A strange disconnected week. I spent much of my time at Glasgow Sheriff Court waiting to see if I would be picked for jury duty and pondering what it is to be human in a place where the complexities, the tragedic and the comedic in life , are so evident. People leaving chastened or led down to the cells prompting censure, empathy, compassion and making me think of what it is to be human - ‘Will your system be alright/When you dream of home tonight?’.
I’ve had interesting discussions with Daniel and with Jen on my blog and on twitter (although I do find twitter difficult as complex ideas are so difficult to express there) about what it is to be human and where morality/ethics fits into the human/posthuman. My feelings on Harraway (2007) were that her myth of the cyborg allowed her to sidestep the thorny realities of being human – ‘in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender’ (35). What is more useful, I think, is Hayles (1999) problematising of what it is to be human which is also found in Edwards’ (2010) consideration of the term ‘post-‘ as something that deconstructs rather than follows on from/negates the previous idea. However, as I discussed with Daniel, perhaps the term ‘post-‘ is a redundant one because ‘human’ already contains the germ of the problem of being human. Terms such as (Post)modernism and the (Post)human are not meant to be historically chronological ones. Modernism, as a reaction against the supposed (moral) certainty of the Victorians, is often identified with the early 20th century, a point that is emphasised by, for instance, Modernist architecture. And yet, arguably, Modernist deconstruction of certainty and of human beings as individuals with stable identities, is evident in literature and philosophy throughout written history at least. Postmodernism might be said to hold many of the same values as Modernism, lack of certainty being one of them, but the ‘Post-‘ indicates a certain playfulness or self-irony. Indeed, Harraway’s posthuman cyborg is ‘resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’ (35). The possible losses and gains in using irony are all to do with meaning. Irony both represents and undermines meaning so Bakhtin can say that ‘irony is a special kind of substitute for silence’ (‘From Notes made in 1970-71′ in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 1986) – it speaks but never says anything definitive. In this we might see something of Edwards’ critique of the separation of the subject and the object, the matter and the meaning, and Harraway’s and Hayles’s projects to engage with and question the liberal humanist subject. However, one of the problems I have with all three viewpoints is their shared view that dualism lies at the heart of the problem: dualism is characterised as polarising when this is a simplistic rendering. A dualism of polar opposites does mean a separation which also entails a strict system of representational epistemologies however dualism need not be about polarities but about an endless discursive engagement between differences. At either end of the dualistic scale there are the polarised and the unified views (the latter being, for instance, that body and soul are one because spatially or ontologically unified in the human subject) – I am interested in the more problematic view that dualisms exist but create meaning by their, often contradictory, relationship. In this way irony and dualism are similar – they acknowledge but question meaning and I suppose this shows a similarity with the posthuman project to problematise the ‘human’. To return to morality, I suppose one could say that the posthuman proposes an antidote to a human-centred, prescriptive morality and replaces it with a more humble responsibility (something we are looking at in week 10 with posthuman pedagogies and particularly in animal and environmental studies). I still have my reservations though – the role of irony in the postmodern (much as I am keen on its ability to express the human condition rather than to solve it) and it’s implications for other ‘posts’ can lead to such a constant oscillation between representation and deconstruction that no stable meaning can result and, with that, no common ethical stance and, surely, morality has something to do with commonality?
The Lifestream process this week has been somewhat hit and miss. I’ve been looking at online resources for my assignment which will be centred on digital culture, politics and e-learning. Sometimes I feel a little disconnected from my Lifestream – it seems lacking in a unified view and here I come back to earlier discussions with Anna (Week 2: Rhizomes and portals, Oct 4 2011) over whether it is a kind of writing or an aggregation. The lifestream I think is both but more so the latter as it is a collection and often a slightly disconnected one, whereas the blog entries are more about making sense of the lifestream through a process of writing. One might also say it is a posthuman pedagogy, a gathering, but that is for next week!
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