Posthumanist Discourse Research Articles

Postmodern Philosophy as a Condition for the Emergence of Posthumanism Theory

The article presents a brief retrospective of the conceptions of philosophical postmodernism in their connection with posthumanism. Posthumanism is a philosophical movement that has been actively developed in the last decade, with its roots in the 60s and 70s of continental philosophy. The discourse of posthumanism implies work and development of conceptions and notions used by M. Foucault, J. Derrida, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, R. Barthes and others. Connecting with such philosophical trends as disability studies, animal studies, postcolonial philosophy, actor-network theory, intersectional feminism, posthumanism expands, complements and reincarnates many provisions of postmodern philosophy. This article outlines the main concepts used in posthumanist discourse.

Film Music within the Posthuman Discourse

Film Music within the Posthuman Discourse

Sympoietic Art Practice in Co-expressive Re-worlding with Hegel’s “Vegetal Subject”

“Sympoietic art practice”, construed as co-creative making-together-with plants, contributes to posthumanist discourse by forming cross-species partnerships which re-configure exploitative relations with plants. The posthumanist commitment of sympoietic practice to live equitably with the more-than-human world is inherently opposed to the tradition of anthropocentrism widely associated with Hegel’s idealization of reason and culture. But when Hegelian philosophy comingles with the radically different assumptions of sympoietic art practice in this exploratory paper, a co-expressive “worlding with plants” emerges. A transformative re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature reveals that the English translators have smoothed away the vibrant concept of a “vegetal subject” explicitly used by Hegel in the original German. The resulting interpretive fissure makes space for a creative scrutiny of human exceptionalism, humanist and posthumanist conceptions of plant subjectivity and human-plant relations. Our transdisciplinary article concludes with a performative knitting together and composting of shreds of Hegelian text with vibrantly participative strands of living couch grass.

FÉLIX GUATTARI AND THE HIGHWAYS OF MEMORY

One of the last major works of “French Theory,” Félix Guattari’s notoriously dense 1989 Schizoanalytic Cartographies (SC) has only recently been made available to English-speaking audiences by Andrew Goffey’s 2013 translation. This sudden displacement of Guattari’s treatise into the present day provides the ideal opportunity for its place within Guattari’s thought, and also within the wider field of post-humanist critical discourse that has developed since its publication, to be reconsidered. I contend that the thread of memory – the storing, recalling, and forgetting of memory-data – serves as both a privileged means of navigating this text’s hyper-complexity and of articulating its critical utility. SC offers itself as a framework for thinking through the subject-in-production’s complex imbrication in the “age of planetary computerization,” one in which there is always a revolving door between the “data” of subjectivity and the “memory” of technical machines.

Embodiment and the Animal in Guadalupe Nettel’s El matrimonio de los peces rojos

This article explores an interaction between posthumanist and cognitive discourses through the work of award winning Mexican author, Guadalupe Nettel. I focus on her 2014 anthology, Natural Histories, rereading the central motif of the narrative, that animals ‘are like a mirror that reflects submerged emotions or behaviours that we don’t dare to see’ (Nettel, 9). This ‘reflection’ is not simply the image of the human reflected off the opaque surface of the animal, but rather the humans themselves act as a mirror, simulating the behaviour of the animals with which they cohabit. This can be read as a literary representation of a neurophysiological phenomenon — embodied simulation, an internal mimicry, either perceptible or imperceptible, performed when watching others completing certain tasks, movements or expressions (Gazzola et al. 2007; Uithol et al. 2011; Iacoboni 2009). In particular, the first story, ‘El matrimonio de los peces rojos’, depicts a profound human-nonhuman embodied resonance that moves between linguistic, narratological and characterological levels. A cognitive critical approach to the mirroring between animals and humans in the stories reveals the particular intersection between new paradigms in cognitive science, animal studies, and posthumanism that the anthology develops, each of its narratives intertwining mind, body and nonhuman other in a non-hierarchical network.

‘How We Were Never Posthuman’: Technologies of the Embodied Voice in Pamela Z'sVoci

AbstractThis article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia workVoci(2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z's work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman.Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In aVociscene entitled ‘Voice Studies’, for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy throughVoci's allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

Performing the cyborg self: explicit and implicit examples of body hacking the distributed self

ABSTRACT Today, as many work and socialize completely online, we are more acutely aware than ever of the cybernetic relationship between the body (in-situ) and the virtually or digitally extended self. However, even before the onset of the current global pandemic (COVID-19), the contemporary ‘body’ had to be understood as extended beyond physical flesh, through global communications systems. How do our practices on these platforms reveal our evolving relationships with a distributed and digitally mutable body? Drawing on my own construction of cyborg theory as a subset of posthuman discourse, this paper links the practices of explicitly cyborg performance, like Stelarc and ORLAN, with the increasingly banal practice of body-hacking as it is realized in the performance of the self (both consciously and unconsciously) on distributed, social media platforms. These discussions touch both on identified trends in contemporary self-representation as well as artists whose work within those spaces acts as a comment, critique, and application of those practices. Through this discussion, I show how these practices can be understood as body hacking and how that body hacking can both reflect an increasing sense of personal empowerment in relation to the body as well as a morally ambiguous algorithmic redefinition of the paradigmatic body.

Myśleć fantastyką. Przez science fiction do posthumanizmu


 
 
 The author presents the thesis that fantastic literature and film, especially in the science fiction variant, is a privileged form of expression in posthumanist discourse. The themes, motifs and protagonists of science fiction are invoked in various contexts by Donna J. Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Luciana Parisi, and Pramod K. Nayar. The author analyzes various areas of the involvement and usage of science fiction in posthumanist discourse: on the ontological, axiological and epistemological levels.
 
 

포스트휴먼 담론과 미래 문법 교육의 인식론적 쟁점

본 연구는 포스트휴먼 담론을 검토함으로써 미래 문법교육에 발생할 인식론적 쟁점을 예측하고, 미래 문법교육이 지향해야 할 방향을 제시하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 이를 위해 우선 포스트휴먼 시대 문법교육의 대상이 지녀야 할 조건으로 ‘인간의 언어를 사용할 수 있을 것’, ‘인간의 언어를 인간적인 방식으로 사용할 수 있을 것’, ‘인간과 같은 방식으로 인간의 언어를 학습할 것’, ‘인간의 인지 모듈이 최종적인 판단 권한을 가지고 있을 것’의 네 가지를 제안하였다. 그 다음 현대 인식론의 쟁점 중 하나인 인식론적 내재주의와 외재주의 논쟁을 검토하고, ‘인식적 책임’이라는 개념을 바탕으로 포스트휴먼 시대 문법 교실에서 일어날 수 있는 인식론적 문제를 논의하였다. 이러한 논의를 통해 ‘인식적 책임’은 언어적 주체를 길러내고자 하는 미래의 문법교육에서도 포기할 수 없는 가치라는 점을 도출하고, 동시에 기술 발달로 인해 성취 수준의 도달을 강조하는 교육이 지속되기 어렵다는 점을 지적하였다. 이러한 진단을 토대로 앞으로의 문법교육이 ‘메타-문법하기’와 같은 방법을 통해 ‘인간의 언어적 사유 방식’에 보다 큰 관심을 갖는 방향으로 이루어져야 한다는 점과 학습자가 문법 인식의 최종적 판단 능력을 갖출 수 있도록 설계되어야 한다는 점을 제언하였다.

POSTHUMANISTIČKA ETIKA ODGOVORNOSTI: OD LEVINASA KA DRUGOM, KA NEHUMANOM

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical and conceptual connections between the philosophy of the Otherness by Emanuel Levinas and postulates established by the critical posthumanism theoreticians regarding the new humanism ethics. The starting point for this elaboration is the theory of responsibility for the Other developed by Levinas, which is understood as the basic principle of humanity, and therefore of the human subject as well. The responsibility for the Other is an immanence of being, instigated by the encounter with the face, the look and the touch of the Other. For Levinas, precisely these form the primary speech of humanity that one can express to the Other, becoming himself too in that expression. As posthumanism is a paradigm which brings the overcoming of the exclusivist principle of the traditional anthropocentric humanism, the notion of the Other has become a focal point for all the posthumanist discourses regarding the investigation of the essence of the human. Considering the fact that posthumanism tends to surpass all the dichotomies related to the Other – human or inhuman, configured differently in the racial, class, gender, biological or technological manner – we can confirm that posthumanism has restored the question of the responsibility for the Other and the necessity of his recognition without any tendency to assim- ilate, subjugate or eradicate it. Therefore the paper comparatively depicts and analyzes all the overlapping points of the new ethics of Levinas and the desired ethics of posthumanism overlap.

포스트휴먼 담론과 ‘인간-이후’ 한국시의 한 가능성 －김혜순의 『피어라 돼지』(2016)와 『날개 환상통』(2019)에 대한 포스트-휴먼적 읽기

최근의 인문학에서 ‘인간’은 극복의 대상으로 논의되고 있다. 미셸 푸코의 주장을 인용하자면 이러한 상황은 ‘인간학’의 해체로 요약할 수 있다. 인류세, 포스트휴먼, 트랜스휴먼, 인지과학, 그리고 ‘동물-타자’에 대한 데리다의 철학, 들뢰즈의 ‘동물-되기’, 도나 해러웨이의 ‘사이보그’, 아감벤의 서구 철학사에 대한 탈구축 등 최근 인문학과 문학 연구에서 중요한 논점으로 인용되는 일체의 담론들이 모두 근대적인 ‘인간’ 개념에 대해 비판적인 태도를 견지하고 있다. 이들의 주장에 따르면 근대적 휴머니즘을 떠받치고 있는 ‘인간’ 개념은 타자, 또는 동물에 대한 부당한 존재론적 차이에 기초하고 있다. 따라서 이 글에서 지적하려 하는 ‘인간-이후’의 문학이란 휴머니즘 이후의 문학이며, 나아가 ‘인간’을 옹호하기 위해 문학이 배제해온 것들의 존재론적 의미를 적극적으로 사유하는 문학적 경향이다.BR 이러한 경향성의 일종으로 최근 소설에서는 SF 문학, 사이보그, 젠더 등이 주요한 관심사가 되고 있다. 반면 시에서는 ‘동물’이 중요한 논점이 되고 있다. 이 글이 최근 출간된 김혜순의 시집들에 주목하는 이유도 그것들이 집중적으로 ‘동물’에 관한 문제를 제기하고 있기 때문이다. 이 글이 주목하는 시집은 『피어라 돼지』(2016)와 『날개 환상통』(2019)이다. 『피어라 돼지』는 화자의 목소리가 ‘돼지-인간’의 것이라는 점이 중요하다. 그것은 ‘인간’의 것도 아니고 ‘돼지’의 것도 아닌, ‘인간’과 ‘동물’의 합성체, 혹은 종-횡단적 방식으로 블록(block)을 형성한 낯선 존재의 목소리라는 점에서 ‘동물’을 소재로 삼는 ‘동물시’와 근본적으로 다르다. 또한 『날개 환상통』에서 시인은 타자의 목소리를 통해서 존재가 드러나는 창작 경험을 ‘새’를 통해 탄생하는 ‘인간’의 모습과 나란히 놓음으로써 새로운 존재론을 보여준다. 다만 『피어라 돼지』에서의 ‘돼지’와 달리 이 시집에서 ‘새’는 구체적 대상이라기보다는 ‘타자’의 형상으로 제시되며, 따라서 기표 또는 기의로 다양하게 변주되는 양상을 보인다. 김혜순의 최근 시집들은 이러한 경향을 통해 타자에 관한 존재론적 논의를 제시하고 있지만, 그가 앞세우고 있는 ‘동물’의 형상은 포스트-휴먼, 즉 ‘인간-이후’ 시의 가능성이라는 맥락에서도 상당히 중요하다고 평가할 수 있다.

Posthumanismo. Contornos de una herramienta epistemológica (I)

El presente es un texto teórico que se interesa por la llegada del posthumanismo al campo epistemológico en los últimos años del siglo xx. Rastrea dos discursos críticos sobre el humanismo, el primero de Friedrich Nietzsche y el segundo de Michel Foucault, para luego encontrar en la conferencia del filósofo alemán Peter Sloterdijk, Normas para el parque humano, de 1997, una suerte de acta de nacimiento del posthumanismo en tanto cuestión filosófica. Se propone a continuación una definición del posthumanismo a través de seis discursos que componen un sistema, y que se abren como una perspectiva epistemológica para el estudio, principalmente, de la literatura y el cine.
 Este artículo es el primero de dos, el segundo será un análisis de obras literarias y cinematográficas a la luz de esos discursos posthumanistas.
 Palabras clave : posthumanismo, epistemología, filosofía, teoría literaria, cine.

Non-Western Onto-epistemological Paradigm Shifts: Posthuman Feminist Discourse of the Pakistani TV Animation Series Burka Avenger (2013–2016)

ABSTRACT “Posthumanism” denotes an increasing focus on women, the environment, machines, and animal-centered discourses instead of male-dominated narratives. The posthuman feminist field of research is one of the many emergent thematic discourses of existent posthumanisms. Posthuman feminist notions have almost always been the subject of discussion in Western academia. However, we intend to analyze the posthuman feminist discourse of a Pakistani technically mediated female subjectivity, an animated female superheroine—Burka Avenger—in order to initiate discussion on non-Western posthuman feminism. By analyzing the historical genealogy of Pakistani feminist activism, we establish that Burka Avenger contributes to two major discourses of Pakistani feminist struggle, the right to education and veiling debates. Through our analysis of the animated female subjectivity presented in this series, we contend that the protagonist is a Pakistani posthuman feminist figure because she challenges the established mental habits of Pakistani feminist struggle and prefigures an onto-epistemological shift.

Posthumanism and Colonial Discourse: Nineteenth Century Literature and Twenty-First Century Critique

Nineteenth Century novelists frequently picture life beyond and across the edges of humanity—figuratively moving the ‘posts’ of humanity—a practice that this article calls ‘posthumanisation’. Inspired by the accelerating as well as mutually reinforcing dynamics of colonial expansion, empiricism, new biological and scientific findings (Darwin, paleontology, and psychology), and the rise of industrialisation, prominent writers such as Mary Shelley, the Bronte sisters, and Joseph Conrad habitually blur human-animal boundaries. This article engages with versions of posthumanisation in selected novels by these authors—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898)—and the anonymously published The Woman of Colour (1808), examining how they engage either in critiquing the perfidious overlaps between posthumanisation and colonial discourse (The Woman of Colour; Frankenstein) or blur Cartesian binaries between humans and animals to reinforce colonialism’s narcissistic politics of non-relation (for example, seeGandhi, 2006;Simmons, 2007; andDrichel, 2018). The article foregrounds the extent to which a thriving colonial discourse and biological racism do not (necessarily) result in a ‘fixing’ of racial others on the side of ‘animal’ (and, as such, in their ‘dehumanisation’), but rather in a strategic ‘flexibilisation’ of ‘hum-animality’ (seeEllis, 2018) in the interest of plausibilising white supremacy and the slavery system. Arguing for the merit of historicizing literary analysis as posthumanist scholarship directs its gaze to the past; building on race-critical contributions to posthumanist discourse (see, for example,Malm and Hornborg, 2014;Jackson, 2015;Jackson, 2020;Davis et al., 2019; and Yussof, 2019); and also engaging with the still-scarce scholarship on the overlaps of posthuman being and race relations in the context of Britain’s ‘imperial century’ (seeEllis, 2018; andJackson, 2020), this essay contributes to setting on a more solid, historical foundation a discourse that has repeatedly been criticised for engaging a ‘racial’ ‘wilful blindness’ (Yusoff, 2018). The article thus contributes to diversifying not only historical approaches to ‘proto-posthumanisms’ as they are currently proliferating in the field but also, and by implication, current posthumanist self-understandings and research ethics.

Evolution, Machine, and Humanity: Rereading Samuel Butler from a Posthuman Perspective

Abstract Samuel Butler (1835–1902) stands out among his contemporaries for engaging into a famous controversy with Charles Darwin. He develops the unconscious memory analogy and the extra-corporaneous limb theory in his famous Dystopia fiction Erewhon and his works on evolution as a counter-argument against Darwin’s version of evolutionary theory, which puts the emphasis on chance in natural selection. His treatment of machines, and particularly the relationship between man, machine, and environment in his works, attracts great critical attention in the current debate on posthuman pragmatism. The intention of this article is to show how Butler anticipates the posthumanist discourse that is characterized by the decline and deconstruction of the anthropocentric way of thinking.

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

Anthropology of Education, Qualitative Research, Post-human discourses and Our Future

Anthropology of Education, Qualitative Research, Post-human discourses and Our Future

포스트휴먼과 지능 담론(1) -인간의 뇌와 인공지능의 비교 담론을 중심으로-

본 논문은 인간의 두뇌와 인공지능 사이의 비교 담론을 종합하고자 하는 목적에서 작성되었다. 인간의 두뇌에 대한 논의는 지능에 관한 연구들과 깊이 관련이 있다. 그리고 이 연구들은 인공지능과의 비교에서 근거로 사용된다. 따라서 우리는 인간의 뇌와 인공지능이 비교되는 지점을 살펴보았다. 우선 우리는 유발 하라리의 연구에서, 아직 차세대 인간이 나타나지 않았지만, 그 논의가 지나치게 구체적으로 진행되고 있다는 점을 지적하였다. 다음으로, 인간의 뇌가 생리학적으로 존재하는 것과 인공지능이 계발되는 목적이 서로 다르다는 것이다. 인간의 뇌는 인간의 삶 전체를 모델화하고 제어하는 데 관여한다. 그리고 과거의 사실을 종합하여 미래를 예견하는 데 있어, 뇌의 부정확성은 오히려 창의적으로 작동한다. 마지막으로 컴퓨터와 인공지능의 구조를 우리가 완전히 파악하고 있는 것과 달리, 인간의 뇌가 작동하는 기제는 아직 완전히 밝혀지지 않았다. 그리고 인간의 뇌는 감각기관의 정보를 수용하는 데 자신의 해석을 개입시킨다. 그에 따라, 인지능력의 불완전성은 오히려 인간의 경험을 확대하는 데 결정적인 역할을 한다. 인간의 뇌 담론은 앞서 말한 것처럼 인간의 지능 담론들과 연결되어 있다. 따라서 본 연구의 논의는 인간의 지능과 인공지능과의 비교 담론을 검토하는 것으로 이어져야 할 것이다.

Posthuman Knowledge

Posthuman Knowledge

The human-animal divide in communication: anthropocentric, posthuman and integrationist answers

The human-animal relation has mainly been negotiated one way or another – a humanist/anthropocentric approach which centralizes the human condition and a posthuman perspective which sees the human perspective as a hindrance to fully comprehending the nonhuman world. By exploring the humanist and posthuman discourse on the human-animal divide in communication, this paper contends that both approaches are subject to the “language myth”. At the end, an integrationist-humanist answer to the human-animal divide will be proffered, which constitutes a form of humanism that neither relies on decontextualized conceptions of human communication nor inhibits personal sign-making creativity, thereby marking a point of departure from said humanist and posthuman models.