Prometheus

The first rule of posthumanism is this: you don't understand posthumanism. Well, not really. At least, you shouldn't trust anyone who says he does, or who posts about it in his annoying meta-humor blog.

I remember back in college, when postmodernism was still something you could talk about without people rolling their eyes at you (okay, *as*many), and my lit. professor was saying how the new PT-Cruiser (does that make me old?) was postmodern because it was a new car that was built to look like an older model, and I constantly return to that comment as an excellent example of what postmodernism is really not quite like at all.

In the same vein, I find it funny when people claim utter ignorance of posthumanism while checking their phone for a new status-update or tweet without even consciously doing so. Because that's exactly not quite what posthumanism is. It isn't it in the same way that the PT-Cruiser is not postmodernism, and these examples are actually quite helpful, I think, along the lines of a Noh Drama being helpful in understanding what Zen Buddhism isn't. If this is pissing anyone off, by the way, they should be comforted in knowing that I share that feeling.

Why you should be frustrated with me, though, is because I haven't even mentioned Katherine Hayles yet, and this is the fourth paragraph of an attempt to delve into what it means to be posthuman (if you count that bit at the beginning as a paragraph, at least, which I think you sort of have to). She'd be the first to tell you, however, that she really isn't that important in the overall scheme of the subject, because we're all not really important in the overall scheme of anything that matters in the long run, because we're all pretty much sentient variables in a cultural paradigm that is wrestling with the consequences of every facet of the human experience being replicated through simulacra in some form of computer code. She's cool like that.

Simulacra - you probably stopped at that word, unless you happen to be a theory nerd like me, which you shouldn't be, because there's really no money in it. That's part of postmodernism. It's really Warhol. Sure, Baudrillard may have come up with the best definition as "that point when the simulation becomes so identical to the original that one cannot distinguish the difference" (that was a paraphrase, because I'm a *lazy* theory nerd), but Warhol was the one who actually went out and did it. Duchamp, also, and the dadaists were hinting at the simulacra with their anti-art post-representational representations of "this is not a pipe" and the toilet seat, but Warhol built a factory around the idea.

And I think it's worth noting that right now, at this very moment, I am switching browser tabs to see a picture posted on my facebook by my wife, of our cat, which is literally less than ten feet away from me, and clicking the "like" button to show my approval and support of that image (and her belly-fur comment). And that's the difference between postmodernism and posthumanism. Also, the gawddam spell-check still underlines "posthumanism" in red, while it leaves "postmodernism" alone. Those two things speak volumes to the difference between them. If postmodernism is Baudrillard, then posthumanism is Warhol - or, to be more precise, we're all Warhol now, and we carry our factories in our pocket or on our laps.

This idea is important. I say this because not only will you have to explain to your grandchildren what turning pages and putting discs in things was like, but because the underlying cultural overtones are kind of exploding into the constant question of what it means to be human. Not in that antiseptic, clinical, Platonic sense of human-writ-large, but in the praxis of our actual everyday waking moments. Our actual conscience. This thing right now. The words you're reading. Where is it? It's not on your laptop, or on your phone, or even in the servers that Google owns in their labyrinthine underground caverns of robot slaves and astronaut food, if you want to be technical (you just know they have robots and astronaut food down there). It's in all of those places, and yet nowhere at all. It's Schrodinger's Blog-post. But without the felinicide (and the not-felinicide).

I'm pretty sure that's what all the magic werepire fiction has been about this past decade, actually. And the zombies, but I can't seem to squeeze out a portmanteau for all three (zomberpire? Werepirombie? It just doesn't work). The subtext of all of them has been an exhaustive reevaluation of what we are, and how and why we think, and what gives us the right to dare differentiate ourselves from other animals, cryptozoological or otherwise. Turns out nothing. We spend a thousand or so years developing a complex system of gameplay that tests the very limits of cognitive human capacity (the word "checkmate" comes from the phrase "shah-mat," meaning "the king is dead," dontchaknow), and we're pwned by a computer in less than half a century.

And it doesn't even matter anymore that we built the computers. Not exactly the same way that it didn't matter that Dr. Frankenstein built the monster, but more in the sense that when you say "Frankenstein," no one ever thinks of the doctor. It's only a detail that traditionalists will point out. And maybe theory nerds. The posthuman Prometheus doesn't give a damn that he was named after a Greek myth, after all. And yes, this is definitely the worst review of that Ridley Scott film evar. Sorry about that.