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How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here. .
Price: $14.02
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Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of “the end of history,” Francis Fukuyama argues that as a result of biomedical advances, we are facing the possibility of a future in which our humanity itself will be altered beyond recognition. Fukuyama sketches a brief history of man’s changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle to the modernity’s utopians and dictators who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person’s descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions. In Our Posthuman Future, one of our greatest social philosophers begins to describe the potential effects of genetic exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy: the belief that human beings are equal by nature. .
Price: $7.42
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Posthuman Bodies (Unnatural Acts)
"Its sheer breadth of scope makes it unlike the usual 'science, technology, and society' texts, and its rigorous insistence on the transformative and inventive potentials of these technologies distances it from the denunciatory, technophobic texts that litter academic bookshelves. Since both 'the body' and 'technoscience' are such potent sites of recent academic investigation, "Posthuman Bodies" will no doubt draw a wide readership from the ranks of literary critics, film scholars, science studies scholars and the growing legion of 'literature and science' researchers. It should be among the essentials in a posthumanist toolbox." - Richard Doyle ""Posthuman Bodies" is a speculative, or a performative, collection...its importance lies in its offering a singularly discriminating and singularly creative engagement with the imaginative project that Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Haraway have been among the first to foster." - James Faubion. "Posthuman Bodies" engages in a vital interdisciplinary investigation of the emerging political technologies of the body in the wake of postmodernity - technologies apparent in film, medicine, entertainment industries, politics, and the arts. This interdisciplinary collection reflects the growing concern with new interfaces between humans and computer and bio-medical technologies, providing a strong sense of the fundamental changes underway that will radically alter the experience of our own and others' bodies. Automatic teller machines, castrati, lesbians and other 'queers', people with AIDS, people with multiple personality disorders, the Alien and the Terminator: they participate in the profound technological, representational, sexual, and theoretical changes in which bodies are implicated. The contributors are Kathy Acker, Alexandra Chasin, Camilla Griggers, Judith Halberstam, Kelly Hurley, Ira Livingston, Carol Mason, Paula Rabinowitz, Roddey Reid, Steven Shaviro, Susan Squier, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Jennifer Terry, and Eric White..
Price: $29.95
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Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age
The growing synergy of humans and technology--from dialysis to genetically altered foods to PET scans--is transforming how we view our minds and our bodies. But how has it changed the body politic? How can we forge a society that protects the rights of human and cyborg alike? The creator of the cult classic Cyborg Handbook, Chris Hables Gray, now offers the first guide to "posthuman" politics, framing the key issues that could threaten or brighten our technological future. For good or ill, politics has already been cyborged in ways that touch us all: On-line voting promises to change who participates. Wars are won on video screens. Biotechnological advances-- cloning, sexual prostheses, gene patents--are redefining life, death, and family in ways that strain the social contract. In the face of these advances, visions of the cyborg future range from the utopian to the nightmarish, from a spiritual super-race transcending the body's confines to a soulless Borg consuming human individuality. Only with a broad, historically rich and ethically grounded understanding of these issues, Gray argues, can we combat the threats to our freedom and even our survival. A work of vision and imagination, Cyborg Citizen lays the groundwork for the participatory evolution of our society..
Price: $24.97
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Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body
Bringing a lively and accessible style to a complex subject, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls explores the idea of the "posthuman" and the ways in which it is represented in popular culture. Toffoletti explores images of the posthuman body from goth-rocker Marilyn Manson's digitally manipulated self-portraits to the famous TDK "baby" adverts, and from the work of artist Patricia Piccinini to the curiously "plastic" form of the ubiquitous Barbie doll, controversially rescued here from her negative image. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Baudrillard, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls explores the nature of the human - and its ambiguous gender - in an age of biotechnologies and digital worlds. .
Price: $20.71
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From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology And Technology in a Postmodern World (Ashgate Science and Religion Series)
Technology is one of the dominant forces shaping the emerging postmodern world. Indeed the very fabric of daily life is dependent upon various information, communication, and transportation technologies. With anticipated advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, that dependence will increase. Yet this growing dependence is accompanied with a deep ambivalence. For many, technology symbolises the faith of the postmodern world, but it is an ambivalent faith encapsulating both our hopes and fears for the future. This book examines the religious foundations underlying this troubled faith in technology, as well as critically and constructively engaging particular technological developments from a theological perspective..
Price: $26.69
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The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future
Prosthesis—pointing to an addition, replacement, extension, enhancement—has become something of an all-purpose metaphor for the interactions of body and technology. Concerned with cybernetics, transplant technology, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, among other cultural and scientific developments, "the prosthetic" conjures up a posthuman condition. In response to this, the 13 original essays in The Prosthetic Impulse reassert the phenomenological, material, and embodied nature of prosthesis without dismissing its metaphorical potential. They examine the historical and conceptual edge between the human and the posthuman—between flesh and its accompanying technologies. Rather than tracking the transformation of one into the other, these essays address this borderline and the delicate dialectical situation in which it places us. Concentrating on this edge, the collection demonstrates how the human has been technologized and technology humanized. The eclectic approach taken by The Prosthetic Impulse draws on disciplines ranging from gender studies, philosophy, and visual culture to psychoanalysis, cybertheory, and phenomenology. The first section, "Carnality: Between Phenomenology and the Biocultural" concentrates on the organic, describing a body that, by its very materiality, is always and already prosthetic. The second section, "Assembling: Internalization. Externalization," considers the technological qualities and peculiarities of prosthesis, raising questions about the ways in which film, photography, AI, drawing, and literature—representation itself—can be situated within the framework of a prosthetic discourse. Taken together, the essays suggest that prosthesis is material as well as metaphorical. "It is just a matter of pondering where the inelegant edges lie," the editors write, "and living them most wonderfully.".
Price: $11.35
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Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems
From Dr. Moreau’s Beast People to David Cronenberg’s Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem’s robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler’s human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs.New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, Posthuman Metamorphosis develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman.Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox.Posthuman Metamorphosis draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism..
Price: $18.20
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