This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, ...but actively emerge through entanglements and in co-constitutive relation with one another. Such an attentiveness recognises that we are shaped by the places in which we live and by the many others – human and nonhuman – with whom we live. It also urges the need to reshape research methodologies. To illuminate how we might more closely attend to the places in which we live, learn, teach, inquire, and research, this article offers a series of situated, speculative, and somatechnic engagements arising from our recent ventures in two separate post-industrial cities. The article is framed as a mode of writing otherwise – as a series of experimental elemental essays and the theory-practice diffractive musings they have given rise to. Taken together, the essays and musings aim to contest deficit discourses of post-industrial cities and the multiple bodies who / which inhabit them. The posthuman situated and speculative somatechnics approach we propose offers insights into unexpected and surprising new relations. We hope the elemental essays and musings which follow invite readers to take up the ‘practice of the pause’ in their own places and spaces.
Pippi's posthuman power Lundström, Markus
International journal of sociology and social policy,
05/2021, Letnik:
41, Številka:
3/4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
PurposeThis study aims to probe the ambiguity of posthuman heroism by revisiting the remarkable story of the children's literature icon Pippi Longstocking. The purpose is to explore with Pippi a ...non-anthropocentric living in the more-than-human world.Design/methodology/approachThe study’s critical posthumanist analysis is empirically based on the American English translation of the Pippi book trilogy from the 1950s, as well as the Swedish TV series produced in 1969.FindingsPippi's posthuman power serves to conceptualize a move beyond the anthropocentric savior complex. The analysis exhibits a power used to defy, mock and resist authority, but always with the purpose of securing agency for Pippi and her community. This power to, rather than power over, becomes a creative force that builds a posthuman community between inorganic matter, human and nonhuman animals.Originality/valueInstead of showcasing a heroism to save our planet, Pippi animates how to relate differently to the more-than-human world. She is a productive fantasy, an idea materialized – a posthuman figuration – that extends the notion of community, opens up the demos and forcefully challenges anthropocentric normativity.
In this article, I draw on William S. Burroughs’ The Western Lands to think about what François Laruelle has termed a “generic humanity.” This generic humanity broadens and expands our ethical ...obligations towards those who have not yet been included in humanity. Burroughs’ emphasis in the novel on flattened time, magic, and death as transformation is used to show how we can make Mankind extinct from our way of thinking. Burroughs’ novel is thus an example of a “philo-fiction,” a work of literature that allows us to see the world differently.
En este trabajo nos proponemos realizar una lectura crítica de la obra reciente del artista argentino Tomás Saraceno, desde la perspectiva del materialismo posthumano. Contra gran parte de la crítica ...que ha señalado en esta obra un ejemplo de colaboración interespecie y una suerte de utopía que habilita nuevas formas de vida para un mundo por venir, nuestro objetivo es señalar cómo se reproduce en este ejemplo una lógica que hace de todo lo existente una cantera disponible para la extracción de recursos (materiales y simbólicos) teleológicamente destinados al existente humano. Acuñamos el término figuración posthumana para pensar alternativas no antrópicas que habiliten modos de ser imaginarios más allá de toda prerrogativa humana.
Lifelong Learning as the Future Human Need Voitovska, Oksana; Tolochko, Svitlana
Philosophy and cosmology : the journal of the International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology (ISPC),
2019, 2019-01-00, 2019-01-01, Letnik:
22, Številka:
22
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the paper, the authors give a brief review of studies in the field of the neuroscience of consciousness in order to prove the following key point of the future human image: lifelong learning is ...the posthuman need. As well as new physical culture, which the authors have examined in the previous article, lifelong learning is the second key feature of the future human image. The authors have used the dialectical, scientific and formal logical methods of philosophy in order to fulfil the task. The novelty of the study is the substantiation of lifelong learning based on the neuroscience of consciousness, as well as the consideration of lifelong learning as a special culture that ensures the continuous development of the neural basis of consciousness. As a result of the study, the authors came to the following conclusions: а) lifelong learning is a special culture that provides continuous development of consciousness in ontogenesis; b) lifelong learning need as culture is due to the dynamic neural basis of consciousness, which requires special conditions for full development in ontogenesis.
En este artículo quiero defender el necesario papel que juega el reconocimiento de la subjetividad animal humana en la articulación de una ética posthumana. Para ello planteo que lo que he llamado ...“escritura animal” es un modo de la escritura que persigue expresar esa animalidad humana. Analizar. los rasgos de lo que es la escritura animal, proponiendo la razón poética de Zambrano como un método adecuado para articularla. Como ejemplo de escritura animal, examinar. las narrativas de lo salvaje feminista. Por último, recorrer esos textos me permitir. destacar algunos principios propios de lo que considero debe ser una ética posthumana.
Ulrike Almut Sandig's 'bootleg' version of Walter Ruttmann's 1927 documentary of Berlin consists of a 22 canto cycle recorded and read over the film image, with a soundtrack by her Ukrainian ...collaborator, DJ and composer Grigory Semenchuk. This article argues that Gesänge des Funkturms - nach Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927 (2016) makes an intervention into urban space that constitutes a claim of 'right to the city' (Lefebvre). The methodological roots of the Gesänge can be traced to Sandig's 'Augenpost' project in Leipzig (2001-08), in which the poet and two collaborators staged a sustained intervention into public space in Leipzig, pasting poetry onto the city's walls. Through the Gesänge Sandig develops the right to the city into an emancipatory reconceptualization of the relationship between urban space and urban subject. Close reading of the Gesänge demonstrates how Sandig produces an epic reconstitution of Berlin's history from a radically 'othered' position and proposes a new ontology of the city constituted by a porous, hybridized, collective network of others.
We live in the digital age where our sense of self and identity has moved beyond the body to encompass hardware and software. Cyborgs, online representations in social media, avatars, and virtual ...reality extend our notion of what it means to be human. This book looks at the progression of self from the biological to the technological using a multidisciplinary approach. It examines the notion of personhood from philosophical, psychological, neuroscience, robotics, and artificial intelligence perspectives, showing how the interface between bodies, brains, and technology can give rise to new forms of human identity. Jay Friedenberg presents the content in an organized and easy-to-understand fashion to facilitate learning. A gifted researcher, author, and classroom teacher, he is one of the most influential voices in the field of artificial psychology.
Artistic works provide unique ways of understanding the gendered and sexual subject. Bringing together a feminist psychoanalytic materialist approach inspired by Rosi Braidotti with the work of the ...artist Louise Bourgeois, this essay highlights how sculpture in particular can show the polymorphy of female embodiment. It thereby moves beyond previous interpretations of Bourgeois, which mainly drew on Freud's and Klein's psychoanalytic theory. Focusing on three works by Bourgeois, Torso/Self-Portrait (1963-64), Janus Fleuri (1968), and Maman (1999), I argue that these sculptures show amorph, ambiguous, and hybrid modes of embodiment. All three examples thus illustrate the lived polymorphy of the subject's body. I read Torso/Self-Portrait as an example of what Braidotti calls the state of 'Becoming-Woman' and, thereby, as deconstructing phallic identity. Janus Fleuri can be seen as further breaking with the Oedipal logic and as depicting the subject's profound sexual ambivalence-which importantly is not merely situated in the realm of discourse but in embodied materiality. Finally, I interpret Maman as an example of what Braidotti calls 'Becoming-Insect', or in another formulation, a 'posthuman'. As such, Maman shows how one can escape the Freudian/Lacanian fate of being a woman confined to the Pre Oedipal state of lack. My essay concludes that sculpture is particularly suited to show the subject's lived polymorphy, i.e., the ability to have different morphological forms simultaneously. By virtue of its three-dimensionality, sculpture allows the embodied viewer to experience the polymorphy of the gendered and sexual subject by encountering it as another body.
Academy Award-winning author and illustrator Shaun Tan's 2007 graphic novel The Arrival poignantly tells the story of the typical immigrant experience. Tan creates an ostensibly alienating and ...unfamiliar terrain which may be described as a "posthuman landscape". Instead of presenting the traditional native-versus-immigrant framework typical of diasporic stories, Tan chooses to delineate an inter-species relationship where the immigrant man is assisted by a native animal. An odd-looking creature becomes the protagonist's guide in the new country and assists him in a myriad of ways throughout the story. This article explores the implications of such a relationship in the age of the Anthropocene where the privileged anthropocentrism of western humanism has been replaced by an egalitarianism of species. Using Donna Haraway's notion of "companion species" and Rosi Braidotti's recent articulation of the posthuman, it suggests a connection between the posthuman and the postcolonial in Tan's text and thereby explores the significance of a non-human Other coming to the assistance of the immigrant Other within the space of a posthuman, postcolonial world. Thus the article seeks to study the reconfiguration of otherness in the face of incommensurable difference, and articulate its implications for diasporic thought.
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