non human

How do videogames imagine diegetic and extradiegetic posthuman agents? In a sense, videogame play is already posthuman. The player of a videogame is redistributed in an interrelational assemblage of human and non-human agents (Braidotti 2013); of physical world, player, technology, player character, and virtual environment (Taylor 2009).

Thus, videogames, by their very “nature” should allow us to play out versions of breaking away from anthropocentric idealism and experience what new modes of subjectivity and agency might entail. 

One such attempt is found in the 2017 videogame NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames 2017), lauded as a work of existential nihilism and post-humanity (as “after-human” as well as “beyond-“ or “more-than-human”). NieR: Automata is a role-playing action adventure videogame set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where androids and machines are caught in an eternal war. The player “controls” the android 2B, and later other androids and drone companions, to fight machines on behalf of humanity.

The director, Yoko Taro, has explained that the videogame intentionally avoids asking, “What does it mean to be human?” in favor of asking questions about what is left when we are gone (Muncy 2018).

The videogame more than nods at the posthuman in its narrative and gameplay, as it rejects standardized perception (Gerrish 2018) and traditional depictions of characters (Wright 2020) for machines interacting outside of the human sensorium, and idiosyncratic narrative structures (Backe 2018; Jaćević 2017).

Yet even if the humans behind the conflict are revealed to be long gone, their traces linger as machines and androids are struggling with concepts of human society such as gender, race, and human language. What happens to the posthuman stance of videogame play when machines are breaking away from humanism’s restricted notion of what being human is while continuously performing versions of it?

This presentation investigates how NieR: Automata consolidates reversing an anthropocentric view with firmly situating the human in the network. Through conceptualizing the posthuman as an interrelated agent (Braidotti 2013; Hayles 1999; 2017), the videogame presents oppositions to the humanist fantasy of autonomy on several fronts, especially in the final scene of the videogame. Here, the player has to shoot (and by extension, kill) the credits with names of the developers.

After removing the creators, the player can choose to “release” the player characters by deleting the videogame’s save file, thus stopping the perpetual circle of war, dying, and rebirth that the videogame presents. Is this part of the posthuman agent? Ultimately, in the tension between accelerating and inhibiting agency, in joining and distributing perspectives, in prompting continuation and condemning it, NieR: Automata imagines a paradoxical posthuman future of a human present.

Literature and art forms contribute significantly to the discussion of epistemological concerns of posthumanism. Which is to say that, literature and art imagine, interrogate and nurture the subjective and embodied attributes of the nonhuman experience. It is through such exploration of the experiential aspects that sensitivity and other similar personal engagements can occur, which can augment our comprehension of nonhuman beings and entities, that in turn can lead to conspicuous epistemological and ethical consequences.

To consider critical posthumanism as established only within critical theory and philosophy, wherein the idea of the human has been the moot point, is to neglect the significant role of popular culture and literature in the revaluation of the concept of the human.

This paper while delineating critical posthumanist ideas in critical theory and discourses like animal and monster studies, techno scientific advancements, vital materialism and actor network theory, also concentrates on literary texts. Therefore, the rationale for conjoining the critical posthumanism with literary texts should be traced herewith.

This paper establishes that children’s literature is a fertile ground where philosophy and representation merge, providing a scope that children might think about their “being” and posits children’s literature as a resource to engage in complex philosophical explorations. The mutation of ontologies in children’s fiction challenges the ideological division between human, animal and the artificial. Since, children’s texts experiment with the idea of being, it puts forth ontological questions to their readers and invite readers to question who they are and what they might become.

This paper partakes in the timely debates discussing the possible ways in which posthumanism could operate in literary research by proving useful as an effective tool of analyzing literary texts for children. Posthumanism may, apparently, seem to be at odds with the traditional purpose of children’s literature to socialize and enculturate.

The essential humanist ideas of agency and selfhood conventionally portrayed in children’s literature are contrasted by the multiple and fluid forms of subjectivity as well as networked and assembled forms of selfhood as identified by posthumanist paradigm. However, posthumanism and children’s literature are connected by their shared interest in ethics. Innately preoccupied with the ethical subject formation, children’s literature provides for a ground ideal for interrogating the exclusionary practices that have historically led to creation of the humanist subject.

Moreover, the everyday state of the child or adolescent subjects as being in-between with respect to their relation with the adults and adult culture is analogous to the position that animals, machines and other nonhuman forms occupy in relation to the human subjects within the humanist scheme of things. In their ability to seek “pleasure in their confusion of boundaries” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 172) children emerge as being the ones who delight themselves in discarding absolute ontologies in favour of posthuman ways of thinking about ways of being.

The primary aim of the paper is to connect posthumanist concerns to children’s texts and thereby examine the ways in which these texts facilitate reconsidering and rethinking the ethical and political questions about the human, nonhuman and posthuman in various aesthetic contexts.