Postscript: On “the Living”
- PostscriptOn “the Living”
One of the hallmarks of posthumanism is ability to think about a variety of phenomena—phenomena that were previously lodged in ontologically or epistemologically discrete domains—in terms of dynamic, complex, nonlinear systems. Given that the movement from chaos theory to complexity theory and more recently to autopoiesis theory was made possible by shifting away from models derived from physics and mathematics, toward theoretical paradigms drawn from the life sciences (which are then redeployed to describe social, cultural, and political phenomena as well), an interesting question presents itself: what, if anything, is at stake in the difference between living and nonliving systems? Given the obvious interpenetration of living and nonliving systems in everything from biomedical to informatic systems, what, in short, is the specificity, the status, and the stake of “the living”? And how does the question of the living—that which is alive—complicate and challenge representational strategies by introducing problems of time, duration, movement, affect, and self-reference, in ways that in some sense pose a limit or barrier to what can be thought, known, drawn, and—more pointedly—rendered? [End Page 255]
Cary Wolfe, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, is completing the book What Is Posthumanism? (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press) and (with Branka Arsic) working on an edited collection, The Other Emerson. Founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press, his recent books include Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory and the edited collection Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003).
