Journal of Posthumanism

Introduction

Jana-Katharina Burnikel — 2024-09-10

In parallel to the evolution of the multivocal critical debate around it, the posthuman has increasingly invaded everyday life over the last 50-odd years. In the 2020s, posthuman encounters are, for large parts of humanity, occurrences in multiple areas of everyday life. The number of artificially created entities, some of which are ever more indistinguishable from their human creators, has multiplied. The human body has become the focal point of enhancements that call hitherto largely unchallenged notions about its humanness into question, from prosthetic joint replacements and the medical procedures enabling them to the promises of genetic engineering and neurotechnology.

Westworld and Humans: The Sentimental Disposition of Popular Posthumanism

Christian Krug — 2024-09-10

Popular trans- and posthuman TV fictions such as Westworld (2016-22) or Humans (2015-18) are replete with sentimental tropes and scripts–those inherited from an 18th-century sentimental tradition and the affective-political ones that allow the sentimental to continue to operate today, as a communicative code in an arena of ‘public feelings’. Here, it is activated in times of crisis and to hedge in experiences of radical contingency. Uncanny encounters with posthuman forms arguably constitute such moments of crisis. But how can the sentimental do its cultural work if these encounters threaten to decentre its humanist foundations? In Westworld and Humans, sentimental scripts are partially revised, develop ambivalent, multi-coded forms and are employed self-reflexively, both in the shows’ diegesis and in the way they address their audience: In ‘quality TV’ drama, fictions of the posthuman seem to engender a ‘meta-sentimentality’ – which in turn may allow for a critical mode of inquiry.

Homo Crispr and the Uncanny Art of Self-Reproduction

Dunja M. Mohr — 2024-09-10

Selected classic 19th-and 20th-century fictional texts, I argue, function as imaginative precursors of material fusions, either by prosthetic integration in the sense of repurposed imperfection or by internalizing genetic perfection, creating homo crispr. E.T.A. HOFFMANN’s dark literary tale The Sandman (1816), MARY SHELLEY’s gothic proto-science fiction Frankenstein (1818), VILLIER DE L’ISLE-ADAM’s fin de siècle Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), and ANGELA CARTER’s carnivalesque The Passion of New Eve (1977) position the artificial other as both an externalization of the human desire for perfection in an uncanny act of autoerotic, poetic-scientific self-fertilization and as a reverse image of the composite self. They not only disrupt the perception of the other as external, but the subtexts, I contend, pre-empt this fusion of self and other that, in the logic of 21st-century discourse’s revaluation of imperfection, diversity, and dis/abilities, life sciences seek to realize with the imminent spectre of homo crispr’s dissolved material self/other boundaries.

The Promise and Peril of Emerging Technology for Brain Enhancement

Kevin LaGrandeur — 2024-09-10

Today’s emerging technologies provide possibilities for radical therapy for human diseases and disabilities, as well as radical enhancement and alteration of human abilities. This article discusses both the positive and negative possibilities of three current emerging technologies for therapy and bioenhancement—brain-computer interfaces, prosthetic memory, and transcranial direct current stimulation—as well as fictional narratives that prefigure these innovations. The author argues that the particular dangers of current radical emerging technologies that could enhance brain processing speed, alter or enhance memory, and affect mental states are prefigured by fictional stories that anticipate these real innovations.

Of Information Superhighways, Sexbots, Friends: The Delights of the Uncanny

Cordula Lemke — 2024-09-10

This article explores the uncanny potential of artificial intelligence in view of the trope of the Frankensteinian creature. I argue that since Masahiro Mori has coined the term ‘uncanny valley’ the link that has been created between AI and the uncanny has more to do with postcolonial notions of first contact than with the uncanny as such. Reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Spike Jonze’s Her and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, I investigate how these texts follow a new trajectory of AIs that are programmed to please rather than the well-trodden paths of dystopian or apocalyptic worst case scenarios. The AIs all raise important posthumanist issues that need addressing, but they do so in a very unthreatening manner. My final take on previous developments of a new medium shows that new mediums have mostly been denigrated as evil.

AI at Elsinore: What Horatio can teach us about Artificial Intelligence

Stephan Laque — 2024-09-10

This paper argues that the early modern period was already debating questions about the interstices and transitions between humans and machines, much like the ones that govern our engagements with AI today. Looking at Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I will be showing that, next to the ghost, Horatio is another and arguably no less challenging uncanny character on the battlements at Elsinore. While the ghost is situated between the full humanity of a living human being and the inanimate materiality of a dead corpse, Horatio seems to be situated between the full humanity of being “passion’s slave” and the mechanical functioning of a time-keeping and recording device. Horatio, then, is an experiment in artificial intelligence avant la lettre. This paper shows how his reduced, partial, and artificial humanity is explored by the play as it exposes Horatio’s inadequacies.

Screening Posthuman Procreation and Monstrous Motherhood in Raised by Wolves

Jana-Katharina Burnikel — 2024-09-10

Representations of posthuman birthing and artificial motherhood are at the center of the universe of the sci-fi series Raised by Wolves (2020-2022). This paper investigates how the series’ cinematographic aesthetics fabricate discourses on human procreation, posthuman motherhood and maternal heteronormativity. In the series, these topics are negotiated within the categoric triangle of woman, animal, and machine. Embodied by the series’ gynoid protagonist ‘Mother’, these categories become blended into a monstrous-feminine other whose uncanny performances of maternity outline the potential fascination and horror of (post)human gestation. Applying a close reading of two scenes screening Mother’s performances of birthing and of Mother’s own ‘birth’, this paper debates the subversive potential of the corporeality of the monstrous machine-mother in the light of a patriarchal remodeling of the feminized body for the purpose of procreation, and discusses how the series’ adaptation of the notion of the abject is used to constitute the technologized monstrous-feminine.

Posthuman Encounters and Patterns of Care in Klara and the Sun (2021) or, What Ishiguro’s AI Tells Us About the Uncanny Valley

Diane Leblond — 2024-09-10

The protagonist of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) seems a perfect candidate to take us through the uncanny valley (Mori, 1970)—a place where the once attractive almost-but-not-quite-human suddenly repulses us. Klara is an artificially intelligent android and the best carer to Josie, a teenager afflicted with a fatal condition. She is also a sympathetic narrator and focaliser, until a plot twist presents her in an entirely different light. Told from the AI’s viewpoint, the fable informs our experience of the uncanny valley. While Mori’s model focused on appearance, the notion that Klara might replicate human consciousness brings up the hypothesis of an ‘uncanny valley of the mind.’ Yet, through most of the story, sharing the AI’s perspective is exhilarating rather than off-putting. Ultimately, in encountering this peculiar narrator, we are reminded that storytelling allows us to theorise about and rejoice in the inner lives of others, human and not.

“They are here. They are everywhere. They are us.” – Posthuman Encounters in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018)

Heike Missler — 2024-09-10

In Little Eyes (2018), the latest technological hype comes in the shape of cute, pet-like robots with cameras for eyes. These so-called kentukis are remotely inhabited and controlled by their human users via an online connection which is established at random. As the novel’s blurb - “They are here. They are everywhere. They are us.” - suggests, a kentuki is at once a familiar and unfamiliar creature and users’ experiences range from comforting to unsettling. The novel revolves around the theme of stranger danger and reports several uncanny encounters between humans and not-quite-humans in places around the world. The representation of these posthuman interactions in the novel remains ambiguous: Even though the potential to challenge or even transgress the human/non-human binary is addressed, the novel follows a classic dystopian narrative, which posits that it is not the technology itself which is inherently good or bad, it is us humans.

Fungal Intelligence and the Posthuman: Mycohuman Art, Entangled Theory, and Fungi in (Eco-)Gothic Narratives

Susanne Gruss — 2024-09-10

Fungi have become paradigmatic for the wonders, the adaptability, and the resilience of the nonhuman in publications, ranging from Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt’s anthropological analysis of the matsutake mushroom (2015) to Merlin Sheldrake’s popular take on the ‘world-making’ capacity of fungi (2020). This article explores different conceptualisations of ‘fungal intelligence’ and the posthuman in art, (popular) science, and literature. In a three-step argument, it moves from the world of contemporary art to the recent flurry of textual production about fungi in anthropology and (popular) science and the concomitant construction of fungal intelligence. Readings of Aliya Whiteley’s The beauty (2018) and Silvia Garcia-Moreno’s Mexican gothic (2020) are then used to scrutinise how these literary texts create a posthuman ‘other’ intelligence that is depicted as threatening in its uncanny otherness. In both texts, the monstrosity of the posthuman fungal other is positioned as a new iteration of the classic gothic monster.

“The Scrapyard at the End of the Universe”: Waste Spaces as Incubators for Uncanny AI in the Doctor Who Episode “The Doctor’s Wife”

Anne Hess — 2024-09-10

Human society effectively others and marginalizes its waste spaces. This designation as a willingly forgotten, alternate place has inspired sci-fi (screen) writers to (re-)present dumps as sites of subversion in the otherwise ordered fabrics of their secondary worlds. One facet of this othering are the presentations of these spaces as incubators for new, often dangerous, posthuman forms of life. In the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife” (2011), a waste space gave rise to artificial intelligence, which came into being without direct human intervention, thus subverting any creator’s myths humanity might cling to, but it also created itself out of the (technological and organic) material of the dumps, giving what human society deemed waste a new purpose. The totality in which this AI rethinks the potential value of the waste material accessible to it is radical, uncanny and challenging to human sensibilities, especially as regards humanity’s relationship to natural/technical resources.

The Digital Hereafter, or: Nirvana in the Cloud

Dirk Vanderbeke — 2024-09-10

In the discussion of posthuman encounters, the focus is predominantly on robotics and the cyborg, artificial intelligence, and the implementation of technological elements into the human body. Less often explored is the complementary vision of the uploaded mind as a promise of life extension or even immortality. Nevertheless, there is, by now, quite a body of conceptual explorations, promises, warnings and also popularizations of this idea. The technological options described range from memory transfer to whole brain emulation or simulation, and they raise a multitude of theoretical, technological, philosophical and ethical concerns. Unsurprisingly, the assessment varies from enthusiastic celebration to dystopian nightmares, and the concepts have also been explored controversially in literary works. In my paper I outline the most important arguments and discuss some works of science fiction which explore visions of uploaded minds, most importantly Greg Evans’s Permutation City, Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome, and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein.

Front Matter

2024-09-10