The Posthuman: Without It, Nothing Else is Possible

Abstract

The concept of the ‘posthuman’ seems to represent both a threat to our inherited understanding of the human and a challenge to the humanities as the academic disciplines best equipped to understand the human. Traditionally, the claim of the humanities was based on the premise that human beings are distinctive for their singular ability to use language, an ability that machines cannot duplicate. However, a review of the most influential accounts of language of the last two hundred years, including philology, structuralism, deconstruction, Chomskyan linguistics, and even the account given by evolutionary psychology reveals that an element of mechanism is a standard feature of this most human of attributes. In other words, the key element of posthumanity has always been incorporated into accounts of human language, and thus human being.

Keywords:

• posthuman
• Chomsky
• language
• machine

Notes

1 This was the view of the biologist and polymath Ernst Haeckel, who was impressed by the tree stemmata developed by philologists, and of the comparative linguist Max Müller. On the history of philology and the various returns to philology, see Harpham, 2011.

2 The transcription of the end of the question period suggests that de Man was exhausted: ‘Something being said there which is kind of important to me, which I think … which isn’t clear’ (de Man 1986b, 104).

3 On Skinner, see Chomsky, 1987, also Hermann and Chomsky, 1988. On ‘simply a responsive cog’, see Chomsky, 1975, 131. On ‘either a machine’, see Chomsky, 1979, 93.

4 On Rousseau, see Chomsky, 1987, 142–43; on Descartes, Chomsky, 1966, 4; Chomsky, 1987, 145. Descartes’ description of the animal is from Descartes, 1911/1978, 116.

5 Hauser’s arguments (Hauser 1996 and 2006) for a hardwired moral faculty have been placed in an akward context by his one-year suspension from the Harvard faculty after a finding of academic misconduct. See ‘Misconduct Found in Harvard Animal Morality Prof’s Lab’, New Scientist, 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19293-misconduct-found-in-harvard-animal-morality-profs-lab.html.

6 Which it already has, in the case of the European starling. See Gentner et al., 2006. The ‘neural Darwinism’ associated with Gerald Edelman confirms Chomsky’s intuition of human exceptionalism by positing recursion, or ‘reentrant signaling between neuronal groups’, as a specifically and exclusively human capacity, see Edelman, 1987. Perhaps the larger threat to the notion that recursion is the essence of the human is the emerging capacity of evolutionary computing programs to include ‘super-recursive algorithms’, see Burgin, 2005.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is director of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA. His many books include Shadows of Ethics, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, and, most recently, The Humanities and the Dream of America.

Correspondence to: Geoffrey Galt Harpham, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA. Email: [email protected]