miah - becoming posthuman
TRANSCRIPT
8/13/2019 Miah - Becoming Posthuman
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
Professor Andy Miah
@andymiah
Faculty of Business & Creative Industries
BECOMING POSTHUMANinal lecture
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Where did we begin? – Political, social, and (moral)philosophical
implications of posthumanism
• Joanna Zylinska „ethics of cultural studies‟
(2005)
• Communication of science through media
• Question found in centuries of philosophicalthought (see Fukuyama)
– Different ways of characterising the human
• Transhumanism, cyborgology, posthumanism
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• What is posthumanism? – Fetish for the new (though Posthumanism
has been around as a formal area ofscholarly inquiry since 1990s)
• The new is characterised byspeculation
– eg. We may imagine a future wherepeople are genetically modified to avoidall suffering brought about by biologicaldysfunction, but such a future may
require an overwhelming burden ofhealth surveillance throughout life
– Consequence of a leisure society
• Where enhancement is seen as anecessity, rather than just a luxury
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Paul Virilio (humanist)
– Speed is characteristic of these times
– Suspicious of modern/postmodern
– Globalisation or virtualisation? – We are not fragmented communities
– We retain „grand narratives‟, such as a concern for
justice
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Paul Virilio – Critiquing the „Art of Technology‟
• Immediacy and instantaneity
• Loss of orientation
– The Transplant Revolution
• Collapse of the distinction bw the human bodyand technology
• Concern for „neo-eugenics‟
– Critique of Stelarc for becoming the last manbefore automation
– Rejects Cybersex: technological replacement ofemotions
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• What is the status of the posthuman?
– Is the posthuman ontologically transitory?
• What happens after AI?
• What happens after athletes are geneticallymodified?
• Does the sky fall or does it just challenge our
imagination in a very difficult way?
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Let‟s imagine that world
– Genetically modified, surgically enhanced,
super-intelligent, forever young, politically
superficial, communicatively reductionistic,
• Not so different from present day
• Why have technological futures been
characterised as dystopian?
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Status of posthuman remains the same
• Being human is not affected by thesetendencies
– We do not become unhuman, subhuman orinhuman
– We do not lose our rationality or consciousness
– We retain many of our characteristics
– We still feel emotion, care about others
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• It does, however, create new burdens – Responsibility towards ecosystem health
– Patenting human genes
– Rationing health care resources
• But we are used to this.
• We remain human, despite thesethings
– But this still begs the question „what is human‟ – Is it intelligence? Is it morality? Is it our capacityto feel and articulate emotion?
– These are all good arguments
» (defining the posthuman requires definingthe human)
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Once posthuman, can we then everturn our backs on technology? – The implication being that, even if it is not
wholly explained by technology, that the
posthuman is constitutively technological – But, posthumanism is more than
technology, even if technology isconstitutive of the posthuman
• Our view of the world changes through
technology – Technology also become a way of
returning to nature - environmentaltechnology
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• What comes after the posthuman?
– Does it reveal a linearity towards
something?
– Is posthumanity necessarily „after‟?
– Is posthumanism a reaction to high-
technology and its infiltration of culture
• Seeking a return to the natural
– Posthumanism has been used in a way to
counter our acceptance of technology• It instils fear
– Cf. Fukuyama
• But this is merely its untheorised,
superficial articulation, where it has
been used in a same way as…
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• “Monsters, aliens and others still
function as important monitors
and mediators of understandings
of what it means to be
post/human” (Graham 2003).
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• Perhaps becoming posthuman
entails becoming comfortable
with this kind of future/present
– Relinquishing us from the ties of
the „natural‟
• Even though we have always
tampered with nature
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• It would be superficial to concludethat we are still human, but alsoinadequate to argue we areposthuman
– Are we in limbo?
– We have already contested thedefinition of humanness
– At most, we can conclude that there aremany ways of being human and, as
individuals, we appropriate thesedifferent ways in different contexts
• We are not always representing theposthuman
• But posthumanism acknowledgediversity
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
• But if there is no clear definition of
being human, then posthumanness
might be an acceptance of this
– Different ways of being human• Gray‟s definition of the cyborg
– Which is why it is primarily an ideology
and not a statement about the human use
of technology
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BECOMING POSTHUMAN
Beyond Posthumanism?
FINAL DEBATE
We are alreadyposthuman.
Agree or disagree?