SCIENCE/FICTION: Imagineering the Future of the Human (original) (raw)

Abstract

This monograph ('second book') began more than 20 years ago, after I listed to Katherine Hayles speaking on 'how we became posthuman' in 1999. I then received a postdoc grant by the Swiss National Science Foundations to work on this 'habilitation' project in the Netherlands from 2003-2006, first at the Gender Centre of the University of Nijmegen, then at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Below is the abstract I wrote back then which caused a lot of frowning at the time - especially when I talked about taking the human-animal relation seriously as a topic in critical theory and literary/cultural studies; meanwhile, the posthuman has turned into a new paradigm for the 21st century in a number of academic fields and creative practices, and animals/animots have been followed in many wonderful books. The plan is to finally get the book out there soon, with most of the chapters being elaboration of published articles and unpublished talks and conversations with colleagues of the Critical Posthumanism Network and the international as well as European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. ABSTRACT In the wake of the postmodernist challenge to the humanist values of the Enlightenment and, more effectively perhaps, due to the extraordinary advances in computer technology and biomedical engineering, the category of the human and its analogues – humanism, humanity, humane – are undergoing profound transformations. These changes raise the greatest hopes and deepest fears within contemporary human beings with regard to their individual identity as well as with regard to the future of the human species. With the growing intersections between human, animal and technology, there are no longer any clear answers - if ever there were - to questions such as what it means to be 'human' and where 'humanness' or 'human nature' is to be found. Instead, 'we' witness the death of the liberal-humanist subject as a coherent and autonomous being and the concomitant artificial birth of what has been referred to as 'the posthuman' or 'cyborg', an amalgam of various organic and non-organic components, an entity whose boundaries undergo continuous (de)construction and reconstruction. The project focuses on the category of the post/human as constructed primarily in contemporary science fiction written in English but also as 'imagineered' in theoretical and philosophical writings as well as in (popular) scientific texts on reproduction in a wide sense. The research starts from the premise that the popular genre of science fiction is an important cultural resource for dealing with those changes and, in turn, shapes developments in information and biomedical technology in crucial ways. Because of my contention that the hitherto separate spheres of science fiction, science and social reality are collapsing and in order to emphasise the narrative nature of scientific writings, I consider all the selected types of text as 'science/fiction' to be subjected to a careful narratological analysis which is theoretically and methodologically informed by gender studies, bioethics, deconstruction and the cultural studies of technoscience. My main research interests lie in the investigation of how human beings are 'built' textually and how 'human' is differentiated from other organic and non-organic entities. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between different 'imagineerings' of the post/human and prevailing structures of inequality and discrimination: what/who does the term 'human' include or exclude, and in whose advantage or disadvantage are such inclusions or exclusions?

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