Glossary

Postanthropocentrism

Postanthropocentrism marks the deprivileging of the human as the basis through which to comprehend, evaluate, and position ourselves from within a Planetary framework. Epistemologically, it is a recognition that the Planetary is not dependent upon our perception, nor judgment of it (it exists in its own terms with or without us); and ethically it is an acknowledgement that the ‘value’ of nonhuman life, or ecosystems at large, cannot be reduced to the metric of how it serves “human interests”. [1] While the ‘hard’ sciences have been able to navigate within this framework with “relative ease,” [2] the legacy of European traditions bolstering human centrality as a dominant perspective (i.e. Humanism) proves more challenging, as it requires a reorientation in forms of coexistence. Similar to other conceptual ‘traumas’ in the histories of human thought (from Copernican heliocentrism, to evolutionary theory), postanthropocentrism is a “sobering process of disidentification” and defamiliarization from naturalized values and perspectives, which demands “becoming relational in a complex and multidirectional manner”. [3]

Postanthropocentrism, however, is not by default a progressive, or socially just orientation. The term can be used to depoliticize the history of climate emergency by flattening accountability across the spectrum of humanity, or as Rosi Braidotti points out, a Capitalist postanthropocentrism may cynically “democratize” the value of all living organisms in the treatment of human and nonhuman life-forms as a mere resource. [4] Following feminist and decolonial practices that have critically dismantled naturalized representations of gender and race within the inter-human community, postanthropocentrism extends upon such legacies in relation to nonhuman life-worlds, probing how subject formation emerges from an interdependent self-understanding. Postanthropocentrism is not a disavowal of humanness, nor our anthropomorphic existential condition, but a relational position in life-worlds that exist beyond our resemblance, and certainly not exclusively ‘for’ us.

[1] Katie McShane, “Anthropocentrism vs. Nonanthropocentrism: Why Should We Care?,” in Environmental Values 16, 2007: 169–185.
[2] Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. R. Grusin, (Minneapolis: Minnesota university Press, 2017), 30.
[3] Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. R. Grusin, (Minneapolis: Minnesota university Press, 2017), 30.
[4] Ibid., 31.

Author: Patricia Reed