Considering that there is so much diversity in the human race, the first thing to do was search for was commonality.  For starters, we are all born and we all die. To survive we need sleep, we must eat and we must drink. We age and become frail as we grow older; we are prone to diseases and we feel pain.  But these statements are also true of animals.  So what makes us ‘human’?

Humans are sociable and help work towards the common good (well some of the time). And there is a strong tendency towards a sense of belonging, be it to a group, tribe or community, as our ethnographies proved.  I can’t posit this as a reason for being human though as research shows animals too have these attributes.  Ah, but where  we differ is that we have the ability to laugh, cry, be compassionate, give gratitude and empathise. This must surely distinguish us. I wonder, are we inherently sceptical of those who lack emotion and could this be why we mistrust, even fear, cyborgs and posthumans?  Wasn’t there just the teeniest bit of doubt about the emotion of the cyborgs in Blade Runner?

Hayles states that “the human has ..been associated with rationality, free will, autonomy and a celebration of consciousness”.  So being human is more than just attributes, it’s also about our capacity to use our brain;  our ability to reason;  our belief that life has meaning; our need to improve ourselves and shape our world.  This took me back to the film festival at the beginning of this unit: Bendito Machine (Episode 3 Obey His Commands) and eXistenZ: the restaurant sequence. These films showed how humans react and interact with technologies.

An experience I had earlier in the week made me realise my own interaction with technologies. My Mac stopped charging and I only noticed when there was 30 minutes of battery time left. The nearest Apple Store was a couple of hours drive away and anyhow it wouldn’t have been possible for me to go there until the weekend.  What a disaster! I hadn’t backed-up my files and all my personal stuff, such as music, photos, phone numbers and coursework is stored on my Mac.  I was beside myself trying to think of how I was going to remedy this. I was so relived when the problem turned out to be a dodgy outlet.  Once I saw that the battery was recharging, I reflected on my initial reaction. I knew this wasn’t a life or death situation but that didn’t stop me from feeling quite devastated when it happened. Is this an example of me being posthuman?  Hayles states, “the world we understand is also the world we make, in both literal and figurative senses.”

“I think that questioning humanism-posthumanism itself – begins to build ways for being different in the future. “We” have nothing to lose but “our”selves.”  (Badminton, 2003, p23)  Now this makes sense to me so may be I’m closer to understanding the difference between human and posthuman than I thought.

References

Badmington, Neil, “Theorizing Posthumanism” Source: Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003), pp. 10-27 Published by: University of Minnesota PressBibliography

Hayles, N. Katherine, (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” from Hayles, N. Katherine, we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25,293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press

Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201101/can-animals-work-the-common-good