post-humanism

humanism

• Places the human at the centre of the world

• Considers Homo Sapiens the highest point of evolution

• Asserts the capacity of humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectibility

• Advocates for the self-regulating and moral powers of human reason

• Supports the belief that the mind – rather than the body – determines consciousness (Cartesian dualism)

posthumanism

• addresses the question of the human in the age of technological modification, hybridized life forms, new discoveries of the sociality of animals and new understanding of life itself.

• It calls into question the boundaries between human/non-human, human/machine and human/inhuman. Disability studies, animal studies, cybernetics and consciousness studies all contribute to posthumanism because they redefine the boundaries of the human.

• Posthumanism challenges the idea that human consciousness is located in the mind, and advances the concept of embodied consciousness to argue for the role of the body and the environment in human ontology and the development of consciousness.

versions of posthumanism

1. transhumanism

2. critical posthumanism

transhumanism

• supports technological modifications of the human will improve the ‘human’. This suggests a distinctive entity identifiable as the ‘human’, a human ‘self’ or ‘person’ which can be improved.

• This branch treats technology as adding to already existing qualities or filling the lack in the human.

• Cary Wolfe defines transhumanism as “an intensification of humanism” (What is Posthumanism?, xv).

• emphasizes the machinization of humans and the humanization of machines.

• It is techno-deterministic and techno-utopian, in its faith in technology’s ability to ensure a certain kind of future.

STAR WARS

• legitimizes new social entities (cyborgs, AI, Virtual societies) where the future is a space for the realization of individuality, the transcendence of biological limits and the creation of a new social order

critical posthumanism

• Critical posthumanism treats the human as co-evolving, sharing ecosystems, life processes, genetic material with animals and other life forms. It also sees technology not as a mere prosthesis to human identity but as integral to it.

• Critiques the humanist and transhumanist centrality of reason and offers a more inclusive understanding of life.

• Rethinks the idea of human subjectivity as an assemblage, co-evolving with machines and animals.

• Interrogates the hierarchic ordering of life forms.

HARAWAY’S WHEN SPECIES MEET

• questions the humanism that still animates transhumanism, targeting the enlightenment narratives of human nature

aims of post humanist critics

• To study cultural representations, power relations and discourses about humans and their relationship with non-human entities and machines.

• To question hierarchical power dynamics in descriptions of human and non-human entities

• To investigate the gendered and racial politics of posthuman entities and the extent to which gender and racial norms are surpassed

Haraway: A manifesto for cyborgs; main aim

To advance a new political vision of feminist socialism using the figure and imagery of the cyborg.

Haraway; cyborg

• a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.

• Supports that all humans are hybrids of machine and organism, or cyborgs.

• Cyborgs are part of a “post-gender world”, thus disrupting the Western ideal of an abstract, unified self. They also define a community beyond the model of the organic family.

• Disruptions of the boundaries between human and animal; between organism (human-animal) and machine; and physical and non-physical.

haraway; political goal

• Poststructuralism and techno-utopia inform her political goal: “The cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work”.

• While critics have developed arguments regarding dominating technology and the need to return to organic bodies to create forms of political resistance, accommodating a cyborg world might help us seek other forms of power in technologically mediated societies.

• Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the tools recrafting our bodies – which embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide.

Haraway; women

• Women in the integrated circuit: the situation of women in a world intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology.

• The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us.

• Cyborg imagery shows the need to take responsibility for the social relations of science and technology to refuse an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and embracing the task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in connection with others and in communication with all of our parts.

Hayles; virtual reality

• An epistemic shift from presence and absence toward pattern and randomness.

• The forces of pattern and randomness are especially pertinent in virtual reality.

• Virtual reality puts the user’s sensory system into a direct feedback loop with a computer. E.g. through avatars, where the movement is reproduced on the computer screen, the result is a multisensory interaction that creates the illusion that the user is inside the computer

Hayles; how the shift towards pattern/randomness affects human and textual bodies?

1) as a change in the body – the material substrate, and

2) as a change in the message – codes of representation. So new technologies will create new models of signification.

Hayles; flickering signifiers / liberal humanism

• The notion of “flickering signifiers”: characterized by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions.

• Humans and posthumans as constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology and culture: The reference point for the human is the tradition of liberal humanism; the posthuman appears when computation is taken as the ground of being.

• Important to examine simultaneously both simulation and the materialities that produce it to understand the implications of articulating posthuman constructions together with embodied actualities.

Hayles; information narratives

explicit shifts from presence and absence to pattern and randomness in contemporary literature, from the physical object that constitutes the text to character, plot, author, and reader.

William Gibson: cyberpunk fiction and his novelties

1) The idea of point of view which does not imply physical presence. 2) That the point of view is located in space but exists in time.