Course:MDIA300/Posthumanism

A Brief Description

In several media studies texts, technologically advanced futures are theorized to be “posthuman”. Daniele Rugo defines posthumanism as an “umbrella term” often referring to the enhancement of human existence due to “applied science and technological developments”. The concept of posthumanism is often seen as dystopian and futuristic; posthuman futures often consist of technology overtaking humans. However, certain theorists argue modern society’s technological creations and reliance on virtual mediums are already characteristic of posthumanism.

Original Definition

The concept of the posthuman was first introduced by Ihab Hassan in Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthuman Culture?: A University Masque in Five Scenes. This theatrical text, written in 1977, includes the characters of Pretext, Mythotext, Text, Heterotext, Context, Metatext, Postext, and Paratext, who discuss the concept of the posthuman as a an “emergent” and “undefined culture (Hassan 831). Text speaks of the posthuman as “inner divisions of consciousness and the external divisions of humankind” being “made whole” (833). Text warns Heterotext that there “is nothing supernatural in the process leading us to a posthumanist culture”; he defines this process as the “human mind” intruding “onto nature and history” (835). To Text, posthumanism, like Prometheus’ mind, is “where Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology, Language and Number” converge (835).

Prometheus as Posthuman

Metatext aims to summarize Text’s conceptions of posthumanism. He believes Prometheus–a “figure of flawed consciousness” who struggles “to transcend” the separation between “the Universal and the Concrete” is a symbol of posthumanism (Hassan 838). He concludes the second scene by recognizing “imagination and science” as “agents of change” whose interactions influence “culture and consciousness” --core principles of posthumanism (838). Hassan’s characters illustrate posthumanism as the intermingling of internal human thought and external phenomena. This is expressed by Text’s speech in the fourth scene. Text believes posthumanism is a radical extension of “human consciousness” and conceptualizes this theory through visualizing Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing of the “Vitruvian Man”, whose limbs, typically enclosed within a circle and square, have “broken through…and spread across the cosmos” (843).

In this masque’s conclusion, Mythotext, outrageously condemns “optimism” towards posthumanism (Hassan 847). He warns that posthumanism may act like its symbolic counterpart, Prometheus, whose trickery and theft must be acknowledged (847). Text encourages Mythotext to calm himself, yet agrees that the posthuman may “beget monsters and mutants” in the form of “cloning, parthenogenesis, transplants, prosthesis; of the alteration of memory, intelligence and behavior” (848).

Fears of Posthumanism

Certain theorists express fear towards a posthuman world in which humans are heavily reliant on technology and virtuality. In her chapter, “Body”, Bernadette Wegenstein views the “posthuman” body as “downright frightening, if not starkly antihumanist" (27). She claims, in a posthuman world, the human body becomes "likened to a machine”; at the same time, human “mental capacities are figured as programs” (27).

Furthermore, she critiques posthumanism by similarizing the concept to “technocultural fads like ‘extropianism’ or cryogenics” (Wegenstein 27). She believes posthumanism often supports “cyberfantasies of radical disembodiment” (27). Additionally, she associates the term with Moravec and Kurzeil’s concept of “wetware”--a reduction of the human body to its mere “flesh and blood” (27). By reducing the physical body to “wetware”, the tangible human body become solely perceived as an impediment to advanced forms of information transfer such as “downloading microthin brain layers onto a hard drive” (27).

Posthumanism in Making

Media theorist and professor, Tim Ingold, in his book, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture, argues “the regression of the hand” to be posthuman (123). Throughout this book, Ingold notes that the popularization of typewriters have led humans to privilege typing over handwriting. He supports André Leroi-Gourhan’s view that activating machines with mere pushes of buttons equates to “‘lacking a part of one’s normally, phylogenetically human mind’” (123). The favouring of convenient, button-operated machinery over handwritten, handdrawn, and other forms of traditional making that engage the whole human hand, signifies a move towards posthumanism. He supports this theory by quoting Leroi-Gourhan’s belief that this tendency will cause humans to inevitably “‘[cease] to be sapiens’” (qtd. in Ingold 123).

Posthuman Aura

In “The Iphone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura’”, Emily McArthur defines the posthuman as a "reconstituted, expanded version of the human” that reflects “our attachments to an ever-expanding catalog of new technologies” (113). She applies this theory to Siri, a digital program created by Apple. Siri, remains a revolutionary program that communicates in verbal human speech to assist IPhone users. As a “personal assistant” embedded within IPhones, she remains constantly accessible to users (119). She answers her users' questions, sets reminders for them, and schedules appointments, among other simple tasks whenever prompted.

McArthur states Siri upholds the concept of a “posthuman aura”-- an expansion of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura”: “a sense of uniqueness, permanence, and authenticity surrounding a work of art” that is disappearing due to the rise of capitalist "technological reproduction" (115).

McArthur believes Siri recreates the aura in a posthuman way; rather than restoring “uniqueness and authenticity” to art, however, Siri restores “uniqueness and authenticity” to “technology” that remains “in the nebulous space between human and thing” (115). By being programmed to act as a servant that gives a user a sense of control, Siri upholds classist and gendered dynamics. She is programmed to speak in a feminine voice, upholding a traditional sense of subservience. As a virtual secretary, her user subtly and unknowingly adopts the identity of a “bourgeois subject” and a master; her ability to uphold human dynamics as a digital program demonstrates her posthuman quality (119, 120). McArthur emphasizes that pieces of traditional, original “fine art” and “natural language processors (NLPs)” like Siri both participate in and “defend social hierarchies”; as a result, they both uphold the concept of the aura (116).