or map its state vector prior to uploading an entire personality

(Kurzweil 2005, 317);3

the elusive goal of artificial general intelligence the

creation of robots or software systems which approximate or exceed the flexibility of

human belieffixation and comportment; or, perhaps less speculatively,

improvements in processor technology sufficient to emulate the computational

capacity of human and other mammalian brains (Ibid. 124125).

Among the metaphysical issues that trouble all but the most facile of transhumanist

itineraries is the scope of functionalist accounts of mental states and processes.

Functionalist philosophers of mind claim that the mental states types such as beliefsor pains are constituted by the causal role of token states within a containing

system rather than by the stuff that the system is constituted from. The causal role

of a token state is defined by the set of states that can bring it about (its inputs) and

set of the states that it causes in turn (its outputs). The substrate on which that state

is realized is irrelevant to its functional role.4

Some philosophers of mind David

3For a rather less sanguine commentary on the state of the art in noninvasive scanning see Jones

2009.

4

By analogy, any system could count as being in the state White Wash Cycle if inputting dirty whitesat some earlier time resulted in it outputting clean whites at some later time.


3/11


4/11

4

Speculative posthumanism is logically independent of the normative thesis of

transhumanism: one can be consistently transhumanist while denying the

ontological possibility of posthuman transcendence. Similarly, speculative

posthumanism is consistent with the rejection of transhumanism. One could hold

that a posthuman divergence is a significant ontological possibility but not a

desirable one.

Critical posthumanists such as Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark, Don Ihde and Neil

Badmington do not contest the potential of NBIC technologies or advance principled

arguments against enhancement (Clark is a warmblooded, moderate transhumanist

according to my taxonomy) but argue that speculative or precritical posthumanism

reflects a philosophically nave conception of the human such that the posthuman

would constitute a radical break with it. This position is clearly implied in the title of

Katherine Hayles' seminal work of cultural history How We Became Posthuman. For

Hayles, the posthuman is not a hypothetical state which could follow someprospective singularity event, say, but a work in progress: a complex and contested

reconception of the human subject in terms drawn from the modern 'sciences of

the artificial': information theory, cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life

(Hayles 199, 286).

One example of the intellectual tendencies that inform this new cultural moment is

socalled 'Nouvelle AI' (NAI). Where the manipulation of syntactically structured

representations is the paradigm of intelligence traditional AI, NAI draws inspiration

from computational prowess exhibited in biological phenomena involving no

symbolization, such as swarm intelligence, insect locomotion or cortical featuremaps. The guiding insight of NAI is that the preconditions of intelligence such as

errorreduction strategies, pattern recognition or categorization can emerge in

biological systems from local interactions between dumb specialized agents (like

ants or termites) without a central planner to choreograph their activities.

If human mentation 'emerges' likewise from millions of asynchronous, parallel

interactions between dumb components, Hayles argues, there is no classically self

present 'human' subjectivity for the posthuman to transcend. Mental powers of

deliberation, inference, consciousness, etc. are already distributed between

biological neural networks, actively sensing bodies and artefacts (Hayles 1999, 239).

I have christened this 'the antihumanist objection to posthumanism' given its

striking similarities to the deconstruction of subjectivist philosophy and

phenomenology undertaken in postwar French antihumanisms Derridas in

particular (Ibid. 146). Hayles proximate target, here, is the putatively autonomous

subject of modern liberal theory. The autonomous liberal subject, she argues, is

unproblematically present to itself and distinct from the conceptually ordered world

in which it works out its plans for the good (Ibid. 286). The posthuman subject, by

contrast, is problematically individuated, because its agency is constituted by an

increasingly 'smart' extrabodily environment on which its cognitive functioningdepends and because of the open, ungrounded materiality or iterability of


5/11

5

language which is both arrested by the context of embodied action and infected by

its opacity (Derrida 1988 152; Hayles 1999, 2645). The decentered or distributed

posthuman subject is no longer sufficiently distinct from the world to order it

autonomously as the subject of liberal theory is required to do.

But is this right?

Lets suppose, along with Hayles and other proponents of embodied and distributed

cognition, that the skinbag is an ontologically permeable boundary between self

and nonself (or exoself). Proponents of the extended mind thesis like Andy Clark

and David Chalmers argue from a principle of 'parity' between processes that go on

in the head and any functionally equivalent process in the world beyond.6

The parity

principle implies that mental processes need not occur only in biological nervous

systems but in the environments and tools of embodied thinkers. If I have to make

marks on paper to keep in mind the steps of a lengthy logical proof, the PP states

that my mental activity is constituted by these inscriptional events as well as by theknowledge and habits reposing in my acculturated neural networks.

However, given the parity between bodily and extrabodily processes, this cannot

make the activity less evaluable in terms of the rationality standards we apply to

deliberative acts. Even if the humanist subject emerges from the summed activities

of biological and nonbiological agents, this metaphysical dependence (or

supervenience) need not impair its capacity to subtend the powers of deliberation or

reasoning liberal theory requires of it.7

Derridas more systematic deconstruction of the semantically constitutive subjectnuances this picture by entailing limits on the scope of practical reason in the face of

the outside or exception which infects any rulegoverned system (Derrida 1988,

p.152). The rule or desire is always precipitate, in this way. But there is a difference

between being ahead of oneself and being beheaded. The posthuman, in Hayles

critical sense of the term, is not less human for confronting the fragile, constitutively

precipitate character of cognition and desire.

This is not to say, of course, that there is no merit in the model of the hybrid self that

Hayles presents as 'posthuman' or that it has no implications for precritical or

6Parity Principle. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were

it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process,

then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.(from Clark and Chalmers

(1998) p.XX)

7The notion of supervenience is frequently used by nonreductive materialists to express the

dependence of mental properties on physical properties without entailing their reducibility to the

latter. Informally: M properties supervene on P properties if a things P properties determine its M

properties. If aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, if x is physically identical to y and

x is beautiful, y must be beautiful. Supervenience accounts vary with the modal force of the

entailments involved. Natural or nomological supervenience holds in worlds whose physical laws

are like our own. Metaphysical supervenience, on the other hand, is often claimed to hold withlogical or conceptual necessity.


6/11

6

speculative posthumanism. On the contrary, a 'deconstruction' of the classically

constitutive subject of postCartesian thought is, I have argued, a useful prophylactic

against immaterialist fancies or transcendentally inspired objections to the

naturalizing project of cognitive science (Roden 2006). However, the naturalization

of subjectivity and mind is at best a conceptual precondition for envisaging certain

transcendent posthumanist itineraries involving the emergence of artificial minds

from new technological configurations of matter. It does not represent their

culmination.

There are two other objections that may potentially survive this analysis. Firstly, it

could be objected that the critical posthumanism like the extended mind thesis

shows that the human is always already technically constituted. In her contribution

to a recent Templeton Research Seminar on transhumanism Hayles argues that

transhumanists are wedded to a technogenetic anthropologyfor which humans and

technologies have existed and coevolved in symbiotic partnership. Not only would

future transhuman enhancement be a technogenetic process; but so, according tothis story, are comparable transformations in the deep past. Human technical

activity has, for example, equipped some with lactose tolerance or differential

calculus without monstering the beneficiaries into posthumans. One of the

proponents of the extended mind thesis, Andy Clark, has framed the technogenesis

argument against posthumanism particularly clearly in his book Natural Born

Cyborgs:

The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans

and semiintelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. . . We

are already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deepinto our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to

believe in any posthuman future and to resist the temptation to define

ourselves in brutal opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now

live, love and work (Clark 2003, p. 142).

Natural born cyborgs, as suggested, are already dealers in hybrid mental

representations which exploit both a linguistically mapped environment and the

pattern detecting talents of our multifariously talented brains. This is significant

because our capacity to ascribe structured propositional attitudes to others arguably

presupposes the capacity to use language to represent their contents. Representingthe contents of beliefs is necessary for evaluating them and it is independently

plausible to suppose that, as Donald Davidson argues in his essay Thought and Talk,

having the capacity to evaluate beliefs is part of what is required in a believer

(Davidson 1984).

Clearly, if we restrict the evidence base for the technogenesis argument to cases

where augmentation has not resulted in a species divergence or something very like

it, then we will induce that this is not liable to happen in the future. However, some

prehuman divergence had to have happened in our evolutionary past and it is at

least plausible given the natural born cyborgs thesis that technologies such aspublic symbol systems were a factor in the hominization process. Given a prehuman


7/11

7

divergence has occurred in the past, perhaps due to evolutionary pressures brought

about the development of simpler symbolization techniques, why preclude the

possibility that convergent NBIC technologies might prompt a similar step change in

the future?

I have argued elsewhere that a cognitive augmentation that replaced public

language with a nonsymbolic vehicle of cognition and communication might

assuming Clark's account of hybrid representations lead to the instrumental

elimination of propositional attitude psychology through the elimination of its public

vehicles of content. Postfolk folk might, arguably, be opaque to the practices of

intentional interpretation we bring to bear in our i.e. human social intercourse

and thus might well form initially discrete social and reproductive enclaves that

might later seed entirely posthuman republics.

Another of Hayles objections to standard posthumanists visions of transcendence is

their supposed elision of the materiality of human embodiment and cognition: themateriality argument. The fact that computer simulations can help us understand

the selforganizing capacities of biological systems does not entail that these can be

fully replicated by some system by virtue of implementing a sufficiently finegrained

software representation of their functional structure.

It is true that some posthumanist scenarios presuppose that minds or organisms can

be fully replicated on speculative nonbiological substrates like the computronium or

'smart matter' imagined in Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution novels. However, this

objection applies to a fairly restricted class of posthuman itineraries: namely those

involving the replication of existing minds and organisms in computational form.Although Hayles provides no arguments against pancomputationalism or global

functionalism, it might well be the case that syntheticlife forms or robots,

being differently embodied, will be differently mindedas well (who knows?).

Thus the materiality of embodiment argument works in favour of the precritical

posthumanist account, not against it.8

On the other hand, she may be wrong and the

pancomputationalists right. Mental properties of things may, for all we know,

supervene on their computational properties because every other property

supervenes on them as well.

I turn, finally, to an objection that is perhaps implicit rather than explicit in the

arguments of Critical Posthumanists to date but is worth considering on its own, if

only for its speculative payoff. I refer to this as the antiessentialist argument.

The antiessentialist objection to posthumanism starts from a particular

interpretation of the disjointness of the human and the posthuman. This is that the

only thing that could distinguish the set of posthumans and the set of humans is

that all posthumans would lack some essential property of humanness by virtue of

their augmentation history. It follows that if there is no human essence no

8It may militate against transhumanist dreams of virtual immortality, but, as many have pointed out,

this is a humanist or hyperhumanist scenario, not a posthumanist one.


8/11

8

properties that humans possess in all possible worlds there can be no posthuman

divergence or transcendence.

This is a potentially serious objection to speculative posthumanism because there

seem to be plausible grounds for rejecting essentialism in the sciences of complexity

or selforganization that underwrite many posthumanist prognostications. Some

philosophers of biology hold that the interpretation of biological taxa most

consonant with Darwinian evolution is that they are not kinds (i.e. properties) but

individuals. Evolution by natural selection is a form of selforganization involving

feedback relationships between the distribution of genetic traits across populations

and their phenotypic consequences in particular environments. An individual or

protoindividual can undergo a selforganizing process, but an abstract kind or

universal cannot. Thus, the argument goes, evolution happens to species qua

individuals (or protoindividuals) not species qua kinds. To be biologically 'human'

on this view is notto exemplify some set of necessary and sufficient properties, but

to be genealogically related to earlier members of the population of humans (Hull1988).

Clearly, if biological categories are not kinds and posthuman transcendence requires

the technically mediated loss of properties essential to membership of some

biological kind, then posthuman transcendence envisaged by precritical

posthumanism is metaphysically impossible.9

Underlying the antiessentialist objection is the assumption that the only significant

differences are differences in the essential properties demarcating natural kinds. But

why adhere to this philosophy of difference?10

The view that nature is articulated bydifferences in the instantiation of abstract universals sits poorly with the idea of an

actively selforganizing nature underlying the leading edge cognitive and life

sciences. A view of difference consistent with selforganization would locate the

engines of differentiation in those micro components and structural properties

whose cumulative activity generates the emergent regularities of complex systems.

For example, we might adopt an immanent ontology of difference for which

individuating boundaries are generated by local states of matter: such as differences

in pressure, temperature, miscibility or chemical concentration (Delanda 2004). For

immanent ontologies of difference that of Gilles Deleuze, say the conceptualdifferences articulated in the natural language kind lexicons are asymmetrically

9This objection is overdetermined because the possibility of successfully implementing radical

transhumanist policies seems incompatible with a stable human nature. If there are few cognitive or

body invariants that could not in principle be modified with the help of some hypothetical NBIC

technology then transhumanism arguably presupposes that there are no such essential properties

for humanness.

10David Hull points out that the genealogical boundaries between species can be considerably

sharper than boundaries in 'character space' (Hull 1988, 4). The fact that nectarfeeding hummingbird

hawk moths and nectarfeeding hummingbirds look and behave in similar ways does not invalidatethe claim that they have utterly distinct lines of evolutionary descent (Laporte 2004, 44).


9/11

9

dependent upon active individuating differences (Ibid. 10). Deleuzean ontology is

obviously not the only option here: any ontology which reconciles the existence of

real or radical differences with the lack of transcendent or transcendental organizing

principles would do.

In short: we can be antiessentialists and antiPlatonists while holding that the world

is profoundly differentiated in a way that owes nothing to the transcendental

causality of abstract universals, subjectivity or language.

Conclusion:

I have argued that critical posthumanists provide few convincing reasons for

abandoning precritical or speculative posthumanism. The antiessentialist argument

presupposes a model of difference that is ill adapted to the sciences that critical

posthumanists cite in favour of their naturalized deconstruction of the human

subject. The deconstruction of the humanist subject implied in the antihumanistobjection may itself be a useful prolegomenon to a posthumanengendering

cognitive science; but it complicates rather than corrodes the philosophical

humanism that critical posthumanism problematizes while leaving open the

possibility of a radical differentiation of the human and the posthuman. The

technogenesis objection is weak, if conceptually productive. The elision of

materiality argument is based on problematic assumptions and, even if sound, would

preclude only some scenarios for posthuman divergence.

Of these, the antiessentialist objection seems the strongest and most wide ranging

in its implication. Our response to it suggested that it might be circumvented with animmanent ontology of emergent differences such as Deleuze's ontology of the

virtual. However, a consequence of embracing locally emergent differences in this

way is that there can be no adequate concept of posthuman difference without

posthumans. For it is surely a consequence of any such account that a science of the

different cannot precede its historical emergence or morphogenesis, even if only in

simulated form. This implies that the posthuman is at best a placeholder signifying a

possibility that we cannot adequately conceptualize ahead of its actualization.

However, this does not preclude a theoretical development of the implications of

the posthuman insofar as we can conceptualize it.

Moreover, the emptiness of the signifier 'posthuman' has an ethical or, perhaps,

'antiethical' consequence that arguably should be considered more fully in the light

of Derrida's remarks about the precipitate character of thought.11

If the speculative

idea of the posthuman is a placeholder for differences that are determinable only via

some synthetic process such as the creation of actual posthumans, modified

11In her address to the Cardiff, SEPFEP conference, 'The Ethics of Extinction' Claire Colebrook argued

that while ethos implies habit, place and environment, situations of catastrophic change (e.g. climate

change) imply the need to overcome these rooted modes of action and affect. Hence the prospect of

humanity being superseded by nonhumans requires an antiethics which imagines or simulates theradically nonhuman.


10/11

10

transhumans, or a range of simulations or aesthetic models (as in cybernetic art)

these differences can be determined only by progressive actualization. Thus

posthumanist philosophy is locked into a dialectically unstable preterition falling

between speculative and synthetic activity. To understand what it as yet

undetermined, it must attempt however incrementally to bring it into being and

to give it shape.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Bostrom, Nick (2005), A History of Transhumanist Thought,Journal of Evolution and

Technology, 14 (1).

____(2008), Why I Want to Be Posthuman When I Grow Up, B. Gordijn, R

Bostrom N, Sandberg A (2006), 'Converging Cognitive Enhancements', Ann. N.Y.

Acad. Sci. 1093: 201227.

Chadwick (eds.), Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Springer.

____ (2005b), In Defence of Posthuman Dignity, Bioethics 19(3), pp. 203214.Clark, Andy (2003), Natural Born Cyborgs, (Oxford OUP).

___Language, Embodiment and the Cognitive Niche, Trends in Cognitive Science

10(8), pp. 370374)

___(1993)Associative Engines, (MIT Bradford).

___(2006) Material Symbols, Philosophical Psychology Vol. 19, No. 3, June 2006, pp.

291307.

Clark Andy, Chalmers David (1998), The Extended Mind, Analysis 1998 58(1), pp. 7

19.

Churchland, Paul (1998), Conceptual Similarity Across Sensory and Neural Diversity:

The Fodor/LePore Challenge Answered, Journal of Philosophy, XCV, No.1,pp. 532.

_____(1995). The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul(Cambridge Mass.:

MIT Press.

_____(1989)Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human

Behaviour, Philosophical Perspectives 3, pp. 225241.

____(1981), Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,Journal of

Philosophy78(2), 6790.

Cilliers, Paul (1998). Complexity and Postmodernism. London: Routlege.

Davidson, Donald (1984) Thought and Talk, in Inquiries into Truth and

Interpretation (Oxford, Clarendon Press), pp. 155170.Deacon,Terrence (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and

the Human Brain (London: Penguin).

DeLanda, Manuel (1997), Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of

Form, South Atlantic Quarterly96:3, Summer 1997, pp. 499514.

_____(2004), Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1992),A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi

(trans.). London: Athlone.

Derrida, Jacques (1986), Margins of Philosophy, Alan Bass (trans.). Brighton:

Harvester Press), pp. 209271.

___(1988), Limited Inc. Samuel Weber (trans.). Northwestern University Press.___(2002),Acts of Religion, Gil Anidjar (ed.). New York: Routledge.


11/11

11

Daniel,Dennett (1991). Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.

Fukuyama, Francis (2002), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the

Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile Books).

Hayles, N Katharine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in

Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Hull, David (1988), On Human Nature, in PSA 1986, vol. 2, A. Fine and P. Machamer

(eds.), East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 313; reprinted in Hull

(1989) and Hull and Ruse (eds.), Philosophy of Biology(1998).

Jones, Richard (2009), Brain Interfacing with Kurzweil,

http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=450, Accessed08.09.2009.

Kurzweil, Ray (2005), The Singularity is Near(New York Viking).

LaPorte, Joseph (2004), Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change (Cambridge CUP).

Lisewski, Andreas Martin (2006), The concept of strong and weak virtual

reality, Minds and Machines 16, 201219.

Lycan, William G. (1999), The Continuity of Levels of Nature, in William Lycan

(ed.) Mind and Cognition(Oxford Blackwell), pp. 4963.MacLennan, B.J. (2002), Transcending Turing Computability, Minds and Machines 13:

322.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1994), The German Ideology, C.J. Arthur (Ed.).

London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Mackenzie, Adrian (2002), Transductions: bodies and machines at speed(London:

Continuum).

Patton, Paul (2007), Utopian Political Philosophy: Deleuze and Rawls, Deleuze

Studies 1, pp. 4159.

Rawls, John (1999),A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press).

Roden, David. 2010. Deconstruction and excision in philosophicalposthumanism.Journal of Evolution and Technology21(1) (June): 2736.

Simondon, Gilbert (1989), Du mode dexistence des objets techniques (Editions

Aubier).

Shragrir, Oron (2006), Why we View the Brain as a Computer, Synthese (153), pp

393416.

Soper, Kate (1986), Humanism and Antihumanism. London: HarperCollins.

Sterling, Bruce (1996), Schismatrix Plus, (Berkley, New York).

Vinge, Vernor (1993) [online] The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive

in the PostHuman

Era,http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.htmlAccessed2008.24.04.

A DEFENSE OF PRE‐CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

Documents

Transcript of A DEFENSE OF PRE‐CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM