| Sumario: | Deeply held humanist ideas constitute a residual discourse in our late age of print, a discourse that has not been effaced by the rise of technology or by widespread computing practices. Against humanism's Enlightenment idea of the rational individual, mid-twentieth century schools of anti-humanism postulated a ``subject'' constructed by, rather than controlling, its language, culture, and technologies. The contemporary notion of the subject comes from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, where Lacan draws upon cybernetics and computing as evidence of a symbolic order constructive of subjectivity. This computational symbolic, in turn, owes much to Heidegger's post-war notions of technology. Today, however, work in new media suggests that the dominant discourse on the subject – the discourse underwriting contemporary theory – is being challenged by an emergent discourse of the posthuman. Consequently, theory itself is thrown into question. The question of theory now arises since we must ask whether the posthuman subject of technology is rewriting the anti-humanist subject of theory in new and unanticipated ways. This article thus offers an overview of the shift from humanist, to anti-humanist, to posthumanist assumptions. My goal is to help readers decide whether today's computing environments can still be approached through late twentieth century anti-humanist theories or whether e-texts demand new, media-specific analyses.
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