Perversely, I started my reading with Allison Muri’s ‘Of Shit and the Soul’ (2003). I’m a sucker for a good title; I have a friend who wrote an article on WW1 French and German women’s writing called ‘Beyond the canon’. Brilliant title (don’t remember much of the contents of the paper though).
Anyway, I thought it was fantastic dismantling of discourses around disembodiment or corporeal irrelevance. Muri concludes that “extravagantly metaphorical claims about the disembodied post-human condition are offered as original contributions to academic discourse when in fact they reinforce the familiar old stereotypes of the baseness of the body distinct from, and opposed to, the elevation of mind or spirit (2003: 89-90).
So, such discourses rework centuries old beliefs about our vile bodies; the posthuman does, indeed, always ring twice (have I sort of justified my blog post title 
?).
However, skim reading some of the other articles – e.g. Hayles – I think some theorists’ conceptualisation of the posthuman is less about disembodiment and more about a critique of the so-called ‘liberal humanist subject’ and its defining characteristics (e.g. rationality, free will, autonomy, consciousness as the seat of an identity or selfhood which is stable). This looks to me like the familiar poststructuralist and postmodernist critique of the ‘liberal humanist subject’. At the moment I can’t see any clear blue water between posthumanists and postmodernists.
Anyone any thoughts?
References
Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge.
Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25
Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23(7).
Muri, A. (2003). Of Shit and the Soul: Tropes of Cybernetic Disembodiment in Contemporary Culture. Body & Society, 9(3): 73-92
I had the same feeling. I always thought postmodernism is about multiple identities, and infinite reflexivity – which is also what posthumanism seems to be about. I think postmodernism was already trying to explain our relationship to technology. Maybe in posthumanism the networking aspect is new, which a relative recent aspect of our relationship to technology.
[...] leave unread by starting with those that take a critical position on the posthuman (I am drawn to Muri). However, Shields turns me on to Haraway and, having read Haraway I’m totally blown away. I [...]