What is a posthuman?

I've been struggling with the definition of the posthuman, in part because I need to have a clear idea of it in my own head in order to shape the dissertation chapters into a coherent whole, rather than a set of discrete essays, since the underlying figure in all the texts is the posthuman. Right now, each chapter defines the posthuman for its own purpose.

But I also feel like I need to be able to define a posthuman at some point - ideally in the introduction, or perhaps after exploring all its manifestations, in the conclusion. Either way, I need at some point to be able to say just what it is.

One the one hand, a posthuman seems to be a fairly simple thing to define, after all, it's something that doesn't exist yet, so the imagination is free to create the posthuman in whatever shape seems appropriate to the moment.

But unlike the cyborg, with which it is closely affiliated, the posthuman is a little harder to define. After all, the cyb-org - cybernetic organism - is at its most basic core a cybernetic organism, that is, it is an organism that can be controlled. In popular culture, this means that it is a merging of flesh - organism - and machine - control. If you look at the pop culture references to cyborgs, such as the Terminator or Robocop, you get the idea.

But while a cyborg may be a posthuman, the posthuman is more than just a cyborg. It can take many shapes.

Transhumanists - real people out there who are embracing the idea that humans will change in the near future - offer a kind of bridge between the human right now, and the posthuman. But because the posthuman is "post" the bridge may hint at what it would look like, but cannot define it.

Defining what constitutes the posthuman is complicated by the fact that it is a compound word, and the meaning changes depending on which part of the word you emphasize.

A posthuman would be a creature that comes after human, but a posthuman, emphasizes the way in which the human is maintained in its "post" state. These could be two entirely different creatures, and the latter - the posthuman - is the one what I suspect most transhumanists would recognize, while the former - the posthuman - is probably more often what we encounter in science fiction literature and film.

I suppose through this blog post I've started to find my way to a solution for the problem of defining the posthuman, that is, by defining it as posthuman and posthuman, rather than choosing one over the other.

What do you think?