BOOK REVIEW

What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2010. Pp. xxxiv+357.

As with many post- configurations, posthumanism is a term that elicits suspi-

cion from some critics and scholars. Humanism is also such a term, and Cary
Wolfe opens his aptly titled What Is Posthumanism? with a definition of
humanismunfortunately, in this case, from Wikipedia. While the meta-
critical moment here may be thematically clever, the books straightforward
title suggests, appealingly, that some precision lies behind the cover, and its
opening recourse to what the internet says feels coy (Wolfes clearest state-
ment about humanism comes on page 99). It takes a little while for Wolfes
sense of his own key terms to emerge with any tensile clarity, but one valu-
able point is made very carefully in the introduction: posthumanism is not a
rejection of the category of the human. Wolfe is critical of N. Katherine Hay-
less How We Became Posthuman (1999), asserting that the ground tone of
that well-known book is to associate the posthuman with a kind of trium-
phant disembodiment.1 On the other hand, Wolfe points out, his use of
the term, which names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human
being in not just its biological but also its technological world, is exactly the
opposite: posthumanism in my sense isnt posthuman at allin the sense
of being after our embodiment has been transcendedbut is only post-
humanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and
autonomy, inherited from humanism itself (xv).
Throughout What Is Posthumanism? Wolfe attacks what he interprets as
the fantasies of scientists, artists, philosophers, activists, and others about
what constitutes the human. Wolfe, editor of the Posthumanities series at

1. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,

and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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 Book Review E137

University of Minnesota Press, which includes important contributions

such as Donna Haraways When Species Meet (2007), is renowned as an articu-
lator of the link between posthumanism and the question of the animal,
as Derrida frames it in his late writing on animals (seen in The Animal That
Therefore I Am).2 Wolfe is a theorist of posthuman animality studies, aspiring
to change the view of animals as diminished or crippled versions of that
fantasy figure called the human (45) and to highlight the move, as Mar-
ianne DeKoven also advocates in Why Animals Now? (an essay that refer-
ences Wolfe), beyond human-only and only-human paradigms (367).3
For Wolfe, as he elaborates in the books most compelling, and lengthy,
chapter, Flesh and Finitude: Bioethics and Philosophy of Living, the ani-
mal question is part of the larger question of posthumanismthe question
of who and what can count as a subject of ethical address (49).
But while animality studies, or animal studies (its adherents often dis-
agree about terminology in this expanding field) occupies a large portion
across multiple chapters of Wolfes focus, this area is not the only subject,
or even, in terms of coverage, the primary subject, of this long study. What
Is Posthumanism? performs a kind of virtuoso roving criticality over its ten
chapters, taking on through what feels like sheer energetic determination
a wide range of cultural practices and objects. (Of the ten chapters in What
Is Posthumanism? nine were previously published, and some were published
more than twice.) Wolfe analyzes contemporary art (drawing and installa-
tion), Lars von Triers infamous musical film and Bjork vehicle Dancer in
the Dark (2000), Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Maus urban landscape design
Tree City for Torontos Downsview Park, Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Dil-
lers architectural project Blur, Ralph Waldo Emersons essays, Wallace Ste-
venss philosophical poetry, and Brian Eno and David Byrnes album My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), among other sources of intellectual inspira-
tion. The book feels invested in demonstrating that there is no area of cul-
ture and interrelation that is untouched by the relevance of posthumanist
insight and practice.
Across animality studies and The Idea of Order at Key West and Brian
Eno, what is consistent in What Is Posthumanism? is a heavy emphasis on
deconstruction and on systems theory. This book is centrally about systems
theoryspecifically, what Wolfe identifies as the second-order systems
theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, which followed the first-
order systems theory of people like MITs Norbert Weiner, the mathemati-
cian regarded as the originator of cybernetics. If first-order systems theory

2. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Maller and trans. David Wills
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
3. Marianne DeKoven, Why Animals Now? PMLA 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 36169.

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 E138 MODERN PHILOLOGY

was interested in feedback, second-order systems theory, as Wolfe tirelessly

excavates, is interested in emergence and self-organization. Wolfe is deeply
smitten with systems theory and with Luhmann (192798), and large (too
large) portions of the majority of his chapters are given over to quotations
from Luhmann. If the book has one takeaway, besides the takedown of that
old critical punching bag liberal humanism, then it might be summa-
rized, simply, as: systems theory is relevant to everythinganimals, Emer-
son, what have youand people ought to start paying more attention.
The other, related theoretical anchor in Wolfes book is deconstruction;
Derrida is his main intellectual interlocutor across the diverse terrain of the
study. Wolfe, in his opening, manifesto-like chapter Meaning and Event;
or, Systems Theory and The Reconstruction of Deconstruction, argues
that the joining of forces between deconstruction and systems theory is
crucial (26). They share a conceptual rivet point; in Wolfes view of systems,
via Luhmann, these are self-referential and self-producing, which means
they are autopoietic, a keyword for Wolfe introduced in the early 1970s by
the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturala and Francisco Varela. In Wolfes
view, both systems theory and deconstruction turn on what Luhmann
names openness from closure (15). The formal dynamics of self-refer-
ence, iterability, and recursivity are also articulated by deconstruction
which, writes Wolfe, needs systems theory to help carry out work toward
which it has . . . only gestured (24). Wolfe is so attracted to systems the-
oryand so devoted to demonstrating Luhmanns wide reach to just about
everythingbecause it is functional as opposed to ontological. Its postu-
lates replace the familiar ontological dichotomies of humanism (culture/
nature, mind/body, spirit/matter, reason/feeling, and so on) with the func-
tional distinction system/environment (254). Further, systems theory
replaces what questions with how questions; it amplifies deconstruction
by linking its knowledges to historical emergence and the specificity of par-
ticular social forms (26). And while neither deconstruction nor systems
theory is the same thing as posthumanism, it can help us, in Wolfes view,
draw the insights of these methodologies and practices forward.
This is most clear in Wolfes writing on an established area of his exper-
tise, the question of the animal. His chapters on animality studies some-
times feel unwieldy, but thats because they are ambitious: choppy but full
of insight and clarity. The constitution of the field and its objects of analysis
are broken down expertly by Wolfe. Although he sometimes fall prey to soft
targets, like bioethics textbooks, he effectively takes on prejudice based
on species difference, rejecting, among other philosophies, the (anthro-
pocentric) rights discourse of Martha Nussbaum as the wrong axis and
the analytic philosophy of Peter Singer as similarly, in its utilitarian calcu-
lus, missing the mark, because it avoids the stuff of ethics in avoiding the
ordeal of ethics in its sum-based formulations. Whats fascinating in these

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 Book Review E139

chapters is how clear the insights of posthumanism are (philosophical

work that takes on the moral status of nonhuman animals is posthumanist)
and how deft Wolfe is addressing subtleties of argument and also address-
ing the most core of core issues, such as the fundamental one of the defini-
tion of the ethical. Wolfe lands on a sense of the ethical, through Derrida,
as a struggle, the unforecloseable, a practice of eternal vigilance (96).
Where Wolfe is less convincing is in, for instance, his analysis of contem-
porary art. Outside of his examinations of animality studies, in which he
captures nuance, both praising and pointing to limitations in the philoso-
phy of Cora Diamond, for instance, in his later chapters he tends to pair fig-
ures, one good and one bad, or he tends to simply hold up work as exem-
plary (part of the films genius [188]; the genius of Blur [229]). This
results in unconvincing chapters like From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-
Dark Bunnies, on the drawer and printmaker Sue Coe, author of a book
project called Dead Meat (1995), and the installation artist Eduardo Kac.
Wolfe is not particularly sensitive to media aesthetics and the difference in
platform of these artists (its immediately obvious who is going to be the
criticized artist and who will be the revered one). His analysis of still images
lacks energy and rigor, even as he argues that Coes images lack sophistica-
tion in their supposed sentimentality, their witnessing. If the ethical func-
tion of art is what Coe thinks it is, why not just show people photographs of
stockyards, slaughterhouses, and the killing floor to achieve this end? he
asks clumsily (152). His revulsion with Coe extends a familiar fear of the
visualparticularly of visual display (one criticism is of her works pleni-
tude: nothing is hidden, he complains) (152). Further, it is surprising that
Wolfe does not bring Adornos crucial essay Commitment into the dis-
cussion, as its schema of committed artwork versus art that struggles
against itself maps exactly onto what Wolfe argues about Coe and Kac. In
this chapter, as elsewhere, Wolfes analysis also falls prey to favoring an
artists own interpretation and intentiona tension in his methodology,
as it seems a very unposthumanist critical procedure.
On the key topic of vision and visuality, Wolfe is prone in spots to
rehearse commonplaces about mastery and visuality, its role as the human
sensory apparatus par excellence (162) and our lust for the visual and its
(humanist) centrality (163). Kacs installations are praised for decenter-
ing or displacing visuality. In Wolfes reading of von Triers Dancer in the
Dark, the protagonists agency grows with lack of vision. Luhmann opens
up Emerson because he demonstrates observation without vision. And so
forth. Since the book is so engaged with Haraway, the absence of her tex-
tured and important take in The Persistence of Vision feels profound,
like a missed step; it might have complicated matters productively. Haraway
writes, I would like to proceed by placing metaphorical reliance on a
much maligned sensory system in feminist discourse: vision. Vision can be

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 E140 MODERN PHILOLOGY

good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insist on the embod-
ied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been
used to signify a leap out of the marked body (677).4
Luhmann and the insights of systems theory make plausible but not
always compelling frameworks for every chapter. The strength of What Is
Posthumanism?its ranginess, its thoroughness in examining the system
(what Wolfe thinks of as a detotalized totality)is also in some parts a defi-
cit, and the book, although evidently learned, can be repetitive. This collec-
tion is not one to sit down and read from start to finish, but it is a book in
which to sampleespecially its passionate posthumanist grapplings with
animals, which constitute an intellectual core of the studyand Wolfes
ambitions for enacting and widening the purview of systems theory is admi-
rable and ambitious. In the end, one does in fact come away with a useful
series of propositions about posthumanism. Perhaps the most simple uni-
tes everything Wolfe is interested in: we are not we. . . . Rather, we are
always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very beingnot just in
the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerabil-
ity . . . but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and
technicity of a language (89). The human is always heterogeneous to the
human.
Hillary Chute
University of Chicago

4. Donna Haraway, The Persistence of Vision, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment
and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1997), 28395.

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