Becoming an Animal and a Posthuman

66

foregrounds the human-non-human relation and highlights that human beings do not have a separate and individual position in the world; instead, they share the same universe with other living or non-living beings, which means that human beings need to revise the conception of what a human being is by means of the external determiners of who or what this human being is.

67

posthumanism is the discourse that more or less critically investigates the figure of the posthuman. It is characterised by the increased urgency of the questions of what it means to be human and the nature of the relationship between humans and non-human others (animals, plants, the inorganic, machines, gods, systems and various figures of liminality – from ghosts to angels, from cyborgs to zombies).

Posthumanism thus responds to a relatively straightforward imperative to think beyond humanism, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. As such, it engages in modes of thought that have been deemed to be foreign, perverse, paradoxical or simply out of bounds by humanist patterns of thought. In this sense, posthumanism positions itself as coming ‘after’ humanism […]. (Callus, Herbrechter, Rossini, 2014: 111-112)

Robert Pepperell, who explains the way to posthumanism in his The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the Brain (2003), also gives the features of posthumanism in many respects, like its relation to consciousness, thought, and uncertainty. Consciousness, which is being aware of and open to the states in the psychology and events in the physical world, is, for him, not only about the mind; it is also the product of body, which means that both body and mind are constitutive of consciousness (Pepperell, 2003: 178). As consciousness is constitutive of identity formation, it is appropriate to state that consciousness is open to the changes in the internal and external world, which delineates how human beings define themselves differently in humanist and posthumanist situations. “There is nothing external to a human, because the extent of a human cannot be fixed.” (178) It is for this reason that

“[h]uman bodies have no boundaries” (178). They are prone to the changes because consciousness and thoughts are prone to the changes. In posthumanism, thoughts are not the separate or individual data on the brain; instead, they are the intermediary links that engender consciousness (183), which also highlights the uncertainty of what a human

68

being is. As there is no fixed definition of the term “human being” anymore in posthumanism, technology²⁴ and nature, consisting of animals too, are the external determiners of what he/she is; he/she is liable to modify himself/herself throughout his/her life.

This modification is not only about physical appearance or body; instead, it is also about the psychology of human beings. Based on this bodily integration into psychology, human beings can find an identity for themselves. It is through this integration that they recognise who or what they are. To relate the idea to postcolonialism, one can claim that human beings are no more the Western, superior, phallocentric, “masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language” man (Braidotti, 2013: 65). Instead, they are what they otherize: they are machines, cyborgs, animals. Thus, they have a different form and psychology from the classical or Renaissance humanist concept of human being. They leave the sense of pure humanity, and they welcome the others within them. From now on, they are different from pure human beings of humanism; they are beyond, after, and far from humanism; they are posthumans.

As the concept stated earlier points out, posthumanism welcomes the others within or external to the human beings. Human beings are not constituted only with organs within their bodies:

The human microbiome is alive with trillions of microbial cells – bacteria, fungi, archaea, sometimes viruses, and other swarming microscopic organisms that make us all interspecies beings. (Oppermann and Iovino, 2017: 13)

24 Beryl Fletcher’s The Silicon Tongue is an example of how technology is a determiner on identity formation.

69

That is, human beings are already tied to other species that they otherize; it is these other species that also constitute what a human being is. This recognition of being tied to other species enables us to think that posthumans have close connections to nature, the Earth, and the animal as well as technology as Braidotti claims (2013: 66).

Braidotti explains, in her The Posthuman (2013), how a human being can become an animal and thus a posthuman: for her, the connection between human beings and animals lies in metaphorization (69): “animals [are] metaphorical referents for norms and values. Just think of the illustrious literary pedigree of the noble eagles²⁵, the

25 In bestiary, eagle is a noble animal because he is the first bird created and the one that can fly higher than the other birds (Theobald, 1928: 60). That is, it has a superior status among the other birds. The same idea is given in different lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s

“The Parliament of Fowls” as follows:

“Ther mighte men the royal egle finde,

That with his sharpe look perceth the sonne;” (Chaucer, “The Parliament of Fowls”, 9).

Another example from “The Parliament of Fowls” is as such:

“But to the point: Nature heeld on hir hond A formel egle, of shap the gentileste That evere she among hir werkes foond, The most benigne and the goodlieste:

In hire was every vertu at his reste,

So ferforth that Nature hirself hadde blisse

To looke on hire, and ofte hir beek to kisse.” (Chaucer, “The Parliament of Fowls”, 10)

70

deceitful foxes²⁶, the humble lambs²⁷[,]” (69). That is, for Braidotti human beings can become animals through metaphorization: metaphors, the implied comparisons between

26 Bishop Theobald explains how deceitful and cunning a fox is by making other animals his prey:

Lying as if he were dead, scarce even drawing a breath,

Crows or some other birds now thinking a corpse they will find him, Light on him hoping him food, if not to peck him to death,

Quickly the Fox rises up, and suddenly seizes one flying,

Which to a sad death he gives, tearing it up with his teeth. (1928: 73)

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, also points out the deceitful nature of a fox in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”: a “coal-tipped fox of sly iniquity” lurks round the place where the cock Chanticleer is (Chaucer, 1977: 243) with “his sisters and his paramours”, among whom there is the hen Lady Pertelote (233). Described as “new Iscariot, new Ganelon” and “Greek Sinon” (243), the characters notorious for their treachery and betrayal, the fox aims at murdering Chanticleer and the hens (243). The deceitful and sly nature of the fox lies in his utterances he tells Chanticleer:

‘Sir! Whither so fast away?

Are you afraid of me, that am your friend?

A fiend, or worse, I should be, to intend You harm, or practice villainy upon you;

Dear sir, I was not even spying on you!

Truly I came to do no other thing

Than just to lie and listen to you sing. (244-245)

With some more flattering utterances, Chanticleer is deceived and killed by the fox, and the tale is told by the nun’s priest as follows:

Sir Russel Fox leapt in to the attack,

71

two objects, people, or animals, relate one of these objects, people, or animals to the other by emphasizing their similarities. As stated earlier, human beings are interspecies beings and there are some similarities between human beings and animals, so some human qualities, like nobility, deceit, humbleness, loyalty, and shyness can be attributed to animals; that is, a connection between human beings and animals can be founded by changing the understanding of what an animal is. In posthumanism, animals are not the sub-humans of human beings; they do not have a lower position than human beings;

instead, they attain similar attributes and become like human beings; thus, they change form, and they become postanimal just as human beings who become posthuman when they attain the attributes of animals.

Then the question will be how human beings attain the attributes of animals.

Scientifically, for Darwin and Darwinian theorists, it appears that human beings are already posthumans from the very beginning because, as interspecies beings, they argue that human beings share some similar genes with animals. However, this is a very broad explanation of how they become posthuman as it disregards the differences between

Grabbing his gorge he flung him o’er his back And off he bore him to the woods, the brute, And for the moment there was no pursuit. (246)

27 In bestiary, the lamb is portrayed as Jesus Christ: “Christ destroys all sinners from Adam to us. St. John the Baptist says also ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.’” (Theobald, 1928: 58). The same utterance in the Bible is as follows: “The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” (New Testament, I John. 1.29 – 217)

72

human beings and animals.²⁸ To put it more explicitly then, one can become a posthuman when the human genes are intermingled with animal genes, which is not preferred nowadays because of the ethical side of issue. Yet, there is another way to make human beings posthuman, and that is through metaphorization, as Braidotti claims. If, for instance, a person has a very brave nature, he/she is resembled to a lion²⁹, or if he/she is very tall, he/she is resembled to a giraffe³⁰. If he/she immigrates from a place to another, the migratory nature of a bird is attributed to him/her. That is also the way how human-animal relation is founded, and how human beings become posthuman in the sense that either they change form, their physical appearance, or their mind changes and they feel like an animal, as in Grace Cleave in Towards Another Summer, by Janet Frame.