Review of Christopher John Müller, Prometheanism (2016)

The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2016

In What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists "the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist." 1 Our argument, made manifest by this special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, is that it is not only our ways of thinking about the world that must change if they are to be posthumanist, or at least not simply humanist; our ways of being and doing in the world must change too. In particular, we view the challenge to humanism and the human brought about by the emergence of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, bioscience, pre-emptive, cognitive, and contextual computing, as providing us with an opportunity to reinvent, radically, the ways in which we work, act, and think as theorists. In this respect, if "posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore," 2 then it generates an opportunity to raise the kind of questions for the humanities we really should have raised long before now, but haven't because our humanist ideas, not just of historical change and progression (i.e. from human to posthuman, to what comes after the human), 3 but of the rational, liberal, human subject, and the associated concepts of the author, the journal, and copyright that we have inherited with it, continue to have so much power and authority. Our use of disruption in this context thus goes beyond the usual definitions of the term. This includes those characterizations of technological disruption associated with Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School, and with the rhetoric of Silicon Valley. It is not our intention to try to sustain and develop the current system for creating, performing and circulating humanities research and scholarship, its methodologies, aesthetics, and institutions, by emphasizing the potential of disruptive technologies to generate innovations that are capable of facilitating the production of a new "digital" humanities, or even "posthuman Humanities studies." 4 As the title of this special issue indicates, rather than helping the humanities refresh themselves with what Joseph Schumpeter

Brill , 2024

This chapter furthers the mimetic turn in posthuman studies by revisiting the myth of Prometheus from the entangled perspective of technics and mimesis. Reframed in the company of Bruno Latour and Bernard Stiegler, Prometheus calls for self-knowledge in the epoch of the Anthropocene so as to hear the untimeliness of the following ancient lines : Hephaestus: You shall be grilled by the sun's bright fire and change the fair bloom of your skin … Prometheus: I placed in them blind hopes … Besides this, I gave them fire. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound …

Shame 4.0: Investigating an Emotion in Digital Worlds and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Ed. Elisabeth Vanderheiden & Claude-Hélène Mayer & Paul Wong. New York: Springer, 2021

This speculative essay proposes an account of shame phenomena in the 4th Industrial Revolution that traces the origin and meaning of shame to technology. Drawing upon sociological and psychological inquiries and theories, the essay explains the origin of shame as related to what Norbert Elias (1939/2000) dubbed generally the “instruments of civilization.” The essay reflects upon the imbrication of human agency, identities, and visibility as it relates to the historically shifting threshold of shame from pre-industrial to post-industrial societies. The essay will have 4 main concerns: outlining the history of shame and its moralities from a sociological perspective; identifying the technological origins of shame; considering some transformations of shame by technology, and speculating upon the future of shame as a moral construct embedded in technology, with some consideration of the binary divisions such as technology/society and subject/object that have traditionally structured the cultural significance of shame.

Journal of Responsible Technology, 2024

This paper evaluates the historical-anthropological and ethical underpinnings of the concept of "digital humanism." Our inquiry begins with a reconstructive analysis, focusing on three pivotal works defining digital humanism. The objective is to expose shared characteristics shaping the notions of "human being" and "humanity." Moving forward, our investigation employs anthropological-evolutionary and individual-cognitive perspectives to discern how cultural-historical contingencies shape the implicit understanding of the "human being" that forms the foundation for digital humanism. As an illustrative case study, we delve into Luddism to illuminate the potential and limitations of adopting a critical stance towards digital humanism. Through a thorough analysis, encompassing both efficacy and implicit anthropological elements, our goal is to extract ethical implications pertinent to our broader objective. This examination reveals the interplay between cultural-historical contingencies and anthropological constants in shaping assumptions about the "human being" within the context of digital humanism. In conclusion, our paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of the implicit assumptions permeating the digital humanism discourse. We advocate for a more critical and reflective engagement with the foundational concepts of digital humanism, urging scholars and practitioners to navigate the complexities of its historical-anthropological and ethical dimensions.

Human Studies, 2021

This introduction [ii] will propose six basic principles as the foundation for a new sub-discipline -Digital Anthropology. While the principles will be used to integrate the chapters that follow, its larger purpose is to spread the widest possible canvas upon which to begin the creative work of new research and thinking. The intention is not simply to study and reflect on new developments but to for humanity that may help us to conceptualise the consequences of the digital. Just like the digital, money represented a new phase in human abstraction where, for the first time, practically anything could be reduced to the same common element. This reduction of quality to quantity was in turn the foundation for an explosion of differentiated things, especially the huge expansion of commoditisation linked to industrialisation. In both cases, the more we reduce to the same the more we can thereby create difference. This is what makes money the best precedent for understanding digital culture and leads to our first principle of the dialectic.

American Quarterly 58(3) (September 2006): 569-595.

A theory and historical analysis establishing technological progress as the unspoken theology of US culture. Technology has long been the unacknowledged source of European and Euro-American superiority within modernity and its underlying mythos traffics in what James W. Carey called "secular religiosity." Lewis Mumford called it the "mechano-idolatry" of US culture as early as 1934. This analysis contrasts the original concept of social progress with its replacement by technological progress through the visions of GNR scientists (genetics or biotech, nanotechnology, robotics). The article traces the whiteness of this technological vision from the early nineteenth century to the space program and into the future through popular culture (e.g., The Terminator, Star Trek). The conclusion is that the post-human is an escape from the necessary work of establishing a pan-human future.

Configurations, 2018