Posthumanist Themes

By “posthumanist,” I mean the line of thought from the humanities that’s centrally about non-anthropocentrism, not the Silicon Valley humanist fantasies, “transhumanism.”

The game occasionally references some idea of humanness. Characters speculate about you being the last human in the universe, Nahema talks about freeing oneself from debt slavery and doing the human thing of exploring Proteus, Nahema expresses that humans don’t belong on Proteus, and Sophie’s ghost can state that you must not forget you’re a human. Humanness is arguably a theme.

I think it’d be interesting if the game intentionally explored posthumanist themes like non-anthropocentrism, distributed agency, and humanness as an ideological construct.

Perhaps on Proteus, humanity is dying. Not necessarily literally, the lineage one calls human may continue to live on in some manner or other, but dying in the sense that ∗∗∗ is dead. It’s role as a normative, organizing concept is fading, and people must reckon with this. Humanity was always like a secular ∗∗∗.

Also, perhaps the game could explore humans not being seperate from Proteus, not sealed off masters of some terra nullius. Proteus is chock full of mutualism and changes every organism that interacts with it. It’s protean. The “pioneers” could become a part of Proteus and intra-act with its agency.

The game arguably already contains similar themes and plot points, although I’m unsure if it’s intentional and if other have critically examined them. I’d like to see more of that going forward.

Unlike Sophie suggests, I want to forget I’m a human. Let that deity fade into nothing. Proteus won’t be understood for as long as I kneel before the shrine of humanity.

Isn’t it exploring such themes already? Given your interest, I wonder if you’ve ever heard of Jean Gebser and his observations of human “consciousness structures” throughout human history. If not, I highly recommend his work.

I think we need to move away from the conventionally understood “postmodern” and “posthuman” language. Like a toddler, the emergent “integral consciousness” (in Gebser’s terms) is more or less babbling, atm. Or, as a mentor once put it, “we need a new language.” Took me a while to figure out what he meant by that. We can see evidence of emergence everywhere, but have no shared vocabulary with which to discuss it yet. Gebser coined neologisms easily translatable into one’s “native tongue,” so to speak, in an effort to bypass the worn out, realtively meaningless, circular logic and language we appear to be stuck in, atm.

One could analyze the game in terms of these sorts of themes and argue that it explores them to some extent

I think it’d be cool if the story leaned into this sort of stuff a bit

It’s currently unclear to me if that’s the direction it’s going in