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Textual entanglements & entangled texts: On relationality and narrative
The notion of entanglement is central to critical posthumanist thought. It might be said to have replaced the ubiquitous network metaphor or even the paradigm of the global in a number of contexts; at the very least, it stands in a tense relationship to them. While the figure of the globe is undeniably linked to human(ist) construction practices and the European colonial project, and a network-like connectedness implies links between objects that are ultimately thought of as separate, the topos of entanglement entails a fundamentally different, relational form of (intra)connectedness with other ethical implications. When fctional texts generate connectivity, e.g. by linking storylines that are separated in terms of their geographies, literary studies often habitually refer to these texts as "global novels" or "network narratives".
The implications of these tropes of connectivity themselves - as briefy outlined above - are rarely given much thought; and as labels, they cannot account for more complex and meshwork-like formations. In this talk, I will be thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of entanglement.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:21
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Habit: posthuman aesthetics from prehuman physiology
Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century advances in physiology – in particular the discovery and characterisation of the autonomic nervous system, an adaptive physiological mechanism that carries out life-sustaining functions entirely automatically – led to growing awareness of the central role of automaticity in human survival.
Reflecting this growing awareness, French physiologist Claude Bernard observed that, despite appearing 'free and independent', humans largely rely on automatic processes for their survival, just like their evolutionarily more ancient precursors. Further emphasising Bernard's idea, at the turn of the century American philosopher and psychologist William James estimated that ‘nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of [human] activity is purely automatic and habitual'. These and similar observations suggested that, whilst intuitively appearing defined by individual agency and free deliberate choice, humans are, to a large extent, dependent upon evolutionarily ancient automatic physiological mechanisms.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:28
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From the AI Imaginary to Artificial Communication in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
The AI imaginary as unfolded over half a century of posthuman machine beings foregrounds how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. AI exhibits this condition explicitly as engineered intelligence instantiated in machines.
Classical versions of the AI imaginary typically bring artificial intelligence forward as higher intelligence, beyond organic contingencies, cosmic rather than terrestrial. In the thrust and escape velocity of such cosmological narratives, the AI imaginary beams outward and away from Earth along expansionist and monolithic lines of evolutionary progressions toward cosmic heights ever receding from its human origins.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:41
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“Haunting” Performance of Nonhumans. A Case of Electricity in the Polish History of Literature
The well-defined focus in the last year on tracing back the performance of nonhumans in many fields of knowledge is often led by the somehow troublesome consciousness of the entanglement of humanity in the technological spectrum. I use the term ‘spectrum’ deliberately, because in my view it brings to mind the scope of critical possibilities of posthumanism.
In my presentation, I would like to pick up on that issue by discussing the “haunting” performance of nonhumans that is revealed when we install a posthumanist lens to investigate the historical accounts on literature. Starting with my current research into the reciprocal designation of the fields of literature and science in the nineteenth century, I will try to define the broad agency of electricity as an agent and a metaphor. Its ontological status cannot be determined.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:56
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Hold the Door: Companion Prosthetics in Game of Thrones
Despite its many flaws, the blockbuster television series Game of Thrones could be seen as attempting to resist what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have identified as narrative prosthesis, in which disabled characters are oversimplified and utilized primarily as a kind of catalyst for normate characters in their foregrounded narrative arcs.
Characters in the series can arguably be seen as more complex at times, while also evoking other stereotypes of disability, from Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, who is referred to as a “dwarf” and has congenitally restricted growth, to Bran Stark, who is paralyzed after being thrown out of a window, and Hodor, who only ever utters the word that has become his name.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 13:37
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Reading in the Anthropocene
The cultural use of the concept of the Anthropocene usually includes the problem that the climate, unlike the weather, is not organized in an event-like manner and not directly perceptible, so the human imagination is facing a serious challenge when it tries to think about climate change.
This problem most often leads to questions that ask about the possibilities and performances of the art (what kind of works of art can adequately mediate the hard-to-conceive era of the Anthropocene?), which questions are complemented in this article by the question of the reception, especially reading. This addition is motivated by the recognition that the understanding of our world is traditionally associated with its “readability,” but such a metaphor of reading — precisely in the absence of perceptibility and eventuality — may no longer be able to describe our relationship to the culture and the world.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 13:41
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Playing posthumanism? NieR: Automata and the inescapable human
How do videogames imagine diegetic and extradiegetic posthuman agents? In a sense, videogame play is already posthuman. The player of a videogame is redistributed in an interrelational assemblage of human and non-human agents (Braidotti 2013); of physical world, player, technology, player character, and virtual environment (Taylor 2009).
Thus, videogames, by their very “nature” should allow us to play out versions of breaking away from anthropocentric idealism and experience what new modes of subjectivity and agency might entail.
One such attempt is found in the 2017 videogame NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames 2017), lauded as a work of existential nihilism and post-humanity (as “after-human” as well as “beyond-“ or “more-than-human”). NieR: Automata is a role-playing action adventure videogame set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where androids and machines are caught in an eternal war. The player “controls” the android 2B, and later other androids and drone companions, to fight machines on behalf of humanity.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:01
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Identifying, Deceiving, Protecting and Hunting: What Fictional Machines and Humans Do with Machine Vision Technologies
This presentation explores the cultural imaginaries of machine vision as it is portrayed in contemporary science fiction, digital art and videogames. How are the relationships between humans and machines imagined in fictional situations and aesthetic contexts where machine vision technologies occur?
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:07
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‘Doing e-lit’ in print: Plus-Human Codes and the (re)Turn to the Bookbound
“He may be a superdecoder or a superspy but he’s sort of neutral, though not quite like a machine, more like he’d, sort of, come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties”, or so Zab falteringly describes the Martian boulder-cum-supercomputer that has crash-landed in a disused Cornish mine.
Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1986 novel, Xorandor, is remarkable as much for its eponymous radioactive-waste-guzzling, double-crossing rock, as for being partially narrated in the programming language, Poccom 3. Invented by siblings, Jip and Zab, first as a kind of idioglossia and then as a lingua franca for communicating with Xorandor, Poccom 3 is rather like the indeterminate rock: its presence in the text requires a supreme effort of decoding to begin with, becomes increasingly naturalized with exposure, but consistently questions all our certainties about the language of literature.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:11
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Literary and Aesthetic Posthumanism
Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar of science fiction, writes that “Native slipstream,” a subgenre of speculative fiction, “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like a navigable stream.” The immense possibilities inherent to this genre, she continues, allow “authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures.”
Biidaaban (Dawn Comes) (2018), a short stop-motion film by Vancouver-based Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong, illustrates the political possibilities of Indigenous slipstream, and Indigenous science fiction more broadly, to envision liberatory futures in the face of forces that naturalize the current destructive, capitalist, and colonial order.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 14:21
