REPRESENTATION OF THE POST/HUMAN
-what it means to be human
Impact of 21st century technologies – digital, cybernetic and biomedical – our understanding of what it means to be human.
-desires, anxieties, interests fuels humanity’s continuing relationship with tools and technologies.
– relationship between technologies innovation and social change.
-technologies – called into question the immutability of boundaries between human, animals and machines, born and made…
Humanity intervened in the development of other living organisms.
– Scientists able to intervene in so-called ‘natural’ processes with the help of technologies (technologization of nature)
– new reproduction technologies, cloning n genetic modification – future in which boundaries between humanity, technology n nature will be more malleable (easily influenced)
– if smart machines can simulate human intelligence..?
Cyborg(fusion of organic n cybernetic) from fantasy into reality .
– computer-assisted technologies transform assumptions about pattern of leisure as well as work.
– increasingly the major source of wealth n determinative mode of power.
-social change – driven by circulation n commodification of data.
– erode the distinctions between virtual n real taken-for-granted patterns of physical space, communication n intimacy.
The distances of time, space, n place are shrunk.
Technologies are not so much an extension and appendage to human body. Skin as barrier is erased.
Digitally generated virtual worlds offers ‘post-bodied’ activity, synthesized interactive environment.
– Virtual reality allow digitally generated ‘self’ into cyberspace, alternative subjectivities constructed – extensions of the body.
Philosopher: technology enframed the inner essence of being. but, possibility of establish a relationship between humanity and technology that is not nihilistic.
Transhumanism – technology as the manifestation of human liberation.
– transcending physical limitations.
POST/HUMAN
-humans are mixtures of machine n organism, nature has been modified (enculturated) by technologies.
Featherstone n Burrows refer to the future of humanity as ‘post-bodies and post-human’.
Question: response to new technologies, enslavement or liberation? as threats to human intergrity or means of facilitating its further evolution.
-Machines transformed themselves from tools into sentient beings, questions about ‘their’ status in relation to ‘us’.
-boundaries between humans n almost-humans – in the discourse of ‘monstrosity’
-Monsters serve both to mark the fault-lines but also signal the fragility of such boundaries.
‘human’, ‘nature’, ‘technology’ are being intermingled.
science fiction -shock our assumptions n incite our critical faculties. Example of Frankenstein, occupy a definitive role in the reception of biological n genetic innovation. – science n pop culture may regarded as representations of the world – both do not simply report reality but construct, mediated n constitute human experience.
*Donna Haraway – Cyborg Writing
[technologies making humanity into gods.]
THE END OF THE ‘HUMAN’?
-humans-as-machines and post/human evolution as representational devices that metaphorically delineate the normatively human in the face of challenges to ontological hygiene.
-cyberspace taken-for-granted concepts of embodiment problematic (body is discarded, retained, mutated in virtual media).
– Stelarc cyberpunk n postmodern performance art – the ontological hygiene between non-human nature, humans and machines is tested to its limits.
-Robot take the place of human labour.
Metropolis – robot, women, patriarchal power.
-Machine as alive – depends on their self-regulating nature and their dependancy upon the reception n processing of feedback and resistance to entropy.
– human is sophisticated as tool users, their skill with tools are one of the factor for evolution
tool > become machine the human> turned into machine
– Mazlish’s – transcultural continuity to homo faber as the essence of what it means to be human.
– The ambition that distinguishes humanity is the wish to transcend embodiment altogether, as driven by ‘fear of death, loating of the body, desire to be moral and free of error.’
– humanity pick up its tools and build a world.
(animalistic > almost-human > humanity > machine-line > post/human)
BODY AND SELF, VIRTUAL FORMS OF EMBODIMENT
If persons have no fleshly substance in cyberspace then raise the question of whether it is still appropriate / meaningful to link traditional ideas of identity, freedom, agency or community with notions of corporeality or physical space.
Heim: The face is the primal interface, establish trust. Flesh makes the very province of humanity.
Virtual reality still depends in a residual sense upon bodily proprioception n conventions of space, movement n perspective transferred from embodied experience.
In cyberspace, evolved special symbols, or emoticons to denote states of mind/indicate bodily expression.
Face-to-face reality may prove less attractive n fulfilling than the simulated authenticity of the hyper-world.
Cyberculture extend human creativity n sociability.
Cyberworld – more fluid identity, self as performative, electronic domain is the stage.. where selves can be enhanced, augmented, changed/erased.
Virtual technologies – the representation of the real becomes the real. (if there is real)
Cyberpunk, dystopian mood
-hybrids of technology n biology, nature does not feature in cyberpunk.
– dystopian vision of the assumption of progressive/ humanist science fiction are all upended.
-setting forth a prediction of the erosion and colonization of human freedom by inhuman technologies.
Stelarc’s vision of technologized future is one in which the defining motif is of the obsolescence (outdated) of the human.
-skin is no longer the boundary with the ‘outside world’ but the interface into machinic.
Stelarc: technology now becomes a component of the body.’
1. transformed embodied experience
2. redefined what it means to be human.
Performativity precedes n iterates (perform repeatedly) the meaning of embodiment and of human identity
Stelarc is dissolving the distinction between subject n object.
CYBORG WRITING Harraway – A Cyborg Manifesto.
– Cyborg is a metaphor for post/human metamorphosis in a technoscientific age.
-cyborg promises a renewal of relationship between humanity n what have been characterized as nature n technology, a greater intimacy n complicity with environment n artefact.
– Cybernetic provide technoscience:
1. dynamics of command, control, communication, n of technologies as potentially self-regulating
2. a system of representation that portrays human, organic n machine life as sharing same vitality.
Cyborg is a way to get all multiple layers of life and liveliness as well as deathliness with which we live each day.
Creature of the boundaries between species as ‘monstrous’ in their power to signify the limits n constructedness of the narratives of western modernity (Harraway)
Masculinity + cyborg.
CYBORG THEATRE
– Harraway fails to consider how the cyborg has already been fashioned in our cultural imagination.
– the female has often been a site through which to play out the anxieties of technological displacement.
– cultural imaginings of cyborgs and – monsters, automata, robots often seems to upholding traditional gender stereotypes.
Metaphoric imaginings of the cyborg.
– look in depth at constructing of bodies problematically deemed abject, or object; terms chosen because of their specific historical n theoretical implications for representations of woman.
Cyborg theatre provides a way to mark distinction through the analyses of diff interpretation of the body n technology that are woven together, understand how technology’s influence has shifted ideas of subjectivity in contemporary, mediatized moment.
Cyborg also offers a useful metaphoric concept to explore how not necessarily literal mergings between live bodies n technologies can destabilize in performance
Like cyborg (merging bodies n technologies) itself, theatre, technolgy has always been a co-author with the lining performer.
-like laboratory, the theatre is a space for trying things out.
-body on stage – conceptually mediatized lining figures.
‘Live’ can be read in oppposition to death. The cyborg theatre explores deaths, also exploring lives.
-humanness n its dependance on mediatization, the human age is literally the media age.
-intertwinement of bodies n technologies on stage as cyborg.
-cyborg subjectivity
Big Art Group – crossed bodily boundaries n definitions through their ongoing experiemnts with subject technologies. Engage with bodies abject, object n subject through diff modes of technological performance.
ZOMBIES ARE US
-what zombies are, how they operate, what their existence prompts.
– what would we do if the dead rose up.
present an apocalypse, an end to humanity through zombification.
zombie apocalypse always is unexpected with a key generic feature being the disruption of normal life.
perspectives on the zombi in terms of its relationship to humanity, zombies n humans can be interchangeable.
zombie in its relationship to the human – the self or soul as the ultimate local.
zombies, as an abject reflection of our individual mortality, forces viewer to consider the possibilities of a meaningless existence.
THE POSTHUMAN – Rosi Braidotti
After the post-modern , the post-colonial, the post-communist, post-feminist conditions, we seem to hvae entered the post-human predicament (a difficult, unpleasant situation).
Qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity n our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet.
The boundaries between the categories of the natural n the cultural have been displaced n to a large extent blurred by the effects of scientific n technological advances.
Post-Humanism: Life Beyond The Self
-classical ideal of ‘Man’
Protagoras – ‘the measure of all things’
Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
-an ideal capacity of humans to pursue their individual n collective perfectibility.
-subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, n self-regulating ethical behaviour.
-otherness defined as its negative n specular counterpart. ‘others’ raise issues of power n exclusion. Need more ethical accountability in dealing with the legacy of humanism.
Humanism’s restricted notion of what counts as the human is one of the keys to understand that we got to a post-human turn at all.
Anti-Humanism
Fascism n communism rejected the basic tenets of European Humanism.
Anti-humanism mostly related to war.
‘Death of Man’ – Foucault, target the implicit Humanism of Marxism more specifically the humanistic arrogance of continuing to place Man at the centre of world history.
Anti-humanism is one of the historical n theorectical paths that can lead to the posthuman
THE DEATH OF MEAN, THE DECONSTRUCTION OF WOMEN
-the human of Humanism – recognizability – sameness
all others can be assessed, regulated n allotted to be designated social location.
Human norms- transpose specific mode of being human into a generalized standard.
– from male to masculine and onto human as the universalized formed of humanity.
Perfect Man – Man as the measure of all things.
Anti-humanism rejects the dialectical scheme of though, marking off the sexualized other (women), the racialized other (the native) and the naturalized other (animal, the environment, earth)
‘different from’ = ‘less than’
to overcome Humanism as an intellectual tradition, a normative frame an institutionalized practice, lie at the core of the deconstructive approach to the posthuman.
THE POSTHUMAN CHALLENGE
Posthumanism marks the end of the opposition between Humanism n anti-humanism, looking towards new alternatives, work towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject.
Martha Nussbaum: abstract universalism is the only stance that is capable of providing solid foundations for moral values such as compassion n respect for others.
3 major strands in contemporary posthuman thought:
1. comes from moral philosophy n developes a reactive forms of the posthuman.
2. from science n technologies studies: raises crucial ethical n conceptual questions about the status of the human
Posthuman agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre n structure of the living n have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human body.
-technologies contribute actively to how humans do ethics.
-writer thinks that the science n technology studies approach is political neutrality it express about the posthuman predicament.
-tend to dismiss the implications of their positions for a revised vision of the subject. Subjectivity is out of the picture.
– Isaac Asimov’s ‘three laws of robotics’ 1942
‘Machine Ethic’ ability to tell right or wrong, and who is to decide?
– writer promotes radical posthuman subjectivity.
-A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self n others (including the non-human)
Pan-human – relating to / affecting all humanity.
– current scientific revolution, led by contemporary bio-genetic, environmental, neural n other sciences, creates powerful alternatives to established practices n definitions of subjectivity.
Post Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species.
Anthropocentrism – is the belief that human beings are the central/most significant species on the planet. Interpreting or regarding the world in terms of human values n experience.
– what understanding of contemporary subjectivity and subject-formation are enabled by a post-anthropocentric approach?
– the relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species, but it includes all non-anthropomorphic elements. anthropomorphic – having human characteristics
– the wider scope of animal and non-human life, also known as zoe.
– zoe-centred egalitarianism – is the logic of advanced capitalism.
Experimenting with what contemporary, bio-technologically mediated bodies are capable of doing.
– post-anthropocentrism displaces the notion of species hierarchy and of a single, common standard for ‘Man’ as the measure of all things.
– ‘others’ are cast out of normality, monstrosity, and bestiality – anthropocentric
Ideals – white, masculine, heterosexual European civilization
Louis Borges classified animal into 3 groups:
1. those we watch tv with
2. those we eat
3. those we scared of
These confine the human-animal interaction within classical parameters, namely an oedipalized relationship; an instrumental; an fantasmatic(scare of)
– is unequal, framed by the dominant animal, taking for granted free access to, saturated with projections, taboo and fantasies.
Animal need to be approached in a neo-literal mode, as a code system or a zootology of their own.
-species hierarchy run by the human.
– Post-human and its relationship to animal, the way they treat animal. Mice and pig being modified to produce organs for human.
The posthuman in the sense of post-anthropocentrism displaces the dialectical scheme of opposition, replacing well established dualisms with the recognition of deep zoe-egalitarianism between humans n animals.
– the vitality of animal n human bond is based on sharing this planet, territory or environment, no longer so clearly hierarchical, nor self-evident.
-change human-animal interaction.
Pets qualify as cyborgs creatures of mixity/vectors of posthuman relationality.
The cloned sheep Dolly, embodies complexity, it is no longer an animal but not fully a machine, is the icon of the posthuman condition.