Posthumanism and Technology

This lecture, I look at Han’s notion of  ‘psychopolitics.’ Psychopolitics is the affective moods which besiege human beings as a direct result of contemporary techno-politics. More specifically, I will look at how Han explains what he calls the transparent society which is the primary driver of affective psychopolitics. Secondly, I will explain how the psychopolitics generated by new technologies creates a dangerous form of emotional capitalism. In the last section, I will explain some alternative modes of life which Han suggests might provide us with a refuge from the tempest of technological determinism.

Byung-Chul Han's work attempts to make sense of a number of things, what life is like in the late capitalist societies of the 21st century, the affective consequence of technological acceleration, how mental health has deteriorated in Western democracies, and the deleterious consequences of freedom and positivity. In this lecture, I will begin by explaining how Han approaches the question of time. The dysfunctions of time and temporality is in my view the core idea in Han, the one which makes all his other ideas intelligible. Subsequently, I will turn to outlining some of the affective conditions which occur because of our dysfunctional relation to time. Finally, I will explain the forms of resistance which Han thinks are absolutely crucial to re-humanize ourselves.

This week I want to primarily explain how Zuboff charts how the insights of behaviourist psychology were radicalised into surveillance capitalism. Specifically, I look at how Zuboff critiques B.F Skinner’s behaviourism, the psychological method through which leading technology companies have since extrapolated means of behaviour modification and a politics of absolute social control. Secondly, I look at the what Zuboff has to say about ‘digital nudging,’ or the means of exercising power by corporations, governments over their populations by technical suggestion, subliminal prodding, through ‘reading’ the inner moods and desires of citizens ,and bending them towards ‘optimum’ outcomes. Outcomes which preclude deviance, dissent and resistance. While this does sound akin to the paranoid ‘mind control’ of a bad sci-fi movie. Zuboff’s point is more subtle, as the mind does not really come into the equation at all. The nudging occurs before the mind even has a chance to assess the way it is being influenced and is thus inherently pre-conceptual. Finally, I will look at what Zuboff has to say about the nature of freedom, and the ways it can be reanimated and returned to public discourse to ‘disrupt’ the logic of surveillance capitalism.

This week we are going to explore Shoshana Zuboff’s major recent work Surveillance Capitalism. In SC Zuboff does something really interesting and innovative. Zuboff believes that we do not really have the right concept or ideas for the effects which have been wrought on us by the internet revolution. While we say and are aware of words like ‘big data,’ ‘e-commerce,’ ‘encryption’ and ‘authentication’ and ‘GDPR,’ but do we really know how they actually work, who works them and who monitors who works them? This lecture will explain precisely what is ‘behavioural surplus,’ how and when it appeared, and examines how tech corporations – e.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft – have harnessed this new form of exchange to constitute predictable, consuming, and malleable humans through data extraction, as well as the invention of new coercive forms of power.

N. Katherine Hayles in her more recent work expands on the work initiated in How We Became Posthuman. Turning her attention to human consciousness she explains how consciousness itself is increasingly distributed across all the technical systems which modulate our behaviour. as Hayles sees it, we have to accept that cognition and human agency are distributed across quite obscure technical networks. The quicker we accept this fact, the quicker we accept that we are not the only cognizers in the world, the better it will be for us all. This is why her work Unthought continues, to undermine the idea of human exceptionality. Rather, we need to embrace the idea that the majority of cognition is in fact nonconscious. Once we do this, we will be able to attune ourselves more clearly to the technological world we inhabit. Here, I will explain how Hayles distinguishes between consciousness and nonconscious cognition. Subsequently, I will outline how Hayles theorises how nonconscious cognition intersects with technology. I will go on to show two of Hayles’ case studies that illustrate the dangers and possibilities inherent to what Hayles calls cognitive assemblages.

In the last lecture we explored how Hayles assessed the impact of the Macy Conferences on the developments of Artificial Intelligence. Here I will proceed to explain Hayles’ recounting of how cybernetics began to adopt more reflexive models of cognition. I will look at what she has to individually say about the second and thirds waves of cybernetics and conclude with a discussion on Hayles’ claim that a central tenet of the posthuman self-understanding is virtual embodiment.

Nancy Katherine Hayles, more than anyone, has contributed the most to our understanding of what it means to be posthuman. Her work How We Became Posthuman is an extensive interdisciplinary chronicle of science, technology and literature, explaining how posthumanism emerged. In this lecture I will explain Hayles overall project in How We Became Posthuman. More specifically, I will concentrate on how Hayles reimagines early developments in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence and the values which underpinned these developments.

In this lecture my aim is to provide a synoptic account of how Donna Haraway moves from cyborg thinking towards what she calls companion thinking. Firstly, I will outline how Haraway tackles the question of the construction of knowledge with special attention to her essay ‘’Situated Knowledges.’’ This will in turn enable me to explain how Haraway develops a theory of biopolitics which sets the stage for Haraway’s later work on environmental ‘technologies.’ Finally, I will look at what Haraway has to say about ecological questions in her later work. While quite live to the challenges we face due to imminent ecological collapse, in the end, I claim that Haraway has quite an optimistic dimension to her philosophy.

In this lecture I will first outline the central themes Donna Haraway introduces in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto.’ Secondly, I explain what Haraway means by cyborg feminism. Towards the end of the lecture, I will turn to explain Haraway’s account of boundary blurring which is essential for understanding the ethical and political imperatives of the cyborg.

In this lecture, I will begin by recounting some of Haraway’s background and intellectual context which I think is very instructive for helping us understand Haraway’s theories. I will then proceed to explain the origin of her own philosophical method, especially as it merges in her challenge to what she deems to be thinly ‘objectivist’ accounts of scientific knowledge. From there, I will then explain the alternative relational ontology which Haraway develops as a curative to more restrictive models of scientific and technological objectivity.

In this lecture I will how Lyotard's The Inhuman offers a reconceptualization of technology as a type of inscription. By ‘inscription’ Lyotard is referring to development’s information and communications. The expansion of communications has specific consequences for how we experience time, space and cognitive perception. I will conclude with a discussion of Lyotard’s famous essay ‘Can thought go without a body?’ which offers alternatives to the logic of development.

In this lecture, I will provide you with some background context to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s philosophy, as well as look at what is meant by postmodernism, and more specifically, I will explain Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. This latter much misunderstood text is crucial for understanding the theoretical features of the posthuman condition.

Lectures from Staffordshire University's Philosophy team from our module Posthumanism and Technology.

In this lecture, I begin our course on philosophical posthumanism. I compare and contrast two very different philosophers on the question concerning technology: Martin Heidegger and Rosi Braidotti