Crossbreed, Change, Betray (original) (raw)
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Contemporary posthumanisms can be understood as operations of subtraction. Each suspends or ‘unbinds’ some epistemological and ethical privilege attaching to the human: whether as a vital embodied subject or the free rational subject of post-Kantian thought. However, each posthumanism combines a subtractive or abstractive epistemology with an erotics of alienation, a xenophilic urge to splice a future that does not simply reproduce the present but is - in some still unimaginable way - disconnected from it. I start from the assumption that the subtractive orientation alone cannot explain the orientation of the posthuman to the future. To understand the posthuman we must understand the erotic or ‘desiring’ aspect that enjoins this production of the new (Roden 2018). This text was presented remotely at on May 3, 2019 at the conference A Sad & Lonely Constellation: Navigating the Antinomies of Technological Hope at the Caffè Letterario in Milan. ASALC proposed "to navigate through the thick swarm of hopes surrounding the body of Artificial Intelligence as it accelerates towards us." The panel can be seen be seen here https://youtube.com/watch?v=SD42RWdR8qc
International Journal of Communication, 2016
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Subtraction is a critical method whereby a cognitively inaccessible reality is thought in terms of its inaccessibility or “subtraction” from discourse. In this essay I begin by considering the role of subtraction in Alain Badiou’s work, where the method receives its most explicit contemporary articulation. I then generalize subtraction beyond Badiou’s ontology to explore a productive aporia in posthumanist theory. The implicit subtraction of posthumanist epistemology and ontology, I claim, confronts theorists of the posthuman with an inescapable tension between their philosophical language and its deployment within the historical situation I call the “posthumanist predicament.” This reveals an equivalence between ontological subtraction and an empty compulsion to become what one cannot yet think, or “xenophilia.” That is, between a philosophy of limits that forecloses the thought of the posthuman (qua defined structure or subject) through subtraction and an implicit desire to construct or “become” this subtracted, unpresented posthuman.
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The elite imaginaries of our world hold a monopoly over the future, drawing power from the particular 'utopias' they promote as a kind of currency to induce a psychosomatic investment in a specific future of society. This displaces the material and temporal content of actually lived exploitation today. In considering the ways in which power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively, we explore the conditions for shaping an asymmetrical politics of transformation beyond the hyperbolic tropes of our current future. To this end, we argue that alien-theory can help to conjure new tomorrows through a focus on the creative power of non-being, disconnection, exploitation and alienation. In collecting together critical threads running through 'science fiction capital', cyborg theory, Afrofuturism and Xenofeminism, we synthesize a series of 'alien-on-earth' approaches to this futures-crisis in the context of a neoliberal present where our relationship with the experience of alienation has been fundamentally changed, altered and reformed. In speaking to the ways in which we can begin to decolonise this future-monopoly, we explore the concept of chronopolitics as a collective effort for unearthing different histories, mapping alternative spatio-temporalities and reshaping our present conditions in the now of time.
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