Donna Haraway, for example, claims that humans are always already cyborgs in A Cyborg Manifesto.
What this means is that there has never been a human being that was distinct from the nonhuman world fully, particularly that of tools and machines. Humanisms, for example, create images of math like these out of writing and other material - natural material. There are always non-human supplements that belie human interdependence with the world from the outset.
We can't think of ourselves as if from the outside except by using the non-human, a proxy means of thinking. This always-already-cyborg means that by the time you can consider yourself special, or distinct, you are already imbricated with these non-human supplements. So you see what this means? There's no line [between human and nonhuman], as [the nonhuman] is always what enables the hypothesis that there is a line [between the two].
Consider this: your memory is outside your body. Your thought is outside your body. Your conception of yourself is generated by interaction with what isn't you and what isn't human. Let's introduce a new theorist here to help us out.
Bernard Stiegler claims that we humans are not exceptional from other animals because we have a special essence or divine investment, but simply because we've learned the skill of incorporating the world into our bodies. This process begins with tools but we are not special just because we use tools, as both animals and machines can do this as well. We do use them differently however, and in a way they almost seem to use us, almost as parasites live off of a host.
“The invention of the human: without our needing to be complacent with the double genitive, its ambiguity signals a question that breaks down into two: “Who” or “what” does the inventing? “Who” or “what” is invented? The ambiguity of the subject, and in the same move the ambiguity of the object of the verb ‘invent,’ translates nothing else but the very sense of the verb.” – Stiegler
So who invents the human? Well humans do, but they don't invent it ex nihilo, they use tools to invent themselves. For Stiegler it is most significant that we use tools for memory and thought, in this case writing and art. Writing and art outsource our memory, agency, and thought to a material outside of our brain - which is relatively short-term and unreliable - to these external media. These are long memories, and are what allow us to have history.
“One must then ask what the closure of the cortical evolution [BRAIN] of the human implies from the vantage of the general history of life, the closure the cortical evolution of the human, and therefore the pursuit of the evolution of the living by other means than life - which is what the history of technics consists in, from the first flake pebbles to today, a history that is also the history of humanity.”
Technics, or this deployment of technology and tools, has literally steered our evolution. And this was not an agentic or rational decision, for Stiegler this was more of an accident. Maybe a lucky accident, but we'll have to see if the biosphere collapses as a result.
While we use written language in its materiality it gets more complex, more developed, and even though it is not conscious it impels our philosophy and self-conceptions in directions activated by this medium itself. The human conception of self and society, as well as what can be built or invented, increases in complexity as our media increases in complexity. We can think of a long book of subjectivity, or the blueprint for a complex machine that saved the history of that form for posterity. We have become apparently distinct from nature only because we never start at square one, since our memory is outside of our bodies. As it turns out we use these media and they develop as a part of a symbiotic relationship. You may be able to consider language in this sense a living organism, distinct and yet dependent upon us. This analogy also carries over as we talk about living, dead, and endangered languages.
Furthermore, writing comes to affect us. Our emotions, our memory, our relationships, and even our sense of time as a continuous process. History is kept by the nonhuman, and history is paradoxically that which differentiates humans from nonhumans, so the division between the ‘special human’ and the ‘unspecial non-human’ is in fact contingent upon there not being a division between the two. Extending this argument to its inevitable conclusion; our being in the world is special because of the world, not because we are self-conscious, as the world is always supplementing self-consciousness and consciousness is never on its own. Thanks Husserl. What is special about us is not within us, in our soul, but it's in our history of technics.
So here's the posthuman reversal. Humans do not make art and write because they are rational and free. Rather humans are rational and free because they write and make art, which depends upon our technical appropriation of the material world, from clay tablets to tablets. The reason that you can think the way you do is because the nonhuman world already cleared a space for you to think.
