Idea Transcript
FOAR 702: Posthumanism Session 2, 2016 - Mondays, 12-2pm 4 Modules (of 3 weeks each) Module 1:
A Genealogy of Ideas
Week 1 – English
Introduction: What is “posthumanism”?
August 1
Film screening: Her (Spike Jonze)
Required Readings 1. N.Katherine Hayles, Ch 1, Toward Embodied Virtuality in How We Became Posthuman (1999). 2. Badmington, “Theorising Posthumanism” Cultural Critique, No. 53, ( 2003), pp. 1027.
Victoria Flanagan and Paul Sheehan Week 2 – Philosophy
August 8
Michael Olson
Finitude and Subjectivity: Early Modern Humanism Though posthumanism is much more than a simple rejection or overcoming of humanism, it will nevertheless prove helpful to foreground our discussion of the former with some reflection on the latter.
1. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. Elizabeth Forbes, in E. Cassirer, P.O. Kristeller, J.H. Randall Jr (eds), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1956) 215-256.
In this seminar, we will discuss two short texts of renaissance and early modern humanism. First, we will discuss Pico’s claim that what are often taken to be human limitations are in reality the foundations of the surpassing value and freedom of human life. We will also consider the centrality of the rational subject in Descartes’
2. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D, Murdoch (eds. and trans.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 111131.
paradigmatically modern philosophical system. Week 3 – MMCCS August 15
Undine Sellbach
Feminism and Neuroscience
Essential Reading:
Descartes’ mind and body split made way for a science where human bodies could be dissected and studied like elaborate machines. Responding to this, many feminists have been critical of the medical sciences for their reductive accounts of bodies. The provocation of Elizabeth Wilson’s work, however, is that contemporary neuroscience and feminist understandings of embodiment should exist in productive new relations.
Wilson, Elizabeth A. “Brain in the Gut,” Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Duke, 2004, pp. 16 - 31 Recommended Reading: Wilson, Elizabeth A. “Gut Feminism,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 66-94.
In this seminar we will ask: What can feminism learn from an engagement with the medical sciences? How do neurological accounts of gut confound conventional understandings of mind and body? What does Wilson bring to the medical literature she reads? What might “gut feminism” be important?
Module 2:
Postbiology
Week 4 – English
Corporeal reimagining
Essential reading:
Bodily modifications in the context of posthumanism generally involve the exploitation or extension of some kind of scientific / technological principle – which is why posthumanist reimaginings are so often the provenance of
J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1984)
August 22
Giorgio Agamben, “The Muselmann”, from Remnants of Auschwitz (1999)
Paul Sheehan
science fiction. Coetzee’s Michael K, by contrast, uses South African politics (c. 1980, but set in the near future) to draw connections between body, environment, nature, narrative and animality. In this seminar, we will consider alternatives to technological posthumanism via what could be termed ‘political posthumanism’, based principally (though not exclusively) on a politics of the body.
Recommended reading: Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002) Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013)
The questions to be addressed include: how does such a bodily or corporeal politics relate to more conventional understandings of the ‘political’ that involve authority, bureaucracy, rule of law, and so on? Does the protagonist’s journey signify freedom, self-subjugation, or some other kind of state or condition? Week 5 – Philosophy August 29
Colin Klein
Transhumanism Humans are poised to create machines that are far more intelligent than we are -- indeed, perhaps more intelligent than we could even grasp. It seems like we ought to be concerned about that. Is there any way that humans could restrict superintelligent machines within human-friendly boundaries? Or, conversely, ought we instead embrace the possibility of moving beyond our limited, historically contingent human values, even if we cannot now conceive of what a transition would be like?
Primary Texts: 1. http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwil l.pdf 2. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/oracle.pdf Recommended Reading: 1. http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/values.pdf 2. https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanierthe-myth-of-ai
Module 3:
Animals
Week 6 – English
Science, Species and Subjectivity
Primary texts:
September 5
Peter Singer argues that “If a being suffers, there can be no Film Screening: Project NIM, James Marsh (2011). moral justification for refusing to take that suffering in to consideration” (50). What do these texts suggest about the Dovey, Ceridwen. “A Letter to Sylvia Plath, Soul of Dolphin, Died 2003, Iraq.” Only the Animals (2014). nature and experience of animal suffering? How do they challenge conventional binaries or hierarchies of human and animal suffering?
Victoria Flanagan
How do these texts engage with the concept of speciesism?
Secondary texts: Moore, Lisa Jean. “Speciesism.” Contexts 12.1 (2013): 12-13. Ratelle, Amy. “Science, Species and Subjectivity.” Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 90-116. Singer, Peter. “Equality for Animals?” Practical Ethics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 48-70.
Week 7 – MMCCS
September 12
Jakob von Uexküll: Animals, Ecologies and the Imagination Writing in the 1930s, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll proposes that animals, plants and even cells in our bodies are subjects with distinct perceptions and orientations. Dissatisfied with a mechanistic language of cause and effect, he turns to aesthetics to help think an organism's
Essential Reading/Viewing Extracts from: Von Uexküll, J. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning. Trans. J.D. O’Neil. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2010. and
Undine Sellbach
relation with its environment, and the larger ecological relations it participates in. Most famously, Uexküll imagines a vast symphony of nature, where all living things are musically, and also structurally, attuned like different orchestral instruments, allowing for the intensification of relational properties. But Uexküll’s biology also has a more playful dimension, where he invites his readers to ventriloquize animal environments, using make shift objects, sensations and words. In the seminar we will combine a discussion with improvised imaginative activities, asking: Do insects, plants, bacteria and even cells, actively sense and interpret their environments? Are animals subjects with worlds of their own? Can art, music, performance and play, help science understand the complex ecological and evolutionary relationships living things participate in?
Rossellini, I. Green Porno [Short films] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk19yT8ZSbg Further Resources 1. Grosz, E. “Art and the Animal,” Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics and Art. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. 2. Agamben, G. “Umwelt” and “Tick” The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 3. Wheeler, W. "Affective Habitus: Wendy Wheeler 'A Feeling for Life'" [Public Lecture] https://vimeo.com/117875479
Mid-semester Break – September 19-30 *Public holiday on Monday 3rd October, so no class Week 9 –
Multi-Species Futures
Primary Texts:
English October 10
Nayar discusses a multi-species future in which there is “a rejection of autonomous subjectivity in favour of an intersubjective condition, a communitarianism that I am calling species cosmopolitanism” (126).
Film screening: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis) – “Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts” (Episode 2)
Victoria Flanagan
How do these texts conceptualise a multi-species future? What might be the empathetic and progressive potentials of such a future?
Hornung, Eva. Dog Boy (2009).
How do the ideas of companion species and co-evolution seek to alter or re-imagine traditional interactions between species? How does the prospect of a multi-species future challenge conventional understandings of an autonomous subjectivity?
Secondary Texts: Nayar, Pramod K. “Posthuman Visions: Toward Companion Species.” Posthumanism. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2014. 125-149. Grebowicz, Margret and Helen Merrick. “Ethics.” Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 74-85.
Module 4:
Posthumanity – (Implications of posthumanism – where to from now?)
Week 10 –
The Wisdom of Silenus and Antinatalism
Philosophy
Posthumanisms certainly offer fruitful suggestions for how we might continue to address deeply entrenched problems of social and political life. There are some, however, who conclude that criticisms of the paramount value of human life usher in a broad pessimism about the value of human life as such.
October 17 Michael Olson
Week 11 –
Peter Zapffe, “The Last Messiah,” trans. Gisle Tangenes, Philosophy Now, vol. 45 (2004) 95-39. David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006) 18-59.
This week we will discuss two such pessimistic views, one of which argues powerfully that we have a moral obligation to abstain from procreation. To live is, after all, to suffer. Vibrant Matter
Essential Reading:
In Vibrant Matter Jane Bennett asks if non-living (and part Jane Bennett, “Preface” and “The Agency of
MMCCS
October 24
living) things such as metal, food, electricity or rubbish are agents in the formation of political and ecological relations. Breaking with the idea that the world can be portioned into life and dead matter, she proposes a “vital materiality” that crosses between living and non-living things.
Assemblages,” Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, Duke UP, 2010, pp. vii – xix and 20-38. Recommended Reading: Yusoff, K. “Queer Coal: Genealogies in/or Blood,” philoSOPHIA, Vol. 5, Num. 2, Summer 2015, pp. 203229
Undine Sellbach
In this seminar we ask: Why does Bennett think political theory needs to address the agencies of non-living things? What new vocabularies and practices might be entailed? Why is this important in the context of the Anthropocene?
Week 12 – English
The figure of the cyborg; posthuman challenges to concepts of subjectivity and social relations
October 31
How does the figure of the cyborg destabilise conventional models of subjectivity? What sort of anxieties does it generate about empowerment and disempowerment?
Secondary Texts:
How do these texts problematise and subvert binary oppositions? (self/other, human/machine, real/artificial, feminine/masculine, mind/body, nature/culture etc.) What are the social and literary effects of these disruptions?
Toffoletti, Kim. “Feminism, Technology, and the Posthuman” Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 9-30.
How does the figure of the cyborg interrogate normative schemas of femininity?
Vint, Sherryl. “Introduction.” Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 3-26.
Victoria Flanagan and Paul Sheehan
Primary Texts: Pearson, Mary E. The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008).
Recommended reading: Nayar, Pramod K. “The Body, Reformatted.” Posthumanism. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press,
2014. 55-76. Nayar, Pramod K. “Life Itself: The View From Disability Studies and Bioethics.” Posthumanism. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2014. 100-124.
Week 13
Class Presentations
November 7
Assessment: Assessment Task
Weight
Description
Due Date
Active Engagement and Participation
10%
Students are expected to participate actively in each weekly seminar.
Evaluated on a weekly basis.
Research Proposal
20%
Students must submit a 800-1000 word outline for their final research paper. This outline should provide brief information about:
September 5
1. The problem/issue/text(s) that the paper seeks to address. (That is, outline the scope of your paper.) 2. The theoretical framework that will be used to analyse this
problem/issue/text. Please refer specifically to published scholarship and indicate how these writers/publications will allow you expand and develop your own ideas. 3. Indicate how your argument will progress and develop – what issues and concepts will you consider, and what kinds of conclusions do you hope to be able to draw?
Research Paper
50%
The aim of this paper is to apply posthumanism as a critical November 16 framework to an issue or problem within your own discipline. Alternatively, you can focus your analysis on a book, film or other cultural artefact. Questions that you might use to frame your critical inquiry include: 1. How can posthumanism challenge or expand traditional understandings of human identity and experience? 2. How might posthumanism offer fruitful suggestions for how to address deeply entrenched problems of social and political life? 3. What might a posthuman future entail? What are the implications of this future for humanity and other lifeforms? (Please only use one of these questions to frame your argument and discussion.)
Class Presentation
20%
In the final week of semester, each student will make a brief presentation which outlines the central focus of their major research project.
Week 13
Learning Outcomes: A) Acquire a coherent and advanced knowledge of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project. B) Synthesize and analyze information from a variety of sources in order to develop an awareness of current debates about the status of the posthuman. C) Critically reflect on the relationship between posthumanism and research in the humanities and social sciences. D) Exercise independence in the identification of a research problem and formulate a sophisticated approach to investigate it.