Posthuman Turn Research Articles

Review of Rosi Braidotti’s, Posthuman Feminism

Critiques to the universal condition of the human have defied the boundaries of the body and what is meant to be considered as “normal” or “neutral”, prompting the-so-called posthuman turn. This book, written by Rosi Braidotti, elaborates on the thought that “mainstream posthuman scholarship has neglected femist theory” (p. 2), postulating feminist theory as not only a contributor, but also as a precursor of the posthuman turn. Braidotti aims at offering a more sophisticated analysis of the reframing of the human as an embodied and embedded “heterogeneous assemblage” (p. 6), that understands the prismic nature of feminism and builds on a multiple stanpoints emergent from the birth of ecofeminism, feminist studies of technoscience, LGBTQ+ theories, black feminisms, decolonial feminisms, and Indigenous feminisms and that recognises such complexity within the structural socio-economic dynamics and upcoming environmental challenges that shape the subject.

The Politics of Vulnerability and Care: An Interview with Estelle Ferrarese

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone discussions on vulnerability and precarity, she discusses her approach to normative expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of someone else's agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of contemporary issues, such as the Men's Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state.

Assemblage drawings as talking points: Deleuze, posthumans and climate-activist teachers

AbstractIn this paper, we employ Deleuzian philosophy to explore the complex challenges confronting teachers and education systems posed by the climate emergency and the implications of the resulting posthumanist turn. Self-identified climate-activist teachers working in schools in Aotearoa New Zealand were asked to draw Deleuzian assemblages of their educational realities and of themselves while contemplating the climate emergency. Their thought-provoking drawings were used as semiotic artefacts during unstructured Zoom interviews, leading to rich conversations. Through this process, the drawings channel affect within the research assemblage, entangling the reader actively into the research process. Insights gained from the participants problematise the perspectives of teachers in response to the climate emergency and lead us to conceptualise the potential of teachers as Deleuze’s nomadic change makers toward posthuman futures.

Transhumanism

The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’ it is frequently associated with technological enhancements that redefine human bodies and their limits. However, the core argument of transhumanism has to do with the human mind or consciousness. Transhumanists suggest that the human mind is reducible not only to its biochemical substrate but also to something more fundamental called information that characterises all existence in the universe. Since silicon-based computation is the basis of informatic processes today, transhumanists argue that machine intelligence can become conscious, eventually making fleshy humans obsolete. This process of technological advancement towards a super-intelligent computational civilisation is regarded as part of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe, a universal telos of existence of which humans are only one instance. Thus, human intelligence is set to yield to a nonhuman destiny. This entry traces the formation of transhumanism, reviews some of the anthropological studies, and concludes by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of post-humanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

Ambulant Methods and Rebel Becomings: Reanimating Language in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Language has been at the core of humanism, as a pre-eminently human capacity—the primary resource through which the world is mediated. What has/will become of language in the post-human turn? And what are the implications for post-qualitative method?

Размышляя с Сюзанной Лангер: сонарные связи с нечеловеческим

Аn aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer's theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her "new key" in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

The Symbols of the Divine: Approaching a Post-human Ontology of Digital Design via the Study of Discards

Thinking about design in post-human terms (Forlano, 2017) challenges designers to consider the effects of their designs on the more-than-human world, and in particular to consider non-human actors as users of our designs (Forlano 2017, Cruickshank & Trivedi 2017). However, the post-human turn also calls into question the modernist assumption that “good design” is predicated on notions of instrumental use, which underpins user-centred design, the dominant perspective in digital and interaction design. I propose an alternative, based on Willis’s ontological designing (Willis 2006) and Yuk Hui’s digital ontology (Hui 2016), which highlights the role of ongoing care and maintenance in the ontology of the digital, and argue that discards, and in particular digital discards, have a peculiar ontological status within this theory which offer promise for future study of digital design beyond instrumental use, and it’s entanglements with the more-than-human.

Toward an Ethics of Affinity: Posthumanism and the Question of the Animal in Two SF Narratives of Catastrophe

ABSTRACT This article reads two narratives of catastrophe, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” (1983) and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” (2015), in an attempt to explore how their concern with disaster destabilizes the binary human/nonhuman. Conjuring up visions of transformation and extinction before and after catastrophe, the stories interrogate humanist accounts of subjectivity through their focus on language and consciousness, prompting us to rethink the ontological divide between the human and the animal. This interrogation is carried out not only at the level of thematics, but also at a formal level, through the techniques of defamiliarization and extrapolation as well as through the choice of narrative voice and focalization. Thus, the two stories engage with some of the key issues addressed by the discourses originating from the fields of animal studies and critical posthumanism, which are currently gaining momentum in philosophy and literary criticism in the context of the Posthuman turn. As will be contended, the stories send a powerful message about the boundary between self and other, highlighting the necessity of a shift toward a posthumanist ethics of affinity.

Posthumanism and Mimesis: An Introduction

A different, immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis is currently informing the posthuman turn. Emerging from an ERC-funded project titled Homo Mimeticus, this opening essay introduces the mimetic turn in posthuman studies via three related steps: first, it differentiates aesthetic realism and the metaphysics of sameness it entails from a posthuman mimesis open to differential processes of becoming other; second it inscribes the mimetic turn in a brief genealogy of re-turns to mimesis in the history of western thought; and third, it turns to contemporary manifestations of hypermimesis—from Covid-19 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—to test the relevance of the mimetic turn. Together, these opening steps argue for the urgency to rethink mimesis in light of all too human, environmental, and posthuman challenges in the twenty-first century.

Ontology and Closeness in Human–Nature Relationships: Beyond Dualisms, Materialism and Posthumanism, by Neil H. Kessler

<i>Ontology and Closeness in Human–Nature Relationships: Beyond Dualisms, Materialism and Posthumanism</i>, by Neil H. Kessler

Infrastructural events? Flood disaster, narratives and framing under hazardous urbanisation

‘The river was moved too close to my house!’ declared a soon-to-be-displaced resident following flood disaster in Brazil. Infrastructural engineering decades earlier had changed the river's course and led to the flooding of his home, yet the state now blamed a rainstorm for causing the disaster. The narrative of a natural event provided the pretext for urban governance based around evictions and further rounds of infrastructural engineering, nominally aimed at pre-empting a dangerous climate future. The paper takes the circumstances of this case to trigger a conceptual discussion on governance of the disaster event, narratives, and the promise of infrastructures to mitigate alarming urban futures. I draw on urban political ecology, the sociology of the event, and recent social studies of infrastructure, while also questioning understandings of eventful nature in the post-human turn. Tackling urban disaster risk, it is argued, depends on a political reframing of disasters as infrastructural events. This is a reflexive process that challenges how risks are produced through capitalist urbanisation, with the aim of making this longer temporality eventful for social change. A focus on politicised infrastructures reveals and disrupts dominant natural hazard narratives that remain integral to hazardous urban expansion.

COVID19, “we are in this Together or are we” a Decolonial Crisis of Locating the Missing People in the Post-Human, South Africa

ABSTRACT In discussing both decolonial and posthuman conceptual frameworks, the article advocates for putting the ‘human’ back into the humanities. However, most work on decoloniality refuses engagement with the posthuman and the Anthropocene. Similarly, posthumanism barely acknowledges the parallel work in decolonial literature. The posthuman turn is inadequate without acknowledging decolonial literature and decolonial literature is encouraged to expand its analysis into the Anthropocene. This article makes a case for drawing the two terms together. COVID19 produced various categories of ‘missing people’ more vulnerable and economically affected by the lockdown than others. This articles argue against a reactive re-composition of unitary humanity posited as being a ‘together threatened and endangered species’ resulting in a panhuman bond of vulnerability’. Indeed, we are in this together- but we are not one and the same. What is notable from the data is that everyone was affected by COVID19 but not equally so. It is difficult to separate the missing people between those at a biological risk and those at an economic impact because they often were intertwined. The article conceptualises the notion of ‘missing people’ in cultural studies that acknowledges both the decolonial turn and the posthuman turn. The study is delimited to the 21 days of lockdown Level 5 (2020), South Africa. The nation-wide lockdown was enacted in terms of the Disaster Management Act from midnight on Thursday 26 March until midnight on Thursday 16 April (2020), wherein all South Africans had to stay at home.

Posthuman Creativities: Democratizing Creative Educational Experience Beyond the Human

This chapter explores the urgent relevance of posthumanist theory and practice for democratizing creative educational experiences in 21st-century schools, universities, and informal learning environments. Posthumanism challenges the myopic centering of the human in creative education in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence, and zoonotic disease, where nonhuman agencies are intricately imbricated in human cultures and lives. Using a cartographic methodology, the chapter critically maps key theories and debates in posthumanist creativity studies across four substantive fields of inquiry: (a) process philosophy, (b) affect studies, (c) place-based education, and (d) creative ecology. Drawing links between theoretical concepts and practical examples of creative experience across formal and informal education contexts, the chapter scopes an alternative agenda for critical studies of creativity in light of the posthuman turn.

Speed and space: Rates of motion in health and wellbeing

The posthumanist turn in health and wellbeing research has paid attention to the qualities of space, particularly through the work of geographers. Although a range of these qualities have been explicitly articulated and well explored, a clear omission in the literature has been ‘speed’ - an important quality in its own right, and evident in all other qualities. This review paper takes a good look at speed. First it considers what speed is, and the myriad ways in which it arises and is registered according to science and other intellectual paradigms. Second it considers speed as a distinctive feature of twenty-first century life and the health and wellbeing involvements and implications of this life. Third it considers some partial precedent for a focus on speed and space in health and wellbeing research, by drawing speed out of current studies where it is implicit or a minor consideration. To conclude, the paper thinks about the issues, challenges and possibilities for researching speed more fully, and the opportunities this might open up.

Where did the Eco go in Systemic Practice?

In this paper, I argue that, although the systemic therapy community adopted some of Gregory Bateson’s ideas, we neglected his ecological concerns, and his thinking about epistemology and ontology might have shaped our practice even more than the comparatively few concepts we took. With rising concerns about the impact of humans upon the environment in the era in which we live, described as the Anthropocene, along with the posthuman turn, perhaps now is the time for us to look both backwards and forwards to deepen our understanding of Bateson’s message; to acknowledge the continuing importance of his thinking and influence upon the posthumanities.

Frankenstein Redux

Frankenstein Redux

Thinking with Susanne Langer: Sonar Entanglements with the Non-human

Abstract An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature(s) with culture(s) is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art.

On Posthuman Folklore by Tok Thompson

On Posthuman Folklore by Tok Thompson Travis Brisini (bio) Posthuman Folklore, by Tok Thompson. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. ISBN: 9781496825087. Hardcover, paperback, and ebook. If I might be so bold, I’d like to begin this review with a generalization: for the sake of an easy shorthand, there are effectively two types of books about posthumanism. The first is the highly technical philosophical text, aimed at the massive pillars of tradition and topicality that have propped up academia since at least the Enlightenment. While these interventions share the unifying characteristic of skepticism about the privileged and unique ontological status of “The Human,” there is significant diversity in topical focus and scope. Michael Serres—whose oeuvre tells the story of humanity, technology, and nature as an ongoing, contiguous milieu—provides a historical account, while Donna Haraway’s recent work proposes relationships of care and mutual obligation as fundamental to our Earthly life with nonhuman Others. Rosi Braidotti provides a complex philosophical genealogy for the posthumanist turn, while Alaimo, Neimanis and van der Tuin examine the relationship between New Materialist and feminist ontologies, and the consequences of this pairing for political and social formulations. Broadly speaking, these works offer deep challenges to the very ontology and epistemology of twenty-first-century knowledge. It is a question, [End Page 282] in these works, not only of what counts, but of how to imagine, undertake, and interpret the situated knowledge(s) of the world. The second type of book about the posthumanities is the work of survey and application: a text whose primary goal is to take the insights generated by the first type of work and apply them to a particular context, in the process reevaluating that context in light of these new posthumanist ideas. These texts—while perhaps less rigorously and ardently philosophical—nonetheless serve an important place in the ecosystem of the posthuman turn, as the site of application and integration. They are the books that show us the consequences—in our familiar academic fields—of the broad philosophical shifts that arise from posthumanist perspectives. Posthuman Folklore, by Tok Thompson, is a book squarely located in this second camp. It is the first book-length effort elucidating the consequences of the posthuman turn for the field of folklore, including an interdisciplinary cadre of scholars and artists in the areas of folklore, storytelling, anthropology, cultural studies, and performance studies, to name a few noteworthy examples. The book succeeds in its claim to offer a wide variety of examples of posthumanist thought, altering established concepts and tenets of folklore. Its form does, however, come with a number of limitations. Posthuman Folklore is essentially two books: one on the nonhuman (animal, plant, material) tendency in posthumanist scholarship, and another on the technological (digital/virtual) tendency that is sometimes also called “transhumanism.” Thompson suggests that it is his goal to integrate these two often disparate tendencies around the question of ontology, writing that “both can be used to help inform the other, and the wider question of basic human ontology: what is it to be human, and how do we perform our humanity?” (14). But in practice, the two areas remain distinct. One might argue that the chapters each contribute to an emergent, “holistic” conversation that proposes a distinct posthumanist ontology and position for the human, but that conversation never materializes in an overt way, and readers are left to draw their own connections between the ontological statuses of the human proposed by each chapter. The work is clearly a collection of previously published essays, and as such, while each chapter stands on its own, the collective philosophical thrust of the work seems both bifurcated and weakened. The nonhuman bent clearly offers more opportunities for new inventional, conceptual expansions for folklorists but also contains within it the possibility that a posthumanist turn may end with (or demand) a level of conceptual stretching that undoes folklore as a discrete object of inquiry. [End Page 283] It is unclear how coherent our shared program of research will be without the commonplace of the “human” as an agent/element of folkloric construction or performance, or how or to what degree the demands of ethological inquiry will...

Becoming posthuman: hepatitis C, the race to elimination and the politics of remaking the subject

ABSTRACT Hepatitis C has long been a public health problem in Australia. ‘Revolutionary’ new drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C have now emerged. The Australian government has invested heavily in them, and has an ambitious goal to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030. Numerous shifts in policy and practice are required if the elimination agenda is to be realised. This paper explores the significance of these shifts. We ask: what is the race to elimination doing with the subject? We argue that the race to elimination can be understood, simultaneously, as a product of posthuman forces, capable of being analysed using the theoretical tools made available via the posthuman turn; producing an intervention in what it means to be human; and generating a dilemma for people who use (or used) drugs, people with hepatitis C, and posthuman scholarship. In drawing out these issues, we aim to: trace the significant developments underway in hepatitis C medicine and raise awareness of them; encourage reflection on the consequences of these developments; and invite reflections on what might be lost when the human is remade by hepatitis C medicine.

The domestication triangle: How humans, animals and technology shape each other – The case of automated milking systems

This article investigates the domestication of milking robots, most often labelled automatic milking systems (AMS) into dairy farms in Norway. It shows that producers of AMS tend to represent the integration of the technology as a process where their expert systems aid and guide the farmer so that she learns how to be an ‘AMS farmer’. However, farmers' AMS-stories shows us that learning to live with AMS is a process that continues even after the AMS technology seems to have been fully integrated. Furthermore, cows and fellow farmers are central actors, but machines also learn in the process. Hence, we find a extended domestication process where farmers and cows not only adapt to the machine, but indeed that the machine also need to ‘learn’ how to function in particular farms. As such, we target a domestication triangle of machines, animals and farmers where all elements co-evolve. From this we argue that the concept of domestication in studies of agricultural technology needs to take a posthuman turn and focus on a domestication triangle of humans, animals and machines.