It is sometimes argued that novel biotechnologies, such as xenotransplantation and cross-species gene transfe,r are shaking our belief in an autonomous human subject, as they question the naturalized division between human–animal–plant life forms, and draw awareness to the genetic and structural similarities between them. Optimistic posthumanist thinkers argue that the breaching of this boundary between human nature and non-human nature should propel us into a posthuman future characterized by a new ethical appreciation of our non-human ‘cousins’.

It is true that universal subject of liberal humanism has, along with its Cartesian metaphysics, is under pressure. Postmodernism is widely credited with imploding, or at least destabilizing, the binary oppositions that underpinned the intelligibility, autonomy and integrity of the modernist subject.The old distinctions between culture and nature, consciousness and body, human and machine, masculine and feminine, and reason and unreason are no longer perceived to provide an unproblematic foundation for identity.

This was argued early by Fredric Jameson in his seminal "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," where he recast the decentred subject as schizophrenic For Jameson, postmodernism signals, above all, a loss of depth. The waning of affect, the eclipse of parody by pastiche, the loss of the historical referent, the flattening of space into surfaces, the abandonment of theoretical depth models, and the schizophrenic aesthetic are all symptomatic of "a new kind of superficiality" that Jameson argues is the 'supreme formal feature" of the postmodern.

Jameson then identifies the decentred subject as the causal link between late capitalism and the postmodern aesthetic. Jameson's thesis depends upon the assumption that the subject is no longer bounded, centred or possessed of psychic depth. Though he is unclear of about which economic, technological or political tendencies of late capitalism are implicated in the postmodern shift from an alienated to a fragmented subject he does argue that in late capitalism time, language and subjectivity are thrown into crisis.