The Posthuman
and
the Post-Biological
The goal of the post-human is a
zoo of posthumanities rather
than the family of man
Judith/Jack Halberstam & Ira
Livingston
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
What defines the human
changes historically – we call
this process an anthropological
machine
Giorgio Agamben, The Open
This anthropological machine is
a continuum with animals on
one side and technologies on
the other
Animals
Technologies
More Than Human
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
(1930)
Robert Silverberg, Son of Man (1971)
Human + Machine
Frederick Pohl, Man Plus (1976)
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Marge Piercy, He, She and It (1991)
Amy Thomson, Virtual Girl (1993)
The Posthuman
Pandorum
Christian Alvart 2009
Biomedia
Post-biological
Pandorum
Christian Alvart 2009
Hunters have evolved from an
enzyme to make humans
accommodate better to a new
planetary environment
Pandorum
Christian Alvart 2009
This is a posthuman future as
nightmare — we will try to
create better ways of surviving,
but in the process we will create
something inhuman
Pandorum
Christian Alvart 2009
Biomedia experiments will end
in a different form of
degeneracy, making us more
animal than human in the
process
Splice
Vincenzo Natali 2009
Biomedia
Ethics
Gender
Splice
Vincenzo Natali 2009
Splicing genes from human and
animal creates Dren, blurring
boundaries between animal,
human and technology
Splice
Vincenzo Natali 2009
The anthropological machine in
Splice revolves around the
complicated issue of biomedia
and rights. Dren is not human
— not entirely — and this why
transgressions against her are
okay
Splice
Vincenzo Natali 2009
The ambiguity of Dren is strong,
both in terms of gender and her
status as human.
Splice
Vincenzo Natali 2009
The posthumanity in Splice is
both overt and subtle. The
genetic engineering of humans
is presented as a dangerous
path but also a path which we
inevitably will walk down.
Splice
Vincenzo Natali 2009
We face both desire and
disgust for Dren, yet are mostly
empathic to her situation for
most of the film.
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi 2009
Biomedia
New People
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi 2009
All fossil fuels have been used
up and most plants and
foodstuffs have been killed by
genetic plagues known as
blister rust.
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi 2009
“That is the nature of our beasts
and plagues. They are not
dumb machines to be driven
about. They have their own
needs and hungers. Their own
evolutionary demands. They
must mutate and adapt…”
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi 2009
“’My body is not mine,’ she told
him, her voice flat when he
asked about the performances.
‘The men who designed me,
they make me do things I
cannot control. As if their hands
are inside me. Like a puppet,
yes?’”
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi 2009
“We should all be windups now. It’s easier to
build a person impervious to blister rust than to
protect an earlier version of the human
creature. A generation from now, we could be
well-suited to our new environment. Your
children could be the beneficiaries. Yet you
people refuse to adapt. You cling to some idea
of a humanity that evolved in concert with your
environment over millennia, and which you now,
perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep with.”
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi 2009
Humans have always
transformed alongside the
environment; our current
biomediated environment will
end up transforming us —
which is the point exaggerated
in The Windup Girl
Prometheus
Ridley Scott 2012
Biomedia
Engineers and
humans
Prometheus
Ridley Scott 2012
Halfway between the early
posthumanist science fiction
and the contemporary
biomediated one, providing an
origin story of the human rather
than of the posthuman
Prometheus
Ridley Scott 2012
The alien creature becomes the
opposite side of the
anthropological machine in this
work and so serves the side of
the animal. The Engineers are
aligned with a creator of some
sort, but in terms of biomedia
Prometheus
Ridley Scott 2012
Our biomedia origins technically
raises the issue of human-asanimal, no such discussion is
suggested. Instead, humans
remain a chosen species
indicating a kind of divinity to
our creation
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga – Mother Monster –
calls into question ontological
configurations of difference
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga
Challenges the integrity of the
organic body, and confronting
the viewer with her
morphogenesis into humanmachine-animal hybrid
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga
There is a link between
mothers, monsters and
machines in the displacement
of women in the reproductive
realm as a high-tech affair
Consequences for the human
These posthuman works reside
in an imaginary space which
questions conventional
understandings of subjectivity,
the body, and reality
These posthuman works
confront traditional ideas of the
subject, language, and culture
offers the possibility to think
differently and think differences
differently
No longer is difference the
articulation of an opposition
between Self and Other, but
rather beyond simple dialectics
into a larger dialog of positive
identities
Posthumanism is a proliferation
of experiences of different
bodies existing in various
technologies and recasts how
our bodies are lived and
imagined
Thank you!