Posthumanist Transmedia: David Blandy’s The World After (2019)

Transmedia storytelling can be a powerful tool for representing and narrativizing our world, but also for building a better, more ethical present. In particular, transmedia’s digital lens can reveal important new possibilities, particularly when approached through a posthumanist perspective. When we think of ‘the posthuman’ we might initially envision cyborgs, aliens, and monsters, but the theoretical framework of critical posthumanism takes a different approach to this term. As Stefan Herbrechter points out in the Posthuman Glossary, the ‘post’ in posthumanism on the one hand “signifies a desire or indeed a need to somehow go beyond humanism (or the human), while on the other hand, since the post- also necessarily repeats what it prefixes, it displays an awareness that neither humanism nor the human can in fact be overcome in any straightforward dialectical or historical fashion (for example, in the sense: after the human, the posthuman)” (Herbrechter 2018: 94). As a result of this double vision, looking forward and back at the same time, acts of critical posthumanist imagining remain firmly grounded in the present moment. In Herbrechter’s words, a critical posthumanism “functions more like an anamnesis and a rewriting of the human and humanism’ than an erasure, explicitly resisting transhumanist or apocalyptic visions of the future through which humans might “‘argue themselves out of the picture’ precisely at a time when climate change caused by the impact of human civilisation (cf. Anthropocene) calls for urgent and responsible, human action” (Herbrechter 2018: 95). David Blandy’s 2019 exhibition The World After offers an excellent illustration of the possibilities of posthumanist transmedia for imagining a world outside ourselves, and beyond the dystopian capitalist realities of the contemporary Anthropocene