Exits to the Posthuman Future

Exits to the Posthuman Future PDF Author: Arthur Kroker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745682251
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Exits to the Posthuman Future is media theory for a global digital society which thrives, and sometimes perishes, at the intersection of technologies of speed, distant ethics and a pervasive cultural anxiety. Arthur Kroker’s incisive and insightful text presents the emerging pattern of a posthuman future: life at the tip of technologies of acceleration, drift and crash. Kroker links key concepts such as “Guardian Liberalism” and Obama’s vision of the “Just War” with a striking account of “culture drift” as the essence of real world technoculture. He argues that contemporary society displays growing uncertainty about the ultimate ends of technological innovation and the intelligibility of the digital future. The posthuman future is elusive: is it a gathering storm of cynical abandonment, inertia, disappearance and substitution? Or else the development of a new form of critical consciousness - the posthuman imagination - as a means of comprehending the full complexity of life? Depending on which exit to the posthuman future we choose or, perhaps, which exit chooses us, Kroker argues that a very different posthuman future will likely ensue.

Exits to the Posthuman Future

Exits to the Posthuman Future PDF Author: Arthur Kroker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745682251
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Exits to the Posthuman Future is media theory for a global digital society which thrives, and sometimes perishes, at the intersection of technologies of speed, distant ethics and a pervasive cultural anxiety. Arthur Kroker’s incisive and insightful text presents the emerging pattern of a posthuman future: life at the tip of technologies of acceleration, drift and crash. Kroker links key concepts such as “Guardian Liberalism” and Obama’s vision of the “Just War” with a striking account of “culture drift” as the essence of real world technoculture. He argues that contemporary society displays growing uncertainty about the ultimate ends of technological innovation and the intelligibility of the digital future. The posthuman future is elusive: is it a gathering storm of cynical abandonment, inertia, disappearance and substitution? Or else the development of a new form of critical consciousness - the posthuman imagination - as a means of comprehending the full complexity of life? Depending on which exit to the posthuman future we choose or, perhaps, which exit chooses us, Kroker argues that a very different posthuman future will likely ensue.

Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures

Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures PDF Author: Debashish Banerji
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 8132236378
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This volume is a critical exploration of multiple posthuman possibilities in the 21st century and beyond. Due to the global engagement with advanced technology, we are witness to a species-wise blurring of boundaries at the edge of the human. On the one hand, we find ourselves in a digital age in which human identity is being transformed through networked technological intervention, a large part of our consciousness transferred to "smart" external devices. On the other hand, we are assisted---or assailed---by an unprecedented proliferation of quasi-human substitutes and surrogates, forming a spectrum of humanoids with fuzzy borders. Under these conditions, critical posthumanism asks, who will occupy and control our planet: Will the "superhuman" merely serve as another sign under which new regimes of dominance are spread across the earth? Or can we discover or invent technologies of existence to counter such dominance? It is issues such as these which are at the heart of this new volume of explorations of the posthuman. The essays in this volume offer leading-edge thought on the subject, with special emphases on postmodern and postcolonial futures. They engage with questions of subalternity and feminism vis-à-vis posthumanism, dealing with issues of subjugation, dispensability and surrogacy, as well as the possibilities of resistance, ethical politics or subjective transformation from South Asian archives of cultural and spiritual practice. This volume is a valuable addition to the on-going global dialogues on posthumanism, indispensable to those, from across several disciplines, who are interested in postcolonial and planetary futures.

The Posthuman

The Posthuman PDF Author: Rosi Braidotti
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669964
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

Disability and the Posthuman

Disability and the Posthuman PDF Author: Stuart Murray
Publisher: Representations Health Disabil
ISBN: 178962164X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Disability and the Posthuman analyses cultural representations anddeployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of embodiedtechnologies. Working across texts from contemporary writing and film, it arguesthat there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials inthe dialogue between disability and posthumanism when read as generating sustainableyet radical critical spaces.

Digital Memory Studies

Digital Memory Studies PDF Author: Andrew Hoskins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317267419
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Digital media, networks and archives reimagine and revitalize individual, social and cultural memory but they also ensnare it, bringing it under new forms of control. Understanding these paradoxical conditions of remembering and forgetting through today’s technologies needs bold interdisciplinary interventions. Digital Memory Studies seizes this challenge and pioneers an agenda that interrogates concepts, theories and histories of media and memory studies, to map a holistic vision for the study of the digital remaking of memory. Through the lenses of connectivity, archaeology, economy, and archive, contributors illuminate the uses and abuses of the digital past via an array of media and topics, including television, videogames and social media, and memory institutions, network politics and the digital afterlife.

Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction

Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction PDF Author: Grzegorz Maziarczyk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004347852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction is a collection of essays examining the potential of the contemporary English-language novel to represent and inquire into various aspects of the human mind. Grounded in contemporary literary theory as well as consciousness studies, the essays consider both narrative techniques by means of which writers attempt to render various states of consciousness (such as multimodality in digital fiction or experimental typography in post-traumatic narratives), and novelistic interpretations of issues currently being investigated by neurobiologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind (such as the adaptive value of consciousness or the process of self-integration by means of self-narration). The volume thus offers critical reflection upon the novel’s cognitive accomplishment in this challenging area. Contributors are: Nathan D. Frank, Judit Friedrich, Justyna Galant, Marta Komsta, Péter Kristóf Makai, Ajitpaul Mangat, Grzegorz Maziarczyk, James McAdams, Daniel Panka, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Joanna Klara Teske, Lloyd Issac Vayo, Dóra Vecsernyés, Sylwia Wilczewska

Ludopolitics

Ludopolitics PDF Author: Liam Mitchell
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785354892
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions? To what extent do the technical features of videogames index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status? And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions without ever putting down the controller? Ludopolitics responds to these questions with a critique of one of the defining features of modern technology: the fantasy of control. Videogames promise players the opportunity to map and master worlds, offering closed systems that are perfect in principle if not in practice. In their numerical, rule-bound, and goal-oriented form, they express assumptions about both the technological world and the world as such. More importantly, they can help us identify these assumptions and challenge them. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, Braid, Undertale, and Bastion, as well as play practices like speedrunning, theorycrafting, and myth-making provide an aesthetic means of mounting a political critique of the pursuit and valorization of technological control.

History in Financial Times

History in Financial Times PDF Author: Amin Samman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503609464
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Critical theorists of economy tend to understand the history of market society as a succession of distinct stages. This vision of history rests on a chronological conception of time whereby each present slips into the past so that a future might take its place. This book argues that the linear mode of thinking misses something crucial about the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Rather than each present leaving a set past behind it, the past continually circulates through and shapes the present, such that historical change emerges through a shifting panorama of historical associations, names, and dates. The result is a strange feedback loop between now and then, real and imaginary. Demonstrating how this idea can give us a better purchase on financial capitalism in the post-crisis era, History in Financial Times traces the diverse modes of history production at work in the spheres of financial journalism, policymaking, and popular culture. Paying particular attention to narrative and to notions of crisis, recurrence, and revelation, Amin Samman gives us a novel take on the relation between historical thinking and critique.

The Assemblage Brain

The Assemblage Brain PDF Author: Tony D. Sampson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452953295
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Once upon a time, neuroscience was born. A dazzling array of neurotechnologies emerged that, according to popular belief, have finally begun to unlock the secrets of the brain. But as the brain sciences now extend into all corners of cultural, social, political, and economic life, a yet newer world has taken shape: “neuroculture,” which goes further than ever before to tackle the profound ethical implications we face in consequence. The Assemblage Brain unveils a major new concept of sense making, one that challenges conventional scientific and philosophical understandings of the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Tony D. Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics. From this novel perspective the book is structured around two questions: “What can be done to a brain?” and “What can a brain do?” Sampson examines the rise of neuroeconomics in informing significant developments in computer work, marketing, and the neuropharmaceutical control of inattentiveness in the classroom. Moving beyond the neurocapitalist framework, he then reestablishes a place for proto-subjectivity in which biological and cultural distinctions are reintegrated in an understanding of the brain as an assemblage. The Assemblage Brain unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins many scientific and philosophical accounts of how sense is produced, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain.

Sentient Relics

Sentient Relics PDF Author: Janice Baker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317057139
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Sentient Relics explores museums through cinema and challenges the dominant focus of museum theory as an inclusion–exclusion debate. The author responds to the Enlightenment, ‘rational’ museum of reason contrasting this with the museum of affect and reveals these ‘two museums’ operating alongside one another in a productive paradox. In structuralist-orientated museum theory the affective realm is often subsumed within the imperatives of Marxist theory and practice, identity politics, semiology and psychoanalysis. Sentient Relics, while valuing the insights of ideologically focused meaning-making, turns to the capacity of the affective realm of experience to transform the passive subject and object relation. The author uses museum encounters and cinematic affect to engage with problems of difference, temporality, emotion and the sublime. In so doing the book advances research in museum studies by demonstrating what is at stake in pragmatically working toward a deeper understanding of the museum socially, culturally and philosophically.