The Posthuman and the Post-Biological

The Posthumanand

the Post-Biological

The goal of the post-human is a zoo of posthumanities rather than the family of man

Judith/Jack Halberstam & Ira Livingston

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

What defines the human changes historically – we call this process an anthropological machine

Giorgio Agamben, The Open

This anthropological machine is a continuum with animals on one side and technologies on the other

Animals

Technologies

More Than Human

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930)

Robert Silverberg, Son of Man (1971)

Human + Machine

Frederick Pohl, Man Plus (1976)

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Marge Piercy, He, She and It (1991)

Amy Thomson, Virtual Girl (1993)

The Posthuman

PandorumChristian Alvart 2009

Biomedia

Post-biological


Hunters have evolved from an enzyme to make humans accommodate better to a new planetary environment


This is a posthuman future as nightmare — we will try to create better ways of surviving, but in the process we will create something inhuman


Biomedia experiments will end in a different form of degeneracy, making us more animal than human in the process

SpliceVincenzo Natali 2009

Biomedia

Ethics

Gender


Splicing genes from human and animal creates Dren, blurring boundaries between animal, human and technology


The anthropological machine in Splice revolves around the complicated issue of biomedia and rights. Dren is not human — not entirely — and this why transgressions against her are okay


The ambiguity of Dren is strong, both in terms of gender and her status as human.


The posthumanity in Splice is both overt and subtle. The genetic engineering of humans is presented as a dangerous path but also a path which we inevitably will walk down.


We face both desire and disgust for Dren, yet are mostly empathic to her situation for most of the film.

The Windup GirlPaolo Bacigalupi 2009

Biomedia

New People


All fossil fuels have been used up and most plants and foodstuffs have been killed by genetic plagues known as blister rust.


“That is the nature of our beasts and plagues. They are not dumb machines to be driven about. They have their own needs and hungers. Their own evolutionary demands. They must mutate and adapt…”


“’My body is not mine,’ she told him, her voice flat when he asked about the performances. ‘The men who designed me, they make me do things I cannot control. As if their hands are inside me. Like a puppet, yes?’”


“We should all be windups now. It’s easier to build a person impervious to blister rust than to protect an earlier version of the human creature. A generation from now, we could be well-suited to our new environment. Your children could be the beneficiaries. Yet you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with your environment over millennia, and which you now, perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep with.”


Humans have always transformed alongside the environment; our current biomediated environment will end up transforming us — which is the point exaggerated in The Windup Girl

PrometheusRidley Scott 2012

Biomedia

Engineers and humans


Halfway between the early posthumanist science fiction and the contemporary biomediated one, providing an origin story of the human rather than of the posthuman


The alien creature becomes the opposite side of the anthropological machine in this work and so serves the side of the animal. The Engineers are aligned with a creator of some sort, but in terms of biomedia


Our biomedia origins technically raises the issue of human-as-animal, no such discussion is suggested. Instead, humans remain a chosen species indicating a kind of divinity to our creation

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga – Mother Monster – calls into question ontological configurations of difference

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga

Challenges the integrity of the organic body, and confronting the viewer with her morphogenesis into human-machine-animal hybrid

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga

There is a link between mothers, monsters and machines in the displacement of women in the reproductive realm as a high-tech affair

Consequences for the human

These posthuman works reside in an imaginary space which questions conventional understandings of subjectivity, the body, and reality

These posthuman works confront traditional ideas of the subject, language, and culture offers the possibility to think differently and think differences differently

No longer is difference the articulation of an opposition between Self and Other, but rather beyond simple dialectics into a larger dialog of positive identities

Posthumanism is a proliferation of experiences of different bodies existing in various technologies and recasts how our bodies are lived and imagined

Thank you!

Documents

The Posthuman and the Post-Biological