A practiced-informed critique of technological posthumanism and its ideologies
Date
2010-06-02T16:11:43Z
Authors
Cecchetto, David
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Abstract
With the recent emergence of copious and diverse scholarship that considers the discursive valence of the term "human", posthumanism has emerged as a timely and
powerful interdisciplinary discourse. This study is a critical analysis of three dominant strains of the technologically oriented segment of this discourse; namely "scientific" (Ollivier Dyens), "humanist" (N. Katherine Hayles), and "organismic" (Mark B. N. Hansen) constructions of technological posthumanism. In each case, the study desublimates (and often deconstructs) the particular ideological claims that underwrite a given perspective, emphasizing the specific elements that such presumptions enable or foreclose. To this end, particular emphasis is given throughout the essay to the critical capacity of performativity, a perspective that is enacted through analyses of selected new media artworks.
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Keywords
posthumanism, technology and culture, art and technology, deconstruction, aesthetics, media art