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Reading Through-the-Earth. Towards the Posthuman Aesthet(h)ics
We are living-with our embodied and embedded lives now-here. Our entities are entangled not only with other (human and non-human) entities but also in the present time and local space, which are never only present and local. They should be rather considered as the assemblage of past-present-future with various forms of the glocality.
Merging Timothy Morton's notion of hiperobjects with Karen Barad's onto-epistemology turns us towards the posthuman aesthet(h)ics. According to our living-with now-here, I argue that we cannot differentiate ethics and aesthetics. We rather need to re-lecture Jacques Ranciére's concept of the distribution of the sensible in a posthuman manner.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:46
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Transgression, transcendence and posthumanism in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
What makes us human? Descartes believes it is the cogito – the rational mind, or the soul. “Reason,” he writes in the Discourse on the Method, “[is] the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts.” This categorical distinction between the human species and all other living things is embedded in the western philosophical tradition which has held, since antiquity and even before, that man has a privileged position in the natural world. Human life is endowed with intrinsic value, while other entities, such as animals, plants or minerals, are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:50
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Wordlyphagic Literature: For biopoetry to microbiological A.I
I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison.
William S. Burroughs, Electronic Revolution
As with bacteriophages – viruses that parasitize a bacterium by infecting it and reproducing inside it –, literature is permeated by a series of centripetal and centrifugal movements of rarefaction, in which a sequence of virulent “wordlyphagic” language processes chew, devour, swallow, digest, and regurgitate words (just to swallow them again). Moving away from the printed page, or being even more deeply impregnated in its textures, these viral processes can either offer a truly literal meaning to Burroughs' often-quoted words, “Language is a virus”, or simply emphasize its metaphoric sense, just as they can be simultaneously analyzed in vivo by means of laboratorial practices and/or scrutinized by digital algorithms.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 11:23
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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
