I’ve been thinking about whether i should just copy and past the feedback I got or if it was better to only put some parts in this post. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll “just” copy and past it, but not because it’s easier (because it is) but because this way I’ll have ALL the feedback here. So if I need to access it and can’t find it in my emails, I won’t be missing parts.

Hi Francisca,

I’ve now read through your Independent Study proposal – here are a few thoughts. This is great stuff, and looks to have the makings of an exciting dissertation.

You make a distinction between ‘control’ of technology and ‘mutation’ through exposure – this could be developed in interesting ways, particularly if part of a broader consideration of the collapse of various dualisms central to humanist thought, such as self/other, mind/body, free will/determinism, organic/technological, culture/nature, human/animal, one/many, etc.

Haraway’s work is a good way into this, though it might be useful to find a contemporary source that responds to or develops specific points of Haraway’s argument which relate to biotechnology.

You could also consider her recent writings and talks on the subject of the Anthropocene. In a sentence, the Anthropocene is a term geologists are now using to describe the idea that we have now entered the ‘age of man’, an age that can be measured geologically, namely by the scarring of the earth. There are broader implications related to such an idea, particularly concerning the temporality of such an age – if the age of the human is simply a brief moment in the deep time of the planet, then the human is clearly not at the centre of all things, as we have previously assumed. This is nicely outlined in a piece by Claire Colebrook (a key writer on the posthuman) in the context of memory: http://thememorynetwork.net/the-anthropocene-and-the-archive/

The Braidotti book you mention should certainly be a key source. There are a couple of recent books you could add to it – Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism?, and a collection called The Nonhuman Turn edited by Richard Grusin. I attach pdfs of the introductions to both books.

Ray Kurzweill’s rapturous writings could certainly play a key role in your study if you wish, but it is not a theoretical text so you would need to use it in a different way to the other material. The Latour text might be a bit heavy going – perhaps it would be better to look for texts that directly apply Latour’s idea that ‘we have never been modern’ to media technologies.

I would suggest avoiding the Curran text you cite. He is rather caught up in the old representationalist model of media theory, and you are doing something much more interesting here. Perhaps you could substitute this text with some of the material on accelerationism I mentioned? Deleuze and Guattari, key figures associated with discourses of acceleration, were inspired by Nietzsche’s call to ‘accelerate the process’. It might be interesting to explore links between the somewhat post-political acceleration of the ‘Extropians’ and the political discourses of accelerationism. As a taster, I attach part of the introduction from The Accelerationist Reader.

The Thacker essay you mention is derived from a longer book – Biomedia, published in 2004. Here’s a blurb on the book, I have a copy of this if you’d like to read it: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/biomedia

Finally, I would recommend going back to a text we used for Society, Aesthetics and Digital Media last year: Life After New Media by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska. Specifically, take a look at the passages in which they refer to Bernard Stiegler’s notion of ‘originary technicity’. This is in the library, but let me know if you can’t get hold of a copy.

In terms of focusing your attention as you progress, I think your proposal to examine various ‘fictive visions’ should provide you with a structure. I would recommend that you avoid any concern with how ‘realistic’ these might be, and instead consider how such visions are symptomatic of a crisis in traditional humanism, and/or serve to express the emergence of such debates in society more generally. In this sense, any references to policy documents, regulation, etc., should be made in response or as an aside to such visions. So, I would recommend that you begin compiling some potential fictive visions of the posthuman, and then over the coming weeks we can reduce this list to two or three key examples that can be examined in detail. Off the top of my head, the film Ex Machina, and the Channel 4 series Humans (broadcast this summer) might be interesting, though there are plenty of other less obvious ways you could approach this. Perhaps your selection of fictive visions (the key examples around which you might structure your essay) could individually focus on specific realms of crisis, e.g. crisis of the human body, crisis of human consciousness, etc.

See you in week 3,

Rob

Right this all sounds a bit wacky and it probably won’t make any sense cause it doesn’t quite make sens in my head yet either but here is what I’m thinking:

If we have evolved from homo sapiens and they evolved from their ancestors and they from theirs and so on and so on then the human will eventually evolve too. Which brings us to my dissertation topic of the post human. So if the post human is what comes after us, in other words a hybrid of machine and organism, then there’ll be no need for gender anymore, nor for religion, nor for families (reproduction). Technology will enable us to “fix” ourselves, to essentially live forever. Does this mean the post human is the final stage? That there is nothing that comes after because we can’t evolve?

Because if so, and that’s where my brain stops working, does that mean we create God? Or at least something that is the highest form of existence, that can never be greater than what it is? Now I don’t believe in the concept of God, but if the post human becomes the creator of everything that is still to come, and by that I mean worlds, landscapes (I haven’t thought as far as creatures) and is therefor God of everything it creates, does that mean the new world with evolution and everything will eventually reach the status of God? And that everything is just a huge cycle of creation???

The area I am interested in researching for my dissertation revolves around posthumanism and biotechnology. I am especially intrigued by the extent to which human beings will remain human. Several media texts predict a future of cyborgs and robots, or even a transition from the physical to the digital world. The scenarios range from creating human clones for “organ harvesting”, as in “The Island”, to using cyborgs as a new body, in “Surrogates”, to transferring our mind into the virtual world, as described in the novel “More Than This”. This implies biological as well as cultural changes, changes to the body and to society. I want to look at how the concept of the “self” will be transformed, how we will identify ourselves when we reach the stage of posthumanism – that is, if we reach it in the first place. There are also notions that suggest that human beings have always been posthuman.

There have always been fictive visions of our modifying our bodies to make them better, faster, stronger even immortal. The question however is, how realistic these concepts are. The representation of the posthuman being is often supernatural and unrealistic. There are all kinds of superheroes and villains who are able to transform their bodies with the help of advanced science and technology. On the other hand, there are Iron Man and Batman, who quite literally use technology as a tool. Neither of them experiences a change in their human bodies, but rather use advanced technologies to fight evil. And then there is mutation, as in X-Men and Spiderman. However, in X-Men mutation happens “naturally”, it is part of human evolution and not caused by bio-, or nanotechnology. Ironically, at the same time society sees mutants as being non-human. It would be interesting to find out whether a human being who advances with the help of technology is seen as being more human than someone who mutates due to natural causes. I imagine that when technologies are used, we control and are in control of the transformation, whereas in the case of a mutation we would not be able to control it.

Read the complet proposal here: Proposal_FB.docx