Posthuman Lifestyles: The Film
Posted on June 29, 2010
At long last, the footage from my inaugural lecture is online. Thanks a lot to Ian White and the crew @CCA for all their work.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Part 5:
Part 6: 2008-2009
Part 7:
Part 8:
Sorry you are so wrong – saying there was no theory on Posthuman!!! I can believe you can say this and never once mention the seminal work of N. Katheryn Hayles “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics”, 1999IN 1999 no less!!!!
(otherwise interesting talk but without that mention it all seems suspect to me)
i wish u had left your name, we could have talked further. in my view, hayles ideas about posthumanism are too narrowly focused on cybernetics for it to be seen as a theory of posthumanism. certainly – as in my lecture – the integration of biology and machinery is important, but it’s not the whole picture.
I think a theory of posthumanism must draw more heavily on aspects of biotechnology. At the time hayles published, human cloning and the GM debate were huge, but she doesn’t touch on these areas.
I don’t recall exactly what I said in the lecture, but i hope it would have been that, by around year 2002, there were no good books on theories of posthumanism. i think this remains true. there have been a series of books, including hayles, which provide parts of the puzzle, but no comprehensive theory of posthumanism that draws together such diverse subjects as artificial intelligence and, say, patenting human dna.
incidentally, i’ve had hayles’ book since it came out, it’s also a core reading on my ‘Becoming Posthuman’ course, which has been running for 8 years. She even blurbed by last book.