Inhuman, all too (in)human—

Manifestos are contradictory, passionate and overblown, deploying stylistic ruptures so as to invoke—and usually provoke—some inkling of new thought that breaks with the baggage of the past. Yet, a manifesto must be held to account for its own principalia, especially if it seeks to accentuate its differences to the (posthuman) discourses that precede it.

Gary Hall’s Inhumanist Manifesto claims to advance the “inhuman” as a means to challenge the “liberal humanist” regime of data, copyright and authorship. The Inhumanist Manifesto declares that it eschews the authorial “I,” breaks with conventions of copyright and property, and embraces the collectivity of collaboration. It does so by undertaking an “attack” mode that “dare[s] to break with the conventions of polite academic ‘discussion’” (Hall, quoting Didier Eribon, 23).

So, in the spirit of the manifesto itself, I will do the same.

I must begin with the “I”: with the Subject of the manifesto critiquing the human-ist subject. The humanist subject is precisely that which is at stake in the Inhuman Manifesto. Hall calls for a revaluation of humanist but also posthumanist values, demanding theorists put their ideas into practice, particularly by engaging in collective and anticopyright publishing practices.

Yet it is here that the Manifesto indicates deeper tensions between the collective and the individual, between anticopyright and Hall’s need to possess theoretical postulates. For a manifesto dedicated to “interrogat[ing]…liberal humanist values and practices,” particularly “the individual proprietorial author” (20) as “universal subject” (23), the author nonetheless claims various arguments in the first person possessive, as found, for example, in “my theory of media” (13, 24, 28).

Hall suggests that his possessive media theory takes place through “differential authorial ‘I’s’, as it were—in order to transform my own work processes and produce something different” (22). One I, another I—what is the difference from serial solipsism? The text remains, in this reader’s eyes, marked by the same authoritative ‘I.’ Hall defends his multiple “I’s” in big, bold type by saying: “When I write ‘I’ here, I am not referring to myself in a naive sense, as if I am still operating according to a model of the sovereign, unified author as individual creative genius” (29). Denial, however, does not make for argument. Further, his possessive pronouns are coupled with a lack of citation—which is to say, recognition of the ideas of other ‘I’s. When I imagine texts that embrace a multiplicity of ‘I’s, they are infused with alterity, intertextuality, heteroglossia, idiom—dialogical forms that fragment the self as they incorporate their other(s) (see Bakhtin 1984; Kristeva 1967). Yet, where other(s) appear in this Manifesto, their authorial ‘I’s are mostly invisible, their scholarly work uncited (as I shall turn to next).

Hall likewise eschews all manner of autobiographic reflection, saying that “I provide very little in the way of autobiographical information…. Next to nothing about my life” (24)—a point which could be seen as circumventing the need to critique subject position and privilege, thus reinscribing the (white male) humanist subject through its supposed erasure. It is perhaps ironic that the work opens with the title “How I Came To Write A Manifesto,” where Hall quotes himself asking a question at a conference, before quoting himself again from his own book (3). So begins a practice of possessive self-citation, rather than, say, remixing or sampladelia of the other(s) (cf. Miller 2004). For a manifesto of anti-authorial principalia supposedly based on collectivist anti-copyright, Hall’s work does not seem to put into practice what it espouses.

As the conference question sets the agenda for what follows—from a gathering on contemporary art and the Anthropocene (Chthulu help us)—here it is in full:

OK, so the subject of our work as artists and writers may be concerned with the posthuman: with undermining the human’s “natural” boundaries with the animal, technology, and the environment, and dislodging the self-identical humanist subject...