Posthuman Dialogues in International Relations

Erika Cudworth, Stephen Hobden, Emilian Kavalski, Erika Cudworth, Stephen Hobden, Emilian Kavalski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781409461913
• eBook ISBN: 9781317041917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Posthumanism represents a significant new research direction both for International Relations and the social sciences. It emerges from questions about inter-species relations which challenge dominant perceptions of what it means to be human. Rather than seeing the human species as 'in nature' posthumanist thinking considers the species as 'of nature'. The work of posthumanist thinkers has sought to dispute accepted notions of what it means to be human, raising profound questions about our relations with the rest of nature. The volume commences with an overview of the influence thinkers have had on the development of posthumanist thinking.

Key ideas in International Relations are interrogated and reconceptualised and specific case studies are presented with a focus on inter-species relations. The work allows for a consideration of the limits of the posthumanist move and provides space for critics to argue that such an approach opens the discipline up to a biological determinism, and that a focus on inter-human relations should mark the boundaries of the discipline. The essays collected in this volume provide an overview of contributions from posthumanist thinkers with the particular intention of providing a succinct introduction to the area and should appeal to scholars and students in Politics, IR and philosophy.

1 Animals and human constitution

Greek lessons, posthuman possibilities

Caleb J. Basnett

When the ‘mad Socrates’, Diogenes the Cynic – or, Diogenes the Dog (ho kyonikos) – was asked to which political community he belonged, he is said to have responded that he was kosmopolites – a ‘citizen of the world’ (Laertius 2005: VI: ¶63). Though the word ‘cosmopolitan’ today conjures images of liberal worldliness and upper class international mobility, it is worth recalling these ‘animal’ beginnings. Diogenes took up residence in Athens after being exiled from his home in Sinope. Infamous for shunning popular conventions to such an extent that he became known as the ‘dog’ (kyon), in claiming to be kosmopolites Diogenes transformed his ‘animal’ status into a political challenge: rather than being deprived of citizenship, Diogenes claimed to be a member of a polity that did not yet exist. This challenge ought also to be understood as a challenge to politics conceived as a uniquely human sphere, for Diogenes’ ‘cynical’ or ‘doglike’ disposition involves rejecting not only the definition of citizenship current in his day, but challenges the association between concepts of human being and citizenship more broadly. Rather than accept the borders that structured his world and which had left him excluded, Diogenes makes it possible to imagine a transgression of the borders that both define polities and produce subjects,¹ where ‘subject’ is understood as a confluence of knowledge, speech, and action that gives shape to experience. We might recover this challenge, I shall argue, in the interest of a different kind of polity, and a different kind of subject.

Diogenes’ insights have largely been overlooked, however.² Rather than reject the idea of citizenship as being fundamentally linked to the concept of humanity, we have seen humanity time and again confirmed as that with which one must be identified in order to become a citizen. In this sense, we might call ‘human’ the most expansive range of subjective coordinates outlined by our borders. The capacities, tendencies, and even essence of the human subject has broadly been understood as the basis of politics, and more particularly, theories of international relations, which take among the constant variables they expect to persist over time the subject to whom politics applies. From the Melian Dialogue to Realism and its liberal critics, the basic structure of human relations and the possibilities for cooperation and conflict are found to reside in the structure of this subject. Yet without sufficiently taking into account how this human subject is produced by the societies in question or through the act of theorizing, even theories that eschew reliance on a concept of the human subject, such as Neorealism, tend to project the stable features that were thought to compose this subject onto the agents examined, whether states or other forms of organization, while excluding the dimension from which politics and international relations are actually experienced.³ An account of how human subjects have been produced, and the normative consequences of their production, remains wanting.

The task of this chapter is to outline one of the deeply influential ways in which the human subject has been constituted historically: as the suppression of other animals. For this concept, the human is only in relation to the animal that it is not. Through an account of different ways in which this human subject is constituted as the construction and suppression of the animal in three classical sources – namely, Homer, Plato, and Aristotle – the importance of animality for the possible disruption of these subjective coordinates is illustrated, and the permanence of this self-same human subject is undermined. Moreover, a normative dimension for this project is revealed: it is through the relation to animals that the spell of the human and its limitations might be broken. To follow Diogenes here is to affirm the animal inclinations that would obstruct the production of the human within a political community, gesturing instead toward a posthuman subject, and to politics organized otherwise.

Homer: human and animal in the world of poetic myth

The Greek world into which Diogenes, Plato, and Aristotle were born was a world of poetic myth, where the received wisdom tending beyond the strictly practical was largely transmitted through the memorization and recitation of myths in poetic form. Thus, poets stand in an important position of authority on matters human, animal, and divine, and perhaps among them none stand taller than Homer. Using Homer’s most well-known works as examples of the received wisdom of this world on the human-animal distinction, we find that humans are often distinguished from each other by entering into particular relations with certain animals. The large majority of references to animals in the Iliad (Il) and the Odyssey (Od) fall within four basic categories: 1) in comparisons that link an animal or animals with a person or place through a simile, metaphor, or title; 2) in prizes or goods; 3) in auguries; and 4) in accounts of sacrifices. The references found in each of these categories illustrate the manner in which humans enter into particular relationships with animals that serve to distinguish them from their fellows. In entering into proximity with one or more animals, an individual might elevate him or herself above other humans and the common humanity they share, thus becoming a master of animals and of other humans. In this way, human subjects and their place in the world of poetic myth are to a significant degree shaped through their relation to other animals.

In terms of the first category, we find Menelaus, in attacking Paris, to be ‘thrilled / like a lion lighting on some handsome carcass / lucking to find an antlered stag or wild goat / just as hunger strikes’ (Il III: 15ff). Here the actions of Menelaus serve to bring him into proximity with the lion, a proximity which both serves to distinguish Menelaus from other Greeks while at once transforming Paris from his appearance as a god only moments before into no more than a hunted animal. Likewise, Odysseus, through the mastery and command of his comrades, is described by Priam as a ‘thick-fleeced bellwether ram – / making his way through a big mass of sheep-flocks’ (Il III: 190ff) and the armies themselves are described variously as herds of goats, swarms of flies, or flocks of geese or cranes (Il II: 455–80). Even in activities thought to be more specifically human than exercises of force or gathering in great numbers, humans are individuated in ways that bring them into close proximity with certain animals, such as the eloquent speakers described as being ‘clear as cicadas’ (Il III: 145ff). Humans who have long engaged in such acts of individual distinction come to attach themselves permanently to animals appropriate to these honors, as the titles of Atreus, ‘breaker of horses’, or Nestor, ‘the noble horseman’, bear witness (Il II: 20–30, 50–60, 330–335).⁴

Yet we might note here a difference between the proximity to animals an individual exhibits in simile or metaphor on the one hand, and in a title on the other. While Menelaus does not become an actual lion while stalking Paris, Atreus’s title ‘breaker of horses’ could refer to actual horses. Thus, the proximity to animals these two examples display differs in terms of their reference: one to the image of an animal, the other to an animal actually possessed and at the disposal of the title-bearer. The difference between these two types of animal proximity can be understood in terms of the second category noted above: prizes and goods. Animals and goods made from animals are frequently distributed to characters in Homer’s poems to honor them and their deeds. For instance, among the gifts Agamemnon offers Achilles⁵ in his attempt to assuage the latter’s anger and restore his honor are lands ‘rich in sheep-flocks, / rich in shambling cattle’ (Il IX: 150ff), and likewise Agamemnon honors Ajax for fighting Hector like a lion or boar with the choice cuts of meat from a sacrificial ox (Il VII: 255–60, 321–5).

Similarly, a distinguished Trojan archer’s bow is noted to have come from ‘the horn of a wild goat he’d shot in the chest’ (Il IV: 105–10), and Paris’s godlike features are noted along with his leopard skin cloak (Il II: 15–20), while similar goods are displayed or offered to Odysseus at various points in his travels. In this way, we might see the role animals or their parts play as prizes as solidifying the tenuous proximity to animals established through deeds: in acting like a lion in battle, one might be rewarded in cattle, and so after be known as a ‘lord of cattle’. Thus becoming like an animal in one’s deeds serves to distinguish one in a manner that one might win for oneself prizes that would establish the physical recognition of this ‘animality’, and so a more permanent identity with the animal in a personal title. The animality recognized in prizes and possessions signifies mastery of animals, and through them, mastery of other men – it is a kind of elevation above the equality found in one’s humanity, which is by definition shared in common with others. In both cases, animals serve as markers of one’s status in relation to others, indicating the kind of person one is.

Yet in entering into proximity with animals in such a way as to distinguish oneself among one’s peers as a master, one is also elevated above one’s peers, and enters into proximity with the divine. Not only are great deeds frequently described as ‘godlike’ by Homer, but we must note that the Greeks also invested considerable authority in auguries, thus reading divine import not only into the flight patterns of birds, but also the conflicts among different animals, as when a snake devouring a sparrow and her brood of eight is interpreted by the Greeks as a sign from Zeus that it will be nine years before they secure victory (Il II: 300–30). Insofar as animals can be sent by gods, and divine judgments can be read into animal activities, and insofar as the ferocity of human conflicts can likewise be described metaphorically as the conflict between different animals, it might also be possible to read these battles as a divine script, the duel itself becoming a kind of augury from which the favor of the gods might be ascertained.

Indeed, Homer’s texts are rife with examples of victory and defeat being attributed directly to divine intervention, and divine intervention can even be responsible for the distinguishing proximity to animals noted above. Athena will show favor to Odysseus by ‘making him taller, more massive to all eyes’ so that he might win honors in the contests organized by his hosts, and they might treat him with ‘kindness, / awe and respect’ (Od VIII: 15ff). Likewise, Diomedes is granted divine enhancement fighting the Trojans. Diomedes is seized by a fury, becoming ‘claw-mad as a lion’, and proceeds to maul the Trojan ‘flocks’, invoking such awe that the Trojans become confused as to whether or not Diomedes is human or god (Il V: 135ff). In this way, the proximity one might enter into with animals is at once a proximity to the gods – it is the gods that shine through the great deeds of men, especially where those deeds make them more like animals.

Yet we must also note here the terror that marks the proximity of humans to gods and other animals in the world of poetic myth. Diomedes in his fury attacks even Apollo, who admonishes him: ‘Think, Diomedes, shrink back now! / Enough of this madness – striving with the gods. / We are not of the same breed, we never will be’ (Il V: 435–41).⁶ Despite celebrating an individual’s efforts to imitate the gods, the Greeks were pointedly aware of the disaster brought in thinking oneself their equal. Likewise, the possibility of being permanently transformed into an animal, not simply in attaching oneself to one as the marker of one’s status, brought equal terror, as in Odysseus’s episode with the witch Circe, who transforms his crew into various animals (Od X). In short, there needs to be some way of regulating the proximity to gods and animals humans attain through their individual deeds, and this way, this techne that humans will adopt to regulate their tenuous proximity with the divine, other animals, and each other, is sacrifice.

Sacrifices serve a vital role in the world of poetic myth. While the sacrifices performed in the Iliad have an obvious enough narrative function – that is, to either transform or fortify the fortunes of the Greeks by paying the proper respect owed to the gods – the length at which Homer will often describe the sacrifices, from the opening rituals and prayers to details of the butchering itself, gives these passages a kind of didactic quality.⁷ Sacrifice extends beyond not only the practical concerns of slaughtering and butchering an animal for human consumption and divine offering, but as a kind of magic ritual – sacrifice transforms the living animal into consumable flesh. Through the magic of sacrifice and the specificity of its procedures, humans conjure away their affinity with other animals, demarcating the boundaries of human, animal, and divine that are continually blurred in the heroic deeds described above.

Thus, sacrifice stands opposed to the proximity that human, animal, and god enter into through their deeds, serving to divide these figures in a way that establishes a community of those who sacrifice in opposition to those who are sacrificed and those who demand sacrifices.⁸ In this way, the world of poetic myth would cope with the terror and anxiety of life lived in the midst of opaque and potentially hostile forces, wherein power may serve to elevate one above one’s peers, or bring about enslavement and death.⁹ In detailing the proper procedures of sacrifice, Homer serves to teach his audience how to recognize, draw, and uphold the boundaries of human community. For those who would ignore this ritual, Homer offers terrifying consequences. When Odysseus’s crew slaughters and consumes the cattle of the sun without observing the proper rites, the magical transformation from living animal to consumable flesh is botched: despite the cattle being dead, Homer claims their ‘hides began to crawl, the meat, both raw and roasted / bellowed out on the spits, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: framing the posthuman dialogues in international relations
• 1 Animals and human constitution: greek lessons, posthuman possibilities
• 2 With a posthuman touch: international relations in dialogue with the posthuman – a human account
• 3 Telling (hi)stories in the Anthropocene: when forest is multispecies relation
• 4 Potential of posthumanist onto-epistemology for the study of international relations
• 5 Agency in posthuman IR: solving the problem of technosocially mediated agency
• 6 Posthumanist international relations and ecopolitics
• 7 Worm politics
• 8 Fish and international relations
• 9 The posthuman way of war
• 10 Representing posthumans: citizenship and the political production of bodies and technologies
• 11 Genetically modified crops and the posthuman politics beyond borders
• 12 Cyborgs, control and transformation: posthumanist arms control and disarmament
• 13 Non-lines of sight: battlespace visualization and the reterritorialization of martial vision
• 14 The excesses of posthumanism: some reflections on ‘thinking’ as capacity
• Epilogue: beyond the anthropocentric partitioning of the world
• Index