Posthuman Condition Research Articles

Sex Robot Utopianism and the Transhumanist Vision: A Critical Reflection

Abstract The sex robots (or sexbots) are coming, and this has generated a lot of discussion. The scholarly debate on love & sex with sexbots has been ignited mostly by David Levy’s book in 2007, Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. There exist many perspectives on sexbots, and one way to assess them is to view this as an embodiment of the transhumanist or posthumanist vision (see Michael Hauskeller’s book, Sex and the Posthuman Condition, in 2014). Some enthusiasts for sexbots such as David Levy espouse a kind of sex robot utopianism that largely mirrors the transhumanist vision of posthuman transformation. Thus, this essay will first introduce transhumanism as well as the major philosophical and theological criticisms of transhumanism. In a second step, it will introduce Levy’s sex robot utopianism and then critically assess his arguments. The critical discussions of both parts will prove to be mutually illuminating and reinforcing.

(A Journey) towards an Affirmative Politics for Environmental Education

Abstract Environmental education (EE) can never be separated from politics and the relationship between the two is complex, has changed over time, and is understood and experienced differently. The field’s relationship with politics is both internal (its own politics) and external (political forces outside the field) to it. In this article, I narrate my story of engaging with EE, politics and the relationship between the two. I refer to my story as an autocartophilosography because it has been significantly influenced by my engagement with philosophy and by my movement in space and over time. My most recent engagement has been with scholars’ theorising in the posthuman condition, and I suggest that this present condition requires a different politics, an affirmative politics. I generate seven propositions towards an affirmative politics for EE: making kin, transversal subjectivity, new alliances, dis/identification, embracing slowness, ethical and intellectual stamina; experimental energy.

Sensibility in the world of science and gendered society: the ethics and aesthetics of skin in The Skin I Live In

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the aesthetical and ethical representations of skin in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011). By emphasising the interconnectedness of the skin as an expressive interface mediating between the inner self and the material world, this paper examines how the image of skin extends beyond the visual aesthetics to engage viewers in a haptic sense. I argue that the haptic experience, when actively engaged, can transcend bodily suffering from unjust treatment, charging moving images with ethical consideration and envisioning alternative human bonds in a posthuman condition. By engaging with phenomenological concepts of flesh, intersubjectivity, and interobjectivity, this paper criticises the mistreatment of beings in the scientific field and the objectification of human bodies to sustain a gendered and patriarchal structure. Instead of solely attributing abusive and controlling masculinity and the oppression of women to the patriarchy, it is essential to go beyond traditional categories of male/female and masculinity/femininity and examine the modern systems that excessively alienate human beings. The paper proposes that an individual’s existence precedes social and political identification and advocates for a dynamic way to recognise and describe the process of becoming-body as it continuously undergoes qualitative changes through lived experiences.

Human Cloning in the Posthuman Era: Critiquing Ethical Dilemmas in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go displays a dystopian society where the human clones exist solely as ‘carers’ and ‘organ donors’ to prolong the lives of their human counterparts. This advances profound ethical questions about human worth and the ethical implications of biotechnology. This paper explores the clones' defiance and resistance to identity within this ethically oppressive power structure in the posthuman condition. When the clones grapple with the otherness imposed upon them, they connect to the broader societal dynamics of control and freedom. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti's theoretical insights of subjectivity and posthuman ethics, and Homi K. Bhabha's hybridity, the paper analyzes the clones' acts of defiance through memory, subjectivity, artistic expression, and self-awareness. The clones' identities and their interaction within the human power structure reflect the ethical implications of social control that function as tools for the clones to navigate their imposed limitations. The analysis reveals that although the artistic creations of clones ranging from painting to literature to games develop the human-laden values in the clones, the artistic expressions like arts, literature, and paintings also awaken them to subvert and challenge the values imposed on their bodies and lives. The clones' rebellion through symbolic means in a posthuman context provides valuable insights into posthuman studies on scholarship and academic disciplines.

The posthuman condition: Insights for decolonising curriculum in childhood education

Background: Recent attempts to rekindle the decolonisation of education project in South Africa, is a reaction to perceptions that there are fundamental frailties in the existing curriculum. Childhood education is yet to take up the challenge in any substantive way.Aim: To explore the insights critical posthumanism might offer in attempting to address a comprehensive decolonial effort in early childhood education transformational initiatives.Setting: This essay is framed within the context of curriculum decolonisation and transformation work in early childhood education.Methods: This experimental think-piece, attempts to theorise early childhood education alongside critical posthumanism.Results: Staying true to posthuman ways of thinking, doing and becoming, we deliberately avoided presenting any determinist, neatly packaged ‘results’, in order to further open up the debate to include alternative ways of thinking and doing curriculum work in early childhood ecologies.Conclusions: Early childhood transformation initiatives, has to recognise the fundamental embeddedness of the existing school subjects in Western-Eurocentric humanist tradition. The effects of this canonical orientation are, that the tenets of Western-Eurocentrism remain unchallenged, that a racialised colonial education prevails in contemporary times, and that the centering of the adult human at the expense of the more-than-human, including child, is sustained. The nature-culture and child or adult dualisms prevail and, a consolidation of a deficit, sub-human construction of children, as immature, fragile and innocent. Critical Posthumanism suggests thinking anew.Contribution: An interrogation of the assumptions on which contemporary childhood education is based, and consideration for the advancement of posthumanist ways of thinking, doing, and becoming.

A Critical Study of Blade Runner from A Posthumanism Perspective

Posthumanism is the theory concerned with how the developments in technology and science has challenged our conception of what it means to be human. It looks for representations of a posthuman condition within literature, mostly in science fiction texts. The theory mapping the development of humanism into the present day and its relationship with technology and devoting in looking at the distinction between humans and animals and/or humans and machines. As one of the most notable artworks in the film industry, the Blade Runner is always regarded as a representative research object of posthumanism theory. This paper would mainly focus on the analysis of Blade Runner, to see how posthumanism is performed and distillated in this classical film.

Decentering Human/ Becoming Posthuman: Monstrous Subjectivity in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)

Since its appearance in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), the monster figure was deemed the human’s other that poses a threat to humanity. In 2013, in his award-winning novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi, the Iraqi acclaimed writer, appropriated Shelly’s monster in the hybrid posthuman figure of Whatsitsname that shares with Shelly’s Frankenstein the same anxieties but within the context of Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. With the advent of the twenty first century, and emergence of new social realities due to the capitalist system, the changes associated with technology, war on terrorism and globalization led to the rise of the posthuman condition in which human and other-than-human entities are envisioned in a new light. What characterizes the posthuman condition is the reassessment of the dualistic thinking that governed the human thought and the rise of hybrids as posthuman subjects. In this respect, many traditional boundaries between nature/culture, human/other, and humanity/monstrosity were transgressed. This paper aims at exploring manifestations of posthuman subjectivity in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi in the light of critical posthumanism. It claims that the monstrous figure in the novel is a posthuman subject that presents an alternative vision, not a threatening entity. It will focus on decentering human identity as highlighted in Michel Foucault’s criticism of biopolitics, and exploring posthuman subjectivity as pursued by Rosi Braidotti and Ellen L. Graham. Keywords: Posthumanism, Monster, Subjectivity, Decentering, Frankenstein

Kondisi Poshuman di Mongrel (2021) Karya Sabda Armandio

This article aims to examine the relations of posthuman subjects formed through language in Mongrel’s fiction. Relations of posthuman subjects will always be surrounded by the current situation being faced, so it is no longer necessary to differentiate human and nonhuman hierarchically. Mongrel is a fictional story published serially in the mass media KumparanPlus in 2021. This article uses a discursive approach to gain knowledge about the relationship of posthuman subjects by connecting meaning, representation, and context. This article shows that the posthuman conditions that surround characters in Mongrel include the economic crisis, advanced capitalism, and the creation of paguyuban (community), technology and artificial intelligence, and the work of shamans and the existence of Dimensi Kalia. In some ways, the posthuman condition in Mongrel exhibits the attempt to surpass the dichotomies especially between human/animal/plant/technology. The posthuman condition in Mongrel leads to a double-edged sword, namely the paguyuban going hand in hand with advanced capitalism. Mr. Polo, as the metaphor of advanced capitalism, no longer utilizes the dichotomy of human/nonhuman and modern science/shaman to develop his business. This is also the case for the paguyuban. However, what sets Mr. Polo apart is his attempt to control nonhuman entities in order to further his self-interested agenda.

Wandering abroad: British law, Irish independence, and Beckett’s vagrants

If there is something approximating a Beckettian social type it is doubtless the vagrant or tramp, those ostensibly idle and disorderly individuals. But too often (and for far too long) these figures have been understood only in terms of a metaphysical or metaphorized “homelessness”, as exemplars of existential despair, psychoanalytic banishment, modernist alienation or even a precondition of the posthuman condition articulated in his later work. This essay instead locates these figures in relation to the legal legacy of colonialism in post-independence Ireland, precisely to demonstrate how Beckett’s writing relates to this discourse. Most relevant in this regard is Section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act passed by the Westminster Parliament – and still in force during the Irish Free State era – which indicates that the following classes of people shall be deemed “rogues and vagabonds”: “every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or wagon, not having any visible means of subsistence and not giving a good account of himself or herself”. In all its particulars, the definition closely applies to the many vagrants found in Beckett’s fiction and drama, especially the narrators of his four nouvelles, whose very existence seems to be at odds with the legal ideology of the post-independence state. Acknowledging this legal legacy is key to recognizing the political significance of contradiction, aporia, and misunderstanding in Beckett’s writing, which disrupts the authority of such discourses (taken to be non-contradictory, systematic, and self-evident) not just to assert and maintain legal identities, but to separate some individuals from the ranks of legitimate subjects of the bourgeois nation-state.

Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene

Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Samuel Beckett’s corpus centres on the characterization, examination and imaginative exploration of the human mind, encompassing the realms of consciousness, cognition and perception. In his teleplays, this focus is distinctively achieved through the performances of different media, which this article refers to as ‘intermedial performativity’. This term not only designates the semiotic contents of performance in intermedial forms, but also highlights the cooperative performances of the material media themselves, along with their uncharted possibilities and effects. This article delves into the ways in which intermedial performativity in Beckett’s teleplays realizes several unique configurations of the human mind, such as its split state and its transfiguration to a posthuman condition. This exploration not only sheds light on Beckett’s artistic vision and cosmic ontology, but also brings attention to the reverberations and implications of intermediality for humanity and its potential transformations.

A Postmodern (Singularity) Future with a Post-Human Godless Algorithm: Trans-Humanism, Artificial Intelligence, and Dataism

The objective of this manuscript is to reveal that the challenge in understanding the ethical consequences of a post-human condition characterizing trans-humanist ontology is linked to postmodern epistemology lacking any metaphysical and theological essence. The introductory section provides an overview of trans-humanist thought and the concerns deliberated against it at the recent conference titled A.I Ethics: An Abrahamic Commitment to the Rome Call, charting a path ensuring that technological innovations do not undermine the ethical, spiritual, and moral values animating the telos of the human being. The second section traces the philosophical genealogy of trans-humanism from the Age of Reason (i.e., modern epistemology) to our current Age of Feeling (i.e., postmodern epistemology). This section also stresses that the ontology accenting both periods—the death of God and the death of human—is latent in trans-humanist ideology, which seeks to extinguish the quest of knowing God with an ateleological state that crucifies the human in pursuit of worshipping technology. The third section scrutinizes the conceptual framework of trans-humanism by deconstructing concepts structuring its worldview such as Singularity, Artificial Super Intelligence, and the pseudo-religion known as Dataism. Additionally, this section examines how trans-humanist proponents—while adhering to postmodern philosophy—alter the definitions of sacred concepts that exclusively animate a human state of being, such as consciousness, intelligence, and awareness, by anthropomorphizing AI. The final section recalls the wisdom of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Alchemy of Happiness, composed—respectively—by Aristotle and Al-Ghazali. It highlights the immoral significances of choosing to ignore the implications of Dataism and its techno-scientific objectives, which obscure the use of techne in a virtuous manner attaining eudaimonia and the essence of humanness seeking a path—using God-given sensoria—knowledge of Divine Beauty.

ALAN AYCKBOURN’ÜN TRANSHÜMANİZMİ VE POSTHUMAN DURUMUNU KEŞFİ: HENCEFORWARD (ŞİMDİDEN SONRA)

One of the finest and most prolific writers and directors in England, Alan
 Ayckbourn walks the line between humor and despair in his plays while emphasizing
 people from the middle class and addressing issues with the family unit and marital
 difficulties that may or may not arise in society. The purpose of this research is to provide
 an explanation of the ‘post-human condition’ by focusing on transhumanist theory and the
 post-human scenario in the play Henceforward (1987), which was dramatized by
 Ayckbourn with a gloomy outlook on the future. In the context of transhumanism, which
 represents the transition from humanism to post-humanism, in Ayckbourn's Henceforward,
 Jerome is addicted to technology but lost his productivity and falls into a void due to his
 wife's abandonment having an isolated life in a shelter equipped with technological tools,
 but hopelessly tries to produce something but he fails. In addition to the character of
 Jerome, who is trying to regain his family in desperation by trying to create, a woman
 Android (NAN 300F), which is the creation of modern man and is programmed to take care
 of a baby, takes part in the main action of the study. The second part of this research
 examines the post-human nature of the characters as well as their behavior patterns,
 focusing on how the man-made and human-like robots interact and communicate with
 actual humans. Considering the plot of the play, the study examines whether the humanmachine
 conflict is possible in the foreseeable mechanical future, whether real humans or
 man-made androids with artificial intelligence will dominate each other in the near future,
 and whether human-designed and human-like machines are acceptable for the future of
 humanity.

Post-human Writing of Klara and the Sun Using Corpus-based Approach

As a novel which explores the relationship between human and robots, the novel Klara and the Sun has won a lot of attention from both readers and researchers, as it is different from normal writing of science fictions. Through many researches, however, a great amount of results are derived by using qualitative research method. Therefore, to draw a conclusion with authentic language data, this paper aims to use corpus-based method to compare the novel with other fictions and study the writing style and standpoint based on post-human condition combining quantitative study with qualitative study.

Natality and the Post-human Condition

Critical posthumanists have observed that technoscientific developments are in the process of rewriting human ontology, fundamentally changing what it means to be human. While they argue that the posthuman breaks with the Cartesian liberal subject and embraces a more decentered ontology, their analyses remain firmly situated in a Cartesian world that marginalizes if not completely ignores questions about natality. This essay examines two filmic texts, Blade Runner 2049 and the AMC television show Humans, that are situated firmly in a posthuman environment in which technoscience is seemingly rewriting the conditions of being human and blurring the boundary between human and machine, but which focus on natality and childhood and emphasize themes of parenting and growth and development. In doing so, they disclose shortcomings in critical posthumanism that can only be addressed when we give more serious attention to how natality shapes being human.

Posthuman Body and Visuality: Local and Virtual Interface in New Media Art

The term “posthuman” is used to characterise ways of existence brought about by hypothetical improvements to human nature brought about by technical and applied scientific advancements. It also denotes the decentering of human uniqueness and the triumph of humanistic ideas. The posthuman condition is an opportunity to restore the balance between humans and nonhumans, advance horizontal ontologies, expand the boundaries of ethics, and extend rational mastery, surmounting humanity’s biological limitations. Hypervisuality of the images situates the body as an instrument and a site for the local, global and virtual interplays of online global audiences and offline located/situated producers and consumers. This paper will study the concept of the posthuman body and visuality in the context of current art practices. It will analyse the shift new media brings in the concept of body from painting, and sculpture to the new media artworks.

Citizenship matters: Young citizen becoming in the posthuman present

This article contributes new insights to research on citizenship and young citizen subject formation in the context of the posthuman condition. Bringing a feminist materialist sensibility to bear, we explore citizenship as materially mobilised and produced. Considering the constitutive role that embodied and affective phenomena play in this production, we attend particularly to acts of citizenship. We show by way of vignettes how human subjects and material and natural objects ‘intra-act’ to produce civic capacities and bring citizen subjectivity into effect. The forces by which these capacities are produced come into view inviting challenge to normative, human-centred framings of (youth) citizenship. The forces in question are various—affective, corporeal, temporal, spatial, spectral—but it is affect that provides the main impetus to action. Supplementing the more conventional frame of citizenship as belonging, we propose a framework of citizen becoming as a generative way to think and do citizenship in the posthuman present. The argument is made that analytic frames that attune to citizenship as an affective movement of becoming best address current conditions for producing citizen subjects and usefully extend individualised models of citizenship that have long influenced education.

“The City Eats and Sleeps Noise”: Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and the Contours of Entangled Corporeality

ABSTRACT This essay aims to explore Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) in order to examine how the corporeal schema of a feeling human is radically reconfigured in the contemporary capitalist culture that thrives on augmenting the lived body’s somatic and cognitive experientiality. By accommodating a narrative frame where the location of the body as an organically sealed discrete biological category is problematized, the novel partakes in a landscape of endless entanglements. How such an ontological convergence unsettles the epistemic realms of reasoning is what this reading attempts to investigate. DeLillo’s novel dramatizes a reconceptualization of human subjectivity by unpacking a conflation of biogenetic matter and algorithmic flow of data within a postmodern metropolis. To situate this problematic, the reading affirms “intra-active” transactions between the biomedically theorized body and extra-human ontologies. In illustrating how the notional frames of epistemological certitude seem increasingly untenable in the cultures of neoliberal technocracy, the novel points toward a posthuman condition and wagers what appears to be a transhumanist ethos at the end. The essay interrogates this trajectory by looking at templates of corporeal entanglement in the text.

Morphological Fantasies: Posthuman Embodiment in Tian Xiaolei’s Video Art

This article explores the issue of posthuman embodiment envisioned in contemporary Chinese artist Tian Xiaolei’s (田晓磊) two representative videos: The Creation (Chuangzao “创造,” 2015) and Greatness (Weida “伟大,” 2017). Perceived and envisaged from an erotic perspective, The Creation reveals humans’ unrestrainable lust and desires for fusing with technology, while Greatness, by taking a different trajectory of remaking a Buddhist mandala, provides us with a set of religious symbolism and reconstructs the spiritual order of a posthuman future, thereby invoking an intriguing affinity between posthumanism and Buddhism with respect to a renewed conceptualization of the human. It argues that both works invite us to experience and ponder on, aesthetically and conceptually, the kaleidoscopic morphology of human corporeality in the posthuman condition.

Re/thinking Curriculum Inquiry in the Posthuman Condition: A Critical Posthumanist Stance

In the reconceptualisation era of curriculum studies, scholars drew on a range of theories such as existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism, and especially critical theory. They used critical theory as a lens to examine the influence of social and political forces on curriculum, in particular the role of dominant ideologies on schooling and higher education in capitalist societies. In this article we explore some of the limitations this has, especially with regard to the current posthuman condition, without repudiating all the benefits that it has offered. Then we re/think curriculum studies in the posthuman condition, drawing on insights from a particular strand of posthumanism, critical posthumanism. We experiment with the real, as well as with what a reconceptualised subject (one that is ecological) might mean for curriculum inquiry in South Africa. In our exploration, we re/think the curriculum concepts: curriculum-as-lived, curriculum as complicated conversation, and currere.