E:听Posthumanisms (Convenor: Prof Martin Crowley)
This seminar will examine strands of thought from the 1960s to the present day which have sought to relativize or indeed abolish the centrality or primacy of the specifically human form of being. Its four sessions will consider in particular: (1) the constitution of this form of being via paradoxically originary technical prostheses; (2) the conception of beings in general in terms of the machinic, and the generalization of the insights of cybernetics and theoretical biology (including further consideration of the machinic) towards a maximally egalitarian understanding of being as multiplicity; and (3) the political possibilities and problems opened by the translation of this understanding into a conception of agency as distributed across heterogeneous assemblages of beings; and (4) critiques of the limitations of 鈥榩osthumanism鈥�, notably from race-critical perspectives. Rosi Braidotti鈥檚 The Posthuman (海角社区: Polity, 2013) will make useful preparatory reading.
Session 1: Originary technicity Arthur Bradley, 鈥楲ife鈥�, in Originary Technicity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1-20. Jacques Derrida, 鈥楾he Supplement of (at) the Origin鈥�, in Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 313-16. Bernard Stiegler, 鈥榃ho? What? The Invention of the Human鈥�, in Technics and Time, 1: The fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 134-79.
Session 2: Machines, cybernetics, and flat ontologies Gilles Deleuze & F茅lix Guattari, 鈥楧esiring Machines鈥�, in Anti-艗dipus (London: Athlone, 1984), 1-50. Gregory Bateson, 鈥楥onscious Purpose versus Nature鈥�, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 431-45. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, 鈥業ntroduction鈥� and 鈥極n Machines, Living and Otherwise鈥�, in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The realization of the living (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 73-84. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology: What it鈥檚 like to be a thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3-22.
Session 3: The (eco)politics of hybrid agency Jane Bennett, 鈥楾he Agency of Assemblages鈥�, in Vital Matter: A political ecology of things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20-38. Donna Haraway, 鈥楽ympoiesis鈥�, in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 58-98. Bruno Latour, 鈥楩ifth Lecture: How to Convene the Various Peoples of Nature鈥�, in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (海角社区: Polity, 2017), 146-183.
Session 4: Post-Who? Post-What? Displacement and critique Claire Colebrook, 鈥業ntroduction鈥�, in Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), 9-29. Caroline Koegler, 鈥楶osthumanism and the Question of Race鈥�: https://criticalposthumanism.net/posthumanism-and-the-question-of-race-or-posthumanisation-in-the-colonial-anthropocene/ Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, 鈥極uter Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement 鈥淏eyond the Human鈥濃��, GLQ 21:2-3 (2015): 215-18. Maneesha Deckha, 鈥楾oward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals鈥�, Hypatia 27 (2012): 527-45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01290听
Back to core course seminars
