Posthuman Condition Research Articles

Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema

Aquatic Imagination or Unweaving the Rainbow: Introduction to Hydro-Stories about American Art

As early as the 1940s, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard was convinced that the eye itself is weary of solids. It was obvious to some American artists almost at the same time, because aquatic imagination has accompanied American art at least since the discovery of the fluidity of paint and the oceanic boundlessness of Pollock’s paintings. However, only Robert Smithson has opened the water discourse in contemporary art, which is not about the representation of water but about the specific relation between the subject and its background. Moreover, a liquid mind opens up to the unplanned. This also happens in Ellen Gallagher’s art, because her counter-memories from the future evoke sea creatures, their mutations and their post-human condition.

The Flight of the Junky: Existential Posthumanism and Immanent Life in Early Burroughs

William Burroughs early book Junky is generally separated from his later experimental fiction.  Stylistically it accords much more to realism than the postmodern aleatory method he later innovated.  However, Burroughs’ preoccupation with resisting all forms of subjectification, his disenchantment with bourgeois life and his simultaneous literal and tropic use of addiction as a form of flight from powers of normalization and conformity are strongly present in this early work.  This paper explores Junky on three fronts.  First, it shows the novel as an elaboration of a posthumanist existentialism by emphasizing the materiality of the body through Burroughs’ explanation of the physiological mechanisms of addiction.  Through this existentialist posthumanism, the novel critically responds to Sartrian existentialism, which was so fashionable at the time of Burroughs’ writing, and repudiates the Jeffersonian idealization of the transcendental subject and its middle class figurations.  The emphasis on the material body simultaneously challenges post-structuralist renderings of Burroughsian readings.  This leads to a conception of strategies of flight from all forms of conformity by utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs and immanent Life.  Junk is a vehicle of flight and self-affirmation, a means of highly individualized, libertarian modes of subjective deterritorialization.  Addiction and habitual use are not mere uncontrolled thirsts, but forms of actualizing a wholly detached social and independent individual.  But the danger of junk lies in its reterritorializing of the body through new assemblages of need and dependence, leading the protagonist to ultimately seek a different mode of escape.  Junk illuminates our posthuman existential condition and leads Burroughs to seek new experimental forms of aesthetic expression.

Cybernetic Performance Ecosystems: The Im-Medea Cycle

Abstract This article discusses a series of experimental musical theater performances that took place between 2015 and 2017. This art-based research applies cybernetic and system theory principles at different levels (i.e. compositionally aesthetically dramaturgically) in the creative process to demonstrate how qualities of the posthuman condition can manifest in experimental music theater. The article presents a number of these experimental musical theater performances and introduces the term cybernetic performance ecosystem

Do we need a posthumanist sociology? Notes from the COVID-19 pandemic

This article asks whether we need a posthumanist sociology, arguing that such a perspective can export a good deal of useful methodological and theoretical insight into the sociological toolbox. A posthumanist sociology is not a flattened ontology, in which we find agency in all things living and non-living. A posthumanist sociology asks instead what we do with the fundamental question of becoming both more and less human, following a surge of interest in decentring human exceptionalism. Moreover, a posthumanist sociology returns to the question of what it means to be an intersectional being, to proliferate the involvement of entities at the intersections of histories and social structures. Thus, it is a perspective that emerges from within the conditions of related crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has highlighted the need to decentre human exceptionalism, raising a challenge for sociologists to return to the premises of what it means to be a social being. In some sense, management of the pandemic already assumes a decentring. This article builds an argument by first reviewing what broadly constitutes a ‘posthumanist’ sociological perspective, then moves on to a case study of the interrelated human and non-human actors that constituted the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. The case study usefully marks the intersection between human and non-human bodies as nodes in the interpretive production chain of this global event – one that acknowledges human extensions and connections to multispecies and ecological systems. Such interlinkages become foundational to interrogating what it means to become human in a posthuman world. The article ends on this posthuman question: under the posthuman condition, if we do not discern a difference between the human and other-than-human entities, how will this homogenization affect the human collective ability to enact and maintain cross-species and cross-entity protections?

Experimental persistence of change: collages of the palimpsestic temporalities of Freixo's Thermoelectric Power Station (Campanhã, Porto)

This paper presents an artistic work developed as part of the curatorial research Persistent Materialities, that experimented with different modes of documentation and mediation of loss of the post-industrial ruins of Freixo’s Thermoelectric Power Station (Campanhã, Porto). Whereas this building becomes less legible as an official object of industrial heritage and yield into continuous ruination and post-human condition, the collaged photographs presented here constructs a narration and interpretation of a retrospective history. The visual representations usually surrounding the imaginary of this landscape highlight two fixed modes of its existence: historical photographs are instrumentalized in a conservative discourse of preservation while architectural collages and technical drawings project a possible future where the building is no more. Distancing from these visual representations that conceive the landscape apart from its contingent and material reality, the retrospective collages stage the complexity of layers that assemble and reassemble this palimpsestic landscape. The recollection of segments, traces and fragments of a dynamic and mutable history quest for the endurance of the transformed and transforming aspect of this heterotopic space rather than the landscape itself.

The Future of the Literary Text in the Posthuman Condition

Posthuman” does not mean after human or beyond human. It is only a reconfiguration of what it means to be human in the rapidly changing technological scenario. Though the Enlightenment concept of the human as autonomous, as a rational creature who by the use of the faculty of reason, can give any shape to the self as s/he wishes, has been discredited by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Marx’s dialectical materialism, and Freud’s psychoanalysis, yet the biological and the technological world had not infringed upon the human, thereby reducing all claims of autonomy to sarcasm, as they do in the present era. The posthuman denotes, Cary Wolfe says, “the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being is not just its biological but also its technological world (Qtd Seldon etal 284). N. Katherine Haylesin How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodie in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) contends that normal human beings become post-human by using prosthetic body parts adopting computer technologies. Donna Haraway has indeed conceived of the humans as cyborgs who are part human and part machine, the machine being a prosthetic extension of the human. In this age of Information Technology and social media, a natural corollary of the posthuman condition is Digital Humanities: This essay explores how the post human condition and digital humanities impact the interactive composition and interpretation of the literary text.

Precarious duniyas in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: life, death and repair in ‘ruin-worlds’

ABSTRACT In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers us a productive triangulation between the Anthropocene, the non-human, and the postcolonial. The post-human condition in the contemporary phase of late capitalism, Braidotti contends, seeks a relationality, a connection with geo/bio/techno environments, that can lead ultimately to an ethical relationship with radical Others. She thus provides a framework to examine precarity and the possible solidarities through which a new ‘post-human' subjectivity and politics may emerge. In this article, I examine Arundhati Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), arguing that Roy's literary practices consummately carve a space for this post-human subject and its relational politics. The novel's structure, according to Roy, is meant to mirror that of a sprawling metropolis in the Global South, where planned spaces are constantly ambushed by encroachments by the ‘surplus and the unwanted’. The novel thus spatializes both precarity and the embryonic communities that emerge teetering on the porous borders between life and death, human and non-human, abandonment and community. I explore this spatialization through two sites that are central to The Ministry: the borderland of Kashmir and the urban crannies of Delhi - Old and New - where Roy locates affirmative alliances amid death and dereliction.

Art Communities at Risk: On Slovenia

Abstract “Art Communities At Risk: Slovenia” talks about how it is somehow easier to take a moral than a political position in times of crisis today—and how political manipulations often hide under seemingly moral attitudes. The author analyzes these issues against the background of growing authoritarian forces in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Slovenia, which saw the rise of covid-19 and Janez Janša as prime minister at the same time. Janša's government systematically ignores professional competencies in cultural institutions as well as in science, especially in relation to the epidemic.The voice of experts in the field of culture is ignored, and this is precisely because their specialized knowledge is not neutral. In a time when the space for free speech is shrinking, the need for a clear positioning becomes even more pressing. The author discusses the exhibition Bigger than Myself / Heroic Voices from Ex-Yugoslavia, which she curated for Rome's MAXXI museum last summer. The work shown there addressed Yugoslav emancipatory histories in relation to the issues of particular urgency today: global capitalism, the posthuman condition, and the return of authoritarianism, in particular. The Slovenian authorities took a hostile attitude towards the exhibition, not only because it presented critical voices from the region but also because artists from the former Yugoslavia were presented there, who, according to Slovenian right-wingers, are no longer worthy of participating in national cultural projects. Concerning the example of what is happening in Slovenia today, the essay asks why there has been such a strong turn to the right in Central and Eastern Europe, which is reviving “traditional” morality, patriarchy, and nationalism and engaging in political interference in cultural institutions. The current governments of Slovenia and other countries in the region want to get rid of the critical voices of left-wing experts in culture by favoring ostensibly neutral experts. It removes from important positions all those it considers to be leftists and replaces them with its own people in order to seemingly strike a balance between the various political options. This balancing act and new “neutrality,” however, are just one of the modern disguises of acute authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.

Letter from the Editors

Letter from the Editors

Reflections on the (Post-)Human Condition: Towards New Forms of Engagement with the World?

ABSTRACT The main purpose of this paper is to examine the validity of the contention that, over the past decades, we have been witnessing the rise of the ‘posthuman condition’. To this end, the analysis draws on the work of the contemporary philosopher Rosi Braidotti. The paper is divided into four parts. The first part centres on the concept of posthumanism, suggesting that it reflects a systematic attempt to challenge humanist assumptions underlying the construction of ‘the human’. The second part focuses on the concept of post-anthropocentrism, demonstrating that it articulates a desire to reject the twin ideas of ‘species supremacism’ and ‘human exceptionalism’, which it seeks to replace with ‘species egalitarianism’ and ‘monistic vitalism’. The third part is concerned with the concept of critical posthumanities, positing that its advocacy is based on the cross-fertilization of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. The fourth part offers an assessment of the ‘posthuman condition’ thesis, evaluating the extent to which it sheds new light on the ways in which our engagements with the world are shaped by the confluence of zoe-, geo-, and techno-based dimensions. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the key insights gained from the preceding inquiry.

Saviors, naïfs, or orphans? The posthuman condition in literary and cinematic perspectives on human cloning

Saviors, naïfs, or orphans? The posthuman condition in literary and cinematic perspectives on human cloning

Posthumanism in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance

This study is an attempt to shed new light on the potential representation of posthumanism, the posthuman condition in particular, in Hernan Diaz’s tour de force novel entitled “In the Distance.” The main focus of the study is highlighting the inextricable bond between humans and their surroundings in the most anthropocentric trend of posthumanism, and addressing our exploitative way of living and the outcomes of our ill-treatment toward the natural environment, as represented in one of the contemporary fictions, “In the Distance.” We are told that nature is an eternal Eden which was predestined for serving humankind, and will be balanced once it has fulfilled its duty. The novel, however, as evidenced by current environmental issues, makes an effort to warn us about the end of nature and in turn the failure of humanity. In the same context, this study seeks to demonstrate the “In the Distance” novel as one of the main works arguing for post-humanistic principles during and after the colonialization of America, accompanied by modern civilization and technological advancement in the late 19th and early 20th century.

BECOMING THE POSTHUMAN: THE DESTABILISATION OF THE SUBJECT IN THOMAS GLAVINIC’S NIGHT WORK

The paper provides an insight into the destabilisation of the subject and the emergence of the posthuman condition in the novel Night Work (Die Arbeit der Nacht, 2006) by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic. The first part briefly discusses previous analyses of the novel and the definitions of posthumanism as an umbrella term for a heterogeneous theory dedicated to the questions of what follows after the re-consideration of the humanist ideals and after decentring the human. The posthuman is interpreted as non-fixed, in the state of constant reconstruction as opposed to the humanist subject’s fixedness and integrity. The analysis examines the ‘uncanny’ setting of the novel and the power of survival in the face of death, which becomes the protagonist’s point of demise and divergence from consciousness and rationality. The urban environment devoid of all organic life replaces the Other applied traditionally to other humans. The Sleeper as the nightly doppelgänger and the filming of the environment further add to the transgression of the boundaries between material and immaterial, the living and the non-living, the real and the dreamlike/artificial, and ultimately determine the protagonist’s posthuman existence in the state of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’.

A Flattering Robopocalypse

A Flattering Robopocalypse

The Nature-culture continuum through moving images: from Pauline Julier’s Vegetable Pompeii to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historiae

It is not scientific ingenuity that discovers Nature, but on the contrary it is the changing Nature that makes scientific research possible. Nonetheless, we are disposing of Nature as worthless consumer objects that alone could be bringing us to some sacred significance. In order to analyze the contradictions and pitfalls of the posthuman condition in a novel way, i.e., by means of research methodology, it would be desirable to approach artistic images such as Julier’s through the recent scholarship of Durafour and his idea of “econology”: images as “beings-in-between”, making the link between human and non-human nature. I hope to demonstrate how we, from our human position, should face and reconnect to the inhuman part of images.

\u201cWe\u201d Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same

The COVID-19 pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. Paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in increased use of technology and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. It has thereby intensified humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place. This combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the Fourth Industrial revolution and the Sixth Extinction is the trademark of the posthuman condition. This essay explores this condition further, offering both critical and affirmative propositions for moving forward.

Posthuman Knowledge

Posthuman Knowledge

The Desire for New Humanisms

Abstract This paper articulates our desire for new humanisms in a contemporary cultural, economic and global context that has been described as posthuman. As researchers committed to modes of radical, critical, politicised and inclusive education, we are mindful of the significance of social theory and its relationship with articulations of social justice. Whilst sympathetic to the potentiality of posthuman thought we grapple with the imperative to embrace new humanisms that historicise and recognise global inequalities that concurrently exist in relation to a myriad of human categories including class, age, geopolitical location, gender, sexuality, race and disability. We focus in on the latter two categories and draw on ideas from postcolonial and critical disability studies. Our argument considers the problem of humanism (as a product of colonial Western imaginaries), the critical responses offered by posthuman thinking and then seeks to rearticulate forms of new humanism that are responsive to the posthuman condition and, crucially, the political interventions of Postcolonial and Critical Disability Scholars. We then outline six new humanist projects that could productively feed into the work of the Journal of Disability Studies in Education.

Posthuman/transhuman. An inquiry into Gabriele Salvatores’ Nirvana

ABSTRACT This essay traces the main differences between transhumanism and posthumanism and brings forward a more coherent definition of both theories by analysing the presence and interplay of transhuman and posthuman elements in Gabriele Salvatores’ 1997 film Nirvana. It argues that the artificial enhancement of the human body represented in the film – which is at the core of the transhuman condition – clashes with a cyberpunk world inhabited by characters who have displaced their superiority and exceptionalism. In other words, Salvatores depicts transhuman bodies in a posthuman condition, which can help us clarify the distinction between the two concepts.