Introduction: Memory after Humanism

Springer eBooks, 2021

The notion of "posthumanism" I intend to use throughout this paper encompasses both the assemblages of human and nonhuman components and the critical tool that posthumanism can be. Indeed, posthumanism addresses two problematic situations facing humanism as well as the humanities today. On the one hand, historically, humanism has often identified itself with imperialism-the universal Human as a norm shaped according to the image of the Western, white, Christian, heterosexual, upper-middle-class male. On the other hand, the development of biotechnologies and artificial intelligence, as well as the development of systemic and environmental modes of thought-all types of knowledge that lead to thinking in terms of life milieus rather than of isolated individuals-have made obsolete the possibility of studying humankind as a species separated from other life forms, whether they are organic or artificial (see for instance Haraway 2004; Braidotti 2013; Nayar 2014). If "posthuman" figures, because of their important place in our contemporary societies, affect numerous propositions elaborated upon within the performance arts, I am particularly interested in the way they affect the postdramatic stage. What can the stage, that space which

This course examines the history and crisis of the idea of " the human. " Readings will be drawn from graphic novels, post-apocalyptic narratives, classical and contemporary theory, science fiction, and recent work in cultural and environmental criticism. Through our reading, we will reconsider the distinctions between humans and nonhumans, as well as the idea of the natural. The often-porous borders between species, technologies, and environments will also allow us to ask questions about the future of the humanities. If we unsettle prevailing assumptions about the meaning of " the human, " what will the humanities look like in the coming decades? What is the future of humanistic study in an age when digital technologies have become a common feature of everyday life and environmental crises pose existential threats to the planet and our species? In order to reconsider what we mean when we talk about " the human, " we will need to trek across diverse intellectual terrain. We'll consider narratives that imagine a future continuum of human-cyborgs, reflect on vast spatial-temporal scales that call into question the significance of our species, probe the assumptions about race and gender underlying popular American ideas about nature, and evaluate scenarios in which the natural becomes " uncanny " even as the technological becomes " organic. "

Sound end Environment: Contemporary Approaches to Sonic Ecology in Art / Zvuk a prostředí: Současné přístupy ke zvukové ekologii , 2020

The Western concept of nature draws heavily on the tradition of landscape painting and the modern organization of visuality in the arts and sciences, which rests on the distinction between the observing subject and the world that unfolds before his eyes. 3 In the Western tradition, man, the anthropos, is most commonly defined by his di erence-in degree, quality, or status-from nature and from that which is non-human. Acoustic ecology has attempted to refigure the default mode of the modern scientific 1 This paper was written in the framework of the research project The Second Sense: Sound, Hearing and Nature in the Czech Modernity (-Y), funded by the The Czech Science Foundation.

Let me begin with a brief reflection about the widespread (in my view profoundly misguided) assumption that all "critical knowledge" ought to issue from a neutral point of view and to conceive its "objects" as ostensibly unrelated to us. On this account, knowledge of a particular issue originates in a dispassionate "view from nowhere" (T. Nagel) that supposedly owes nothing to and notably is not affected by the phenomenon under investigation. To know is not to commit to a (potentially transformative) interaction with a form but, rather, to pursue the unilateral and impersonal determination of a shape. Indeed, form largely ceases to have an epistemologically significant role as, by the late sixteenth century, the identity of a given object (as indeed the warrant for crediting it with reality in the first place) is overwhelmingly conceived in terms of efficient causation. Yet if this model of rational inquiry seems obvious to us now, we should remember that it is of rather recent historical provenance; viz., it reflects the ascendancy of modern scientific method over a pre-modern modern culture of judgment, a shift that commenced barely four-hundred years ago. Previously, to know something had involved one's drawing progressively closer to, indeed participating in the phenomenon at stake so as to grasp its intrinsic law (lex insita) of operation. The reality and identity of a thing were deemed inseparable from the form of its appearance, the way in which it not only appears to our attention but stakes a positive claim on it, thereby enabling the beholder to evolve in dynamic interaction with the appearing phenomenon. To know thus meant to participate in the formal cause that accounts for the unique functioning (Aquinas' operatio) of a "thing" (res)-the latter not to be confused with the term "object" that would only supersede it in the early modern era.

Lacan and the Posthuman, 2018

The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero's oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction's indeterminacy to Surrealism's fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.

European Journal of English Studies, 2014

43rd APEAA Conference | Culture(s) of the Self, Catholic University, Lisbon, Portugal, 1-3 June , 2023

This study explores the afterlife of Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (Shelley, 1818) in the work Anti-Marta, by portuguese bio-artist Marta de Menezes. I will focus on the violence that the exploration of the limits of human individuality entails in the context of our increasingly biotech-based society. Anti-Marta points out to the interactions between the I and the Other, and the risks that flow from that, such as the annihilation of the Self and/or the destruction of the Non-Self. For that, the myth of Prometheus can be of great use to elaborate a deeper understanding of these concepts. I will firstly discuss Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime, which informs the final section of Frankenstein, in which a furious persecution compels the figures of the creator-creature binomial to embark on a passionate quest for the destruction of one another, in response to their fear of death. Secondly, I will offer a commentary of the section of Hesiod's Theogony in which the myth of Prometheus first appears, requiring that I turn to the topic of ethics, also prevalent in Anti-Marta. Thus, I will unpack the concepts of body and foreign bodies brought up by Jean-Luc Nancy in his book Corpus. My conclusion highlights how the concept of the sublime, mobilized in Frankenstein, is reconfigured in De Menezes’ installation, in which art and science merge and raise questions of an ethical nature, pertinent in our society, where human- made and nature-grown things become one. This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the nature of the human being as a fragmented creature in a modern world.

Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue that posthumanism is not just an epistemology (Wolfe, 2009), but an aesthetic that blends three elements – the primitive, technology and horror. The interrelation of these three elements produces an aesthetic sensibility, that says three things about non-humanist conceptions of life. First, we draw attention to metamorphosis as an engine that encourages the viewer to recognise life not as being, but as perpetual becoming. However, as an antidote to the liberatory promises of ‘flow’, we specifically argue for a distinction between morphing and mutating, showing how each articulates opposing fantasies of posthumanism. Second, the concept of primal technology is introduced, which injects the humanist understanding of technology with an alternative, subterranean and posthuman supplement. Third, proto-atavism introduces the concept that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life. Ancient and future evolutionary traits exist in the present – both in the aesthetic imagination and in everyday life. Ultimately, we work towards a more wide-ranging idea – a posthuman biology – an ethical imperative which reminds us that, in a technological age, life is no longer containable in ‘simple’ life.

Leonardo, 2001

ost-human development will likely proceed rapidly in the coming century. Research in genetic and medical engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, and computer science will no doubt soon be translated into applications within the human body, with the integration of information systems and the brain, at the neural level, forming the horizon of possibility. Conceived as a machine whose every process is amenable to intervention, reconfiguration, and replication, the organism beckons to research and development units with the promise of a vast new market to divide and conquer, a frontier zone whose outlines are drawn now in science fiction. While the genetically-engineered human, the cyborg, virtual consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the autonomous robot are still in primitive, exploratory stages of development, their appearance on the cultural agenda portends, if not the completion, then the closure of the modern West's historic project of self-description. To "understand" a phenomenon, whether in nature, society, or the mind, has meant to be able to construct for it a corresponding symbolic machine; and in this manner, everything, at one level or another, has been described-that is to say, represented by a set of symbols combining themselves according to a finite set of algorithms that allow for a certain statistical predictability, a neutralization of future uncertainty. What arises now, however, is the question concerning the import of this procedure for contingent and mortal creatures like human beings, and what this accumulation of descriptive models entails; as Don Byrd points out, "if the model corresponds precisely to the original, it is not clear what has been gained. The locus of the object is changed." [1]. Today, as the human object fades into the statistical blur of the post-human, the strategy of simulation that has long constituted our self-knowledge reaches its ironic reductio ad absurdum. The vertiginous space opened is a model with no earthly referent, no common location of "thereness." As Jean Baudrillard writes, "It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational" [2]. Of course, for many purposes traditional modeling procedures will continue to prove immensely productive or as the engineers say, robust. Although one may find fault with the sterility of suburbs and shopping malls, the blandness of fast-food, or the puerility of Hollywood, these represent the historically unprecedented material success of a certain model of human production-of the very idea of taking production as an end in itself, and modeling its processes solely in terms of efficient input-output ratios. And while one may be dismayed by environmental degradation, saddened by extinction of species, maddened by automotive congestion, or frightened by ultra-destructive weaponry, these too are