Technology, science fiction and psychopathology in the new millennium

Abstract

Summary This paper argues two imbricated points. Firstly, it is concerned to take issue with overly enthusiastic predictions many commentators are making that we are entering a “posthuman” era in history, brought about by the relationship we have to contemporary information technologies which threaten to make human intersubjective exchange at the physical level obsolete. Theorizing about the superseding of the human, I will argue, has both a science fictional and a millennial character, a problematic status for any episte‐mological claims such thinking would wish to make. The second and related point of the argument is to suggest an alternative reading of the cultural consequences of information technology. Such a reading focuses on the renegotiation of natural versus cultural forces in the human psyche due to the imbrication of the human with its technology, and suggests that what is most human about us, is what is perhaps most “pathological” about our psyches ‐ that is, what exceeds or escapes assimilat...