Postanthropocentrism

RELATED TERMS: Anthropo-Scenes; Anthropocene – Capitalocene – Chthulucene; Plantationocene; Humanism; Object-Oriented Ontology; Posthuman; Posthumanism; Speculative Realism

The idea of ‘postanthropocentrism’, which questions the human exceptionalism and methodological individualism of certain strands of humanist traditions, is a key focus of posthumanist thinking. It is a rethinking the human in its necessary relations to the nonhuman others, such as animals, machines, objects, systems, environments, for example, that form a necessary, but generally unrecognised, part of ‘being human’. (Herbrechter, 2013: 3)

The value of the concept of postanthropocentrism for design practices is that it invites a reconsideration of the relationships among the discursive, the narrative, the environmental and the human dimensions of the overall design, conceived as a field of actantiality. The narrative and the environmental are not supplements or additions to human being but are integral parts of an extended life/support system, in Sloterdijk’s terms, of which the human is part.

References

Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Herbrechter, S. (2013). Rosi Braidotti (2013) The Posthuman. [Book review]. Culture Machine, (April). Available at: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewFile/495/516