S h o r t E s s ay

I t ’s ( fo r ) y o u ; o r, t h e t e l e - t / r / o p i c a l
p o s t- h u m a n

J u l i a n Ya t e s

Department of English, University of Delaware, Delaware.

Abstract

This essay asks what kind of trope or rhetorical operation is activated by

the call of the ‘post-human’? What modes of inscription does the term deploy? I argue
that the ‘post-ing’ of the human proceeds by refiguring of the ‘human’ as telephone or
screen, as a surface that registers the action or presencing of the inhuman via an
overwhelming apostrophe or prosopopeia. Allied to this call is a refiguring of the
‘post-humanities’ as an inquiry into how the modeling of non-human entities inflects
the constitution of a common world, leading us to embark on a quest for less lethal or
more friendly modes of inscription or writing. The philosophical movement known as
‘speculative metaphysics’ provides a rubric for this quest and so for a speculative
literary history that would refigure our contacts with the textual traces named ‘past’ as
a contact zone with alternate ways of being.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 223–234.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.20

There is no off switch to the technological. REMEMBER: When you’re on
the telephone, there is always an electronic flow, even when that flow is
unmarked y To the extent that you are always on call, you have already
learned to endure interruption and the y click.

Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book

G o i n g P o s t /a l

The arrival, dissemination, and now normalization of the words ‘post-human’
or ‘post-humanism’ in literary, historical and cultural studies marks the addition

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of a new ‘actor’ or ‘actant’ to the assemblage of persons, machines, and the
various parading of animal and plant remains employed to disseminate stories
about the textual traces named ‘past.’ But what order of proposition or tropic
operation is this ‘post-’ or ‘post-ing’ of the ‘human,’ this figural turning of the
‘human’ after or outside of itself? What is the nature of its call? What does the
term activate?

Obviously there are difficulties, not least of which, as Katherine Hayles

remarks, is that ‘post, with its dual connotation of superseding the human
and coming after it, hints that the days of the ‘‘human’’ may be numbered’
(Hayles, 1999, 283) and that the term might sponsor fantasies of escaping
embodiment in some transcendent upload or translation. Indeed, no matter
how many brilliant, vital, anti-teleological protestations there are to the
contrary – that ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour, 1993); that ‘we have never
been human’ but have always been ‘embodied’ (Hayles, 1999); that we have
always been ‘natural-born cyborgs’ (Clark, 2004); or that ‘humanism’ not the
‘human’ is what finally resides in the ‘post-human’ (Wolfe, 2010) – the pull to
mere chronology in the preposition ‘post’ threatens to posit the ‘post-human’
merely as what comes next, nominalizing the term, and so sloughing it off
as a category, a type of being, an ontology, even an anthropology, and so a valid
reference.

Against this pull to linearization, the ‘post-human’ stages an ontological slide

that up-ends the stability of categories (animal, plant, person, machine, fungus
and so on) and their enabling narratives to focus instead on the ligatures,
connections, or vinculae between differently animated entities that constitute
ways of being (Serres, 1995, 4). The term deterritorializes being, making visible
what Jacques Derrida once called the arche, ‘general’ or ‘generative text,’ the set
of programs or infrastructure that writes/constitutes the world. It is worth
recalling here that Derrida’s staging of ‘the history of life y [or] differance’ as
the ‘history of the gramme`’ aims to make visible modes of cognition, historical
consciousness and forms of personhood that do not respect the ratio of the line
or the linearization of the world that occurs in a phonetic writing system. The
story, as you remember, begins with the observation lethal to any metaphysics of
presence that ‘life’ begins with the writing event of ‘genetic inscription’ and
‘short programmatic chains regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the
annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos
and of a certain homo sapiens’ (Derrida, 1974, 84). The project of metaphysics
has been to construct a shelter from the technologizing of being as writing and
being written by boxing up this program or inscription as an untranslatable
origin – call it Nature – and so holding at bay the insight that there exists a
history of technology, of the machine and the animal, that is simultaneously,
necessarily a history of human life.

The word ‘post-human’ seeks to do more, however, than detonate this shelter;

it strives to alter the text, to transform it, to rewire its relays or switchboard so

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as to imagine alternate futures. The ‘post-human’ is a type of writing, then,
sponsoring a total re-description of terms and landmarks, a passage to other
regimes of description and other forms of narrative emplotment, a re-
articulation of ethics and politics. As a writing event or trope, the ‘post-human’
trips up the ‘human,’ closing it off, placing the ‘human’ in a parenthesis, and so
marking a passage beyond. But this passage ‘beyond’ or ‘after’ obeys no linear
chronology so much as it seeks to stage the ‘human’ now as a site of exposure,
effecting a pause, and so figuring a hiatus or fitting of the ‘human’ as a category.
Rhetorically, the ‘post-human’ accomplishes this task by placing a potentially
deadly, overwhelming call to the putatively human dasein, a call that cannot be
refused, that comes in on all frequencies, and that simply overwhelms or
overwrites existing codes.

The solipsistic human dasein is forced to idle and to listen or try to listen to

the figurative chatter, songs or screams of the countless non-human actors
whose manufactured declensions fund the networks that wrote the ‘human’
as self-identical being. If the ‘human’ is judged now to be the product or
precipitate of a catastrophic way of modeling the relations between differently
animated beings whose mode of existence, once upon a time, posed no ethical
or political questions of use, then, the ‘post-human’ fractures forever that
certainty. It brings the figure of the outside or the exterior inside the oikos
or collective, remarking that the figure of the outside, that is of all the
beings confined there and not granted citizenship, is a structural fault in the
collective and its concept.

T h e Co l l e c t C a l l

By making lively, by making present, ‘things’ that once were silent, the ‘post-
human’ functions as a powerful tele-t/r/opical operator – activating calls that
resonate within the ‘human’ but whose exteriority precludes their ready
processing. It deploys an overwhelming, potentially cacophonous prosopopeia,
the trope that means to give voice or face to some thing, the trope of
apostrophe, which, as Paul de Man notes, ‘implies that the original face can be
missing or non-existent,’ that it exists only because of its being figured or by the
program of figuration itself (De Man, 1986, 44). But the call doesn’t quite go
through. There’s a fault on the line. And so the prosopopeia folds back on to
itself to become a personification of the call itself: a figure of the figure, a call of
the call or the potentiality that there is a call, coming through, but going
unanswered. By connecting calls that the ‘human’ once simply blocked, the
‘post-human’ floods the switchboard, threatening paralysis, extinction or
terminal overload. It raises the ethical and political ante that inheres to the
‘human’ to breaking point.

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When, for example, in Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour figures the ‘ecological

crisis’ of our present as a ‘generalized revolt of means’ – all those entities pressed
to use in the service of the ‘human’ now demanding entry to what the later Kant
called ‘the kingdom of ends’ (Latour, 2004, 216) – he does so by figuring
a biblically charged knocking, apostrophe or call. ‘Nothing and no one,’ he
writes, ‘is willing any longer to agree to serve as a simple means to the exercise
of any will whatsoever taken as an ultimate end. The tiniest maggot, the
smallest rodent, the scantest river, the farthest star, the most humble automatic
machines – each demands to be taken also as an end, by the same right as
the beggar Lazarus at the door of the selfish rich man’ (Latour, 2004, 216).
And so there comes a figurative knocking at the door to the house or from under
the humanist table, perhaps. Knock. Knock. Who’s there? The common world
that you have arrogated to the state of exception that founds and funds the
‘human.’ Knock. Knock. Who’s there? No. It’s not that easy. There’s no relay
that allows you to answer. There is no guarantee that your physiology or
perceptual apparatus, even when extended, enhanced or properly disabled,
will enable you to recognize or to receive the call as anything other than noise,
static, or silence. Yeast, so Sophia Roosth tells us, ‘screams’ when a ‘scanning
probe microscope y records the vibrational movements of cell walls and
amplifies these vibrations so that humans can hear them’ (Roosth, 2009, 332).
But so what? Is ‘yeast’ now a subject-citizen or merely now manifesting in
ways that have been brought within the realm of human subjectification –
that is made accessible to what de Man once called the ‘army of tropes’
marshaled in the name of anthropomorphism (De Man, 1984, 241–242)?

Paralyzed by the call or activation of the ‘post,’ the ‘human’ is transformed

into an imperfect but potential receiver for all manner of signals from a world
that thus far have been processed as noise or static, but which now assume the
urgent status of positive or negative feedback. Rendered as telephone/screen/
interface, always on, always waiting for the call, human life now becomes
the zone for other entities to manifest or to be judged as manifesting in ways
we will term ‘alive,’ ‘lively’ or ‘alife’ (Doyle, 2003). But this ‘post-ing’ of or to
the ‘human’ installs also the paranoia of the missed or dropped call, of how to
judge when there is a call coming through and whether or not to accept the
charges (which will always be reversed and which could, if the critter is an
unwelcome viral agent, prove lethal). The prospect or uncertainty of the future
hollows out the present as the ‘human’ acquires an altered definition, a
becoming interface or space of connection, a reverse or inverse prosopopeia.
There is, to reprise Avital Ronell, no off switch for the ‘post-human.’ The call is
always (for) you. It leaves you ringing.

The defacement that the tele-t/r/opical call of the ‘post-human’ effects induces

only partial panic, however, for it is accompanied almost immediately by a
refocusing of critical energies on altered forms of inscription or translation. The
function of different modes of imaging, visualizing, sonifying or animating an

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object (and thereby also its analysts) becomes the question that governs the
collective. By which protocols may we create ‘ethically’ which is to say also, as
Isabelle Stengers frequently observes, ‘technically’ well-modeled experimental
subjects becomes key (Stengers, 1997, 216). Hence the proliferation of altered
regimes of description such as the actor-networks of Bruno Latour, the cyborg,
companion or multi-species of Donna Haraway, the ontological choreography of
Charis Thompson, among others, which all deploy an additive, horizontal or topo-
logical mode of description which assumes that ontological boundaries (subject/
object, human/animal, animate/inanimate) are never stable, so much as evolving
propositions, unfinished sentences, that, when looped or stopped, seek to close on
something finite, but which always find a way of running on, for good and ill.

It seems fair then to assume that this conversation about models and ways of

modeling might productively re-task humanist inquiry also, leading us to focus
critical energies on ways of speaking, on ways of making things speak to and of
‘us.’ Deploying the familiar intoning of an ubi sunt formula, in We Have Never
Been Modern, Latour asks ‘where are the Mouniers of machines, the Le´vinases
of animals, the Ricoeurs of facts?’ (Latour, 1993, 136), and he goes on to
adopt the essential formlessness or emptiness of the ‘human’ as an essence,
reconstructing the anthropos as ‘weaver of morphisms’ (Latour, 1993, 137). It’s
this refigured anthropology of the ‘post-human’ as weaver but also as screen,
interface or telephone, that funds Latour’s hallucinatory and justly compelling
figure of the ‘parliament of things’ (Latour, 1993, 142–145), where he imagines
a constant inquiry into the composition of the collective in which variously
skilled or embodied human persons are elected to serve as prosthetic
mouthpieces for this or that phenomenon (most usually the ozone layer).
‘Natures are present,’ he writes,

but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies
are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast
from time immemorial. Let one of the representatives talk, for instance
about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical industry,
a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another for the voters
of New Hampshire, a fifth for the meteorology of the polar regions y
[and so on, all talking] y so long as they are all talking about the same
thing, a quasi-object they have all created. (Latour, 1993, 144)

Welcome, one might say, by extension, to a model for the University Campus of

a reconfigured ‘post’-humanities, which re-organizes itself so that its various
disciplines are understood to represent different skill sets that each analyze a
segment in the life cycle or some ‘thing.’ All of us, as the philosopher Michel
Serres might say, two cultures or not, engaged in an inquiry into a general physis
(Serres, 1982) or general theory of metaphor, clustered around a quasi-object
that we are making.

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It is here that the ‘thing’ we name a ‘literary’ or ‘cultural critic’ might be

productively re-tasked or re-understood. Refigured by the call of the ‘post-
human,’ I argue that we find ourselves reterritorialized in questions of form,
rhetoric, genre and translation, understood now as ways of moving, ferrying or
shifting things (persons, concepts, plants, animals) between and among different
spheres of reference. When, for example, Latour issues the call for new ‘speech
impedimenta’ (Latour, 2004, 62–64) or ways of speaking, Stengers studies
modes of scientific authorship (Stengers, 1997), Hayles surveys modes of
embodiment or the poetics of electronic literature (Hayles, 2008), or Haraway
asks us to think about the mediatizing of entities by way of critter-cams, duct
tape or agility sports for the dog/person companion species (Haraway, 2001;
Haraway, 2008), we are being invited to try out new rhetorical and technical
means by which to transform noise into news of an other. Taking the tele-t/r/
opical call of the ‘post-human’ means, for us, I think, being prepared to
understand our expertise in these terms, and so configuring the textual traces
named ‘past’ as an archive or contact zone which may offer occluded or
discarded ways of being.

Enter the speculative metaphysics of the philosophers, Quentin Meillasoux

(2008), Graham Harman (2002, 2005), and Ray Brassier (2007), and also the
speculative turn that a post-human literary history might take, following the
passage of things themselves through human discourse, charting the networks or
association that form as things travel from hand to hand, in and out of texts,
between and among different spheres of reference, describing a kind of Brownian
motion of persons and things, each remaking the other as they are put to use, re-
animating aesthetics as a contact zone in which the presence of things is understood
to manifest via the installed thoughts and feelings of their human screens.

1

C l i c k ( a H a n g U p )

Modeled as a tele-t/r/opical call or a rhetorical plugging in of every potential
circuit, the ‘post-human’ becomes intelligible as a strong form of writing that
aims to install new modes of inscription. The term seems consonant then with
the desire voiced by Giorgio Agamben at the end of The Open to ‘render
inoperative the [anthropological] machine that governs our conception of man,’
going on to say that this ‘mean[s] no longer to seek new – more effective or more
authentic – articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus
that – within man – separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this
emptiness: the suspension of the suspension [or state of exception that is the
human], Shabbat of both animal and man’ (Agamben, 2004, 92). But, where
Agamben’s project resonates, in this instance, with a pure negativity, inclining to
rest, the ‘post-human,’ at least in my rendering, carries with it the promise or
hope of adequate or effective translation, or even, to use a term freighted with

1 For an attempt to

do this in
Renaissance
studies, see Yates
(2004, 2006).

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inhuman connotations, communication. The power of the tele-t/r/opical call of
the ‘post-human’ is premised precisely on the possibility of a more capacious
holism, a description or modeling that even as it recognizes that ‘person and
thing exchange properties’ or that there is ‘no translation without transforma-
tion’ (Latour, 1996, 61, 48), posits the possibility of the effective triage of
possible futures and a hygienic management of unwanted error, errancy
and risk.

Where Agamben begs for a ‘Shabbat,’ a cessation, an idling or suspension of

the mechanisms by which the state of exception of the ‘human’ is created, the re-
tasked ‘post-human’ seems to rely on a Eucharistic poetics that may, one day,
transubstantiate the body of the collective via the correct ingestion of so many
non-human others – some of which will be pronounced citizens, others of which
will be pronounced enemies and quite righteously be put to death (Latour, 2004,
112–116). In Agamben’s terms, it seems possible then that the tele-t/r/opical
overload of the ‘post-human’ merely sponsors a further rationalization of those
procedures for remarking more and more subdivisions of ‘bare life,’ as the state
takes upon itself the permanent project of sorting those entities which may be
judged to be potential citizen-subjects and so embarked on the project of finding
‘a way of living proper to the individual or the group’ (bios) and those that are
merely ‘bare life,’ which simply exist (zoe¨), and so may be put to use or death
(Agamben, 1995, 1–2).

Doubtless, the Latourian postivization of the ‘post-human’ aims to make the

anthropological machine less lethal, enabling entities to change their status
when and if the correct mode of translation is recovered. Perhaps this is the best
we can hope for. It strikes me, however, that this possibility means that we have
to be on our guard when taking the call of the ‘post-human,’ and that that guard
might entail an alternate re-tasking of literary critics, leading us to divide our
labor and understand our expertise not solely in terms of a speculative
metaphysics, and so to recall instead the place of resistance in questions of
reading and translation, of the necessary impossibility of translation as it is
figured by Paul de Man and Walter Benjamin. For them, translation represents
the further fragmentation of what was already a fragment (Benjamin, 1968,
69–83; De Man, 1986, 73–105), and so the question of reading becomes one of
how those resistances are inhabited, managed, erased so as to make or ratify
certain worlds and not others. Might some of us then find ourselves re-tasked so
as to remind the collective of the agency of error, errancy and disorder in the
pursuit of any project? This is, in part, what I hear voiced in Cary Wolfe’s recent
reminder to animal studies of the ‘human’ animal as marked by the ability to
take up certain traces and so as a site of exposure to the ‘ahuman technicity and
mechanicity of language (understood in the broadest sense of the semiotic
system through which creatures ‘‘respond’’ to each other)’ (Wolfe, 2009, 571).
Such an exposure, even when amped up by the ‘post-human’ so as seemingly to
void rhetoric, necessarily means that the ‘human’ (gone post/al or not) will tend

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always to find itself beside itself, voided, in advance, by its own attempts to self
predication in whichever media to which it finds itself translated.

So, against the arrival of an old/new speculative metaphysics and the shelter

from the inhuman that it perhaps offers, I would like to maintain the
productivity of error, dissonance, opacity and so also the state of nervous,
attenuated being that a melancholy ‘post-human’ produces in and for the
‘human.’ Here, by way of an ending, is a little inhuman aid, summoned from a
seventeenth-century contact zone.

O p e ra t o r A s s i s t a n c e / t h e I n h u m a n C i rc a 1 6 0 9 ( a P o s t- I t )

Imagine you’re a Jesuit-in-training, that it’s 1609, and that you’re at the College
of St. Omer in the Louvain. Your teacher is Father John Gerard, an Englishman,
who was deputy to the Jesuit Mission in England during the 1580s and 1590s.
Or, perhaps, you are having his story read to you by one of your peers in his
absence. Gerard wrote a description of his time in England at the behest of his
superiors, titled simply Narratio Joannis Gerardi, most probably to serve as
both memoir and pedagogical guide. Here he is imprisoned in the Tower of
London in 1597 recovering from successive bouts of torture at the hands of
Richard Topcliffe, chief priest-hunter to the crown:

Left to myself in my cell I spent most of my time in prayer. Now, as in the first
days of my imprisonment, I made the Spiritual Exercises. Each day I spent
four or sometimes five hours in meditation; and everyday, too, I rehearsed the
actions of the Mass, as students do when they are preparing for ordination,
I went through them with great devotion and longing to communicate,
which I felt most keenly at those moments when in a real Mass the priest
consummates the sacrifice and consumes the oblata. This practice brought me
much consolation in my sufferings. (Gerard, 1952, 116)

2

Prison turns back the clock. It returns Gerard to the seminary, and so he

becomes a student once again, passing his time practicing the Ignatian
Exercises, enacting the Mass minus the Massing Stuff, and finding
consolation nevertheless in the partial repetition of a form that to him is
second nature. He goes through the actions with ‘great devotion and longing
to communicate’ (Gerard, 1952, 116), which he feels most keenly at those
points when his gestures mime the transformation of the host – the palpable
presencing of the inhuman. But Gerard’s hands are empty. His gestures are
exactly that, gestures. He performs a ritual minus the substance, the
observance of pure form. Time passes, or is made to pass. And in the place
where communication should take place Gerard experiences a longing, a
longing that transports him elsewhere.

2 The text of

Gerard’s memoir
exists now in one
manuscript at
Stonyhurst College,
Lancashire. For the
purposes of this
short and
impressionistic
essay I have chosen
to use the
translation by
Philip Caraman
(1952) as Gerard’s
manuscript is not
readily available to
readers.

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Gerard’s meditations, his opening of a space for the inhuman, have a

material-semiotic effect. The gestures of the incomplete Sacrament, which effect
no transubstantiation, serve as curative techne´, allowing him to mend his body.
At the end of 3 weeks he is able to move his fingers, hold a knife and feed
himself. The Spiritual Exercises that enabled him to be elsewhere while in
prison, now enable him to be more insistently here, in the Tower, more fully
present to the prison. He finishes the Exercises and asks for a little money and
a Bible, which his friends get for him. He then asks his warder to buy him three
large oranges, and ‘as [the warder] was particularly fond of the fruit,’ Gerard
tells us, he makes him a present of them, ‘thinking all the time,’ he adds, ‘of
another use [he] could put them to’ (Gerard, 1952, 116). This mysterious ‘other
use,’ that Gerard withholds from his readers for several pages, will include
pressing the oranges and collecting their juice to serve as invisible ink; providing
him with the reason for his request for a tooth pick from which he cuts
a makeshift pen; a physical therapy exercise consisting of cutting and piecing the
oranges to make crosses; stringing the crosses to make rosaries for fellow
prisoners; paper to wrap the rosaries in for transport; and so paper on which to
write letters. Ultimately, the warder’s ‘particular fondness’ for oranges will
enable Gerard to escape from the Tower, orchestrating a spectacular waterborne
escape via an exchange of letters written secretly in orange juice.

According to the rhetorical pattern of Gerard’s text, it’s tempting to say that

the deferred communication of the Mass materializes in the form of the warder.
Gerard’s empty-handed offering, his tele-poetical placing of the call to the divine
translates into the figure of the orange-bearing warder who aids in his escape.
The providential drift to the story is made plain – a little too plain perhaps –
when we learn that the orange-bearing warder converts to Catholicism, and so
the text bears witness to the ways in which, as Gerard puts it, his escape from
prison was, ‘in God’s kind disposing, the occasion of his [the warder’s] escaping
hell’ (Gerard, 1952, 138).

Obviously, space permits me only to offer this moment as a quasi-allegorical

treatment of our own predicament when receiving the tele-t/r/opical call of the
‘post-human.’ But it is worth remarking that the efficacy of Gerard’s text depends
on its resistance to our reading of it. How should we parse the efficacy of his
repetition of a program of exercises that summon the orange-fond warder to his
side? What exactly is this text attempting to teach or to install in its readers and
listeners? It appears to disclose the secret writing technologies and practices of the
Jesuits and so to inform on matters of substance – but it is hard to know whether
this disclosure is not itself a further encryption of the actual ways in which the
escape was planned. Is a ‘particular fondness for oranges’ itself already code for
Spanish sympathies – Claudio, in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About
Nothing (1598) is ‘civil, civil [Seville] as an orange’ (2.1.217–24)? Does the text,
in other words, teach its content or its form? Or, does it play an even more subtle
game of disclosure and obfuscation, mixing fact and fiction in an exquisite blend

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to produce holes or gaps in the narrative where the inhuman tropes the story, and
where that presence may be remarked or felt – the inhuman causing the surface of
the text to ripple in ways that a community of believers become readers is able to
register?

Probably the answer is both. For what Gerard installs in his listeners and readers

is the fundamental, defining importance of the Ignatian Exercises themselves as a
tool for the remaking of selves and their way of being in the world. Gerard’s text
teaches a way of moving around the world, of reading persons and events with an
eye to the oblique or the multiple, with an eye to the things persons carry lodged
within them, treating human persons as aggregates of variously coded matter and
ideas, and so as vectors, and prisons as turnstiles, as they are inducted into the
alternate time-frame and formal engagements of an underground movement. For
sure, we can name this way of moving around the world one attuned to the nature
of the multiple or multiplicity, but what funds this pedagogical re-making of his
listeners or readers is a deployment of the inhuman which breaks the narrative line,
summoning the warder to him, disclosing the opportunity to save a soul, even when
he faces almost certain execution.

‘You can call [such inhuman emanations] divine or sacred, if you want,’ writes

Paul de Man, ‘but y [they are] not mysterious in that sense’ (De Man, 1986, 96–
97). ‘The inhuman,’ he continues, is not ‘some kind of mystery, or some kind of
secret; the inhuman is: linguistic structures, the play of linguistic tensions,
linguistic events that occur, the possibilities which are inherent in language –
independently of any intent or any drive or any wish or any desire we might have

y

If one speaks of the inhuman, the fundamental non-human character of

language, one also speaks of the fundamental non-definition of the human as
such, since the word human doesn’t correspond to anything like that’ (De Man,
1986, 96). Obviously, we need to broaden the spectrum of language to include all
the many forms of inscription or media deployed (now and then) to model or
translate non-human others so that they bear on human relations, but it strikes
me that what the ‘post-ing’ of the ‘human’ reveals is the way the emptiness or
‘non-definition’ of the ‘human’ might best be understood to serve as what, once
upon a time, Protagoras named the imperfect, cut, and re-stitched metron or
‘measure of the world’ (Heidegger, 1977, 143) – not the arbiter of the world, but
the hybrid, screen, interface or horizon of all that presences and which is therefore
pronounced ‘lively.’ There is no escaping the call of the ‘post-human.’ It was
placed long ago, from the very beginning, by the fact that Being is hardwired.

Knock. Knock.

A c k n ow l e d ge m e n t

Thanks go to Richard Burt with whom the idea for this essay was hatched and
honed as part of our ongoing conversation.

Yates

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A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

Julian Yates is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He
is the author of Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English
Renaissance (Minnesota, 2003), which was a finalist for the MLA Best First
Book Prize in 2003. His recent work focuses on actor-network theory and
Renaissance Studies.

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