Seeing Like a Cyborg? The Innocence of Posthuman Knowledge

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

The term " posthumanism " was used for the first time in the critical sense that entered then common language by Ihab Hassan in 1977. In its almost four decades of existence, posthuman theory has witnessed several evolutions, transformations and refinements, not least because this concept does not name an homogeneous and compact field, but is rather a " discourse " in the Foucauldian sense, a multiplicity of different streams, heterogeneous and fragmented, held together by a basic idea: the notion that old humanism is over. This issue of " Lo Sguardo " intends to attempt a sort of assessment of the last four decades, in order to analyse the limits and boundaries of the concept of posthuman. The leading thread of this issue is thus the question: what is still alive and topical, today, in the question of the posthuman? What themes and trends have progressively run out, and what instead have come to the foreground? How did the questions, and most importantly the answers, to the problem of the posthuman evolve? The question of technology, that is of the hybridization between human and machine, is still for many the most " showy " trait of the posthuman, both in popular culture and for the common understanding within academia; and yet the triumphalism of a certain posthumanism – and above all of its transhumanist deviations – alienated a number of scholars, starting precisely with one of the " mothers " of posthuman theory, Donna Haraway. The fact remains that the levels of technology's intimacy and intrusion into the human have, if anything, enormously increased sinceA Cyborg Manifesto (1983), and so have also the oppositions to it (Habermas, Fukuyama), and this keeps raising inexhaustible ontological, ethical and aesthetic questions (decisive are here Bostrom's reflexions).

2013

"This book is an interrogation of humanity's new potentials and threats brought by technology when the question of social change is becoming more crucial than ever. The selected essays in this anthology confront questions from a wide-ranging perspective that evoke the postmodern idea of the cyborg to illuminate recent phenomena from global warming, Wikileaks, to the Occupy movements. Multiple disciplines from music to psychoanalysis to journalism to anthropology collaborate to examine the way we shape the world from behind our ubiquitous screens to taking to the streets in mass protests. What does the increasing omnipotence of networked machines ultimately mean? What do social networks do to our sense of self, others and society? Does P2P technology foster new ethics and spiritualities? What potentials does posthumanity have to bring about social change? Featuring essays from Robert Barry, Siri Driessen & Roos van Haaften, Bonni Rambatan, Dustin Cohen, Jacob Johanssen, Michel Bauwens, Aliki Tzatha, Zakary Paget, Stefen Baack, Alessandro Zagato, Peter Nikolaus Funke, Glenn Muschert, and Jung-Hua Liu."

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, 2022

To pose the question of posthumanist technology today, it is insufficient to reiterate the question as posed by Heidegger in the years immediately following the Second World War. In this chapter, it is argued that only by moving beyond the anthropocentric limits of Heidegger’s position, does it become possible to engage critically with both the place and the potential of technical ensembles within the giant cybernetic system we know as the Anthropocene. To do this, it is necessary first of all to analyze the process of instrumentalization as the deracinating essence of our technological modernity that seems hell-bent on global catastrophe. The coincidence of instrumentality and causality that begins with Aristotle determines just what can and, more importantly, cannot be counted as an entity deserving of ethical consideration. Indeed, the truism that posits the existence of an internal principle unique to biological organisms that governs the organization of living forms of matter still prevails to this day and remains fundamental as to how we think of ourselves as human beings today, a normative process of identification that is repeatedly fed back to us in the form of our worst collective nightmares. This principle, it is argued, serves an entirely ideological function, propping up an unfounded distinction between living and nonliving forms of organization on the basis that the organization of living beings retains as its condition the potential to be profoundly unpredictable. Whereas the metaphysical concept of life only ever drags us back to the impossibility of genetic origin and to the ghost in the machine that is all that remains of humanism, the potential for novelty definitive of metastable forms of organization – including all forms of living being – has no need of magical donations of vitality. And potential, above all else, is the primary concern of both the posthuman and the technological insofar as it concerns the chance of a future in the making.

Scientia et Fides

The advent of the digital era brings with it the dream of 'transcending the human' through the most sophisticated AI / robot technologies. The Author argues that the concept and practices of 'transcendence' are deeply ambiguous, since on the one hand they simply aim to overcome the weaknesses, limits and fragility of the human, while on the other hand they modify the human by selecting its specific qualities and its causal properties in a way to generate beings ' other than human. ' Post / trans-humanist ideologies supporting a radical transformative change, instead of strengthening the human, lead to its dehumanization because they imply the denial of the characteristics that are uniquely human and / or those that constitute human nature. To understand when new digital technologies enhance the human (keeping it within its natural boundaries) or distort it, it is necessary to analyze and evaluate social processes on the basis of a relational vision that shows us which human relationships emerge from the use of technologies.

Sound and Technological Posthumanism, 2013

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.

Interconnections, 2023

2024

In this paper, I aim to assess whether postphenomenology's ontological framework is suitable for making sense of the most recent technoscientific developments, with special reference to the case of AI-based technologies. First, I will argue that we may feel diminished by those technologies seemingly replicating our higher-order cognitive processes only insofar as we regard technology as playing no role in the constitution of our core features. Second, I will highlight the epistemological tension underlying the account of this dynamic submitted by postphenomenology. On the one hand, postphenomenology's general framework prompts us to conceive of humans and technologies as mutually constituting one another. On the other hand, the postphenomenological analyses of particular human-technology relations, which Peter-Paul Verbeek calls cyborg relations and hybrid intentionality, seem to postulate the existence of something exclusively human that technology would only subsequently mediate. Third, I will conclude by proposing that postphenomenology could incorporate into its ontology insights coming from other approaches to the study of technology, which I label as human constitutive technicity in the wake of Peter Sloterdijk's and Bernard Stiegler's philosophies. By doing so, I believe postphenomenology could better account for how developments in AI prompt and possibly even force us to revise our self-representation. From this viewpoint, I will advocate for a constitutive role of technology in shaping the human lifeform not only in the phenomenological-existential sense of articulating our relation to the world but also in the onto-anthropological sense of influencing our evolution.

In the modern world an individual deals with different technologies and products of scientific and technological progress and becomes more and more dependent on them, spending considerable time to understand changes and to keep up with progress. In general, the entire human history especially in the last few centuries is the history of victories and triumph of science, technology, and information technologies. Moreover, the humankind being a father of technology at the same time became more and more dependent on it. Today technologies penetrate almost every aspect of our life: private, family and intimate, as well as our mentality. But even more serious transformations are awaiting us in the future when devices and technologies are introduced into the human body and consciousness thus putting strain on all our biological (nervous, physical, and intellectual) adaptive capacities. Today they give a serious thought to seemingly strange ideas about whether mobile phones, computers, and organizers can become a part of our body and brain. In fact, technology has become one of the most powerful forces of development.