Post-human ageing: A critical commentary

This paper outlines a critique of the use of post-humanist epistemologies in the study of age and ageing which we argue makes age more a matter of human imagination than of human mattering. The 'decentring' of what is human that is associated with post-humanism creates a set of phenomena that we feel obfuscates rather than illuminates the place of age and ageing in human life, human relations and human society. Applied to the study of ageing, post-humanism claims to establish a new materialist gerontology that challenges the ontological basis applied in most ageing studies. Both the species-being of humanity, the individual experience of age and ageing and the social relations in which the processes of ageing are embedded, are sidelined in favour of a view of ageing conceived as an entanglement of objects, organs and organisations. Rather than a human or social reality, age appears to dissolve into a complex, contingent set of networks and processes extending beyond the merely human. These post-humanist developments are seen as offering new and alternative perspectives to those associated with more conventional ageing studies, which have focused on change in the individual experience, cultural representations and social relations of ageing. Such post-humanist epistemological frameworks, we suggest, risk acting as a set of mirrors through which age is endlessly refracted. In the process, age and ageing lose much of their human understandability to become a seemingly infinite flux of diffusely distributed, and ultimately directionless quasi-vitalities.