Notes on: Braidotti, R. (2019). A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. Theory Culture and Society 36 (6): 31 – 61. DOI: 10.11 77/0263276418771486. Dave Harris Knowledge now goes beyond human exceptionalism. The foundation is 'a neo-Spinozist monistic ontology that assumes radical immanence, i.e. the primacy of intelligent and self organising matter' (31) the subject is now to be understood as 'a relational embodied and embedded affective and accountable entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness'. There is a continuum between mind and body and between nature and culture. Transdisciplinary knowledge is being produced, the critical posthumanities. Post–anthropocentrism is another factor, and particularly involves a criticism of species hierarchy and human exceptionalism. This is also interdisciplinary and linked to different social movements. There is a convergence with the posthuman predicament and certain neo-humanist claims, leading to a transdisciplinary field and a possible qualitative leap. The Anthropocene to describe the posthuman era is inadequate. Of particular importance is the advance of technology and the increasing inequalities. There may be an 'accelerationist tendency and proliferation [of terms].. It needs a materialist approach, looking at different layers — the environmental, socio-economic, and affective and psychic dimensions, ecologies of belonging as in Guattari. It follows that we should develop cartographies of power relations, showing how knowledge and discourse leads to subjectivity after exchange, producing 'a relational community… A nomadic, transversal "assemblage"' [bullshit reference to D&G] with nonhuman actors including technology. This is necessarily selective and partial and it follows that knowledge production must be multiple and collective, and texts democratic and 'overcrowded', 'the essay as assemblage'. Power is seen as both 'entrapment… And as empowerment' (33). Biopolitical scholarship from Foucault is obviously relevant. It charted power relations but did not embrace affirmative aspects, because it depended on 'residual Kantianism in terms of values' [pass]. It separates bios and anthropos and does not stress nonhuman and technological actors enough. These are now central and also vulnerable so the biopolitical is insufficient. Instead we need nomadic becoming and 'neo-Spinozist vital ontologies' [referenced to Deleuze's two books on Spinoza --notes on one of them here]. Subjectivity is not individual but rather a 'cooperative trans-species effort' that takes place between nature and technology and all the other categories like male-female local global, present and past, in assemblages not binaries, 'in between states'. They all [?] 'Aim at the production of joyful or affirmative values and projects'. Posthumanism materialises this post structuralist approach with a new ontological framework. The feminist 'politics of locations' or 'situated knowledges' [references include Haraway] introduce 'embodied and embedded carnal empiricism' (34) locating people in space and time and giving political subjectivity are ground. At the same time [?] there is an emphasis on immanence rather than transcendental universalism or mind-body dualism is. Matter is a single substance, intelligent and self organising both for humans and nonhumans, and is driven by an 'ontological desire for the expression of its innermost freedom (conatus)' [Wikipedia gives conatus as meaning an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself for Spinoza].  This provides an ontological ground for critical posthumanities. Critical cartographies are both negative and creative and aim to bring forth 'alternative configurations or conceptual personae'.[Deleuze's weasel for when he has to refer to real people].  Figurations are 'localised and hence immanent to specific conditions' and cease to be metaphors but act as 'material and semiotics signposts for specific geopolitical and historical locations' instead. They represent 'grounded complex singularities, not universal categories, expressing both repression and affirmation, the processes of becoming without referring to the usual concept of the subject. This conception is empirically grounded but not 'a substantive entity' but rather a figuration or conceptual persona, a 'theoretically powered cartographic tool' aimed at understanding factors that undo the human, becoming-subjects, tracking discourses about the 'non/trans/meta/ posthuman'. Human nature is now replaced by a continuum between nature and culture, stressing new linkages, '"zoontologies"' (35) and complex interfaces with technology. At the same time, political economy features 'the opportunistic commodification of all that lives'. The old assumptions about 'Man' were Eurocentric and have caused problems and hybridisation. In some cases, panic has resulted about the future of the human in technological societies [and she includes Habermas and Derrida]. Instead, posthumanist scholarship shows 'a remarkable upsurge of inspiration'. The anxiety is unfounded, because 'the human' was never universal or neutral, but rather normative, indexing privilege and entitlement and discrimination. The posthuman is not a narrowing of options, but is 'normatively neutral', offering 'a spectrum', and analysis of complexity of subject formation, including questions like who might we be. New subjects of knowledge now seem possible 'through immanent assemblages or transversal alliances between multiple actors' (36). There is now a strange 'pan – human', united in its vulnerability, expressed in the Catholic Church and in UN humanitarianism, and even in the progressive left. It is a classic reaction by 'the majority' that is 'male/white/heterosexual/owning wives and children/urbanised/speaking a standard language'. However, it is not just universalist languages that are threatened here, so are 'radical epistemologies like feminism and postcolonial theory' What is required is 'nomadic or vital materialism' to solve the 'paradox of simultaneous overexposure and disappearance of the human' we can turn to D&G [W IP] and 'the notion of the present': it is a paradoxical notion because it makes us aware of what we are ceasing to be, as well as perceiving what we are becoming. 'Man' has only become thinkable now it is threatened. D&G say we should move towards the actualisation of the virtual instead of staying with critical analysis of the actual. So posthumanism is a form of critical thought directed at what we are ceasing to be as well as accounting for what we are becoming, the expression of unrealised possibilities. The second one involves new concepts and navigational tools, particularly focusing on 'the project of actualising the virtual' (37). This focus on becoming is deeply connected to affirmative ethics and creativity — the latter draws upon a block of past experiences and affects to realise their potential.. We get a flow of virtual intensity, differentiation and becoming in which 'there is no Greenwich Mean Time' and no paradox, no 'extinction/survival binary', no justification for panic. We have complexity and diversity and 'multiple becomings' [sounds very comforting and apologetic to me, assuming that the ruling class also want to engage in this open becoming, instead of being incapable of it]. She identifies a 'yearning towards the virtual' and says we should focus collective efforts on developing this, pursuing the '"otherwise other"' rather than the usual' oppositions and pejorative differences' (38). New transdisciplinary hops have produced an exuberant growth. They call themselves various kinds of studies like feminist and queer studies, colonial, media and so on. Some have grown up in STS, say the work of Stengers, or digital culture. They all criticise the conventional notion of the humans for anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism or '"methodological nationalism"', which infect the academic disciplines and ground the authority of them in the past. They pursue instead an outsiders approach [nothing to do with careers then?]. They are concerned with contemporary events and its complexities are, for example combinations of rationality and violence, and they all offer alternative versions of the self. She cites Irigaray and Fanon. Contemporary feminism is a good example, departing from the regime of Man in every sense, seen best in eco-feminists, and cultivating the notion of being an outsider, Strange alliances have been formed with the technological as in feminist sci-fi. Various alliances have been formed with insurrectionist 'others' including nonhumans. Bonds with others 'including monstrous and alien others' have been formed, binaries have been rejected, diversity and alternatives of sexualities, found in nonhumans, even microorganisms, have been studied for support (39). Neologisms have proliferated, such as '"humanimals"' (40), digital life has being given a second nature. A new area of studies has appeared as well including posthuman or in human studies focused on disability or celebrity or diet or plants, and new media has generated subsections like software games 'critical code studies'. There have been conflict and peace studies human rights studies, suicide studies and various other kinds. However, they all take place 'within the axiomatic and profit driven system… Of '"cognitive capitalism"'. This produces both multiple options for consumers and 'deterritorialised differences for the sake of commodification' (41). Commodities are addictive and toxic. Living matter is seen as the source of surplus, and virtual systems as a role to accumulate information, an 'opportunistic biogenetic political economy' which itself blurs distinctions between humans and nonhuman's 'when it comes to profiting from them'. That 'spuriously unifies all species under the imperative of the market' There is a danger that posthuman scholarship will itself become 'just an epistemic form of accelerationsm'. It has to be met with 'affirmative ethics' and a political praxis that collectively counteract choices the virtual, a politics based on affirmation, deceleration, the reconstruction of 'the missing people'. [Hopelessly idealistic]. She acknowledges the speed of reterritorialisation by capitalism and the way it saturates the present which prevents actualisation of the virtual  or blocks collective desires. It affects universities, scientific communities and the art world, and makes it difficult to tell the difference between affirmative and instrumental modes of knowledge production. We have to make 'careful ethical distinctions' (42). [Fat lot of flocking good that will do us]. Our 'neo-materialist vital position' will help us make robust rebuttal, to resist over coding by capitalist profit principles and develop affirmative compositions of transversal subjectivities which expand selves, and extend their relational capacities to nonhumans, 'zoe–centred egalitarianism' which is the core of posthumanism for her' Nonhumans in knowledge production have a distinguished history, and 'actor network theory is part of this tradition' (42), establishing collaborative networks. However it did not analyse power relations at work, especially socio-economic differences, preferring instead a 'flat ontological equality of actors 'instead of a critical epistemology [does she mean ethics]. Latour rejected any theorisation of subjectivity which meant rejecting politics, and foregrounded ethnographic observations of practices instead of 'over politicised discussions about power and knowledge' as in Foucault and others. We have to go beyond these. The critical posthumanities and their various studies also have led to offshoots showing what the humanities can become. They are based on 'monistic vitalism' driven by 'nomadic, embedded, embodied and technologically mediated subjects' (43). It is zoe- centred. It profits from analyses of current forms of power relations such as '"bio piracy… Necro politics"'. This proliferation could be a sign of 'new meta-discursive energy' by the disciplines themselves, which retains institutional power. However they could also be seen as 'an nomadic expansion… Rhizomic growth' which will produce hybrids and heterogeneous assemblages. There is a new acknowledgement of the porous boundaries of traditional disciplines, and changes to their 'epistemic core', which results in new driving forces for knowledge, 'the extent that they show the ability and the willingness to move on… Movement… Towards a qualitative new new approach… A nomadic shift'. However, what makes these shifts nomadic and critical, in the environmental and the digital humanities? To take the environmental first. There is a metanarrative based on neoliberal economics and majoritarian formations, countered with a new idea drawn from social sciences anthropology and environmental sciences, drawing on sustainability, recoded as 'the environmental humanities'. This field is 'so dynamic it seems unstoppable' (42) and has already subdivided, somehow just insisting on 'the necessity of recasting ethical and political subjectivity for our times' (43). There is an analogous development in digital humanities from media studies, following computing methods and its application to humanities content, as in databases of texts, 3D scanning or the 'digitisation of musical scores'(45) this has suggested new relations between humans and technology. Neoliberalism has found ways to capitalise on this, but there has been an mutation into new media studies which might mutate into digital humanities, and there are indeed at least 'six specialised journals… And an international network'. It has caught on in major research universities. This pattern is 'indexed on the becoming – minoritarian of knowing subjects and knowledge practices. They are carried by affirmative ethical forces' [real wishful thinking here — they exist only until the next financial crisis]. There are still 'patterns of exclusion'[telling me] and a little adoption of feminist or decolonial humanities. Deterritorialisation is stil of lesser speed than acceleration. 'Cognitive capitalism' might not wish to overcoat everything, 'but it does pick "Star specimens'. However [let's be optimistic] it still allows for alternatives by minor subject, 'that actualise is what I call "the missing peoples"' (46). Thinking represents 'the conceptual counterpart of the ability to enter modes of relation'. Critical/creative nomadic thought pursues the 'actualisation of transversal relations', generative cross pollinations. Deleuze gets this from Spinoza. It is a break with quantification. We've seen the quantitative proliferation of discourses, but this does not indicate a paradigms shift to posthumanism. We need a qualitative shift as well, involving 'supra-disciplinarity, meta–discursivity, material grounding, nomadic generative force and affirmative ethics'. We can operationalise these as methodological guidelines — cartographic accuracy, ethical accountability, critique combined with creativity 'including a flare for paradoxes' and the recognition of art practices as specific, nonlinearity, the importance of memory and the imagination, and 'the strategy of de- familiarisation'. The crucial ones are nonlinearity, which connects with 'rhizomic logic'and the weblike structure of the global economy and the complexity of contemporary science, the complext topology of knowledge. Linear time, Chronos is institutional and authoritative, while Aion is 'dynamic, insurgent and more cyclical' [citing Deleuze — wrongly I think] so we have a difference between Royal institutional knowledge compatible with capitalism and minor marginalised knowledge which is ethically transformative and 'politically empowering, nomadic, and creative [bollocks] It is becoming that is the conceptual motor and provides parallelism between philosophy science and art. Deleuze is cited again. DeLanda refers to Deleuze in science as anti-essentialist and argues that minor science 'also replaces typological thinking' with the virtual and the intensive becoming as 'the ruling principle of resemblance, identity, analogy and opposition' [pure bullshit here, reference to the big book on Spinoza]. Critical post humanities are developing faster than academic institutions can keep up with. They develop between universities social movements and corporate interests in the form of the studies. They may coexist and co-construct capital and 'the profit oriented re-acquisitions of life as capital'. The difference for her is 'ethical but its effects are political', whether assemblages are affirmative, whether they actualise '"collective imaginings"' (48). Complexity is the issue, whether matter is auto-poetic, a complex singularity, 'a relational vitalist entity'. Ontological differences 'inflect' epistemological conceptions. The critical posthumanities 'actualise an immanent politics' [well they suggest a potential one, in the most abstract in idealist terms — actualising one is another matter]. Our habits of thought are defamiliarised and undergo a qualitative shift. Instead of bemoaning and loss of privilege, we undertake an assessment of our deficits and injuries, especially towards nonhumans, we see those instead in terms of 'trans-species flows of becoming: a native or vernacular form of cosmopolitanism'. The Oxford Inst for the Future of Humanity 'embodies the hegemonic model of the posthuman as trans-humanism, implemented through a program called "super intelligence"' it believes in scientific rationality as a way to human enhancement, the European Enlightenment, the development of robotics and computational science. It gets lots of support from capital. She proposes minor science and nomadic critical posthumanities instead. She sees 'margins of negotiation' within the clusters of interest and the episodes of reterritorialisation in cognitive capitalism. The codes of capital never saturate becoming, and power is never a single entity. Growth takes a non-profit form, of interbreeding and cross pollinating, in liminal spaces. The connections are multiple but the central tenet is that 'plateaus are not dialectically distinct and opposed, but rather contiguous and co-constructed' (49), there are 'multiple missing links', only one matter, nothing outside, only critical spaces to be developed inside through radical immanence and transversal assemblages. There might be a risk of introducing segregation again. Certainly few 'institutional meta patterns' have emerged to connect up the various identity studies. There is 'rhizomatic energy' and that includes border crossings [she cites Nixon 2011 on slow violence, post-colonialism and indigenous epistemologies — that's one bloke not an institution. He proposes new dialogues apparently] there are other individuals cited to show similar developments, and these claim to have developed whole new fields. They include 'decolonising new media'. Mignolo is cited to warn that digital technologies can devastate indigenous ways of knowing and to argue for a delinking of digital media from European colonialism and this can lead to new alliances between indigenous people, their epistemology, and new media activists [new PhDis about them]. Apparently something called the Hastac Scholars Forum was 'explicitly inspired by Mignolo''s work' (50) [the note cites a website  http://www.hastac.org/forums/colonial-legacies-postcolonialrealities-and-decolonial-futures-digital-media] These are transversal discourses combining ecology with care for indigenous populations and criticising Western imperialism and racism. This is not relativism. Nor is it some self generating [academic careerist] process. It is generated by the Internet but that 'does not make it spontaneous' (51) it is generated by the hard work of 'communities of thinkers and activists — alternative collective assemblages — that reconstitute not only the missing links in academic practices, but also and especially the missing people'. She means everyone who isn't included in the normal human category, all those who never made it into official cartographies, including all the minorities and nonhumans. These new alliances constitute them as political subjects of knowledge. There are also virtual missing people, including 'Earth-others (land, waters, plants, animals) and nonhuman inorganic agents (plastic, wires, information highways, algorithms, et cetera).' All apparently are to be involved in a new alliance. So the present may record the decline of man but it is also the trigger for 'becoming subject', for the missing people to emerge as a complex singularity. The forces of been transposed from past to future, from virtual to actual.  bodies can now show what they can do. 'This is liberation through the understanding about bondage as Spinoza teaches us' (52). D and G apparently have said [no reference] that the human is only one vector of becoming and that 'we need to compose a new people and a new earth' in a form of 'politics of radical immanence' (52). This is the way to proceed instead of the abstract idea of pan humanism, apparently grounded in sphere of extension and world risk [and Beck is cited here] So there is exuberance and 'process ontology underscoring' for this position. It constructs a 'conceptual persona, a navigational tool' to illuminate discursive and material formations. The new transdisciplinary discourses and critical posthumanities now warrant 'serious scholarly credentials '[so they can cease being nomads and come in and enjoy the hospitality of universities?]. They express a qualitative shift to a 'vital, neo-materialist epistemology' that opposes nature culture binaries and sees matter as relational ,'auto-poetic and sym-poetic'. This grounds critical posthumanities as 'a supra-disciplinary, rhizomic field of contemporary knowledge production' [plenty of jobs!] Which matches the acceleration of cognitive capitalism. Its novelty is the distinction between the present and the process of becoming, the horizon of becoming. The contemporary university and the academic humanities could benefit from this opening out, and links to social and political movements, and even 'new kinds of economically productive practices in a market economy liberated from capitalist axioms' (53) [but the market economy is dominated by capitalist axioms]. Everything else has been recuperated so 'there is nothing left for critical thinkers to do other than pursue the posthuman, all too human praxis of speaking truth to power and working towards the composition of planes of eminence for missing people'. They should focus on complex singularities rather than generalisations about humanity so as to grasp the interconnections but also the internal fractures of humanity and actualise the missing people. A minor science is to be reconstructed. [Clear emergence of academic politics in the last bit — the role of the humanities in the modern university] NB Barad gets a mention in one of the notes