#posthumanist research

[lady-illyria-the-magi]

29.8.2024

Short version: One uni really likes me and wants me there and i got 2 tutoring professors/senior researchers who are agreed to tutor me!!

2 other universities are out bc no time to tutor me and/or they don't do the same research i'm planning to do

Long version:

Okay so a lot has been happening today and this week. I contacted all professors of literature in this country and i've been receiving their answers. This means a few things: first off, I got an official tutoring professor and other mentor from university of Oulu. And they also said that i'm very damn likely gonna get chosen, if i apply there (i will).

The other universities are discussing still (Jyväskylä), and two (Helsinki and Turku) are out of the talk now since they either are already with too many PhD students and other students and/or their own research and therefore they cannot tutor me, or they are not well-known enough with my research methods/topic to actually help me. Tampere gave me two no's and one of the professors said "maybe, but talk with this person first". I emailed them and am now waiting for the answer.

Everyone i have been sending my research plan says it's either interesting or thought provoking. I'm kinda confused, I did that basically in a week? Of course the planning and so on took 5 weeks, but still. The semi-edited version was brought to the world during the last 7 days.

So even if all the other uni's somehow say no, i still got one very likely place i'm gonna get to. That means moving (again) to a new city where i know no-one. It's stressing me. I've made myself at home here now and feel anxious leaving all locations, the forest, my friends, but to chase my academic curiosity, of course i will and would do it.

Study wise i have been going through my possible references, reading and reading, and editing and editing. My korean A1 part 1 begins next week. I feel very confused, apparently i somehow made really good job with the research plan, even tho i felt like "this will not be good enough, it needs more work". Of course i will keep on editing it and clearing my main ideas and so on.

I'm gonna wait for 2 weeks for the rest of the professors in different uni's to answer me, and then i can actually start applying. I realized i can do it far earlier than the deadline, if i get everything done in time, which now seems likely.

Even my workaholic/studyholic parents said my research plan is good.. which surely means something.

Anyways study plans for the rest of the week:

read more references, there's a neverending list really, i just gotta keep reading as many as i can

solve the korean book situation

edit the research plan and keep the already "yes-said" professors up to date with the final form of it

I can't say "I'm in!!" yet, but i'm surley jumping around and grinning at my reflection in the mirror. It may even be i have to pick and choose between the Universities, and not the other way around (imagine here a total brain explosion as graphicly as you would like)

[boxeboxer]

FRANCIS EUGENE ARCHER

Origin: asalee

Status: organic

Nationality/Ethnicity: British, Somali

Age: 30s

Occupation: Computer scientist, WEAVER for OURO R&D

About:

Francis (they/them) is a renowned British programmer and one of the key members of The New Disciples of Mesmer along with Cassandra Mallory. Not much is known about their family or personal life. Has a cat named Ganymede.

After studying under roboticist Choshi Amaterasu in Korea, Francis became the second person to earn the title of WEAVER—a specialized computer science degree focused on HDD memory analyzation and fabrication in posthumans. Seeing their success in asatya research, Cassandra recruited them into the NDofM. Their main role is overseeing posthumanistic technologies such as proxies, software maintenance and troubleshooting.

Francis is very eccentric, though soft-spoken. When not glued to a terminal screen, they enjoy playing pranks on their krtrim coworkers Bheema and Devi, or playing with the NDofM's Ira intelligence engine, Melisende. Their humor borders on cruel at times. While they appear aloof, they are ceenly observant and clever. They have an unbeatable poker face and usually have something up their sleeve.

Background:

After graduating from college with a degree in computer science in the early 2030s, Francis traveled to Korea to study under Choshi Amaterasu. Around 2035, Cassandra recruits them into the NDofM.

[mariaseizes]

[image description: This is a photo of a hand-stitched embroidered linen napkin in an embroidery hoop. It is a scene of a grandmother with her granddaughter sitting on her lap, and they are surrounded by flowers. It is primarily composed of satin stitches, and there are also lazy daisies used to make the leaves and flower petals, french knots to make some of the tinier, more delicate petals and parts of flowers, running stitches to hold parts together and create stems and outlines, and backstitches to create parts of clothing and stems. Below the scene is a piece of rose patterned cloth with writing that says: Nana & Maria, used from leftover fabric an earlier pattern two decades ago that the grandmother and daughter made of a pillow for the granddaughter's stuffed animal.]

✨Some Thoughts✨

This summer, I felt very moved by a piece I read called "Craft as Care-Full Correspondence" by Amber Ward and Jennifer Harness Wilkinson, where the two authors, who identify themselves as art educators and researchers, introduce craft as a "communal, political, and feminist art practice when pairing it with care-full correspondence as a method for artistic research and critical reflection." They embroidered their research reflections on old handkerchiefs and exchanged them back and forth with each other.

As someone who has been feeling the weight and speed of research within the academy, I felt my body yearning for this slowness. So, this summer, I decided to learn embroidery as I was continuing my research. Though I did not have a research partner engaging in the exchange with me, per say, I have been trying to learn more about what it means to take up a posthumanist methodology and practice, exploring slowly the works of theorists like Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Harraway, and others.

So, as I stitched, read, and listened, I found myself, as Barad writes,

"re-turn[ing] (to) the past", becoming entangled literally with my threads, and also entangled and re-turning within the "spacetime coordinate[s]" of Woodstock, NY, where my grandmother had first introduced my to the slow art of needle and thread. As Barad explores, the art of diffraction cannot bring one back to one specific spacetime coordinate- one moment, for example, the moment in time of sewing with my grandmother, "like all moments, is itself a diffracted condensation, a threading through of an infinity of moments-places-matterings, a superpositions/entanglement, never closed, never finished". It is for this reason that I feel so convinced by Ward and Harness's proposal of embroidery as a slow, care-full act. Through this embodied act of stitching, I was able to dialogue with my grandmother throughout time.

Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623

Ward, A., & Wilkinson, J. H. (2023). Craft as care-full correspondence. Visual Arts Research, 49(2), 19–33. https://doi.org/10.5406/visuartsrese.49.2.0019

[musicforspaandearthquake]

"Critical Ambience" (Jonathan Dovey and Matt Hayler, from Ambient Literature monograph)

--we want to argue that practices of critical ambience can speak back to some of the current problems posed by the totalising discursive framings of 'immersion.' (142)

--ambient work, by definition, is concerned with that which already surrounds us, with subtle additions to the environment and the elevation of attention, not with replacing our surroundings with a better, more malleable, more frictionless fantasy environment. Instead of the complete sensory takeover implied by immersion, we argue for a critical ambience that produces ways of attending to the world that allows us to move between scales and entities...

--interested in those forms of cultural practices that surround us, where the physical environment co-constitutes the work itself.

--Critical ambient practices are part of the traditions of environmentally based arts, land art, walking arts, architecture, urban design, and public arts...

--the development of the smart city and the rise of the research field of ambient intelligence arising out of ubiquitous computing are reframing our understandings of ambience and immersion. Places, sites, and environments are now augmented by the instantiation of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems affording them new communicative potentials. These emergent augmentations are producing new contexts for immersive or ambient practices...

--talks about the desire to be immersed *in* a work of art.

--first critical conversation about the virtual (and VR) [in the 1990's] reaches its apogee in Janet Murray's 1997 classic definition of immersion: The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in itself, regardless of the fantasy content. We refer to this experience as 'immersion'. 'Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychogically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as differest as water is from air, th[at] takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.

--immersion also implies a forgetting of the structure or apparatus of the medium itself, a making invisible of the medium

Ambience

the ambient literature works of the monograph might offer 'a way into understanding the way that the ambient could begin to become actively critical.'

--the idea that the ambient is necessarily passive has been present in much writing about ambience. Seth Kim-Cohen's essay 'Against Ambience) (2013): 'The appeal of ambient phenomena is attributed to their evanescence, ineffability, and immersiveness; 'they appeal through their effacement of the important histories of critical art practices like feminism, postcolonialism, relational art, or social aesthetics,' and they offer us instead what he calls the 'inchoate space of wombessence.'

--in this critique, the immersive and the ambient are closely related, an all-around passive enclosure of undifferentiated 'inchoate space.' Kim-Cohen objects to the inability of the ambient to ever become more interesting than it is ignorable, art reduced to backdrop, like a mindfulness app.

--however, another strain of writing about the idea of ambience develops a more radical understanding based on its potential to reconfigure our subjectivity towards a more usefully posthumanistic position. In picking up this strain we want to correct the popular notion of ambience as necessarily inert background to argue that environmentally situated works are critically important at this moment and that environmental siuatedness and ambience are closely related. this emergences in timothy morton's often challenging and contradictory ecology without nature (2007): "I choose the word ambience to make strange the idea of environment, which all too often is associated with a particular view of nature. Morton's ambient poetics looks for experiences that produce heightened awareness of all the entities that constitute our environments, decentres human subjects.

--Morton: Ecological writing wants to undo habitual distinctions between nature and ourselves. it is supposed to describe, but also to provide a working model for a dissolving of the difference between subject and object, a dualism seen as the fundamental philosophical reason for human beings' destruction of the environment. If we could not merely figure out but actually experience the fact that we were embedded in our world, then we would be less likely to destroy it (Morton, 2007, italics the editors).

--what is it that is preventing us from experiencing the fact that we are embedded in our world?

--the editors: "our version of ambient literature doesn't seek the dissolution of subject and object. instead, it requires audience to shift between and through those positions, and it is this movement of attention between scales of time and place that produces a new, potentially critical awareness of one's own time and place. In doing so, we argue that these works usefully suggest a way of frmaing events that produce particular modes of attention constituted by a situated awareness of the complex entanglements of subjects in global technological, social, and environmental systems (151).

--Thomas Rickert's Ambient Rhetoric (2013), begins with an account of how computer and communications technologies are 'permeating the carpentry of the world' before seeking to reframe rhetoric as an environmentally situated practice in which, ambience refers to the active role that the material and informational environment takes in human development, dwelling and culture, or to put it differently it dissolves the assumed separation between what is (privileged) human doing and what is passively material

--Paul Roquet's Ambient Media (2016) draws on Heidegger's 'stimmung' from Being and Time (1927), usually translated as attunement to atmosphere or mood (but also, interestingly for our argument, having overtones of climate or listening). Its importance for us is that it establishes how mood can be a foundational experience; our experiences are subjected to mood or atmosphere before they are determined through cognition (Roquet, 2016, 133). Moreover when 'attuning' we are being co-constituted by our environments, our being moulding to its surroundings....

--Later in the book, in his own chapter on 'ambient literature' Roquet (2016) argues that such a phenomenon can be found in particular tropes and narrative styles of the Japanese novel...In the end Roquet develops a position not far from Malcolm McCullough's (2013) in so far as he suggests that critical ambience that he hints at might produce a greater sense of responsibility for the 'affective attunement of shared space'. More pertinently for our argument here, he also wants to understand ambience as productive of a mode of subjectivity that decentres the human through its reconnection with wider energies and forces: "An ambient media understanding of self necessarily situates the person in an intimate relationship with larger ecologies, affirming our interdependencey not only with other people but with the affordances of the objects and environments we live with and through.

--In our proposition for the critical potential of ambient literature, this encounter with the wider flow of energies present in the reading is characterized by particular forms of attention, shifting between the foregrounded content of the work itself and the background setting for the experience. This movement back and forth is, as we have seen above, a feature of ambient artworks; here, however, our ambient literature projects hail the user on the digital ground of the contemporary attention economy. They call attention not only to the particularities or generalties of the environment but also to the global data networks of control and surveillance that co-constitute them.

--Such a call is quite different in nature from those ordinarily proposed. More often, place based or site based art would call our attention to the immediate environment, site, or piece of art, to the exclusion of "the global data networks of control and surveillance." In fact, such data networks and informatic flows are usually seen as the opposite or enemy to such focus on place or immediate sensory environment.

--What in any case, is the difference between "having your attention called to" these informatic flows, or "noticing the various layers of information," and the usual day-to-day experience of having one's attention dominated by those very same flows. Why do we need special "ambient literature" works to call our attention to the varied flows of information which are required in day to day experience, when those varied layers of attention are our daily norm? it seems the editors are simply building in the same layers of distraction and anti-immersion that are present in our day to day life.

--The world of information overload and attention scarcity produces distraction as social malaise and attention as its answer; 'In an era of changing planetary circumstances, personal attention to immediate surroundings seems like a manageable first step towards some huge cultural shift (McCullough, 2013). In his consideration of this manageable first step, McCullough turns to the category of the ambient as a way to start to think about the modality of information in the urban environment. Our aim in proposing the field of ambient literature has been to address McCullough's key question '...do increasingly situated information technologies illuminate the world, or do they just eclipse it?' We want to argue for a poetics alert to embodiment, textuality, place, sonics, and technology that enhances awareness, connectivity, and understanding of the instrinsic qualities of phenomena of the world that we share.

[cleekleequlee]

More than “more-than-human centered design”

Earlier this year when presenting in EASA 2024 with anthropologists and peer design researchers, I (after my presentation done and a drink in the kitchen at 11pm Hong Kong time) responded rather strongly to the idea of more-than-human design as “more-than-human centered” design. Example is to consider how wildboar moves around and create tunnel in urban spaces. At that time I cannot quite articulate where that sentiment is from. I still cannot today, but finds two reference helpful in explaining my opinion, that more-than-human design, or more accurately posthumanist design, is not just design for more-than-human.

One reference is Alex Wilkie’s co-authored paper on speculative design brief. Knowing his strong theoretical foothold in process theory gave me the confidence to read the paper in detail and multiple times. What I take away so far is that the design brief meant by Wilkie and authors is not only concerned with the outcome of design but also the process of design. This is key for understanding their concept of “design event”. This is under the premise that designers don’t start the design process knowing exactly what they want to design. Rather than “allowing drift” which is the idea of “design drift”, Wilkie takes a more radical position seeing this formulation of design brief as part of design process. This the design brief includes the intention of design and instructs processes for designers to map the network with existing and absent (more-than-human) actors. Theoretical conceptualization proceeds the forming of brief for articulation through design. In an other word, theory not only serves as providing the mechanism of design (as designers always go to psychology for ways to do something), but is the fundamental reason and drive for design articulation.

The next reference comes from a quick read of Annemarie Mol’s latest book Eating in Theory. I have yet to wade through the whole book. But based on the first chapter where Mol introduced the intention and structure of the book, it surprisingly shed some light on my research. In this new book the topic Mol explored is eating - an mundane, too ordinary experience that everyone cannot do without for every 12 hours they are alive on earth. Mol sets off to challenge the separation between survival and living, between labor and actualization which is very much in line with my idea of practice theory. What makes my eyes wide open with excitement is how she does that by reframing the not-worth-mentioning experience of eating. There is nothing new actively being done or designed, but this reframing is enlightening for us to take another look at all the everyday experience we have and see them in new, philosophical lights. In a nuanced way this reframing to me is connected to what Foucault and Braidotti always does, and according to (the amusingly mysterious) Barad, another way of spacetimemattering. If we call any intentional doing with a purpose as design, then Mol’s approach is also design with changed theoretical lens (from Hannah Arendt / Aristotelian) division of body and mind (labor, work and politics) to something else. A missing step if there is to call it design is to prove that such reframing gets to people’s mind, and make concrete, material change in their doing, even if it is just to feel how their throat is in touch with the other - plants and animals that we call food. I was definitely inspired by a talk by design researcher /to-be anthropologist Duan Zhipeng last week that what interests him more is not doing any form of intervention directly - like me he is no believer that the top-down approach would work, but to better “describe”. In this sense, the cosmetic work of design - I have graphic design in mind - can also be critical in forming new ways of thinking, and a lot of the top-down structures that we have relied so much in the past won’t be too helpful in achieving this vision of graphic design.

So design - I’ll use the term posthumanist design for now, is not about more-than-human centered. It is the reshuffling the conceptual construction of the world for everyone, from designers (in Wilkie’s case of attuning to MTH as part of design brief) to people who eats (which is everyone who is alive). If this can be done in the most mundane experience of eating, it can certainly be done for other groups - certain professions, certain geographies, certain practices. Finding the existing contact with MTH or stage such contact, reframe the experience as transformative learning opportunities (Mezirow) to prepare for the conditions of social change (Manzini).

ps. Some of the discussion on the relationship between theory and empirical in introductory chapter also reminds me of the many methodological books by Matz Alvesson where the empirical is not only for applying theory but for generating novel theories.

I hope I will get more thinking disturbed in reading Mol - I’m in discussion with peer PhD student to do a book club on Mol’s two books. I also am curious how other design students think of them.

References:

Wilkie, A. and M. Michael (2023). "The aesthetics of more-than-human design: speculative energy briefs for the Chthulucene." Human–Computer Interaction: 1-13.

Mol, A. (2021). "Eating in Theory."

Alvesson, M. and D. Kärreman (2011). Qualitative research and theory development : mystery as method. London, Sage.

Alvesson, M. and K. Sköldberg (2009). Reflexive methodology : new vistas for qualitative research. London ;, SAGE.

[enactivewebs]

23.1

Annotation #8: Adams, T. E., Jones, S. H., & Ellis, C. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of Autoethnography. Routledge.

Brisini, T., & Simmons, J. (2021). Posthumanist autoethnography. In Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 355-366). Routledge.

What are the meanings of the text? What’s the Author’s voice? Apply it to your own process and thinking. What’s its value to my practice? Unpacking it 200-400 words

Handbook of Autoethnography 2nd Edition edited by Adams, Jones and Ellis is a collection of key contemporary academic articles and research projects exploring and unpacking the field and methodological practice of ‘autoethnography’, from across different social science and creative disciplines. The handbook’s introduction outlines a description and unpacking of what autoethnography is, its underlying ethos and politics, and what the project aims to achieve in terms of real impact in and for communities, and within academia. The editors highlight a definition of autoethnography, breaking down the auto (self), the ethno (culture) and graphy (representation) and how autoethnography looks to present and communicate personal subjective experiences, which creatively shed light and insight on cultural and societal issues, questions and/or problems - conveying more impactful representations of phenomena and cultural issues in ways that complement, support, and surpass more traditional forms of research. 

The relevance of this book, and especially the introductory section, is that it has given me a potential methodological framework in which to consider and underpin my intersubjective interactive documentary. Autoethnography or autoethnographic techniques could be used to conceptualise how I am looking to document lived experiences and phenomena of pluriversal and global south design, in order to add to pre-existing theories and research in a more evocative and subjective way, as well as to uncover and explore these phenomenological methods as potential ways of doing pluriversal and global south forms of design. 

The article within the book, Brisini, T., & Simmons, J. (2021). Posthumanist autoethnography, is also relevant and valuable to my practice, as it formulates a more relational approach to autoethnography, which aligns to nondualistic, new materialist, and posthuman threads which are emerging in my thinking and research already. This article highlights a way forward for writing and thinking about personal experiences in relation to the environment and culture in ways which don’t centre the human, but take into consideration all other living beings and matter as part of the experience which is co-created and ‘brought forth’ together. This thinking resonates strongly with my interests in enactivism and intra/inter subjective thought and theory. 

Although autoethnography is an interesting and relevant genre of research which can inform and highlight some methodological approaches to conducting and ways of conceptualising my research (i.e. through centering my lived experiences to connect and shed light on wider theoretical pluriversal/global south design issues and questions related to socio-ecological problems), I would not consider my project as wholly an autoethnographic form. Because the project is based in a practice-based/led research paradigm and design theory, the social scientific background of autoethnography does not sit 100% comfortably with my research, which looks to not only address wider socio-ecological contexts and issues, but also the process and practice of design, design thinking, and technology itself. The work also strives to more poetically and evocatively explore the phenomena and subject matter (in line with artistic, design research) which does not explicitly lend itself to directly connecting to social science research and can be more open ended and open to interpretation… ? (check this rationale)

[mirandamckenni1]

Did feminism FAIL men? SUPPORT MY WORK: Patreon: https://ift.tt/CvcFhLT ~MERCH~ https://ift.tt/6o4uBPw ~MUSIC~ https://ift.tt/uyACJ74 ~SOCIALS~ Twitter: https://twitter.com/aretheygay Tumblr: https://ift.tt/CRvN6Au Public Discord: https://ift.tt/97RizKT ~BUSINESS INQUIRIES~ alex@itsall.gay ~CREDIT~ Transmen Narration 1: Kimmy Giggler Transmen Narration 2: Ziyun Wu Transmen Narration 3: Everett O'Donoghue Misc. Narration: Reem ~BIBLIOGRAPHY~ Myron Gaines, “Why Women Deserve Less,” 2023 (I had to donate $20 to planned parenthood because I felt bad buying this book) Katherine Bagley, “Why Low-Income Households Need to Be Part of the Clean Energy Revolution,” 2019 https://ift.tt/WtrlapT Henry James, The Bostonians, 1889 Rivers, C. (1994, June 19). When were men really men?. The Washington Post. https://ift.tt/LUmiswK Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Esquire, 1958 https://ift.tt/WYZbFoC bell hooks, The Will to Change, 2004 (quotes: p. 27) Pew Research, “On Gender Differences,” 2017 https://ift.tt/MVaeXjP Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990 Mehltretter, et al., “Indigenous and Western Knowledge: Bringing Diverse Understandings of Water Together in Practice,” 2023 https://ift.tt/TwOyFqM Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1961 NASA, 95% of Matter and Energy is Unexplained https://ift.tt/ilBvTKz. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” 2003 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975 Chaplin, “Gender and Emotion Expression: A Developmental Contextual Perspective,” 2016 Lumen, “Gender and Early Childhood,” 2020 https://ift.tt/BHq9syX Halim, et al., “Rigidity in Gender-Typed Behaviors in Early Childhood: A Longitudinal Study of Ethnic Minority Children” 2013 https://ift.tt/9GgevHk Chaplin & Aldao, “Gender Differences in Emotion Expression in Children: A Meta-Analytic Review,” 2012 https://ift.tt/QERj0Ss Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 1998 Bourdieu, “The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field,” in R Benson and É Neveu (eds) 2005, Bourdieu and the journalistic field, Cambridge: Polity, 29-47 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 1993 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1979 Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” 1986 https://ift.tt/cfaCzlm Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 1980 Jan Morris, Conundrum, p. 130 Bhana and Mayeza, “We don’t play with gays, they��re not real boys … they can’t fight: Hegemonic masculinity and (homophobic) violence in the primary years of schooling,” 2016. https://ift.tt/Nw0YJn9 Emma Renold, “‘Other’ boys: negotiating non‐hegemonic masculinities in the primary school,” 2007 https://ift.tt/Nw0YJn9 NAM News Room, “More Women Join the Manufacturing Workforce,” 2023 https://ift.tt/mXoAt8E Affleck, et al., “Men’s Mental Health: Social Determinants and Implications for Services,” 2018 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism Jonathan A. Allan, “Masculinity as Cruel Optimism,” 2018, p. 182 Bourdieu Quote on Love from Masculine Domination, p. 112 bell hooks Quote on Love from The Will to Change, p. 28 #ClimatePowerPartner #ClimatePowerEnAcción via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOhs9jxe4lM

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: Children's Cultures after Childhood

"Children’s Cultures after Childhood" introduces theoretical concepts from new materialist and posthumanist childhood studies into research on children’s literature, film, and media texts with attention to the entanglements of which they are part. Thirteen chapters by international contributors from diverse disciplinary fields (literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and childhood studies) offer a cross-section of empirical and theoretical approaches sharing an inspiration http://dlvr.it/SwJSs7

[performanceperform]

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

[grandhotelabyss]

I was going to include in my latest Substack essay friend-of-the-blog Paul Franz's beautiful meditation on Twelve Monkeys linked above—its contrast between humanistic and posthumanistic ways of knowing the self or anything else—but I got caught up in other aspects of the argument. You should read it though. Here is its evocation through the time-travel trope of what Nietzsche, Freud, Eliot, Benjamin, Borges, and Bloom understood about the aesthetic retroversion of the temporal:

No other movie I know so persuasively shows how our thinking and our lives are woven together, how our curiosities are linked to our deepest rememberings, how our experiences are irritants in us, inciting us to go in search of them, externalising (and thereby failing to recognise) our private pains and fears in the ostensibly objective subjects of our research, only to find ourselves confronted, just when we think we have mastered them, by the return of the repressed – as Dr Railly is, when Cole carjacks her after her book talk at the museum in Baltimore. (Bursting out of the shadows, growling “I have a gun,” he commands her to drive him to Philadelphia – the very city, strangely enough, where this scene was filmed. In this sense too, you could say, he commands her to take him where she already is.)

Hence the futility, as well as the nastiness, of imagining that historical context could exhaust literary criticism, when what literature proves is that linear time does not exist. For a poppier treatment of the same subject, see Geoff Klock's "Harold Bloom's Pal, Donnie Darko":

What is especially complex about [Freud's] notion of deferred action is that it can be understood as an effect that precedes its cause : that is the cause, the primal trauma, is created retroactively. This paradoxical structure is familiar to all fans of time travel films in which our hero goes back in time to stop some horrible tragedy only to discover it was his own interference with the earlier time which created the tragedy in the first place: in Twelve Monkeys, Bruce Willis goes back in time to gather information about a plague that will devastate the world of 2035, but becomes concerned that, put in a mental asylum in the present, his ravings about the future have given the idea of unleashing a plague that will almost destroy humanity to an asylum inmate with the power and desire to make it happen. The jet engine in Donnie Darko is, of course, its own emblem of deferred action: the latter event that returns to change the past, the effect that is ultimately its own cause.

[stdio2020]

Rosi Braidotti “Posthuman Knowledge”

In this lecture Braidottie establishes that the critique of the universal begins not with the postmodernist thinkers but is established and follows parallels to the idea of humanism itself. She confronts the ongoing fixation with defining the term ‘human’ as a process of definition by negation e.g. to be human is to be man. man is not woman, man is not animal, man is not nature. And that really the term only serves to index an axis of power. 

Braidotti postulates a kind of convergence she describes as the Posthuman Convergence Phenomenon: Which is the meeting of post humanism (the critique of man) and post anthropocentrism (the critique of the Anthropos, the idea of species supremacy in which aside from all sociological variables the species grants itself access to every living organism and body)

these two ideas run parallels but don't necessarily intertwine until the convergence which can be seen as a set of interrelations that zig zag, plateau. a nomadic set of events that are carried by the two main events that characterize historicity; the fourth industrial revolution, the knowledge economy AKA cognitive capitalism and on the other hand the sixth extinction, the death of the species, and of the planet. 

“These two events are happening simultaneously, it is not as though we have climate change on Monday and AI and synthetic biology on Tuesday. How do we think about this simultaneity of boom and bust on this scale, multi scale or multi dimensional is the Post Human challenge. It is causing a great deal of panic on the one hand and excitement on the other. These are really the best of times and the worst of times” 

^^This relates to by previous writing about the confusion and contradiction in expression throughout by work caught between optimism and cynicism, irony and sincerity

How to think about such dissonant almost opposite events demands skills of endurance, of imagination, and of transversal connectivity. Transversality is the key term here, you need to draw lines across events that are not at all parallels. the future is in the transversality of almost everything. 

We now need to look at these two phenomena, look at the chain of socialogical, theoretical, political effects that they are causing and draw a course of navigation that provides something productive, propositional to offer. In saying ‘we’ is unitary, we needs to be grounded according to the politics of imminence, grounded in feminism, politics of locations, anti racism, anti facism, indigenous epistemology, perspectives. These are ways that we can ground ourselves against universalism without falling into Relevatism. ‘We’ is not one in the same but ‘we’ are all in the posthuman convergence together. Perspectivsm requires your own analysis of your point of entry. 

Lets do away with the Anthropocene, it has become an Anthropos meme, gone berserk. It is too fluid and misses the point of the convergence effect, that we not only need to pay attention to the extinction, the end, but also the incredible period of growth and amazing scientific revolutions with all the consequences that it entails. 

“Swinging moods is an element of the Anthropocentric landscape. An imaginary disaster that the Hollywood machine pumps out. There is really money in extinction, money in catastrophe. and it is always the same template; White man, dog, rifle, pickup truck. This is a format that codes the social imagining of disaster that prevents us from looking forward at all the other elements of a  complex effective landscape.” We cant do much with the Anthropocene but we take note of the mood, the anxiety, the fear. The melancholia, the “why bother”

Enter the discussion via a critique of the necro political character of cognitive capitalism. The wealth disparity at a time like this causes an enormous ammount of problems, but lets not be sentimental about this, lets take stock of the contradictions of the fourth industrial resolution and the sixth extinction. We owe it to our intelligence to celebrate our technological advancements. 

COGNITIVE CAPITALISM

Cognitive and bio-genetic advanced capitalism and media and information technologies. Capital today = the informational power of living matter itself, its immanent qualities and self organizing capabilities. Profits generated from scientific and economic comprehension of all that lives. re. ‘Bio-piracy’(Shiva, 1997) a system that profits from all living this (this includes death, the necro political) - amongst this, great things are happening, the post human convergence and critical thinking is about this oscillating of ‘yes but’

The posthuman is an indicator of our historicity, and also a navigational tool (as Deleuze would say, a conceptual persona) that helps us illuminate what is happening to us, where we are at. Foucault’s question “what kind of subjects are we becoming?”

Posthuman scholarship has a tremendous focus on the non academic, the aesthetic, design and media for knowledge production. 

The queer, feminist, racial, postcolonial, film, art, subaltern studies do the work of exposing the connection between rationality and violence, reason and exclusion. Theses are ways of showing the knowledge that is being produced by the voices of the excluded. 

The critical posthumanities no longer assume that the knowing subject is homo universalis nor Anthropos but rather a complex embodied and embedded non unitary but relational affective transversal subjects collaboratively linked to a material web of human and non human agents. 

Collaborative morality is the ethics we get from Spinoza. Great introductory research into the kinds of scholarship that is born out of posthumanist thought 

[lady-illyria-the-magi]

28.10.2024

Current reads + my loyal study friend, lip balm and a dark purple/red lipstick because i am a goth, after all.

Elo ja anergia (environmental/posthumanist philosophy)

Postmoderni kirjallisuus (literature history of postmodern literature in the broader time span sense)

Actually it's really interesting reading two post-isms on the same go. Same base problem: western modernism. Two different ways out or coping with it.

[softrobotcritics]

Machine Movement Lab

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2020.577900/full

The Esthetics of Encounter: A Relational-Performative Design Approach to Human-Robot Interaction

Petra Gemeinboeck

Department of Media Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

This article lays out the framework for relational-performative esthetics in human-robot interaction, comprising a theoretical lens and design approach for critical practice-based inquiries into embodied meaning-making in human-robot interaction. I explore the centrality of esthetics as a practice of embodied meaning-making by drawing on my arts-led, performance-based approach to human-robot encounters, as well as other artistic practices. Understanding social agency and meaning as being enacted through the situated dynamics of the interaction, I bring into focus a process of bodying-thinging; entangling and transforming subjects and objects in the encounter and rendering elastic boundaries in-between. Rather than serving to make the strange look more familiar, aesthetics here is about rendering the differences between humans and robots more relational....

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Keywords: human-robot interaction design, aesthetics, performativity, agency, design, movement

Citation: Gemeinboeck P (2021) The Esthetics of Encounter: A Relational-Performative Design Approach to Human-Robot Interaction. Front. Robot. AI 7:577900. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2020.577900

Received: 30 June 2020; Accepted: 14 December 2020; Published: 16 March 2021.

Edited by:

Elizabeth Ann Jochum

, Aalborg University, Denmark

Reviewed by:

Gregory J. Corness

, Columbia College Chicago, United States

Jonas Jørgensen

, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Copyright © 2021 Gemeinboeck. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Petra Gemeinboeck, petra.gemeinboeck@uni-ak.ac.at

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[fursasaida]

In this paper, I have argued that while certain posthumanist ontologies in human geography and cognate disciplines have brought important novel ideas and approaches to bear in several scholarly debates, they have a troubled relationship with the idea of citizenship as responsible agency, and civil society as its normative embedment. In exposing some key dimensions of this relationship, I have not sought to argue against all aspects of posthumanist thinking as it clearly has potential for challenging us to rethink aspects of complex socio-material developments and human-nature interdependencies (Abrahamsson et al., 2015, Bingham, 2006, Braun, 2008, Head and Gibson, 2012). Instead, I have shown what particular problems follow from the idea of distributed agency as coupled with the idea of symmetry between human and non-human actors when considering normative valuations as an aspect of citizenship.

The question that follows is, can we reconcile the fundamental differences between these posthumanist ontologies and the inherent normativity in ideas of civil society and citizenship? The answer depends largely on whether posthumanist and humanist ontologies are seen as complementary or rival – an issue that has received little attention in posthumanist literature (Murdoch, 2004). The way in which posthumanism is typically presented as a corrective to modernist fallacies that we should detract from, makes it difficult not to think of it as an exclusive ontology that is rival to its humanist alternative (Korf, 2008). Indeed, posthumanism is often proposed as an explicitly monist position based on the premise that “researchers already ‘know’ ontologies, and empirical research is a way to show how a specific ontology, or even a specific ‘thing’, came into being” (Aspers, 2015, p. 452). Yet, its analytical (and political) efficacy risks being compromised by the consequent difficulty to communicate with bodies of existing research building on alternative ontological premises (Lynch, 2013, Joronen and Häkli, 2016).

Could we extend the notions of civil society and citizenship by moving beyond the humanism/posthumanism controversy, towards “humanizing posthumanism” (Murdoch, 2004, p. 1359)? Promising in this regard is the idea of positionality originally developed by German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, 1969, Plessner, 2003 and taken up by Ernste (2004) and Korf (2008). Positionality refers to the inescapable condition that links humans with the environment “through dynamic bordering” whereby “the human being is structured as both centered and eccentered”, that is as both entangled with and detached from the natural world of contingent emergence and causal necessity (Ernste, 2004, p. 444). Unlike things or non-human animals, humans live mediated lives in the sense of both having physical existence and distance to it, which leaves no option for humans but a reflective relationship with the world of praxis.

It is this detachment that for Plessner (2003) constitutes human subjectivity – not in the sense of a centered, sovereign, and coherent subject, but a worldly being in an ever-continuing process of becoming and living in ontological ambiguity (Korf, 2008). Humans cross nature and culture in the “double aspectivity” of being, which means a genuine duality of physical being and (intersubjective) reflection of that being – a duality that “can't be modified, neither by monism, nor by assuming a dialectical process” (Lerch, 2014, p. 206). Consequential for thinking about ethics and responsibility, this duality bestows humans with the power of putting themselves in the place of any living (or non-living) thing, other humans included (Ernste, 2004).

Plessner's “ontology of possibility” (Korf, 2008, p. 729) may open up avenues for extending ideas of civil society and citizenship precisely because it helps overcoming the forced choice between either humanist or posthumanist stance on human ethical agency. As of yet, few authors have taken on the challenge of working out what it actually means to extend citizenship to non-humans, which testifies to the difficulty of linking normative aspects of citizenship and civil society with ontological positions that obliterate such subject-dependent valuations. In what remains a deliberately speculative move, Hayles (2014, p. 179) claims that “every real object possesses – or even more strongly, has a right to – its own experience of the world, including biological, animate, and inanimate objects”. But without a grasp of rights that cross humans and nature, it is difficult to see how this statement could ever resonate with politics in a (civil) society.

To take steps in that direction, in issues where it seems particularly fruitful such as ecological citizenship, I suggest that we should study further the idea of a humanised posthumanism, building on an ontology of possibility that acknowledges our assembled entanglement with the non-human world but also accords an important role for humans in acknowledging these interdependencies. As a move beyond monist posthumanism, instead of portraying mastery over passive nature, this position builds on the idea of political responsibility for the vulnerabilities, injustices, and hazards that our assembled life of dual being in and with the nature entails. It also acknowledges that all ontological claims and arguments remain meaningless without the audiences to which they are directed – audiences concerned with how to lead a civic life in a more-than-posthuman world.

-- Jouni Häkli, “The subject of citizenship – Can there be a posthuman civil society?“ 2018

[vaiicreates]

Artist Research 140821 Jill Sorensen https://jillsorensen.net/about/

Jill completed her undergraduate studies in 1991 at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia and gained an MFA with First Class Honours at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in 2002. Jill is currently studying towards her PhD in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington.

Jill is the co-leader of the artist’s collective Achronological Manor, established in 2010. The collective explores the dynamics of collaborative curatorial practice through exhibitions and publications. Notable recent events include an exhibition, performance and publication series at Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin (2013) and a group project at the Hastings City Art Gallery (2011).

Jill has also been a finalist in the National Contemporary Art Awards, Wallace Art awards and the Parkin Drawing Prize. Jill is represented by Whitespace Contemporary Art in Auckland.

'My research is situated in relation to current posthumanist theory, which posits horizontal rather than hierarchical relationships for human/nonhuman cohabitation, my research sets out to test the hypothesis that experiential and participatory art practices can engender new understandings of the everyday relationship of domestication as a site of human/nonhuman interaction.  It poses the question; can a practice of unsettling and reframing familiar scenes of domestication elicit understanding that is critical, embodied, imagined and conducive to the notion that humans and nonhumans might coexist on a levelled platform of being? This research posts and set out to test the veracity of a working methodology that deliberately cultivates a hopeful space for imagining and feeling, in tandem with intellectual and informational research. This is a working hypothesis in two parts; firstly, navigating a methodology through which to nurture re-imaging; a research practice I propose as a receptive space of unknowing, A term I call into play to define the ‘mindful fostering of a practice of durational, conceptual and intellectual holding-back from familiar ways of perceiving'

https://www.whitecliffe.ac.nz/jill-sorensen

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Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Gl

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Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Gl

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Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Gl

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Synopsis A Critical Examination of MOOCs critiques MOOCs and online education s problematic reliance on humanist foundations and explores frameworks that look beyond these limitations. While MOOCs (massive open online courses) have attracted significant academic and media attention, critical analyses of their development have been rare. Following an overview of MOOCs and the format s corporate, universalist means of promotion, this book unravels the research and theory that continue to adopt normative views of user access, participation, and educational space in order to offer alternatives to dominant strategies, routines, and notions of community and authenticity.” Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Coursecritiques the problematic reliance on humanism that pervades online education and the MOOC, and explores theoretical frameworks that look beyond these limitations. While MOOCs (massive open online courses) have attracted significant academic and media attention, critical analyses of their development have been rare. Following an overview of MOOCs and their corporate means of promotion, this book unravels the tendencies in research and theory that continue to adopt normative views of user access, participation, and educational space in order to offer alternatives to the dominant understandings of community and authenticity in education. Product Identifiers ISBN-10 1138940828 ISBN-13 9781138940826 eBay Product ID (ePID) 215327904 Key Details Author Jeremy Knox Number Of Pages 224 pages Format Hardcover Publication Date 2016-02-04 Language English Publisher Routledge Publication Year 2016 Additional Details Copyright Date 2016 Illustrated Yes Dimensions Weight 17.6 Oz Width 6 In. Length 9 In. Target Audience Group College Audience Classification Method LCCN 2015-030689 LC Classification Number LB1044.87.K65 2016 Dewey Decimal 371.33/44678 Dewey Edition 23 Table Of Content Preface List of Figures Introduction The Massive Open Online Course MOOC structures MOOC Reactions: disrupting and ‘making sense’ Chapter 1: (Post)Humanism and Education Introduction Humanism Humanism and education Critical Posthumanism New Materialism Rethinking Educational Dualisms Posthuman knowledge and the (non)representational Conclusions Chapter 2: Masters of the Universal: MOOC Education and the Globe Introduction Humanism and colonialism The Corporate World of the MOOC World- leaning MOOC research The MOOC Platform Conclusions Chapter 3: Colonising Communities and Domesticating Data Introduction Immunizing communities and the anthropological machine Measuring MOOC communities Identifying participants and categorising participation Connectivism and community Lurking and the tyranny of participation The Personal Learning Network Individualism in the connectivist MOOC Conclusions Chapter 4: Housing the MOOC: Space and Place in ‘ModPo’ Introduction Modern and Contemporary American Poetry Spatiality and Mobilities Theory The House of Possibility The Kelly Writers House Tour Other voices, other rooms: power and potency in the ModPo fora The immutable mobile of MOOC pedagogy Conclusions Chapter 5: Monstrous Openings in the EDCMOOC Introduction The E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC The Monstrous Outside of bounded educational space Calls for cohesive community Outside of the humanist subject Conclusions Conclusion Summarising Posthumanism and the MOOC Suggestions for MOOC practice, pedagogy and research In closing Index Reviews “A much needed critical examination on MOOCs through the lens of humanism and educational philosophy has been conducted and described eloquently by Jeremy Knox. Anyone who wants to have a closer look at the intricate and somewhat paradoxical nature of today’s MOOCs experiment in higher education will greatly appreciate this timely work.” –Paul Kim, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, USA “Drawing on posthumanist and new materialist approaches, Knox breaks with utopian MOOC narratives, challenging readers to consider not only what it means to educate the masses but also what it means to be a student and what it means to be an educational site–questioning whether most MOOCs, despite the hype, have merely privileged the orthodoxy of established educational frameworks. Knox offers a thorough consideration of the technopedagogical systems that purport to serve a universal community –providing an in-depth exploration of the evolution of educational philosophy and aspirations of MOOC providers–elucidating long standing Western educational ideals and models as a way to better understand the future design and delivery of education to a diverse audience.” –Karen J. Head, Ph.D., Director of The Communication Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at The Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and Editor of Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation “Jeremy Knox provides a refreshingly critical take on a high-profile area of educational innovation which has been generally under-theorised. He does not shy away from addressing the ‘big questions’ surrounding massive open education, and in doing so he tackles with insight and clarity the shifting terrain of higher education itself.” –Sin Bayne, Professor of Digital Education in the Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh, UK

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