The Posthuman in the Anthropocene: A Look through the Aesthetic Field JACOB WAMBERG and MADS ROSENDAHL THOMSEN Aarhus University, Denmark. E-mail: litmrt@cc.au.dk The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero’s oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction’s indeterminacy to Surrealism’s fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things. The Posthuman as Anthropocene Interface The term ‘posthuman’ was rarely used before the mid-1990s, 1 although visions of various sorts of successors to the human species have been imagined in numerous ways since the appearance of their first non-religious predecessors, such as the recombined creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or the New Prometheus (1818), 2 the intelligent machines in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), 3 or the manifold humanity, divided after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). 4 Yet, even if Darwin’s observation of continual species change and extinction logically opened up the idea of humans developing into, or being displaced by, something else, this posthuman prospect of biological evolution European Review, page 1 of 16 © 2016 Academia Europæa doi:10.1017/S1062798716000405 http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1062798716000405 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker, on 10 Oct 2016 at 08:51:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at