The main thing I want to be arguing with this chapter, and which I realised today makes a good title for the chapter, is that “We have always been posthuman.” The process for arguing this is to show that technology has always been a part of what it is to be human – that since we began building fires, making art and speaking (whichever of these founding stories you ascribe to, with their mythological connections to Prometheus, who brought us fire from the Gods, and Orpheus, with his lute) we separated ourselves from other animals and this was the beginning of human being – and that it is therefore a natural part of being human to engage with technology.
At the moment I’m reading Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media and much of this is covered, although her argument is somewhat different from mine. I’m half way through now and still feel a bit confused as to exactly what her argument is; she seems very focussed on information and the relationship of information to bodies as the key relationship in HCI that needs to be re-imagined – something she proposes to do through the device of the fold. I think a lot of her concerns are not directly related to what I’m wanting to discuss (although it’s hard to be definitive about this as I find her writing dense and convoluted so trying to figure out exactly what she’s saying is a bit difficult since she isn’t clear about which statements are hers and which are paraphrasing the comments of others), but she does talk about attempts to try and ‘naturalise’ digital technologies, different approaches to interfaces and ‘interfaciality’ (which are relevant for my 3rd chapter), posthumanism, cybernetics, etc.
It’s clear to me again in reading her book that so much of the discussion in this area is focussed on human subjectivity and how technological changes affect this, as well as emphasis on anthropomorphic representations in technological design. I’m keen to write this chapter as being about technology and not about humans. The intent is for my argument and discussion to be one that is focussed around technology and humans as a part of this, but not as the ones most affected by these relations. Perhaps it’s a matter of borrowing from Munster in her use of the fold in terms of folding humanity back into nature (although, not having read Deleuze on the fold, I need to revisit this as I’m not convinced this is the same thing; Munster’s fold is a much more complex concept than this). This would then allow me to discuss nature as a much broader concern and people as a part of this and to also approach some of the political concerns of the project (although these are not something that I want to be very explicit and spend a great deal of time on).
So this chapter needs to somehow place humans back within nature and allow our use of technologies, therefore, to become natural. This is not the same as digitising nature. Munster’s analysis of the ‘naturalisation’ of digital technologies only addressed an approach through which code is naturalised and everything, therefore, gets drawn back into digital culture rather than the other way around. This does not address the fact that there are other approaches through which to talk about technologies being ‘natural.’ In order to do this I also need to look at the mind/body split and trace this back to Platonist traditions, as Ihde did, to discuss how a symbiosis of humans and nature can help us to see technology as a natural part of our environment. By looking at this, and also incorporating notions of technologies extending our bodies (both Ihde and McLuhan), I will argue that contemporary engagement with, and embedding of technologies within our own bodies, only continues this practice that has always been part of being human. Both the mind/body separation and the constitution of the human subject came after we began using technologies. This will also need to address issues to do with cutting the flesh as a taboo practice so as to discuss the difference between using a technology as a tool outside the body and the incorporating it within the body as another organ.
To sum up:
The use of technologies being what makes us human.
Folding humans back into nature.
Revisiting the mind/body split.
Human subjectivity.
Sacredness of the body and taboo of cutting the flesh.
Posthumanism as humanism.
The trick is to write it from a non-anthropocentric position, which will be difficult. Perhaps in attempting to do this I need to try to pretend I’m not human and write an alternate story and then afterwards re-work it to make it somewhere in between so that it doesn’t sound corny.
As an aside… The focus on ‘digital technologies,’ while relevant for contemporary discussions of technologies, reduces discussion of contemporary computer technologies to notions of ‘digitisation’ – ie. The process of making things into digits to be processable by a computer as information. This is a reductive approach that sees all elements involved in this process as information. We perhaps need to bring back some of the approach that was used by early philosophers of technology to broaden the understanding of contemporary technologies to be less about digitisation and more inclusive of form. Is this possible? When a voice is translated into digital code then into a beam of light, how can we see the organic/natural within this process? The question is, how do we extend back/towards the organic in this process without the taint of artificiality? Do we need to naturalise numbers and, if so, naturalise language (as the abstraction of thought) and isn’t this, as the product of our thoughts and muscles (voicebox), and breath, already natural? How can we naturalise numbers to allow this to be an organic process? Is this necessary? How corporeal can abstraction be? There is reason here to look back to the beginnings of counting and mathematics but I think it might be outside the scope of my project to go far down this route. To even propose the notion of naturalising numbers asks so many questions that it’s not relevant to deal with this here.
Also, there is a question in using this title that relates to the relationship of posthumanism to capital, but again this may be outside the scope of the project since it then requires a discussion of industrialism, consumerism, exchange relations within society and whether technology is necessarily related to this whole area.
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