Following on from N. Katherine Hayles’s seminal work in How We Became Posthuman, this project argues that the media made us both human and posthuman. It engages with the idea of “originary technicity” which is gaining ground in media and cultural studies thanks to Bernard Stiegler’s work, among others. The underlying idea is a critique of the “inevitability” of the currently dominant techno-utopian strand in media and cultural theory. Instead, the volume will be arguing for “critical (digital) media studies and “critical posthumanism” as a way of doing justice both to the specificity and historical contextuality of current changes, and the continuity of “critical tradition”.
Parts already presented or published are:
- “Originary Mediality”, a talk given at the Posthumanist Perspectives workshop, University of Mannheim (March 2014).
- “Posthumanism ‘Without’ Technology, or How the Media Made Us Post/Human”, keynote delivered at The Politics and Aesthetics of Posthumanism conference in Tel Aviv (May 2014); video, text.
- “Derrida on Screen” (chapter in Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck and Curtis D. Carbonell, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, 2015: 28-36). Pre-publication text.
- “Just Gaming With the Posthuman: Toy Story, Remediation and Electracy”, talk given at the Open Media Research Seminar, Coventry University (March 2012).
