Afterword: Posthumanism—Past, Present and Future

Of words and terms, I often think, they are what they do—or what can be done with them. I want to ask, in this brief afterword, not what posthumanism is but what it does, which is also a way of asking, what it does now and what might it do for those who still invoke it. So the point becomes to say, with Robert Sawyer, Monika Sosnowska, and the contributors “we have always been posthuman,” but also then to ask “what can and should we do with that now?” Although most references to origins are dubious (and the unsavory powers associated with them), I start with two early invocations of both postmodernism and the posthuman, fully aware, in the context of this special issue, that it would be no surprise to succumb to the temptation to add “early” before any use of the term modern, modernism, or modernity, or to substitute “early modern” for any of the references to either modernism or postmodernism. This was of course very much on my mind in the years of collaboration with Scott Maisano on the volume Renaissance Posthumanism, which we thought of not as a variety of posthumanism but as an attempt to understand how the stage for later (including recent) disenchantment with and the de-centering of the human was more than capaciously set by the thinkers and the writers at heart of anything one might call Renaissance humanism. In the heady days of 1976, as postmodernism was taking root both as a way of describing the world and as a staple of academic discourse, Ihab Hassan seems to have coined the term “posthumanist” in “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture,” which was first the keynote address at the International Symposium on Postmodern Performance and then later a published text appearing in the Georgia Review. “Prometheus as Performer”