A Contest of Tropes: Screened Posthuman Subjectivities

Abstract

Popular culture film and TV are full of artificial humans, cyborgs, disembodied selves, hyperembodied individuals, hybrids and chimeras, post-biological beings and even technologized creatures like zombies and vampires. In the uncritical posthumanism of ‘transhumanism’ and its detractors, the variants of science fiction (SF), horror and fantasy often represent altered humans or successor species in a terrifying or ambivalent fashion. In the political sphere, posthumanism relates to medical bioethics and social policy debates. However, academia follows different trajectories. One major path by philosophers of technology responds to Heidegger in understanding how technoscience shapes the ‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ as a commixture of discursive/material properties. In the smallest niche of professional academics, posthumanism challenges the Enlightenment’s rational, liberal subject, as well as reconstructs the posthuman beyond entrenched dualisms tied to the exceptionalism of the anthropocene. Most radical is the argument that we have never been human and the posthuman is a book yet to be written. Or, less radically, we are currently ‘posthuman’ because our extended selves are already enmeshed in distributed informational networks. Most widely, the posthuman exists in an imagined future, often feared, sometimes welcomed.