Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2003 19:52:53 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: what is the posthuman ?


Eric/all,

I think it is unncessary for me to repeat Lyotard's critiqiue and 
refusal of  Hayles position as you represent it below - I of course (as 
you know) agree with him (apart from the fact that he got his dates 
wrong and i guess he doesn't understand how long a billion years is...).

Perhaps it will be clearer why the anti-humanism of the 
post-humanism-of-the-enlightenment is more attractive than the Hayles 
approach if we understand where it emerges from. Humans were sacralised 
by the relations imposed on them/us by the religions (and their 1001 
gods), this gave way to the subject/citizins rights which we have been 
enrolled in by the increasingly secular states post the enlightenment. 
The descralisation of humans, by the secular  worldviews that developed 
during the renaissence period resulted in the state becoming almost 
sacrad in turn, and those who in it's service  have become the guardians 
and guarantaurs of the rights og humans, also postulate that we should 
give obediance to our local and incresingly globalised states. It is 
this very humanism which has become the cult of the alienated 'man'. 
Hence the anti-humanism. To apply a technological gloss over the 
humanism and declare it to be post-humanism defines it as reactionary. 
The postulatation of post-humanism as being in some sense related to the 
imposed alienating technology that we have developed precisely within 
the current temporary capitalist infrastructure seems excessive, don't 
you think ?

'Man' has often been confused with the history of the current 
subjugations and freedoms, but this confusion derives from trhe human's 
relations to the material and obviously enough the economic....

Is the post-human as presented in the Hayles position merely an 
acceptence of the current socio-economic as nature ?

regards
steve
(got to go off to see the matrix 3 -  as for Moravec he's just an 
extremely bad and reactionary scientist.... might as well believe in 
anstrology or fairies as that tosh.)

Eric wrote:

>Steve,
>
>It will be very interesting to see what Diane's class has to say about
>this topic or Paul - maybe this would be a good time for anon to return
>with his latest update on cybernetics.
>
>Just to contextualize a bit, N. Katherine Hayles has been writing about
>these issues for a long time now. Probably her best known book is "How
>We Became Posthuman - Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
>Informatics" which I have often thought shares an affinity with
>Lyotard's "Can Thought Go On Without a Body?" insofar as Hayles tends to
>be very critical of the Moravec 'Hail Bop' stance of dropping the body
>in order to ascend into a new pneumatic template; a virtual computerized
>remake of the holy ghost.  
>
>My own understanding of the posthuman is certainly not restricted to the
>"post-humanism-of-the-enlightenment, that is aiming to redefine and go
>beyond the restricted and excluding humanism that has cursed western
>societies and thus the world since the 17th and 18th Centuries."
>
>I tend to regard it as equally linked to what Bucky Fuller once called
>the principle of ephemeralization, what De Chardin referred to as the
>emergence of the noo-sphere, and the art show Lyotard curated under the
>name of the Immaterialists.  It tends to see Information as the master
>cipher unlocking the mysteries of the universe whether this is the DNA
>double helix of Watson and Crick, the theories of Weiner and Shannon, or
>the "it's all a deep structurally embedded hologram of information"
>found in the pop new-age quantum mysticism.
>
>This is certainly not Hayles approach. Against the apocalyptic view that
>encourages the body be 'left behind' in some kind of technocratic
>attempt at engineering the rapture where the mystical body of Christ is
>reconfigured into the virtual grid of Gibson's neuromantic cyberspace,
>Hayles seeks to conceptualize the posthuman instead as a concept
>conducive to the "long-range survival of humans, and of the other
>life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and
>ourselves."
>
>She believes we can accomplish this task by reconceptualizing the
>posthuman.
>
>"As long as the human subject is envisioned as an autonomous self with
>unambiguous boundaries, the human-computer interface can only be parsed
>as a division between the solidity of real life on one side and the
>illusion of virtual reality on the other, thus obscuring the
>far-reaching changes initiated by the development of virtual
>technologies...This view of the self authorizes the fear that if the
>boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing to stop the self's
>complete dissolution. By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a
>distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen
>precisely to depend on the splice rather than being imperiled by it."
>
>Perhaps the answer to the Sophiclean riddle of homo prosthesis is also
>the answer to the Deleuzean point that we still do not know what a body
>is capable of. In this view of the posthuman, 'man' is no longer the
>autonomous Cartesian subject, 'only a little less below the angels', but
>a bricolage assemblage composed of glass, string, wire, rusty cans,
>recombinant DNA, whispers, and the miracle of language. The ghost is not
>in the rusty machine, but rather haunts the entire anime animated pixel
>pixilated distributed universe. To be posthuman is a little like waking
>up to find yourself becoming an incarnation of Watts Tower. We are at
>large and in the midst of things.
>
>There were giants in the earth in those days....
>
>eric 
>
>
> 
>
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