Carefully read The Chicago School of Media Theory on “posthumanism” and Steven Poole’s article “Slaves to the Algorithm,” and ask one of your research questions and answer it as if posthumanism were a technology instead of a concept or movement. In other words, treat posthumanism as a new technology or technological way of being. You may choose whatever question you feel is most relevant. Please only reference the two sources above and refrain from personal opinions. Your post should try to avoid first-person pronouns and, as always, any badly written posts (i. e., clearly not proofread) will be downgraded. All quotes and paraphrases necessitate full citations. Your comments need to critically address the student’s post, not simply reiterate what is in the articles.

Carefully read The Chicago School of Media Theory on “posthumanism” and Steven Poole’s article “Slaves to the Algorithm,” and ask one of your research questions and answer it as if posthumanism were a technology instead of a concept or movement. In other words, treat posthumanism as a new technology or technological way of being. You may choose whatever question you feel is most relevant. Please only reference the two sources above and refrain from personal opinions. Your post should try to avoid first-person pronouns and, as always, any badly written posts (i. e., clearly not proofread) will be downgraded. All quotes and paraphrases necessitate full citations. Your comments need to critically address the student’s post, not simply reiterate what is in the articles.

 Articles:

1:

https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/posthuman/

2:

https://aeon.co/essays/which-decisions-should-we-leave-to-algorithms

Choose one or two from these questions:

1. What is the problem for which this technology is the solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?

4. What new problems might be created because we have solved this problem?

5. What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?

6. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost by such changes?

‘When Garry Kasparov lost his second match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in
1997, people predicted that computers would eventually destroy chess.’ Photo by Jeffrey
Sylvester

Slaves to the algorithm
Computers could take some tough choices out of
our hands, if we let them. Is there still a place for
human judgment?

I n central London this spring, eight of the world’s greatest minds
performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience
of hundreds watched in hushed reverence. This was the closing stretch
of the 14-round Candidates’ Tournament, to decide who would take on
the current chess world champion, Viswanathan Anand, later this year.

Each round took a day: one game could last seven or eight hours.
Sometimes both players would be hunched over their board together,
elbows on table, splayed fingers propping up heads as though to

Steven Poole

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support their craniums against tremendous internal pressure. At times,
one player would lean forward while his rival slumped back in an
executive leather chair like a bored office worker, staring into space.
Then the opponent would make his move, stop his clock, and stand up,
wandering around to cast an expert glance over the positions in the
other games before stalking upstage to pour himself more coffee. On a
raised dais, inscrutable, sat the white-haired arbiter, the tournament’s
presiding official. Behind him was a giant screen showing the four
current chess positions. So proceeded the fantastically complex slow-
motion violence of the games, and the silently intense emotional
theatre of their players.

When Garry Kasparov lost his second match against the IBM
supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997, people predicted that computers
would eventually destroy chess, both as a contest and as a spectator
sport. Chess might be very complicated but it is still mathematically
finite. Computers that are fed the right rules can, in principle, calculate
ideal chess variations perfectly, whereas humans make mistakes. Today,
anyone with a laptop can run commercial chess software that will
reliably defeat all but a few hundred humans on the planet. Isn’t the
spectacle of puny humans playing error-strewn chess games just a
nostalgic throwback?

Such a dismissive attitude would be in tune with the spirit of the times.
Our age elevates the precision-tooled power of the algorithm over
flawed human judgment. From web search to marketing and stock-
trading, and even education and policing, the power of computers that
crunch data according to complex sets of if-then rules is promised to
make our lives better in every way. Automated retailers will tell you
which book you want to read next; dating websites will compute your
perfect life-partner; self-driving cars will reduce accidents; crime will be
predicted and prevented algorithmically. If only we minimise the input
of messy human minds, we can all have better decisions made for us.
So runs the hard sell of our current algorithm fetish.

If we let cars do the driving, we are outsourcing
not only our motor control but also our moral
judgment

But in chess, at least, the algorithm has not displaced human judgment.
The imperfectly human players who contested the last round of the
Candidates’ Tournament — in a thrilling finish that, thanks to unusual
tiebreak rules, confirmed the 22-year-old Norwegian Magnus Carlsen

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as the winner, ahead of former world champion Vladimir Kramnik —
were watched by an online audience of 100,000 people. In fact, the host
of the streamed coverage, the chatty and personable international
master Lawrence Trent, pointedly refused to use a computer engine
(which he called ‘the beast’) for his own analyses and predictions. The
idea, he explained, is to try to figure things out for yourself. During a
break in the commentary room on the day I was there, Trent was eating
crisps and still eagerly discussing variations with his plummily amusing
co-presenter, Nigel Short (who himself had contested the World
Championship against Kasparov in 1993). ‘He’ll find Qf4; it’s not
difficult to find,’ Short assured Trent. ‘Ng8, then it’s…’ ‘It’s game over.’
‘Game over!’

Chess is an Olympian battle of wits. As with any sport, the interest lies
in watching profoundly talented humans operating at the limits of their
capability. There does exist a cyborg version of the game, dubbed
‘advanced chess’, in which humans are allowed to use computers while
playing. But it is profoundly boring to watch, like a contest over who
can use spreadsheet software more effectively, and hasn’t caught on.
The ‘beast’ can be a useful helpmeet — Veselin Topalov, a previous
challenger for Anand’s world title, used a 10,000-CPU monster in his
preparation for that match, which he still lost — but it’s never going to
be the main event.

This is a lesson that the algorithm-boosters in the wider culture have yet
to learn. And outside the Platonically pure cosmos of chess, when we
seek to hand over our decision-making to automatic routines in areas
that have concrete social and political consequences, the results might
be troubling indeed.

t first thought, it seems like a pure futuristic boon — the idea of a car
that drives itself, currently under development by Google. Already legal
in Nevada, Florida and California, computerised cars will be able to
drive faster and closer together, reducing congestion while also being
safer. They’ll drop you at your office then go and park themselves.
What’s not to like? Well, for a start, as the mordant critic of computer-
aided ‘solutionism’ Evgeny Morozov points out, the consequences for
urban planning might be undesirable to some. ‘Would self-driving cars
result in inferior public transportation as more people took up driving?’
he wonders in his new book, To Save Everything, Click Here (2013).

More recently, Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York
University, offered a vivid thought experiment in The New Yorker.
Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge, and
a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. There is

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no room for the vehicles to pass each other. Should the self-driving car
take the decision to drive off the bridge and kill you in order to save the
children?

What Marcus’s example demonstrates is the fact that driving a car is
not simply a technical operation, of the sort that machines can do more
efficiently. It is also a moral operation. (His example is effectively a kind
of ‘trolley problem’, of the sort that has lately been fashionable in moral
philosophy.) If we let cars do the driving, we are outsourcing not only
our motor control but also our moral judgment.

Meanwhile, as Morozov relates, a single Californian company called
Impermium provides software to tens of thousands of websites to
automatically flag online comments for ‘not only spam and malicious
links, but all kinds of harmful content — such as violence, racism,
flagrant profanity, and hate speech’. How do Impermium’s algorithms
decide exactly what should count as ‘hate speech’ or obscenity? No one
knows, because the company, quite understandably, isn’t going to give
away its secrets. Yet rather than pursuing mere lexicographical
analysis, such a system of automated pre-censorship is, again, making
moral judgments.

If self-driving cars and speech-policing systems are going to make hard
moral decisions for us, we have a serious stake in knowing exactly how
they are programmed to do it. We are unlikely to be content simply to
trust Google, or any other company, not to code any evil into its
algorithms. For this reason, Morozov and other thinkers say that we
need to create a class of ‘algorithmic auditors’ — trusted
representatives of the public who can peer into the code to see what
kinds of implicit political and ethical judgments are buried there, and
report their findings back to us. This is a good idea, though it poses
practical problems about how companies can retain the commercial
edge provided by their computerised secret sauce if they have to open
up their algorithms to quasi-official scrutiny.

If we answer yes, we are giving our blessing to
something even more nebulous than
thoughtcrime. Call it ‘unconscious brain-state
crime’

A further problem is that some algorithms positively must be kept
under wraps in order to work properly. It is already possible, for
example, for malicious operators to ‘game’ Google’s autocomplete

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results — sending abusive or libellous descriptions to the top of
Google’s suggestions when you type a person’s name — and lawsuits
from people affected in this way have already forced the company to
delve into the system and change such examples manually. If it were
made public exactly how Google’s PageRank algorithm computes the
authority of web pages, or how Twitter’s ‘trending’ algorithm
determines the popularity of subjects, then unscrupulous self-
marketers or vengeful exes would soon be gaming those algorithms for
their own purposes too. The vast majority of users would lose out,
because the systems would become less reliable.

And it doesn’t necessarily require a malicious individual gaming a
system for algorithms to get uncomfortably personal. Automatic
analysis of our smartphone geolocation, internet-browsing and social-
media data-trails grows ever more sophisticated, and so we can thin-
slice demographic categories ever more precisely. From such
information it is possible to infer personal details (such as sexual
orientation or use of illegal drugs) that have not been explicitly
supplied, and sometimes to identify unique individuals. Even when
such information is simply used to target adverts more accurately, the
consequences can be uncomfortable. Last year, the journalist Charles
Duhigg related a telling anecdote in an article for The New York Times
called ‘How Companies Learn Your Secrets’. A decade ago, the
American retailer Target sent promotional baby-care vouchers to a
teenage girl in Minneapolis. Her father was so outraged, he went to the
shop to complain. The manager was equally taken aback and
apologised; a few days later, he called the family to apologise again. This
time, it was the father who offered an apology: his daughter really was
pregnant, and Target’s ‘predictive analytics’ system knew it before he
did.

Such automated augury might be considered relatively harmless if its
use is confined to figuring out what products we might like to buy. But
it is not going to stop there. One day in the near future — perhaps this
has already happened — an innocent crime novelist researching bloody
techniques for his latest fictional serial killer will find armed men
banging on his door in the middle of the night, because he left a data
trail that caused lights to flash red in some preventive-policing
algorithm. Perhaps a few distressed writers is a price we are willing to
pay to prevent more murders. But predictive crime prevention is an
area that leads rapidly to a dystopian sci-fi vision like that of the film
Minority Report (2002).

In Baltimore and Philadelphia, software is already being used to predict

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which prisoners will reoffend if released. The software works on a crime
database, and variables including geographic location, type of crime
previously committed, and age of prisoner at previous offence. In so
doing, according to a report in Wired in January this year, ‘The software
aims to replace the judgments parole officers already make based on a
parolee’s criminal record.’ Outsourcing this kind of moral judgment,
where a person’s liberty is at stake, understandably makes some people
uncomfortable. First, we don’t yet know whether the system is more
accurate than humans. Secondly, even if it is more accurate but less
than completely accurate, it will inevitably produce false positives —
resulting in the continuing incarceration of people who wouldn’t have
reoffended. Such false positives undoubtedly occur, too, in the present
system of human judgment, but at least we might feel that we can hold
those making the decisions responsible. How do you hold an algorithm
responsible?

Still more science-fictional are recent reports claiming that brain scans
might be able to predict recidivism by themselves. According to a press
release for the research, conducted by the American non-profit
organisation the Mind Research Network, ‘inmates with relatively low
anterior cingulate activity were twice as likely to reoffend than inmates
with high-brain activity in this region’. Twice as likely, of course, is not
certain. But imagine, for the sake of argument, that eventually a 100
per cent correlation could be determined between certain brain states
and future recidivism. Would it then be acceptable to deny people their
freedom on such an algorithmic basis? If we answer yes, we are giving
our blessing to something even more nebulous than thoughtcrime. Call
it ‘unconscious brain-state crime’. In a different context, such
algorithm-driven diagnosis could be used positively: according to one
recent study at Duke University in North Carolina, there might be a
neural signature for psychopathy, which the researchers at the
laboratory of neurogenetics suggest could be used to devise better
treatments. But to rely on such an algorithm for predicting recidivism is
to accept that people should be locked up simply on the basis of facts
about their physiology.

f we erect algorithms as our ultimate judges and arbiters, we face the
threat of difficulties not only in law-enforcement but also in culture. In
the latter realm, the potential unintended consequences are not as
serious as depriving an innocent person of liberty, but they still might
be regrettable. For if they become very popular, algorithmic systems
could end up destroying what they feed on.

In the early days of Amazon, the company employed a panel of book

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critics, whose job was to recommend books to customers. When
Amazon developed its algorithmic recommendation engine — an
automated system based on data about what others had bought —
sales shot up. So Amazon sacked the humans. Not many people are
likely to weep hot tears over a few unemployed literary critics, but there
still seems room to ask whether there is a difference between
recommendations that lead to more sales, and recommendations that
are better according to some other criterion — expanding readers’
horizons, for example, by introducing them to things they would never
otherwise have tried. It goes without saying that, from Amazon’s point
of view, ‘better’ is defined as ‘drives more sales’, but we might not all
agree.

Algorithmic recommendation engines now exist not only for books,
films and music but also for articles on the internet. There is so much
out there that even the most popular human ‘curators’ cannot possibly
keep on top of all of it. So what’s wrong with letting the bots have a go?
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is professor of internet governance and
regulation at Oxford University; Kenneth Cukier is the data editor of
The Economist. In their book Big Data (2013) — which also calls for
algorithmic auditors — they sing the praises of one Californian
company, Prismatic, that, in their description, ‘aggregates and ranks
content from across the Web on the basis of text analysis, user
preferences, social-network-related popularity, and big-data analytics’.
In this way, the authors claim, the company is able to ‘tell the world
what it ought to pay attention to better than the editors of The New York
Times’. We might happily agree — so long as we concur with the
implied judgment that what is most popular on the internet at any
given time is what is most worth reading. Aficionados of listicles, spats
between technology theorists, and cat-based modes of pageview
trolling do not perhaps constitute the entire global reading audience.

So-called ‘aggregators’ — websites, such as the Huffington Post, that
reproduce portions of articles from other media organisations — also
deploy algorithms alongside human judgment to determine what to
push under the reader’s nose. ‘The data,’ Mayer-Schönberger and
Cukier explain admiringly, ‘can reveal what people want to read about
better than the instincts of seasoned journalists’. This is true, of course,
only if you believe that the job of a journalist is just to give the public
what it already thinks it wants to read. Some, such as Cass Sunstein,
the political theorist and Harvard professor of law, have long worried
about the online ‘echo chamber’ phenomenon, in which people read
only that which reinforces their currently held views. Improved
algorithms seem destined to amplify such effects.

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Some aggregator sites have also been criticised for paraphrasing too
much of the original article and obscuring source links, making it
difficult for most readers to read the whole thing at the original site.
Still more remote from the source is news packaged by companies such
as Summly — the iPhone app created by the British teenager Nick
D’Aloisio — which used another company’s licensed algorithms to
summarise news stories for reading on mobile phones. Yahoo recently
bought Summly for $USD30 million. However, the companies that
produce news often depend on pageviews to sell the advertising that
funds the production of their ‘content’ in the first place. So, to use
algorithm-aided aggregators or summarisers in daily life might help to
render the very creation of content less likely in the future. In To Save
Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov draws a provocative analogy
with energy use:

Our information habits are not very different from our energy
habits: spend too much time getting all your information from
various news aggregators and content farms who merely
repackage expensive content produced by someone else, and
you might be killing the news industry in a way not dissimilar
from how leaving gadgets in the standby mode might be
quietly and unnecessarily killing someone’s carbon offsets.

Meanwhile in education, ‘massive open online courses’ known as
MOOCs promise (or threaten) to replace traditional university teaching
with video ‘lectures’ online. The Silicon Valley hype surrounding these
MOOCs has been stoked by the release of new software that
automatically marks students’ essays. Computerised scoring of
multiple-choice tests has been around for a long time, but can prose
essays really be assessed algorithmically? Currently, more than 3,500
academics in the US have signed an online petition that says no,
pointing out:

Computers cannot ‘read’. They cannot measure the essentials
of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning,
adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing
argument, meaningful organisation, clarity, and veracity,
among others.

It would not be surprising if these educators felt threatened by the
claim that software can do an important part of their job. The
overarching theme of all MOOC publicity is the prospect of teaching
more people (students) using fewer people (professors). Will what is
left really be ‘teaching’ worth the name?

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One day, the makers of an algorithm-driven
psychotherapy app could be sued by the
survivors of someone to whom it gave the worst
possible advice.

If you are feeling gloomy about the automation of higher education, the
death of newspapers, and global warming, you might want to talk to
someone — and there’s an algorithm for that, too. A new wave of
smartphone apps with eccentric titular orthography (iStress,
myinstantCOACH, MoodKit, BreakkUp) promise a psychotherapist in
your pocket. Thus far they are not very intelligent, and require the user
to do most of the work — though this second drawback could be said
of many human counsellors too. Such apps hark back to one of the
legendary milestones of ‘artificial intelligence’, the 1960s computer
program called ELIZA. That system featured a mode in which it
emulated Rogerian psychotherapy, responding to the user’s typed
conversation with requests for amplification (‘Why do you say that?’)
and picking up — with its ‘natural-language processing’ skills — on
certain key words from the input. Rudimentary as it is, ELIZA can still
seem spookily human. Its modern smartphone successors might be
diverting, but this field presents an interesting challenge in the sense
that, the more sophisticated it gets, the more potential for harm there
will be. One day, the makers of an algorithm-driven psychotherapy app
could be sued by the survivors of someone to whom it gave the worst
possible advice.

What lies behind our current rush to automate everything we can
imagine? Perhaps it is an idea that has leaked out into the general
culture from cognitive science and psychology over the past half-
century — that our brains are imperfect computers. If so, surely
replacing them with actual computers can have nothing but benefits.
Yet even in fields where the algorithm’s job is a relatively pure exercise
in number- crunching, things can go alarmingly wrong.

Indeed, a backlash to algorithmic fetishism is already under way — at
least in those areas where a dysfunctional algorithm’s effect is not some
gradual and hard-to-measure social or cultural deterioration but an
immediate difference to the bottom line of powerful financial
organisations. High-frequency trading, where automated computer
systems buy and sell shares very rapidly, can lead to the price of a
security fluctuating wildly. Such systems were found to have
contributed to the ‘flash crash’ of 2010, in which the Dow Jones index
lost 9 per cent of its value in minutes. Last year, the New York Stock

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Steven Poole

aeon.co

Exchange cancelled trades in six stocks whose prices had exhibited
bizarre behaviour thanks to a rogue ‘algo’ — as the automated systems
are known in the business — run by Knight Capital; as a result of this
glitch, the company lost $440 million in 45 minutes. Regulatory
authorities in Europe, Hong Kong and Australia are now proposing
rules that would require such trading algorithms to be tested regularly;
in India, an algo cannot even be deployed unless the National Stock
Exchange is allowed to see it first and decides it is happy with how it
works.

Here, then, are the first ‘algorithmic auditors’. Perhaps their example
will prompt similar developments in other fields — culture, education,
and crime — that are considerably more difficult to quantify, even when
there is no immediate cash peril.

A casual kind of post-facto algorithmic auditing was already in
evidence in London, at the Candidates’ Tournament. All the chess
players gave press conferences after their games, analysing critical
positions and showing what they were thinking. This often became a
second contest in itself: players were reluctant to admit that they had
missed anything (‘Of course, I saw that’), and vied to show they had
calculated more deeply than their adversaries. On the day I attended,
the amiable Anglophile Russian player (and cricket fanatic) Peter
Svidler was discussing his colourful but peacefully concluded game
with Israel’s Boris Gelfand, last year’s World Championship challenger.
Juggling pieces on a laptop screen with a mouse, Svidler showed a
complicated line that had been suggested by someone using a
computer program. ‘This, apparently, is a draw,’ Svidler said, ‘but
there’s absolutely no way anyone can work this out at the board’. The
computer’s suggestion, in other words, was completely irrelevant to the
game as a sporting exercise.

Now, as the rumpled Gelfand looked on with friendly interest, Svidler
jumped to an earlier possible variation that he had considered pursuing
during their game, ending up with a baffling position that might have
led either to spectacular victory or chaotic defeat. ‘For me,’ he
announced, ‘this will be either too funny … or not funny enough’.
Everyone laughed. As yet, there is no algorithm for wry comedy.

is a British journalist, broadcaster and composer. His latest
book is Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower? (2013).

13 May 2013

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The Chicago School of Media Theory

posthuman

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first appearance of the term
“post-human” as Maurice Parmelee’s 1916 Poverty and Social Progress. In a
section entitled “Eugenic Measures and the Prevention of Poverty,” Parmelee,
a sociologist, wrote:

But even though it is not possible, at present at any rate, to do much to
improve the quality of the human stock by eugenic means, it is
interesting and profitable to consider what would be the result if
socially undesirable types could be eliminated entirely or in large part
. . . . [But] it is evident, in the first place, that it is inconceivable that
human nature could be changed to the extent that is contemplated by
[the] theory of perfectibility. Such changes would bring into being an
animal no longer human, or for that matter mammalian, in its
character, for it would involve the elimination of such fundamental
human and mammalian instincts and emotions as anger, jealousy,
fear, etc. But even if such a post-human animal did come into
existence, it is difficult to believe that it could carry on the necessary
economic activities without using a certain amount of formal
organization, compulsion, etc.[i]

Parmelee’s passage identifies several important issues that run throughout the
lexicographical history of the term “post-human” into the present day. In
answering “What is the post-human?” a corollary set of questions arise: Are
we already post-human or is post-humanism permanently stuck in the future?
At what point does a human stop being a human? What is the relationship
between humans and animals? Does scientific advancement necessarily
improve the human condition, or ought we limit it? If our social
configurations (states, laws, families) are predicated on human nature, what
happens to that order when we alter our nature? These inquiries stretch across
disciplines from physics to anthropology, but they coalesce over the figure of
the post-human. I would like to outline how three major thinkers—N.
Katherine Hayles, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jürgen Habermas—have
contributed to our understanding of the post-human. Speaking from different
backgrounds and fields of study, Hayles, Lyotard, and Habermas each provide

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a unique perspective of the post-human, establishing multiple points of
consensus and disagreement.

I: Hayles

We can infer much from the title of N. Katherine Hayles’ seminal book How
We Became Posthuman: taken literally, the past-tense “became” connotes that
the transformation from human to post-human has already occurred. But
Hayles notes the “multiple ironies” of her title, since her thesis is “more
complex than ‘That was then, this is now’”.[ii] Her “argument” is that human
subjectivity is always “historically specific”: the “changes [from human to
post-human] were never complete transformations or sharp breaks; without
exception, they reinscribed traditional ideas and assumptions even as they
articulated something new.”[iii] In other words, an element of or precondition
for the post-human has always been among us (or more accurately, in us)—
hence, her title. “People become posthuman because they think they are
posthuman,” not simply because they use dishwashers, the internet, or genetic
engineering.[iv]

But Hayles does not deny that a real shift is taking place. Hayles’ impetus for
her research was the 20th century’s articulation, by science fiction authors and
cyberneticists like Norbert Weiner, that a great new epoch could be reached
with the arrival of conscious computers, cyborgs, robots, and other variations
of post-human beings which could finally separate mind from matter. She
opens her essay “Visualizing the Posthuman” with the claim that, “no longer a
cloud on the horizon, the posthuman is rapidly becoming an everyday reality”
through physical prostheses, genetic engineering, and digital and artificial
environments, all of which are necessary, but not sufficient, elements of post-
humanity. [v] It is not that such technologies create the post-human object;
rather, they allow for the possibility of a post-human subject. Thus, “[o]ne
cannot ask whether information technologies should continue to be
developed. Given market forces already at work, it is virtually certain that we
will increasingly live, work, and play in environments that construct as
embodied virtualities.”[vi]

Hayles elaborates her thesis by examining the practices of reading and

writing

within the digital media environment. For Hayles, the computer and digital
technology have created the conditions for new conceptions of identity and
subjectivity that demarcate the post-human era. In contrast to the pre-modern
“oral subject” (“fluid, changing, situational, dispersed”) and the modern
“written subject” (“fixed, coherent, stable, self-identical”), the postmodern
“virtual subject” can be described as post-human because its subjectivity is

beautiful/sublime

body/embodiment

book

camp

code

collective consciousness

color

comics

common sense

compression

cosmetics

creativity

cybernetics

cyberspace

cyborg

dance

decoration

dialectic

digital art

discourse

drawing

ear

ekphrasis

epic

theater

event

exhibit/exhibition

exteriority

face

fantasy (1)

fantasy (2)

fashion

fidelity

figurative/figural

film

filter

food

forgery

form

frame (1)

frame (2)

game

gaze

gender

genre

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“formed through dynamical interfaces with computers”:

The physics of virtual writing illustrates how our perceptions change
when we work with computers on a daily basis. We do not need to
have software sockets inserted into our heads to become cyborgs. We
already are cyborgs in the sense that we experience, through the
integration of our bodily perceptions and motions with computer
architectures and topologies, a changed sense of subjectivity.[vii]

For Hayles the central issue in post-humanism is whether the body is
superfluous: “Should the body be seen as evolutionary baggage that we are
about to toss out as we vault into the brave new world of the posthuman?” she
asks.[viii] In its philosophy and practice, the modern age sought to separate
mind from body. It is only on that premise, Hayles argues, that we could
conceive of discarding the body while keeping the mind, as many
utopian/dystopian fictions describe, in scenarios predicting the
“downloading” of brain matter. Instead, Hayles says our minds are bound up
with our bodies, irrevocably: there is an “inextricable intertwining of body
with mind . . . . We are the medium, and the medium is us.”[ix]

Thus, Hayles’ conception of the post-human is marked by two characteristics:
it is not a sharp or radical break, but is a historically specific conception of
subjectivity, just as Enlightenment humanism was. Because of this, the full-
blown post-humanism of science fiction is necessarily incomplete: we can
never completely isolate the mind and discard the body. Hence, the future is
not pre-determined, neither as a positivist utopia with minimal labor, or as
apocalyptic dystopia of human oppression: “Technologies do not develop on
their own. People develop them,” and people can be guided to better or worse
decisions through deliberation and politics.[x] Hayles’ goal is “not to
recuperate the liberal subject”.[xi] Such a fantasy, she notes, was “a
conception that may have applied at best to that fraction of humanity who had
the wealth power and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous
beings exercising their will through agency and choice”.[xii] The post-human
is, for better or worse, here: but it “does not really mean the end of humanity.
It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human”.[xiii]

II: Lyotard

Perhaps most poignant image of the post-human emerges from a thought
experiment conducted by Jean-François Lyotard in his text The Inhumane.
There, Lyotard asks, what happens when the sun explodes, as scientists tell us
it will, “in 4.5 billion years?” It will surely mean the destruction of the planet.
For Lyotard, this scenario is the prerequisite for post-humanity, and

gesture (1)

gesture (2)

graphic novel

grotesque

handwriting

hieroglyphics

hypermedia

icon

iconoclasm/iconoclash

ideology

image

imagination

immediacy/immediate

information

installation (1)

installation (2)

intention

interactive

interior

interpellation

intuition

involution

irony

kanji

keyword

kitsch

landscape

language

law

liminal

listen

literacy

logic

logo

logocentrism

magazine

manuscript

mask

mass media

material/materiality

mediation

medium specificity

melos/opsis/lexis

meme

memory (1)

memory (2)

metaphor/metonymy

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consequently, the only one worth philosophizing about as “the sole serious
question to face humanity today.”[xiv] Even a world destroyed by nuclear
weaponry does not suffice to create the post-human:

“[A] human war…leave[s] behind it a devastated human world,
dehumanized, but with nonetheless at least a single survivor, someone
to tell the story of what’s left, to write it down . . . . But in what
remains after the solar explosion, there won’t be any humanness,
there won’t be living creatures, there won’t be intelligent, sensitive,
sentient earthlings to bear witness to it, since they and their earthly
horizon will have been consumed.”[xv]

Lyotard’s post-human is thus grounded not in the transcendence of certain
human capabilities or features, like Parmelee’s emotions or Hayles’ digital
subjectivity, but on a fundamental altering of the world as we have ever known
it. For Lyotard, such a universe cannot even be thought of—because to grasp it
in our minds still taints it with the trace of humanity. The universal apocalypse
must remain unthought: “if there’s [total] death, then there’s no thought.
Negation without remainder. No self to make sense of it. Pure event.
Disaster.”[xvi]

But this does not mean we must take the attitude of Epicurus, referenced by
Lyotard to stand for those who preach to only augment one’s own worldly
happiness. In a tone of urgency, Lyotard suggests that we must make way for
the coming of the post-human. “What is at stake in every field” from genetics
to particle physics is “how to make thought without a body possible . . . . That
clearly means finding for the ‘body’ a ‘nutrient’ that owes nothing to the bio-
chemical components synthesized on the surface of the earth through the use
of solar energy. Or: learning to effect these syntheses in other places than on
earth.”[xvii] Lyotard expresses nostalgia about this inevitability, concluding
that we must “say to ourselves . . . we shall go on.”[xviii] This serves as the
impetus for his exegeses on aesthetics and art, whose etchings and engravings
capture the last vestiges of humanity, as he affirms: “let us at least bear
witness, and again, and for no-one.”[xix] The possibility of a witness implies
the possibility of a human. Thus, Lyotard presents a radicalized vision of the
post-human as an essentially alien thing, even suggesting that the post-human
condition is beyond the scope of our imaginations. The post-human is not a
half-man, half-robot: he has no attachment to the earth whatsoever.

III: Habermas

A staunch defender of the ‘unfinished’ modern project of human freedom,
liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ The Future of Human Nature speaks

mimesis (1)

mimesis (2)

mind

mirror

mode

modernism

money

montage

movement

multimedia

museum (1)

museum (2)

music

music

narrative/lyric/drama

network

newspaper

noise

notation

numbness

object petit a

objecthood

olfaction

orality

painting

palimpsest

perception (1)

perception (2)

performance/performativity

perspective

phantom vibration

phenomenon

photography

picture

poetics

poetry

portrait

post

postal

system

posthuman

practice

print

process

projection

propaganda

prosthesis

protocol

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directly to the concerns raised by Parmelee on “improving the stock of man.”
Habermas’ starting point is 1973, when the human genome was cracked. This
scientific advance has allowed for embryo research and a “liberal eugenics” of
preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which can manipulate an embryo’s
eventual gender among other capabilities.[xx] Habermas believes
developments of biology call into question our natural idea of the human
being, and consequently, our laws, societal organization, nuclear families, and
even philosophies. Mankind has hitherto taken birth (roughly) as a given fact
of the world, meaning we make the “assumption” that “the genetic endowment
of the newborn infant, and thus the initial organic conditions for its future life
history, lay beyond any programming and deliberate manipulation on the part
of other persons.”[xxi] However, modern technology is “obliterating the
boundary between persons and things” because the embryo becomes subject
to design, like any other object or commodity. [xxii] For the first time, the
human species can “take its biological evolution into its own hands.” The post-
human corresponds to the reversal of Jean Paul Sartre’s humanism, whose
slogan—‘existence precedes essence’—is now definitively called into question:
now, “a decision on existence or nonexistence is taken in view of the potential
essence.”[xxiii]

Because new technologies are “regulated by supply and demand”[xxiv] they
leave the “goals of gene-modifying interventions to the individual preferences
of market participants.”[xxv] But Habermas thinks merely intervening in the
market through legislation cannot resolve the underlying conflict: “Legislative
interventions restricting the freedom of biological research and banning the
advances of genetic engineering seem but a vain attempt to set oneself against
the dominant tendency.”[xxvi] Genetic technologies have obvious upsides that
justify their application, like the eradication of debilitating genetic disorders.
But the question is “whether the instrumentalization of human nature changes
the ethical self-understanding of the species in such a way that we may no
longer see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal beings guided by
norms and reasons.”[xxvii] The “strange” science fiction accounts of “humans
being improved by chip implants” is for Habermas only an exaggeration of an
already present reality.[xxviii] Because genetic modification occurs before the
moment of consciousness, subjects have no way of knowing that their
characteristics were, to some degree, designed for them. In other words, the
salient point for Habermas is the anti-democratic nature of the post-human:
there is no choice of a red or blue pill, to use the famous scene from The
Matrix.

Thus, in the post-human, Habermas sees the fate of the enlightenment project
of freedom. While he does not clearly mark the threshold between human and
object, his conception of the post-human is one where humans are not free to
create themselves, connecting the human with the philosophy of humanism.
In the mold of the Enlightenment philosophers, Habermas views humans as
self-governing beings with the capacity for reason; new technologies,

publish

pun

purity

radio

reading

reality/hyperreality (1)

reality/hyperreality (2)

reception

reciprocity

repetition

replica

representation

reproduction

rhetoric

rhizome

scopic / vocative

screen (1)

screen (2)

sculpture

selfies

semiotics (1)

semiotics (2)

senses

sequence

shock

sign

silence

simulation / simulacrum (1)

simulation / simulacrum (2)

site (1)

site (2)

smartphone

social network

space/time

spectacle/spectator (1)

spectacle/spectator (2)

speech

spirit

star

stimulus/stimulation

storage

surface

symbol/index/icon

symbolic/real/imaginary

synaesthesia (1)

synaesthesia (2)

system
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especially embryonic ones, undermine that modern view, ushering in the post-
human.

NOTES

[i] Parmelee, p. 350.

[ii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p.6

[iii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 6.

[iv] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 6.

[v] Hayles, “Visualizing the Posthuman”, p. 50.

[vi] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 48.

[vii] Hayles, “Condition of Virtuality”, p. 12.

[viii] Hayles, “Visualizing the Posthuman”, p. 50.

[ix] Hayles, “Visualizing the Posthuman”, p. 54.

[x] Hayles, “Condition of Virtuality”, p. 14.

[xi] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 5.

[xii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 286.

[xiii] Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 286.

[xiv] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 8.

[xv] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 10.

[xvi] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 11.

[xvii] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 14.

[xviii] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 105.

[xix] Lyotard, The Inhumane, p. 203.

[xx] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 43.

tableau vivant

taste (1)

taste (2)

technology

telegraph

telematics

telephone (1)

telephone (2)

television

text

theater

thing

touch

transitivity/intransitivity

translation

transmission

type/print

uncanny

unconscious/subconscious

ut pictura poesis

vehicle

veil

ventriloquism

video

video game

virtuality

virus

visual field

voice/sound

weapon

webcomic

wiki

window

writing

zoographia

Members

Adam Shapiro

Adam Weg

Andrew Mall

Bill Brown

Dan Clinton

Dan Knox

Eduardo de Almeida

Hans Belting

Harper Montgomery

James Elkins

Jenifer Schadlick

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[xxi] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 13.

[xxii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 13,

[xxiii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 50.

[xxiv] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 30.

[xxv] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 19.

[xxvi] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 25.

[xxvii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 40.

[xxviii] Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, p. 41.

WORKS CITED

Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. London: Blackwell, 2003.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of
Chicago

Press, 1999.

—-“Visualizing the Posthuman”

—-“The Condition of Virtuality”.

Lyotard, The Inhumane: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003.

Parmelee, Maurice. Poverty and Social Progess. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

Joanna Slotkin

Joel Snyder

Kasia Houlihan

Kirsten Rokke

Kristan Hanson

Kristine Nielsen

Mal Ahern

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Rebecca L. Reynolds

Roberto Kutcher

W.J.T. Mitchell

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