A performative project Janneke Adema has put together, based on our ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’ article for New Formations, Number 78, Summer, 2013.
The postdigtial intimacies symposium brings together a network of researchers at Coventry University and our wider global networks who are looking to make sense of how we relate to ourselves and to others in complex, anxious, unequal worlds. This symposium will be the beginning of a collaborative, negotiated and participatory collective, which will look to define new questions about and how we shape of intimacies into the future.
The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) is a new Faculty Research Centre at Coventry University. We are looking to recruit a developer with knowledge of new technologies such as Xtended Reality and those associated with open access publishing. Our Research Fellow/developer will be equally happy with building platforms as they are with contributing to funding bids and academic papers. The person we employ will be involved in all technical aspects of the Research Centre from uploading website content to creating virtual reality scenarios and will have the people skills to work with those at all levels of technical understanding.
You will be qualified in object oriented programming languages such as c#, c++, Java, Java scripts and swift with proven experience of development in modern web development languages like PHP and HTML5. Plus you will possess some experience in 2D/3D modelling using software such as 3DS max and Photoshop and Maya for digital asset creation and Unity 3D or Unreal game engines for developing game-based and immersive experiences.
This is the chance for you to join the CPC team in the early stages of growth and to play a significant role in the development of impactful research activity within the emerging field of postdigital cultures. Led by Professor Gary Hall, the Centre explores how innovations in postdigital cultures can enable 21st century society respond to the challenges it faces at a global, national and local level.
how we receive, consume and process information
how we learn, work, and travel
how we engage and regenerate our communities and cities
What Do We Mean By Postdigital Cultures?
"The digital" can no longer be understood as a separate domain of media and culture. If we actually examine the digital - rather than taking it for granted we already know what it means - we see that today digital information processing is present in every aspect of our lives. This includes our global communication, entertainment, education, energy, banking, health, transport, manufacturing, food, and water-supply systems. Attention therefore needs to turn from "the digital", to the various overlapping processes and infrastructures that shape and organise the digital, and that the digital helps to shape and organise in turn.
The CPC investigates such enmeshed digital models of culture, society, and the creative economy for the 21st century "post digital" world.
Research Areas covered by the centre include:
Post-capitalist Economies
Post-humanities
Affirmative Disruption and Open Media
Immersive and Playful Cultures, Creative Archiving and International Heritage
Digital Arts and Humanities
The 21st Century University and Art School
Members of the CPC include Janneke Adema, Adrienne Evans, Valeria Graziano, Kaja Marczewska, Marcel Mars and Miriam de Rosa.
The role of the Research Fellow Developer is to plan, develop and manage collaborative and individual research projects, using their specialist technical skills.
This will include implementing new technology platforms and applications integral to the research projects of the CPC (for example, those associated with open access publishing and immersive XR technology) which address issues at an international scale using research as a driving force for global change. It is also to develop ideas for generating income and to seek funding opportunities for routes to disseminate research findings that inform teaching and build the reputation of the University whilst advancing knowledge in the field.
The Job Description and Person Specification is available here.
Many thinkers are currently attempting to replace the tyranny of the human with an emphasis on the nonhuman, the posthuman and the Anthropocene. Yet as I showed in Pirate Philosophy, such post-theory theorists continue to remain bound up with the human in the very performance of their attempts to think through and beyond it. Regardless of the anti-humanist philosophies they profess — be they inspired by Deleuze, Kittler or Latour — in their practices, in the forms their work takes, in the ways they create, publish and disseminate it, in their associated upholding of notions of individual human rights, freedom, property and so on, they continue to operate in terms of a liberal, humanist model of what it is to be and do as a theorist.
What forms is critical theory to take then if, in its performance, it is not to be simply liberal and humanist– nor indeed human — but something else besides? To put this question another way: what are the possibilities for inhuman modes of theory? By this I mean theory that is able to take account of and assume (rather than ignore or otherwise deny) an intra-active relation with both human and nonhuman others, be they animals, plants, objects, technologies, the environment or the cosmos?
Bacteria on mobile phones
Why ‘inhuman’? My use of this term is intended to emphasise that the human cannot be simply contrasted to the nonhuman. There is no such thing as the nonhuman – nor the human for that matter. The nonhuman is already in(the)human. Each is born out of its relation to the other. The inhuman is thus a mode of being, thinking and doing with the nonhuman. It follows that any such inhuman theory could also be understood as an instance of the inhumanities. For if the inhuman equals the human intertwined with the nonhuman, then a humanities with this intra-active inhuman figure at their heart must become the inhumanities.
Of course, such an intra-active understanding of authorship and subjectivity could be gathered under the sign of the posthuman and posthumanities. As Janneke Adema and I have shown, however, approaches to the posthumanities have been dominated by the ‘posthuman humanities’ of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and others. My proposal is that the above transformative conception of the human and the humanities can therefore on occasion be more productively articulated in terms of the inhuman. The idea is that such a rhetorical and conceptual shift might enable us to better challenge to the self-identical, liberal humanist subject that serves as a blind spot or datum point in so many theories — not just of the humanities, but of the posthuman and posthumanities too. Indeed, building on the argument developed by McKenzie Wark in ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, could we go so far as to characterise the inability of so much contemporary theory to operate according to a more inhuman mode of philosophy as a sign of its obsolescence? (1)
Wark’s text on the bourgeois novel was published on the blog of Verso Books as an addition to the collection of critical appreciations he provides in his 2017 volume General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers For The Twenty-First Century. While the chapters in General Intellects offer succinct analyses of individual thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Timothy Morton and Quentin Meillassoux, Wark’s focus in ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel’ is The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by the writer and novelist Amitav Ghosh. In this non-fiction book Ghosh contemplates the environmental crisis and global warming from a literary perspective that has origins in the Indian subcontinent. As far as he is concerned, it is not just about ecological problems, or even capitalism and its carbon-based political economy. Climate change is about empire: it is about imperialism. Above all it is about climate justice. Providing an account of Ghosh’s influential lectures on the great derangement thus enables Wark to conceive of a geo-humanities project that brings earth science into contact with ‘post-colonial voices that have pushed back against imperial mappings of the world.’ At the same time, he acknowledges that approaching climate change in terms of social justice brings with it a conceptual challenge. As Wark articulates it when quoting from The Great Derangement: ‘One has to avoid excluding the diversity of human voices, and yet at the same time avoid excluding the non-human world and rendering it a mere background, or "environment." One has to voice “the urgent proximity of nonhuman presences”’.
Ghosh approaches this conceptual challenge as a literary problem. The difficulty, however, is that climate change goes beyond what can be expressed in the form of the bourgeois novel. The issue for Wark is summed up by the fact that ‘fiction that takes climate change seriously is not taken seriously as fiction’. Hence, for him, some of the best responses to the Anthropocene have been provided by science fiction. Hence, too, Ghosh’s concern that we are now ‘entering into a great derangement’. Wark describes this as ‘a time when art and literature concealed rather than articulated the nature of the times and the time of nature.’ Instead of dealing with the Anthropocene, novels become choked with what, following Franco Moretti, can be termed ‘filler, the everyday life of bourgeois society, its objects, decors, styles and habits'.
The reason the bourgeois novel is obsolete, then, is because it has not ‘adapted to new probabilities.’ Nowhere is this more apparent according to Wark than with respect to the ‘centrality of the improbable’, by which he means the Anthropocene as an epoch that ‘alters a predictable one’ so that it is no longer about either gradual or catastrophic time, orderly or apocalyptic change, but rather a temporality of a third type. (It’s here he sees Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence as coming into play.) Instead, Wark characterises the bourgeois novel as ‘a genre of fantasy fiction smeared with naturalistic details — filler — to make it appear otherwise. It excludes the totality so that bourgeois subjects can keep prattling on about their precious “inner lives.”’
Yet critical theory has not adapted in the Anthropocene either. In fact, to include contemporary theory seriously in the argument Wark makes about literature and art only serves to place further emphasis on the idea that we are arriving at ‘a great derangement’, a period when no element remains in its original place. For ours is a time when theory too can be said to obscure rather than express the changing nature of the times and the time of nature. As with the bourgeois novel, it’s a derangement that works through formal limitations – and this despite the fact that one of the reasons critical theory continues to be important is because of its ability to denaturalize the parameters within which our professional forms, methods, and procedures of knowledge operate. In the case of theory (and both literary and genre fiction, I might add, although this seems to be something that the commercially-minded, liberal humanist professional in Wark prevents him from seeing, at least in his essay on Ghosh),(2) these limitations involve the named individualistic human author, the codex book, the fixed and finished text, originality, authenticity, copyright and so on. And as with the modern novel, the screening out of this scaffolding — this ‘faded frame’, as David Theo Goldberg has referred to it — ‘“continues to be essential”’ to the functioning of what we might now rather teasingly refer to as bourgeois theory. To further paraphrase Ghosh by way of Wark, here then is the great irony of theory in the Anthropocene: ‘the very gestures with which it conjures up’ nonhuman actors, objects and elements ‘are actually a concealment’ of them.
The performance of serious theory today is thus as formally limited to liberal humanism as the novel. (As Wark says in his essay on Moretti: ‘It is about making something of this world, not transcending it in favor of another.’ So there is no adventuring into the unknown, ‘no spontaneous bravery’, ‘“few surprises”’. It might be ‘hard work’, being a bourgeois writer or theorist, ‘but it’s a steady job’.) This means it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for even the most radical of theories to do anything other than exclude the diversity of human and nonhuman presences. To resample and remix Wark’s text on the novel in the Anthropocene as a means of further undercutting notions of the author as self-identical human individual: anything that would actually impact on the concealment of theory’s established scaffolding, how it’s created, published and circulated, is regarded as not proper, experimental, odd, and risks banishment. ‘But from what? Polite bourgeois society?’ The for-profit world of Verso books and Routledge journals where proper theory can be found?
In this way theory eliminates the ‘improbable’ — including non-humanist, non-liberal, non-grammatological, non-rivalrous or non-commodifiable ways of being and doing — ‘from serious consideration’.
(As examples designed to provoke further speculation I could refer here to the fact that the Amazon has recently been declared a 'subject of rights' by Colombia’s supreme court in a bid to protect it from further deforestation; that the Whanganui river in New Zealand has been given the same rights as a human person; and that an orang-utan in Argentina called Sandra has been declared by the courts there to also have legal rights. If nonhuman things can now have rights and be the party of interest in administrative proceedings, can we envisage reaching a point in the future where a work of critical theory can be legally and professionally recognised as having been co-authored by an ape, a river, a forest, an ecosystem, even by nature in general? If so, what then would the consequences be for our notions of the author, originality and copyright? Does even asking such improbable questions not involve us in imposing legal and professional strictures designed for humans onto nature?) Certainly, from the point of view of bourgeois theory, that which is outside its inherited liberal humanist frame in this respect can only appear as ‘strange’, ‘weird’, ‘freaky’. Any such ‘strangeness’ emanating from an actual engagement with the implications of the Anthropocene can thus be kept in the ‘background’, the unmarked environment in which theory takes place, or moved into it.
Like the bourgeois novel, such theory — with rare exceptions — ‘draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman’, not to mention the ‘collective and collaborative’. Here, too, the actions of individual human agents are treated as ‘discontinuous with other agents’, elements and energies (including ‘the masses, peoples, movements’), even though ‘“the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities…”’.
We can thus see that bourgeois theory clearly ‘isn’t working’. The nonhuman, climate change, the Anthropocence in general, all exceed what the form of proper theory can currently express. Like the novel, it has not adapted to the new reality ushered in by the Anthropocene, including all those laws and legal decisions that are starting to pile up around the question of the rights of nature. Certainly, the last thing such theorists want is for any of this to actually impact on their own ways of performing as authors. Instead, theory ‘imposes itself on a nature it cannot really perceive or value’. Just as ‘serious fiction, like bourgeois culture, now seems rather unserious, indeed frivolous’, so too does serious theory.
The nonhuman may be what a lot of contemporary theory studies and writes about, but it cannot take seriously the implications of the nonhuman for theory. As a result, the current landfill of theoretical literature on the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism smeared with nonhuman filler — objects, technologies, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, stones, geological formations — to make it appear otherwise.
Endnotes
1) I should stress that my understanding of the inhuman is somewhat different from that of Wark. For him, the inhuman is ‘an apparatus of labor and technology. Indeed, the inhuman is the zone where the partition between the human and nonhuman is negotiated, at the expense of rendering the inhuman labor in between invisible. There is no such thing as a "history of ideas," only of the labor and technics of producing them’ (McKenzie Wark, ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, Verso (blog), August 16, 2017: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene).
2) Wark comes a little closer to doing so in his earlier text on Franco Moretti and the bourgeois novel, 'The Engine Room of Literature'. Here he suggests that 'Moretti’s evolutionary model for thinking about the novel', in which the:
tree of literature is constantly sprouting new branches, but some die off, taking their place in the fossil record of 'the great unread.' … explains very well ... how the market feedback loop exaggerates differences in success between the more and less fit kinds of literary form.
It is a ‘matrix of bourgeois culture’ in which ‘all of literary criticism participates’, according to Wark, regardless of whether it does so consciously or not. In the higher echelons ‘it may be all high-minded talk of resistant readings and counter-canons, but down in the engine room the business of literature is all about making variants on products for a panoply of markets.’
Stretched Skin: Obsolete, Uncertain and Indifferent Body, by Stelarc is a beautifully bound book with 200 pages containing stunning images from various photographers and informative texts about Stelarc’s suspension performances. In addition to texts by the artist, it include articles (some previously printed, others newly commissioned) about Stelarc and his work by writers including Darren Tofts and Shannon Bell.
For over 40 years, Stelarc has been pushing the physical, conceptual, and technological boundaries of the body. His work has inspired and awed people the world over, and given many a new perspective on what the body means, where it begins and, indeed, ends. His first book Obsolete Body was published in 1984 as a compilation of Stelarc's suspension performances, it is now a very rare and expensive book to come by. But Obsolete Body, while the source of many people's inspiration, does not tell the whole story or contain a complete record of Stelarc's suspension performances. After its publication, Stelarc continued and expanded his work, and those performances have never been seen in print.
Stretched Skin focuses on all of Stelarc's suspension performances—from the very first in 1976 to the most recent in in 2012, including the collaborations with Håvve Fjell and Wings of Desire in 2012 and 2013. The book also contains some of Stelarc's other performances; where they have direct relevance to, or lead up to, the suspension series.
We're delighted to announce the first book in our new Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series:
Bernard Stiegler's The Neganthropocene.
As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap—Bernard Stiegler here produces the first counter-strike and moves beyond the entropic vortex and the mnemonically stripped Last Man socius feeding the vortex.
In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end 'banality' of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in. Understood as the reinscription of philosophical, economic, anthropological and political concepts within a renewed thought of entropy and negentropy, Stiegler’s ‘Neganthropocene’ pursues encounters with Alfred North Whitehead, Jacques Derrida, Gilbert Simondon, Peter Sloterdijk, Karl Marx, Benjamin Bratton, and others in its address of a wide array of contemporary technics: cinema, automation, neurotechnology, platform capitalism, digital governance and terrorism. This is a work that will need be digested by all critical laborers who have invoked the Anthropocene in bemused, snarky, or pedagogic terms, only to find themselves having gone for the click-bait of the term itself—since even those who do not risk definition in and by the greater entropy.
Updated on 5 July, 2018.
Except where otherwise indicated, content on Media Gifts can be distributed, reproduced, transmitted, translated, modified, remixed, built upon, used and 'pirated' in any medium, even without indication of origin. (This does not affect any rights others may have in it or in how it is used.)
Given the lack of a licence that is consistent with the (inhumanist) approach to copyright that is articulated and enacted on Media Gifts, this statement is provided to acknowledge yet deny the copyrighting that is performed by default by a public domain CC-O licence or when all rights are otherwise waived.
Thursday, July 12, 2018 at 10:09AM 
