Post-human sociality. Morphing experience and emergent forms

The present chapter begins to develop an analysis of the social processes that are challenging the basic assumption, according to which the boundaries of society overlap with those of interactions among human beings. I call post-human sociality the emergent phenomenon of relations and networks in which human and non-human entities are involved together as relationship partners. The primary aims of the study are to explore how these hybrid relations really differ from ‘purely human’ ones, what role they could play in the human experience of the world, and how the whole social realm might be transformed in their wake. The final point would be to understand what a post-human society might look like. In the present chapter, a fresh perspective on the subject, and some characteristics of these relational experiences are examined. The approach taken in this essay is critical of both deterministic views, according to which ‘social technologies’ automatically produce deep change in human relations, and the dismissive accounts that downplay the relevance of these phenomena, arguing against their capacity to elicit genuinely social experiences. This possibility must neither be taken for granted – as post-humanist ideologues do – nor be denied in principle. It is precisely the possible points of discontinuity between hybrid types of social experience and ‘historical sociality’ that are the main object of the present investigation.