The Invisible Revealed Symposium – ANSTO

How has nuclear science helped the Powerhouse examine its collection objects? Hear from scientists as they unveil techniques in this panel discussion.

The exhibition is an outcome of a partnership between Powerhouse and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) that has examined collection objects from a materials research perspective using nuclear and accelerator-based methods. Through this partnership we are mutually learning more about the Powerhouse collection and the benefits of applying nuclear methods to cultural heritage.

Throughout the day, scientists, museum staff and cultural experts will unveil techniques and processes used on these cultural objects in shared conversations.

Dr Joseph Bevitt is a senior instrument scientist on ANSTOs DINGO radiograph/tomography/imaging station, and scientific coordinator for the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering. He is collaborating with museums and universities internationally to pioneer the use of neutron and synchrotron X-ray microCT (3D imaging of objects using neutrons or X-rays with micrometre resolution) in the areas of palaeontology, archaeology, and cultural heritage.

Dr Geraldine Jacobsen is the Principal Research Scientist at ANSTO.

Matthew Connell is Powerhouse Acting Director Curatorial, Collections and Programs. His research and curatorial interests include computing history, mathematics history and STEM education and learning. His current research projects relate to post-disciplinary curatorship, curating art/science collaborations, interactive immersive systems, audience engagement and learning in maker spaces, and the industrial and cultural implications of digital manufacturing technologies. He is also an Adjunct Professor, iCinema, UNSW Centre for Interactive Cinema Research.

Rod Dowler is the National Education and Engagement Manager for ANSTO and manages the ANSTO Discovery Centre which has built a comprehensive national education program over the past decade. He believes that is critical for the nuclear industry to apply marketing principles and to better understand its stakeholders when creating education and outreach programs.

Dr Deborah Lawler-Dormer is Powerhouse Research Manager and was lead curator on Invisible Revealed. Her work is transdisciplinary and often engages art, science, and technology in collaboration with industry, tertiary and community partners. She is a visiting Research Fellow, UNSW Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre, and Adjunct Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Recent publications include a chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (2022).

Dr Floriana Salvemini is an instrument scientist at ANSTO and co-responsible for the DINGO thermal-neutron radiography/tomography/imaging instrument at the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering. Her expertise is in neutron imaging and diffraction for the investigation of cultural heritage, physical metallurgy and archaeometallurgy. She has a strong interest in the application of non-invasive techniques for the study of works of art.

Associate Professor Kenneth Sheedy is the founding director of the Australian Centre for Ancient Numismatic Studies, Macquarie University. His current research interests are the technology for manufacturing ancient coins, the incuse coinage of South Italy, the archaic coinage of Athens and the archaeology and coinage of the Cyclades.

Dr Rachel White is the sample environment group leader at the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering. She is a part of the ANSTO Cultural Heritage Project and enjoys being a part of connecting the cultural heritage community with ANSTO. Her expertise is with electron microscopy, laboratory management, chemical safety and safety and procedural documentation.

Tammi Gissell is a Murruwarri woman from North-Western NSW and Collections Coordinator, First Nations at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Powerhouse Museum). Bourke born and bred, she holds a Bachelor of Performance: Theory and Practice (Honours) from the University of Western Sydney. Since 2007 she has worked across First Nations cultural and educational institutions as coordinator, educator and researcher.

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The Invisible Revealed Symposium - ANSTO

What is Posthumanism, and Why Should You Care? | Thoughtful Play

Welcome to Posthumanism and Video Games. The purpose of this project, conducted by St. Olaf undergraduates Anthony Dungan and Israa Khalifa, is to examine how numerous video games interact with posthumanism and what audiences can learn about posthuman ideas through video games.

At its core, posthumanism is a theoretical framework that wants to re-imagine what a human is or rethink humanitys place in society. Some posthumanists want to remove humanity as the center of existence and want to every object in existence to be treated equally; others consider what existence on Earth would be like if humanity went completely extinct. Some challenge the boundaries of the human body and want to extend or augment those capabilities through cybernetics; others consider the personhood of completely artificial beings like androids or artificial intelligence. For a more nuanced definition and understanding, see our glossary entry on posthumanism.

The fact is, humanity is already becoming a posthuman society. Cybernetic bodies arent some far-off concept, but rather something that exists already. There are recent advancements like cybernetic and prosthetic limbs, as well as enhancements that have been around for decades, like hearing aids. Artificial life is making significant progress as well. In 2017, the first robot became a citizen of a country, and robots are becoming more physically capable. Imagining an existence without humanity might not be that hard, considering the threat that global warming poses to society means Earth might very well be literally posthuman within a few hundred years.

In addition, scientific knowledge and technological advancements are historically situated. Keeping this in mind allows for an understanding of Western cultures long history of individualism, technological warfare, and the binarism between body and soul. Posthumanism rejects that binary and allows for a fuller understanding of the Wests obsession with a human and technological apocalypse or a techno-utopian world. In addition, posthumanism breaks free from the patriarchal and supremacist legacy created by Christianity in the Enlightenment as well as favoring humans over other objects. These legacies of the Enlightenment are directly linked to systematic oppression, racism, slavery, and wars all over the world. Posthumanism, to an extent, allows for alternative solutions or ways of thought to break free from these problems.

We could say something about how games are the most profitable medium in the modern entertainment industry. We could also say that video games reach an incredibly large audience, or a number of other reasons. The fact is, we researched video games because the medium allows players to directly interact with ideologies in a safe space. Unlike audiences in other mediums like film, literature, or music, players directly interact with whats happening. They dont just see fancy technology, they use it. Players are active participants in the messages they create, which is something unique to the medium of games. As games are a relatively young medium, researching the medium helps establish a better understanding of how games engage audiences in unique ways.

With that in mind, please enjoy the results of our research! You can read our analyses in any order, but if you want to be directed to a good beginning spot, Id recommend our podcast episode, Embodiment in Transistor. If youre interested in making your own Thoughtful Play project, contact thoughtfulplay@gmail.com. You can check out our glossary here, and if you want to check our sources, head over here.

Anthony Dungan has been playing video games for almost longer than he can remember. It all started when his parents would let him watch them play Star Wars video games, and his obsession that started then has only become more rabid. Almost two decades later, Anthony has started mixing academic work into his love of video games. After watching a thoughtful, engaging presentation on The Last of Us by a professor from St. Olaf College, Anthony knew that he had to attend St. Olaf to improve his writing skills and hopefully have a chance to engage in academic work on video games. This wish was granted, and resulted in Posthumanism and Rhetoric in Video Games.

Israa Khalifa studies sociology and anthropology at St. Olaf College.

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What is Posthumanism, and Why Should You Care? | Thoughtful Play

Open call: 2022 International Residency – Announcements – e-flux

Asia Culture Center (ACC) is pleased to announce the international open call for ACC Residency 2022. Applications are currently being accepted online with a submission deadline of June 13, 2022.

Under the theme of Post-COVID-19 Era, Posthumanism, ACC Residency 2022 seeks to interrogate issues such as the fourth industrial revolution in the contactless era, the changes in the notion of labor brought about by the digital transformation and the new relationship between humans and things (the post-human).

The Residency consists of five categories: Art & Technology, Visual Arts, Design, Theater, and Dialogue and is opened to all creators and researchers who have experience and capability to propose and implement a project exploring the theme.

ACC will support selected participants with workspaces, accommodation, a grant of 2,000,000KRW per month, and research/project funding up to 10,000,000KRW for Researchers and up to 50,000,000KRW for Creators. In addition, ACC will offer various resources from seminars, workshops to consulting sessions with experts as well as production facilities and audio-visual equipment in ACT Studio. ACC will work closely with the each participant and projects developed throughout the 5-month residency will be presented through showcase, exhibition and performance in December.

For more information and to apply, please visit ACCs website. The selection process will consist of two steps, application document review and interview through which around 27 individuals/teams are expected to be selected. The announcement will be made in July through ACC website.

Practical informationApplication period: May 23June 13,2022 (6:00pm KST)Apply onlineTheme: Post-COVID-19 Era, PosthumanismResidency period: August 2022December 2022 (5 months)Categories: Art & Technology, Visual Arts, Design, Theater, DialogueEligible applicants: Individuals/groups who have experience and potential and are actively involved in the relative fieldsSupportsGrant, project/research fund, and supporting programs.Presentation at group exhibition/showcase/academic event.Workspace, accommodation, and ACT centerAirfares for international participants

Materials to submitApplication form (including Personal Information Collection and Usage Agreement) in a provided form (.pdf)A project (or research) proposal in a provided form (.pdf)A portfolio in a provided form (.pdf, maximum 30 pages including the cover, not exceeding 50MB)A letter of recommendation (only for international applicants)

About Asia Culture Center and ACC ResidencyAsia Culture Center (ACC) located in Gwangju, South Korea, is an international arts and culture organization committed to bringing together and fostering exchange among different regions and disciplines. As one of its year-round programs, ACC Residency is a platform for research, creation and production that brings together creative talents from around the world to share their knowledge, technological insight and experience. Since 2015, it has supported the cross-disciplinary, inventive, and bold projects of more than 740 creators, designers, artists and researchers.

For more information, please visit acc.go.kr.

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Open call: 2022 International Residency - Announcements - e-flux

Captive animals include pets | Opinion | dailyuw.com

Editors Note: Everyone designs. While not all design work is compensated, DIY Design strives to promote awareness of design processes in everyday life. Each week, Tatum Lindquist explores a new field or theory in the design world and relates it to the UW community as a way to live with intentionality and agency.

TikToker @justinbieberthecat_ showcases Justin, a cat, using extensive vocabulary via talking buttons to communicate with his owner. Some videos show Justin using the buttons beyond basic care requests to express discontent by pressing love you and no repetitively after his owner stopped playing with him to work. While adorable, the videos receive a range of responses, including skeptics who criticize Justins cognitive comprehension of the words hes trained to use.

However, humans may not yet possess the capabilities to even fully understand the extent of animals cognitive abilities, especially given that Justin and other animals can communicate beyond human perception. Limited in perception, humans may fail to fully understand the complex experiences of animals altogether. And in the design world, where the ethics of animal participation are muddled and gray, these limitations need consideration.

Posthumanism is a collection of theories, philosophies, and worldviews, or epistemologies, having to do with understanding the more-than-human inhabitants of our world, Kristin Dew, an assistant teaching professor of human centered design & engineering, said.

More-than-human encompasses both environmental and technological inhabitants and, as with any theory applied to design, posthumanism starts with questions and reflection. For me, it means deconstructing the human from human-centered design processes and opening up space for animal experiences, especially those captive in human society.

When people think about sites of captivity with animals, they almost never think of companion animals, Karen Emmerman, a philosophy lecturer, said. People forget that we're in this sort of relationship with them where we have made a lot of choices for them.

While zoos, laboratories, or aquariums may associate more closely with captivity, pet owners decide their animals diets, living conditions, reproductive abilities, and so on. Im not here advocating for you to stop making choices for your pet, because thats neither practical nor productive. The point that posthumanist design makes is to acknowledge the reality of our relationship with animals and the greater world.

The current age we live in, known as the Anthropocene, describes the ecological time where human activity irreversibly and significantly impacts the environment. Humans and our constructs and systems impact the nonhuman world, and for pets or other captive animals, it means trading some agency for survival.

I work in a theory thats called ecofeminist theory, which is basically looking at animals and ecological issues through the lens of feminist theory, Emmerman said. And in particular, what this means for animals is that the domination and exploitation of animals [are] connected to other forms of domination and exploitation.

That joke about how some pampered pets live in better conditions than people in lower socioeconomic statuses? That inequality directly ties into the inequality of wealth created by human constructs of wealth and capitalism. That trend asking people to show who lives in their home rent-free, and creators show their pet? Thats animals living under the same economic and social contexts as humans.

The ethics of how designs participate in systems of oppression extend beyond the humans impacted; these designs impact and can impose these same constructs on nonhumans. A valid critique arises when considering if humans should never use or keep animals, given that we cant even uphold the collective rights of historically marginalized communities.

However, this critique asks for perfection, a toxic ideal rooted in white supremacy. Posthumanism, instead, asks for the willingness to be wrong and make mistakes and to be held accountable in our personal relationships with companion animals.

Something like grief and regret, that we have to be in this kind of relationship with our animals, Emmerman said. Where can we find ways to really promote their agency and give them back control in any possible way that we can give it back to them?

As the owner of an emotional support animal, I hold a breadth of complex grief, gratitude, love, and care in how I benefit emotionally from my relationship with my cat. Given the constraints of society, the answer is not simply to never keep companion animals. For me, posthumanist design means promoting the agency of my cat and designing our habitat our home with her needs and desires in mind.

It means poking at the silliness of rearranging furniture and rooms so my cat can have her own personal space. It means pushing back against the cr-zy cat person stereotype, swallowing my pride, and taking my cat out for walks in a pet stroller because she wants to go outside. In its simplest form, this do-it-yourself posthumanist design asks: How can I respect the lived experiences of captive companion animals?

Reach writer Tatum Lindquist at opinion@dailyuw.edu. Twitter: @TatumLindquist

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Captive animals include pets | Opinion | dailyuw.com

What Was Deconstruction? – The Chronicle of Higher Education

In 1990, at the Humanities Research Institute at University of California at Irvine, I found myself sitting next to Jacques Derrida at a lecture given by Ernesto Laclau. The topic was Antonio Gramsci. At the end of the talk, of which I understood frustratingly little, Derrida asked a question that took about 20 minutes to formulate. Laclaus response was of equal length. This mattered, because the event was the only one open to the public (it was to be followed by an invitation-only seminar). Graduate students and professors packed the lecture hall and, like Laclau himself, deferentially hung on Derridas every word. But they never had time to speak. The episode struck me as symbolic of the reverence deconstruction commanded at the height of its influence and also of the hierarchies, buoyed by awestruck puzzlement, upon which it rested.

At a private reception the next day, I approached Derrida to press him on his comments, for his intervention at Laclaus lecture had, as far as I could tell, nothing to do with Gramsci. As I cited studies and quoted passages to support my point, Derrida looked up at me with quizzical eyes and a faint, perhaps condescending, smile. I was aware that my questions violated academic politesse, since to press the philosopher on issues about which he seemed ill-informed was impertinent. The underlying joke (which I also got, although I pretended not to) meant knowing that what Gramsci actually wrote, or why, hardly mattered at least here.

Now, 30 years down the road, it is surprisingly hard to remember why Derridas deconstruction a theory of reading with the unlikely catchphrase the metaphysics of presence swept all before it in English departments of the American heartland, prompted Newsweek to warn of its dramatic and destructive power, and moved prominent scholars like Ruth Marcus to denounce its semi-intelligible attacks on reason and truth. For decades the movements adages appeared as one-liners at Modern Language Association cash bars: literary language undoes its own premises, philosophy is the self-subversion of hierarchical oppositions. After all the high-powered careers, the junkets to Bellagio, the National Endowment for the Humanities cash, the Paul de Man scandal, and the hagiographies, its revolution has begun to seem less a bone of contention than the professions longest-running one-line joke.

To this day, deconstruction remains a style of thought more complained about than understood, less outrageous than deliberately elusive. Until the very end, its high-profile proponents contemptuously elected not to define it, insisting instead on its undefinability, which naturally led the unpersuaded (summoning a favorite movement term) to judge deconstruction an escomatage (a dodge or conjuring trick). After the revolution had become rote, critics no longer forced to bite their tongues pointed to Derridas wordplay (aigle for Hegel for instance; or hantologie for ontology), and noted that punning is the lowest form of humor. Could it be, some of us in the discipline began to wonder, that Derrida was the Herbert Spencer of our era a towering edifice in his time and a vacant epigone of Heidegger outside it?

The power of Gregory Jones-Katzs extraordinarily well-researched Deconstruction: An American Institution (University of Chicago Press, 2021), apart from dodging the extremes of obeisance and dismissal, is not to have adopted deconstructions aversion toward situating the movement in its time and place. He capably walks his reader through the fine-grained details of seminal texts, but also wisely moves beyond them, perhaps implying that the schools interest for us today lies less in its stable of familiar themes than in its improbable success. What made deconstruction soar when its philosophical points of departure, the genealogy of its methods, the clash between French and American intellectual culture, and the incompatible positions of its principal spokespersons were so poorly understood? The legacy of deconstruction seems to present us with two alternatives: It is either a story of a radical turn toward a reason freed from binary oppositions (man/woman, truth/falsity), or it is a conversion story with indecipherability its sacred sine qua non.

Grard Rondeau, Redux

In tackling this dilemma, Jones-Katz gives us plausible scenarios but leaves important ones unmentioned. Told as a story of ideas, deconstruction began with two unrelated moves. First, Derrida seized upon Husserls emphasis on the materiality of language, but also on Husserls timidity in reducing the sign to a mere representation, thereby diminishing its ontological force (writing, for Derrida, has material autonomy). Second, Paul de Man redirected the formalists emphasis on literary figures like irony, metonymy, and allegory to what he (confusingly) called rhetoric, which meant not the art of persuasion but the genetic, impersonal principle that literary texts dwell in contradiction and are thus impervious to resolution.

Told as a story of institutions, deconstruction took shape as the gathering of strong personalities who had the ears of their deans, and who nurtured these seeds into a program, a curriculum, and finally, a crusade. The power center featured Derrida, de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and later, Barbara Johnson, and moved back and forth between Yale and Johns Hopkins, Cornell and (later) UC-Irvine, and its members saw themselves as the rescuers of a beleaguered literary studies which at the end of the postwar boom in the 1960s and 1970s was being pressured to defend its relevance and define its purpose. The profession was producing more Ph.D.s than jobs, and legislators were beginning to question the cost of higher education. At the same time, students honed to a sharp point by the civil-rights and feminist movements, as well as by opposition to the Vietnam War, demanded more than the aesthetic contemplation of a canon sealed off from the contagion of everyday life.

From the start, though, the deconstructive revolution was as self-contradictory as the literary language it studied. Touted as the mission of leftist radicals by the media, it was really the creation of midcareer professors at East Coast universities. Inspired by the New Left, it took its leads not from the policy-oriented, anti-colonial wing but the one decried by Thomas Frank for its lifestyle rebellions, obsessions with the personal, and hostility to all authority. While Jones-Katz does not exactly say so, the stage was set for deconstruction also by the threat of American scientism. In fields like eco-criticism, animal studies, and posthumanism that both mimic and deflect the sciences, Derrida remains immensely influential. There he is called upon, among other things, to virally infect communication and short-circuit the nature of thought itself. The book establishes, at any rate, that deconstruction was less a French invasion (as the media would have you believe) than an American invention, beginning with the recruitment of Derrida, lured to the United States only after his influence was beginning to wane in Europe and after the French minister of education denied him a chair at the University of Paris Nanterre.

As deconstruction developed over the 1980s and 1990s, its politics became harder and harder to read. For one thing, it was the brainchild of wildly different kinds of scholars: a literary romanticist and Nietzschean (de Man), a phenomenological philosopher (Derrida), a sociohistorical critic with Auerbachian beginnings (Hartman), an influence theorist (Harold Bloom), a critic of authorial consciousness (Miller), and feminists with affiliations ranging from new historicism and Lacanian psychoanalysis to Marxism (Johnson, Margaret Homans, Mary Poovey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others). Unfortunately, Jones-Katz has nothing to say about the incoherence of this ensemble. Still, the jumble is the first sign that deconstruction, influential and enduring though it might be, is not what it seems.

Jones-Katz rightly observes, for example, that deconstruction sought to make criticism relevant to social needs. But then what could be more embarrassing in an era of trickle-down economics than a theory whose authority depended on an Ivy League seal of approval? The unseemly deference paid by the underfunded academic second-string toward New Haven theories packaged for the provinces was only matched by the indignant, but always eager, coverage of deconstructive antics in the mainstream press, ever alert to the goings-on at institutions with the smell of money (the outrageous professional perks, the cushy gigs, the Guggenheim Fellowships, the NEH and Ford Foundation largess, the island homes off the coast of Maine).

Deconstructions renovation of the humanities seemed equally at odds with its unmistakably religious undertones. Michel Foucault had already pointed out that giving writing a primal status and claiming writing as absence (two of Derridas signature moves) simply repeated the transcendental terms of the religious principle. (This is one reason Derrida remains influential among theologians.) Others took up this charge, wondering what an obsessive textualism based on the invisibility of all intention was if not Gnosticism. On the surface, deconstruction posed as a densely semantic investigation conducted with ruthless precision. And yet, all the while, it seemed to be playing a double game, winking at its readers by counting on them to recognize its Jesuitical, rabbinical, or Sufistic relationship to the Book.

Nominally a redoubt for vanguard critics, deconstruction in some quarters had the feel of an antiquarian rerun, part of that Gallic preciosity that Harry Levin dubbed the Alexandrianism of our time a return, in other words, to the obscure and ornamental writing of the last centuries before the Christian era; or perhaps to the exegetes of second-century Alexandria, among them Philo, who set out to prove that contradiction was the normal mode of all expression, and who proposed to undo the rational forms of Greek thought.

Although few could hear the point during theory fever, some observed that deconstructions attack on logocentrism created problems for liberatory politics. Barbara Harlow (one of Derridas early translators) observed that Western philosophy had, in fact, always given tendentious priority to the written word, to scripture, and the law not speech as Derrida contended. And what are Platos dialogues if not dissimulated speech skillfully managed in Socratess favor within the controlled ironies of writing? The technology of print in imperial Europe was the very brag of its civilization. How to escape, then, deconstructions implicit premise that peripheral traditions of storytelling, song, and word-of-mouth (what Ishmael Reed, after Booker T. Washington, called the grapevine telegraph) are illusory or nave? Texts for many cultures are oral, bodily, tonal, and rhythmic. They depend on communal gathering in short, on a metaphysics of presence.

One wishes Deconstruction in America had involved itself more with these kinds of interrogations. Its pages are given over too often to replaying mini-tussles at Yale or rehearsing minor essays. But Jones-Katz expresses well its principals considerable talents. The loyalty of de Mans students suggests a teacher whose dedication was, as it should be, legendary. Despite deconstructions bad rap, his essays on aesthetics and literary language are remarkably lucid, unpretentious, and pedagogically precise. Derridas erudition and attention to out-of-the-way texts, similarly, showed a creative, antinomian mind, and his powers to fashion syntax into the lure of an ever-receding referent to create the illusion of substance while ambiguating all referentiality was perhaps the highest mark of his brilliance.

At the same time, we need more theory than Jones-Katz provides to unpack deconstruction as theory. Ostensibly, we are exploring the ontology of language, but as the methodological incompatibility of its ensemble of practitioners implies, its real cohesion is not epistemological but ethical. The term deconstruction referred not to a set of philosophical concepts but to a desire, which was also a prescription, that there be (as Miller put it) no center, no head referent, no innermost core. In a post-radical era busy turning radicals into professionals, deconstruction with a great deal of philosophical noise fell back on Americas familiar modernist response to the partisans of all causes: There are no answers, no origins, no past, no perpetrators.

The move was deliberate. As Jones-Katz tells the story, de Mans teaching and mentorship were programmatic. Even an ally like Hartman reflected after his death: In the space war of the theorists, he became the Yoda figure, recruiting acolytes sent out into the profession to replicate his teachings. As Bloom complained, You clone, my dear. I dislike what you do as a teacher, because your students are as alike as two peas in a pod. With its Continental armature, deconstruction had the upper hand. Its adversaries were typically cast as uncharitable or clueless journalists, old-time empiricists, stale New Critics, or the Old World professoriate, handily dislodged (Ren Wellek, in particular, was a fall guy of this type).

Studiously avoided by its defenders was any mention of deconstructions formidable rivals and challengers: the literary sociology of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu; the materialist feminisms of Sylvia Wynter, Nancy Fraser, and Gayle Rubin; the more trenchant and capacious literary essays by Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and Ernst Bloch; and the analytic philosopher John R. Searle, who deconstructed deconstruction with its own tools in The New York Review of Books to devastating and comic effect. Had deconstruction been more often forced to face the likes of Adornos demolition of Heideggers jargon of authenticity, it might have seemed more vulnerable.

As a body of propositions, it was never hard to probe deconstructions weaknesses. Texts undid themselves, it claimed, whereas it was really the deconstructive text that did and intentionally so. Denouncing something so amorphous and pretentious as Western metaphysics partook of the same reductions the school wanted to expose in other paradigms. What could be more damning than pointing out that deconstruction, against its own tenets, opposed opposition? This ultimate performative contradiction lay in claiming that semantic plenitude resists interpretation in the very act of writing that stood as proof of an effort to persuade. What its critics overlooked is that deconstruction triumphed in part by giving its readers less to think about. Its weaknesses gave it strength because running and dodging was its professed mode, so that pointing out its contradictions was a little like getting in its groove.

In this way, its politics seemed perfect for an American setting of plausible deniability. Feminism can apply deconstruction to male metaphysics and gendered and sexed hierarchical oppositions without having to reckon with the fact that in deconstruction metaphysics means the illusory belief that signifiers have worldly referents and hierarchy the taking of a stand, any stand. For Derrida, taking a position is itself hierarchical. The grievances of women can be addressed in deconstruction only at the cost of effacing all contestation. Deconstructions doctrine of interpretive play turns meaning over to a joyous, Nietzschean affirmation, which boils down to the claim that, like the Reagan administrations perverse reading of the SALT II treaty, anything goes.

In the end, deconstruction seems most American in giving repressive tolerance philosophical dignity. In a country where one can speak against the national nightmare so long as one is not heard, the only mainstream dissidence that probes the angry pulse of Americas fascist heart is found in stand-up comedy or fiction, where irony offers the safety of escape. As in the Monty Python sketch, the diligent truth-tellers of the alternative press are just so many Ernest Scribblers. Deconstruction won credence for the left by enlisting the European philosophical right; and was widely welcomed by the liberal center of academe because in attacking oppressive credos it was undermining credibility itself.

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What Was Deconstruction? - The Chronicle of Higher Education

What is Posthumanism, and Why Should You Care …

Welcome to Posthumanism and Video Games. The purpose of this project, conducted by St. Olaf undergraduates Anthony Dungan and Israa Khalifa, is to examine how numerous video games interact with posthumanism and what audiences can learn about posthuman ideas through video games.

At its core, posthumanism is a theoretical framework that wants to re-imagine what a human is or rethink humanitys place in society. Some posthumanists want to remove humanity as the center of existence and want to every object in existence to be treated equally; others consider what existence on Earth would be like if humanity went completely extinct. Some challenge the boundaries of the human body and want to extend or augment those capabilities through cybernetics; others consider the personhood of completely artificial beings like androids or artificial intelligence. For a more nuanced definition and understanding, see our glossary entry on posthumanism.

The fact is, humanity is already becoming a posthuman society. Cybernetic bodies arent some far-off concept, but rather something that exists already. There are recent advancements like cybernetic and prosthetic limbs, as well as enhancements that have been around for decades, like hearing aids. Artificial life is making significant progress as well. In 2017, the first robot became a citizen of a country, and robots are becoming more physically capable. Imagining an existence without humanity might not be that hard, considering the threat that global warming poses to society means Earth might very well be literally posthuman within a few hundred years.

In addition, scientific knowledge and technological advancements are historically situated. Keeping this in mind allows for an understanding of Western cultures long history of individualism, technological warfare, and the binarism between body and soul. Posthumanism rejects that binary and allows for a fuller understanding of the Wests obsession with a human and technological apocalypse or a techno-utopian world. In addition, posthumanism breaks free from the patriarchal and supremacist legacy created by Christianity in the Enlightenment as well as favoring humans over other objects. These legacies of the Enlightenment are directly linked to systematic oppression, racism, slavery, and wars all over the world. Posthumanism, to an extent, allows for alternative solutions or ways of thought to break free from these problems.

We could say something about how games are the most profitable medium in the modern entertainment industry. We could also say that video games reach an incredibly large audience, or a number of other reasons. The fact is, we researched video games because the medium allows players to directly interact with ideologies in a safe space. Unlike audiences in other mediums like film, literature, or music, players directly interact with whats happening. They dont just see fancy technology, they use it. Players are active participants in the messages they create, which is something unique to the medium of games. As games are a relatively young medium, researching the medium helps establish a better understanding of how games engage audiences in unique ways.

With that in mind, please enjoy the results of our research! You can read our analyses in any order, but if you want to be directed to a good beginning spot, Id recommend our podcast episode, Embodiment in Transistor. If youre interested in making your own Thoughtful Play project, contact thoughtfulplay@gmail.com. You can check out our glossary here, and if you want to check our sources, head over here.

Anthony Dungan has been playing video games for almost longer than he can remember. It all started when his parents would let him watch them play Star Wars video games, and his obsession that started then has only become more rabid. Almost two decades later, Anthony has started mixing academic work into his love of video games. After watching a thoughtful, engaging presentation on The Last of Us by a professor from St. Olaf College, Anthony knew that he had to attend St. Olaf to improve his writing skills and hopefully have a chance to engage in academic work on video games. This wish was granted, and resulted in Posthumanism and Rhetoric in Video Games.

Israa Khalifa studies sociology and anthropology at St. Olaf College.

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What is Posthumanism, and Why Should You Care ...

Panel 1: Critical Posthumanism and Italian Cinema and …

Organizers: Enrica Maria Ferrara (Trinity College Dublin) and Russell J. A. Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University)

As Andr Bazin writes in The Ontology of the Photographic Image: For the first time, an image of the outside world takes shape automatically, without creative human intervention All art is founded upon human agency, but in photography alone can we celebrate its absence (2009, 7). Even in the digital era, the photographic basis of the cinematic image continues to signify, as does Bazins singling out of post-war Italian film as the prototype for an audiovisual modality befitting a newworld and new subjectivities. With the above claim in mind, this panel seeks papers that explore the posthumanist dimension of Italian cinema, and/or other audiovisual media, from post-war to contemporary, as a means of escaping a human-centred gaze.What does it really mean to speak of cinema as the absence of the human? Adopting Karen Barads ideas, it means emphasizing the dimension of intra-action between human and technological apparatuses as a way to enact new subjectivities at the intersection of human and non-human entities (Barad 2003); it also means enhancing the notion of human identity as co-ontology (Nancy 2000), a relational identity that recognizes the illusory notion of separateness between body and mind, and between the human and its related others (Ferrara 2020). As highlighted by Elena Past (2019), certain featuressuch as a slow walking pace, intermixing or juxtaposition of fictional and non-fictional elements, the use of non-professional actors, long takes, hand held cameras, and long shotsare particularly suited to illustrating the entanglement of human and non-human ontologies. From this perspective, it is productive to analyse through a posthumanist lens films by traditional auteurs, such as Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Wertmller, but also contemporary features by directors such as Dario Argento, Marco Bellocchio, Michelangelo Frammartino, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Genovese, Paolo Sorrentino, and Alice Rohrwacher, to name but a few. At the same time, however, it is also arguable that cinemas gaze is irreducibly anthropomorphic; i.e., not merely centering (on) the human body, in the form of actors bodies and faces, for instance, but alsocontra Baradinscribing a humanist agenda in its very materiality.

This panel seeks papers, therefore, that offer critical posthumanist readings of cinema as medium and mode of expression or representation or some other process, including the possibility of representing or revealing what was heretofore unavailable to physical, affective, or intellectual apprehension, which might be thought of in productively posthumanist terms, whereby film is read as a relational medium, allowing for alternative subjectivities to emerge.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a 100-word bio to Enrica Maria Ferrara (ferrarae@tcd.ie) and Russell J. A. Kilbourn (rkilbourn@wlu.ca) by5 December 2021.Notification of acceptance of abstracts will be sent out to authors by30 December 2021.

The languages of the conference are English, Italian and Spanish

Proposals for virtual papers will not be considered.

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Panel 1: Critical Posthumanism and Italian Cinema and ...

Technologies that change human nature must be treated with caution – Illinoisnewstoday.com

He writes that great care must be taken when humans experiment with transhuman and posthuman techniques. Paul Budde..

For those involved in technology from a government and industry perspective, as well as from a user perspective, we all have a responsibility to monitor the development of this area and ensure that it is being used for the benefit of society.

If you bring people from Stone ageEarly peasants from MesopotamiaWhen the Greek philosopher, the Florentine Renaissance merchant and one of us blindfolded and started chatting around the campfire, we soon realized that we had a lot in common.

After a few pints, we sing together and soon end up in a cheerful hug. At this level, human evolution has changed little.

Benefits and risks of AI and posthuman life

Philosophers involved in the theory of posthumanism and transhumanism are fascinated by the possibilities or dangers that the future brings to the understanding of human life.

What has changed is the environment in which we live using the tools we have developed. If you dig a little deeper here, its amazing to see that with the help of technology, the quality of life for humans has improved significantly. Even more daunting is the fact that most of it has happened in the last 50 years.

Our consciousness is what makes us human. Ongoing unprecedented technological developments allow us to increasingly reduce our dependence on the body, transplant organs, and other tools enhance our biological and cognitive function. can.

If these developments continue, why do we need a body? Aristoteles I asked the same question about 2,500 years ago.

Returning to the meetings around the campfire, even with its various group chats, we still cant find the answer to the big questions in life.

We cannot discover the exact meaning of life, free will, what the truth is, and so on. Nowadays, you can add issues of democracy, fake news, conspiracy theory, social media echo chambers, populism, and totalitarianism to the list. The human mind does not seem ready to tackle them.

What do you need to improve the current situation?

If history is a good measure, it is doubtful that humans 10,000 years from now will be very different from us. But our cognitive limits are already a problem for the great crisis we are facing today, not to mention the future.

It is not technology that prevents us from tackling these major issues, but human cognitive limitations in dealing with these situations.

But we are clearly at the forefront of inflection points as new technologies are being developed that change the meaning of being human.

The increasing number of tools today seems to enhance our cognitive abilities. For centuries and thousands of years, we are certain that our tool manufacturing capabilities will be greater and create a better environment. It would be difficult to claim that humans remain the same.

The tools we are creating and other developments around the corner show a logical and rational direction. Transhumanism..

So far, we have been able to keep control of the technology we have developed. But machine learning, DNA engineering, biotechnology, neurotechnology, and self-learning algorithms and developments of quantum mechanisms related to our consciousness are all opening Pandoras box.

Can we still maintain control? As a global society, there seems to be a lack of cognitive quality needed to manage these processes in the long run.

If we work to improve our cognitive qualities, we need to do this jointly. Alternatives can be catastrophic.

Do you need a crisis first to build a global consensus? Is it too late? Does our innate fighting instinct lead to selected groups of transhumanism?

As both Stephen hawking And Ray Kurzweil As we insist, we need to face these challenges. Otherwise, you will be defeated by transhumans and posthumans arriving at the scene.

Professor Stuart Russell Lists three principles that guide the development of profitable machines. He emphasizes that these principles are not intended to be explicitly coded on the machine. Rather, they are aimed at human developers.

Artificial intelligence is increasing

Paul Budde states that new developments and opportunities are being opened up in artificial intelligence.

The principles are as follows:

Instead of using artificial intelligence or other technologies to solve complex problems, we need to focus on developing better-equipped technologies to solve these problems faster and more effectively. ..

Last week the Australian Government Announcement We want to be a global leader in the development and adoption of responsible artificial intelligence (AI). This has secured $ 124.1 million. For this National Artificial Intelligence Center Within CSIRO, there are four AI and Digital Function Centers and a Next Generation AI Alumni Program.

Expect to adhere to the above principles to further develop unstoppable transhuman and potentially posthuman technologies while humans are still responsible.

Paul Budde Independent Australian columnist and Paul Budde Consulting, An independent telecommunications research and consulting organization. Follow Paul on Twitter @PaulBudde..

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Technologies that change human nature must be treated with caution - Illinoisnewstoday.com

Three Stories You Absolutely Must Read to Learn About Automatons (And One You Definitely Shouldn’t) – tor.com

Like any totally-normal-not-at-all-obsessed person, I spend a lot of time thinking about automatons.

Mostly, I shake my fist at the sky like an old man complaining that kids these days only like their sleek, human-passing, electric robots and no one cares about the wind, fire, water, and clockwork powered beings that preceded them. Is MonkBot not sexy? With that sweet, sweet segmented mouth action?

Automatons are usually thought of as no different from golems, living dolls, or patchwork girls. Just another category of animated being: nifty, sure, but so what? But automatons are, and have always been, important. And for two thousand years we knew that.

In the arc of human invention, automatons predate paper. That means before we thought sure would be nice to write things in a convenient and portable manner we thought sure would be nice to have an inhuman creation in our shape that moves. Then we immediately looked at this thing wed made and instead of believing wed become gods, we thought wed created them. In ancient Rome and Egypt, as well as during the medieval period, automatons were representations of the divine. Even after they shifted into the realm of entertainment, automatons were singular wonders, art that brought joy to the viewer.

If youre interested in getting a peek at how these fascinating machines used to be viewed in society, and what changed, below are three stories you absolutely must readand one you absolutely must not.

(Honorable mention to the film Hugo (2011) by Martin Scorsese)

This wonderfully illustrated novel tells the story of a boy who has spent two years alone, tending to the clocks of a train station and attempting to fix a broken automaton. Once he discovers the key to making it work, the repaired automaton begins to draw a clue to its origins. This novel is great because it blurs the lines of machine and man. It is Hugo who mechanically tends to the clocks at the same designated time each day, Hugo who has no one to care for him. He is more like an automaton than a boy, and his reentry into the world of other people makes it feel less like the title is referring to an invention owned by Hugo, and more like it refers to his being invented as a person again after spending years as a machine.

The reason you should read this novel is not just to learn that the line between human and automaton is blurry at best, but to see how actual automatons once functioned. Hugos care for his machine echoes the way these intricate machines would have been treated by their creators. Never mass produced, never expected to fill the traditional labor roles we associate with robots like Rosie from The Jetsons or even Siri today, but amusements for the sake of it, a meeting of science and art. Most importantly, the automaton in Hugo Cabret and the story of its discovery are REAL almost. In 1928 a mysterious box of parts was given to Philadelphias Franklin institute where workers reassembled the machine with largely no idea what it would be when they were done. Once they finished repairing the mechanical boyofficially named Maillardets Automatonthey discovered he could draw. Unlike the automaton in the novel, this one replicates four drawings and three poems in two languages. Also, this automaton was actually made in the year 1800, over a hundred years before its recreation in Philadelphia, which makes it one hundred years older than its literary counterpart in the book.

The Pretended takes place in a world where all black people have been killed by a white supremacist society and replaced with fabricated beings whose speech and appearance are caricatures of blackness. We learn that this annihilation was deemed necessary because those in power wanted to pretend black people werent people, which was harder to do while they were alive. The plan backfires, because even these new creations exhibit personhood, and must also be destroyed.

This story exemplifies the hardest aspect of automatons for people to graspas evidenced by the squinchy faces I get when I explain that I work in both posthumanism and critical race theorythat even beings that were never born can be racialized. Not only can they be, but automatons in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were so often orientalist depictions that one reader writing into New Yorks Christian Register in 1844 complained: Why are all automata dressed in turbans? When the first American automatonZadoc P. Dederick and Isaac Grass Steam Manis designed immediately after the Civil War, its patent illustration takes the form most strongly associated with labor in the mind of Americans: a black man.

On one side of this 1868 automaton is two thousand years of wonder and the delicate, handmade, boy-machine writing poetry and drawing ships from Hugo Cabret, on the other is the assembly line and Karel apeks play R.U.R. (Rossums Universal Robots), forever wedding automation and labor in both reality and fiction.

The Sandman is your standard boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy never notices that girl doesnt communicate, boy sees girl disassembled and the sight of eyes sitting on a table drives boy mad tale. You know, classic. But what makes this one so interesting is over two hundred years ago Hoffman resisted the urge to paint the male protagonist, Nathaniel, as a purely duped victim and instead leaves him with, Bruhshe never communicated and you were cool with it?

The last section details the effect the story of the female automaton had on the men who heard it: Many lovers, to be quite convinced that they were not enamoured of wooden dolls, would request their mistresses to sing and danceand, above all, not merely to listen, but also sometimes to talk, in such a manner as presupposed actual thought and feeling

Hoffman even gives the final insult to OG sadboi Nathaniel by having Clara, the fiance he was stepping out on with the automaton, move on happily: she at last found a quiet domestic happiness suitable to her serene and cheerful nature, a happiness which the morbid Nathaniel would never have given her.

Hoffman uses the figure of the automaton here to show us that they are wonders of science and works of art but if that is all youre looking for in a partner you might be one set of disembodied eyes away from jumping off a cliff.

just kidding, his name was Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de lIsle-Adam (Auguste Villiers de lIsle-Adam for short) which, in my defense, does roughly translate to Some Jerk depending on where you put the accent.

In this novel a distressed lord comes to his inventor friend, none other than Edison himself, with a problem: hes found a girl whos wicked hot, but he doesnt like her mind. Shes either too virtuousas in, she didnt want to keep her virginity for the right reasonsor not virtuous enoughas in, she is fallen, but not in a way he can appreciate. Shes too practical. Shes not too stupid, but rather not stupid enough (A woman who has lost all her stupidity, can she be anything but a monster?). The solution? Make a copy of her body and replace the brain with a more palatable version. Literally render her body as an object separate from her personality for the purpose of sexual possession. The novel holds that Alicia herself is not exceptional in her unworthiness, but that women in general are a problem. In one scene the inventor pulls out a drawer full of wigs, corsets, pantyhose, makeup, birth control, etc. and declares the contents of the drawer is everything that makes women. Might as well turn them into sexbots, after all, its what they do to themselves.

I am not saying you shouldnt read this novel because there is nothing it can teach you about the legacy of the automaton. Im saying you shouldnt read this novel because it can teach you, and sometimes you can be taught things that are wrong. With this novel, Villiers ignores and erases the lesson laid down by E.T.A. Hoffman exactly seventy years earlier. Why strive to hear your beloveds voice, he tells men of the time, when you can just replace it with one that pleases you?

By remembering automatons we remember how the prioritization of art can become bulldozed by wants of industry, the miraculous giving way to the profitable. These creations are still essential to study, because when humans create in their own image they also create a tangible snapshot of the values and visions of the world at that moment. Sometimes, that image is of religious devotion. Sometimes, its an image of intellectual curiosity and wonder. But sometimes they are darker, cautionary tales exposing how power operates against the powerless.

Micaiah Johnson was raised in Californias Mojave Desert surrounded by trees named Joshua and women who told stories. She received her bachelor of arts in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her master of fine arts in fiction from Rutgers UniversityCamden. She now studies American literature at Vanderbilt University, where she focuses on critical race theory and automatons.

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Three Stories You Absolutely Must Read to Learn About Automatons (And One You Definitely Shouldn't) - tor.com

(PDF) Posthumanism – ResearchGate

Universitetsforlaget 171

misleading, if taken as its ultimate state: on a subatomic level, everything is in con-

stant vibration. As famously demonstrated by Einstein (1905), matter and energy

are equivalent. Energy is intrinsically relational, as well as matter is irreducible to a

single determined entity; any reductionist approach has scientifically failed. From a

physics perspective, anything which has mass and volume is considered matter:

humans, for instance, are made out of matter, as well as robots. Let's now go back to

our initial question: who am I? We are material networks of relations, fluctuant

becoming in symbiotic interaction with the others, the environment, our sur-

roundings; we are constant potentials. In nietzschean terms: we are a bridge

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 7). Human existence is related to any other form of

existence; nothing, in this dimension, is completely autonomous or totally inde-

pendent. In this sense, the field of epigenetics is significant, with its emphasis on the

heritable changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms which are external to

the underlying DNA sequence. Posthumanism approaches the potentials opened by

biotechnology, nanotechnology, cybernetics, robotics and space migration, in an

ontological way, through Heidegger: technology is no mere means, but a way of

revealing (1953:12). We can thus talk of technologies of existence. Posthumanism

has to do with theoretical philosophy as well as with applied ethics. More extensiv-

ely, posthumanism can be perceived as a path of knowledge, which may eventually

turn into full awareness: we literally are what we eat, what we think, what we

breathe, what and who we connect to. Currently, posthumanism seems the most

open and sensitive critical frame to approach intellectual tasks, as well as daily prac-

tices of being. Since any existential performance has interconnected agency, post-

humanism will add to your perspective as much as your perspective will add to the

posthuman shift. More than an exchange (ex comes from Latin, meaning out),

it is an intra-change, a fluid entanglement of being, an expansion of material aware-

ness, a fractal movement of energy which will have simultaneously affected your

existence as well as the evolution of spacetime. This is why I think posthumanism is

something you want to know about.

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Frontera: The Ne w Mestiza. San Francisco:

Aunt Lute Book s.

Barad, Karen 2007. Meeting the Universe Half-

way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of

Matter and Meaning. Durham et al.: Duke Uni-

versity Press.

Braidotti, Rosi 1994. Nomadic Subjec ts:

Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemp-

orary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia

Universit y Press.

Braidotti, Rosi 2013. The Posthuman. Cam-

bridge, UK et al.: Polity Press.

Butler, Judith 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble:

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New

Yor k et a l.: Rou tle dge.

Crenshaw, Kimberle 1989. Demarginalizing

the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black

Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doc-

trine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.

The University of Chicago Legal Forum 139

167.

Einstein, Albert. 1905. Ist die Trgheit eines

Krpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhngig?

Annalen der Physik 18 (13):639643.

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(PDF) Posthumanism - ResearchGate

What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press

What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanitiesposthumanitiesrespond to the redefinition of humanitys place in the world by both the technological and the biological or green continuum in which the human is but one life form among many?

Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfeone of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theoryranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandins writings, Wallace Stevenss poetry, Lars von Triers Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Enos My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture.

For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.

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What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press

Posthumanism | Encyclopedia.com

The posthumanist (sometimes called transhumanist) views human dignity as a matter of seizing the opportunity to modify and enhance human nature in ways that include the deceleration or arresting of aging, genetic engineering, the bodily introduction of nanotechnology and cybernetics, reproductive cloning, and even the downloading of mind into immortalizing computers. The anti-posthumanist responds that human dignity lies chiefly in accepting the existing contours of human nature as a gift, and that biotechnological efforts to recreate human nature according to inevitably arrogant and short-sighted images of perfectability should be greeted with severe skepticism. The debate between posthumanists and their critics over the future of human nature is rhetorically sharp; any resolutions can emerge only from inclusive discourse, with significant consensus on specific technologies of human modification arrived at only in the full light of disparate ethical self-understandings of the meaning of humanness both secular and sacred (Habermas 2003).

The posthumanist, it is argued, has the superficial enthusiasm of the adolescent convert to some new image of the human, yet has little or no insight into the human condition or the narrative of history. Rather than free humans of biological constraints in a misplaced effort to transcend humanness by technology, the anti-posthumanist urges, to quote Leon Kass's 1985 publication title, "a more natural science."

But many posthumanists are deeply reflective. The 1974 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Christian de Duve (2002), thoughtfully urges pursuing the goal of a superorganism as humans reshape life, and raises the question "After us, what?" De Duve warns against fearing the consequences of genetic engineering, or the seduction of a return to nature philosophy. De Duve contends that before even thinking of genetically modifying humans, society should focus on improving the chances of all its members to realize the potential they are born with (through suitable economic, social and family conditions). Fears should be focused on resource exhaustion and catastrophic epidemics. Nevertheless future generations will increasingly interfere with the human genome, he argues, and hopefully the decisions will not be left to a powerful bureaucracy, although a genetic supermarket using the individual choices of parents is not likely to exert more favorable effects on the gene pool.

Posthumanists embrace decelerated and even arrested aging, but only as part of a larger vision to re-engineer human nature, and thereby to create biologically and technologically superior human beings, as the narrative history of posthumanism by N. Katherine Hayles (1999) makes clear. Genetics, nanotechnology, cybernetics, and computer technologies are all part of the posthuman vision, including the downloading of synaptic connections in the brain to form a computerized human mind freed of mortal flesh, and thereby immortalized (Noble 1997). This last scenario of immortalized minds liberated from any biological substrate makes the biogerontological goal of prolongevity appear conservative.

Posthumanists do not believe that biology should in any sense be destiny, and seek a new sort of entity for whom human nature has been more or less overcome (Hook 2003). They urge humans to take human nature into their own re-creative hands as the next great step in evolution, achieving a post-modern morphological freedom. Their argument begins with the claim that, within the boundaries of technology, humans have always been reinventing themselves through applied technologies. Where should the lines be drawn? Besides as the Princeton University physicist Freeman Dyson writes, "the artificial improvement of human beings will come, one way or another, whether we like it or not," as scientific understanding increases, for such improvement has always been viewed as a "liberation from past constraints" (Dyson 1997, p. 76).

What is natural and what is unnatural, anyway? Homo sapiens long ago embarked on the human phase of evolution through technological prowess, and in the future lies nothing more monumental than increased novelty. At one time the very idea of human beings trying to fly was deemed heretical hubris in the light of eternitysub specie aeternitatis. It would be a repetition of this error to argue that redesigning human nature runs afoul of the precautionary appeal to the complexities of evolutionsub specie evolutionis? Should people not set aside trepidation and with confidence rethink themselves in the light of human creativity? The postmodernists have paved the way by purportedly demonstrating that there is no essential aspect to human nature, and vive le difference. So it is that Gregory Stock (2002) introduces the idea of superbiology as human beings take full control of their own biology in turning toward perfection.

David F. Noble (1997) has argued with some plausibility that the roots of this posthumanist project lie in Western European religion, and especially in the ninth century, when the useful arts came to be associated with the concept of human redemption. As a result, there exists a religion of technology that promotes the uncritical and irrational affirmation of unregulated technological advance. In essence technological advance is always deemed good. Noble hopes people can free themselves from the religion of technology, from which they seek deliverance, through learning to think and act rationally toward humane goals.

Millennialist religion is certainly relevant to the posthumanist vision. As Gerald J. Gruman has pointed out, the modern concern with enhancing longevity "stems from the decline since the Renaissance of faith in supernatural salvation from death; concern with the worth of individual identity and experience shifted from an otherworldly realm to the here and now, with intensification of earthly expectations" (Gruman 1966, p. 88).

With the transition to a this-worldly millennialist human horizon, a powerful current of thought emerged in which the goal of significantly extending the length of human life through biomedical science was affirmed. Gruman termed the concept prolongevity as "a subsidiary variant of meliorism, the belief that human effort should be applied to improving the world" (Gruman 1966, p. 89). Carl L. Becker, in his classic work, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), had similarly interpreted the great ideas of the Enlightenment and the merging goals of science as based on a secularization of the medieval idea of otherworldly salvation, resulting in an advance toward a heaven on earth.

Indeed, Francis Bacon (15611626), a founder of the scientific method, in his millennialist and utopian essay "The New Atlantis" (1627), set in motion a biological mandate for boldness that included both the making of new species or chimeras, organ replacement, and the Water of Paradise that would allow the possibility to "indeed live very long" (Bacon 1996, p. 481). Three centuries before Francis Bacon, the English theologian Roger Bacon (c.12201292) argued that in the future the 900-year-long lives of the antediluvian patriarchs would be restored alchemically. Like many Western European religious thinkers, both Bacons saw death as the unnatural result of Adam's fall into sin. These dreams of embodied near-immortality could only emerge against a theological background that more or less endorses them. There are various other cultural and historical influences at work besides religion, but the initial conceptual context for a scientific assault on aging itself is a religious one (Barash 1983).

The modern goals of anti-aging research and technology, then, are historically emergent, at least in part, from a pre-modern religious drama of hope and salvation, Renaissance science transferred the task of achieving immortality from heaven to earth in the spirit of millennial hopes. The economy of salvation presented by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri was replaced by the here and now. There is a vibrant millennialist enthusiasm in the responsible biogerontologists, who have proclaimed aging itself to be surmountable to degrees through human ingenuity.

For every utopian there is a dystopian. Should individuals, viewing their own prospects for deceleration of aging, pursue such anti-aging treatments when and if they actually become available? Perhaps yes, if this assures one that diseases for which old age is the overwhelmingly significant risk factor can be avoided. But there is an important school of thought that cautions against the development of treatments to slow aging.

Individuals, when confronted with the availability of deceleration, ought to reflect carefully about the choice at hand, raising every question of relevance to themselves and to humanity. One of the wiser minds of the last century, Hans Jonas (19031993), an intellectual inspiration for contemporary anti-posthumanists, articulated these questions quite thoroughly. He wrote in 1985 that "a practical hope is held out by certain advances in cell biology to prolong, perhaps indefinitely extend, the span of life by counteracting biochemical processes of aging" (Jonas 1985, p. 18). How desirable would this power to slow or arrest aging be for the individual and for the species? Do people want to tamper with the delicate biological "balance of death and procreation" (Jonas 1985, p. 18), and preempt the place of youth? Would the species gain or lose? Jonas, by merely raising these questions, meant to cast significant doubt on the anti-aging enterprise. "Perhaps," he wrote, "a nonnegotiable limit to our expected time is necessary for each of us as the incentive to number our days and make them count" (p. 19). Jonas's later essays raising many of these same questions were published posthumously in 1996.

Many of the these issues are echoed in the writings of Leon Kass. Kass for the most part accepts biotechnological progress within a therapeutic mode; his issue is chiefly with efforts to enhance and improve upon the givenness of human nature. He draws on the technological dystopians, such as Aldous Huxley, as well as on the writings of C. S. Lewis (18981963). An early anti-posthumanist, Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man (1944) to defend a natural law tradition: What is, is good, and people should live within their God-given limits. He cautioned against a world in which one class of enhanced human beings would dominate and oppress the other. One might ask, then, if those freed from the decline of aging would become the superior and elite humans, while those who age would be deemed inferior.

In a creative essay, "L'Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?" (2001) Kass argues against prolongevity in ways mostly raised by Jonas. He asserts, for example, that the gradual descent into aged frailty weans people from attachment to life and renders death more acceptable. He contends that numbered days encourage a creative depth in human naturea depth that escaped so many of the immortal Greek gods and goddesses, whose often debauched and purposeless behavior made Plato wish to ban them from the ideal Republic. In addition, says Kass, a preoccupation with the continuance of life is a distraction from that which is best for the human soul. Finally Kass writes that in a world transformed by anti-aging research, youth will be displaced rather than elevated, and the parental investment in the young will give way to my perpetuation; and that in such a new world people will grow bored and tired of life, having been there and done that. These assertions are all thoughtful, creative, and appropriately cautionary, because the implications of slowing or arresting aging itself are obviously monumental and mixed. Responsibility to future generations precludes clinging to youthfulness. There is wisdom in simply accepting the fact that humans evolved for reproductive success rather than for long-lived lives Without such wisdom will people lose sight of their deepest creative motives? Possibly.

Another leading anti-posthumanist, Francis Fukuyama challenges those who would march society into a posthuman future, characterized by cybernetics, nanotechnology, genetic enhancement, reproductive cloning, life span extension, and new forms of behavior control. Undoubtedly the ambitions of posthumanists to create a new posthuman who is no longer human are arrogant, pretentious, and lacking in fundamental appreciation for natural human dignity. Fukuyama is also drawn to the dystopian genre and sees much more bad than good in efforts to significantly modify human nature. He argues powerfully that the anti-aging technologies of the future will disrupt all the delicate demographic balances between the young and the old, and exacerbate the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The concerns raised by political scientists such as Fukuyama are ones that the individual decision maker ought certainly to have in mind.

The anti-posthumanists often appeal to nature and character as morally valuable categories. They understand the proper human attitude toward evolved nature as one of humility, awe, and appreciation. Clearly the emerging technological power to control nature does not always constitute progress. The anti-posthumanist exhorts us to work with human nature to get the best out of it, rather than to seek cavalier domination in an effort to recreate what is already good. Better to accept natural limits, or so, anyway, is the spirit of anti-posthumanism. The perfectibility of humankind lies not in modifying the human vessel, but in developing the treasures within, such as compassion, virtue, and dignity.

In summary the natural law traditions represented by anti-posthumanists exhort people to live more or less according to nature, and warn that efforts to depart from that will result in new evils more perilous than the old ones. How can society presume that the brave new world will be a better world? Should not the burden of proof be on the proponents of radical change? What right have people in the early 2000s to impose their own arbitrary images of human enhancement on future generations?

Posthumanist beliefs in the inevitability and desirability of transforming human nature see human beings as essentially technological beings who now have the opportunity to redirect the technological powers that they have been exercising on the nonhuman world onto human nature itself. Just as humans have made the world better through technological mastery, so will they be able to do with human nature, in the first instance by prolonging human life as it currently exists but then ultimately by transforming human life. Such a posthumanist future is the natural outcome of all previous human history and the specific form that a respect for human dignity takes in the twenty-first century.

By contrast, anti-posthumanists suggest that the proper human attitude toward evolved nature is one of humility, awe, and appreciation. Just as past technological manipulations of nonhuman nature have not always been beneficial, so the emerging technological power to control human nature does not always constitute progress.

STEPHEN G. POST

SEE ALSO Aging and Regenerative Medicine;Artificiality;Bioethics;Cybernetics;Cyborgs;Dignity;Freedom;Future Generations;Human Cloning;Human Nature;Nanoethics;Utopia and Dystopia.

Bacon, Francis. (1996). The New Atlantis. In Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barash, David P. (1983). Aging: An Exploration. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Becker, Carl L. 2003 (1932). The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

de Duve, Christian. (2002). Life Evolving: Molecules, Mind, and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dyson, Freeman J. (1997). Imagined Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gruman, Gerald J. (1966). "A History of Ideas About the Prolongation of Life: The Evolution of Prolongevity Hypotheses to 1800." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 56 (Part 9). Philadelphia: American Philosophical Association.

Habermas, Jurgen. (2003). The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999). How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hook, C. C. (2003). "Transhumanism & Posthumanism." In The Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3rd edition, ed. Stephen G. Post. New York: Macmillan Reference.

Jonas, Hans. (1985). The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jonas, Hans. (1996). Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. L. Vogel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Kass, Leon R. (1985). Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs. New York: The Free Press.

Kass, Leon R. (2001). "L'Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?" First Things 113(May): 1724.

Lewis, C. S. (1996 [1944]). The Abolition of Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Noble, David F. (1997). The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Penguin.

Pepperell, Robert. (2003). The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond The Brain. Bristol, CT: Intellect.

Stock, Gregory. (2002). Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future.

Kass, Leon R. (2003). "Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Improvement." President's Council on Bioethics. Available from http://www.bioethics.gov/background/kasspaper.html.

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(1) Humanities and the Illness Experience (literature, film, the creative arts, poetry, narrative medicine) are intended to elevate student appreciation of the subjective experience of illness in the lives of patients, their families, and caregivers. Only by closely observing the illness experience can students begin to connect with patients as persons, replete with narratives of hope, anxiety, fear, love, loss, meaning, goals, culture, and treatment preferences. Student attentiveness to this narrative opens up the possibility of their encountering patients not just biologically, but as persons rather than mere puzzles. This awareness is at the very center of the art of medicine, of healing in any full sense of the word, and it naturally enlivens deeper empathic capacities.

(2) Virtues ( empathy, compassion, respect, humility, justice, loyalty, benevolence, diligence) all unfold from the uptick in narrative consciousness made possible through detailed humanistic observation. For empathic care to be sustained over the course of a career the professional virtue of self-care is also important. The humanistic virtues build the secure relational foundation of trust that is needed for good communication with patients, and for effective ethical decision making.

(3) Clinical Ethics ( attentive listening, , respect for autonomy, empathic communication, confidentiality, patient advocacy ) is more than the application of a set of principles or procedures for approaching the challenging decisions that patients, families, and caregivers confront daily. Clinical ethics requires a close attentiveness to the humanistic as well the scientific details of each case, a skill that can be finely honed through the medical humanities. Empathic virtues as habits of daily clinical interaction create a safe space for meaningful dialogue with patients around their values, goals, and choices in which their autonomy is respected. These humanistic assets can be developed as workable communicative skill sets with both cognitive and affective dimensions. Clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and provider meaning and well-being are all enhanced when ethical decision making proceeds in the context of the humanistic virtues.

Our three concentric circles exist in a surrounding field of healthcare systems including the healthcare system and finance, health law and policy, justice and access to care, the science of compassionate care and posthumanism. Compassionate care drives clinicians and students toward concern for justice according to patient need. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote famously of the love that does justice. Often patients are as stressed by navigating insurance and the healthcare system as they are by their illness itself. Clinicians committed to the good of patients are driven by compassion to advocate for access to needed medications and other necessary treatments, as well as ultimately to matters of population health.

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What is Posthumanism? The Curator

Perhaps you have had a nightmare in which you fell through the bottom of your known universe into a vortex of mutated children, talking animals, mental illness, freakish art, and clamoring gibberish. There, you were subjected to the gaze of creatures of indeterminate nature and questionable intelligence. Your position as the subject of your own dream was called into question while voices outside your sight commented upon your tenuous identity. When you woke, you were relieved to find that it was only a dream-version of the book you were reading when you fell asleep. Maybe that book was Alice in Wonderland; maybe it was What is Posthumanism?

Now, it is not quite fair to compare Cary Wolfes sober, thoughtful scholarship with either a nightmare or a work of (childrens?) fantasy. It is a profound, thoroughly researched study with far-reaching consequences for public policy, bioethics, education, and the arts. However, it does present a rather odd dramatis personae, including a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, a woman who feels most at ease in a cattle chute, an artist of Jewish descent who implants an ID-chip in his own leg, researchers who count the words in a dogs vocabulary, and horses who exhibit more intelligence than the average human toddler. The settings, too, are often wildly different from those you might expect in an academic work: a manufactured cloud hovering over a lake in Switzerland, a tree park in Canada where landscape and architecture blend and redefine one another, recording studios, photographic laboratories, slaughterhouses, and (most of all) the putative minds of animals and the deconstructed minds of the very humans whose ontological existence it seeks to problematize.

But that is another exaggeration. Wolfes goal is not to undermine the existence or value of human beings. Rather, it is to call into question the universal ethics, assumed rationality, and species-specific self-determination of humanism. That is a mouthful.

Indeed, Wolfes book is a mouthful, and a headful. It is in fact a book by a specialist, for specialists. While Wolfe is an English professor (at Rice University) and identifies himself with literary and cultural studies (p. 100), this is first of all a work of philosophy. Its ideal audience is very small, consisting of English and Philosophy professors who came of age in the 70s, earned their Ph.D.s during the hey-day of Derridean Deconstruction, and have spent the intervening decades keeping up with trends in systems theory, cultural studies, science, bioethics, and information technology. It is rigorous and demanding, especially in its first five chapters, which lay the conceptual groundwork for the specific analyses of the second section.

In these first five chapters, Wolfe describes his perspective and purpose by interaction with many other great minds and influential texts, primarily those of Jacques Derrida. Here, the fundamental meaning and purpose of Posthumanism becomes clear. Wolfe wants his readers to rethink their relationship to animals (what he calls nonhuman animals). His goal is a new and more inclusive form of ethical pluralism (137). That sound innocuous enough, but he is not talking about racial, religious, or other human pluralisms. He is postulating a pluralism that transcends species. In other words, he is promoting the ethical treatment of animals based on a fundamental re-evaluation of what it means to be human, to be able to speak, and even to think. He does this by discussing studies that reveal the language capacities of animals (a dog apparently has about a 200-word vocabulary and can learn new words as quickly as a human three-year-old; pp. 32-33), by recounting the story of a woman whose Aspergers syndrome enables her to empathize with cows and sense the world the way they do (chapter five), and by pointing out the ways in which we value disabled people who do not possess the standard traits that (supposedly) make us human.

But Wolfe goes further than a simple suggestion that we should be nice to animals (and the unspoken plug for universal veganism). He is proposing a radical disruption of liberal humanism and a rigorous interrogation of what he sees as an arrogant complacency about our species. He respects any variety of philosophy that challenges anthropocentrism and speciesism (62)anthropocentrism, of course, means viewing the world as if homo sapiens is the center (or, more accurately, viewing the world from the position of occupying that center) and specisism is the term he uses to replace racism. We used to feel and enact prejudice against people of different ethnic backgrounds, he suggests, but we now know that is morally wrong. The time has come, then, to realize that we are feeling and enacting prejudice against people of different species.

Although Wolfe suggests many epistemological and empirical reasons for rethinking the personhood of animals, he comes to the conclusion that our relationship with them is based on our shared embodiment. Humans and animals have a shared finitude (139); we can both feel pain, suffer, and die. On the basis of our mutual mortality, then, we should have an emphasis on compassion (77). He is not out to denigrate his own species far from it. Indeed, he goes out of his way to spend time discussing infants (who have not yet developed rationality and language), people with disabilities (especially those that prevent them from participating in fully rational thought and/or communication), and the elderly (who may lose some of those rational capacities, especially if racked by such ailments as Alzheimers). Indeed, he claims: It is not by denying the special status of human being[s] but by intensifying it that we can come to think of nonhuman animalsasfellow creatures (77).

This joint focus on the special status of all human beings along with the other living creatures roaming (or swimming, flying, crawling, slithering) the globe has far-reaching consequences for public policy, especially bioethics. Wolfe says that, currently, bioethics is riddled with prejudices: Of these prejudices, none is more symptomatic of the current state of bioethics than prejudice based on species difference, and an incapacity to address the ethical issues raised by dramatic changes over the past thirty years in our knowledge about the lives, communication, emotions, and consciousnesses of a number of nonhuman species (56). One of the goals of his book, then, is to reiterate that knowledge and promote awareness of those issues that he sees as ethical.

If you read Wolfes book, or even parts of it, you will suddenly see posthumanism everywhere. You can trace its influence in the enormously fast-growing pet industry. From the blog Pawsible Marketing: As in recent and past years, there is no doubt that pets continue to become more and more a part of the family, even to the extent of becoming, in some cases, humanized.

You will see it in bring-your-pet-to-work or bring-your-pet-to-school days. You might think it is responsible for the recent introduction of a piece of legislation called H.R. 3501, The Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years, know as the HAPPY Act, which proposes a tax deduction for pet owners. You will find it in childrens books about talking animals. You will see it on Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, and a PBS series entitled Inside the Animal Mind. You will find it in films, such as the brand-new documentary The Cove, which records the brutal slaughter of dolphins for food. And you will see it in works of art.

Following this reasoning, section two of Wolfes book (chapters six through eleven) veers off from the strictly philosophical approach into the more traditional terrain of cultural studies: he examines specific works of art in light of the philosophical basis that is now firmly in place. Interestingly, he does not choose all works of art that depict animals, nor those that displace humans. He begins with works that depict animals (Sue Coes paintings of slaughterhouses) and that use animals (Eduardo Kacs creation of genetically engineered animals that glow in the dark), but then moves on to discuss film, architecture, poetry, and music. In each of these examinations, he works to destabilize traditional binaries such as nature/culture, landscape/architecture, viewer/viewed, presence/absence, organic/inorganic, natural/artificial, and, really, human/nonhuman. This second section, then, is a subtle application of the theory of posthumanism itself to the arts, [our] environment, and [our] identity.

What is perhaps most important about What is Posthumanism remains latent in the text. This is its current and (especially) future prevalence. By tracing the history of posthumanism back through systems theory into deconstruction, Wolfe implies a future trajectory, too. I would venture to suggest that he believes posthumanism is the worldview that will soon come to dominate Western thought. And this is important for academics specifically and thinkers in general to realize.

Whether you agree with Cary Wolfe or not, it would be wise to understand posthumanism. It appears that your only choice will be either to align yourself with this perspective or to fight against it. If you agree, you should know with what. If you fight, you should know against what.

What, then, is the central thesis of posthumanism? Wolfes entire project might be summed up in his bold claim that, thanks to his own work and that of the theorists and artists he discusses, the human occupies a new place in the universe, a universe now populated by what I am prepared to call nonhuman subjects (47)such subjects as talking rabbits, six-inch people, and mythical monsters?

Well, maybe not the mythical monsters.

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What is Posthumanism? The Curator

Posthumanism by Pramod K. Nayar – Goodreads

This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants.

Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and 'speciesist' politics that position the human as a distinct

Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and 'speciesist' politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism's roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of 'normalcy' in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself.

As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.

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Posthumanism by Pramod K. Nayar - Goodreads

New Materialism(s) Critical Posthumanism Network

Digital Bodies by Megan Archer

New materialism is a term coined in the 1990s to describe a theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist traditions whose influences are present in much of cultural theory.[1] The discourses catalogued under new materialism(s) share an agenda with posthumanism in that they seek a repositioning of the human among nonhuman actants, they question the stability of an individuated, liberal subject, and they advocate a critical materialist attention to the global, distributed influences of late capitalism and climate change. The turn to matter as a necessary critical engagement comes from a collective discontent with the linguistic turn and social constructionism to adequately address material realities for humans and nonhumans alike. While new materialists recognise social constructionisms insistence on political relationalities of power and the effect of these dynamics on subject formation, some nevertheless maintain that the idea of discursive construction perpetuates Western, liberal subjectivities and holds on to stubborn humanist binaries. The new materialist turn might indeed be considered a return to matter in the context of historical materialisms concern for embodied circumstance and subject formation. However, as Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman point out in their anthology, Material Feminisms, material theorists do not simply abandon the work of the linguistic turn, but rather build on its foundation, underscoring the co-constitution of material and discursive productions of reality.[2] Feminist new materialisms, for instance, do not discount social constructions of gender and their intersections with class and race. They do, however, also consider how material bodies, spaces, and conditions contribute to the formation of subjectivity.

Theory marked as new materialism collectively works against inert, extra-discursive, and non-generative conceptions of matter, but the plurality of methodological approaches within the field is generous. With thinkers like Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jane Bennett as several of the fields leading scholars, the new materialisms draw on combinations of feminist theory, science studies, environmental studies, queer theory, philosophy, cultural theory, biopolitics, critical race theory, and other approaches.

When the field was nascent, Judith Butlers seminal feminist work on sex and gender was a foundational influence on early new materialist conversations. Butlers argument against a biologically material referent of gender completely erased the nature/culture divide between sex and gender.[3] Feminist science and new materialist reactions to this kind of radical constructivism emphasised that physical bodies moving through the world, and the differences in those bodies, also inform experience. Feminist theorists began to emphasise the material of the body, considering differences among bodies, and to think through the intersections of material and social constructions. Therefore, a discursive analysis of gender required a non-essentialising approach to the matter of the body, itself. Scholars responding to and synthesising the nature/culture question included Elizabeth Wilson, Rosi Braidotti, and Anne Fausto-Sterling.[4] Fausto-Sterlings Sexing the Body takes on the literal co-construction of bodies and social environments, arguing that bodily differences are evident beneath the flesh as human cells react to the signals of their environments.[5] Identity and difference are therefore products of complex interactions between matters inside and outside of bodies, and between the social and environmental conditions in which bodies exist.

The variety of new materialist approaches continues to proliferate as the field develops, but Diana Coole and Samantha Frost suggest grouping the major trends in new materialist scholarship into three identifiable camps in their 2010 edited collection, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.[6] The essays are organised into the categories Ontology/Agency, Bioethics/Biopolitics, and Critical Materialism. Feminist new materialists Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad would both fit into Coole and Frosts Ontology/Agency category, since both theorists examine how matter is agential in its emergence. Braidotti draws on and productively revises ideas from her background in post-structuralist theory. Rather than Giorgio Agambens bare life (zoe), her re-reading of Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari leads her to formulate a zoe that is the potentiality of all matter to form transversal connections or networks with all other matter.[7] In Homo Sacer (1995), Agamben argues that the Western biopolitical distinction between political and nonpolitical life (what he calls bios and zoe, respectively) can be traced to antiquity. It is the connection of sovereign power to biopower that distinguishes for Agamben a crucial cut between beings with no legal status, humans included, and beings with the privilege of legal rights.[8] Braidotti revises critical vitalism and biopolitics alike to argue that posthuman subjectivity is a zoe with an immanent potential for self-assembly along transversals, or the tendency of all living matter to form associations with other material systems. Posthuman subjectivity therefore raises important ethical questions, since it is neither bound to the individual subject, nor singularly human.

Just as Braidottis neo-vitalist theory of matter requires that we revise our existing ethical framework, Karen Barads agential realism suggests that the physical laws underpinning the reality we experience are, themselves, an ethical matter. Barads theoretical upending of the object/subject divide, or that all entities literally do not precede their intra-actions, comes from her robust background in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Conditions for Barad are always already material-discursive; that is, discourse and matter come into being together, and the apparatus that delimits being is only a condition of possibility. Barad contests a human-centred concept of agency. She instead argues that intra-actions entail the complex co-productions of human and nonhuman matter, time, spaces, and their signification. Therefore, the human does not act on matter, but rather humans and nonhumans are agential actors in the world as it continuously comes into being.[9]

Though the Ontology/Agency grouping of new materialist theory makes meaningful political and ethical interventions, Coole and Frost argue that it is the Bioethics/Biopolitics category that centres on more specific questions of nonhuman social justice and geopolitical sovereign control. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, re-reads Charles Darwin to discuss the biological processes that prepare bodies for social and cultural inscription based on difference.[10]

Lastly, Critical Materialism both emerges from a tradition of Marxist historical materialism and responds to the constructivism and deconstructionist criticism of classical Marxist approaches. The new critical materialism engages the effects of global capitalism in an era of climate crisis and rejects the view that discursive rewriting of subjectivity can radically disrupt the material conditions facing the globalized subject under neoliberal capital. Jason Edwards argues that we will need to remember the materialism of historical materialism in the requisite sense if we are to understand how these problems are the systemic product of the reproduction of modern capitalist societies and the international system of states.[11] Jason Moores Capitalism in the Web of Life has also contributed to recent critical materialist approaches by re-examining capitalism as a global ecological force, extracting surplus value from nature.[12] The critical materialist approach is thus not a revitalisation of classical Marxism, but rather a rereading of its critique of capital in an era of global complexity.

Regardless of discipline, all new materialisms embrace the vitality of matter, particularly as it encompasses the nonhuman as well as the human. Rejection of anthropocentrism aligns new materialisms with posthumanism, but also with speculative realism, a branch of philosophy that in recent years has posited whether questions of vitality, agency, and generative capability are appropriate for human and nonhuman matter alike. Although speculative realism and new materialisms align in their arguments for the dissolution of a human centre, they philosophically diverge in their positions on how we can understand a true ontology, and on matters agential and vital capabilities. The approaches of new materialisms extend the capacities of agential and vital qualities to the nonhuman and the material, while the speculative realist approach questions whether an ontology of matter can realistically consider these concepts in the first place.

While new materialists question the position of human-centred ontology, they often do so with the biopolitical bent of also questioning power structures that mark material bodies as subjects of power. In this way they continue to engage with the projects and political concerns of post-structuralism while extending the reach of these discourses into matters beyond the human and into material conditions beyond the linguistically constructed. Somewhat differently, object-oriented ontology is a speculative realist approach which considers the thing at centre, arguing that no entity has privileged ontological status over another, but rather that all things exist equally. Ian Bogosts Alien Phenomenology argues for thing-centred being, cautioning that positioning our centre around human concern precludes all things perception of the world.[13] Bogost and other object-oriented ontologists encourage us to consider perceiving objects as things, rather than filtering our perception of things through human experience.

Jane Bennett, one of the new materialisms leading thinkers, argues that nonhuman (and particularly nonbiological) matter is imbued with a liveliness that can exhibit distributed agency by forming assemblages of human and nonhuman actors. Bennetts 2010 book Vibrant Matter argues that agency is only distributed and is never the effect of intentionality. Bennetts thing-power exemplifies the ability of objects to manifest a lively kind of agency. She explains in her preface: Thing-power gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence of aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.[14] Vibrant Matter also brings to the foreground an extant but more latent history of vibrant or lively matter in Western philosophy. Bennett builds on the ideas of early twentieth-century critical vitalists, as well as the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, to bring together materiality, affect, and vitalism.

New materialist transgressions of humanist subject/object dualism, ideas of distributed agency, and reconsiderations of traditional notions of life and death are not universally convincing, of course. Slavoj ieks 2014 book, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, offers a critique of this new theoretical turn, arguing that in their attempt to dismantle traditional modern thinking, new materialisms re-inscribe humanist values by merely extending agency, vitality, and social phenomena to nonhuman material.[15] Nevertheless, the variety of interdisciplinary methodologies that form the new materialisms allow them to approach similar ontological questions in different ways, a move which seems promising for a theory placing a high value on increasing contact between disciplines in institutional knowledge production, and the entanglement of matter and ideological constructions.

University of California, Riverside, April 2018

[1] Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Interview with Karen Barad, in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed. By Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 48-70 (p. 48).

[2] Material Feminisms, ed. by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 1-19.

[3] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[4] For an overview see Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2008) and Manuela Rossini, To the Dogs: Companion Speciesism and the New Feminist Materialism, Kritikos 3 (Sept 2006).

[5] Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

[6] New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1-43.

[7] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

[8] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

[9] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

[10] Elizabeth Grosz, In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

[11] Jason Edwards, The Materialism of Historical Materialism, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 281-298 (p. 282).

[12] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).

[13] Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What Its Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012).

[14] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

[15] Slavoj iek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2014).

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New Materialism(s) Critical Posthumanism Network

What is Posthumanism? – Cary Wolfe – Google Books

What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many?

Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture.

For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.

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What is Posthumanism? - Cary Wolfe - Google Books

Posthumanism | Transhumanism Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Philosophy may be able to help recruit one. (November 2008)

In literary and critical theory, posthumanism or post-humanism, meaning beyond humanism, is a major European continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It strives to move beyond the ideas and images of the world of Renaissance humanism to correspond more closely to the 21st century's concepts of technoscientific knowledge.

Posthumanism mainly differentiates from classical humanism in that it restores the stature that had been made of humanity to one of many natural species. According to this claim, humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or set themselves above it in ethical considerations a priori. Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. The limitations and fallibility of human intelligence are confessed, even though it does not imply abandoning the rational tradition of humanism.[1]

Ihab Hassan, critic, scholar, and theorist in the academic study of literature, once stated that "humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something one must helplessly call posthumanism". This view predates the currents of posthumanism which have developed over the past twenty years in somewhat diverse, but complementary, domains of thought and practice. For example, Ihab Hassan is a scholar of literature and a known postmodernist whose theoretical writings expressly address postmodernism in society.[1]

Theorists who both complement and contrast Ihab Hassan include Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Shannon Bell, N. Katherine Hayles, Peter Sloterdijk and Douglas Kellner. Among the theorists are philosophers who have written about a "posthuman condition" (Robert Pepperell) which is often substituted for the term "posthumanism".[1][2]

Posthumanism is sometimes used as a synonym for an ideology of technology known as "transhumanism" because it affirms the possibility and desirability of achieving a "posthuman future" in purely evolutionary terms. However, posthumanists in the humanities and the arts are critical of transhumanism, in part, because they argue that it incorporates and extends many of the flaws of Enlightenment humanism, namely scientific imperialism and perfectibilism.[3]

The posthuman or post-human, in critical theory, is a speculative being that represents or seeks to enact a re-writing of what is generally conceived of as human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questions Renaissance humanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence. Thus, the posthuman recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, instead understanding the world through context and heterogeneous perspectives while maintaining scientific rigor and a dedication to objective observations of the world. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can "become" or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.[4]

The posthuman, and posthumanism with it, are philosophical positions that overlap and are constantly engaged with much of postmodern philosophy, biotechnology, and evolutionary biology, so the field is constantly changing. The critical notion of the posthuman is isolated from these fields as the embodiment of critical engagement itself; that is to say that the posthuman is not necessarily human in the first place, but is rather an embodied medium through which critical consciousness is manifested.[citation needed]

Steve Nichols published the Post-Human Manifesto in 1988, and holds a contrarian view that human beings are already post-human compared to previous generations.[citation needed]

Critical discourses surrounding posthumanism are not homogeneous, but in fact present a series of often contradictory ideas, and the term itself is contested, with one of the foremost authors associated with posthumanism, Manuel DeLanda, decrying the term as "very silly."[5] Covering the ideas of, for example, Robert Pepperell's The Posthuman Condition, and N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman under a single term is distinctly problematic due to these contradictions.

The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the "cyborg" of A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.[6] Haraway's conception of the cyborg is an ironic take on traditional conceptions of the cyborg that inverts the traditional trope of the cyborg whose presence questions the salient line between humans and robots. Haraway's cyborg is in many ways the "beta" version of the posthuman, as her cyborg theory prompted the issue to be taken up in critical theory.[7]

Following Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman grounds much of the critical posthuman discourse, asserts that liberal humanism - which separates the mind from the body and thus portrays the body as a "shell" or vehicle for the mind - becomes increasingly complicated in the late 20th and 21st centuries because information technology put the human body in question. Hayles maintains that we must be conscious of information technological advancements while understanding information as "disembodied," that is, something which cannot fundamentally replace the human body but can only be incorporated into it and human life practices.[8]

The posthuman is a being that relies on context rather than relativity, on situated objectivity rather than universal objectivity, and on the creation of meaning through 'play' between constructions of informational pattern and reductions to the randomness of on/off switches, which are the foundation of digital binary systems.[citation needed]

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Posthumanism Theory – Technical Communication Body of …

About Posthumanism TheoryIn as brief a definition as possible, humanism is centered on the idea that human needs, values, concerns, and ideals are of the highest importance, or that the human being is the epitome of being. As a development of this idea, posthumanism is based on the notion that humankind can transcend the limitations of the physical human form. In a traditional sense, humans have been considered to be solidly and indisputably classified as high-functioning animals, but animals nonetheless. In this way, the same biological and physical constraints that limit the entire animal kingdom tether humankind to that base level. Posthumanism Theory suggests it is both possible and for the best for humans to attempt to surpass these limitations, often through the use of technology to augment biology (in a way, using the physiological capacity of the human brain to accelerate the functions of the entire human form).This progressive mentality is an important aspect of the human condition to consider in the course of modern document design and technical rhetoric. Operating under posthumanism ideals requires authors and creators to venture into the hypothetical and the unexplored because these are the areas that build upon and even improve what we already have established. Posthumanism holds this sentiment at heartthe idea that we, as humans, have no inherent barrier to making our physical and mental functionality much more efficient and powerful than it currently is. To apply these ideals to writing and rhetoric, there is the potential to incorporate the conventions of posthumanism both integrally and progressively. Integrally, a posthuman text should reflect the central ideas of posthumanism: what can authors do to make their texts transcend the perceived limitations of text and writing? How can documents be made to do more than what they currently can do, and how can their readability, usability, and accessibility be expanded? Progressively, a posthuman text should relatably adapt for evolutions in interaction: it might explore such questions as how will human interaction with documents change in the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years? How can texts encourage mental expansion? What changes in technology can be predicted and accounted for in the delivery and interaction with documents and writing?Progressions in Usability and FunctionalityWhile the primary focus of posthumanist progression lies in the realm of higher technology, there are developments both in effect and yet to come that have much to do with technical writing and rhetoric. For many, many centuries, writing has been constrained to paper with static text. In more recent decades, the advent of computers and the Internet have caused documents to evolve and adapt. Institution of newer technologies allows for new methods of interactivity, which allow different senses to be utilized by human beings who interact with such documents. Through the use of technology, document designers and writers can allow their readers to interact at a more functional level which is more natural and fully engaging than mere reading.The qualities of new media enable documents and their interactive elements to tap into the human mind to a higher degree. In that way, technology is being utilized to better the human experience and tap into the full range of human capability. New developments in technology such as mobile phones, touch screens, e-readers, and other similar technology afford better interactivity and have evolved the way humans interact with their professional and social worlds. Technology is always changing to accommodate more natural, intuitive means of interactivitybut the most posthuman aspect of this technological innovation creep is the ubiquity of technology that allows delivery of writing and documents. Technology has filled in an accessibility gap that now grants access to documents and writing not only on printed paper, but on desktop computers, laptop computers, smartphones, and other such devices. This technology augments human beings' functionality from two directionsit enhances the ability of the audience to read and respond to writing, and it also enhances the ability of the author to create and distribute his or her writing.Posthumanist rhetoric requires a full understanding of the operation of the human being as an entity, both collectively as an audience and singularly as individual readers. Writing and rhetoric are able to be at their most posthuman when they utilize technology to transcend the physicality of humans as well as the temporality of their existence. In this way, authors begin accommodating more means of delivery and spreading the availability and accessibility of documents in addition to making documents available at much more timely intervalseven as far as on-demand. Posthuman authors who embrace technological advances gain new dimensions of interactivity both within their text as well as in response to their text. A posthuman rhetoric mindset enables the document to blossom further as a medium as it works in harmony with the qualities of its audience and their humanity.

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What does posthumanism mean? – definitions.net

Posthumanism

Posthumanism or post-humanism (meaning "after humanism" or "beyond humanism") is a term with at least seven definitions according to philosopher Francesca Ferrando:Antihumanism: any theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition.Cultural posthumanism: a branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond archaic concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.Philosophical posthumanism: a philosophical direction which draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human speciesPosthuman condition: the deconstruction of the human condition by critical theorists.Transhumanism: an ideology and movement which seeks to develop and make available technologies that eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, in order to achieve a "posthuman future".AI takeover: A more pessimistic alternative to transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise. This is related to the view of "cosmism" which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".Voluntary Human Extinction, which seeks a "posthuman future" that in this case is a future without humans.

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What does posthumanism mean? - definitions.net