Post-humanism

1. Post-humanism Week 8

2. Post = beyond or after

3. humanism a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values; especially: a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason

4. the enlightenment Where there was a substitution of the cults of collective religion for personal subjectivity where the proposal of the free, rational, and autonomous being - what we call the individual - is made and ingrained.

5. Structuralism The notion that human interaction, language, literature are intelligible because of constant laws and overarching structure

6. Structuralism The notion that human interaction, language, literature are intelligible because of constant laws and overarching structure OR In sociology, anthropology and linguistics, structuralism is the methodology that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

7. post-structuralism vs. structuralism

8. post-structuralism vs. Universalist Ahistorical Meaning is fixed Binary Key thinkers: Saussure, Lacan, Mauss and Levi-Straus Local, particular, situated Genealogical Meaning is ambiguous Non-binary Key thinkers: Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan structuralism

9. civilised/primitive right/wrong total/partial Antagonistic Dualisms truth/illusion self/other God/man Culture/nature According to Haraway, “antagonistic dualisms” order Western discourse and “have all been systematic to logics and practices of domination of the other”

10. liberal humanistsubject posthuman subject vs.

11. 1. How does Herbrechter’s account of post-humanism’s (auto)biography differ from the ‘official’ one? 2. Why does Herbrechter describe the subject as having “the ‘hauntological’ structure of a ghost” (331)? 3. How does Herbrechter use Althusser to arrive at posthumanism’s “challenges and potential”? (333-4) 4. Why does Herbrechter say that autobiography is ‘deadly’ (338)? How does he use Derrida and Butler to argue this? 5. What changes to autobiography does posthumanism pose, according to Herbrechter? (340) 6. What are the benefits and risks of the proliferation of opportunities for autobiography or “giving an account of oneself” that new social media provide? (343-44)

12. post-humanism’s (auto)biography

13. post-humanism’s (auto)biography The ‘Official’ Account

14. post-humanism’s (auto)biography The ‘Official’ Account Post-humanism = Poststructuralist Theory + Technics

15. post-humanism’s (auto)biography The ‘Official’ Account Post-humanism = Poststructuralist Theory + Technics Post-humanism Post-structuralism Structuralism

16. Posthuman?

17. Posthuman?

18. Posthuman?

19. Posthuman?

20. Apolcalyptic Visions

21. Stelarc RE-WIRED / RE-MIXED 2015

22. “The body has always been a prosthetic body. Every since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators. We have become creatures that construct tools, artefacts and machines. We’ve always been augmented by our instruments, our technologies. Technology is what constructs our humanity; the trajectory of technology is what propelled human development. I’ve never seen the body as purely biological, so to consider technology as a kind of alien other that happened upon us at the end of the millennium is rather simplistic.“ Stelarc

23. “By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks – language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation…” Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985)

24. Critical Post-humanism

25. Critical Post-humanism = Post-humanism without technology?

26. “...the Posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending and replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born...” N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 1999

27. “All the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions are built on the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them: for instance, spectacles, photographic cameras, ear-trumpets.” Sigmund Freud, “A Note Upon The Mystic Writing Pad” (1925)

28. Joseph Nicéphore NiépceView from the Window at Le Gras 1826 or 1827

29. Joseph Nicéphore NiépceView from the Window at Le Gras 1826 or 1827 “The first image in the history of photography presents a distinctly nonhuman vision, while also enacting a nonhuman agency at the heart of its production.” Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (2017)

30. Jana Sterbak, Waiting For High Water (2003)

31. Jana Sterbak, Waiting For High Water (2003)

32. Robot Zoo exhibition The Horniman Museum, London

33. Roberto Huarcaya, Amazogramas (detail), 2014 SERIES OF 3 PHOTOGRAMS, 30 METERS x 1.06 METERS EACH. Photograms shot at night in the Peruvian jungle deploying 30 meters long photosensitive paper between the dense foliage, which is printed directly to paper with a small flash light and full moon. These frames were revealed with river water.

34. Roberto Huarcaya, Amazogramas (installation view), 2014 SERIES OF 3 PHOTOGRAMS, 30 METERS x 1.06 METERS EACH. Photograms shot at night in the Peruvian jungle deploying 30 meters long photosensitive paper between the dense foliage, which is printed directly to paper with a small flash light and full moon. These frames were revealed with river water.

35. In Amazogramas photography reveals itself as a nonhuman mode of geological tracing with light, across different time scales. But it also comes to the fore as a human-centric practice that has the potential to reenergize us by encouraging us to look at the sun and the moon – and to sense, embrace, and rethink our sourced of energy and light. Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (2017)

37. Response-ability?

38. Lynn Hershman Leeson Agent Ruby ’s EDream Portal 2002Installation view, SFMoMA

39. Lynn Hershman Leeson Agent Ruby 2002website screenshot, SFMoMA

40. Erica ScourtiThe Outage 2014

41. Spike JonzeHer 2013 (film still)

42. “There’s another worry, especially for those of us (i.e. me) who treat platforms like Twitter as an imaginary boyf [sic], a non-judgmental person who we can chat random shit to as and when it appears in our heads: that they [i.e. a real boyfriend] may replace our ‘audience’” Erica Scourti “Sharing, Liking and Overthinking”, wrongdreams.com, 2014

43. Autobiography is ‘deadly’

44. Derrida plus d’une langue the auto-bio-thanato-heterographical auto-immunity

45. “in gathering the events of a life together the attempt is made to present a stable, unified, self present self, but by gathering the self, the self is changed” (Long, 13)

46. “To write one’s autobiography, in order to either confess or to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose oneself, like a work of art, to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide - a death which is total as much as fragmentary. To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest - the other, the reader” (Blanchot quoted in Long, 13)

47. autoimmunity “that strange behaviour where a living being, in a quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” Derrida Autoimmunity : real and symbolic suicides, 2003, 94