Abstract: Ever since its founding in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, modern knowledge production and dissemination have been marked by disciplinary splits and inequalities. The primary of these divisions is that between the who and the what or subject and object, the knowledge of the human and the knowledge of the world. This again is split into the pure and the applied, knowledge “for its own sake” and knowledge “for making a better world.” Over six hundred years of the modern knowledge project it is clear that the “will to power” has been the driver of “the will to knowledge,” and the will to create a better world is better understood as the will to dominate and exploit the world as its “other” and “the others” of the world. This is what is behind the conflicted doubleness of the voyages of discovery and the white man’s burden as other names for colonialism and apartheid. Today, in a post-Saidean world of scholarship, we realize that colonialisnm is also another name for the essentializing patronage of Orientalism. The obscure roots of Orientalism and its inverse nativist affirmation in right-wing nationalisms can be traced back to the epistemological project of the Enlightenment and its seeking for a universal and absolute classification of essences. Nation souls as the subjective correlate of nation states are conjured by its prophetic gaze just as the discourse of positivist rationalism conjures the secular state. Humanism, also born with the Renaissance, has equally marked our age and is almost synonymous with it. As with Orientalism and secularism, romanticism and classicism, imagination and reason, the defnition of the human has shifted between polarities beginning with a mental-vital sensibility but changing to a pure rationality as the ordering power of the world. The sytemic and systematic turn of this faculty led by the will to power has brought us to our present moment of greatest technological triumph, which is at the same time, our moment of greatest impotence in the face of an ecosystem we have shattered. But even as huge cracks appear on the freeways of capital, its agents, oblivious of their presence,continue to advance its technologies and sophisticated systems at the service of the delirious madness of profit-making, production and consumption on the one hand and political ideologies on the other. These technologies become ever more ubiquitous so that we are less and less able to recognize the human with which this age started. Implanted and prostheticized by technology, we may well disappear into machines tomorrow as puppet subjects of capital and ideology. But what of our humanity? In a posthuman age, humanity seems a sad anachronism that lost its relevance long ago. Or did it suffer the misfortune of falling into the binary shadow of technology, harping on nature, romanticism, imagnation and intuition at the cost of the artificial and the technical? It is high time we changed our vision of the relation between the disciplines, those of the who and the what and the how, humanities, sciences an technologies. But to do this we need first to change our will from a will to instrumentalization and consumption, what Nietzsche called the will to nihilism, to the will to becoming, from the technologies of capital and ideology to the technoologies of soul-making. With this shift, a new vision of individuation and transindividuation may be ours, resting on a co-constitution of the humanities, sciences and technologies.Reorienting
I would like to start by unpacking my title in its terms and relations. To “re-orient” is to orient once again. I’ll come to this repetition at the end of my discussion but to “orient” is to locate and direct. The term is related to the rising sun and its direction, the east. It brings to mind ancient rituals of sun salutation and circumambulation but thinking of historical traces closer to our times, it reminds us of the voyages of discovery of 16th c. Europe, a turning to the east, as it were, for an expansive movement of the will to knowledge, but more insidiously behind it, for the will to power, for the possession, enjoyment and exploitation of colonialism. It reminds us of the nautical compass, an emblem of technology, and the journeys glorified and mythologized in the west which were really a hunt for gold. Let us remember that Christopher Columbus went West in search of India in a ship named The Golden Hind and named the people he found “Indians,” a misnomer that stuck for five centuries and is used by a large number of people even today. One may thus say that the orientation of 16th c. Europeans created their own orient however they saw it.
Humanism
This brings us to the “Orient” in the title and to its qualifier “posthumanist.” “Posthumanism” is a contemporary term and refers to a historical overpassing of “humanism.” This is not necessarily “the human” but the “ism” or ideology by which the human is defined. Indeed this term can be traced in its present sense to the same orienting epoch of the 16th c., which itself was really a “re-orientation” from its prior trajectory and a “return” to a previous one, hence a “new birth” or renaissance. The European Renaissance can be thought of synonymously with Humanism, as it was a “re-orientation” from a centering in the institutionalized God of the Christian Church to the discovery of the Human as the source of Knowledge and achievement, a return to the philosophical and cultural humanism of Hellenic or Classical Greece. Aristotle’s definition of the human as a unique conjunction of rational and animal souls or with the feeling function of the animal rationalized by its conjunction with reason, came to occupy the center of a new epoch of discovery as imaged by Leonardo da Vinci in his Vitruvian Man. Within a couple of centuries however, this definition saw some orienting shifts by a variety of means, a major influence being the philosophy of Deism, which held that God had endowed Man with his own creative faculty, Reason, so that he could complete the work of rationally perfecting the world that God had left for him. This shifted the definition of the human to a quasi-divine rationality, an ordering intelligence whose place on earth was to know the laws that made all things predictable, in the image of a clockwork universe. This subordination of the sensible to the rational inaugurated one of the most foundational binaries that characterize our understanding of the human in this Age, the Age of the Enlightenment. It is with us still, which is partly why it informs our discussion of the Humanities today.
This shift in the idea of the human in the Enlightenment cannot be over-emphasized. Though the image of a clockwork universe saw a good deal of nuancing, particularly by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, the idea of Reason as the essence of the Human, by the application of which both the who and the what, subject and object would yield up their secrets and lead to a perfect world, is the systemic and systematic turn constituting the epistemological project which characterizes our times, ever since the Enlightenment, a project immanent in the modern knowledge academy that is ubiquitous and to which we are all yoked by dint of by being born in this Age. Though the form of the modern university as we know it now comes from the 19th c., its roots are in the Renaissance and more properly the European Enlightenment. Behind it is the faith that total or absolute knowledge is the birthright and within the grasp of the Human, the human of Humanism, whose rationality penetrates his animality and all animality and all materiality, to become the Knower to whom the world belongs.
We started with the orienting drive of the voyages of discovery and saw how their so-called epistemological nobility was a cover for the will to power as colonialism, the possession, domination and exploitation of the non-west. This surreptitious aim of Power was ubiquitous to the systematic epistemological project of the modern knowledge academy, something that has made many contemporary thinkers view colonialism as the very heart of modernity, even in our postcolonial age, characterized by Jurgen Habermas as a “colonization of the lifeworld,” but truly far more pervasive, a geopolitics, biopolitics and psychopolitics that unleashes an order of thanatopolitics, a binary of life and death based on who gets to be admitted into the club of the Human, the Master of the neocolonial neo-liberal global “non-human” world.
The absolute hubris, the binaries and privileges of the modern knowledge academy are implicit from its early beginnings in its recognition of the curious imbalance between its infinite ambition and the finite lives of its workers in the choice of its systematic methods. System in the academy manifests itself in three major categories – disciplinarity of subject categories, methodicity in research and standards of protocol in archiving. These are meant to make sure that a body of accumulated knowledge develops that is impersonal and universal, so that anyone at any time and anywhere may enter it to add to it or utilize it. Of these systemic devices what concerns us particularly here is disciplinarity, the classification of subject areas into a tree structure with potentially infinite specialized leaves, with the assumption of an additive integration developing total knowledge at some vanishing point. This model brings to light the ubiquitous nature of arboretic classification in modernity, a paradigm characteristic of rational knowledge, due to its ontology of non-exclusive discreteness and derivative arrangement. These two factors, (a) that in a scheme, any identifiable location is unique and non-interchangeable and (b) that locations are structured according to fixed assignable ancestries, are at the very heart of the ordering mechanism of modernity, whether we understand order in terms of knowledge or power – i.e. of espitemology, the order of the world or coloniality or governmentality, the lines of ordering populations and activities as in commanding them.
The first implies an identification of essences and the second that of priorities. The very first distinction one may think of here is that between the who and the what, the subject and the object, in terms of knowledge, the humanities and the human sciences as against the material sciences, earth sciences and life sciences, forming the pure sciences; and technologies forming the applied sciences. As we have seen, however much the pretension to knowledge of the Renaissance may have privileged the subject and the study of the humanities, philosophy and theology and the pure sciences, with the progress of the Enlightenment the will to power as the driver of the will to knowledge became gradually more overt, leading to a privileging of the sciences over the humanities and of technology over the pure sciences, as the age proceeded. This is particularly so in the case of the university at the turn of the 19th/20th c., with the image of the ordered field of knowledge and of society and politics having little need in its for the arts or for philosophy.
The Orient
We have yet to think of the posthuman, but let us turn to the Orient, as those who oriented themselves towards it did. We have noted that they did so for the purposes of possession and exploitation, as in colonialism. But the matter is not as simple as that. The Enlightenment definition of the human as a rational being is not something that colonialism could shake off easily. This definition is after all extended universally to all humans, and haunts the colonizing enterprise as “the white man’s burden.” This is what constituted the conflicted heart of colonialism, the othering of non-western populations that went hand-in-hand with the bestowal of universal humanity upon them. It was this conflict that was capitalized by Indian nationalists, for example. We are quite familiar with Gandhi’s hunger fasts and rhetoric that played upon the conscience of the British. Yet, while colonialism lasted, the white man’s burden had to be accompanied with other arguments that could stop short from accepting the full humanity of the native. As Edward Said pointed out in 1978, Orientalism was one of these arguments, a back-handed compliment that constructed the Orient as the Other of the Occident, contemplative, spiritual, imaginative and fatalistic in opposition to the rational, materialistic and free-willing West. Of course, many of the Orientalists were projecting a Romantic critique of Enlightenment modernity onto the East as its essence. But in doing so they were helping to locate the Orient in the arboretic classification of Enlightenment racism and ethnocentrism as a different kind of and subordinate human, in Homi Bhabha’s phrase, “not quite/not white.”
Colonialism conjured Nationalism as its own inverse in the arboretic position-play of the mind. Though it would be simplistic to see only two positions of address within colonialism – there are several in-between and at least one extreme, the refusal of humanity, apartheid – for our purposes we can see how Nationalism retorted with varieties of response that clustered around and polarized into a secular humanism and a religious essentialism. Again, this is not to suggest that the early response of cultural politics in Bengal that has been called the Bengal Renaissance can be reduced to religious essentialism or that complex leaders such as Gandhi can be categorized in either response, but these were the polar positions into which the response crystallized over time and emerged in a postcolonial India. Today, seventy years after independence, we have learned that it is no longer necessary to define the human in terms of rationality, and that the identity politics of religious and ethnic essentialism can be a will to power that needs no more rationality than colonialism as its justification, to capture the science and technology to order its own mythological world. Moreover, it is neither the only nor the first to do so. Right-wing nationalism is rising undisguisedly all around us, a sign of the bankruptcy of Enlightenment humanism and a form of posthumanism or alter-humanism.
The will to power, as with the re-orientation of the voyages of discovery we started with, was never primarily interested in knowledge except as it served the purposes of power and possession/consumption, in other words of political hegemony and of capital. Technology, as with shipbuilding and the maritime compass, served this purpose, as did the science of administration and management, but what these applied orders of rationality served were the delirious fantasies of absolute power and enjoyment.
Humanities and Technology
Returning now to disciplinarity and the last part of my title, from the early 20th c., the split between the humanities and the sciences and technologies grew increasingly into an unbridgeable gulf, technology more and more directly the handmaiden of capital in a colonial and industrial political economy, with the Humanities in a precarious position either as part of the justificatory machinery of this economy or integrated into it as its pleasure industries. Embedded within an institutional complex of publishing houses, educational institutions, museums, critics, advertising, speculation, collection and consumption, all dependent on capital or political patronage for support, Humanities in the modern world found itself cornered, a compromised guest in a foreign territory. Its place of independence with regard to the spiritual life, the life of creative expression, of human conscience or of the definition of the human was swept under the carpet, philosophy reduced to natural philosophy, today better known as science. This divide between the humanities and sciences was recognized by C. P. Snow in his famous essay “The Two Cultures” but in that essay he was not clear about the reasons for the peripheral and alienated place of the humanities in our times, or about what has led to the necessity of its politicization against the hegemonic regime of capital and its instrumentalization of the human.
As a world phenomenon, from the early 20th c., the Humanities have largely rejected mainstream populations to focus on the one hand on experimental expressions of subjectivity and on the other, on political responses to the dehumanization and social injustices of our times. The first of these directions, an experimental subjective precision in expression gave a sense of renewed purpose and spiritual realism to modernism in the early decades of the last century, but the shadow of gloom that spread across the world from the second world war on has plunged the Humanities into an age of cynicism and absurdism, in which a nomadic politics of the periphery against the regime of capital is the only way the human spirit has kept itself alive in an isolated culture.
It is almost a given in our times of pervasive cyber-technology that it is technology that makes us human. An average person of our time carries a sense of superiority with respect to history due to the intuition of advanced technology which marks our time. We live in a time when our mediating ontology is technological. We live within a new medium, a cyber-virtuality which we take for granted just like the air we breathe. At the same time we are increasingly prostheticized and implanted with technology, so that it exists inside and outside us. Very soon, if we go by the predictions of the transhumanists, the technological medium will have disappeared into us and we will disappear into the technological medium. Is this the fulfillment of the humanist phase, its supersession or its obsolescence? Clearly we are at a frontier of history when the Humanist image of the human to quote Michel Foucault is a face in the sand being swiftly erased by the incoming tide.
Yet it is nationalist ideology and consumerist technology that drive the levers effecting this erasure. It is neo-liberal globalization and ideological mythology that instrumentalize us and virtualize us and our world. Their objectives profile and target us from within and without giving us our packaged and franchised dreams and turning us into passionate subjects willing to fight for them as for ourselves. When we seem most free we are most bound by the internalized technologies of what Gilles Deleuze called the control societies of our time. Our critical faculty faces obsolescence in this tide and the fire that perhaps truly makes us human is no longer ours, parasited by ideology and capital. In Nietzsche’s view, as expressed in Thus Spake Zarathustra, this is the image of the Last Man, expressing the will to nihilism, the destruction of the true forces of life. What makes us human, according to Nietzsche, is neither our rationality nor an essence of being that distinguishes us, whether a species essence, or a racial, ethnic or religious essence. It is the will to power over our own limitations, it is the will to becoming greater than ourselves, equal to the gods. Though it is not clear if in Nietzsche, who is so full of disdain towards Christian pity, whether this becoming-greater is also a becoming larger, more inclusive, it is important for us to heed his message and apply a constructive hermeneutic to its understanding, as done by Deleuze and Guattari. A will to become-other, applied to the global problems of our time, can include a becoming-minor, becoming-animal, becoming-earth, becoming-cosmos.
In heeding this message, we find that Nietzsche’s definition of the human as a structure of becoming is indeed a “re-orientation,” as it comes from the mouth of an Oriental, the Persian prophet Zoroaster. A constructive hermeneutic of this kind can find a similar message for the human emanating from ancient India. In the Shatapatha Brahmana (XIII:6), Narayana is a seer or rishi who conceives of an aspiration of becoming all that is in the cosmos and all that is beyond the cosmos. He thus defines the scope of the human as a will to becoming that is radically infinite. In modern times this finds expression in a major figure of the Bengal Renaissance, Aurobindo Ghosh (aka Sri Aurobindo):
Thought is not essential to existence nor its cause, but it is an instrument for becoming; I become what I see in myself. All that thought suggests to me, I can do; all that thought reveals in me, I can become. This should be man’s unshakable faith in himself, because God dwells in him. (Thoughts and Glimpses, CWSA Vol. 16, p. 378).
This is much more than a tenet of positive thinking, it is the tenet of becoming-other, not of having more or of social becoming, which is only another kind of having, occupying a position in a static order of being maintained by the regime of our present ontology. Becoming-other implies a different kind of psychology than the rational individualism of the cogito in Descartes or Kant or the bounded ego of Freud. We have to think of other models of psychology and ontology such as Deleuze’s virtuality or plane of immanence or of impersonal planes of consciousness in Indian psychology with which the individual could identify. In the work of Michel Foucault, it is this will to becoming that has been stolen from the human by the state, by capital and by religion. They implant their goals of being and having in us in the form of conscience, through what Freud called the superego or Lacan, the phallocentric figure of the Father. They discipline us through technologies of surveillance, confession and punishment on the one hand and by the pleasure industries supported by technologies of desire-production on the other. The recovery of the will to becoming is the first need of the human in our times, a posthumanist redefinition or re-orientation of the human. Michel Foucault sees this as a project of inverting the technologies of capital and ideology, replacing them with the subjective technologies of soul-making. A posthumanist Orient can contribute and participate in this need of our times through a constructive hermeneutics of the cultural archives of becoming cosmic held, for example, in the history of Indian philosophies, psychologies and cultures. The subjectivity of such a re-orientation of the human opens up a new scope for the humanities in our place and time.
And what of technology and its stranglehold on us today? Technology as an instrument of the human domination of the cosmos has brought us to our present moment of greatest triumph, which is at the same time, our moment of greatest impotence in the face of an ecosystem we have shattered. But even as huge cracks appear on the freeways of capital, its agents, oblivious of their presence, continue to advance its integrated technologies and sophisticated systems at the service of profit-making, production and consumption on the one hand and political ideologies on the other. However, in a post-Covid world, the failures of our civilization will continue to grow more apparent alongside our desperate patchwork attempts to stem the tide of dystpoia. New contested borderlands will appear for those who seek new definitions of the human and new relations with the world. We have already seen in the late work of Michel Foucault that the will to power, turned into a will to becoming, inverts the social technologies of subjection to the subjective technologies of soul-making. With this inversion, we can develop a new understanding of external technologies as well, as theorized by thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler. Extending our technologies from the inside out, we can see our external technologies as an extended organology. Contemporary media technologies are materializing human cultural history into a contemporary spatiality. Stiegler is particularly concerned with the archives of cultural memory that are all around us in and as technology and available to us as a tertiary form of universal memory that can be manipulated from the outside by the forces of capital and ideology but that can, if we recover our will to becoming, be the circuits of long-term memory shared, reinterpreted and participated in by communities of collective transindividuation building the polis of another kind of posthumanist future. Transindividuation is not a collection of individuals bound by a social contract and governed from above by laws, it is not even intersubjectivity, it is a will to conscious collective individuality, a braiding of individuations into a collective individual conscious of itself in all of its individuals. Such communities imply a different political economy, one of fraternal anarchism. A participatory community of this kind with porous goals of becoming can be constituted by shared genealogies of collective memory materialized by technologies and interpreted by the humanities. Technology, seen in this light, in no longer an alienated antagonist of the Humanities, not even a Form in which the Humanities can reside as Content, but as co-constituents of our collective ontology or ontogenesis, as psychologically part of us and as instrumental to our Humanities as our personal memory, perpetually stored and perpetually reinterpreted in our collective participation in a transindividuating cosmogenesis.