The Posthuman as Anthropocene Interface

The term ‘posthuman’ was rarely used before the mid-1990s,Reference Herbrechter ¹ although visions of various sorts of successors to the human species have been imagined in numerous ways since the appearance of their first non-religious predecessors, such as the recombined creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or the New Prometheus (1818),Reference Shelley ² the intelligent machines in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872),Reference Butler ³ or the manifold humanity, divided after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895).Reference Wells ⁴ Yet, even if Darwin’s observation of continual species change and extinction logically opened up the idea of humans developing into, or being displaced by, something else, this posthuman prospect of biological evolution has not taken up much space in public discourse. Rather, spurred by apocalyptic mythologies of the world’s dominant monotheistic religions, there seems in recent history to have been much more focus on various scenarios of a one-sided end of the world, including humanity, through culture’s self-destructive tendencies: nuclear war, climatic catastrophe, or the destruction of the environment through industrial pollution.

One reason for this blind-sightedness could be that observers stick to the hitherto-known driving force of evolution, natural selection working on more or less accidental mutations, a force that works slowly compared with human time scales. However, probably this force has long since died out, since humans keep their anatomy constant by transferring the evolutionary pressures to their environments, rather than, as earlier in evolution, by adapting their bodies to non-controlled environmental shifts. ⁵ Instead of, for instance, growing fur or fins, humans fashion fur coats or build ships. Yet, with accelerating technological innovation and the emergence of the so-called Anthropocene era, the possibility emerges that this specifically cultural sublimation of evolutionary pressures has reached a critical saturation too. Outdistancing culture’s clear-cut division between an active but anatomically stable body and its passive and infinitely malleable surroundings, we meet a more de-centralized distribution of agency, in which the natural environment, saturated with technological interventions in all possible scales, from geological ground, to earth surface, to oceans, to plants, to air and vacuum, begins to exert a new kind of pressure on the human body.

To be sure, the typical framing of the Anthropocene derives from the just-mentioned apocalyptical imagination – that is, as species extinction and displacement, the over-consumption of natural resources and the saturation of the environment with heat, gases, chemicals, broken gadgets and other kinds of waste – and thus its pressure on the human body and other life forms is mostly considered destructive.Reference Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen and Crutzen ⁶ Speaking in terms of complexity theory, the entropy in the form of waste materials that humans, the apex of negentropic life forms, have bestowed upon their own environments, has reached such a density that it threatens the continued negentropic evolution of humans and other species. In striking contrast to – but also acting as a strangely logical mirror-version of – this pessimist narrative of the Anthropocene, the environment facing an involuntary entropic apocalypse, we have the optimist narrative of transhumanism, the body facing artificially driven extropian (negentropic) hyper-evolution – and thereby, we must assume, again displacing an equivalent amount of entropy to the surroundings. According to this narrative, life’s general tendency to sail against the universe’s entropic wind, generating local pockets of complexity in an ocean otherwise dominated by dissolution or inorganic hardness, is reaching a new phase, the extropian or transhuman, in which cultural intervention will take over and accelerate the production of negentropic complexity, extropy, ultimately catapulting the human mind out of its fragile corporeal holster and into a more durable cyborg realm.Reference More ⁷

Our contention, however, is that the alternative between engulfment in entropic destruction and escape into extropian bliss – ultimately between shit and spirit – is false and that the dualisms Anthropocene environment and posthuman body/mind, pessimism and optimism, entropy and negentropy, should be reconsidered, shaken together, and hybridized. Strangely, the author of The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway, hesitates before this move; denouncing the posthuman in favour of the Chthulucene, a compost society of biological kinships, she apparently has forgotten the inorganic, including technologies.Reference Haraway ⁸ But we want to saturate the Anthropocene also with functioning human cultures, including their myriad networks of technologies that exert pressure on the human body just as much as their wastes do. Already in this light, the posthuman masterfigure of the cyborg, the amalgamation of growing negentropic organism and constructed, calculable machine, is no longer to be considered autonomous, a transhuman superorganism. Instead of radiating outward as prostheses, like McLuhan’s electric-age exteriorization of the human nervous system,Reference McLuhan ⁹ technologies exert pressure on the posthuman being. So do their entropic wastes, from dysfunctional gadgets to heat. In the body’s virtual extensions, the informational ecosystems, the brain is similarly pressed between binary algorithmic knowledge and its entropic wastes, the overload of information. Overall, since entropic wastes cannot be excluded to remote environments, just as machinic constructions cannot be thought of as exterior supplements to an essentially organic human body, negentropic evolution is written more closely together with the inorganic world. Such a more prominent role for the inorganic in relation to life’s evolution was already postulated with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, the idea of earth as a giant self-regulating cybernetic system, and so the perspectives of Anthropocene, Gaia and the posthuman converge in a closer mingling of life and the inorganic.Reference Lovelock ¹⁰

A closer look at the sciences of complexity may improve our understanding of these movements: negentropic complexity losing its stronghold in autonomous organisms and being integrated with dispersed calculable machines (the posthuman), and this cyborgian amalgamation operating inside a natural environment marked by both inorganic sustainment of growth (Gaia) and saturated with machine-induced entropy (Anthropocene waste). According to the extension of thermodynamics that was performed by the information sciences after the Second World War and developed into the transdisciplinary field of complexity theory, negentropic complexity arises midway between order and chaos, calculable geometry and incalculable randomness.Reference Pagels ¹¹ Complexity signifies thermodynamic depth, a dynamic disequilibrium that has come into being through an evolutionary process, whose singular steps are remembered in the simplified, but not simple, result. By exporting less usable energy, entropy, to the surroundings, a complex system, for instance an organism, can maintain and evolve a pocket of more organized, negentropic, matter. In contrast, both chaos (high entropy) and order (low entropy) are thermodynamically shallow. A large amount of entropy (e.g. myriad molecule movements in a gas being averaged at the same temperature) is allied to zero entropy (e.g. a crystal lattice collapsing the average order into the order of its singular components).

Transferring these observations to the evolution of humans, we may remark that they make some sense both in relation to the biological and cultural becoming of the human being. Culturally, negentropic complexity could be said to be centred, since antiquity, in organic islands constituted first by the autonomous human body, then gradually the autonomous human mind. These islands have in cultural practice been constructed so as to hover above, and in contrast to, an inorganic ocean, an entropy/order dialectics, which they looked at only through thick panorama windows. However, since the Anthropocene rise of calculable industrial machines and their entropical wastes, negentropy opens the canal locks towards this de-differentiated ocean, flooding the earlier autonomous bodies and minds with new constellations of machines and waste, significant information and noise. Life forms are now intermingled with technologies, whose geometrically founded calculations, simpler forms of order than the organic ones, problematize negentropic evolution. Similarly, entropy can no longer be considered extra-systemic but becomes part of the Gaia system, heaped up around the negentropic life forms.

Posthuman evolution thus concerns a new synthesis between negentropic complexity and its former enemies, entropic chaos and machinic order, as well as a tightened connection between these two seeming counter-positions, a strengthened entropy/order dialectics. Negentropy does not simply escape into space, into a frictionless acceleration of itself, as in Lyotard’s postmodern fable of our posthuman fate after the sun has swallowed up and engulfed the earth.Reference Lyotard ¹² Rather, it enters a more friction-driven alliance with the de-differentiating dialectics of entropic randomness and machinic calculation. The generation of negentropic information in computation, the exterior and now more distributed version of posthuman intelligence, would be unthinkable without the masses of unprocessed information, the entropic noise of Big Data, amidst which it rises. The potential for material complexity in the Anthropocene environment emerges in the midst of already used materials, converting entropic waste into negentropic reuse.

Approaching the Posthuman Body

Although the human body has always been framed and disciplined with techniques (language, skills, rituals, etc.) and intermingled with outer and – to a lesser degree – inner technologies (tattoos, piercings, glasses, pace makers, drugs, etc.), its anatomical structure for each new generation has remained constant over the last 60,000 years, the epoch in which culture sublimated evolutionary pressures into environmental rather than corporeal change. Introducing a less destructive reading of the technologically over-saturated Anthropocene environment, a strong version of the posthuman would therefore signify that this environment expands into the last pocket of left-over virginal nature, the inner continent of the human body. Through this sprawling the body is transformed into a cyborgian hybrid that would no longer be recognizable as human and, for instance, not be able to produce fertile offspring with humans. This proper intervention in biological evolution could happen through genetic manipulation and other drastic interventions in the embryonic stages of humans.

A weaker version of the posthuman concerns drastic changes of the living conditions of humans, who although anatomically alike by birth have become totally dependent on technology and consider themselves seriously handicapped without it: prolonged life spans, and thinking, memorizing, sensing and moving abilities enhanced through drugs and intra-corporeal micro-technologies, or just through extra-corporeal extensions to a pervasive internet of things, which thereby become part of a now thoroughly porous body. Whether we are speaking of a strong or weak version of the posthuman, acting inside such an Anthropocene techno-saturated nature, posthumans become nodes in a vast intra-corporeal terrain of interpenetrative macro-bodies or machines, comparable to Deleuze and Guattari’s Bodies-without-Organs that switch on and off to an extensive rhizomatic machine.Reference Deleuze and Guattari ¹³ The weaker version of the posthuman signifies the continued strength of the notion of culture – that no matter how much humans are interlaced with technology and act in tandem with an extensive material terrain, there still remains a core of anatomical human nature that for each new-born could be thought of and practised anew, just as the machinic rather than organic way of connecting with technology secures a reversibility. Even if posthuman consciousness and body emerge as interfaces to an all-pervasive, Anthropocene rhizome rather than as autonomous entities, they still have the voluntary choice of backing off and initiating new links with this network. In any case, the driving force for transformation cannot be a return to natural selection working on genetic mutations. Rather, innumerable forces – technological, natural, social, ethical, and aesthetic – play together in multi-layered becomings whose genes are just one set of co-actants.

The Shock of the New Versus the Shock of the Old

Venturing more concretely into such posthuman speculations, however, we meet two sorts of challenges: the shock of the new and the shock of the old. ¹⁴ The shock of the new concerns the fast rate of obsolescence marring any vision for the posthuman – that actual technologies and also their practical implementation turn out to be wholly different than imagined. Perhaps even the two alternatives presented above – the strong and weak versions of the posthuman – will turn out to be impossible to distinguish in future conditions that are at present impossible to imagine. We therefore sympathize with speculative posthumanism, a philosophy that is attentive to our limited abilities to predict what lies beyond our present all-too-human condition and that therefore stresses the complete openness – from technological practices, to ethics, to aesthetics – of what the posthuman being might actually be about, except transgressing human experience in the widest sense.Reference Roden ¹⁵

The shock of the old, on the other hand, modifies this apophatic futurism by pointing to all the tradition-derived obstacles that meet the implementation of any posthuman prospects: ethical, political, social and practical. Consider, for instance increased longevity. For philosopher Nick Bostrom, prolonged lifespan, together with enhanced cognitive capability and a massive increase in human population, is sufficient to talk of a posthuman condition.Reference Bostrom ¹⁶ Pondering if longevity might turn into actual immortality, we seriously enter the field of speculative posthumanism. While this can indeed be dismissed as fanciful and wishful thinking, there are considerable sums being invested in not only prolonging the human life span, but actually devising schemes for living endlessly, whether as a rebooted consciousness, a hologram or in an ever rejuvenated body. As Maxwell J. Mehlman has pointed out, there is a quasi-religious element to this aspect of transhumanism: instead of the transcendence towards a different dimension that earlier governed ideas of eternal life, technology will now provide a defeat of death that takes place in the material realm.Reference Mehlman ¹⁷

However, even modest gains in lifespan could have disturbing social consequences. Imagine that a part of humanity could gain access to medicine and gene therapies that could increase their or their children’s average lifespan by ‘merely’ 20 or 30 years. Soon the question of whether humanity could still be thought of as one would emerge, a question that recalls the world’s long history of racism, but now transformed into a different kind of technologically assisted division of unity. And in any case, as Francis Fukuyama has observed, large masses of long living humans would comprise a massive challenge to society, since mature grown-ups do not adapt as flexibly to the ever-accelerating changes of society and would demand resources for sustainment when becoming more fragile.Reference Fukuyama ¹⁸ To these shocks of the old we may add the question of how this desire for longevity rhymes with the rising contrary movement, the cult of the young and the impatience with mature people.

Or consider the area of genetic modification, such as the case with the three-parent babies that are now legal to create in the United Kingdom. ¹⁹ Although this intervention into the natural process of reproduction could be said to push humanity into a new era, it was developed, initially, not to change the human species but rather to avoid inherited deceases. In itself it does not radically change the traits of the average human. Thus, posthuman Trojan horses may be smuggled into the humanist ethical camp without being noticed before they have thoroughly changed the conditions of human heredity. To stop them would thus be conditioned not by technical difficulties, but by ideas about how true ‘human’ procreation should happen, again a shock of the old.

A significant part of the shock of the old could indeed be that actual visions and practices for enhancement are stuck in inherited models of humans that are merely multiplied along easily imagined trajectories. In this sense, the borders between explicitly striving to transcend the human condition in some version of transhumanism, or just wanting to keep yourself or your child as healthy and fit as possible, are completely hazy. Peter Sloterdijk thus has a point in seeing transhumanist modifications as just humanist education with new means, self-breeding outdistancing reading.Reference Sloterdijk ²⁰ However, such extrapolation from human into transhuman tends to overrate individualist qualities: being young, only for a longer time; being a muscular-driven autonomous body, just stronger and faster; sensing from individual viewpoints, just in higher and more swift resolution; having individual experiences, just with more intensity and frequency; thinking and reflecting individually, just with higher cognitive capabilities. If ethical qualities, such as intensified respect for others and the environment, are included, it is only to guarantee individualist experience.Reference More ²¹ Although now being democratized and laid out for individual choice, these desires for perfecting the old human trail have troublesome reminiscences of the fascist and communist visions of the New Human, a neo-classical autonomous body strengthened into superman. What these popular transhumanist visions miss is the radically collective aspect of the posthuman, the possibility of posthuman existence as porous swarm-being, as interface to near and remote parts of the Anthropocene world, as being interlaced with what was earlier bracketed out as environment.

Posthuman Visions in Popular Culture and Literature

Whatever the view, people’s desires for enhancement are not just influenced by doing what is right, but also by what they find joyful, aesthetically pleasing, or what gives them or their relatives a competitive edge in the pursuit of prestige, wealth and love. One obvious indication of this is the lengths to which people are going – financially as well as in terms of corporeal risk-taking – with modifying their looks through cosmetic surgery. It is also highly likely that parents will become increasingly interested in determining the looks and other qualities of their children, not least given how selection of donors is already a factor in human reproduction. Similarly, scanning of foetuses is making parents react to an increasing number of markers that go beyond the fundamental health of the foetus. Aesthetic preferences and ethical considerations cross in such situations, and it would be a misunderstanding to ignore why and how aesthetics often gets to be decisive. It is so in particular because changes in preferences and enhancements of some individuals eventually affect all. Finding partners is still a highly competitive part of human existence where appearance and intelligence are important. If some people begin to enhance their own and their offspring’s looks and brains, this will also affect those who choose not to be part of this.

Additionally, facing a world with more robots, both humanoid and non-humanoid, it is also obvious that the design and aesthetics of these machines is not at all innocent to the emotional response of humans. Comforting animal-like robots are already in use at nursing homes. More controversial is the introduction of sex-robots that obviously are designed to be life-like but with exaggerated sex-specific features. The ethics revolving around this issue are far from solved and involve complicated issues of gender equality, the sanctioning of an objectification of the sexes, as well as providing a better surrogate for those who need or want it.

The ability to make challenges tangible and concrete is an important part of the larger engagement with human futures. If practice-based aesthetics often leave us stuck with the shock of the old, there are, however, several ways in which aesthetics may prepare us for the shock of the new. These are found in the domain of aesthetic virtual spaces, including popular culture, literature and art. These representations are important as they offer a different way of imaging the future as opposed to a rational argument over the various traits with which one could picture humans.

Comic books and Hollywood’s recent blockbusters are filled with superheroes that in various ways are both proper embodiments of posthuman figures, pathetic blown-ups of classical machos, as well as fragile, complex and all too human characters. Some superheroes are born superhuman, others rely on technology, either as fully integrated cyborgs or just being enhanced whenever they please. Spiderman, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and many more dominate movie theatres these years with a variety of human enhancements. These representations of strength, intelligence or superhuman powers should not be shrugged off as mere fantasy but also be seen as a contemplation of human desires. This being said, it is also a fact that these idealized heroes almost always also show strong elements of imperfection.

The aesthetic value of imperfection is not only a matter of turning values upside-down and claiming the ugly to be beautiful. Rather, the imperfect should be seen as a key element of narrative, and of aesthetics more broadly, since it is hard to imagine interesting stories that do not include mistakes, bad intentions, accidents, and other less than ideal events that stir up the world. Dystopian visions of the future sometimes prove this negatively, by portraying worlds where societal control eliminates the unpredictable and thereby impoverishes human life. The emphasis on imperfection in narrative thus seems to be bound up with a quality of life, at least as we have come to know it. Even the superhero characters have taken account of this value of imperfection by having dual appearances that incorporate both superhuman abilities and human frailties. The broad appeal of these figures should be taken seriously as part of the portrayal of contemporary culture, not least in the ways this fascination of the superhuman could influence and condition responses to the ethical challenges technology continues to bring up. The influence of such narratives can move in more than one direction: the dystopian or monstrous elements of fictions can work as a reminder of being cautious about changes. On the other hand, the constant presence of imagery and narratives of enhanced human beings will keep providing inspiration for what could be thought of as advancement for the human species.

Apart from visual popular culture, an increasing number of non-science fiction writers incorporate elements of human enhancement into their novels, most notably cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,Reference Ishiguro ²² or the creation of a new, benign and dull successor to the human race envisioned in Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles.Reference Houellebecq ²³ David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas tells a sweeping story of humanity’s evolution, meandering between the 1850s, the present, and what is clearly a dehumanized posthuman world, followed by a post-apocalyptic return to a more primitive state.Reference Mitchell ²⁴ And while the fantasies are not developed into a fully described fictional world, two of the most seminal American writers, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, have provided several glimpses of posthuman desires, always accompanied by a distrust in perfection.Reference Rosendahl Thomsen ²⁵

An often foreseen consequence of accelerating technologies is the ability to control human beings. Either by controlling their biology, as it is the case in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where deprivation of oxygen in certain foetuses fashions a caste-like society.Reference Huxley ²⁶ Or by making social control and technologies or surveillance go hand in hand, as it is also the case in Huxley’s novel, and in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where one also finds early visions of changing human neurology.Reference Orwell ²⁷ The most profound dystopian aspect of such novels lies in the characters’ inability to influence their own lives and to react to the complexities and contingencies of the world in a way that produces a unique personality. Even if the idea of an essential self is not viable, and hopelessly romantic and metaphysical, the importance of being able to influence one’s own development and identity is presented by way of the narrative as a central humanizing value.

Posthuman Aspects of Modern Art

Roughly put, in popular culture, and to a certain degree also in modern novels with clear-cut narratives, we meet a series of conflicts based on largely intact dualisms – beautiful/monstrous, perfect/imperfect, superhuman/human. However, in that part of art termed modern or avant-garde these dualisms are in a process of hybridization, of re-integration into a coincidentia oppositorum. At the same time that the avant-gardes break up clear narratives and messages, displacing unambiguous semiotic statements with multivalent and contingent enunciations, they compromise earlier aesthetic norms, whether bound to bodies, artefacts or environments.Reference Eco ²⁸ What may be left over of aesthetic appreciation is inextricably bound up with an acceptance of what was earlier, in classical or early modern humanist cultures, considered chaotic, monotonous, over-regulated, indefinable, imperfect, primitive, grotesque or indeed monstrous.

Here we will suggest that all these transgressions should be taken as a more indefinite, but also more encompassing sign of the posthuman in modern art. The signifiers of the human subject, in visual media a definable iconography or simple denotations, are thus compromised in numerous ways, including invasions of less organized, de-complexified entities that stretch from immature or over-mature versions of biological organization (e.g. primitive, childish, insane, decadent, monstrous) to those more obviously inorganic patterns contained within the entropy/order dialectics. These patterns, then, could be seen as structural equivalents to an Anthropocene/posthuman world, in which the less organized or wholly inorganic parts of nature press forward, not least in their intermingling with machines and their wastes. Furthermore, modern artworks expose the medial conditions, through which the artwork comes into being – from virtual (e.g. informational, sensorial) to material (e.g. remotely or locally immersive) ones – thereby stressing the existential condition of being situated and uttering something inside and in relation to a densely interacting world. Whereas in popular culture the posthuman dilemmas are still described through, and in solidarity with, the primal idiom of humanism, naturalism, in avant-garde art the very means of communication are pointed at through alienation. Avant-garde art performs rather than merely describes the posthuman.

Linking the posthuman to modern art as such, and thus extending its time range backwards to the late nineteenth century, may strike some readers as odd and over-general. For, in visual culture, posthuman tendencies are typically identified only in more recent trends of art. Apart from postmodern art forms generally alluding to monstrous, fragmented, machinic or cloned human bodies, such as the Chapman Brothers’ run-amok genetic experiments or Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures combining human and animal forms, ²⁹ the art movements most often associated with the posthuman field are those that more or less explicitly engage with advanced technology and its links with animal and human bodies: bioart, robot art, digital art – from Stelarc’s experiments with robotic prostheses, over Orlan’s plastic surgical body modifications, and SymbioticA’s manipulation of living tissue, to Eduardo Kac’s transgenic art rebuilding organisms, including bacteria, plants, and rabbits.Reference Herbrechter ³⁰ Armed with this lens on recent technological art movements some interpreters will cautiously detect certain genealogies in earlier modern art forms, notably Futurism with its exultation of technology and Dadaism with its ironic engagement with the figure of the cyborg.Reference Biro ³¹

The problem is, however, that there exist no stable boundaries between the monstrous, fragmented, mechanic or cloned bodies ascribed to an allegedly ‘posthuman’ artistic trend and modern art more generally. Modern art as such is pervaded by these qualities. The wish to isolate a specifically ‘posthuman’ trend in recent art derives from a too concrete science-fiction-bound understanding of how technology transforms the human body and from expecting this to be explained through an identifiable body seen from without. But why demand wires and gadgets to protrude visibly from a body that can with safety be categorized as android, when one of the shocks of the new is exactly that technologies become minuscule and extensive, pervade both material and immaterial spaces, are experienced just as much from standpoints within sensorial apparatuses as from without, and have consequences also when they are not directly sensed to be in action?

While fully acknowledging the relevance and importance of recent and older explicitly techno/monstrous trends in art in relation to the posthuman, we will thus see them as only the tip of an iceberg of posthuman tendencies in modern art. If the posthuman condition is indeed a reality gradually absorbing and transforming the whole of the human species and its habitats, it must be a shock of the new having the widest thinkable ramifications, affecting every corner of global existence, most of them only barely conceivable and therefore needing the radical artistic imagination of the avant-gardes to explore them, indeed to make them appear. Exactly because nobody knows what a more manifest posthuman reality looks like, except that it somehow negates the humanist subject, avant-garde art with its open, indeterminate quality and consistently anti-humanist qualities, becomes an important forum for exploring the infinite space of posthuman possibles. The avant-garde simply comprises a repository of indirect posthuman visions. Since it concretizes extra-humanist spaces without draining them of the potential for the yet to be seen, it in myriad ways satisfies a speculative posthumanist attitude.

Above, we suggested that the transhuman utopia of extropianism, the artificially accelerated evolution of a negentropic human body, should be counterbalanced, indeed interlaced with, an Anthropocene entropy/order dialectics to create a more comprehensive and realistic vision of the posthuman. As indicated, a primal set of qualities that challenge traditional humanist aesthetics in modern art could be linked to this dialectics, the bottom in a hazy hierarchy of de-complexification that stretches up and into the negentropic body itself. Moving from the broad domain of life practices and sciences into art we meet the same alliance of real and virtual ecologies, but in contrast to the surrounding functional world, these realms are in art infused with an extra virtual dimension, an aura of artistic reflectivity.Reference Danto ³² Perhaps this aura should be identified with at least parts of the potential negentropic dimension of avant-garde art – an aura that is then transferred from earlier strongholds in the artistic representations of the human body and sensorium. Staged inside this reflective or conceptual aura, different de-complexifying strategies, including ultimately the entropy/order dialectics, then attack or evade negentropy’s earlier centres. Hereby, organic complexity is de-differentiated into an entropic dissolution or a strict geometric order that has as its primary referential repertoire either the less organized biological or wholly inorganic parts of nature or the mechanic parts of technology. Thus, on many levels of material density, from performance art’s material immersion, to Surrealism’s represented scene, to abstraction’s represented sensorium, to the immateriality of concept art and digital art, what could earlier be put aside as environments of the media ecologies, zones with lesser or stricter organisation, want to break through to and displace the organic negentropic attention centres. Consider, for instance, the entropy/order dialectics in such different artistic fora as conceptual art (strict algorithms blending with unpredicted chaotic variations when implemented in social life), situationism (giving over, in the dérive, to unpredicted force fields emerging in the pre-existent structures of urban architecture), or performance art (exposing or inventing conventions, which are destabilized through a reflective framing).

Our exposure of posthuman qualities in modern art more generally has an important forerunner in the now largely forgotten or marginalized Verlust der Mitte (1948) by Hans Sedlmayr.Reference Sedlmayr ³³ In spite of the Austrian art historian’s pessimistic view of modern art as decadent, ill-stricken and perverse – a view to a certain extent catalysed by his engagement in National Socialism and its denigration of modern art as degenerate – Sedlmayr made the still highly apt observation that modern art is marked by an ‘away from the human!’, what he indeed terms a ‘transhumanist’ escape from the classical middle of the Renaissance and Baroque, i.e. the human body as a site for and reflection of the divine element in man. Since the French Revolution, Sedlmayr claims with a mixture of precision and pathos-filled lament, art has increasingly depleted this scenic middle through an oscillation between extremes of rationality and irrationality, stiffness and fluidity, cold and heat, over-conservation and destruction, aerial escape from the pithy soil and descent into base matter. In parallel with movements in modern science, from physics to evolutionary biology and psychoanalysis, art has converted architecture into machines and dehumanized painting into cold abstraction, at the same time as it has delved into all kinds of unbridled hallucinations, giving over to pre-, sub-, and extrahuman domains inside and beyond the human body: the primitive, the childish, the subconscious, the mad, the animal, the superhuman, the inorganic. The sound middle of classical western art, the organic organization of matter into a body reflecting the divine, is hereby dissolved in a demonic and nihilistic materialism.

Despite Sedlmayr’s debatable denigration of modern art, his basic characterization of it as infected by inhuman qualities appears astonishingly un-obsolete, even fresh, today, some 70 years later. The idea of a corporeal middle being shaken between all sorts of extremes, including versions of the inorganic, could be taken as an early observation of the de-complexification of avant-garde art, including its entropy/order dialectics. Moreover, his time frame harking back to the late eighteenth century easily merges the posthuman with the Anthropocene, stressing that the two labels are two aspects of basically the same phenomenon: an exponentially accelerating technological culture absorbing both the environment (Anthropocene) and the human body (posthuman), blending entropic/ordered and negentropic tendencies.

A more optimistic interpretation of those inhuman techno-infiltrated trends of modern art that contribute to Sedlmayr’s disgust of it is found in Jack Burnham’s Beyond Modern Sculpture (1967).Reference Burnham ³⁴ Indeed, Burnham’s seminal work aspires to be the first systematically posthumanist analysis of modern art, seeing it as a response to a stage in evolution in which technology outdistances biology. According to his suggested ‘teleological theory’, an irreversible technology ‘destroys organic life and substitutes for it very sophisticated forms of synthetic life’. Sculpture’s 20th-century movement from vitalist to mechanic and systemic forms – from Brancusi and Moore to Nam June Paik – thus plays a part ‘in shaping our destination as a post-human species’ (Ref. 34, p. 371). In his cybernetic, systems-oriented approach, Burnham opposes vitalism, yet overtakes the organicist idea of technology as simply a means to decrease entropy at the expense of the surroundings. Although individual differences between components are allegedly reduced in the resulting ‘giant, interconnected, living system’, entropy seemingly has evaporated as a dominating factor. Burnham’s earth seems to be more a technologically enhanced Gaia than an Anthropocene planet permeated with waste (Ref. 34, p. 14).

A theoretician, who does include entropy as a factor in modern art, but who looks at it with slight worries, is the Gestalt theoretician Rudolf Arnheim. For Arnheim a successful artwork should be governed by a certain amount of compositional tension, what he terms the anabolic establishment of a structural theme. Entropy wants to reduce this tension, either through dissolution, an increase of randomness, or through its opposite, an increase of orderliness and simplicity.Reference Arnheim ³⁵ If Arnheim is slightly imprecise in seeing in both movements simply an increase of entropy, we certainly can agree that they take place inside the entropy/order dialectics, both converging, as he stresses, in the emptiness of homogeneity.

In its most inorganic version this entropy/order dialectics derives from the sublime, the new Enlightenment category that had already challenged classical notions of beauty and composition by displacing the aesthetic attention from the human body to its amorphous or serially monotonous environment.Reference Wamberg ³⁶ As indicated by Edmund Burke, the sublime qualities – enormity, extreme insignificance, infinity, indeterminacy, coarseness, obscurity, confusion, emptiness, seriality – are rooted in untamed inorganic nature, in overwhelming powers like the stormy ocean, vast deserts, or the dark night, that threaten the humanist subject with extinction. In the Enlightenment, the humanist subject is still saved because of a securing spatial distance that evokes the specifically sublime feeling of delight.Reference Burke ³⁷ Both outdoors and in artistic representations this spatial distance against which the observer could still measure him or herself could be said to be anchored in the few signifiers that are still left over in the vast amorphousness: clouds, waves, rocks, architecture, etc. However, if we move to the sublime’s mutants in modern abstraction, a representation of an extended sensorium, no such unambiguous signifiers exist anymore. ³⁸ Removing a secure perspectival apex, the signifier of a securely distanced observing mind, abstraction destabilizes the autonomy of the human subject and thereby enters the posthuman field. No wonder, that the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset could in 1925 describe modernist abstraction as a ‘dehumanization’ of art. Apart from undermining the subjective viewpoint, dehumanization implied a vacation of what Sedlmayr would term the Mitte, empathic identification with everyday human stories. The abstract pictorial indeterminacy allowed instead an aesthetic appreciation of the pictorial surface, one no longer rooted in empathy with the human subject. ³⁹

Insofar as abstraction represents a sensorium, it still protects the viewer from direct immersion in the inorganic forces of the sublime. However, in Land Art and minimalism the purified chaotic or coolly serial forces of the entropy/order dialectics are no longer sublimated into ethereal distance, but are directly absorbed in earthy matter. And so it was a Land Artist, Robert Smithson, who first considered entropy a primary marker of contemporary urban civilization and a quality to be explored in contemporary art. Extending, like Arnheim, entropy’s range from complete disorder to complete order, Smithson found in minimalism an entropic echo of the inert surfaces and serial monotony of skyscrapers, urban sprawl, movie houses and discount centres. For him, Donald Judd’s labyrinthine collection of printed matter simply broke down to an unending entropic library of Babel. In Smithson’s cynic-ecstatic brooding, the future becomes evolution in reverse, negentropic organic complexity being displaced by inorganic entropy.Reference Smithson ⁴⁰

In other posthuman invasions of modern art, biological dedifferentiation and its base in the entropy/order dialectics directly attack the negentropic human body. In Surrealism, for instance, we move from the semi-immersion of Land Art and minimalism into absurdly manifest naturalist settings that lead the viewer to expect humanist plots in the Renaissance tradition. However, instead of the usual corporeal dominance of the centres of attention, Sedlmayr’s Mitte, inorganic things of all kinds mingle with and penetrate bodies on the same level of reality, the ‘surreal’ one, thereby creating an uncanny uncertainty of what is alive and what is dead. Likewise, bodily fluids, holes, peaks or body fragments acquire their grotesque quality, the abject blurring of the boundary between subject inside and non-subject outside, by confronting us with the sexual or metabolic exchanges with the extra-bodily realm that are normally hidden away in bourgeois humanist culture. Here we are violently reminded of how negentropic growth and its sustainment in copulation is in practice interlaced with entropic decay and death (the corpse being the ultimate waste, in which lower orders of organization overtake the governance of matter).

If all modern art since the late 19th century has acquired the hallmark, indeed the defining quality, of being ‘strange’, this strangeness could thus quite concretely be seen as a posthuman alienation, an alienation of the human subject. Posthuman dilemmas are thus played out in basically two aesthetic forms: one in popular culture, stretching into many novels dominated by a narrative humanist naturalism, another in avant-garde art marked by an alienation of humanist communicative means. With our inclusion of key concepts from complexity theory, implemented in a fusion of posthuman and Anthropocene theories, we hope to have shown that in both the real world and its digestion in avant-garde art, the negentropic human subject is challenged and displaced by a complication of negentropic evolution, one grounded in a dialectics of entropy and order.