Humanism & Its Discontents (Session 5)

So hello and welcome to the fifth session of Humanism It's Discontents with our instructor Reza Nagaristani. So please Reza, you may take it on. Thank you very much everyone. I hope you are doing well. Again, apologies for missing that that previous class. So today we start working on post-humanism and just also going over a few materials that you have posted on Discord, particularly Aaron's set of cogent notes, which I hope that you read. It was very good. We go over that and then post-humanism. And

next session would be again post-humanism or post-human, post-humanities. And then next Last two sessions we do, Pete Wolfendale, Ray, generally thinking what would be a good response to these positions. uh uh consistent and consists of uh that's it so should we start with our presentation today page i think was supposed to do something

yeah hey can you hear me yes hello hi good morning good morning So we did How We Became Post-Human by Katherine Hales and two of the people in our group dropped out last minute. So it's just going to be Emma and I. And so we'll just hone in on a couple of the main themes that resonated with us. And How We Became Post-Human is looking at the construction of cybernetics, interweaving stories of how information lost its body, the cultural construction of the cyborg, and the emergence of the post-human. And I will let Emma start.

Okay. So I kind of started this with like stream of consciousness, like riffs of notes as I read it, and then kind of looked back and saw the main themes and then kind of went from there. So a note that really sparked my attention in her introduction is machines become the repository of human consciousness. You are the cyborg, the cyborg is you. I'm fascinated by the cyborg with full awareness and like acceptance. The term like can sound silly at first. However, science fiction in all mediums, even when it's like dead wrong, can be quite a healthy provocation. From a paper, Cyborgs in Space, by Manfred Kline and Nathan Kline, I'm paraphrasing,

altering a human's body to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments is more logical than providing an earthly environment for said person in space. So she opens the main body of her text with, as you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screen, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman. As we already are post-human, I quote and paraphrase with her again, and it's a long one, cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. Were the cyborg only a product of discourse, it could perhaps be relegated to science fiction and not of much concern to culture.

Were it only a technological practice, it could be confined to such technical fields as bionics, medical prostheses, and VR. manifesting itself as both technological object and discursive formation. It partakes of the power of the imagination, as well as actuality of technology. The subject posed to human is a collection of heterogeneous components, a material informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction. It is the feedback loops, a machinic version of homeostasis that allows for information, control and communication to synthesize. Her description of post-human is a view that thinks of the body as the original prostheses we all learn to manipulate. She goes with that and has a very interesting example of anorexia, calling it a fight for

self-control, self-sustaining self-possession over one's body, independent of the body's desires. That the skeletal frame is the material testimony that the locus of the humanist subject lies in the mind rather than the body and might further make the body merely an object. And I found that pretty interesting and would like to open that up to discussion too. Of course, the construction of the posthuman does not require literal cyborgs. However, I teach surfing to amputees, so know a ton of them. This is actually from our group on the top picture. And they all have various sorts of prostheses from like swimming fin to stomp pad as a foot to a complete absence of limb. And in most cases, most cases, it's better to entirely do without for this actual sport.

But like one example is like one amputee from knees up, all human and from knees down entirely robot, like complete with like wire harnesses, single board computers, batteries, and magneto restrictive fluids that I absolutely had to look up. Others don't have nearly as sharp of a border of like knees, but it's quite like some can be chips in their brain for hearing loss, etc. On the subject of physical prostheses, I just have to mention these coyote teeth dentures that I saw in a museum in a small town. They're from like the early 1900s. And I just take every opportunity I

can because this is gross. On digital prostheses, she introduces a question for connections between user and avatar. What cannot be encoded within the system? And so when you think about sensory substitution through digital means is being pursued in countless labs from gaming companies to military applications. This specific example turns sound vibrations into like electrical stimulations across the upper body. It requires practice like learning a language but aware can feel what someone says. The designer has the ultimate goal to be able to monitor aircraft as a pilot this way. Obviously like virtual reality, interestingly what like testing and

the closest we can get now has been with online gaming for extended periods of time. However, it's causing lasting effects on how users can engage with real life, like I'll call it post immersion. They have trouble with stimuli, it can numb actual senses while digital senses, time and use are increased. Recognizing like touch and depth of vision is most notably affected. So in reality, it's achieving quite the opposite of the intended effect. And I found this idea helpful that, and she mentions informatics, following Donna Haraway's definition of it, are technologies of information as well as biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development, with seeming a larger emphasis on complicate.

Hales referenced an experiment in the beginning of her text that was trying to guess what gender or whether it was a person or computer that you were in dialogue with through like written conversation in a computer and this test represented worlds of contemporary fictions models of signification implicit in word processing embodied experience constructed by interactions with informational technologies and the tech itself. Now, like the AI named Samantha pictured here, if you've heard of the Herd, the movie, it's loosely based on that. And Samantha's a machine learning model called GPT-3. It's a chat bot and quite close to the

movie. It's not like a assistant the way that that was. And when humans interact with her, there's like a lot of recorded responses of journalists and all of these people essentially interviewing Samantha and the biggest like takeaway is mostly unnerving because it's quite sophisticated and people don't tend to expect it this leads directly to new models of signification she speaks oh sorry the author speaks mostly in the sense of visuals in the book and on that note like one fascinating article I read a number of years ago was a blind woman who translated astronomical data into sound and now professionally listens for anomalies for NASA. The author broke off into a bit on randomness or a sense of surprise. And she said,

the most surprising information I could send my students is a string of random letters. If there were only randomness, it would be useless to speak of mutation. However, mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. The potential of randomness is when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information. There were a series of panel discussions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which had participants wavering between a vision of man as a homeostatic self-regulating mechanism, whose boundaries were clearly delineated from the environment, and more threateningly, a reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could change him in unpredictable ways.

And I just couldn't resist with this image. post-human future of humanity ranges from post-biological where intelligent machines become dominant life form and cats if you know this reference and you're as nerdy as me to symbiotic unions of machines as tools which at this point is quite achieved paraphrasing post-human also implies a coupling so multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed. There is a contrast between a body's limitations and cyberspace's power. Look in video games, immersive experiences, and so on, have very much surpassed the date of

publication of her book, which was in 1999. However, cyberspace represents a quantum leap forward into the technological construction of vision, literally. Consciousness moves through the screen to become the point of view, leaving behind the body as an unoccupied shell. This is extremely played out vision of point of view in gaming or like plugging in like the matrix or countless like anime book shows. Every full immersion gaming, there's like a subset of books about it called lit RPG. Her statement, it is nearly certain that we will increasingly live, work and play and environments that construct us as embodied virtualities. Nailed it. I want to actually repeat the long opening quote. Cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors,

living beings and narrative constructions. Were the cyborg only a product of discourse, it could perhaps be relegated to science fiction and not of much concern to culture. Were it only a technological practice, it could be confined to such technical fields as bionics, medical prostheses and VR, manifesting itself as both technological object and discursive formation. It partakes of the power of the imagination as well as actuality of technology. On her own interest in cyborgs, she says cyborgs interest me because they actually exist. In the technical sense, and I've gone with her list and then updated it for this year, in the technical sense, electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses,

artificial skin, cochlea implants, enabling the formerly deaf to then hear again. This technology uses a direct electronic to neural connection. And then two years after the publication of this text, retina chips began to be grafted to blind person's eyes, like human trials of it, and chips being placed in animal and human flesh, letting neurons grow and connect to them. All began. In the metaphoric sense, cyborgs or anyone using like keyboards joined in a cybernetic circuit. Surgeons guided by fiber optics, video games, Zoom, social media, electric skateboards, simple phone calls, cars. Her conclusion on what I've sifted specifically for is not a question of leaving the body behind, but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific

local and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prostheses. There is a limit to how seamlessly humans can be articulated with intelligent machines, which remain distinctively different from human in their embodiments. And I have a number of questions and thoughts, but for the sake of time, my main rumination I've been sitting on before I pass it back to Paige is that the idea that limbs can be insured now for loss or injury and have been for a very long time, like pirates operated that system like long before workers comp, but if it's not whether we do but when and what might it look like for it to be like the cultural norm to be a mix of flesh and machine, and when might we begin opting in for cybernetic limbs or brain chips, etc.

Okay, take it, Paige. Thank you. So, while post-humanism breaks away from the individualized enlightenment human, with a demarcating critique of the disenfranchising biases of those who constructed such, Hales also brings to light the biases within post-humanism itself, based off of the origins of its different constructions. Her main argument is that embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic construction of the post-human. She looks at this through

different narratives in which post-humanism has been constructed through the development of cybernetics, pointing to narrative itself as an embodied form of discourse. Hales says, our images of our bodies, their limitations and possibilities, openings and self-containments inform how we envision the intellectual territories we stake out and occupy. When the body is revealed as a construct subject to radical change and redefinition, bodies of knowledge are similarly apt to be seen as constructs, no more inevitable than the organic form that images them. At the same time that cybernetics was reconfiguring the

body as an informational system, it was also presenting itself as a science of information that would remap intellectual terrains. So we can explore here how such a space of reconfiguration can be liberating but also confining. One narrative we can explore is that of Norbert Weiner, who is considered the father of cybernetics and his personal ideologies which were relevant to this prioritization of information over embodiment. For Weiner, analogy was communication and communication was analogy. An ideology to set up cybernetics as how we know the world.

Now analogy is of course a prevalent and helpful tool for understanding the world, but Hales pointed out the problem with this was that its concentrated potency led to erasure of the very real differences in embodied materiality where analogy correlated with an estrangement from the flesh. The problematic steer could be seen to stem from evident anecdotes that Weiner was extremely uncomfortable in his own body, relying on analogical equivalences between mathematics and emotion for his own psychological homeostasis. This seeped into his view of world

as an analogy, ovulating mathematics onto emotion, sense perception onto communication, and machines onto biological organisms. This went along with an insistence of keeping cybernetics within the physical sciences and out of the human sciences. Meanwhile, he was also coming from viewpoints bound to that of the liberal humanist subjects, and this restricted his cybernetic machine from crossing many bodily boundaries. Hale says, like cybernetics, eroticism is intensely concerned with the problematics of bodily boundaries. At stake in the erotically charged discourse in which Weiner considers the pleasure and dangers

of coupling between parts that are not supposed to touch is how extensively the body of the subject may be penetrated or even dissolved by cybernetics as a body of knowledge. If our body surfaces, our membranes through which information flows, who are we? Are we the cells that respond to the stimuli? Are we the host organisms who, as Richard Dawkins claimed using cybernetic arguments, engage in sex because we are controlled by selfish genes within, a kind of sex without sexuality, a deconstruction of autonomous self as a locus of erotic pleasure, the notion of being infatuated by something in a theoretical sense while simultaneously disconnected from its materiality. Thinking about this era of technological informational

revolution where humans are more isolated than they've ever been before with an overabundance of connection without a certain kind of connection. Hale says, if my nightmare is a culture inhabited by post-humans regarding their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being. My dream is a version of the post-human that embraces the possibility of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being that understands human life is embedded in

a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend on for our continued survival. So looking at the psychodynamics affecting the language when the human and machine are interwoven, she further notes that abstraction, although essential for theorizing, can account for the cannot account for the infinite multiplicity of interactions with the real and i think here we can be careful not to romanticize embodiment but just look at it as a practice in tandem with abstraction and cognition working with machines and so on her critique was that it's possible to deconstruct the content of abstraction while still leaving the the mechanism of abstraction intact. I'll read this quote here. In contrast to the body,

embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment never coincides exactly with the body. However, that normalized concept is understood. Whereas the body is an idealized form that gestures toward a platonic reality, embodiment is the specific instantiation generated from the noise of difference. Relative to the body, embodiment is other and elsewhere at one successive and deficient in its infinite variations, particularities, and abnormalities. Embodiment is akin to articulation in that it is inherently performative. And her importance around embodiment

is that it would undercut this essentialism so prevalent in liberal humanism rather than reinforce it. So I find grounding around this in following Sylvia Wynter's ideas relating narrative to embodiment through being human as praxis. And Hales doesn't mention praxis in her search for embodiment but the closest thing she comes to is offering solutions through looking at functionalities of incorporation and with that she gives an example of the habitus or just talking about you know the habitual psyche of humankind and um the habitus is conveyed through the

orientation and movement of the body as it traverses cultural spaces and experiences temporal rhythms, which is something durable enough to pass through generations. And Hales notes the importance of this, saying that when accounts of learning change, so do accounts of cultural transmission. This type of incorporated knowledge has the power to define the boundaries within which conscious thought takes place, and as these are linked with emerging technologies, embodiment mediates between technology and discourse by creating new experiential frameworks that serve as boundary markers for the creation of corresponding discursive systems. Formed by technology at the same time that it creates technology,

embodiment mediates between technology and discourse by creating new experiential frameworks that serve as boundary markers for the creation of corresponding discursive systems. If the type of post-humanism being aimed for is one that needs a queer openness free of essence, one that involves non-humans and beyond humans outside of a language which can provide definition, then it will have to adapt and mold around its alterities. And so a definitive cannot be grasped and further embodied but I think embodiment can be found in the relationships or relations that make up the post-human or inhuman or whatever you want to call it through this type of praxis and yeah so the post-human she talks about signals the end of a conception of the human which has

always only been applied to a small privileged fraction and when grounded grounded in In embodied actuality, the post-human can offer ways for rethinking humans with machines without being anti-humanist or apocalyptic. There's an openness in this construction which I think is important to be maintained as a relational infrastructure and establishment of channels for ever-changing interactions that we have always already been enmeshed in. And that's all. Thank you so much, Paige. Thank you so much, Emma. Magnificent. Love the presentation. This is a new presentation, by the way.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks. It was fun. So, I mean, I have a lot of questions, but does anyone wants to ask some questions from our great presenters today? No one? Always, why not? Okay, ask them. ask them. I'll let others go first. Did any of you read, I'm trying to remember how long ago a Twitter controversy this was, but the short story, My Gender is an Attack Helicopter?

No. Would you like to expand on that? Oh, it was great. I think this was some kind of trollish meme of someone going off about, like, if you can change your identity to man or woman or non-binary, why not be an attack helicopter? And then someone wrote a short science fiction story called My Gender Identity is an Attack Helicopter, where, are any of you familiar with Peter Watts? Also, it's a very similar thing. Are you talking, I was going to say about that looks awfully sounds like Peter Watts thinks. It's a lot like Peter Watts, where what the sort of what the sci-fi mechanism is, like what the way this works is that embodied cognition, specifically like

embodied sort of sexuality and gender identity are much sort of deeper and more dependable pathways than conscious cognition, right? This kind of non-conscious, how we experience our body. It's much faster. It's much more dependable. It's much less susceptible to error. And so in this sort of future scenario, the US military sort of programs and helps train attack, like helicopter pilots to experience the movements of the helicopter through these sort of embodied pathways rather than in sort of conscious abstract thought. And of course, like when you learn to drive a car or fly a plane, there is an element of this anyway. But the sort of conceit of the story is that this pilot

sort of feels all of the helicopter's movements and intuits and sort of processes in this better way. And it is very much like Watts, who, who, yeah, also has this thing about how sort of conscious cognition is going to be sort of done away with in the future by, by the sort of deeper and more dependable sort of computational capacities of, of non-conscious systems. But it's great. It's also like a, it's sort of trolling internet transphobes. And it does this really good job of kind of giving you this really alien sense of embodiment. I have two remarks

to say to that. One is this thing about gender. She actually opened up the book talking about how the Turing test or the imitation game originally had a gender distinction as well. Besides human and machine, it was man or woman and talking about how this had to do a lot with the production of identity um more than whether a thing is is human or machine which was also you know talking about these this narrative of who is the person creating um yeah the narrative that we're based off of and the fact that gender was in there was really saying a lot and then this thing you're talking about non-conscious cognition that kind of relates to this part of habit I was talking about earlier because that is something you know that is in um the precognitive state that we're usually you know not aware of and is so much about this sort of extended cognition and something I know that she

goes on after this book was is non-cautious cognition and like her thing of the cognosphere about how you know just this completely um interwoven um I don't know just just sphere of cognition which can be like manipulated by capitalism etc so um yeah that's interesting I think Aaron actually, reading the sidebar, I think, not sure, I think Aaron is actually referring to Peter Watts adaptation of the John Carpenter's The Thing, where basically you actually, the story is narrated from the perspective of the thing itself, instead of

human. Yes. It's quite great. No, it is. But I also the Blindsight and its sequel have similar themes. Certainly. Yes, yes. Yeah, maybe you can link it in the chat. Yeah, I'll try to find the story. There was a whole thing about it got pulled down because people then tried to dox the writer about whether she was really trans or not. But I'll see if I can find it. I actually was just reading it as you guys were talking an article about the author yeah she um over so much pushback and everybody kind of attacking her she checked her in um checked herself in to like a psych ward and then changed her name oh wow yeah no the story was supposedly like her trying to sort of process her coming out

as trans through the but it's a great story the author is dead now is supposed to be the I had no idea about this whole thing. I'm going to look at it. Yeah. Can you put the Twitter, if you have the address of that original Twitter, so I can look at it? I'll try to find it. I promise I don't go on Twitter starting the fight. I think it was taken down. You won't be able to resist, I don't know. I think it was taken down, but if you Google, my gender is attack helicopter. like in short brief. The first one on the Vox website has the article. That's really good.

That's magnificent. Yeah. It looks like they have a full text somewhere. There are a few things here that still bothers me as a philosopher. So when we are talking about precognitive you know global work space sort of things you know like in the sense that neurophysiology is talking about cognition and consciousness how much of that sort of you know extended cognition you know what you might call pre

precogutation atmosphere or climate is actually responsible for identification as you identifying with something. That actually always bothered me that the question of embodiment is quite actually a very interesting question, but also a dangerous one. Precisely because Because I think that if you are not careful about the scale of cognitions and the sort of stuff that goes to identification of something as, then the question of embodiments or embodied

cognition ends up to be actually quite oppressing. It undercuts any sort of what you might call to be agential, rational identification of who we are as something else. Well, I have a lot to talk about this, hopefully next session. But anyone wants to talk about this? I mean, yeah, obviously there's this whole thing about the idea of embodiment, and it's not actually something new. It's, of course, we have now, we have a nice term for it, a robust, so-called robust theory of embodied cognition and extended cognition, so on and so forth.

But the roots of it are obvious. The roots of it are into network theory, that Latour actually comes from that sort of things, from Nicholas Lohmann, from system theory, from cybernetics, so on and so forth. but I genuinely feel not philosophically disturbed or agitated but rather perplexed that it can actually be a liberating sort of philosophy or theory of cognition you know just the fact that we understand ourselves as extended in a multiplying web of connections

always and all the time does not automatically translate to this idea that we have certain sort of obligation and responsibilities and with those sorts of stuff comes with identification. So, you know, when imagine I transition to a trans woman, obviously with that comes a certain sort of worldview, a worldview that suddenly the world changes. Majority of the sort of, you know, trans narratives in modern literature, and I agree with

them, believe in a certain sort of emancipatory selfhood, emancipation of the self within the collective, within the collective, within gender collective and so on and so forth. So I have seen and I've talked to my friends who have transitioned. Some of them were, for example, were Landians, you know, canonical red-pilled male people, right? And now they have transitioned and and they see the world, and they are absolutely embarrassed by this whole idea that at some point they were red-pilled. Obviously, there is something to explain here, that why is that

this sort of transitioning creates such a new worldview? You understand the sort of wrong, false moves that you made. But what is exactly in the transition that actually make that sort of change, make that sort of difference that makes a difference, right? I don't think that it can be explained the way by embodiment, by the idea that, oh, I have a different body. It's something else is still there that I just cannot philosophically yet understand. I mean, I don't know. I haven't experienced it. And this is something that I'm completely, absolutely illiterate about.

But nevertheless, it's a question. Anyone can say something here about this, about this change of worldview? I mean, Paul, is it Paul now? Paul, who's the writer of? Besiado. Yeah, Besiado, formerly Beatrice Paul Besiado. She talks about this quite a lot. and I remember I was in CalArts I had it was actually quite a very I wouldn't say disturbing

it was just like odd for me you know as a kind of like a boring male person right to listen to some of the stories of people who have gone through transition so I was talking to a few trans men and they have been taking testosterone and they told me that we just cannot actually talk to our girlfriends anymore that was odd to me We're saying that, look, we think that they talk too much.

They do this, they do that, and we just are fed up with that sort of stuff. So there is obviously a certain sort of biophysical component that is absolutely horrendously real. But nevertheless, there is a certain sort of identification that does not simply come from this sort of embodiedness. it has it's something else it's this its source is not entirely uh bottomed out in embodiment in our uh you know uh complicity with anonymous material so to speak right i do not know what it is i do not know what it is i mean still trying to learn uh but i mean this is why i think that

certain sort of experiences are absolutely real and valid. And so as the experience of identifying yourself as something else, truly systematically. I don't know, anyone wants to say something about this? I can't speak to the trans perspective personally, but I know when Hales is talking about this ideal embodiment she doesn't really go into the nuances within and you know it could be true that too much of a fantasized embodiment um could also be problematic in ways and i think it's just like the point was more of coinciding with a sort of balance and um and what you were

saying about this like too much entanglement type of idea is that i i think that also there could be like an ethics of entanglement with while, you know, it's like you need the entanglement viewpoint to get out of individualism, but while maintaining a response, individual responsibilities and awareness of alterities at the same time. Michael on the sidebar asked a really good question. Yes, I think, I think that might be actually true. So this is just as there are different levels of cogitation and with their own cogitatums and objects of cognition, there are also different levels of embodiment. And I think that, yes, probably the level of embodiment that we are talking about people

post-transition is essentially fundamentally influenced by the community in which they are embraced, right? It's a different source of embodiment, right? It is, and that's fundamentally conscious, self-conscious, I would say, you know, a philosophical sense. It's not mere phenomenal consciousness. Yes. But then there are different scenarios, though. I remember so I'm not sure about this. I'm absolutely

not sure about this. Please correct me if I'm wrong. As I said, I'm a boring male person. Simple as that. I try to learn. I remember 9-11, 9-11, just the night of 9-11, I was talking IRC chat, and it was a trans community. And there were a few people there. Trans community, I don't know whether trans community, how it has changed, it has evolved, so on and so forth. But I remember that specific moment after post 9-11, and there were a few Muslims there, Muslim women who were lesbians.

and basically the trans women attacked them and said that, you know, you are terrorists and, you know, shut the fuck up, so on and so forth. They were utterly, utterly red-pilled. So there is obviously some sort of historical evolution happening, and that's why I mean this is why I think a trans movement by itself is not a guarantee for political correction and emancipation. It only comes within the current historical evolution toward emancipation.

patient. So I saw maybe they did not have a community because back then, trans community was in different parts of the world was fundamentally segregated. So there were certain sort of responses that you could only hear from trans women, at least in that specific chat at the night of 9-11, you could only hear from Trump supporters, right? But look, today is completely different now. There is a certain source of emancipatory movement within trans movement.

But it wasn't always the case, though, was it? So then we should account what happened exactly. I was thinking that maybe it has something to do with the recent perception that, well, it's not very recent, but I think that there is happening some kind of recovery of gender abolitionist ideas that some time ago it wasn't just very clear as I don't know if it is possible to claim that we have still a trans community or LGBTQ community of some sorts because it's just

to decentralize and there's not much consensus about the issues. But I think that with the recent visibility of non-binary persons and the urgency to, I don't know, to perceive some real problems that comes from the sustainability of a gender binary gender system. This is coming to terms with, I don't know, with a possible emancipatory politics, because I don't know with what you were

describing about these incidents in 9-11, maybe these issues weren't reflected at all. Any possible construction of a trans community was based still in some presuppositions of cis-normative binary systems of gender. I don't know. Yeah, no, no, that's good, that's good. But But then it brings us to this idea that perhaps the emancipatory vector of trans movements should not actually be sought in mere embodiment, but rather the assemblage, the new assemblages

of collectivity that we have now in a broader context. I don't know. But yes, I mean, I remember another example. There are all these sorts of examples that, you know, I'm just like a nerd. I always say that it's my business, you know, watching everything, knowing everything, and so on and so forth. But there was another one. It was a debate. I remember in early 2000s, a debate between there was this Israeli

lesbian woman who was talking about the emancipatory vector, right? And there was, among the audience, there was this Palestinian girl who was lesbian, right? And she said to her, so you have talked about the emancipatory vector of the Israeli lesbian movement and all good, great. But you are exactly that sort of person who do not recognize my rights as a lesbian. And do you know what, unfortunately, and it has nothing to do with Israel versus Palestine and any sort of shit.

It's just sort of self versus other, you know. She unfortunately answered that your case is too complex. And people booed her and said that coward. Coward. I really genuinely think that this is the trans movement should be understood not in terms of embodiments merely. yes, there are, of course, that sort of things going on, but ultimately, what makes it a movement, an emancipatory movement,

is precisely within the sociality that cherishes and it basically generates. Otherwise, by itself, it can't do anything, just like any sort of self-recognition as other, right? Hegel 101. But again, I don't know. I mean, all of my examples are fundamentally twisted because I'm coming from a very twisted land, Middle East, where there are so much other things at stake and you're trying to navigate all these obstacles.

Yeah. Thank you so much, though, Cassia. Any more? Any more? Instead of putting this stuff on the sidebar where I cannot actually read, say something. I was wondering whether the kind of primacy of embodiment in this question comes down to, I guess... Love your, by the way, love your attire. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I was just wondering whether it comes down to, I guess, like the conditions for social recognition within liberal kind of Western societies, in a sense.

Embodiment seems like something that is not a choice. And this has historically been a kind of avenue for social recognition of pretty much all of the LGBT community, right, where people have said we're born this way. and that's kind of been the basis on which they've been granted rights by society, or at least that's been the kind of formal argument that's been presented. And so I'm wondering whether the kind of primacy of embodiment is similarly, you know, prioritized, not to say that it's not there, but prioritized within the same kind of, you know, social reality in which, you know, you can be, it's easier to be recognized on a political level for something that you can't choose than it is for something that you would choose if you had, you know, and I kind of, I almost feel like it is politically, not more valuable, but politically

valuable in a different way to say that this is the kind of set of social relations that I choose to enter into, and this is the kind of identity that I choose to adopt, and that I should be recognized politically on this basis, and this is something, you know, I guess it's more of a kind of... of um so in that case then how how how does it actually try to not fall in the pitfall of minoritarianism in in what sense do you mean the pitfall of minoritarianism you see my minoritarianism is actually quite uh a very strong sort of i would say I wouldn't call it fascism, but a dogmatist movement.

In the sense that just because you are a minority, you think you are white. Muslims think that they are white. Right? In America. Because of precisely that minoritarian gravity. I don't think that we should reduce the discussion and the emancipatory achievements of trans movement to them being the minorities who have a choice. Everyone should have a choice. Sure, but this is just a question of political recognition. It's not strictly a question of being correct. I think that the problem that you're identifying is that more mileage is got from the identity position that is adopted, but not.

But the point I'm making is more to do with political recognition to begin with, which I guess maybe it can be assumed in certain cases, but definitely it doesn't seem. And I guess there are things that go with recognition like health care and social care and things like this. But isn't it that sort of recognition is always embedded and can be successful or a failed project to begin with in accordance and in the context of the power relations that are already established? Yeah, it's possible. I mean, I guess that's what I'm contesting. Have any of you watched Malcolm X interview on who is who? You know, when they put some people,

maybe try to guess the identity of a guy, right? And no one actually manages to say that this is Malcolm X. The thing is that really, I was watching it with a friend after so many years of watching it. so there are so many gems in that interview Malcolm X says so they don't attack him for being black you know and these are just a bunch of old white people totally Oxford bred to the bone they are not going to go after him being black,

trying to make a rebellion or something. They are actually asking him, why is becoming a Muslim? Right? And then there are gems in that interview where Malcolm X says that, I do not condone killing white people indiscriminately. Do you know actually what it means? And no one actually pays attention to what he actually says. He says that killing white people indiscriminately, meaning discrimination can be justified. And they are fundamentally afraid of this person because he has become a Muslim.

So there comes with this sort of social relations relations and that what is most threatening to the position of power, the dominance, right? In America, it used to be always black, but imagine that you are Muslim black. You are a goddamn fucking terrorist. To them, to them, you are a goddamn terrorist. And that's exactly how the conversation starts and ends with Malcolm, Mr. X. And he absolutely cherishes it. He plays with them. Yes, I would say that all sorts of, you see, none of these sort of transitions, converting

and so on and so forth, themselves guarantee an emancipatory vector, I would say. Yet, they do actually fundamentally disturb and agitate the relations, entrenched relations, that have created a sort of paradigm of dominance and power. Today, if you actually make one false move, you will be red flagged. And that would be the point of resistance, to push back against them. And I think that's, trans movement has become one of them at this point, but there are different sort of conversions and transitions that also disturb the system.

But this is not because of embodiment. This is because of the social relations already entrenched. definitely watch Mr. X. It's black and white. It's actually, I think, a month or a week before his assassination. Magnificent, magnificent interview. I mean, truly, truly one of the greatest man be set upon this stupid planet. Yes?

I think Arman wants it to... Arman is just like dying. Let this man talk because he's going to bite his neck, bite, eat his toes, so on and so forth. Actually, you talked to it mostly. I just wanted to say that even the emancipator, I don't know personally, but I speculate or suspect that even the emancipatory power of a transitioning movement, either Black Americans who become Muslim to identify with the foreign horror,

as you put it, for the American world, or the trans, that the, let me put it like that. Trans woman becoming Muslim. Not, not, no, no. Black trans woman becoming Muslim in America. No, no, no, no. Totally, utterly threat. That would be double fault. That would be beautiful. But I want to say that anybody that tries to, in a Foucault-like manner, transgress the border between already established power relation that might, must not and ought not be transgressed. The movements that do that, I think the emancipatory power of them is actually still the power relation

is embodied in the society. Because, you know, how do I, maybe what I'm saying, what I'm going to say, it's going to sound turf-like. Please, Cassia or anybody, correct me, because I really want to know this. And this is for me very important, mother of life and death. I say that the emancipatory move or feeling of an identity, of our gender identity, in the end becomes, come to a reflection or recognition other people who treat me um for another now i am i am the other i have become the opposite opposed sex for the other and the person in me that also identifies

me as the other sex now is also an other for me do i make any sense lacanian hegelian sense the other eye that transgressed the border, the gender border still is a societal eye, is the eye that has been marked with society by gender rule and you must be man like this and this and this and you're not that person, you're not that man that society says that you are. So you trans... How much is different from Haraway's position because Haraway, Haraway non-humanism as opposed, because you know that Haraway never actually liked the idea of post-humanism. My apologies, I always mix up the gender pronouns because of my nature. Mother tongue

does not admit any sort of gendered pronouns. So Haraway actually was fundamentally worried of the idea of post-humanism and she used to call it non-humanities and the thing is that as opposed to Rosie Braidotti or Latour, she never actually ever mentioned that their relation of the human to non-humans can be decomposed or deconstructed into based relations, right, that can proliferate.

No, she always understood that there is a certain sort of boundary conditions that we have to accommodate with regard to humans and animals or non-humans, and ultimately the base of it comes to a very basic thing, being vigilant about who is the other. Alertness, a certain sort of critical alertness about the other was always the linchpin of Haraway's theory.

It's difficult for me to understand what your point, because I think that, am I correct to say that gender identity is basically for the other, you in yourself, for yourself have a gender identity? That's my question basically. That may be a little bit provocative. I want to say that you feel, for example, I don't feel a man or a woman or anything, I don't even feel a human until I encounter somebody else, something else that affects me as I... And also, particularly when you become vigilant, then you understand the pitfalls of your passivity to your own self.

You know, to your gender, to where you have come from, and so on and so forth. but then Haraway does not actually tell us where is the source of this vigilance, critical vigilance that allows me to understand myself within the multitude within the common, within the collective where is it the source obviously it cannot be from my own experiences right because that would just be totally trivial it is precisely because i'm a social being but then if you are a social being then what sort of sociality are we talking about

you cannot then bring in the non-human within the idea of sociality to to reassemble a new emancipatory agents in an ongoing process and labor of transition but wouldn't the point be that if you bring the non-human to society already if you market that's human would be something like that sorry i stopped arguing can you can you elaborate a little bit on that uh because if you if you have an If you have a non-human or non-normative or something that you call, you don't call it us or I, something, the other, as we were calling it.

But talk to, think about it as nothing, not a definitive other, a definitive other, but an other, still a egocentric other. That is an other that is a non-I, not a definitive you or something with an identity. that position, if you if you if you go to that position, then yes, all these ideas that this is the nonhuman or this is the Muslim black or this is the lesbian Palestinian and these ideas have bring some power to the relationship, the absent power or explicate and implicated power, Implicit power, I think it's already in the 20 years that have passed from the 9 11 already has

lost its point or poignancy. Let's put it. Perhaps so, perhaps so. I wouldn't say it has lost its point. I would say it has been diluted. I need to think about your main question though. I don't have any answer for it now. Yes, please go on. Actually, yeah, she's on her head. I'm sorry, there are people before me that wanted to say something and my mind I talk a lot you you talk first yeah sorry and um I I just was thinking and the thing

that I tried to write in the chat too that it's the idea of the how you perceive what body or embodiment is and I think like from cyber theory to like feminism of French feminism from irrigatory that people call essentialist, but actually I think has more in common with queer and trans movements than like many other American feminists. And I think that this is this tendency of breaking that idea of like how society or like general orders address you or how you you are put into that frame of reference if we I don't know with new kind of identities or

new conceptions of bodies we can somehow break a symbolic order or frames of reference or a conception that has already been there then maybe maybe that's the change but I'm not going to go further into the next session's discussion, but I was even thinking about those texts that we were reading about, the text by Pete Wolfendale, when at the end he's talking about how there is going to be this alien other that comes out of it, or how the idea of human is going to change. I don't see the difference between like that idea of inhumanism and a certain trends of post-humanism or feminism

or trans theory. Like I think in that sense of changing this frames of reference, they are some difference is actually quite obvious with at least with Peter. You see, so there is actually an undeniable tendency toward naturalism and materialism within post-humanism, right, from Haraway to Catherine Ayliss and Bruno Latour and Rosie and so on and so forth. I remember, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere Pete says something like this, that post-humanity

or post-humanities, because you see, when you unbound the universe above the human, beyond the human, you would have not just post-human, post-humanities. It's a plural thing. He says that its objective, its primary objective is to unbond general animality from the yoke of conservative humanism. So that's absolutely, I do agree, general animality. And we can actually talk about general animality in terms of embodiment and so on and so forth, in terms of causal laws rather than reasons and so on and so forth.

Whereas inhumanism, according to Pete, is to unbind reason from animality, such that we can implement reason in anything that is possible. As long as it has a structure sufficient to support such sort of adjudication. Yes, I think I am sorry. I just want to. Please go on. My apologies. No, no, no. I just wanted to talk about this concept of embodiment in both of them mostly not as their common eek or like that.

that I don't know, I don't want to put words out there now, but like just the sense of embodiment and what, how you conceive bodies or how you define bodies and then how you try to disrupt this orders or like the systems of address that is now. You see, it's not just about embodiment, to be honest with you. It's actually, it is really a recognition of the other, right? Donna Haraway has it. Latour has it. Rosie Bredotti has it. That's, embodiment actually comes next. The first move is that we are part of life.

affirmation of life, a.k.a. Nietzsche, right? And that sort of affirmation of life brings us, supposedly, this recognition that we are part of the assemblage that we have never recognized. Sure, good, great, magnificent. And that assemblage is made of 99.9 non-human, 1.1 human. So, then you have to actually explain then why is that, this is according to, you know,

sort of critical post-humanism, that why is that we are actually putting so much weight on that 0.1% of human? So the move to unbind animality, generalize animality, is essentially a move toward recognition of non-human actors. Of course, Haraway, Latour, and Bredotti have different ideas about as what non-human is or what it consists of. But the question remains, as always, so if you deconstruct idea of human, such non-human

actors, generalize animality, namely the pure and empty form of life, don't you actually, So you are, first of all, first move that you are doing here, you are actually replacing a system with a system of metaphysics of the non-human. And the non-human is absolutely metaphysical. Anything that is not of human nature is purely metaphysical. By that, I don't mean homo sapiens humanists, homo sapiens, but sapiens par excellence.

That which reasons, the practical and theoretical agents. So if that is the case, then that the construction of the idea of the human, 0.1% versus 99.9, like some sort of circus human exceptionalism. Yes, it does. It absolutely does. But then what happens when you deconstruct the idea of human toward that 99.9% of non-human? Can you actually solve the great problems of injustice or are you simply recognizing the injustice that we

have done to other humans but without coming with a practical solution to it that is my main problem with the entire edifice of post-humanism that human exceptionalism is real unfortunately but this human exceptionalism is not exceptionalism in the classical sense it is merely in the sense that we are unfortunately burdened with obligations and responsibilities and we project it onto the nature onto everything else Deconstructing that sort of exceptionalism does not take you to a renewed form of justice,

but simply mimics the form of injustice that is already there, namely capitalism. shall we have a five minutes yeah we still have another presentation today so perhaps do the break and then we get to the presentations two presentations yeah who came up with that idea did i i thought so okay uh after think about that let's have the conversation after the second presentation

because i think that you are making a really nice point here and I feel that I'm talking past you at this point but you have to correct me you have to navigate me to say that this is exactly what I just wanted to say I guess sure I would love to take upon that later but whenever we have time love you okay five minutes break All right. So let us move to next presentation.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Matthias, Eduardo, Denise, and I will do the Haraway presentation. To start off, I will explain what I understand to be the major ideas in Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, along with the supertextual responses that I find she provokes. In the context of this seminar, Haraway is launching a war of discontent against Western anthropocentrism with its normative practices of the phologocentric domination of woman and nature, the interchangeable other. She defines a cyborg as, quote, a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality, as well as a creature of fiction.

This hybridism, the blurred, undulating, and overlapping boundaries between machine and organism, form Haraway's powerful major focus. An Ariadne's thread leading through the Cyborg Manifesto is the continuous disillusion of boundaries and identities between race, gender, species, and most fundamentally, living and dead materialities. The dissolution of gender boundaries becomes less of a political crusade and more of an imminent becoming, not that politics loses its importance. Haraway's work provides a potent preliminary guide to the political implications of the material transitions already occurring. Oppressive domination won't go away, but will become the informatics of domination, functioning among entities existing with mangled, reconfigured, or even utterly absent boundaries.

Haraway calls the cyborg world, quote, the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. abstraction is the sharpest blade of the androcentric west the male crusade blindly propelling women anyone lacking their specific power towards cyborg becoming for survival feminism becomes less exclusive to hetero femininity as the worker subject becomes feminized in the homework economy the stated alliance or association between phallic logocentrism and an authoritative practice of directing violence clashes evocatively with xenofeminism in which the link between violence and masculinity is shattered.

Haraway criticizes this burgeoning violence, presenting a correlated strategy in what she calls a socialist-feminist coalition of the left. Haraway writes, quote, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense, a final irony, since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the West's escalating dominations of abstract individuation. An origin story in the Western humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of women slash nature. A major point for Haraway is the importance and coming ubiquity of dissolved boundaries, and with them the acknowledgement that there never was an original unity. We are already chimeras of bacterias, genes, physicalities, and organs, constantly and totally mutilated, or in cyborg jargon, reconfigured, upgraded, by the environment in which we are a component part.

the specific post-modern era in which he's writing dates harroway's manifesto significantly render it in a certain sense partially reducible to an anthropomorphic historicity this is especially evident in her concern regarding the importance of polyvocal multiplicities among the intense diversity of feminist coalition forces the fragmentation of feminism in the 1980s along the lines of racial class and sexual identities drives her to call for affinity over identity Her work resides in the sedimentary layers of the Western genealogical record, despite her rejection of genealogy itself. Haraway criticizes the tendency towards the desire to be, quote, constituted as totalities in both Marxism and feminism, finding her causal enemy in, quote, political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies, apparently thwarting polyvocality.

What does Haraway mean by genealogy? If she means a Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy, then this is a mischaracterization. A Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy resists totality, attacks totality even, necessitating the acknowledgement and motivational drive of a subjective, perspectival incompleteness. This genealogy is an affirmation of a contradictory, non-dialectic, and polyvocal history. In Nietzsche's genealogy history, Foucault writes that his genealogy will, quote, cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning. It will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice. I argue that Foucault can be established as furthering a critique of that Western awful apocalyptic telos Haraway imposes. However, Haraway seems to disagree. While Foucault's

analysis of power relations is useful to Haraway, she derides both him and some Foucaultian ideas throughout the manifesto, even denouncing his biopolitics as, quote, a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics. The fashion in which Foucault aims his unipolar cyclopean eye on the cracks and schisms denoting the power, the webbing of power relations among phologocentric power structures certainly indicates an orientation towards the androcentric. Haraway writes, The centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. One is reminded here of Foucault's cases of the self rising out of ancient Greek sexual practices, specifically ancient homosexuality, as reinforcing masculinity in a culture of Apollonian anti-feminimity.

Importantly for Foucault, homosexuality is not outside the polis limit. It makes sense that his androcentrism persists. Foucault writes, the trajectory of the question, was ist der Mensch, in the field of philosophy, reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it, their ubermensch. At the end of his dissertation on Kant's anthropology, Foucault has led the question of the anthropomorphos, of what the human is, to Nietzsche's overman. As a transcendent mythical concept, the Oberman is beautifully and productively contrasted by Haraway's cyborg. Nietzsche's vivid depictions of the Oberman recalled a disillusion of boundaries stressed by Haraway with the potentiality to dissipate anthropomorphic structures into great reservoirs of our natural and synthetic evolution. He writes, in truth, man is a polluted river.

One must be a sea to receive a polluted river and not be defiled. Behold, I teach you the overman. He is this sea, in him your great contempt can go under. Haraway's scientific background informs the sense in which she imagines the future. For example, she invokes the, quote, lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates to characterize cyborg sex. Haraway's profane material specificity contrasts productively with Nietzsche's sacrosanct futurism, in which metaphor and grand aphoristic proclamation propel his words into the future. Haraway criticizes Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, as being purely part and parcel of the androcentric West. Yet she remains a socialist, valuing an anti-natural anthropomorphic

ideal of equality. While I find that she doesn't quite commit to the radicality she hints at, I think that the importance she places on the cyborg as a rigorous survival mechanism provides a cogent path forward. So going forward with Harry, perhaps, have all the new manifestos, but I mean, Harry is always in this manifesto sort of intervention. So there is to Harry a direct genealogy between Harry manifesto and the communist manifesto. In the sense of thinking a text that articulates theoretical advances with analysis of present situations, available means for political action, main actress, etc. It is important for her to publish a reorganization of her thought in the form of a manifesto every more or less 15 years, because

there is no philosophical or biological theory which is not political for her, in the sense that we can never forget the materiality of language and thought, so that every theory that finds a way to ground itself in reality possesses worldly consequences to which we must attend. So the first manifesto the cyber manifesto as luke was presenting has for its for its slogan cyborgs for earthly survival in the recent interview we see that later ideas of harry like um talking about compost still pretty much resonates for her with the cyborg so compostism is in a sense a more radical or a new kind of cyborgism um in this interview she she says in coding i don't think compost excludes cyborg in politics it doesn't exclude cyborg entities at all and if one defines

as i would as i have always defined cyborg in terms of specific historicities it is not a synonym for machine not for a robot not for shiny metallic something it's rather a cybernetic organism involving the communication sciences and apparatuses that were provoked significantly by the corporate communications industries like bell telephone company cyborg includes compost the same way it involves the kinds of weldings and becomeings of the contemporary biological sciences ecological sciences and so on also as i look out at my own compost pile the materiality is cyborgian too plastics around one of my bios the history of plastics is there there's no way that these things are exclusive of what i mean by cyborg weldings her second manifesto the companion species

manifesto has for its slogan run fast bite hard in it she will describe cyborgs as one group of members of the larger queer companion species family companion species is a notion based on the idea of companion animals and for her it is especially important this notion of this etymological meaning of companies the ones with whom we share bread we feed together eating and being needed with responsibility. Which relations of companionship reproduce the possibilities of our existence is the important question here. So how many people, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and other beings are involved in the production of our most basic conditions of existence? That's the question. And from the manifesto quoting, she says,

this, the companion species manifesto, is a story of biopower and biosociality, as well as of techno science like any good dorian i tell a story of evolution in the mode of nucleic acidic millennialism i tell a tale of molecular differences but one less rooted in mitochondria weave in a new colonial out of africa and more rooted in those first mitochondrial canine bitches who got in the way of man making himself yet again in the greatest story ever told instead those bitches insisted on the history of companion species a very mundane and ongoing sort of tale one full of misunderstandings achievements crimes and renewable hopes mine is a story told by a student of the sciences and a feminist of a certain generation has gone to the dogs literally dogs in their historical complexity matter here dogs are not an alibi for other themes dogs are fleshly

material semiotic presences in the body of techno science dogs are not surrogates for theory they are not here just to think with they are here to live with partners in the crime of human evolution Her next manifesto would be the Chthonic manifesto, which she didn't publish as a manifesto, but it is arguably one. A stain of the trouble is the book, and the slogan for it would probably be stain of the trouble or another important sentence for her, her making not babies so this one is talking pretty much about the atomic ones and about the general idea of simple uses and that we are all in in this capital scene this new epoch for new companionate wordings. yeah we will have we'll talk about more about the full scene later so an important thing here is this notion of compost humans, which is sort of a joke.

And she opposes to the post-human. As Reza was saying, she has some problems with this idea. She pretty much associates the notion of post-human to the very same transhumanist stories that we are going to become a space race of humans that go up the planet and inhabit all the universe. And she has a problem with that. So she says we should probably be more concerned with doing humusities than humanities. So getting back to humans. To explore this difference, she uses a strategy. She compares two different routines of the word human. So for her, there would be this etymological routine in this root homo and one of the root humans.

So with homo, she says, I choose to have the root word mean the kind of parabolic tragic determinants of the phallic character homo as fundamentally man who looks up and falls down his tragic determinants. that root for homo i use it to designate human exceptionalism a kind of singularity of the human fundamentally masculine no matter the empirical accidents of people collected up into the category this fundamentally hero no matter the languages and ethnicities and colors of people collected up and basically it is a colonizing term in all of its resonances i'm letting homo do that sort of work and for humans she says we should take the human into the humus direction we should take the human into the soil, into the multi-species biotic and abiotic working of the earth, the earthly ones,

those who are in and of the earth, and for the earth. Humus is what is made in soils and in compost for those who would nurture the earth. So when I say compost, it is more than a joke, though it is also a joke. It is a refusal to be quite so serious about categories and to let categories sit a bit lightly on the complexities of the world. But humus is a term on verite attitude that we make with, and we become with each other as in compost we are truly with it's about being in company with being at table with and in compost we are table with including those we return us to the earth in our dying so compost includes living and dying and just to finish my part i wanted to introduce you to two sf equations of her she says a science fictional scientific fabulational equation and

I'm not going into the details, it's pretty weird and complex and, well, fabulational, but she describes in when species meet the biopolis, which is this new space beyond the polis, the traditional humanistic polis. It is pretty much, let's say, a human animal, social political space for companion co-livings. And then in the state of the trouble, she describes the therapolis, which would be a cyborg community building humans on Terra in open-ended multi-species epigenetics, epigenesis, with dimensions yet to come and to be reconfigured. So that's it. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I will focus on Chapter 2 of Staying with the Trouble.

Harry begins tentacular thinking with a humorous description of the exhaustion of human exceptionalist views. As she clarifies throughout the text, the Anthropocene is an incomplete or restricted term, but one that ignites the debate around these matters. To reposition the critical perspective born from Anthropocene advocates, Harry mentions the spider Pimoa Cthulhu. Cthulhu and using the spider she reclaims the word ketonic ketonius greek for off the earth from lovecraft to describe monstrous beings at a time that needs a non-human centered perspective to structure this tentacular thinking science fiction is another of harry's conceptual tools in her understanding of the composting as presented by matthews science fiction will be entangled with a critique of science biology and antiquity myths to compare different perspectives

Harry uses the concept of synpoietic and autopoietic systems. In Beth Dempster's original paper, she advocates that the human organism is a bad analogy for complex systems, and that ecosystems are a better example to draw parallels from. To mark the differences between these two forms of systems, Dempster says, quote, this distinction arises from defining a difference between three key systems characteristics. First one, autopoietic systems have self-defined boundaries. Sympoietic systems do not. Two, autopoietic systems are self-produced. Sympoietic systems are collectively produced. And three, autopoietic systems are organizationally closed. Sympoietic systems are organizationally HR.

Harry links cybernetics and information science to autopoietic systems, centered, predictable, and c-comeostasis. Her proposal of the Cthulhu scene is a synpoietic one. Autopoietic systems can lead to teleological thinking, and while they can propose interesting things, such as her two examples, they aren't good models to base the world on. To string her different references in the authors that she's thinking with, Herraway describes this sort of theoretical arrangement as a string figure and a model that pushes for interconnectivity and shared responsibility. This is how both Legan's career-backed theory of fiction, Latour's critique of science as authority, and Isabelle Stenger's description of Gaia are all intertwined through Heroway's theoretical framing.

To arrive at her critical position of the Cthulhu scene, Heroway begins with the popularization of the Anthropocene. The term was first coined by the ecologist Eugene Stormer in the 1980s. Stormer wanted to bring attention to the human impact on the biosphere. The term was strongly popularized in 2000 with Sturmer and the Dutch Nobel Prize Award-winning chemist Paul Krutzer. Anthropocene labels a period that starts with cold extraction and energy production during the mid-18th century. Sturmer and Krutzer pointed to the fast warming and acidification of these oceans, killing coral reefs and turning them into white cemeteries. Around 2008, Anthropocene was already popularized between scientists, artists, and social researchers. Fossil fuel and the ecological impact of industrial capitalism created the conditions for the conception of the Anthropocene.

By 2012, complex systems engineer Brad Werner stated that scientists and people should revolt because global capitalism is actively interfering with the conditions of a livable planet. Capitalism is another term that has been proposed to name our age. It is not only technological advancement and new forms of natural resources extraction, but how global capitalism, even during its early stages, was performing the geographical extraction of populations, not only humans, but natural rocks, plants and animals. If it is, indeed, industrial Europe that played a great part in shaping today's ecological and economic conditions, so it was the rearrangement of population and species around the world. Anthropocene ultimately conserves human exceptionalism. Capitalism, on the other hand,

might still hold ideas of progress, modernization, and history, falling into a teleological trap. What has taken Gaia and its inhabitants to our actual situation is an anthropogenic way of thinking. To break away from the Anthropocene, our favorite cyborg proposes the figure of the Medusa to help us. To web along with the Medusa, Harry cites Potinia Theron, a motif from the antique Mediterranean art. If the skygazer is the image of the Anthropos, then the Medusa Potinia is the embodiment of the Cthulocene. If corals are disappearing with the acidification of the sea, as described by Anthropocene theoreticians, then it is looking to search a sympaetic system, a place with octopuses and squid, that we might find a reaction. Anthropocene and capitalocene

in our panic reactions that push for disinvestment, fatalism, and non-action. Cthulhuocin points to the act of human and non-human beings now. To make a possible future, Cthulhuocin will make a compost out of the impactful devastation of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. So to finish my part of the presentation, I will read a quote from Harry on page 55, of the Stainful Trouble. We are humus, not homo, not anthropos. We are composed, not post-human. As a suffix, the word kainos, sinos new, recently made fresh epochs of the fig present. To renew the biodiverse powers of Terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Cthulhucin. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene

or the Capitalocene, the Cthulhucin is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the couture scene. Without other beings, they will simply to react. The order is reneeded. Human beings are with and of the earth and the biotic and abiotic powers of deserve are the main story. Thank you so much, all of you. Magnificent. We're not finished. Sorry, Reza.

Yes, please go on. Please go on. This is a lucky presentation. How is the figure of the cyborg from Haraway useful, productive, or operational? What can you do now? We asked ourselves and we want to finish our presentation by asking these open questions to everyone. Helen Hester asks and tries to answer these questions in her essay Sapiens Plus Care and furthermore with her concept of anthropoforming and her work on xenofeminism. post-humanism she argues can quote inform and operate in relation to xenofeminism in the manifesto xenofeminism is a technologized space of collective consternation with the power to

fundamentally shape lived experiences the xenofeminist project she further describes does not refer to a woman or a human but the post-human however at the same time it also refers to the question of reason, rationality, justice, and emancipation. It is irrationalism. The task, she says, is challenging. We need to reconceive qualities typically associated with arrogant anthropocentrism as potentially aligned with a productive post-human politics of care. She says that Haraway's work also finds itself in somewhat uneasy relationship with post-humanism. Helen asks, how can we best leverage the idea of the post-human for emancipatory xenofeminist ends?

As mentioned before throughout the presentation, Haraway is inclined more towards human beings with and off the earth. She tries to argue against some forms of post-humanism, where the protagonist is still at the center of the problem towards the co-implication of companion species. In other words, there is a tension in Haraway's work between situating Homo sapiens as just one non-hierarchized species among many, and, Helen says, her willingness to celebrate the distinctive capacities of other non-human species and her acknowledgement of humanity's notable role in processes of ecological devastation.

It's an effeminist approach is to navigate these tensions between the human and the post-human, their respective capacities, features, flaws, and potentials, both by themselves, she says, are unhelpful and, more importantly, unproductive. The aim is, quote, to retain a post-human tendency without occluding the agency and obligations of existing human. Helen delineates a valuable idea from Haraway, which is an, quote, activation of the common imagination with regards to planetary survival and distributed future flourishing. She refers then to see the post-human as a technology for galvanizing alternative narratives and as part of a process of assigning and facilitating responsibilities, that is, the

capacity to take action. Haraway is keen to re-embed human actants within their specific context and within the assemblages they are part of. So we can interpret the post-human not as a destination, nor even the vehicle for a destination. However, as something operational that we can compare, revise, and challenge. The post-human is a concept that facilitates the circulation of a new imaginary of what the species might become. Our framing of the species should ideally recognize its current strategic usefulness, while also laying the groundwork for and clearing the critical space required to enable its elimination to re-engineer the forms it might take in the future.

What qualities from the post-human, or in this case, from the cyborg, can we retain, revise, and use towards future worldmaking? By signaling what is wrong is not enough. We must also signal what is useful. The cyborg does not want to go back to an origin, to a Garden of Eden. Haraway writes, the cyber must not be about the fall, the imagination of a once upon a time wholeness before language, before writing, before man. Cyber writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. This means that the natural can be made and remade.

It is a non-hereditary adaptation to an environment. Hereditary. The cyborg, nevertheless, even if it does not have an origin, it has a history, according to Helen. She delineates two examples, the 20th century astronaut and the modern housewife, as two figures of a cyborg, two embodiments of artificial intervention to better fit into an environment. The cyborg, she argues, represents the application of technological interventions that change the course of biological existence. It is in part the practice of using human ingenuity to transcend species limits to make things possible. The cyborg provides a space to think. It is emancipation from the idea of the cyborg as an individual transformation.

So, rather than a process of individualized embodied upgrades available exclusively to those who can afford it, the cyborg can complement the human project as a constructible figure. What is productive about the cyborg is still under construction. For us, the capacity to decide how to frame a problem, like which boundaries we are intentionally trying to surpass, which others we want to maintain. The figure of the cyborg may be incomplete, but serves as a guideline for future human construction. It is not about right or wrong, nor about staying passive or active. We're still in a way stuck with dichotomy thinking. We believe that the project of the cyborg can aid us in this stuckness, not to achieve neutrality or cancellation, but to surpass our present limitations towards collective emancipation.

Instead, we can devise projects from what is useful or what is operational. How is the figure of the cyborg useful? Thank you, everyone. Am I right? Your first name is Denis, not... Yes. Denis, yeah, Denis Lourdes. Denis or is it French or English pronunciation? Mexican. can but you can call me luna but you can call me luna it's easier luna is the best uh yeah magnificent i absolutely i really uh cherish this presentation really it it was really good really good i should actually hire some of you uh to make some unbornly ungodly presentation for me

poor me illiterate man knows nothing uh magnificent magnificent presentation excellent um so hmm I'm going to come up with questions uh but I saw something on the sidebar. It's just updating too frequently these days. My first question for all of you is that put all the xenofeminist, no rationalist jazz aside,

Why do you think that actually hybridization of Asians can by itself be an emancipatory vector? 101 question like literally you cannot use technical terms at this point just simply tell me why he brought hybridization compost cyborg is actually going to be emancipatory for us on what level according to what reason Yeah, I think Lukács raised his hands, but perhaps he also has something interesting

to show that, but I'd say in general that he does not, he does not have anything intrinsically emancipatory, but I think that, I'd say that what perhaps is intrinsically emancipatory this movement is to not limit these sort of agents with which we can make these compositions so the emancipatory strategy is something to be constructed on the premise that we now um we are now considering more agents because the systems are just more complex and we have to okay no no that's okay that's that's a good answer uh so you think that it's the inclusivity of other sorts of agents

other than the canonical idea of agency that we humans understand right but then a new problem arises don't you actually dilute the concept of agency at this point such that the question of justice and injustice won't be answered. Or if it is answered, the answer is going to be deferred eternally. I mean, I don't know. I don't have as good an understanding as Matthias does about this, But I, in my reading, in my sort of more nihilistic or darker reading of Haraway, I felt exactly that.

That, you know, cyborg becoming is more about survival. And utilizing being as assemblage of different biological and mechanical parts. Survival in what sense, though? Just a deferred. My wife yesterday about the question of survivalism post-COVID, right? So there are different sorts of survivalism that we have. You know, the macho survivalism. You know, oh, I'm going to have a backpack and all that. Go back to nature. There is a prepping survivalism. And then there is a cunning survivalism. the source of survivalism that you get your paychecks from the goddamn stupid government

and you put it into investment and you survive you make sure that you survive so there are different sorts of survivalism here what source of survivalism are we talking about the cunning oh sorry look no no please please all of you uh all of you can can say i uh i'd love to I can only ask as an architect, not a philosopher, but as an architect that is trying to devoid of its commonly known references, which means that when we take theory or philosophy, it's not something different from the practice. Then that's my take on it.

So what is useful about the cyborg, for me at least, or for architecture, is that capacity of going beyond those references or those limitations. Because there's a lot of discourse of agency in architecture right now as well. And although we actually construct things and construct space, there are intrinsic powers that won't allow us to go beyond that. So usually when maybe it's not useful for philosophy, but it's very useful for projects to think. For projects, yes. No, that's a nice point too. Yes, okay, okay. I can go along with that. For projects, it's actually useful, pragmatic, from pragmatic point of view to multiply agency.

But I would say that in philosophy, it's completely the opposite. Multiplication of the idea of agency is actually a bad recipe, usually. Usually, not always. It dilutes the idea of agency, and Haraway unfortunately does exactly the same thing. So Haraway sticks with the idea of alertness, vigilance about the otherness, the difference that makes a difference, right? So good and great. Let's hold that. But then she goes on and says that there is the fact that humans feel always

the obligation burden of responsibility of their actions is also a form of human exceptionalism that unfortunately she's putting an axe on her own goddamn head you know what it actually means It means that, so we are going to be agents and so on and so forth. We are all agents. And yes, agency always comes with responsibility. A certain sort of, not responsibility in a sense that we hear from can't, but a certain sort of obligation. So if you are also ejecting human responsibility, then how the fuck is anyone going to be responsible for any sort of injustice in the world?

how actually then the whole idea of systematic killing of animals, and by that animals, I simply do not mean killing dogs and cows and kangaroos and so on and so forth, but literally some humans are being treated as animals in our time. and that of course it just doesn't make sense so who is responsible for this is it the fucking force of nature is it because we are compost agents no unfortunately the locus of pure responsibility and obligation is the human and you cannot dilute the locus

of responsibility, which is the agency itself, rational agency. And to the extent that if you dilute it, you simply end up hypothesizing the system of injustice in a different form. Otherwise, why should I actually not kill a dog? to eat it skin it alive put makes leather of it give it some water then a skin it again as this practice as you know that is quite rampant in asia dog leather yeah because he's my dog and i love him it's the only answer you can give right i think about this

all the time. But why is that? What is the source of that? He's right over there. Yes. I mean, do I actually want to kill and eat my pets? Yes, probably so. Probably so. I mean, if a starving person... I mean, don't do that. It is not because of the hybridization. It is precisely because we are the locus of responsibility and we are alone the lucas of responsibility. You know Reza, I was going to say more or less what you said, but if I may, you know I was thinking that of course philosophy doesn't like Haraway's project because it is not

sufficient, it falls short, and as you said she is putting the axe to her, Haraway is putting the axe to her own head. But although we may content ourselves with all this negativity, I think that what is interesting about your question to our four friends who did this last presentation, why is this a vector of emancipation? I think it may create this higher-waste project, she being the liberal scholar that she is and her project of uh reminding us with the us there's another question of there being always another who is oppressed of reminding

of reminding academia that there is an oppressed i think it falls short but uh what what she's saying in the raft what she is saying is look there is a slime mold between the planks and maybe we should listen to the slime mold what the philosopher says is yeah the slime mold isn't saying much but maybe we as rational theoretical and practical agents we could use the slime mold's constituent properties to maybe build a sail so that's the usefulness of harroway's project it's no i no completely understand that no i completely i completely agree with that but

that is exactly not harroway entirely sane uh you see i'm i'm completely fine with this idea that look uh we are made of a star dust glitz star glitz right it's so good feels makes you feel good to be one with the cosmos and all that sort of shit. But nevertheless, we already know that. I mean, science teaches us precisely something like that. That's the scientific image of the human. And every time that we go through a great humiliation,

a defeat of sciences, we ought to be uh of course we are not we ought to be even more modest uh exercise more humility in terms of our decisions as what sort of you know uh complete catastrophes we unfold upon the planet so on so forth yeah that's but that's just like ke li le va damne. That's just like a moral allegory. We already know that. But why is that we don't actually follow through? Why is that if we dilute the concept of agency to such an extent

and simply I'm not talking about kind of Latourian dilution, deconstruction of agency, but more like our way and understanding that there should be always an alertness of the otherness, a difference that makes a difference, right? While at the same time saying that human is not the locus of responsibility, I think that's actually a disingenuous move from any sort of way that you can think about it. While I consider the positive contributions of our way, but I would say that, look, does that actually being vigilant of your differences, radical

differences with a dog, a cat, a lizard, pup eye, and so on and so forth, actually makes you a better person by default no of course not so what then is there into the system of value making the coherent systematicity of that which is valid to quote heinrich rickert that we have to proceed, we have to use and proceed from that point onwards such that we understand that our decisions are partly heterogeneous, precisely because we are one

actor among others. But nevertheless, we unfortunately are the locus of obligation and responsibilities. Other things are not. You see, I think that the curse of humanism is always going with us. It's just that we have to understand the nature of this curse. rather than exercise it fully. Yeah, and just to try and completely to analog on Harry's strategies to deal with that,

I think that one danger in her work in general is that she is pretty much, she's in this deal of composing new images and playing around with images. And I think that philosophically... Metaphors. She calls them metaphors. Yeah. Operational metaphors. But in the end, I think that's cool. Magnificent contribution to human history. Yeah. But in the end, that makes her not completely consistent in all her work. I mean, she sometimes has to exacerbate some elements in here and there. So I think that this gets such a distension, which Denise always

also talked about in the presentation, which is she sometimes is really talking that humans have nothing of special and they are just dissolved in all this, I don't know, synpoietic web, cybernetic system. But in other times, she's pretty much saying that humans have a special place in there and a special responsibility. They have this all this control. Absolutely. This is what separates her from Rosie Braidotti, from Latour and Catherine Hayless. Absolutely. But nevertheless, ultimately, she absolutely reserved a special place for humans.

She wants to be very modest. I mean, I remember in one of the interviews, she said that she's actually defending a diminutive theory of the human. That's actually very modest in its nature, right? But diminutive in what sense? In the sense that, yes, humans are special and so on and so forth. But then when it comes to the locus of obligation and responsibility, she says in the Manifesto for Companion of the Species, she says that humans have a certain sort of misplaced anxiety about their obligation and responsibility.

they think that everything that is happening bad around them, all the injustice, they are responsible for it. And that is a form of human exceptionalism. On the paper, this sounds to be extremely magnificent insight. That you see that we think, why the fuck do we actually cry over a dog's death at the hand of some animal cruelty people? But I think, unfortunately, that's not really correct.

We humans are the sole source of moral and obligational ethical responsibility. everything that we you see we cannot be responsible for things that are happened in empirical sense but if we recognize them and we not do anything about it still we are the locus of responsibility responsibility is not responsibility about when we are talking about agential rational, agential responsibility and obligation. We are not talking about shit happens in the universe. We are talking about stuff that we have recognized and yet we have remained passive to

them. And that unfortunately makes humans exceptional in that sort of sense. you know two animals fight they prey on one another sometimes you as a child i remember myself quite vividly i was five or six years old and there was this frog hunted with that retractable tongue a fly and I pushed the frog aside so the fly goes away and my friends were saying that why did you do that

some of my friends actually befriended back then because I did that but that is really the sort of reactions humans usually show. Precisely because for them everything is entrenched in the system of values. Even values are not empirical anymore. They don't have any sort of base in empirical reality. Values are not derived from empirical reality. Values are, values is a system of formal validness of conceptual kind. And unfortunately, or fortunately, we project it.

But yes, I agree completely with Donna Haraway that non-humans, animals, all sorts of life, but particularly Haraway does not actually want to talk about all of life. She wants to talk about animal species, right? She says that they are supposed to be greater than simply being the reserve wars of our symbolic projections. Right? I agree with that. I agree with that. I think I'll just give the word to Armin, but just to make this quick comment.

And I think there is, it is not clear exactly how to elaborate on all of Harry's point in this, but I think that what she does can be interesting and has been used. So to try and develop other theories of moral agents and responsibility that are also sensitive to other value systems, like systems which usually attribute value to non-human agents. And I mean, there is this discussion here in South America on the traditional peoples and indigenous peoples. And even in Bolivia, they have recognized the rights of Pachamama, which is the goddess nature.

And so there's a whole new sort of value system, which is mixed with nature. And I think at the same time. But by which right, though? Is it simply by the right of being indigenous to the land? no this is i i'm not i'm not a law scholar but this they have recognized um all of these natural agents as um lawful persons which aren't embedded in the constitution and have sure sure sure i mean did you guys read the idea that uh we are not supposed to eat octopus and shellfish anymore they have fields too uh uk london school of economy decided that just a week ago

uh all the muscles i want uh hard really i mean these are the sort of questions that i would say that philosophy cannot fundamentally answer them philosophy can guide through them but it's not the questions of philosophical natures to me. I mean, I do not want to get into really controversial sorts of topics, but for example, with regard to Amazonians and indigenous people, right, people who claim to land and then some assholes come and usurp the land from them, right?

You see, in Middle East, there is also that sort of narrative always and all the time. Why is the Middle East such a restless place? You see, Israelis always had the right to the land, as the indigenous people of Israelite strive. But then why actually you, when Israelis take the land, you say that they are usurpers, if you are pro-Palestinian, right? This stuff to me are not nuanced. They are rife with a lot of controversy, a lot of philosophical problems.

With regard to animism, I think that animism, I know quite a great deal about Asian animism and stuff. Even within animism, you should understand that animism is ultimately a proxy, humanism by proxy. Animism is always humanism by proxy in a certain way. I mean, otherwise, it just doesn't make sense. What sort of judgment do you have to not deforest, to not destroy the planet Earth?

Well, obviously, for survival. Survival of who? Right? take humans out of the equations everything can survive as always in an evolutionary sense so it comes back to this whole idea of Donna Haraway's idea of evolution and which I think is quite biased this evolution is taken for granted evolution is always evolution by virtue of how humans interpret it biologically. There is a certain sort of teleological impetus

in all sorts of stories that we tell ourselves that, oh, from evolutionary, we intermingle with bacteria, viruses, non-humans and so on and so forth. But that is also a very hypothesized human interpretation of evolution that Darwin warned against this sort of interpretation. Evolution does not have any sort of actors. Within evolution, literally, there is no such a thing as value. You cannot derive values from evolution single-handedly. I guess what my question would be is there's a kind of ambiguous usage of

human or you know how she's trying to sort of say that the human can't be the locus of responsibility i mean it's kind of ambiguous though right is she talking about humans as individuals or is she talking about you know human society or is she talking about a value system no she i i think that she she's quite classical in that sense that humans are by definition social beings so when we are talking about the individual we are talking about concrete unit a concrete universal meaning that uh there is no such a thing as individual without the social context it goes into it oh i was just wondering then because it's sort of like if all the agent if

i mean if the agent isn't supposed to take responsibility it's sort of like what's stopping me from killing you know if i turn the camera around yeah well it's obviously for her for her she tries to preserve this idea of justice in terms of recognition of a fundamental of a radical difference that dogs are radically different from us and she actually does it a magnificent job precisely because she does not dissolve the boundary between the human and the animal, right? She's opposed to this whole Latourian deconstruction of humanity par excellence.

But nevertheless, there is a Latourian or post-humanist maneuver in in her ways of discussing in the sense that, as I said, it only takes a lot of, you can only take, you can only dilute the idea of human agency so much before it actually rendered meaningless. right so if you really think a lot uh done our way that humans are not particularly responsible or are not the lucas of responsibility and obligation

then why not killing and eating fucking dogs right the problem of injustice still holds the problem of oppression holds and I do not see a way to solve the problem of injustice other than ascribing the locus of responsibility to humans and humans alone this does not mean that we are rendering human exceptional but that exceptionality comes with a historical recognition that we are actually less than what we understood ourselves as but nevertheless

whatever we are whatever we do we are responsible for our acts and nothing alone we cannot blame anything else yeah but that's what i mean there's the ambiguity of we here is we me the individual or is it society at large because as i said we we heal we always is a matter of historical conjecture so uh the idea is is a very protean concept we is a protein cause it's only can only you can attain the idea we within a historical context and that sort of historical context is not only the past, not only present, but also the future, the sort of goals that we

try to attain vaguely, vaguely. So the idea of we is completely shapeshifted and it's purely historically sensitive. We cannot actually put our finger that, oh, we is this. No, we actually changes. But that's, I mean, so if it is, if ultimately what Donna Haraway tries to do is to recreate the philosophy of history as the philosophy of all values, yeah, sure, I'm all for it. But that's not exactly what she's trying to do.

At least this is not her main goal. I'm seeing 19 three new messages. I'm not going to click on it. Sorry, I'm typing a lot. I'm a little loopy from getting the back yesterday. I'm just going. Okay, more questions. You and Barman, any person. Okay. Yeah, I did want to try to bring it back to Endis point. But also, I'm sorry, I forget your name because it just says new center on your page.

So that's me, Mateo. Mateo, you brought up Rites of Nature, which is interesting and is kind of the, it was It was a couple of years, maybe like 2017 or 2018. I don't know if any of you are Berliners. And when the Haus der Kulturung der Welt did its whole Anthropocene thing with Latour, I was living in Berlin at the time and went to a bunch of those. And it, like, rights of nature and sort of recognition of the environment, either as a whole or environmental entities like animals or forests as persons, really was the only, it seemed like sort of practical solution that they were talking about in all of those talks. And I got pretty interested, I actually wrote a master's thesis about it

while I was there. And it is pretty limited, like it is within this sort of liberal, like if the sort of liberal order is going to survive, if and if our framework of rights and recognition and and responsibility, which is through legal personhood, is going to survive, it needs to do something like that, right? And there are places where they've tried to do this with some limited success. Bolivia and Ecuador both have these provisions in their constitutions with the rights of Pachamama, and they've had some cases. I think Colombia had a case where they tried to give rights to the Amazon as a legal person to prevent some kind of mining or deforestation.

And New Zealand also is a place where they've really done a lot and is interesting to sort of amend their constitution and laws with the like remaining indigenous people in the North Island. And no, not the North Island. well if you if you know if they've recognized certain national parks as legal persons and tried to create this sort of dual stewardship where like indigenous tribal leaders form a council with the government and they co co-manage it it's it's places where they are doing things practice in theory it's it's yeah yeah yeah it's too complicated to get into but yeah not really

like but i'd love to talk more about it lip service to it yeah so i mean my point when i looked into this all this stuff is like in practice it hasn't come out too much right but like and for people like us who are talking about emancipation and probably have marxist backgrounds these kinds of liberal strategies are pretty weak and pretty insufficient to what we're facing. But this does seem to be the only move that the kind of liberal legal political order could make. And that's why I was interested in it. It does seem to be like the Latorian political strategy, if you can think of it. That's why I was interested in it and why it it does seem like a dead end. I think we should give a credit to Haraway that

she's she she she resists Latourian full assimilation of human to non-human no yeah but it's still but it's still but it's still dark some dodgy moves there she's yeah she's more radical he's definitely a liberal uh but he's much more prominent in the sort of international yes severe uh and there isn't something like a haraway and political move that i is she just is trying to articulate this other kind of ethics, but it's one that you can't, I guess, so how this relates to Enda's point before when he was talking about state recognition is really great because I guess the case was with trans people, but we could also make the case

with other queer struggles and with gay marriage also. Like in American law, the way that gay marriage was brought in was that a lesbian couple had to prove that they were incapable of having a normal heterosexual marriage right they had to prove that they were by nature not by like if they had claimed we're bisexuals but we love each other and we want to get married this argument wouldn't have worked in the american legal system they had to prove that they were born this way and like this kind of conservative aristotelian logic of very much like trans discourse in iran Yeah, yeah. We understand the rights of trans people, but look, but not within the queer culture. Yeah, and that's what's interesting and I think with Enda's point that like people need

to make these like rhetorical and rational moves, in some ways denying their own freedom to self determine their gender or their choice of partner and say no, this is just who I am, I can't change it in order to get legal recognition by the law. Right. And I mean, I think it gives lie to the idea that a real. Really sort of philosophically articulated humanism is actually hegemonic, right? Like what's hegemonic is conservative positivist human like humanism and really a form of kind of anti-humanism. and what like the kind of humanism that would allow us to really sort of not tie our moves for emancipation to claiming that we are naturally this way and to really like take

ownership of our freedom and choices to change our bodies to live different kinds of ways yeah would require us to have a different legal structure. Yes, I mean, literally, the recognition of trans rights in so many countries is essentially a father to heterosexism. Simple as that. Yeah. You have to prove that you can't change the way you are when what you want is to change the way you are, right? Like, you get into this, and people are allowed to feel how they want about how they are, And the point isn't to impose this kind of view on anyone, but the point is that you should, I think, telling stories about sort of transition and embodiment through this lens of personal emancipation and freedom, like in the xenofeminist story, is fundamentally more emancipatory or understands what emancipation is better than the born this way.

like and and in some ways you have to um i don't know i might be stepping on my feet here but i do i do think that it sort of gets at what what is unique to the sort of the view of emancipation that we're trying to trying to articulate that is that can't just be natural that can't just be about the body. No, no. It doesn't, but it doesn't. It's about the indication of something else. And I think that I have a question for Haraway that, Luke, if we read the companion species, the ultimate question is that, so actually, would you be able to tell me what is

actually the difference between a child, a human child, and a fairy duck friend? like literally she's going to obviously to create a certain sort of contradictory statements I can imagine that but literally this whole idea is that we take our I don't want to use it as a pet but we take our companions other species as if as if they were our children no it would be very weird if i referred to my dog

as it and it's silly when people misgender your dog and you like people get offended i always i always uh you know i it's completely my own doing and uh on principle with my partner we never wanted to have children and we actually call our cats our babies our children right but that is a certain sort of identification that only comes from us and nothing else and of course that's actually put a massive amount of responsibility on you i don't know what harroway has ever written about this stuff i've never read her dog book but um i guess it's very good it's very good those are those are really good

do you know what it looks like it's like some sort of stuff that you should read for christmas sorry for being nasty about this well i've gotten roped into christmasing now i didn't ever grew up with it but i guess what i was going to say was um joseph rouse who um who we were talking about it in the discord chat who Kirill brought up uh and I brought up has a good discussion on this in a book of his about great apes and um the experiments with trying to teach language to various kinds of great apes and sort of what the line is of like whether you can he's kind of a heideggerian and like bringing great apes into Dasein like bringing them into the space of

intelligibility is my hero of course supposedly it's chan tech the orangutan is that supposedly the one that he thinks is really genuinely capable of conceptual rationality maybe and kanzi the bonobo right or the two but not not coco the gorilla it's it's confusing what the exact but like that this is really like teaching an ape sign language and i think the story with the orangutan is that like they taught her sign language and she could communicate and then they stopped the experiments they got lost funding and they put her in a zoo and she became tremendously depressed and one day they had the researcher come and visit her and she said the first thing she said with the signs was go get the keys like why am I with these orange dogs like I am orangutan person don't leave me with orange dog get

No, this is absolutely true. I mean, I have to find this book for all of you. So it's a volume of edited zoologists who have worked with the great apes, trying to teach them syntax of ordinary languages. Sue Rambo, who basically was responsible over Kanzi's upbringing. So once Kanzi actually initiates into the realm of language and playing video games, toasting marshmallow on Promethean fire,

he fundamentally get depressed. He does not want to engage in sort of social activities that was of his species. And I remember that there is this magnificent YouTube, you should watch it, and some people say that, why the fuck are you actually making so animals so miserable? This is cruelty to animals. Look, that's not cruelty. They understand, I wouldn't call it understanding, but they can, in a very specific syntactic manner they can distinguish between the sort of activities that they have to do

by virtue of their wiring and the sort of activities that they should actually do enjoy stuff that's the meaning of human you see a monkey he feeling sad because he cannot actually engage in orgies. It's not really sad, is it? It's making artwork from an animal. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the point is like, once you have this like practical embodied form of taking part in their like rational, like once human isn't a biological category

or ideal category, but it is being able to do certain practices, you can bring in certain animals and certain non-human sort of the hails is, what is it, the non-conscious cognition, but only in so far as they participate. They participate, yes. Yes, and there is always a certain sort of decisionality, whether it is delusional or not, that comes with that sort of upbringing of a child to an agency. the stoics have always talked about this, that a stoic particularly, for a stoic, the mark of an agency, human agency, namely a rational agency, as opposed to an animal, is one simple thing, that we are the only species that can bring death upon ourselves.

when other animals get wounded they cower they corner themselves under the bed so on so forth but we actually consciously bring death on ourselves rational suicide that was a great mark of the powers of reason I guess I'm thinking of stories of dogs who who starve to death waiting but next to their dead master or whatever yeah of course actually Haraway does think uh does speak about these sort of uh

things. But then, so these stories are always, can be justified that dog has co-evolved with man, with humans, right? But then, obviously, then, philosophically speaking, it becomes very suspicious, because then you have to talk about, really, what is the story of this co-evolution? at the expense of who and who is actually narrating it. Oh yeah, no, they manipulate us, those big eyes. Just one moment, guys, I think, yeah, I just wanted to give the word to Arman who hasn't raised his hand raised. Yes, yes, Arman. Perhaps we can wrap up after that.

so after arman someone who hasn't actually talked at all for the past few sessions we are going to mark this person and ask her to talk right them to talk sorry my apologies my question is really simple um the relation to prescription and description um what we are talking about, how I, in my opinion, is like a descriptive, it's a part descriptive, it's part prescriptive. The prescriptive part seems problematic. The descriptive parts, everybody almost praised.

So my question is, is there any relation between these two parts? Is there really new two parts? And can you have a description and based on that description and ethics, prescriptive account of the work? That's a really good question. I know that I have mentioned his name a number of times, just such that you can actually, if you are curious, look into his work. Heinrich Rickert, particularly his work on the system, on the complete system of values. So where do values come from?

Obviously, for something to be valued, needs to be valid. Valid according to whom, right? So, the traditional humanist stance used to be that humanism actually did not have this sort of monolithic attitude that people attribute to it. Classical humanism understood the system of values as the generalization of all values that is common to all human cultures. but obviously this task is untenable to generalize values that are common to all sorts of cultures

because culture is dynamic if we actually do believe in something like culture let's say that human societies human societies that generalization unfortunately is not going to happen So, Rickert, on the other hand, proposed that maybe we should begin a coherent system for the articulation of what is valid, namely the value, by virtue of reflecting upon what is the most necessary for every human culture. in terms of collective and in terms of personal being a personal agent

that basically sift through a lot of gunk and junk and bring it to the bare minimum necessity uh haraway actually proposes something like that let me let me read this from haraway uh for you uh she says um oh yeah negotiate the very fine line between appropriation of another

and others never innocent experience and the delicate construction of the just barely possible affinities the just the barely possible connections that might actually make a difference in local and global histories. So she's in that sense quite classical humanist in a very Kantian sense that she wants to start from the bare minimum of necessity of what makes valid things across the board and then from that assembling different sort of collectivities imagining different worlds

in which we could live but we are not living them precisely because we have not managed to construct those worlds the more i have thought about it of course this whole idea of world making and so on so forth uh with the system of values even that modest task is rife with massive amounts of indignity and false suit but then what else can we do so essentially we are like prophets who see

what has already happened and we are trying to to to basically say that i told you so right the system of values is exactly like that we have it we have it and we know this completely without which we cannot actually survive without which everything else will succumb to our oppression to our own oppression and dominion but nevertheless so so we have it but then we do not understand fundamentally genesis of the system of values the articulation of a coherent system That to me is a fundamental philosophical problem that I think that post-humanism, particularly

our way, has in a rather acceptable way has highlighted. think that we should take it very seriously page emma all the good people Actually, I have a lot in my mind. Did I interrupt someone?

No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, because, like, I don't know, I feel like, as we are going on, and this is coming from, like, the place of total ignorance, But I'm just imagining like the whole project, this rationalist project is to somehow intentionally hack the evolution course, but like not into a deterministic end, but generally as it is being hackable. Because of this fact. It is essentially a hack. And I don't know, like, I think like there is, but it does not admit that there are now certain agents of this hacking, like that groups of hackers are like, I'm not talking about I'm sad because the dog is dying or like running with bacteria or something.

I'm talking about like certain participation in all this V making and collective making that is not happening in certain other modelings or I don't know. but but but this is i think this is more i have thought about it is unfortunately comes to a certain sort of conceptual confusion uh so if you are going with latourian fine good great actors actants accident attempts are not supposed to be agents uh harway actually uh for the most part tries to actually make reserve a special place for human agency. Let's say that this is what we

have within classical philosophy, a la Kant, rational agency, rational self-hood. And then, yes, there are, of course, participations with other actors. But then this comes back to this whole idea that we were talking about, various scales of consciousness, various scales of agency and so on and so forth that at what point participation with non-humans shows itself in the rational decisions of the human agent and where does it cease to exist I even like talking about lesser humans, like not even going to the non-human parts that

I simply mean at this point, like using post-humanist, uh, Rosie Bray dirty that, you know, anything that is not us as the canonical sense, the canonical concept of the human, rocks bacteria so on so forth uh i would say that if we are actually attribute the idea of agency to them then we are diluting our own sense of agency and hence we are diluting our sense of responsibility and oppression i don't think that's true i think it's like a lot of these points are open up a type of empathy in order to um like figure out how to ethically interact with the

environment not to like i completely agree no but but you see empathy is one thing hypostasization of idea of agency to everything in the universe is something else once you hypothesize the idea of agency among anything that is not human then you relinquish that sort of obligation that is actually yours that sort of responsibility is only yours as a human being so this comes back to this idea that again agency what sort of agency do we

we mean participation, acting or intentional acting, practical reasoning? In what level are we actually talking about these sorts of participations? Obviously, microbes and bacteria do not have practical reasoning, do they? I mean, do they have outs? Do they have basically, do they follow through with the consequences of their own actions as a normative not as a causal chain but as normative chain well some skeptics

might say that well then do you have actually empirical evidence that microbes don't have normativity yes because normativity actually has practical consequences. Those practical consequences are not empirical. In fact, the source of value is not empirical. There is no such a thing as a value that is grounded in empirical situations. But yes, that sort of thing that Haraway and Latour are telling us should be, as I said, should be a source of pure anxiety for us humans. Should be a source of anxiety. Now, it is up to us to decide how to

work with this anxiety. It is truly an anxiety to understand that finally, that yes, we are just one actors among others but nevertheless we are also the logos of responsibility and have a certain sort of a species we are sui generis species if not exceptional that anxiety is quite real and it's quite concrete and unfortunately i don't think that the sort of human values some of values that we have can cope with that sort of anxiety at this point. You see, the system of sciences and system of techniques always unfold more and more

sources of trepidation and anxiety for us humans. And at some point, if we are still immature to cope with that, that sorts of anxiety would be more negative to us than being positive in terms of its own consequences. And we are seeing it here today. I mean, how many people actually think that, really, I mean, just literally, how many people think that we are children of God? No, actually, many people actually think that we are made of atoms and molecules and DNA and genomes and so on and so forth, right?

But that is really a source of, should be a source of anxiety. Darwinian revolution was the most acerbic revolt against that monolithic picture of the human. But the thing is that humans were immature at that point to actually understand how to have ethics in conjunction with Darwinian revolution. We still are in the same dilemma. We haven't matured that much enough. That comes, unfortunately, with our species. You see, sometimes revelations outpace the history of self-consciousness.

And that's the moment that you should actually, should not say that a stop to the revelations, but rather a start to construct a system of humanity. And humanity is only a system, nothing else. to cope with such revelations, to not whine, to not be anxious existentially or otherwise, but to actually move with those revelations. I think that's another place where praxis really is important. Erin asked about Sylvia Winter,

and she just talks about how human species realizes itself by coming to regulate its behaviors through like narratively instituted conceptions of itself and so I guess thinking with her turning how can these anxieties be turned into a type of like practices that is like living out these types of solutions and and being very aware fucking art was supposed to do that wasn't it oh yeah what happened how's it going to do that? No, I really, that's a serious question. No, really. I want to know. Art was supposed to do exactly that sort of job. Yeah. But my God, I mean, art is the source of human misery at this point.

Any more questions? One more question. Someone has spit it out. I have one. Yes. What are we basing agency on? Which concept? Which order? and can't we think on different forms of agency or it's only something that can be linked to reason? No, I mean, as I said, you see, best thing to do with the concept of agency, we should engineer it as different levels of agency, right? At some levels of agency, as an actant, everything

can be participatory, network, so on and so forth, web of participation. Well, traditionally, that's what I actually usually mean. The concept of agency in a philosophical canon is supposed to be locus of rational responsibility and obligation, meaning that for everything that you think and you do, there should be some sort of consequences, and you You ought to embrace those consequences. Not only that, because that would be just a reaction to the consequences of your action and thoughts. But what makes an agency an agency is its philosophy of history.

meaning that you will look back to what sort of presumptions or presuppositions you had that led you to such consequences where did they come from where did those presuppositions come from and then you come back and then you try to revise them in a conceptual manner in a practical manner in theory and practice that is the locus of what we might call philosophical idea of agency so when i am actually talking about agency i mean it a full-bodied agency in that sort of sense agency as something that does not simply has a past but as a history namely series of self

recognitions, right? And self-consciousness of me being part of the world, of us being part of the world. But yes, of course, there are different sorts of grades of agencies. But as we have seen it, people usually tend to either ally the distinctions between various grades of agency or simply consider agencies simply as one thing and then either inflate it or deflate it globally. These are, I think, bad philosophical moves. I think that we need to have all of those grades

at our disposal to actually robustly talk about what we are actually undergoing when we say x or do x what we are undergoing biologically physically nor scientifically socially economically and historically So I am absolutely I'm not against this idea that we should deflate we should deflate the idea of agency, but we should not dilute.

We should deflate it by creating different grades of agency and each would have their own properties and attributes and capacities but we should not dilute the concept of agency the dilution of the concept of agency is usually results a recipe for a bad philosophy a bacteria of us in the world so yeah right i think we should wrap up then yes who's going to the only one presentation next session i'm going to only lecture no question asked i'm not going to answer any sort of

question next session uh just one presentation so the next session we have then the wolf and rosie bradetti uh haraway and alice essentially what we are trying to and probably i don't know i mean that's just too much reading really i was thinking that maybe reading a little bit of latour like you know uh the first introduction on modes of existence it's a really good book but then um because i'm modeling and models of existence sorry it's not on modes and models of existence we still we still have i'm not sure sorry

the um erin's saying that he thinks it is on modes of existence I think it's a multiplicity. I think it's a multiplicity. Multi-lust? Uh-huh. Oh, OK, OK, OK. Thanks, go ahead. But just to be clear, because I think we still have three sessions, six, seven, and eight. And we had the plan was that we would have Wolfendale, the Wolfendale presentation on next, then your text and Ray Brasier's text on the other one. in the eighth session we wouldn't have any presentations but perhaps we should postpone them and don't not having presentations next week and then having uh open day or yours and i don't know no let's have a presentation all right yeah i don't know i mean uh who is for

presentation next week or no presentation next week i feel like the last class not having a presentation that's nice because then everything has been presented and leaves room for discussion after all of the things have been on the table okay so okay how about this next present next i want to say next semester next next session we are going to have presentation presentation should be focused on this idea that uh you know um what we were talking about so we suit we see two trends in post-humanism assimilation of human within the non-human assemblage a la tour actor network theory and haraway that rejects a sort of assimilation as fundamentally

detrimental uh to post-anthropocentric philosophy and critique uh and it's all about alertness critical alertness of the differences radical differences of the other so a certain sort of comparative study of Haraway versus Latour post-humanism sounds good as one of the parties who present next week i want to say that what happens to both of them will be next session after not next session session after that

but so we have no one for the next week yet right yes out of where are you going to go i was going to go with the both but like i'm in the group with wolf and there but i I'm not going to be a loner. A wolf girl. OK. I haven't signed up for any yet, but I needed to. And I wanted to join in on the Wolfengel one as well. But I guess. OK. Atefe and Aaron are going to do the wolf thingy. But we need something for next session. No, I guess I could. Well, I mean, perhaps, I don't know if we are talking about focus, because we already have had the Wolf and Dale plan for the next week and then others for the one after that.

And I guess people will be a bit, yeah, not happy. Yeah, perhaps we can change the focus and make this the inhumanist versus post-humanist in the presentation of Wolf in the day, because I think it pretty much focus on comparing inhumanism and post-humanism. Yeah, no, I think this is why I decided that, look, next session, we still go post-humanist. Session after that, we go Wolfie. We'll be transition and comparative of post-humanism and inhumanism. Then last session, it would be just inhumanism. I'll try to look at Latour and put something together if anyone wants to join me on that.

Okay, someone so Aaron is going someone some partner for Aaron. Who someone Ivan Ivan Ivan say. Okay, so. Right. I posted on the modes of existence. would be a suggested reading perhaps? That's it you think? Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's supposed to be his most critical and not being fucking pseudoscientific. I've never read it.

So Rouse invited him to give a talk on it before he published it. This was maybe in like February or March of 2011. Given Ross Wolfe? No, not Ross Wolfe. Joseph Rouse. I was first exposed to Latour then and he really tore him apart on this book. He said, what the hell do you think you're doing non-critical metaphysics? quite complicated. The book is essentially, you should understand that the book is essentially, so everyone is saying that, oh, Natour's Action Network theory is apolitical, it's just a reification of liberalist capitalism, and he wants to show that, oh, I'm egalitarian, and he's writing this book. But I want you to read

this, at least the first chapter, to understand why even his response is worse than what he has ever written. I will try. Okay, good. Excellent. Have a great weekend. And thank you so much for all your presentation, your contribution. Love you all. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Thanks, bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.