Review – Ontic Flows: From Digital Humanities to Posthumanities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ontic Flows: On the Conditions of Posthuman Inquiry
Ontic Flows: From Digital Humanities to Posthumanities, 2016
The development of digital technologies have given rise to various theories about how those technologies affect our everyday lives as well as our understanding of how those technologies reposition the human amongst all other non-human entities. These questions are not new and have been a part of a rather long standing discourse in the humanities that are tightly connected to the autonomy and the heteronomy of human and non-human entities, discourses along the lines -although toward different ends -of Critical Theory and 'French' theory throughout the last century. Going beyond the concept of assemblages and milieus, poststructuralist inquiries into 'what comes after the subject?' have paved the way for what is now called posthumanism in its many variations.
Posthumanities: The Dark Side of “The Dark Side of the Digital”
The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2016
In What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists "the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist." 1 Our argument, made manifest by this special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, is that it is not only our ways of thinking about the world that must change if they are to be posthumanist, or at least not simply humanist; our ways of being and doing in the world must change too. In particular, we view the challenge to humanism and the human brought about by the emergence of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, bioscience, pre-emptive, cognitive, and contextual computing, as providing us with an opportunity to reinvent, radically, the ways in which we work, act, and think as theorists. In this respect, if "posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore," 2 then it generates an opportunity to raise the kind of questions for the humanities we really should have raised long before now, but haven't because our humanist ideas, not just of historical change and progression (i.e. from human to posthuman, to what comes after the human), 3 but of the rational, liberal, human subject, and the associated concepts of the author, the journal, and copyright that we have inherited with it, continue to have so much power and authority. Our use of disruption in this context thus goes beyond the usual definitions of the term. This includes those characterizations of technological disruption associated with Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School, and with the rhetoric of Silicon Valley. It is not our intention to try to sustain and develop the current system for creating, performing and circulating humanities research and scholarship, its methodologies, aesthetics, and institutions, by emphasizing the potential of disruptive technologies to generate innovations that are capable of facilitating the production of a new "digital" humanities, or even "posthuman Humanities studies." 4 As the title of this special issue indicates, rather than helping the humanities refresh themselves with what Joseph Schumpeter
Can the Humanities Become Posthuman? A Conversation
Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, ed. by S. Oppermann and S. Iovino, 2016
CV: Your latest book is called The Posthuman. In consideration of your philosophical development, which is rooted in the study of Foucault, in an uninterrupted dialogue with Deleuze as well as in feminism and feminist activism, could you explain how your idea of posthumanism developed? In other words, what have been your transitions on the way towards posthumanism? RB: For me as a student of Foucault, Deleuze and Irigaray, the crisis of Humanism means the rejection of all forms of universalism, including the socialist variation. 'Man' cannot claim to represent all humanity because that 'Man' is a culture-specific, gender-specific, race-specific and class-specific entity: is it a European, male, white, intellectual ideal. Moreover, that ideal posits itself as a norm that everyone else is supposed to imitate and aspire to; but all those who differ from the Eurocentric, masculinist, white, intellectual norm are classified as 'different from' it. And being 'different from' means to be 'worth less than'. This hierarchical organization of difference as negative becomes a very politicized issue for feminists, postcolonial, and anti-racist thinkers.
Call for Papers / Proposals (Philosophy) 2017 - LIMITS AND BOUNDARIES OF THE POSTHUMAN
The term " posthumanism " was used for the first time in the critical sense that entered then common language by Ihab Hassan in 1977. In its almost four decades of existence, posthuman theory has witnessed several evolutions, transformations and refinements, not least because this concept does not name an homogeneous and compact field, but is rather a " discourse " in the Foucauldian sense, a multiplicity of different streams, heterogeneous and fragmented, held together by a basic idea: the notion that old humanism is over. This issue of " Lo Sguardo " intends to attempt a sort of assessment of the last four decades, in order to analyse the limits and boundaries of the concept of posthuman. The leading thread of this issue is thus the question: what is still alive and topical, today, in the question of the posthuman? What themes and trends have progressively run out, and what instead have come to the foreground? How did the questions, and most importantly the answers, to the problem of the posthuman evolve? The question of technology, that is of the hybridization between human and machine, is still for many the most " showy " trait of the posthuman, both in popular culture and for the common understanding within academia; and yet the triumphalism of a certain posthumanism – and above all of its transhumanist deviations – alienated a number of scholars, starting precisely with one of the " mothers " of posthuman theory, Donna Haraway. The fact remains that the levels of technology's intimacy and intrusion into the human have, if anything, enormously increased sinceA Cyborg Manifesto (1983), and so have also the oppositions to it (Habermas, Fukuyama), and this keeps raising inexhaustible ontological, ethical and aesthetic questions (decisive are here Bostrom's reflexions).
2015
The cybernetization process which emerged in the middle of the 20 th Century and the digital evolution of information and communication technologies in the beginning of the 21 st Century are today resulting in a growing technicization and reticulation of social and cognitive human environments and to their invasion by media technologies at all scales (“smart” and real-time evolving algorithmic environments, analysis of micro-sensitive data, colonization of daily life by “social networks”). Thus revealing the primary technical condition of human beings, this cybernetic becoming of contemporary environments imply to ask anew the ecological question and to rethink the Humanities, in the context of digital capitalism and hyper-industrial society.
in Flusser Studies: Multilingual Journal for Cultural and Media Theory
This paper offers a brief exploration of Vilém Flusser’s proposed yet undeveloped concept of “new humanism” and argues for the centrality of the concept for a distinct ethical-political track that winds its way through all of his writings on communication, media, and technology, in addition to his explicit references to exile and nationalism. Because changing technologies circumscribe the field of possibility for human activity, the analysis of technology then becomes a matter of anthropology. By placing these questions at the center of his inquiries into communications and media, Flusser re-conceives the human subject itself, ensuring that his “new humanism” is not a return to any established version, but will reckon with the fact that technological development prompts changes in the definitions of the human itself. I also consider his demand for a new humanism an exemplary case for a relation to the master terms of the Enlightenment and humanistic investigation in the digital age, which persists after digitality even as they are then recoded.
Posthumanism, Technogenesis, and Digital Technologies: A Conversation with Katherine N. Hayles
The Fibreculture Journal, Issue 23, 2014
Holger Pötzsch: Katherine Hayles, your idea of posthumanism is inspired by cybernetics and by a new attentiveness to the body and materiality? N. Katherine Hayles: Posthumanism as I define it in my book How We Became Posthuman (1999) was in part about the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject and the attributes 95 FCJ-172 fibreculturejournal.org
Posthumanism and the Ends of Technology
Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, 2022
To pose the question of posthumanist technology today, it is insufficient to reiterate the question as posed by Heidegger in the years immediately following the Second World War. In this chapter, it is argued that only by moving beyond the anthropocentric limits of Heidegger’s position, does it become possible to engage critically with both the place and the potential of technical ensembles within the giant cybernetic system we know as the Anthropocene. To do this, it is necessary first of all to analyze the process of instrumentalization as the deracinating essence of our technological modernity that seems hell-bent on global catastrophe. The coincidence of instrumentality and causality that begins with Aristotle determines just what can and, more importantly, cannot be counted as an entity deserving of ethical consideration. Indeed, the truism that posits the existence of an internal principle unique to biological organisms that governs the organization of living forms of matter still prevails to this day and remains fundamental as to how we think of ourselves as human beings today, a normative process of identification that is repeatedly fed back to us in the form of our worst collective nightmares. This principle, it is argued, serves an entirely ideological function, propping up an unfounded distinction between living and nonliving forms of organization on the basis that the organization of living beings retains as its condition the potential to be profoundly unpredictable. Whereas the metaphysical concept of life only ever drags us back to the impossibility of genetic origin and to the ghost in the machine that is all that remains of humanism, the potential for novelty definitive of metastable forms of organization – including all forms of living being – has no need of magical donations of vitality. And potential, above all else, is the primary concern of both the posthuman and the technological insofar as it concerns the chance of a future in the making.