The Posthuman and the Conditions of Aesthesia

The contemporary allure of a speculative life beyond humanity is

rooted in the contemporary chronopolitical zeitgeist according to
which humans have exhausted their futurity. It is endemic of what
Fukuyama claimed was western cultures persistence after the end
of history, that is, after having discarded all hope of revolution, a
defeatist attitude has eaten away at many socially-viable prospects
for the future. It is now common for theorists to lament the ages
incapacity to imagine the times ahead. To paraphrase Frederic
Jameson (and Slavoj iek): it has become easier to imagine human
extinction than to imagine human life beyond capitalism. It is thus
no surprise, given this exhaustion of any sense of futurity as
extending human progress or enlightenment, that many find an
appealing alternative in the spectre of the posthuman. It is tempting
to see the critical posthumanist thread running through Harraway,
Hayles and Braidotti which claims that, due to our various cyborg
couplings with technology and the mechanic nature of our
embodiment, we are already posthuman as a rhetorical attempt
to bootstrap ourselves beyond the deficiencies of our eurocentric,
phallocentric, and anthropocentric biases. It is no mere coincidence
that the theoretical field is populated with various appeals to non-
human agency: actor-network theory, vital materialism, object-
oriented philosophy, and various other flat ontologies, which no
longer discriminate between humans and nonhumans in an attempt
to eschew anthropocentric favouritism. But there is a risk that this
idea of a radical transgression of the horizon of humanity is merely a
convenient way of outsourcing actual political concerns to the
relativism of an armchair speculation, which, in extreme cases,
confronts the technoevangelical mystics of the singularity, with
primitivists busy preparing for an eventual collapse of civilization
and a regression to pre-technological forms of organization. For
indeed, the chronopolitics of our age mirror technologys ever-
increasing speed of access, transport and exchange. As Paul Virilio
has argued for 40 years, the age is characterized by constantly
reinitialized states of emergency. In such conditions of speed there
is no time to reflect, to abstract thought from the unabating flow of
events. Along similar lines, Bernard Stiegler argues that
contemporary western society is maintained in a constant state of
shock. Indeed, today there is a perpetual urgency to act before its
too late, fear about impending catastrophe, pre-emptive wars,
preventive policies, risk assessment and uncertainty management.
Today unmanned military machines kill people based on
metadata, as former NSA chief Michael Hayden readily admits. It is
no surprise that the rise of this logic of pre-emption in both military
and the market follows the rise of big data. For prediction, pre-
emption, and prevention, all require information: probabilities about
the future, conditionalized on past experiences, which we are driven
to track and analyze to an ever greater degree. But as Niels Bohr
famously said: Prediction is very difficult, especially about the
future. Faced with such dilemmas, my research project proposes to
assess the aesthetic, cultural and technical aspects of our
contemporary engagements with the future. Following what we
might call a neomaterialist approach, these questions are
articulated around investigations into the material and logical
conditions of aesthesia, which implies that we disentangle several
connected notions that intersect the history of metaphysical
thought. This includes considering the reality of asymmetrical time,
disentangling contingency vs. necessity, possibility vs.
compossibility, uncertainty vs. indeterminacy, assessing the
problem of whether values and qualia are emergent from material
processes, as well as negotiating between vitalist/panpsychist and
eliminative materialist tendencies in philosophy. Finally, these
considerations are applied to the question of whether our cultural
practices and technological environments favour or atrophy the
production of aesthesia, and by extension, how they condition our
relation to futurity.

http://posthuman.au.dk/individual-projects/the-posthuman-and-the-
conditions-of-aesthesia/