The Fragility of Things
William E. Connolly (The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41(3) 399–412) thinks posthumanism and antihumanism most unfortunate titles for a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics.
He grasps the motivation behind those terms: exclusive humanism, secularism, omnipotent notions of divinity and scientism have often fostered cramped visions of culture, nature and the subtle imbrications between them. But many of us share such critiques of humanism and cultural internalism while seeking to emphasise care for the fragile condition of the human estate in its multiple entanglements with state politics, regional practices and nonhuman processes. Any title you pick is potentially susceptible to misrepresentation, as we have seen many times before. But those two titles almost invite it.
I agree about 'antihumanism' but I don't understand why he conflates the two. Posthumanism is not antihumanism, quite the contrary. What I like about posthumanism is exactly that it is not anti “care for the fragile condition of the human estate” and if it does invite misrepresentation, so be it. What doesn't? Connolly prefers speculative realism (which is the term Karen Barad proposes) and immanent naturalism ... but the ‘new materialism’ is acceptable, too, though I rather doubt whether it alone can dispose of the baggage many theists, dualists and traditional humanists insist upon heaping onto the terms ‘matter’ and ‘materialism’.
As if a single word, or even two, could dispose of all that baggage. But in any case 'the Fragility of Things' is a wonderful title, and there is a lot of good stuff in this article. I also love the idea of “a cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities of self-organization set on different scales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed”(1) even if Alexander R.Galloway is not interested in it. How could you not be?!
(I agree about the uninterestingness of Jordan Wolfson though.)
(1) This is a quote from Connelly's book of the same name, not from this article.