---
# System prepended metadata

title: Of what human are we post?

---

# Of what human are we post?

Human - Posthuman - transhuman discussion

Ernst Kapp (1808 - 1896): cooking = external digestion (1877)

Novum Organum (idols = sacred objects)

Don ihde: 

1. Paradise 
2. Intelligent Design
3. Cyborg
4. Prediction

Ihde: "Fantasies take shape and form in relation to the relative lifeworlds of the inhabitants."

"Fly!"-Fantasy 
Da Vinci - bird/ helicopter 


## Cyborg 

-> popularized by film 
-> wooden teeth 

Prosthese 

Transparency = 可直接體驗世界
e.g. 牙套 -> high transparency 

## Prediction 

Follies of science 
-> prediction always fail 

John Henry -> folk hero -> win over steam machine 

-Mascular strenght -> hosthuman/ transhuman 
-Calculating power

"Humans in conjunction with machines that produce the result"

## Intelligent Design 

Human design is no match to evolution 

Hubert Dreyfus 

1. biological assumption -> computer software (against)
2. psychological assumption -> presentation of symbol
3. epistemological assumption -> formalise (math) -> rules/laws
4. ontological assumption -> atomic facts 

Dreyfus: human behaviours are context bound. 

human-like AI = human-like being-in-the-world



"The technologies did not replace humans; rather, different technologies plus the humans changed the nature of the task. "





# Cyborg Manifesto (1984)

Cybernetic organism 
hybrid of machine and organism 

a creature of social reality + fiction + lived experience
-> changes what counts as experience 


Femininsm 
Reproduction 
post naturalist
- a way to imagine a world without gender
- without genesis or end
-regeneration, not rebirth (X reproductive sex--> only one way among many strategies pp.30)

"I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." 

Leaks~~
### Mixing between human and animal 
"The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed"(pp11)

### Mixing between organism and machine 

### Mixing between physical and nonphysical 
"Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible."


"post-oedipal apocalypse" 

Herber Macuse - Eros and Civilization 
-applies Freudian analysis of genesis myth 

//[Kristeva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva)'s "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and Lacan's pre-mirror stage. It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words."[19] Furthermore, according to Birgit Schippers, the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic, the rhythmic, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the "feminine", and represents the undifferentiated state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant.[20]

Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic. In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called the symbolic and is contrasted with the semiotic in that it is associated with the masculine, the law, and structure. Kristeva departs from Lacan in the idea that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than arriving at a fixed identity, the subject is permanently "in process". Because female children continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure, they are especially likely to retain a close connection to the semiotic. This continued identification with the mother may result in what Kristeva refers to in Black Sun (1989) as melancholia (depression), given that female children simultaneously reject and identify with the mother figure.

It has also been suggested (e.g., Creed, 1993) that the degradation of women and women's bodies in popular culture (and particularly, for example, in slasher films) emerges because of the threat to identity that the mother's body poses: it is a reminder of time spent in the undifferentiated state of the semiotic, where one has no concept of self or identity. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.

Kristeva is also known for her adoption of Plato’s idea of the chora, meaning "a nourishing maternal space" (Schippers, 2011). Kristeva's idea of the chora has been interpreted in several ways: as a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child, and as the temporal period preceding the Mirror Stage. In her essay Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini from Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva refers to the chora as a "non-expressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement as it is regulated." She goes on to suggest that it is the mother's body that mediates between the chora and the symbolic realm: the mother has access to culture and meaning, yet also forms a totalizing bond with the child.//

Homework economy - feminization of labour 
(since world war 2 + conlonialism -> 3rd world)

("nimble fingers of oriental women"pp14) -making iphones?

### unity through domination / unity through incorpoation (pp20)

 "grammar is politics by other means," and effective politics require speaking in the language of domination

-dominations of "race", "gender", "sexuality", "class" -Now need political unity to confront effectively (pp.21)


Organics of Domination VS infomatics of Domination 

節錄︰
representation --> simulation 
bourgeois novel, realism --> science fiction, postmodernism 
organism --> biotic component
biology as clinical practice --> biology as inscription 
reproduction --> replication 
physiology --> communications engineering 
organic division of labour --> ergonomics, cybernetics of labour 
community ecology --> ecosystem 
home/factory --> cottage industry 
family/market/factory --> women in the integrated circuit 
public/private -->cyborg citizenship 
world war 2 --> star wars (" This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as Star Wars. "-pp8)

Framework: rearrangement in worldwide social relations tied to science and technology. 

(Making partial, real connection)+some are playful, some are poles of world historical systems of domination. Epistemology is about knowing the difference. 

<-nturalistic coding
-> subverts, (e.g. biotic compenents-> in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. )

race -> experimental ethnography 



### Women in the integrated circuit 

"The feminist dream of a common language...is a totalizing and imperialist one."(pp52)

//The epoch of late capitalism emerging out of the Second World War, which has as its dominant features the multinational corporation, globalized markets and labor, mass consumption, and the space of liquid multinational flows of capital.//
i

'
'
*Dispersion *

Home(pp46):paid homework - homebased businesses and telecommuting 
Market (pp47):intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption 

Paid workplace (pp47): intense sexual and racial division of labour; Cash dependent population (X stable job) 

State (pp48): erosion of welfare state; increased survaillance and control; different social groups invisible to each other-> abstract enemies 

School (pp48): managerial class-> de-democratize schools; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture.

Clinic- Hospital (pp49): intensified machine-body relations ; intensified struggle over state responsibility for health. 

Church (pp49): Electronic fundamentalist "super saver" preachers

### Cyborg: a myth of political identity 

Luce Irigaray 
Monique Wittig 

"Women of Colour" as a cyborg identity -> "colonial women don't have a voice" -Spivak 

a woman of color "might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography.

"Historically consituted body" (pp.21)


### Affinity 

"How not to be man through technology" <- rejects essentializing 
-> affinity politics (X identity politics)

"(Katie)King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary eminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations' in feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own political tendencies appear to be the *telos* of the whole." (pp19)

([Catherine MacKinnon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_A._MacKinnon) -theory of experience, of women's identity)-radical feminism -the unity of women by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical nonbeing. -at the cost of radical reductionism (totalising in the extreme； authoritarian doctrine of experience; erasure of polyvocal/difference ) 

Haraway on sexual objectification and sexual appropriation: "To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product" (pp25)





Alternative to Post-human/ Post-feminist : 
Companian Speciesism - (2000)

History matters in "Natures - Cultures"
Historical specificity of a cyborg figure 

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” 

to strengthen the art of living on a damaged planet-- “Making Oddkin: Story Telling for Earthly Survival”