REPROGRAMMING THE HUMAN: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY AND ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE IN PLAYGROUND BY RICHARD POWERS

Abstract

Richard Powers’ Playground (2024) presents a compelling narrative that interrogates the boundaries of human identity, environmental consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Through a posthumanist lens, this study examines how the novel deconstructs anthropocentric assumptions by foregrounding nonhuman agencies—most notably Profunda, an AI entity that participates in narrative authorship. The protagonist, Todd Keane, a quantum computing pioneer suffering from neurodegeneration, embodies a human consciousness in transition, both biologically and philosophically, as he becomes increasingly enmeshed with technological systems and ecological awareness. The research explores how Playground challenges human exceptionalism through its portrayal of the ocean as a sentient archive and through the blurred boundaries between human memory and machinic cognition. Moreover, the novel situates ecological intelligence not as a passive background but as an active force that intersects with posthuman identity, especially in the seasteading setting of Makatea, where colonial legacies and techno-capitalist ventures collide. By drawing on key concepts in posthumanist theory—including Donna Haraway’s cyborg subjectivity, Rosi Braidotti’s notion of the posthuman subject, and N. Katherine Hayles’ framework of the posthuman as a distributed cognition—this research argues that Playground reprograms traditional literary notions of selfhood, environment, and authorship. It ultimately posits Powers’ work as a vital contribution to posthumanist ecocriticism in contemporary fiction.