Welcome to week 3 of Posthumanism—a Summer Reading Group (and apologies for posting late!). Last week we had two really excellent posts by BP Morton and some great discussion in the comments section. I’ve yet to respond to the second post on trans*humanism but plan on doing so as soon as I wrap up this week’s comments.
Today, chapters 4 and 5 of Posthuman Life. As it happens, I’ve already posted on Chapter 4 here and I aspire to post a follow-up related to the “Dark Phenomenology” material later this week.
People who are just joining might want to (re)read the post/comments and then read David Roden’s new post (on his own blog EnemyIndustry) which details some of the ways his thinking is developing on the subject.
Quick Synopsis of Chapter 4: "Anthropologically Unbounded Poshumanism")
The goal of Chapter 4 (in terms of the book's argument trajectory) is to make the case that a priori constraints on the forms that subjectivity or agency can take are unwarranted. Those who are argue for such constraints anthropocentrically bind the posthuman possibility space PPS.
The phenomenological tradition presents us with a particularly strong version of such an argument. Grappling with its claims allows Roden to unbind PPS from anthropocentrism. Roden argues that pheomenological evidence (on which its a priori claims rest) related to the "necessary" structures of experience is necessarily incomplete and requires empirical supplementation. The upshot of the argument is that we just can't know, from the armchair, what forms posthuman agency could take.
Now I’ll focus on Chapter 5 (“The Disconnection Thesis”) but feel free to use the comment section below to weigh in on on issues related to Chapter 4 or on any of the material we’ve covered so far.
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