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Gee, Maxine F. "Posthuman noir : creating positive posthumans." Thesis, University of York, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/19684/.
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Posthuman noir is a new subgenre I have identified at the intersection of posthuman science fiction and traditional film noir. In this thesis, I establish the defining features of this new subgenre; explore its antecedents in the body of films labelled as film noir and in the philosophical concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism; and examine the way the subgenre privileges two human traits — emotional awakening and storytelling ability — arguing that these intangible traits act as essential definers of what it is to be human in the posthuman future. In this thesis, I argue that this subgenre explores what it is to be human through adapting or subverting the tropes found in traditional film noir. My creative practice methodology seeks to explore a non-hierarchical approach to knowledge production, through chapters which interlink academic scholarship with my creative practice of screenwriting. Through figuring the screenplay as a posthuman text evolving towards becoming-film, and through channelling myself as a cyborg-screenwriter, my creative practice — an expression of the human storytelling ability which aims to generate an emotional awakening in the reader — aims to mirror the themes around these essential human traits within the subgenre. Therefore, the reader is encouraged to engage both their emotional and rational thinking processes when reading the thesis; it is this balanced combination, which reflects human thought processes, that is validated within the subgenre. It is particularly pertinent to discuss this subgenre at this present moment as human beings are on a rapid path to becoming posthuman, if we aren’t already there, as critics like N. Katherine Hayles argue. However, I posit that this subgenre has a conservative impulse which seeks to maintain an anthropocentric view of the future and validates humanistic notions of the human rather than pushing a posthumanist vision.
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Collins, Travis John. "Posthuman memories." Connect to Electronic Thesis (ProQuest) Connect to Electronic Thesis (CONTENTdm), 2009. http://worldcat.org/oclc/457041010/viewonline.
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McClellan, Serena Eva. "Life and the Posthuman." Thesis, Curtin University, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/84913.
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This thesis addresses the posthumanist problem of reconfiguring what and how the post/human means, rereading foundational binaries like human/nonhuman and life/nonlife as texts in themselves with a thickness that strains against the discursive structures that produce (and reduce) them as such. It attempts to petromorphically portray stone worlding without reverting to the assumed capacities of living (human) beings, suggesting a worlding that identifies the forces and intensities out of which “being,” stone and otherwise, emerges.
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Toffoletti, Kim 1975. "Transformations : feminism and the posthuman." Monash University, Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/7887.
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Garcia, Rebecca Ann. "COMING OUT OF THE COFFIN AS THE POSTHUMAN: POSTHUMAN RHETORIC AND HARRIS’ SOOKIE STACKHOUSE SERIES." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/400.
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In this article, I argue that the vampires in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels illustrate clearly the posthuman self in its connection beyond itself to other vampires, humans, and non-humans. Learning to co-exist becomes problematic in Harris’ series, where we encounter a “new” representation of vampire. These vampires have come out of the coffin, and their revelation allows us to explore how they can be viewed in connection to the human world and how their transcendence can be seen as a move toward posthumanism, as its particular blend of body and community help demonstrate what the self expanded could be. As a species that differs from us “typical” humans and yet must co-exist with us and other non-humans, the posthuman provides a theoretical framework for how we can approach this new representation as a disembodied non-unitary subject. Through their transcendence from the world of the living to the life of the undead, these vampires let us see humanity as a distinct moment in evolution that is a continuous process, not a resolution. There are six areas where we see these common characteristics between posthumanism and Harris’ vampires. The first is the vampire being represented as an other. Like the posthuman, Harris’ vampires are juxtaposed against the human population and because vampires are marked as other this creates tension where they must co-exist with humans and yet still be examined from an anthropocentric perspective. Another way the posthuman allows us to interpret this fear of vampires is from the position of the de-centered human. Because humans prior to the “great revelation” in Harris’ fictional world, believed themselves to be what defined humanism versus their non-human others; they must shift in where they are located on the species podium due to vampires and that creates a fear. Another correlation is that of immortality; which is what vampires inherit when they become a member of the undead, but for the posthuman it is encoding and dematerialization that allows us to transcend these mortal bodies. This notion of disembodiment demonstrates the body being a rhetorical strategy to create an effect, such as manipulation. Since the body for the posthuman is seen as materiality and therefore they are not embedded to only exist within it, the vampire likewise is able to exploit the body in order to accomplish its purpose. Next for the posthuman, transcendence is the way they not only become immortal, but also how they move from identifying as individuals to identifying as part of a larger community. For the vampires in the Stackhouse series, their consciousness lies in their information and not in their material bodies, thus they are able to situate themselves within the larger network with other vampires, humans, and non-humans. And lastly the connection through the exchange of blood, which for the vampire is a literal connection, but for the posthuman is instead an ideal network which removes individuality.
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Galati, Gabriela. "Duchamp meets Turing : art, modernism, posthuman." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/6609.
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In her book How We Became Posthuman (1999), Katherine Hayles analysed the process through which the conception of the liberal humanist subject led the way to the posthuman subject, a subject who lives in complete entwinement with the digital. This process, however, was not innocuous: it made the (fallacious) perception that information could do without material instantiation pervasive within many fields of knowledge, a process that Hayles contends originates in the Macy Conferences and the evolution of cybernetic theory. This research identifies an analogous process within the artistic realm: when Clement Greenberg delineated the concepts of opticality and colour field as the main characteristics that “defined” Modernist painting, he conceived of these in a purely disembodied subject (Krauss 1993). In this context, this work proposes to consider that the actual overcoming of modernism comes along with the advent of the posthuman, tracing its origin to Marcel Duchamp and his invention of the readymade, and not with postmodernism, the theoretical consistency of which, at least in the artistic field, this research will question. A first aim of this work will be to unify the main concepts and theories of the artistic field with those of cybernetics, to bring together ‘Turing land’ and ‘Duchamp land’ (Manovich 1996). For achieving this, digitalisation processes are not to be understood as representations of some material reality, but rather as ontological repetitions through which difference is conveyed. This is why the consideration of the temporal dimension of the archive as event is fundamental for understanding that the archive can only exist in its change, in its movement, in its action, in its metamorphosis, and thus the relevance of digitalisation processes in this regard becomes evident. Therefore, the archive is not only an issue of memory, but also a question yet to come, of conformation both of the future and subjectivities (Derrida 1967b, 1995). In this context, the present work advances the emergence of a digital subject with the emergence of new media, and theorises that the constitution of this subject happens by assuming a ‘point of view’ (Deleuze 1988) in the technological unconscious (Vaccari 1979). Reflecting upon the effects of digitalisation and actualisation (Deleuze 1968) on the subject, on how the digitised artwork and event affects, and changes, the subject observing and interacting with it, the present research will demonstrate that it is pertinent to talk about a subject who is embodied in the digital. In this sense, if the digitised artwork in the archive needs a subject to be actualised, this process also has its consequences for the subject. Therefore, the digital subject is the possibility of actualisation of the archive, and at the same time changes with it: she assumes an always-different ‘point of view’ constituted for her by the floating signifier in the technological unconscious. All these theories, which are part of the posthuman, are presented as the actual overcoming of modernism to show that the readymade as medium is, at the same time, both one of the points of rupture and the key link to bring back new media and art theory as art at large.
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Mason, Julia L. "Net/Work: Composing the Posthuman Self." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2008. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002513.
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Shakeshaft, Richard. "Finding the 'human' in the 'posthuman' : the representation of the technologically enhanced posthuman in Young Adult fiction." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/288074.
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Technology has become an increasingly significant element of humans' lives in recent years, and it continues to shape them in ways hitherto only imaginable in science-fiction. Moving beyond humanism, the human/technology relationship has caused the question of what it means to be human to be considered through posthuman thought. I see the reality of technology's effect on human lives giving rise to the figure of the posthuman, in which aspects of the human are replaced or enhanced by technology. Through the posthuman subject, I propose the idea of a postchild and the notion of a posthuman trialism as new ways in which to examine representations of posthumans. Texts aimed a teenage readers frequently offer perspectives on questions of identity formation and the need for adolescent protagonists to find their place in the world. I use a range of young adult texts, with a variety of different types of posthuman protagonists written over the past twenty years, to explore how the posthuman is represented through the narratives, and how power structures and ideologies are conveyed. Through my analyses I demonstrate that, despite technology's apparent superiority, it is human qualities that remain more important in the posthuman, although the extent to which the human is prioritised depends on the way in which technology is employed. My findings provide a clear illustration of how teenage readers are being shown about the ways in which technology can be used and viewed in their lives, and how the human/technology relationship may shape their lives. While the presentations do not portend the dystopian vision of the future still prevalent in many people's minds, they stress the need for humans' use of technology to be questioned by its users and those with power in societies. My new approaches to the posthuman also mean that my work gives ways in which representations of the posthuman in any media can be critically examined.
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Wilde, Poppy. "I, Posthuman : embodying entangled subjectivities in gaming." Thesis, Coventry University, 2017. http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/d9a5b3c4-48a5-4c5f-b656-3f8aaa9de8d4/1.
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We live in an era where the fundamental principles of what it means to be human are being reconsidered and reconceptualised, and we are moving towards a more entangled and relational understanding of the human’s ontology. The “boundaries” of what constitute a human as separate from both its surroundings and human and non-human others are being problematised. How do you separate “the human” from its contexts? In an age where advanced technology often constitutes these contexts, how can you separate the human from technology? Whilst we have always been entangled, today this occurs in a context that is more technologically driven, and this has provoked further debate on the status of the “posthuman”. This PhD thesis is concerned with what it means and how feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. What we are capable of doing emerges contextually: it is profoundly dependent on our environments. In my view of the posthuman, the stable “human” self is disrupted, giving way to a subjectivity where our interactions in the world are more intra-active. But how might we consider the emergence of posthuman subjectivities in more depth? I suggest using a particular example of posthuman subjectivity, the MMORPG avatargamer, to demonstrate how the humanistically separated entities of “avatar” and “gamer” can provide a context to explore how “other” and “self” are not ontologically distinct. In doing so, I ask: what specific practices enable or provoke this ontological entanglement? Engaging in an autoethnographic inquiry, I use my intra-action with my avatar Etyme in the MMORPG World of Warcraft as one example of posthuman subjectivity. This methodology in itself is intriguing to explore the multiplicity of selves we experience, and negotiates the humanistic overthrows of “selfhood” whilst experiencing the self as entangled. Through my construct of the posthuman, where the human cannot be meaningfully separated from its environment, we are nevertheless still drawn to speak of an “I” and have a desire to understand ourselves as independent agents. However, the fieldnotes analysed in this thesis disrupt the “I”, and instead reflect on the shifting sense of self with and through an entity that is experienced as both me-and-not-me. Whilst an autoethnographic posthumanism might seem contradictory, I argue that it is a fundamental step in acknowledging our humanistic tendencies and beginning to reflexively engage with, and critique, these ideals. To do so, this thesis “posthumanises” traditionally humanistic constructs: acting and empathy. To widen this concept further, a third analytic re-interrogates different aspects of subject formation to consider how these too could be “posthumanised”. This suggests a broader application of posthumanism, demonstrating how previous notions of mastery, autonomy, and individuality can be critiqued and destabilised in order to view our practices and “selves” as emergent and entwined.
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Xinyi, Lin. "Recycled Posthuman Furniture-What has furniture become." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för design (DE), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-85799.
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Recycled Posthuman Furniture – What has furniture become is a project that aims to explore the relationship between humans and furniture from the post-humanist perspective. Post-humanism is understood here as our capacity of giving non-human items the sense of humanity in terms of ethics and effects. Accordingly, we might consider the furniture has some certain human values. Therefore, this paper aims to demonstrate a new relationship compared with current states through a transdisciplinary design and speculative design with the goal of changing people’s understanding towards discarded furniture. Through the knowledge of current issues, this paper is tended to bring different perspectives of thoughts and questions in order to be aware of surrounding issues with the hope of changing current states to deliver a better future by chance. As the result, this paper puts forward a new sustainable lifestyle which advocates equality and inclusiveness among human and nonhuman and thus helps to solve survival crisis. Human is not the almighty of the world and all the existences are valuable as well. As humans, we must change our thinking patterns and begin accepting and treating other nonhuman equally. We are required to wake emotions that are hiding deep down in our heart and apply them on furniture and treat rejected and abandoned furniture as human. Only in this way can we decrease environmental pressure, reduce the discharge of solid waste and deal with the global crisis. Taking furniture as a start, humans should open their emotions and care for all objects that are living on the earth, focus on collective interest instead of individual interest.
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Schwalm, Tanja. "Animal writing : magical realism and the posthuman other." Thesis, University of Canterbury. English, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/4470.
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Magical realist fiction is marked by a striking abundance of animals. Analysing magical realist novels from Australia and Canada, as well as exploring the influence of two seminal Latin American magical realist narratives, this thesis focuses on representations of animals and animality. Examining human-animal relationships in the postcolonial context reveals that magical realism embodies and represents an idea of feral animality that critically engages with an inherently imperialist and Cartesian humanism, and that, moreover, accounts for magical realism's elusiveness within systems of genre categorisation and labelling. It is this embodiment and presence of animal agency that animates magical realism and injects it with life and vibrancy. The magical realist writers discussed in this dissertation make use of animal practices inextricably intertwined with imperialism, such as pastoral farming, natural historical collections, the circus, the rodeo, the Wild West show, and the zoo, as well as alternative animal practices inherently incompatible with European ideologies, such as the Aboriginal Dreaming, Native North American animist beliefs, and subsistence hunting, as different ways of positioning themselves in relation to the Cartesian human subject. The circus is a particular influence on the form and style of many magical realist texts, whereby oxymoronically structured circensian spaces form the basis of the narratives‟ realities, and hierarchical imperial structures and hegemonic discourses that are portrayed as natural through Cartesian science and Linnaean taxonomies are revealed as deceptive illusions that perpetuate the self-interests of the powerful.
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Hausmann, Mark. "Concrete Reality: The Posthuman Landscapes of J.G. Ballard." Chapman University Digital Commons, 2016. http://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_theses/3.
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While the fiction of J.G. Ballard has been primarily explored through postmodern criticism, his narratives and settings predict major issues concerning the contemporary discourse of posthumanism. His texts explore the escalating economic, social, and ecological crises converging within the material conditions of human urbanization and late capitalism. Nearly all of Ballard’s novels are as much about locations undergoing a crisis as they are about individuals or communities coming to embrace some extended period of human hysteria. His characters in The Drought, Concrete Island, and Super- Cannes, each progress through ecologically and socially alienating surroundings which invigorate them to act against classical humanism’s hegemonic and anthropocentric tendencies. By applying Henri Lefebvre’s spatial concept of “abstract space” to Ballard’s range of urban settings, this thesis investigates how Ballard’s early, middle, and late, novels continually put materiality, humanism, and technological landscapes, through different ecological and geopolitical crises in order to deconstruct a number of cultural and ideological concerns posthumanist studies seek to address.
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Friedland, Barton. "Posthuman leadership and the roles of computational objects." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2015. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/77000/.
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Leadership is a central topic in business and one in which organisations invest heavily. Despite the tremendous influx of computational objects into the workplace and their use as part of the operational framework through which organisational life is enacted, little empirical research exists that explores the relationship between leadership practice and said objects. This study helps to close this critical gap in both practical and theoretical knowledge. Through an interrogation of leadership practice and their enactments with computational objects across a range of situational and comparative empirics, this research develops three original theoretical contributions. First, it presents and develops a range of roles through which computational objects are enmeshed within leadership practice. Second, the study proposes a novel posthuman perspective that attempts to address a historic privileging of the human, positing a disjunction of responsibility from authority. And third, it theorises leadership as a processual phenomenon produced through citationality in material-discursive practice. Through an ethnographic work practice study, this research contributes an original articulation of a posthuman, practice-based theory of leadership not fully accounted for by received conceptions.
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Richards, Daniel Patrick. "Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age." Scholar Commons, 2013. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4933.
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When a disaster the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill takes place, is it natural for the news media stories, investigative reports, and public deliberation to focus almost exclusively on finding the person or group responsible for such a horrendous scene. Rhetorically speaking, the discourse surrounding the event can be characterized as a reductive form of praise and blame rhetoric (epideixis). However, these efforts, while well-intentioned, are troublesome because searches for the one technical cause and the sole personal culpability are thwarted by the sheer complexity of the ecological, technological, scientific, institutional, and communicative network required for such a disaster to take place. Thus, to demonstrate the insufficiency of extant models of disaster in a variety of fields, which tend to privilege human-centered approaches, Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age explores the ontology, technical documentation, and rhetorical theory of disasters through a posthuman lens.
To find a more critical approach to understanding the nature of disasters in the twenty-first century, I ask the following questions: How do rhetoricians and technical communicators account more fully for the human and nonhuman forces at work in the precipitation of disaster? How do rhetoricians and technical communicators find an approach to ecological catastrophe that goes beyond the mere "environmentalist rhetoric" characterizing the public response? Through the application of several posthumanist theories, my project develops an approach to disaster that complicates traditional ways of approaching causality and blame.
I use accident reports, news media stories, and popular literature as data for this project. By examining these texts, my project has broad implications for technical communication, rhetorical theory, and philosophy of rhetoric.
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Sayal-Bennett, Amba. "Posthuman pedagogy : affective learning encounters in studio art practice." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2018. http://research.gold.ac.uk/24089/.
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The growing conceptual turn in UK tertiary-level art education has led to the increasing dematerialisation of the studio as a site for learning. This practice-based research responds to this context and advocates the primacy of the studio as a space for embodied experimentation. In contrast to the representational analyses prevalent in art historical discourse, I propose a new materialist reading of studio art practice to explore the transformative potentials of matter: specifically, how, by giving greater agency to materials, matter takes on a pedagogical role. Drawing on the work of Deleuze, Haraway, Barad and Hayles, I consider the prosthetic nature of art practice, and focus on the fluid boundaries of the artist-learner in the making process. I delineate how material agency operates within artistic assemblages to extend learner subjectivity, and suggest that the artist-learner experiences themselves as ‘other’ through affective intensities that traverse bodies in the artistic assemblage (both human and non-human). These encounters produce immanent learning experiences, as normative perceptions are challenged and new orientations affected. Artist-learners are therefore not discrete but entangled entities, and art practice, as a form of posthuman pedagogy, generates thought that is not exclusively human. This research offers a critical reappraisal of learning in a broader non-human context, where the non-human focus of this research considers how the materiality of learning becomes a core part of what is learnt and how the body becomes. The practices that I investigate can be understood as Critical Pedagogies, as they embrace embodied experience as a vital dimension of the learning process and bridge the gap between producers and consumers of knowledge. This investigation contributes to a field of research that aims to theorise more affective learning practices, and to critical discourse that focuses on the intra-action of cultural studies, art practice and education.
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Svedmark, Eva. "Becoming Together and Apart : technoemotions and other posthuman entanglements." Doctoral thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för informatik, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-120195.
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Using social media and norm-breaking material as an empirical touchstone this thesis elaborates, investigates and explores the entangled relationships between humans and technology in social media settings. Guided by uncomfortable, emotional and bodily online sharing the thesis gives voice to stories that are seldom heard, by people whose lives are rarely spoken of. By exploring the performative entanglements of/with/through technology, design and human intent the overall aim is to offer a critical and new understanding of our online togetherness and posthuman becoming. The conceptual framework throughout the thesis is based on posthuman theory and feminist technoscience, two closely connected theories providing a new onto-epistemological way of understanding the world’s becoming. The thesis should be seen as the product of an empirical practice of making theory about digital things, culture, humans and non-humans. By exploring diffraction and touch as not only theoretical standpoints but also hands-on methodology the thesis contributes to the development of new ways of doing research. Important findings arising from the practice of diffraction and touch are Technoemotions – conceptually agents built on a posthuman understanding of how emotions are entangled between and within the phenomenon, becoming important agents in the apparatus creating the phenomenon. Four Technoemotions seem particularly prominent in the material: Trust, Truth, Time and Embodiment. The thesis concludes by providing a discussion on critical alternatives for ethics, politics and power in relation to social media and the norms and norm-breaking practices most of us participate in. The responsibility and ability to respond are addressed, as well as social justice and hope for the future to come.Sociala medier har för många människor blivit en naturlig del av vardagen där den digitala gemenskapen är lika viktig som den analoga. På platser så som Facebook, Twitter, bloggar och Instagram kommunicerar vi genom att dela med oss av tankar, händelse och åsikter i vår vardag. Vi varvar bilder från vår semester med politiska artiklar, delar vidare kloka citat eller resultatet från ett test av något slag, skryter på våra barn, filmar våra husdjur, delar med oss av sjukdomstillstånd och barnafödande och allt annat som en vardag kan vara fylld av. Just själva delandet är ett viktigt fundament i sociala mediers blivande och dess design är ofta optimerad för att kunna dela samma inlägg till flera olika sociala plattformar med ett enkelt klick. Denna avhandling handlar om hur vi genom sociala medier blir tillsammans på nätet, hur vi formar varandra men även hur vi formas av de tekniska scripts och den design som sociala medier är uppbyggt av. I avhandlingen får läsaren ta del av ett stort normbrytande empiriskt material. Med avstamp i detta normbrytande undersöker sedan författaren hur feministisk teknovetenskap och posthumanistisk teori kan användas som konkret metod för analys. Genom att applicera både närhet och diffraktion till det normbrytande empiriska materialet finner författaren det hon valt att kalla Teknoemotioner – konceptuella agenter som har sitt ursprung i sammanflätningar av digitala, sociala, mänskliga och icke-mänskliga material och kompositioner. Fyra teknoemotioner är särskilt framträdande, dessa är: förtroende, sanning, tid och förkroppsligande men författaren nämner också friktion och frusna berättelser som viktiga för att förstå fenomenet normbrytande delningar i sociala medier. Förtroende, sanning, tid och förkroppsligande är teknoemotioner som befinner sig i mellanrummet mellan skilda delningspraktiker i sociala medier. Dessas teknoemotioner skapar förutsättningar och påverkar upplevelser, ger indikationer om möjliga skillnader och likheter som är av betydelse för hur vi blir tillsammans med digitala material genom sociala medier. Författaren ger exempel på att det visserligen ofta är först i sin frånvaro som teknoemotioner blir uppenbara och får agens. Därmed konstaterar författaren att teknoemotioner också ofta är sin motsats. Analysen visar vidare att användare ofta uppfattar teknoemotionerna som valbara, exempelvis sanning. I sociala medier är sanning ofta en komplex agent, som ifrågasätts eller behandlat som något var och en får/kan avgöra på egen hand. Förtroende likaså. Med teknoemotionen, förkroppsligande, framgår också en tvetydighet, där kroppen (den fysiska) saknas i det virtuella rummet även om digitala kroppar är högst närvarande. Kan det vara så att känslan av anonymitet växer sig starkare om jag kan välja att vara i eller utanför min kropp? Slutligen, tid. Tid är inte detsamma på internet som vi är vana. Där är tid ett högt arbiträrt begrepp och vi befinner oss i vår historia, samtid och till viss del även får framtid simultant. Avhandlingen avslutas med en metareflektion över hur det är möjligt att skapa kunskap om komplexa posthumanistiska fenomen där mänsklig handlingsförmåga vävs samman med digitala material och dess skilda rationaliteter. Genom att efterfråga alternativa ideal för kunskapsutveckling och design där etik, politik och makt är viktiga inslag hoppas författaren på en kritisk och alternativ förståelse av den verklighetsproduktion som sociala medier (och andra posthumana fenomen) bidrar till.
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Ghashmari, Ahmad. "HUMANIZING THE POSTHUMAN IN POWERS, WALLACE, GIBSON AND DELILLO." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent147855115808631.
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Simmons, Daniel J. "Performing posthuman : constructing, inhabiting, and evaluating techno/corporeal networks /." Available to subscribers only, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1594480401&sid=15&Fmt=2&clientId=1509&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Christmas, Amy Jane. "Augmented intimacies : posthuman love stories in contemporary science fiction." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2013. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6546/.
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Science fiction in the developed world has for centuries provided a fertile space for explorations of human and cultural phenomena, on the one hand underpinning philosophical conceptions of humans and human nature, and on the other acting as a fictive mirror in which the aspects and impacts of our technoscientific cultures are reflected. Between nature and culture stands the figure of the posthuman, whose ancestry can be traced as far back as the Talmudic golems, but whose presence is most keenly felt in the genre since the mid-twentieth century, where the science has caught up with the fiction. Resurfacing in post-industrial, secular society, alongside technologies newly able to render it into being, the posthuman reminds us of our position in relation to evolutionary laws, inviting speculation upon its future, and thus, by default, upon our own. In 2002, Francis Fukuyama used two seminal works of science fiction – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – to trace ‘a tale of two dystopias’, or how two fields of technoscience are currently pushing us into a posthuman stage of history. Biotechnology and communications are, as Donna Haraway has put it, ‘the crucial tools recrafting our bodies’ – moreover, they provide the discursive spaces within which we now so consciously write and rewrite our presents, pasts and futures. This thesis follows the dovetailing trajectories of Fukuyama’s ‘two futures’ hypothesis by presenting, in two sections, a range of posthuman figures in contemporary science fiction novels, short stories, comics and films. Beginning with Philip K. Dick’s genre-defining Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and ending just over four decades later with Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s milestone Internet documentary Catfish (2010), the four textual analysis chapters delineate an evolution of the posthuman in fiction (and reality) from cyborg to cyberpunk, showing how the ground is quickly closed up between the human and the posthuman. Much excellent scholarship, following Haraway’s ground-breaking “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), has been produced on the cyborgian/posthuman figure in science fiction and practice alike; the posthuman as the ultimate Other for our technoscientific world. This thesis takes a new approach in refocusing upon the posthuman in love, responding to the growing insistency in science fiction texts to foreground romantic relationships between posthumans, between humans and posthumans, and between humans enframed by the technoscientific. The close readings of these eleven primary sources are underpinned by four chapters devoted to constructing a philosophical framework which marries the cyborg theory of Haraway and the virtual posthumanism of N. Katherine Hayles with the history of the philosophy of love in the continental tradition, specifically the late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century writings of Alain Badiou. Working from Badiou’s central tenets of love – difference, disjunction, and the encounter – and analysing the move to posthuman selfhood alongside the seemingly anachronistic pursuit of love in late modernity, this thesis seeks to explore and explain the presence and meaning of love in high-tech society. If the posthuman is an emergent figure portending the end of history, as many postmodern thinkers have argued, then how can we understand its relationship to the love paradigm, which turns on the perpetuation of a conception of metanarrative that, in current modes of criticism, has fallen out of fashion?
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Swift, Adam Glen. "Mapping posthuman discourse and the evolution of living information." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2006. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/16439/1/Adam_Swift_Thesis.pdf.
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The discourse that surrounds and constitutes the post-human emerged as a response to earlier claims of an essential or universal human or human nature. These discussions claim that the human is a discursive construct that emerges from various configurations of nature, embodiment, technology, and culture, configurations that have also been variously shaped by the forces of social history. And in the absence of an essential human figure, post-human discourses suggest that there are no restrictions or limitations on how the human can be reconfigured. This axiom has been extended in light of a plethora of technological reconfigurations and augmentations now potentially available to the human, and claims emerge from within this literature that these new technologies constitute a range of possibilities for future human biological evolution.
This thesis questions the assumption contained within these discourses that technological incursions or reconfigurations of the biological human necessarily constitute human biological or human social evolution by discussing the role the evolution theories plays in our understanding of the human, the social, and technology. In this thesis I show that, in a reciprocal process, evolution theory draws metaphors from social institutions and ideologies, while social institutions and ideologies simultaneously draw on metaphors from evolution theory. Through this discussion, I propose a form of evolution literacy; a tool, I argue, is warranted in developing a sophisticated response to changes in both human shape and form. I argue that, as a whole, our understanding of evolution constitutes a metanarrative, a metaphor through which we understand the place of the human within the world; it follows that historical shifts in social paradigms will result in new definitions of evolution. I show that contemporary evolution theory reflects parts of the world as codified informatic systems of associated computational network logic through which the behaviour of participants is predefined according to an evolved or programmed structure.
Working from within the discourse of contemporary evolution theory I develop a space through which a version of the post-human figure emerges. I promote this version of the post-human as an Artificial Intelligence computational programme or autonomous agent that, rather than seeking to replace, reduce or deny the human subject, is configured as an exosomatic supplement to and an extension of the biological human.
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Swift, Adam Glen. "Mapping posthuman discourse and the evolution of living information." Queensland University of Technology, 2006. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16439/.
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The discourse that surrounds and constitutes the post-human emerged as a response to earlier claims of an essential or universal human or human nature. These discussions claim that the human is a discursive construct that emerges from various configurations of nature, embodiment, technology, and culture, configurations that have also been variously shaped by the forces of social history. And in the absence of an essential human figure, post-human discourses suggest that there are no restrictions or limitations on how the human can be reconfigured. This axiom has been extended in light of a plethora of technological reconfigurations and augmentations now potentially available to the human, and claims emerge from within this literature that these new technologies constitute a range of possibilities for future human biological evolution. This thesis questions the assumption contained within these discourses that technological incursions or reconfigurations of the biological human necessarily constitute human biological or human social evolution by discussing the role the evolution theories plays in our understanding of the human, the social, and technology. In this thesis I show that, in a reciprocal process, evolution theory draws metaphors from social institutions and ideologies, while social institutions and ideologies simultaneously draw on metaphors from evolution theory. Through this discussion, I propose a form of evolution literacy; a tool, I argue, is warranted in developing a sophisticated response to changes in both human shape and form. I argue that, as a whole, our understanding of evolution constitutes a metanarrative, a metaphor through which we understand the place of the human within the world; it follows that historical shifts in social paradigms will result in new definitions of evolution. I show that contemporary evolution theory reflects parts of the world as codified informatic systems of associated computational network logic through which the behaviour of participants is predefined according to an evolved or programmed structure. Working from within the discourse of contemporary evolution theory I develop a space through which a version of the post-human figure emerges. I promote this version of the post-human as an Artificial Intelligence computational programme or autonomous agent that, rather than seeking to replace, reduce or deny the human subject, is configured as an exosomatic supplement to and an extension of the biological human.
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Smith, Mark Bryan Bridger. "The posthuman : hostis humani generis? : science fiction allegories/social narratives." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4117/.
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Whether in the guise of the novel or non-print media such as film and television, fin-de-millennium science fiction has provided opportunities to envisage a posthuman stage of evolution. The academic response to this has been polarized. Certain elements have embraced the genre as integral to the sociocultural relationship between unfettered biotechnological advance and the limitation of the human flesh. Others have treated the topic as fanciful entertainment, leading them to ignore and sometimes ridicule research on the posthuman. The thesis seeks to utilise the contemporary science fiction allegory as an aid in developing a critique of the emerging posthuman discourse, facilitating the analysis of its socio-political dynamic, and questioning whether discourse advancement necessitates the rejection of the humanist metanarrative. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter differentiates the posthuman from established biotechnological discourses, e mg the discontinuities in global location, temporal engagement, and participant ideology. The second reflects on the contemporary human condition associated with man's technological ingenuity being a credible threat to his own existence. It then outlines the epochal technoscience of the posthuman and introduces the diametrically opposed standpoints of the posthuman as amelioration, or autoextinction. The third chapter draws upon utopian visions of the future to contextualise and assist in the critical analysis of narratives advocating posthuman technoscience. The fourth chapter reverses this, by utilising dystopian imagery as an entree into the rationale of those opposing human alteration, facilitating its critique. The fifth chapter sees the science fiction allegory as a postfoundationalist narrative, offering up a discursive mirror to the influences of providence and progress on the posthuman debate. The final chapter examines whether an a-humanist account of man's relationship with technology might help to advance the posthuman debate.
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Crano, Ricky D'Andrea. "Posthuman Capital: Neoliberalism, Telematics, and the Project of Self-Control." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405531247.
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Chambers, Lynn. "Posthuman Literacy Practices in a Reggio-inspired South African school." Master's thesis, Faculty of Humanities, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/33608.
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Through a posthuman approach to literacy education, I explore the Reggio Emilia pedagogy adopted by an independent South African primary school. Unlike the current emphasis in literacy pedagogy on language, standardised and individualised testing and universal curriculum approaches, Reggio Emilia pedagogy views child, learning and knowing not as separate from each other and from the world, but as entangled and always on the move. Moreover, Reggio Emilia-inspired schools celebrate the ‘hundred languages' of children, not just the spoken or written word, and involve children in an emergent curriculum through pedagogical documentation. In my study, pedagogical documentation (including photos and videos) also serves as research ‘instrument' to co-create data and is analysed diffractively – drawing on feminist philosophers and scientists Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. The new theorypractice produced reconfigures literacy as an assemblage which includes human and nonhuman in an entangled, intra-acting becoming-together. This includes children, no longer understood as individual entities in the world, but as phenomena. My enquiry produces a rich entanglement of unexpected actors, including digital and non-digital technologies, discourses about literacy, questions of ethics and response-abilities, and many more. The ethics of a posthumanist orientation to literacy education urges us to think about what is made to matter in a classroom and what is excluded from mattering. My research shows that children, rather than having agency as singular entities, are part of distributed agency in learning and as such are rendered capable as part of a complex, living system always in motion.
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Lausa, Dawn E. "Descartes' daughters thinking-machines and the emergence of posthuman complexity /." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2009. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Schoultz, Ian D. "A Poor Excuse for a Watering Can." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1470075889.
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Johansson, Mattias. "The Human Cloning Era : On the doorstep to our posthuman future." Thesis, Linköping University, Centre for Applied Ethics, 2003. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-1858.
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Human reproductive cloning came to the public´s attention when Dolly the sheep was cloned in Scotland in 1997. This news quickly spread around the world causing both excitements at the possibilities of what cloning techniques could offer, as well as apprehension about the ethical, social and legal implications should human reproductive cloning become possible. Many international organisations and governments were concerned about the impact of human reproductive cloning on human health, dignity and human rights. To this day, many institutions have drafted resolutions, protocols and position statements outlining their concerns. This paper outlines some of the major ethical issues surrounding human reproductive cloning and the position towards this novel technique taken by three important international organisations - Council of Europe, World Health Organization, and United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization - expressed in different regulatory frameworks. Proponents of human cloning occasionally point out that cloned humans are already among us in the form of twins - people with identical sets of DNA - so what is the problem? Besides avoiding the fact that natural twins are always siblings, whereas a clone could be the twin of a parent or grandparent, this observation ignores a crucial moral difference: natural twins arrive as rare creations, not as specifically designed products. Instead of being an uncontrolled, self-regulated evolutionary process, creation of man through reproductive cloning are shifting from being natural to a state of instrumentality where parental interests constitutes what is important. This shift will inevitably lead to the child being a means for some other end (parental interests). However, this is not the same as being subdued into genetic determinism, but the point brought forward is the child´s lack of freedom caused by the interests of the parents. In this sense the clone´s genome constitutes a heavy backpack because of our pre-knowledge of its physical building blocks - or in other words its potentiality. Even though the argument of genetic determinism is a weak one, our subconscious"forces"us to create hopes upon the child because of its potentiality. No longer is the evolution the creator with the dices of randomness. A new gambler is in town and this time the dices are equilateral.
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Griffin, Meghan. "Somatechnologies of Body Size Modification: Posthuman Embodiment and Discourses of Health." Doctoral diss., University of Central Florida, 2012. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/5228.
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This project focuses on persistent gaps in philosophies of the body: the enduring mind-body divide in accounts of phenomenology, the unfulfilled promises of representing and inhabiting the body in online and virtual spaces, and the difference between health as quantified in medical discourse versus health as lived experience. These tensions are brought to light through the electronic food journal genre where the difficulty in capturing pre-noetic, outside-consciousness aspects of experience and embodied health are thrown into relief against circulating cultural discourses surrounding health, body size, self-surveillance, and self-care. The electronic food journal genre serves as a space for users to situate themselves and their daily practices in relation to medicalization, public policy, and the conflation of health and body size. These journals form artifacts reflecting life writing practices in digital spaces that model compliant self-surveillance as well as transgressive self-care. The journals instantiate the mind-body-technology interactivity of extended cognition, but also point toward a rupture in the feedback loops that promise to integrate pre-noetic aspects of being and experience. By exploring the tensions inherent in these online food journaling spaces, this project concludes by offering a PEERS heuristic/heuretic for assessing theories and technologies of embodiment and health for their ability to access what resides in the “remainder” of current embodiment philosophy and to identify the aspects of lived experience left unattended in USDA health policy, food journaling interfaces, and embodiment philosophy. The PEERS model can be used to evaluate existing technologies for their capacity to map true mind-body-technology interactivity and to build new theory that accounts for a fuller, more nuanced approach to understanding embodied reality and embodied health.Ph.D.
Doctorate
Arts and Humanities
Texts and Technology
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Pearson, Megan St Clair. "A Whedon Manifesto| Superhumans, Inhumans, and Humans in the Posthuman Century." Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1560922.
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Examining Whedon's cyborgs using Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" and the literary theory of posthumanism, I examine which posthuman cyborg characters exhibit characteristics of villainy as well as those that display the antipodal characteristics of heroism. Haraway is well known as one of the earliest theorists to examine cyborgs in literature as transformative figures, and she is referenced in almost every cybernetic studies text available. Haraway's construction of the cyborg identity, which she deems essential for the progress of feminism, opens up a new type of human existence. For Haraway, the cyborg's conglomeration of bits of organic matter with that of machine creates an authentic replication of natural human existence, removed from possible human error within the body itself. Haraway's definition of the cyborg allows for some clear-cut outlines of what constitutes the body of the cyborg. The cyborg is a fused being, a combination of both organic and nonorganic material, which exists in both reality and fiction (Haraway 7). Whedon's corpus is replete with cyborg characters, from the `Frankensteinesque' Adam in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to that of the manipulated human forms of River Tam and the Reavers in Firefly and Serenity, and lastly to the technologically-adept Dolls and Topher Brink in Dollhouse.
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Murgia, Claudio. "[Beyond] posthuman violence : epic rewritings of ethics in the contemporary novel." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/93366/.
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My research will consist of a literary investigation into changing representations of violence in the contemporary novel in the context of the paradigm shift from humanism to posthumanism, from reality to fiction. The core of my work, developed through the reading of some research in neuroscience, will concern the examination of the brain as metaphor machine. From here, I will argue that the problem of violence in relation to fiction today is due to the struggle in the human body between transcendence and immanence. The individual has a tendency to transcend reality and in so doing lives violence as fiction even when inflicting pain to the other. I will observe how this transcendence is translated in contemporary narrative forms and I will shape a rhetoric of contemporary literary violence. My intention is to conduct comparative research across British, American, French and Italian literary fiction of the past 20 years, with a few exceptions. I will explore whether and how, in a globalizing world, it is both possible and necessary to develop a comparative literary analysis of the forms of contemporary violence. I will observe how the advent of posthumanity or of the fictional man has generated a crisis in the definition of identity and reality in a context in which fiction has taken its place. I will show how the individual re-acts to this condition through violence in order to find authenticity. References will include the works of Deleuze, Badiou, Bauman, Baudrillard, De Man, Agamben, Hayles et alii. In order to explore the different ramifications of the substitution of fiction to reality and its connection to violence, I will focus on what I consider the main three tools for the creation of simulation today: language, desire and information, through the works of Wallace, McCarthy, Miéville, Ballard, Gibson, Palahniuk et alii. Finally, the work will focus on the new emphasis given by contemporary writers to literary responsibility after the irresponsible writing (after the death of the author) of postmodernism through the analysis of the New Italian Epic postulated by Wu Ming but applied to the English Weird Fiction writer China Miéville. I will suggest that an attempt to overcome postmodernism is taking place in contemporary global fiction based on a more ‘serious’ approach (as Wallace would have said), a new ethics of literature, which endeavours to depict the reasons for contemporary violence in fiction and advocates for a balance between the transcendence of fiction and the immanence of reality.
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McAulay, Alex Cooper Pamela. "Surfing the interzones posthuman geographies in twentieth century literature and film /." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,2228.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008.Title from electronic title page (viewed Jun. 26, 2009). "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English." Discipline: English and Comparative Literature; Department/School: English and Comparative Literature.
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Ramsey, Anna Brooks, and Anna Brooks Ramsey. "A Million Metaphors for Love: Mending Posthuman Heartache in the Anthropocene." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/625681.
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In this research, I investigate multiple entry points for understanding and developing art and visual culture curriculum to respond to the Anthropocene. Informed by posthuman, feminist, and ecological theories, I ask what practices and theory art educators might take up to cultivate emergent artistic practices with students toward responding to the geological, social, and present moment.
Organized around integrating visual art into school and community garden sites, this writing includes curriculum theory, a unit design and reflections on implementation and the writing process. Using autoethnographic and visual art methodologies, I attempt to engage the subjective relational space between myself, my psyche, and the phenomenon of teaching, writing, and embodying this curriculum. Through this research, I wanted to know whether co-facilitating with human and non-human members of school gardens would stabilize affective and relational containers of care and stewardship as part of the learning environment. To this end, I found that co-facilitating with place, including the garden, is a stabilizing environment for myself as a teacher, but can also be conducive to perpetuating Western and white narratives of place.
Another central theme and finding from this data was the lived experiences of grief. Employing autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), I reflected on my teaching through my psyche, body, and emotions. I found and analyzed this data through present moment awareness of my embodied response to the experience of writing and facilitating a four-week art curriculum with middle school girls in their school garden. As an emergent response to this grief, I have therefore organized my writing around the notion of mending posthuman heartache in the Anthropocene. This is a call I believe educators should take seriously. The Anthropocene moment is in so many ways the result of deep disconnection and separation, years of violence against the planet, and against humanity in the forms of colonization, patriarchy, white-supremacy, and capitalism.
I hope for this research to contribute to animating art and visual culture education toward affective and critical ecological solutions to the moment we are living in. The implications of this research are not empirical in nature, but rather take up poetic, artistic, and enigmatic qualities of the present to tease out ways of being with, working against, and creatively responding to these times in which we live. To conclude, I believe any practices that cultivate care and affective relationship to place, self, and the other members of our human/non-human communities, such as visual art and gardening practices, can serve as containers and resources for living in the Anthropocene.
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Carlson, Jacob. "Empathy Enough| The Disorienting Power of Androids in a Posthuman World." Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10844407.
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In the 1968 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick envisions a world where synthetic beings have become advanced enough to walk among humans unnoticed, blurring the boundary between human and machine. In a later interview, he claims that the inspiration of the novel came from reading a Gestapo officer’s diary, believing that the writing represented a “humanoid other” that is morphologically human and yet is not human in essence. Using critical theory on object-orientation, technology, and identity, I investigate the novel’s use of space, object description, and references to the ersatz to uncover the conditions under which a humanoid other emerges, and what Dick offers as the remedy for our “bifurcated” humanity.
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Wood, Nicole E. "From Seed to Fruit: A Posthuman Journey From Stage to Page." OpenSIUC, 2010. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/theses/392.
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This thesis uses Cybernetic Fruit: A Posthuman Fairytale (a show directed by Shauna MacDonald and Nico Wood) to explore notions of posthumanism. The thesis of this project is that every being possesses beingness (one could say, a soul), be it raccoon, raspberry, or rock; that nothing is perfect or ever can be, for perfection and imperfection (like order and disorder) are human constructions spun from human vantage points and seen with a human-level of resolution; that collaboration fosters propagation of a posthuman discourse and compassionate behavior; and finally, that staging philosophical inquiry, in the flesh and for the community, is a potent methodology for germinating new theoretical fruit.
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Kimberley, Maree A. "Dirt Circus League : power and belonging in posthuman young adult fiction." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2014. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/75428/6/Maree_Kimberley_Exegesis.pdf.
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This creative practice-led thesis consists of a creative work titled Dirt Circus League, which tells of a female teenaged medical intuitive who follows an enigmatic cult leader to his isolated home in Cape York, and an exegesis. The exegesis explores the representations and complexities of neuroscience and posthumanism in contemporary young adult fiction. The exegesis also discusses how the mechanics of storytelling changed the novel's original focus from one of neuroscience in relation to impacts and effects on teenage brains to the broader social concerns of posthumanism.
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Ring, Isa. "Frankenstein; or, the trials of a posthuman subject : An investigation of the Monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and his attempt at acquiring human subjectivity in a posthuman state." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Engelska, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-34419.
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley and the characters within, tell a prominent story of the posthuman condition in a society where humanist thought is the only conception of subjectivity. The use of not only posthuman studies, but more specifically studies including subjectivity was needed, in order to analyse the relationship between the humanist and the posthuman subjects. Theories of posthuman subjectivity and subjectivity by Rosi Braidotti and Michel Foucault were used in order to examine the posthuman condition of “Frankenstein’s monster” and the role of humanist vs. posthuman subjectivity between Victor Frankenstein and the monster. The tension between Victor and the monster was analysed in order to investigate the monster’s struggle at acquiring subjectivity in a posthuman state, which revealed why it is impossible for the humanist and posthuman subject to peacefully coexist.
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Vita-More, Natasha. "Life expansion : toward an artistic, design-based theory of the transhuman/posthuman." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/1182.
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The thesis’ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic, design-based approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining personal identity. To delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology. Life expansion is located in the domain of human enhancement, distinctly linked to technological interfaces with biology. The thesis identifies human-computer interaction and the potential of emerging and speculative technologies as seeding the promulgation of human enhancement that approach life expansion. In doing so, the thesis constructs an inquiry into historical and current attempts to append human physiology and intervene with its mortality. By encountering emerging and speculative technologies for prolonging life and sustaining personal identity as possible media for artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement, a new axis is sought that identifies the transhuman and posthuman as conceptual paradigms for life expansion. The thesis asks: What are the required conditions that enable artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement that explicitly pursue extending human life? This question centers on the potential of the study’s proposed enhancement technologies in their relationship to life, death, and the human condition. Notably, the thesis investigates artistic approaches, as distinct from those of the natural sciences, and the borders that need to be mediated between them. The study navigates between the domains of life extension, art and design, technology, and philosophy in forming the framework for a theory of life expansion. The critical approach seeks to uncover invisible borders between these interconnecting forces by bringing to light issues of sustaining life and personal identity, ethical concerns, including morphological freedom and extinction risk. Such issues relate to the thesis’ interest in life expansion and the use emerging and speculative technologies. 4 The study takes on a triad approach in its investigation: qualitative interviews with experts of the emerging and speculative technologies; field studies encountering research centers of such technologies; and an artistic, autopoietic process that explores the heuristics of life expansion. This investigation forms an integrative view of the human use of technology and its melioristic aim. The outcome of the research is a theoretical framework for further research in artistic approaches to life expansion.
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Panteli, G. "From puppet to cyborg : posthuman and postmodern retellings of the Pinocchio myth." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2016. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1528658/.
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The myth of Pinocchio is the story of a puppet that desires to become human and achieves it with the power of his will. Created by Carlo Collodi in The Adventures of Pinocchio, the myth of Pinocchio is linked to the fairy tale tradition and is the most recent manifestation of the animate/inanimate archetype. This thesis is the first systematic study of the Pinocchio myth and examines how it has been used and reinterpreted in different retellings across different media and disciplines. The first part of this study focuses on Pinocchio retellings in film and shows that the most contemporary example of the Pinocchio myth is in the story of the sentient cyborg/robot that desires humanity. Moving from the classic in the field of cyborg studies Blade Runner through Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which directly links the robot to Pinocchio, to the least technophobic and most transhumanist Battlestar Galactica, Chapter 1 demonstrates how all case studies are connected to Collodi's novel through the confrontation scene, a specific passage in the text which touches upon the core of the Pinocchio myth, as Pinocchio is confronted both by the Blue Fairy and his corporeality. Chapter 2 examines Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice and Jerome Charyn's Pinocchio's Nose, two metafictional novels that deconstruct the myth of Pinocchio by challenging each of its components. Pinocchio's posthumanity is a reversal of the original story, as both protagonists turn from flesh to wood. Moreover, this analysis focuses on the role of the Blue Fairy in instigating Pinocchio's desire for humanity and on the role of writing and authorship in both texts. Chapter 3 analyses Pinocchio retellings that combine posthumanism with postmodernism. Winshluss's Pinocchio and Ausonia's Pinocchio focus on the malfunctioning conscience of Pinocchio. Both graphic novels deconstruct the Pinocchio myth visually and conceptually. The desire for humanity, central to the myth of Pinocchio, is missing from both texts, suggesting an alternative reading of the original text and exposing the ways the myth has been used to perpetuate consumerist values.
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Van, der Schyff Karlien. "Screen bound/skin bound : the politics of embodiment in the posthuman age." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/4139.
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Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The end of the second millennium saw a sudden return to corporeality, especially within feminist scholarship, where embodiment and issues surrounding the body were, for the first time, made explicit. This study examines the corporeal body in relation to technology and the impact that newly emerging virtual technologies have on our understanding of the body, not only through examining representations of the technologically modified body, but also by exploring how contemporary cultural practices produce corporeal bodies that view themselves as somehow integrated with technology. It focuses on the material artefacts of contemporary culture in relation to explicitly virtual technologies, both arguing for a return to corporeality and contesting the pervasive trope of disembodiment that characterises so-called “posthuman” age. This study thus takes one of the most popular metaphors for the relationship between the corporeal body and technology as its starting point, namely Donna Haraway’s cyborg figures. Following the publication of Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), the female cyborg became an icon of emancipation for many feminist scholars, who utilised Haraway’s cyborg discourse as a means of discussing the cultural practices that both construct and limit female gendered identity. Through closely examining the metaphor of Haraway’s cyborg figures in relation to cultural representations of female cyborg bodies, this study argues that, ultimately, the metaphor of the cyborg is inherently neither challenging nor liberating. It then examines the failure of the cyborg as an icon of postgenderedness in terms of its negation of the corporeal, as cyborg figures paradoxically only strengthen the same Cartesian dualism Haraway’s cyborg discourse attempts to deconstruct. It explores representations of three female cyborg figures found in contemporary popular culture to illustrate how the cyborg body’s negation of the corporeal only results in the reiteration of conventional gendered stereotypes, rather than liberation from oppressive gendered practices. Finally, this study examines the crucial interplay between the corporeal and the technological, not only when speaking of more imaginary cyborg configurations and tropes, but also when speaking of the physical reality of lived bodies and embodied experiences. By examining the increasingly embodied nature of cyberspace, this study explores possible alternatives to the figure of the hypersexualised and disembodied cyborg, through investigating new figurations with which to describe the embodied postmodern subject and his/her dependence on technology. Since the central task for a feminist ethics of embodiment would be grounded in the project of representing the female body, in such a way that it constructs autonomous women’s representations without falling prey to patriarchal, stereotypical or estranging images of women’s bodies, this study concludes with more useful methods of representing the corporeal body in relation to virtual technology through an appeal to an ethics of embodiment.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die einde van die tweede millennium het ‘n skielike belangstelling in beliggaamdheid ontlok, veral binne feministiese vakgeleerdheid, waar beliggaamdheid en kwessies rondom die ligaam vir die eerste keer eksplisiet gestel is. Hierdie studie ondersoek die stoflike liggaam in verhouding tot tegnologie en die invloed wat nuwe, virtuele tegnologiëe op ons begrip van die liggaam het, nie slegs deur voorstellings van die tegnologies-gemodifieërde ligaam te ondersoek nie, maar deur ook te kyk na hoe kontemporêre kulturele praktyke beliggaamde subjekte produseer wat huself op een of ander wyse as geïntegreerd met tegnologie sien. Die studie fokus op die materiële artefakte van kontemporêre kultuur in verhouding tot eksplisiet virtuele tegnologiëe. Dit bevorder ‘n terugkeer tot beliggaamdheid, terwyl dit teen die sogenaamde “postmenslike” era se mees kenmerkende troop van ontliggaamdheid argumenteer. Die studie begin dus deur een van die mees populêre metafore vir die verhouding tussen die liggaamlike en die tegnologiese te ondersoek, naamlik Donna Haraway se siborgfigure. Sedert die publikasie van Haraway se “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), het verskeie feministiese vakgeleerdes die vroulike siborg-figuur beide as ’n ikoon vir emansipasie beskou en gebruik om die kulturele praktyke wat vroulike geslagsidentiteit gelyktydig konstrueer én beperk te bespreek. Deur Haraway se siborg-figure met kulturele voorstellings van vroulike siborg-liggame te vergelyk, kom hierdie studie tot die gevolgtrekking dat die metafoor van die siborg inherent nóg uitdaagend nóg bevrydend is. Gevolglik ondersoek die studie die onbevoegdheid van die siborg-figuur as ‘n ikoon vir postgeslagtigheid in terme van die siborg-liggaam se negering van beliggaamdheid, aangesien siborg-figure op ‘n paradoksale wyse die selfde Cartesiaanse dualisme versterk wat Haraway se siborg-diskoers wou dekonstrueer. Dit ondersoek voorstellings van drie vroulike siborg-figure in kontemporêre populêre kultuur om te illustreer hoe die siborgliggaam se negering van beliggaamdheid slegs konvensionele geslagstereotipes versterk, eerder as om ons van beperkende, patriargale geslagspraktyke te bevry. Ten slotte ondersoek hierdie studie die deurslaggewende tussenspel tussen die ligaamlike en die tegnologiese, nie slegs in terme van meer denkbeeldige siborg tropes nie, maar ook in terme van die fisiese reailiteit van konkrete, beliggaamde lewenservaringe. Deur die toenemend beliggaamde kwaliteit van kiberruimtes te ondersoek, stel hierdie studie moontlike alternatiewe maniere voor om die postmoderne subjek en sy/haar afhanklikheid van tegnologie te beskryf, eerder as om op ontliggaamde en hipergeseksualiseerde siborg-figure staat te maak. Aangesien ‘n feministiese beliggaamde etiek gegrond is in ‘n projek om die vroulike liggaam op só ‘n wyse voor te stel dat patriargale, stereotipiese of vervreemdbare beelde van die vroulike liggaam vermy word, eindig hierdie studie met meer nuttige metodes om die stoflike liggaam in verhouding tot virtuele tegnologie voor te stel deur ‘n beroep tot ‘n meer beliggaamde etiek te maak.
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Han, Seok J. "Choreographing the posthuman : a critical examination of the body in digital performance." Thesis, University of Surrey, 2015. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/807919/.
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In the field of dance, the advent of the virtual and robotic body of a human performing subject pushes choreography in new dimensions since these nonhuman presences bring into question how they engage with the perceptual and embodied experience of the human subject. To resolve this question, this thesis analyses selected digital performances where choreographic composition is employed in creating the posthuman, addressing how the human body is engaged with its technological self and vice versa, and then how these choreographic practices evoke ideas about the posthuman subject and its embodiment. For the analyses of the case studies, I draw upon critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian phenomenology as a theoretical framework, which helps the posthuman escape from an anthropocentric humanist bias against technology’s physical and cognitive ability as a threat to humanity and from a popular posthumanist desire for the disembodiment and transcendence of the body. This thesis argues that in the case studies the choreographers manifest the posthuman, as an alternative and affirmative vision of the human, which resists an anthropocentric view on the nonhuman as the ‘Other’ or something to control. Instead, they rethink technology as a constituent part of the construction of human subjectivity, while reframing choreographic knowledge of human embodiment as a synthesis of corporeal and digital thoughts. Posthuman embodiment in the choreographic works urges us to rethink the notion of the anthropocentric and Cartesian human subject in terms of the human’s relation to machine, and re-inscribes the body’s doubled condition of presence and absence in the experience of the (physical and/or virtual) world. Also, the case studies reveal the validity of choreographers’ specialised knowledge of bodily ways of being-in-the-world in a posthuman age and the possibility of expanding their knowledge into further domains.
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Torell, Alexander. "Ideological Technology and Posthuman Conditions in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Cosmopolis." Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Engelska, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-28118.
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Leung, Jason Cham Sum. "Posthumanism, singularity, and the anthropocene : a thematic perspective on posthuman science fiction." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2019. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/713.
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When speaking of the future of the human, our attention is often on human beings themselves as a species and their capability to survive in the face of the changes of the world. Our understanding of the human body, space and even our connection with technoscience are vastly transformed by the changes brought by the close and interconnected relationship of human and technology in the contemporary world. From Donna J. Haraway's cyborg to N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe's discussions on posthumanism, it is undeniable that we have already entered the age of the posthuman. Science fiction as a form of creative writing explores various possible futures of the human species augmented by the advent of technology while posthumanism looks into how the human should respond in view of the changing connection between human and technology, human and animals, human and the earth, and human and nonhuman. Science fiction with a posthuman theme is a unique genre that deals with the human condition in the world of science and technology and its relation to the nonhuman world. This dissertation examines posthumanism, the singularity, and the Anthropocene in science fiction from a thematic perspective. Chapter One reviews the history of cyborg and posthuman theories and the connection between posthumanism and science fiction to illustrate how posthuman discourses and science fiction works develop together. Chapter Two examines the representations of the posthuman body in science fiction along the development of posthuman discourses. Discussions on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Blade Runner (1982), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), William Gibson's Neuromancer, eXistenZ (1999), and Robert J. Sawyer's WWW Trilogy: Wake, Watch, and Wonder demonstrate four main types of imaginations to illustrate different visions of the posthuman in science fiction: (1) the technologically-made monster, (2) artificial intelligence in an organic body, (3) plugging one's body into the digital realm, and (4) embodiment of the nonhuman. Chapter Three argues for an alternative perspective other than the insistent privileging of the human in posthuman science fiction. From humanistic values and anthropocentric biases to the WWW Trilogy's embrace of the singularity, there is a paradigm shift from humanism to the concern of the nonhuman. The chapter examines Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil's visions of the Singularity with reference to the WWW Trilogy and other singularity science fiction works which portray possible worlds of symbiosis, coexistence, and coevolution. Last but not least, Chapter Four focuses on the Anthropocene and science fiction to illustrate the coevolution of human and nonhuman in relation to the environment and climate change with discussions on Paul Di Filippo's short story "Life in the Anthropocene" and Kim Stanley Robinson's science fictions New York 2140 and 2312. By examining the development of posthuman discourses, concepts of the singularity and the Anthropocene along the creative narratives of posthuman science fiction, this dissertation aims to affirm science fiction's role in exploring the posthuman condition and reimagining our future. It also puts science and humanities together in developing new perspectives and ethics for the world we are in.
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Greer, Lindsay Patrice. "Summoning the Spirit of Obsolescence in Media and Performance: A Posthuman Sèance." OpenSIUC, 2017. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1460.
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In this dissertation, I explore the fantasies and paradoxical desires belying spiritual medium performances of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and new media practices of remediation. Forming the organizing construct of this dissertation, spiritual medium performance gives me a medium to explore fantasy as a means of suspending and manipulating audience belief. Through the use of my performance persona, Lucida Fox, I further connect the spiritual medium’s communication with the dead to the practices of remediation meant to summon the influences of obsolete media. Through Lucida, I remediate the past (Chapter 2), future (Chapter 3), and experiment with several spiritualist techniques in the present (Chapter 4). In the final chapter, I address the implications of this research on current discussions within the field of performance studies and conclude by offering future direction of this research.
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Shirley, Beth J. "Adapting Environmental Ethics and Behaviors: Toward a Posthuman Rhetoric of Community Engagement." DigitalCommons@USU, 2019. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/7513.
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What persuades people one way or another to accept or deny climate change? More importantly, what persuades people to act on, ignore, or even be defiant of climate change? We would like to think that people are motivated when they hear the science explained clearly and when they are presented with a clear understanding of how their actions have a lasting impact. Yet the science on climate change has been made clear for some time, and doubt in climate change science is rampant (at least in the United States).
This dissertation seeks to answer these questions and develop a new methodology for persuading people to change their behaviors to be more environmentally friendly. I discuss a rhetorical theory called new materialism (a branch of posthumanism) that looks at the impact that nonhuman factors have on an audience’s decision-making. I apply that theory to the study of technical communication in three case studies of rural communities in Utah, Morocco, and Ohio, learning from local knowledges and seeking to understand what persuades these audiences’ in a more complex way than we may have previously thought. I conclude by suggesting what approaches communicators might take with these communities in the future toward engaging them in making the behavior changes that are necessary to mitigate the human contribution to climate change.
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Jeffery, Scott W. "Superhuman, transhuman, post/human : mapping the production and reception of the posthuman body." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/19464.
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The figure of the cyborg, or more latterly, the posthuman body has been an increasingly familiar presence in a number of academic disciplines. The majority of such studies have focused on popular culture, particularly the depiction of the posthuman in science-fiction, fantasy and horror. To date however, few studies have focused on the posthuman and the comic book superhero, despite their evident corporeality, and none have questioned comics’ readers about their responses to the posthuman body. This thesis presents a cultural history of the posthuman body in superhero comics along with the findings from twenty-five, two-hour interviews with readers. By way of literature reviews this thesis first provides a new typography of the posthuman, presenting it not as a stable bounded subject but as what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as a ‘rhizome’. Within the rhizome of the posthuman body are several discursive plateaus that this thesis names Superhumanism (the representation of posthuman bodies in popular culture), Post/Humanism (a critical-theoretical stance that questions the assumptions of Humanism) and Transhumanism (the philosophy and practice of human enhancement with technology). With these categories in mind the thesis explores the development of the posthuman in body in the Superhuman realm of comic books. Exploring the body-types most prominent during the Golden (1938-1945), Silver (1958-1974) and contemporary Ages of superheroes it presents three explorations of what I term the Perfect Body, Cosmic Body and Military-Industrial Body respectively. These body types are presented as ‘assemblages’ (Delueze and Guattari, 1987) that display rhizomatic connections to the other discursive realms of the Post/Human and Transhuman. This investigation reveals how the depiction of the Superhuman body developed and diverged from, and sometimes back into, these realms as each attempted to territorialise the meaning and function of the posthuman body. Ultimately it describes how, in spite of attempts by nationalistic or economic interests to control Transhuman enhancement in real-world practices, the realms of Post/Humanism and Superhumanism share a more critical approach. The final section builds upon this cultural history of the posthuman body by addressing reader’s relationship with these images. This begins by refuting some of the common assumptions in comics studies about superheroes and bodily representations. Readers stated that they viewed such imagery as iconographic rather than representational, whether it was the depiction of bodies or technology. Moreover, regular or committed readers of superhero comics were generally suspicious of the notion of human enhancement, displaying a belief in the same binary categories -artificial/natural, human/non-human - that critical Post/Humanism seeks to problematize. The thesis concludes that while superhero comics remain ultimately too human to be truly Post/Humanist texts, it is never the less possible to conceptualise the relationship between reader, text, producer and so on in Post/Humanist terms as reading-assemblage, and that such a cyborgian fusing of human and comic book allow both bodies to ‘become other’, to move in new directions and form new assemblages not otherwise possible when considered separately.
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Perham, John. "SCIENCEFRICTION: OF THE POSTHUMAN SUBJECT, ABJECTION, AND THE BREACH IN MIND/BODY DUALISM." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/268.
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This thesis investigates the multiple readings that arise when the division between the biological and technological is interrupted--here abjection is key because the
binary between abjection and gadgetry gives multiple meanings to other binaries, including male/female. Using David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and eXistenZ, I argue that multiple readings arise because of people’s participation with electronically mediated technology. Indeed, abjection is salient because Cronenberg’s films present an ambivalent relationship between people and technology; this relationship is often an uneasy one because technology changes people on both a somatic and cognitive level.
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Baldo, Sofia <1995>. "Will the Machine stop? - E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" as posthuman perspective." Master's Degree Thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/18398.
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Questa tesi vuole offrire una panoramica più approfondita possibile circa il postumanesimo, in tutte le sue sfaccettature sociali, ambientali, e ovviamente, umane. Supportati dalla storia breve di E. M. Forster, “La macchina si ferma”, i tre capitoli presenti in questo elaborato vogliono dapprima mettere in risalto le caratteristiche, le peculiarità e le questioni sollevate in alcuni passaggi dell’opera di Forster in correlazione col postumanesimo, per poi inserirle in un'analisi critica più approfondito. Capitolo dopo capitolo, i lettori avranno non solo una definizione più puntuale possibile su cosa vuol dire postumanesimo in termini concettuali, ma soprattutto cosa questa corrente può implicare, se messa all’interno di un’ottica più pragmatica.
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Возний, Андрій Петрович, Андрей Петрович Возный, and Andrii Petrovych Voznyi. "Проблема трансгуманизма в формировании постчеловека." Thesis, Видавництво СумДУ, 2011. http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/24232.
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Kiraly, Thom. "An Angel Passes By : Posthuman and Acousmatic Voices in Digitally Mediated Contemporary Live Poetry." Thesis, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Sektionen för planering och mediedesign, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:bth-4738.
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This paper is a comparative analysis between two digitally mediated live poetry performances: Frikativ by Jörg Piringer and This Loud by Amy X Neuburg. More specifically, I examine how these poets use digital technology in their live performances to challenge traditional notions of the human voice. My main argument is that their modes of exerting controlling over their voices ultimately serve similar purposes; those of establishing the voice as a relationship between speaker and listener, a phenomenon rather than a discreet object or bodily organ possible to observe on its own. This phenomenological point of view draws on Karen Barad’s concept of posthumanist performativity as well as on philosophical works on the voice, such as Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More. Moreover, I give an historical account of sound poetry, tape poetry and tape loops as they relate to Frikativ and This Loud. In this, I also discuss live-looping; a technique used by both Piringer and Neuburg and connect it to Gilles Deleuze's ideas of difference and repetition. Finally, Piringer's and Neuburg's works is compared based on how they attempt to control the voices-as-relations in their performances. My conclusion is that Frikativ constantly destabilizes the establishment and recognition of voice-as-relation. This Loud, due to the extensive and focused use of live-looping, does not destabilize as much as it multiplies the possible configurations of voices-as-relations.
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Hawk, Julie. "Storied Subjects: Posthuman Subjectivization Through Narrative in Post-1960 American Print and Televisual Narrative." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/82.
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This dissertation theorizes the ramifications of new media forms of narrative on subjectivization by tracing the evolution of the observer through its permutations as second-order observer, witness, director, and narrative agent and demonstrating the various interacting processes involved in the recursive feedback loops between and among, self, world, and story. In this project, I ex-plore novels by contemporary U.S. authors John Barth, Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, as well as two televisual texts, Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse. Drawing from several seemingly disparate theories, I situate my argument in the interstices of systems theory (Luhmann, Clarke), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Butler), media theory (Ellis, Fiske, Buonanno), and posthuman theory (Hayles, Badmington), putting forth a theoretical lens I call posthuman narrative onto-epistemology. The study thus fits into overlapping critical conversations. The extended treatment of five contemporary American novels situates Storied Subjects in conversations surrounding postmodernism and posthumanism as well as conversations surrounding these particular authors. For example, in the first chapter, I argue that the John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 incorporate the observer from systems theory into the narrative frame, catalyzing an ontological and epistemological shift. In the second chapter, I show the ways in which Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Underworld demonstrate what John Ellis calls the “witness” ontology as well as the evolution of that ontology into what I call the “direc-tor” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In addition, the chapter devoted to televisual texts intervenes in an important, though often marginalized, conversation surrounding the importance of situating televisual narratives in dialogue with print fiction, arguing that we must attend to TV texts if we are to understand the texture of contemporary print fiction, which is saturated with the language of TV. In the final chapter, I explore the development of the “narrative agent” ontology, examining both form and content of the televisual texts Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse in order to argue that, once second-order observation reaches a prolonged critical awareness, the observer’s observation runs alongside her or his ability to intervene in the narrative, which allows for changing the story itself.