1. Introduction

Hassan (1977, p. 844) associates cosmological extension of human consciousness with the literary movement Posthumanism.

The sigmatoid (Pinheiro 2015, p. 1) posthumanism makes us theorise that this movement appears after Humanism, since a postdoctorate (Akerlind 2005, p. 25) comes after a doctorate, and a postnatal depression (Bilszta et al. 2009, p. 44) appears after giving birth.

To prove that the sigmatoid posthumanism means something beyond what we now theorise, we must talk about what the sigmatoid humanism points at as well as the temporal situation of the literary movements.

Humanism defines and names itself by describing a new way of life centering on human• interest instead of religious or transcendental interest.

To accomplish this shift, human is defined as the locus of reason.

Reason is offered as a form of thought that is at once free and freeing, free in the sense that it can operate outside of the dogmatism, prejudice, and irrationality of medieval ideology.

(Shapiro 1990, p. 17)

Shapiro defends that rationality frees us from the purely abstract entities, those that are completely machine-friendly (only a computer can be completely impartial, and therefore perfect in its impartiality).

God has to be a purely abstract entity, since He is perfect, and therefore He never commits a mistake (Sparks 2008, p. 257), but all that exists is imperfect or bears some amount of mistake in its essence (a rock cannot move like us, a human being cannot fly by default, and so on).

God is built from dogmas, but rationality unavoidably makes us commit very serious mistakes (Jesus had a public and open judgement, following the local rules, and the majority of us, by means of rationality, has accepted that his judgement was fair. The public had a choice between a well-known criminal and Jesus, and the well-known criminal was released in place of Jesus), and therefore rationality is one more step into humanity, which, as plenty have said, is imperfection per se (Haers, Hintersteiner & Schrijver 2007, p. 168).

The session to vote for Jesus or the well-known criminal frontally opposes the reasoning associated with dogmas, for those are not proved or discussed in terms of their essence.

We at most discuss their consequences.

Jesus’ life could have been saved through a rule: nobody who claims to believe the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will ever be judged or condemned to any penalty.

If the just-suggested rule had been imposed to the people by the Emperor back then, Jesus would not end up on the cross, and this would happen even if the entire population of the place wanted The State to kill Jesus, and therefore regardless of the existence of rationality.

We become more rational, and therefore decide to have democracy, vote for things, and Jesus dies…

It is probably in this sense that Shapiro says that centering things on human interest, rather than religious, is humanising them or entering Humanism.

We then equate religious to dogmatic and human interest to items like democracy.

As for temporal situation, Rossiter (2018) teaches us that, between Humanism (rennaiscence, 14^th-17^th CE) and Posthumanism (mid 20^th CE), there is Modernism (early 20^th to mid 20^th CE), so that posthumanism is not the same as after humanism.

This post must make posthumanism connect to humanism in the same sense that postmodernism connects to modernism instead (Felluga 2011, para. 40).

In this case, the bulk of humanism is absorbed, but it is a stronger movement (extending reason to soul and/or other areas of the human persona (Pinheiro 2017b, pp. 21-24).

Well, according to Bolter (2016, p. 1), posthumanism:

a) is a new way of understanding the human subject in relationship to the natural world in general.

b) claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centered in Cartesian dualism.

c) seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological.

And, for Hassan (1977, p. 838), who coined the term, posthumanism can be understood from reading the extract below:

1. the cosmos is performance, posthumanist culture is a performance in progress, and their symbolic nexus is Prometheus;

2. Prometheus is himself the figure of a flawed consciousness struggling to transcend such divisions as the One and the Many, Cosmos and Culture, the Universal and the Concrete;

3. with regard to posthumanism itself, the most relevant aspect of the Promethean dialectic concerns Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology, Earth and Sky, two realms tending to one;

4. this dialectic, however, has a hoary history; the languages of imagination and the languages of Science have often mingled and crossed in certain epochs and in certain great minds of the past;

5. because both imagination and science are agents of change, crucibles of values, modes not only of representation but also of transformation, their interplay may now be the vital performing principle in culture and consciousness-a key to posthumanism.

We then discuss the world reference for posthumanism, contrasting the views of Hassan and Bolter with that of Shapiro, analyse A Report to an Academy, by Kafka, under the light of posthumanism, compare that text with other two texts that Rossiter (2018b) classifies as posthumanist pieces, and determine whether A Report to an Academy is a posthumanist story or not.

2. Development

Bolter uses Cartesian Dualism in the same way Shapiro uses rationality: anthropocentrism is reason, or placing the center on the human being is rationality, and anthropocentrism is Cartesian dualism, so that rationality is Cartesian dualism.

Bolter then says that posthumanism is something that is not about Cartesian dualism, and therefore, to put both thinkers together, we say that rationality is something different from Cartesian dualism.

How dualism would equate anthropocentrism is a puzzle.

Anthropocentrism (Kopnina et al. 2018, p. 109) is the understanding that value is human-centred and that all other beings are means to human ends.

Human beings are more than mind and body: extrasensory perception (Lemmon 1937, p. 237), soul (Pinheiro 2015b, pp. 1-88), magical powers (Subbotsky 2014, pp. 1-17), thought transmission (Grau 2014, pp. 1-6), auras (Swanson 2008), reincarnation (Walter 2001, pp. 21-38), implants, and so on.

Perhaps what Bolter meant is that humanism attempted to put rationality in all analysis and portraits of the actions and thinking of humans, but ended up operating in the realm of Cartesian Dualism, which is still better, or more human, than the total abstraction of the religious dogmas, since the latter could be seen as only one of those two parts, so say mind or thinking.

The Bristol Humanist Group (American Humanist Association 2018, para. 4) states that Humanism is an approach to life based on reason and our common humanity, recognizing that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone.

Moral values definitely have to do with bipolarity (good x evil or right x wrong, see (Bucciarelli 2008, p. 125), but reason does not necessarily connect to Dualism [(Spellman & Schnall 2009, pp. 5-6) deals with reason that does connect to dualism, but (Priest 2001, pp. 1-264) deals with reason of a different nature].

Perhaps common humanity could be associated with this concept, and then justify the opinion of Bolter.

In case Bolter is right, Posthumanism should be faced as the true humanism, since that is the fulfilment of the purest intentions with that movement.

Bolter mentions epistemology that is not centered on the human being (2016, p. 1).

Center on human beings means the opposite to Cartesian Dualism, which is Classical Logic (Pinheiro 2017, pp. 44-50).

Cartesian dualism implies that mind and body, or evil and good, as for what could be called Ancient Times (Eck 2017, p. 4-7), are all that there is (Rosell 1999, pp. 1-18).

Classical Logic implies true and false are all that there is instead.

Human beings are more, in their psyche, than any logical system (Pinheiro 2014, pp. 61-65), which is something that matches a machine: we may, for instance, act upon being invaded by extra-human forces, so say spirits (Naumescu & Halloy 2012, pp. 155-176).

With that, we may act outside of the Cartesian system (our action is not ours, and therefore we have not done good or evil; we have simply been forced to do something that may be good or bad or maybe even good and bad at the same time. That is when we could start thinking of the Logic of Paradox, the system envisaged by Priest (Priest 1979, pp. 219-241).

Foster (1991, pp. 1-308) wants us to consider that Descartes was not less than fully dualist because he took non-human animals to be mindless automata, and that, if someone claims that there are no minds apart from their own, they are not making an anti-dualist concession.

Foster is here saying that we could have human animals, first of all, so perhaps Manimal or something (Manimal 1983).

Whatever Descartes saw as non-human animals, which we expect to be something like a dog, would be a mindless automaton, and therefore something like a dumb computer terminal in Networks (WebFinance Inc. 2018, para. 1).

That means that, for Descartes, it is just a body, since the world is divided into mind and body for him.

What Foster is doing here is letting us know that the fact that some animals would not have a mind for Descartes, and therefore would be formed of one of the two components of his world, does not imply that he stopped seeing the world in that way: either mind or body.

It is the same as saying that if you do not have contact with evil, your mind may still think on those grounds all the time: things are either good or evil, and there is nothing else.

If we say that there are no minds apart from our own, that does not mean that we see the entities in this world as something that is not divided into mind and body, so that Foster is just making sure we understand that these events are unrelated.

That point made, we must agree that if Posthumanism is not the same as Cartesian Dualism in what comes to construction of knowledge, consciousness is extended in cosmic ways, no boundaries exist to separate what is animal from what is human or from what is technology, and we incorporate what is beyond human, we may now finally be allowed to learn things from past lives, from exercising thought transmission, and so on.

Hassan’s Prometheus is struggling when attempting to destroy the boundaries between one and many, cosmos and culture, and so on.

In this case, Hassan is making us regress, since we all accept that acknowledging diversity is progressing, so that creating divisions whilst constructing knowledge is progress.

At the same time, Hassan is changing literature and allowing us to extrapolate human existence through it (infinity is reached through our thinking), what is progress in literary terms.

Kafka may not be an example of his proposal, since he seems to be a dualist: all he does is making the animals reason like us and us reason like the animals.

That is exchanging heads, and therefore all still reduces to mind or body.

In this sense, Kafka is not better than Descartes in what comes to Philosophy, but he is revolutionising writing: that far, we could say that admitting that animals may have souls or become infinity through thinking was something outrageous.

In Kafka’s (1988, p. 5) words:

a) A fine, clear train of thought, which I must have constructed somehow with my belly, since apes think with their bellies.

b) And that too is human freedom, I thought, self-controlled movement. What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.

Kafka puts both minds together: an ape’s and a human being’s.

He could not be in one of them only, for, in the item a, he says ‘apes’, what means that he is not one of them, and, in the item b, he says ‘human freedom’, what means that he is not a human.

Apes think (item a) implies that Kafka is in the human being’s mind, and with my belly (item a), because of the rest of the sentence, implies that he is in the ape’s mind.

This is what they have called cosmological extension of our consciousness, so that this particular piece of Kafka fits Hassan’s definition for posthumanist (Hassan 1977, p. 844).

As said, Hassan coined this term (Hassan 1977, p. 838).

The only way Hassan’s writings could agree with Bolter’s (Bolter 2016, p. 1) is if what is meant by cosmological extension (Hassan 1977, p. 844) is two or even three (Bolter mentions human, animal, and technological) becoming one, not many, and, in special, never infinitely many, as in Fuzzy Logic (Sharma & Gupta 2013, p. 1).

Kimberley (2016, p. 125) approaches things from a very different perspective: posthuman means beyond human, encompassing but not limited to various combinations and permutations of cyborg, superhuman, genetically superior human, and animal/human fusion.

Our hearing aid can extend our corporeal/human/normal capabilities, but so can a spirit capable of assuming each person’s persona, since the two parts (mind and body) become plenty (mind of x, body of x, mind of y, body of y, and so on).

Posthumanism proposes that all we currently call mind become one indiscernible and consistent consciousness whilst the bodies that currently are seen associated with those minds are kept apart.

It is all about the mind…

With this, the main difference between posthumanism and humanism becomes what is beyond human, so being able to count on a head implant as if we were counting on a genuine part of the original brain and assuming that that implant is a contributor when it comes to the functioning of the mind.

Hassan also talks about making Science and imagination become one.

In this case, we know that posthumanism is something that opposes Realism, like it would be possible that animals thought and we were able to accurately describe their thinking, but it is not possible that our imagination, per se, match Science all the time.

If there is one thing that a posthumanist piece of art should not be is realist, we just concluded, but could a piece of art, so say Report to an Academy, belong to both posthumanism and modernism?

To answer this question, we study a few other pieces of art.

The East Window from Brodie (Brodie 2013, p. 1-16) is classified as both medieval and gothic or simply neo-gothic.

The East Window satisfied the criteria to be called medieval and it also satisfied the criteria to be called gothic.

Some Kafka’s pieces are classified under modernism (Bloom 2010, p. 37) and others are classified under postmodernism (Roberts 2000, p. 115) or posthumanism (Barcz 2015, p. 259).

Some think that Kafka is always inside of modernism (Bloom 2010, p. 13) as well.

Ryan (2018, para. 1-22) says that Kafka:

1) writes from the point of view of a third person;

2) writes about issues involving authority and power;

3) writes in a symbolic way, so that we are left with several possible interpretations;

4) thinks that it is all about subjectivity; and

5) creates protagonists that are oppressed and passive.

The ape in (Kafka 1988, pp. 250-258) is certainly oppressed (shot, then put inside of a ship, etc.) and passive (changed into something else and taken somewhere).

The ape is now the boss (they hear what he says about the visitors), but, in the past, he was the most oppressed (authority and power).

Kafka could be thinking of a man who behaves like a monkey, a monkey that became a man, following Darwin’s reasoning (UNSW Australia 2016, para. 3), a monkey who was born different, or even something else (symbols).

A Report to an Academy is also about being subjective because of the choices made, so say, for instance, drinking beer or feeling free whilst still being an ape.

That is not something that many would connect to.

Plenty of people think that apes are never free, regardless of how they feel, and this is probably part of the reason as to why Ryan (2018, para. 2) thinks that Kafka’s writing connect a lot to expressionism (subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person – (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 2018, para. 1).

The strength of the connection between Kafka’s writing and expressionism is less important than explanatory power, however, so that, for Ryan, Kafka’s writings are better explained if we say that they belong to an early phase of Experimental Modernism (Ryan 2018, para. 2).

When the ape says that he became human, he could mean that all that happened to him before that date, on which he claims to have become human, did not happen, is it not?

It could be a metaphor.

That is just like an icon in a computer screen: a symbol that can mean anything.

We go, click on the icon with the right button of the mouse, and change the program it refers to.

The decision on whether the icon will refer to what it referred before depends on who uses the computer.

Kafka’s texts’ interpretation belongs to those who are reading them, which may be why Ryan talks about interpretive keys (Ryan 2018, para. 2): these keys should have the same function as the right button of the mouse in our example.

In the following extract, Kafka’s words (Kafka 1988, pp. 250-258) may mean that we think the ape he refers to feels free because it acts like a man.

In fact, to give up being stubborn was the supreme commandment I laid upon myself; free ape as I was, I submitted myself to that yoke.

They may also mean that we think that the ape is free simply because it does not repeat, but the other monkeys do.

The extract clearly makes us think that we are the monkey, so that Kafka is writing from a first person’s POV.

Notwithstading, we have already said that Kafka writes from a third person’s POV (Ryan’s beliefs), so what does Ryan mean by that?

What Ryan (2018, para. 1-22) meant is that we cannot feel as if we have entered the mind and body of Kafka’s ape when we read his text, so that Kafka must be writing from a third person’s POV.

It is more about the distance the author holds from their creature, perhaps degrees of distance, than about the pronouns used (I) or the intentions we may think Kafka had with the piece.

See (Zhou & Hall 2016, pp. 1-14):

(...) the more intimate first-person perspective with the more objectively distanced third-person in writing…

Point of view and voice are or should be different concepts: voice might be our tone, vocabulary, level of refinement in expression, pronoun, and so on, but point of view is the distance the reader perceives between the text and the humanity contained in the situation (sounds, moods, and so on).

Some believe that the author’s is always a first-person’s voice and the narrator’s is always a third-person’s voice (Zhou & Hall 2016, p. 1), so that, when we write as in natural writing, that is a first person’s voice.

When we impose a second degree of distance, observing all, that is a third person’s voice.

In (Hornung 1999, pp. 21-45), it is a narrator’s voice; third-person’s therefore.

The POV is that of the narrator as well.

There is not much about authority or power: it is more like mates and wonder.

The dog is not an oppressed entity (became the leader of the puppies, p. 24).

Besides, in Dog Boy, the consciousnesses do not blend, but, in Kafka’s piece, all consciousnesses become one with the narrator’s or the narrator’s consciousness is cosmic (‘once upon a time,’ he said. He felt the other puppies behind stop at the sound of words, p. 25).

We conclude that Dog Boy might not be entirely inside of posthumanism.

It is not about subjectivity (the puppies behind lost interest. Everything was ritual, p. 25).

Dog Boy is also not as much about symbols as Kafka’s piece is.

Maybe we should split posthumanism into branches, and one of its branches should connect to A Report to an Academy whilst another should connect to Dog Boy…

In (Haraway 2016, pp. 93-117), or in The Companion Species Manifesto, or Manifesto for short, the fusion between animal and human is one of the type where only one survives, and that is the human, so that swapping animals for humans brings negligible loss (my love of Whitehead is rooted in biology, p. 96).

We could define this branch of posthumanism as the branch where we see human actions and thinking being transferred to an animal.

That is more like a scientific study to determine what humans and animals do or do not have in common.

There is almost no symbolic writing; no oppression or passivity; no power or authority issues; and almost no subjectivity.

It is also about what is not human.

Haraway’s piece is in the first-person’s voice.

The reader is perhaps left to the situation of fourth-person’s voice, since it is very hard to connect to what Haraway writes (the Church and the press – are famously corrupt, famously scorned, p. 113).

Haraway’s piece adopts the perspective of the author, so that it is also in first-person’s POV.

There is no sharing of consciousness with the animal.

As a last item, we could mention The Metamorphosis (Kafka 1996, pp. 1-44) by Kafka.

In this piece, the main character appears as an animal right at the beginning.

The Metamorphosis is classified as Magic Realism (Sasser 2010, pp. 181-207).

There is more detailing in The Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis for short, than in A Report to an Academy, Report for short.

In Metamorphosis, a man becomes an animal, and, in Report, an animal becomes a man.

In Metamorphosis, the reader experiences being a roach, but, in Report, they don’t experience being a monkey (pathetically licking a cocoanut, p. 5).

There is a reason to become a roach or to feel as if we have become (humiliation, being powerless, South Americans are called roaches in the USA until at least 2001, feeling like an insect, something that can easily be smashed, etc.), but there is no reason to become an ape (apes can react, and do that) or feel as if we have become, so that Metamorphosis is closer to Realism than Report.

3. Conclusions

Kafka’s writings in general, so also A Report, can be classified as at least expressionism, modernism, postmodernism, experimental modernism, and posthumanism.

Some experts, such as Doctor Driscoll (2018, pers. comm., 22 May), from the Utrecht University, The Netherlands, believe that Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Report can also be classified as anti-humanist pieces, since they challenge the logic of metaphysical anthropocentrism.

According to Driscoll, posthumanism is not a tag given because of technical details: we should overlook the intrinsic qualities of the text.

It is all about interpretation instead.

This was all confirmed by email (M. R. Pinheiro, pers. comm., 22 May).

We believe Report, Metamorphosis, Dog Boy, and Manifesto are anti-humanist pieces because they are a regression from the Cartesian dualism, since we now only have consciousness, and therefore mind, instead.

Whilst one could say that we became infinity with such an approach, so perhaps soul, there is a regression from the point of awareness and acknowledgement of differences, and therefore we now have the equivalent to rejecting the existence of diversity and coming back to the time at which we thought of human kind as something formed of beings that are exactly the same.

In this case, all human fights that represent advancement for a few meaningful groups, so say black peoples, homosexuals, women, migrants, and so on, would be told to be waste of resources, and all would come back to the point at which there was nothing special for those groups that some would call marginalised by the time they produced the differentiation through organisations, rules, laws, systems, and all else.

That is the end of the boundary between the one and the many that Hassan referred to.

It is also the actualisation of the main Catholic goal: we are all one with God, and therefore one in general.

If you are a Catholic, then you should think and do what every other Catholic thinks and does, and therefore what the Pope tells the Catholic Church to think and do, so say not marry if you are a priest, choose chastity if you are a nun or a priest, not defend rights to abortion, instead defend duty of never aborting, and so on.

That is definitely thinking inside of one wave of thinking or with a cosmic consciousness, and this is posthumanism in Hassan’s view.

That is equivalent to forgetting many-valued logical systems, so say Fuzzy Logic, and going back to pre-Classical Logic, depending on how far you go in the direction of the many that become one.

In Report to an Academy, the point of view comes from a second-degree level or third-person level, the protagonist (ape) is passive and oppressed, the theme is authority and power, and there is symbolic writing plus high levels of subjectivity.

Report to an Academy is a posthumanist text because it is about something other than human, there is a fusion between the animal and the human, so that we cannot tell which one is which many times, and the voice is supposed to be the ape’s, but it is not a very genuine voice.

Every member of the text is at the same distance from us, so that the POV is that of the third person: we are in the ape’s shoes, but there is not much difference, since we feel as if we are everywhere in the same way, and nowhere with the depth that would be necessary.

That could also be a reflection of Hassan’s cosmological extension of the human consciousness (Hassan 1977, p. 844).

Posthumanism is not an extrapolation from the Cartesian Dualism into many dimensions, as in Fuzzy Logic.

It actually resembles the flat earth theory (Wolchover, N. 2017) or all in one dimension instead.

The author attempts to have omniscience, but they are stuck in a one-dimensional world.

What most seems to happen in posthumanist pieces, considering the few pieces we here analysed, is that the author is nowhere that is deep enough (animal or technological or human), and they have the voice of one part of the story most of the time or all the time.

Some authors seem not to get the voice of any entity in particular, and that is compatible with the struggles that, according to Hassan, Prometheus faces.

For us to feel in the intended way, if there is an intended way, the text would have to be written from a first-person’s POV.

We could call that degrees of intimacy with the character: if we experience being the character, that is first degree, thus first-person’s POV.

If we experience being no particular character, and, at the same time, all of them, that is third degree or third-person’s POV.

If we write ‘I’, our voice is a first-person’s voice.

In Report, Kafka does not seem to change his vocabulary or perception of things (he mentions a brand of beer and uses the word beer), so that that should be a first person’s voice.

On the other hand, the reader’s voice, upon reading the piece, becomes a third-person’s voice, meaning that they do not feel as if they are inside of any mind or character in particular.

(Haraway 2016, pp. 93-117) does not seem to be under posthumanism, and we here are then talking about Manifesto, because the essential ingredient, sharing the consciousness with the animal, going beyond human existence, does not seem to be there.

It is more like scientific writing…

Yet one could easily say that Haraway distanced herself from herself in this particular piece, so that, in that sense, it is beyond human existence, perhaps something like spiritual existence or cosmic consciousness.

(Hornung 1999, pp. 21-45), or the Dog Boy, could be under posthumanism, but the element of communion of consciousness is weakly inside of it.

It is more like a factual description from the narrator’s POV.

Yet again one sort of mind would have been formed from those many that existed, so that we could say we there have a cosmic consciousness.

The three pieces we analysed determine branches for the posthumanist movement: (Kafka 1988, pp. 250-258), or Report, is a political piece, whose thematic goes inside of the intricacies of the relationship between power and oppression.

(Haraway 2016, pp. 93-117), or Manifesto, is a piece between fiction and science.

This type of piece may generate very good science, depending on how close it goes to nonfiction.

(Hornung 1999, pp. 21-45), or Dog Boy, is like observing an animal and describing our observations, something that is a few degrees away from Kafka’s approach (we feel more in the shoes of Kafka’s characters than in the shoes of Hornung’s), and is closer to the fable (joy, playful things, etc.).

Were it Logic, we could match Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Report with Ontological Paraconsistency, Hornung’s Dog Boy with Classical Logic, and Haraway’s Manifesto with a one-dimensional approach.

Yet, in terms of voice, it is all one voice, of a single character, spelled out in the piece or not, giving us a sense of spirit, and therefore of transcendence, so transcendence without visiting religion (Pinheiro 2015b, pp. 1-60).

If this transcendence went through religion, we would be outside of humanism (Shapiro 1990, p. 17), and therefore outside of posthumanism.

Moving to religion could be seen as evolution if we consider the reasoning involving diversity and oneness, since we then would include at least one more sphere in our humanity (mind, body, and spirit)

In this sense, the pieces we here analysed should be seen as anti-humanist rather than posthumanist.

If maximum evolution is everyone together as one spirit or cosmic consciousness, say we call that God, then our current understanding of progress and our current investments in science, development, and others are wrong: those translate into looking for further specifications and specialised studies (more types, more diversity).

Notwithstanding, our current understanding and investments do conflict with Theology: being The Father is more than being The Son, and therefore being cosmic consciousness is being more than being human.

More rationality into more parts of our persona, persona regarded as in Human Persona, should mean even more humanism, so posthumanism, but it seems that rationality resumes to mind in the pieces we analysed, so that we should perhaps say that we went from no body and no mind (time at which the aborigines were going through Catholic brainwashing) to mind only.

Perhaps we need a postposthumanism to finally get it right, so to finally put rationality in all components of our personas (Pinheiro, M. 2017b, pp. 21-24).