‘A point of exteriority’

Whether questioning the privilege of discursive thought, the thought-

world correlation, a normative conception of a free, able-bodied subject,
posthumanism necessitates a subtractive operation which allows us to
question the generality and stability of the human (McNulty 2013, 32-3).
Subtraction takes many forms: the deconstruction or naturalization of
subjectivity; a symptomatic analysis as a gap between symbolic and real
(Badiou 2007, 49-55); revisionary ontologies like vitalism or process
ontology which eliminate the presumption of a coherent self or ego as a
transcendental organizing principle.
However it is effectuated, subtraction implies an opening to a nonhuman
‘point’ or zone of exteriority (Meillassoux 2016, Loc 3285) - the Outside,
even if this is represented as a figure of hybridity such as the cyborg, as
differing-immanent life, as absolute contingency, as a withdrawn object,
as an invocation to Great Cthulhu or Skynet, etc. Posthumanism traces
this Outside by highlighting the constitutive inefficacy of the human
subject or language; the brokenness or dereliction of their order.
The Outside need not be understood as transcending the human
(although it can) but it must be notionally independent of it, implying a
minimal realism. Even a posthumanism that rejects the dualism of subject
and object in favour of pure relations, a plane of immanence, implicates a
zone of variation, or becoming beyond our borders, however these are
circumscribed. For if posthumanism thought its Outside adequately or
completely, if only through some dialectical operation, its project, its
desire, would be frustrated. Perhaps its only axiom is that the Outside is
disconnected. Its accessibility to the, now ‘broken’, human cannot be
presumed.
For Speculative Posthumanism, disconnection is conceived as the agential
independence of hypothetical posthumans from the ‘Wide Human’ (WH)
- the reciprocating assemblage of ‘narrow’ humans, ecologies, technical
systems - simultaneously a ‘noise generator’ and source of undirected
techno-social mutations.
This version of the Disconnection Thesis (DT) is already highly abstract
– for it tells us nothing about how posthumans are embodied; only that
they are functionally and existentially independent of WH.
Even if we question the purchase of concepts of agency on deep
technological time – as the unbinding of anthropocentric filters enjoins –
the DT persists as a bare interval, a bridge out to the void.i Thus the
excision of anthropocentric constraints is an organon; like Ray Brassier’s
early nihilism – a method for phenomenal extinction or extroversion.
Bellmer’s homunculus proliferates its anagrammatized, wounded bodies.
What, then, drives this auto-destructive machine?
Without a xenophilic desire, or an ethical orientation to strip away
constraints that ‘filter’ the world in our image, layer by layer, the
invocation of the Outside would be unaccountable.
Who or what is this alien vector? If – as I will argue – xenophilic desire is
contentless and self-extirpating, how can we expect it to inform a
posthuman politics, a conception of inter-species justice, or some other
ethics?
Conversely, can posthumanism ever hear the neat, unfiltered noise of the
Outside? Its medusoid cochlea hatched through the meatus of a cracking skull.
These questions are admittedly febrile and disordered, as, perhaps they
must be, since the point of exteriority is precisely not the topic for a well-
ordered text. But they acquire traction if we consider posthumanism as a
generalized orientation to the futurity. Apart from SP, xenofeminism (XF)
and accelerationism (ACC) are explicitly temporal, concerned with the
technological excision of the human and the production of posthuman
forms of agency, sexuality and affiliation. Yet even a critical
posthumanism that, like Rosi Braidotti’s, disclaims totalizing or futurist
ambitions, is necessarily concerned with power relations in the actual
world and thus with their processes, flows, vortices, involutions (Braidotti
2018, 4).
Each posthumanism is pre-empts an abstract disconnection space, an
Outside that may be unbounded by its own ontological or epistemic
assumptions even if most also apply proprietary filters which restrict the
consideration of politics or ethics to restricted portions of this exteriority.
Thus, for moderate or left Accelerationists and Xenofeminists, the idea of
sapience or rational autonomy comprehends a morphologically various
future of alternate bodies, genders, sexualities. Xenofeminists aim to
abolish gender as an essential component of identity, allowing fluid, non-
binary forms of sexuality and reproduction to be explored without societal
constraint (‘Let a hundred sexes bloom’). Yet the profusion is constrained,
on most accounts, by the assumption that such agents would be sapient,
no matter how morphologically variable – rational or discursive creatures
answerable to discursively articulated claims and norms of reasoning
(Hester 2019, 2018).
Nick Land and Amy Ireland, refuse the sapience and sentience filters,
making no distinction between sapient or non-sapient forms by which a
future hyper-capitalism might escape its biological subjugation (Land
2017). Like my Speculative Posthumanism, their Unconditional
Accelerationism (U/ACC) relates the current Wide Human dispensation
to a void: the empty horizon.
This unfettered, unfiltered posthumanism is also the most philosophically
essential and rigorous. The organon of extinction works its harrow: all the
filters break when pressed.

References:
Badiou, A., 2007. The Century, translated by Alberto Toscano. Polity
Press.
Braidotti, R. 2006. “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible”. In Deleuze
and Philosophy, C. Boundas (ed.), 133–59. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Hester, H., 2019. ‘SAPIENCE+ CARE: reason and responsibility in
posthuman politics’. Angelaki, 24(1), pp. 67-80.
Ireland, Amy. 2016. “Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde.” In
Aesthetics After Finitude. Edited by Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson, and
Amy Ireland, 217–228. Melbourne: Re.Press.
Ireland, Amy. 2019. ‘”Alien Rhythms’,
https://zinzrinz.blogspot.com/2019/04/alien-rhythms.html (Accessed 2
May 2019).
Land, N. 2017. ‘A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism’,
https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-
to-accelerationism/ (Accessed May 3 2019).
Meillassoux, Quentin. 2016. “Iteration, reiteration, repetition: a
speculative analysis of the meaningless sign”, in Genealogies of
Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity Since Structuralism, edited by
Suhail Malik and Armen Avanessian. Bloomsbury Publishing.

iThus posthumanists are driven, also, to question any ‘pre-established harmony’ between concepts and reality:
‘Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable’ (Brassier 2011b, 47).