Silvia Gherardi SOCIOMATERIALITY IN POSTHUMAN PRACTICE THEORY (original) (raw)
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Sociomateriality in Post-human Practice Theory.doc
A posthumanist practice theory – which grants equal status to humans and non-humans – provides the context for a discussion of the concept of sociomaterial practices. The constitutive entanglement of the social and the material within a practice is illustrated in three different contexts. I start by focusing on the sociomateriality of bodies in the social practice of fathering. I then consider a working practice and its technological change in the case of artificial nutrition. In the last case, I discuss the disruption of social practices that Hurricane Katrina brought about and how it made visible the interconnection between past and present practices. In all the three cases, the materialities of bodies, technologies, discourses could not be separated from the society that formed them, and vice versa the social cannot be considered external or separate from materialities.
Posthumanism, the Social and the Dynamics of Material Systems
Technology has developed to the point where a clear distinction between nature and culture seems to be dissolving. Against this background, a broad aspect of social research has emerged that considers an interdependence between the social and the material. So far, social-systems cybernetics as described by Luhmann has remained rather marginalized in these discussions. This article is intended to overcome this marginalization by developing the concept of meaning. Meaning can abstractly be defined as a ‘doing negativity’. Returning to systems theory, it becomes obvious that verbalized meaning (expressed through language) is only one possible medium of meaning. Adopting some concepts from Helmuth Plessner, I introduce another medium of meaning – corporealized meaning (expressed in physical terms), which also operates meaningfully along the distinction between actuality and potentiality and thus does negativity. I discuss consequences of observing the relationship between sociality and materiality from this perspective.
As biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, and artificial intelligence are converging, not only the human body but also what it means to be human becomes at stake in whole new ways. While Enlightenment humanism promised freedom and progress for every human being by stressing the idea of a "universal essence of Man", in its practices it often failed to meet its own ideals, and hence could not fulfill its promises. Contesting the very dichotomy of culture and nature, 'we' and 'them', humans and nonhumans, feminist and postcolonial scholars emphasized the existential need for decentering and deconstructing the anthropocentrism, essentialism, and universalism inherent to Enlightenment humanism. Shifting the focus to the marginalized and marked-that is, to "all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self", as Donna Haraway put it-posthumanist theories aim for novel critical figures and tropes in a world thoroughly transformed by technobiopower and the technosciences. At the same time, transhumanism gains a foothold as a kind of technophilic hyper-humanism that seeks to take control over human evolution itself through the means of existing and hypothetical future technologies such as cognition enhancing drugs, nanotechnologies, cryotechnologies, and whole brain emulation. In this seminar, we will critically reconstruct these debates and explore their promises and dangers. In doing so, we will discuss how the authors are engaging with the question of what it means to be non-/human and how human bodies are being transformed by rapid advances in science and technology. What is our relationship to the 'natural' world? Do new biotechnologies, nanotechnologies and information-and communication technologies determine the ways we think, act, and feel both as individuals and societies? And how do we construct a politics and common world in this new era of the posthuman?
Posthumanism entails the idea of transcendence of the human being achieved through technology. The article begins by distinguishing perfection and change (or growth). It also attempts to show the anthropological premises of posthumanism itself and suggests that we can identify two roots: the liberal humanistic subject (autonomous and unrelated that simply realizes herself/himself through her/his own project) and the interpretation of thought as a computable process. Starting from these premises, many authors call for the loosening of the clear boundaries of one's own subject in favour of blending with other beings. According to these theories, we should become post-human: if the human being is thought and thought is a computable process, whatever is able to process information broader and faster is better than the actual human being and has to be considered as the way towards the real completeness of the human being itself. The paper endeavours to discuss the adequacy of these p...
Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies
Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, 2020
This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children's lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between 'what is' and 'what could be', with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.
Thesis Eleven 132.1 , 2016
sense as it discusses materiality in general and how human relationships with things, from drugs to CDs to photographs, create and confirm particular cosmologies and identities. While most of these things are indeed technologically-produced artefacts, more specific reflections on the nature or essence of technology would have been welcome. The author raises an interesting discussion of 'technological lifecycles'-the phases and stages technologies such as the telephone go through while transforming or dying off. The subject-object blurring efforts of Donna Haraway around 'companion species' and Serres on 'quasi-objects' is discussed before Matthewman arrives at his conclusion: 'We have always been posthuman'. Technology and Social Theory makes a valuable contribution to sociology and related disciplines that face a double challenge: keeping pace and looking ahead in a rapidly changing socio-technological milieu, while simultaneously looking back at how technology has been shaping society and the (post)human ever since upright walking apes took hold of stones on the African savannah. Understanding what technology is, what it does and how individuals and societies are coupled with and transformed by technology will become ever more salient as planet Earth increasingly becomes a 'human-built world'. Such a world calls for a critical sociology that understands the history, essence and effects of technology on both humans and nonhumans, not only in our times but the times to come. It came as little surprise when I recently learned Matthewman is currently at work on a book on the sociology of accidents and disasters, phenomena that are both solved and often created by technological interventions. For a relatively short survey, Technology and Social Theory covers a lot of ground. The book chronicles the trajectory of technology in social theory since Marx, while the critical discussions of ANT, 'thing studies' and posthuman theory highlight some of the dynamic newer directions in social theory. Despite this, there is surprisingly little coverage of major sociological topics such as globalization, mobilities, the internet, and the environment, phenomena which are unthinkable without considering the evolution of technology. Nonetheless, Matthewman's volume is highly recommended for mid to upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates and any social scientist who needs reminding of (or a first lesson about) the centrality of technology to the (post)human condition.
TRAUMA, CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM AND NEW MATERIALISM
2020
By tracing several theoretical frameworks drawn from dominant trauma theory, current memory studies, critical posthumanism and new materialism this chapter, in its interdisciplinary engagement, is divided into subsections. However, this chapter primarily seeks to trouble the idea of centralizing and universalizing the human figure or what Giorgio Agamben calls an "anthropological machine" that defines the conceptual, material, philosophical and political production of the human subject (Agamben 2004: 37). Bruno Latour critically reminds us of a gap that is culturally and socially constructed between "two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on one hand; that of nonhumans on the other" (Latour 1993: 10-11), and it is ethically imperative to challenge the concept of the human as a privileged, dominant and fixed figure, supposedly an independent entity that is isolated from its socio-ecological surroundings. In an endeavour to critically talk about trauma today, it is necessary to renew and radically interrogate our perceptions and representations of trauma in a way that recognizes the complex entanglements of planetary existence. Rather than centralizing and privileging the human as the emblematic wounded and traumatized being that is at the root of Western psychoanalytical conceptualizations of the "talking cure" or "the work of therapy", novelistic perspectives drawn from reconceptualization of natural-social entanglements are worth considering. To move beyond the constructivist-essentialist impasse of transcendental and humanist traditions, the interdependence of the material and the discursive, the human and the non-human underscores the idea that agents do not only denote humans. In this regard, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti's notion of the human subject which rests on "an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others, including the non-human or 'earth' others" rejects selfcentred individualism (Braidotti 2013: 48). Braidotti's definition entails questioning the sovereignty of the human subject, and hence Cartesian dualism. Accordingly, Katherine Hayles's seminal book, How We Became Posthuman, redefines the human as "an amalgam" that brings together the human and the non-human, which constitutes "a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction" (Hayles 1999: 3). Hayles's definition engages with both a new dynamic subjectivity and the decentralization of a liberal humanist subject. This critical definition overrules the "mind-matter and culture-nature divides of transcendental humanist thought" (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 96), and