Posthumanist Discourse Research Articles

The Nature of Fear: Edgar Allan Poe and Posthuman Ecology

Taylor’s essay complicates Simon Estok’s analysis of ecophobia by illustrating, first, that fear of the natural world need not lead to its domination, and second, that ecophilia—ecophobia’s presumptive opposite—represents not a solution to this problem but an extension of the same logic under another name. Extended readings of Henry David Thoreau (“Walking”), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Island of the Fay,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una”) and recent posthumanist discourse illuminate these points. Unlike his transcendentalist contemporaries and many current posthumanists, Poe represents the fusion of subjects and environments as a cataclysmic collapse, making the nonhuman environment the field against which discrete selves disappear as material bodies and as metaphysical entities. Poe’s texts thus foreclose both the idea that human selves are inherently distinct from or superior to their nonhuman environments and the seemingly antithetical (but actually coextensive) notion that we can self-constructively lose ourselves to the world. For Poe, the world can be made neither other nor mirror; if our ontological separation from the universe is a fantasy, then so too is our enabling kinship with it. What remains is an irresolvable fear regarding the uncertain borders between persons and environments. The essay concludes with a consideration of the implications of such a fear for ecocriticism.

Deconstructing Affect: Posthumanism and Mark Hansen’s Media Theory

In the context of the highly contested discourse of posthumanism, this essay examines Mark Hansen’s attempt to give a robust account of technology in its extra-linguistic dimension by evincing an ‘‘‘originary’’ coupling of the human and the technical’ that grounds experience as such (Hansen, 2006a: 9). Specifically, I argue that Hansen’s perspective is haunted by the representational logic that it moves against. In this, I do not repudiate Hansen’s argument as such, but rather reject one of its central underlying implications: that the extra-discursive materiality of technology might be accessed, linguistically, without attaching a meaning to it that is foreign to this materiality. To this end, the essay begins with an examination of technesis as it is initially developed by Hansen, demonstrating the necessity from which it sprang, the contribution that Hansen’s reading makes, and its ultimate limitations. From here, the essay articulates Hansen’s argument for an affective topology of the senses, corroborating the increased importance of digital technologies in this perspective through a brief comparison of Roberto Lazzarini’s ‘skulls’ (as read by Hansen) and my own piece ‘Sound’. Finally, this comparison pivots the essay towards a critical analysis of Hansen’s account of primary tactility that demonstrates its dependence on the (representational) logic of language. In closing, then, I argue that what is accomplished by Hansen’s putting-into-discourse of technesis is, paradoxically, a re-staging of the constitutive ambivalence of deconstruction that reinvigorates the posthumanist elements of that discourse.

Psychoanalysis at the Time of the Posthuman: Insisting on the Outside-Sense

This article ‘diagnoses’ the discourse of posthumanism as a contemporary symptom, and thus as a mode of the social link that attempts to deal with the real of the human condition as, precisely, non-natural. In order to then interpret this posthuman symptom, the article outlines the psychoanalytic notion of interpretation itself, not as the laying bare of a latent meaning, but as the inducement of truth-effects which are distinct from scientific understandings of truth premised upon identity and non-contradiction. Lacan's Seminar XVII is then utilized both as an example of the psychoanalytic interpretation of contemporary life, and as a resource for thinking through the reification of science and technological ‘lathouses’ that underpins the posthuman era. The article concludes with a strong defence of the capacity of psychoanalysis to hold open a space for the ‘outside-sense’, or what evades capture by the (scientific) signifier. It is argued that this ‘outside-sense’ is what truly constitutes the human insofar as humans are speaking beings.

Introduction: Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of the Posthuman

When, over thirty years ago, Ihab Hassan first coined the term ‘posthumanism’, he used it to describe an era in which ‘the human form — including human desire and all its external representations — may be changing radically, and thus must be revisioned.’ In the wake of the techno-scientific revolution, Hassan suggested, humanism was transforming itself into ‘something we must helplessly call “posthumanism” ’.1 ‘Posthumanism’ was therefore initially proposed as a — perhaps imperfect — discursive solution to a crisis pertaining to embodiment, desire and representation, to which humanism’s vocabulary and ways of knowing seemed increasingly inadequate. Since then, the term and its cognates have found a degree of common currency within critical theory and cultural studies. And yet the ‘helplessness’ that accompanied its birth still seems intimately relevant, suggestive of a certain ongoing unease about the adequacy of the term to what it names. This is partly because the discourse of posthumanism is not always as posthumanist as it claims, even — or rather especially — in its most celebratory forms. As the work of N. Katherine Hayles, Eugene Thacker, Neil Badmington and others has shown, there is more than a residual humanism to the posthuman wherever techno-scientific developments are taken to be both cause and effect of a profoundly individualistic understanding of the human subject as autonomous agent.

Is there a Doctor in the House? Psychoanalysis and the Discourse of the Posthuman

This article uses a Lacanian framework both to map types of posthuman discourse that shape the debates around science, technology and the fate of the human, and to advocate a more psychoanalytic framing of these debates. It identifies three dominant posthumanisms: ‘doomsday’, ‘celebratory’ and ‘critical’. The first adopts an apocalyptic tone in the defence of a supposedly natural human essence; the second unthinkingly embraces the promise of new technologies for augmenting human potential; the third draws on the critique of humanism to balance the first two tendencies. The article then proposes a ‘fractal’ reading of both Freud and Lacan which updates psychoanalysis for the online world today. Finally, the article aligns each of the types of posthumanism with one of Lacan's ‘four discourses’: ‘doomsday’ posthumanism with the discourse of the hysteric, ‘celebratory’ posthumanism with that of the master, and ‘critical’ posthumanism with that of the analyst, thereby putting psychoanalysis at the centre of the posthuman rather than its margins.

The paradox of transcendent machines in the demystification of the Boxley Christ

The discourse of posthumanism considers the body a site of negotiation between the material and the transcendent, and medievalists have noted the resemblance between this posthuman body-as-nexus and the medieval notion of the body of Christ as a material pathway to transcendence. The physical incarnation of Christ, in elevating the standing of humanity through a synecdochic association between the embodied divine and the body of the faithful, provided a material means to salvation. But whereas posthumanism imagines a body readied for a literal transcendence through machinic interventions, the late medieval relationship to the divine body was largely affective. These discourses therefore mostly run parallel, but may be bridged through an interesting if little-known incident in the representational history of the embodied divine, in the story of the Boxley Christ.

Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist Discourse

Becoming Flesh of My Flesh:Feminist and Disability Theologies on the Edge of Posthumanist Discourse Sharon V. Betcher (bio) "Oh, you're one of those," the interviewing nurse summarily concluded, as I indicated that, no, in fact, I did not wear or own a prosthesis to "remediate" my left leg amputation. To be sure, my unprostheticized—or should I say, "unproselytized"?—body often receives social comment: really, Why would I, given the supposedly remediating wonders of technology, assume to go public so "unrehabilitated"? Given cultural encouragement for bodily health, but given that I am a more active person without what is, in my case, the encumbrance of a prosthesis, I suppose I am offending a social norm. More specifically, I suspect that the divergence in cultural aspirations social commentaries hold about my disability and my own lived capaciousness sit somewhere between body, to which we have all been encouraged to aspire given the politics of health, and the unrehabilitated flesh, which opens off the terrain of my amputation. Body: feminists recuperated the term and its material terrain from the underside of an earlier cultural, dualistic management strategy that values the masculine spirit or mind more than the feminine body or physicality. Feminist theology contrarily argued appreciatively for human embodiment with and through an immanence of spirit. Yet feminism's recuperation of the undervalued body has not necessarily impeded either disability abjection or the ways in which cultural ideologies today capitalize upon the body. Given the cultural command performances expected of the body's ability, health, beauty, and productivity, I wonder if—just as Nature has proven to be "a transcendental term in a material mask"1—body, even loosed from any conscious religious scaling, might likewise hide its transcendental demeanor in a corporeal overcoat? [End Page 107] Whereas body can invite the hallucinatory delusion of wholeness, and thus the temptation to believe in agential mastery and control, flesh, I want to propose, admits our exposure, our vulnerability one to another, if also to bios. Flesh, the dynamic and fluid physics of embodiment, cannot as easily as the body submit to transcendentalist metaphysics, to the logic of the one. Flesh suggests that the capaciousness of a life resembles a teacup crackled with ten thousand veins. Spirit, lived in relation to flesh, might then not be so interested in wholeness as in passion.2 This essay celebrates the work of feminist and disability theologian Nancy Eiesland, who died in March 2009, and revisits the roundtable conversation between feminism and disability in which she first participated in 1994.3 Here, I think yet again from the ecotone of philosophical difference between body and flesh. Feminist and disability theologies might, I suggest, find in the flesh a shared religious agenda. From a disability perspective, thinking from the flesh challenges the naturalization or normalization of the body and thereby the sociocultural and economic value of ability. Flesh might comparably remind feminism that, whereas body has already been submitted to a cultural regime of wholeness—by way of hallucinatory imagistic totalization, as even Jacques Lacan insisted, corporeality differs with itself daily. Flesh, in other words, makes alterity central and might also, therefore, allow us to talk about that which metaphysics has often hidden from the sociocultural agenda, that which we know to be true of lives—pain, difficulty, disease, transience, aging, error, and corporeal limit, if even also the epiphanies and critical insights that come with illness, as Virginia Woolf insists.4 On Thinking Flesh without Recourse to "the Body" In the 1994 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion roundtable conversation, feminist disability theologians lamented the ways in which feminism, unconscious of its own valorization of ability, had joined itself to liberal humanist discourse: laying claim to the "fitness" of women's humanity, feminism—attempting to shrug off the note of "degeneracy" that "woman" had carried in philosophical discourse since Aristotle's time—unwittingly thereby also accepted [End Page 108] "patriarchal" ways of judging personhood.5 That feminism could align itself with body, while culturally concurring with the measure of the deficient flesh of disabled persons, suggested to women with disabilities that body itself had already and/or could easily be capitalized upon within the cult...

Themes of genetic engineering and the homunculus in Patricia Piccinini's sculptural installation, We are Family

In this article Patricia Piccinini's We are Family of 2003 is considered in terms of the concept of the genetic homunculus, which can be understood as the product of artifice. The genetically engineered human being is investigated within the context of alchemic and post-human discourse, with specific reference to the ideas of Donna Haraway and Jean Baudrillard. It is maintained that, although it is as yet impossible to accurately predict what the outcomes of such forays into the realms of the natural or the divine may be, post-human futures are already imagined and simulated in the milieu of artistic licence.

Scenarios of Poiesis: Italian New Media (1994–2004)

This essay attempts to read a number of interventions in Italian new media over the last decade as both a response to and an implicit critique of posthumanism. After a brief discussion of the principal terms in question—new media, interaction, and posthumanism—and a survey of the most important contributors to the discourse of posthumanism in Italy, the essay maps the principal features of Italian media as embodied by the works of three contemporary new media artists. These characteristics include the privileging of a prosthetic model for understanding interaction and more generally the staging of interaction as moments ofpoiesis. They also include more recently the cancellation of the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and cultural images. The essay insists that by foregrounding the primacy of Italian cultural patterns for determining how meaning is generated in new media, Italian new media artists implicitly critique a reifying tendency among posthuman observers in Italy. The essay concludes with a broad assessment of the importance of poiesis for an Italian technological imaginary.

Wireless Affections: Embodiment and Emotions in New Media/Theory and Art

A central strategy in selling information technology has involved the appropriation of earlier historical notions of the ether: as an immersive environment, communicative medium and electronic presence. Just as telephony was connected to the ‘wireless ether’, virtual reality and cyberspace have been connected to the idea of a virtual, electronic sphere, represented as an informatic space, through which a mode of (digital) being is conducted. However, as this paper will argue, while the data trails generated through ‘dataveillance’ technologies, or the information collected by wearable computers, may indeed situate the individual within a digitally rendered ‘ether’, these technologies are based on the generation of knowledge more than the creation of a space, installing an epistemological, rather than an ontological framework for understanding telepresent agency. With reference to recent works by Canadian artist Catherine Richards, this paper will discuss both research into new ‘reality mining’ and ‘affective computing’ technologies and the discourse of posthumanism, as it elaborates the transformation from autonomous liberal subject to post-human hybrid currently underway, and the developing relationships between humans and embodied, emotionally intelligent machines.

Narrative Thinking and Experiential Knowledge: The Example of Ronald Sukenick

Post-humanist discourses, by undermining the disinterested subject as the basis for conceptual knowledge, have brought narrative to the forefront of political thinking. Indicative of the revaluing of narrative thinking is the increasing prominence of the work of Hannah Arendt, for whom storytelling is the primary task of political theory and the source of political concepts.1 For Arendt, though, rather traditional notions of narrative still prevail. As Robert C. Pirro shows in his Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, the structure of Greek tragedy informs Arendt's narrative strategies and perhaps her political thinking as a whole in fundamental ways. However, Eric B. Gorham, in The Theater of Politics: Hannah Arendt, Political Science and Higher Education, suggests that Arendt's notion of political freedom might be at least as well served through the appropriation of other, more innovative modes of storytelling. Noting that Arendt's assumption of the validity of traditionally plotted narratives relies upon her claim that the creation of the work of art involves the concealment of

Mapping Posthumanism: An Exchange

The serried ranks of post-prefixed isms marched their way through human geographyduring the 1990s. To open the door to yet another may seem the habitual act of ahopelessly trendy discipline, one derivatively preoccupied with what’s de rigeur in thesocial sciences and humanities. Yet there might be something both apposite andproductive about staging a confrontation between a subject whose very title announcesits determined commitment to ontological purity and a discourse that questions thiskind of delusive hygiene. In one sense, of course, that confrontation has been ongoingfor several years now. Since the early 1990s many ‘human geographers’ have steadfastlyquestioned the adequacy of the appellation used to describe themselves, theirresearch, and their discipline. Drawing upon the thinking of Deleuze, Guattari, andLatour, among many others, they have revealed what Sarah Whatmore, in hercommentary below, calls ‘‘more than human geographies’’. The gravitational forceof their work has not yet exerted a tidal pull on human geography as a whole. But ithas certainly raised some profound questions about the routinised ontological beliefsthat underpin research in the discipline. The full explanatory and normative con-sequences of this questioning will only become apparent in the years ahead, ashuman geography’s ‘structure of feeling’ altersoor does notoin response to itsinsistent demands.What, then, of the discourse of posthumanism? It is hardly new, nor is it unified(Braun, 2004). Like so many of the intellectual currents that have animated humangeography in recent years, it originated outside the discipline, gathering momentumover the last decade. By the time Katherine Hayles published her well-known bookHow We Became Posthumanin 1999 there was already a sizeable literature explainingwhy ‘the human’ must be compulsively draped in scare-quotes.What’s more, the nownot so new neologism ‘posthumanism’ has been fleshed out in a variety of ways that,while generically resonant, are substantively irreducible. Some of these elucidationsare, inevitably, demotic. Francis Fukuyama’s (2002) Our Posthuman Future is partofapredictable genre ofwriting inwhichthe incipient eclipse of the‘human’is lamentedand the ‘post’ taken, in eschatological mode, as a decisive temporal break. Othertheorisations of the posthuman are, fortunately, more sophisticated and thoughtful.