Download or read book Posthuman Blues written by Mac Tonnies and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Posthuman Blues, Vol. I is first volume of the edited version of the popular weblog maintained by author Mac Tonnies from 2003 until his tragic death in 2009. Tonnies' blog was a pastiche of his original fiction, reflections on his day-to-day life, trenchant observations of current events, and thoughts on an eclectic range of material he culled from the Internet. What resulted was a remarkably broad portrait of a thoughtful man and the complex times in which he lived, rendered with intelligence, imagination, and a wickedly absurdist sense of humor.
Download or read book Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination written by Kristen Lillvis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monáe. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term “posthuman blackness” to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory—an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality—in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Morrison’s Beloved. Reading neo–slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.
Download or read book Posthuman Blues written by Mac Tonnies and published by . This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You there. Reading this. You don't have to you know. But I have succumbed to the narcotic tentacles of blogging and will be posting a daily mishmash of uncategorical mental rubbish to appease my strange and obscure urges to populate the info-sphere with my creative spoor." So begins this first volume of Posthuman Blues, the edited version of the popular weblog maintained by author Mac Tonnies from 2003 until his tragic death in 2009. Tonnies' blog was a pastiche of his original fiction, reflections on his day-to-day life, trenchant observations of current events, and thoughts on an eclectic range of material that he culled from the Internet. The result was a remarkably broad portrait of a thoughtful man and the complex times in which he lived, rendered with intelligence, imagination, and a wickedly absurdist sense of humor. "Posthuman Blues is of a piece with the Lost Generation of the 1920s and the Beat Generation of the 1950s. Tonnies spoke for his generation with passion, eloquence, and a rare insight." - A. J. Gulyas, author of Extraterrestrials and the American Zeitgeist "This book has the inventiveness and prose of a novel, but it's good, honest observation and speculation. From lambasting fakery to closing in on the true paranormal, Mac Tonnies takes us on a wild trip. Tonnies was mysterious, maybe because he always had an eye and ear for the mystery underlying our strange existence." - John Shirley, author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to his Life and Ideas and the A Song Called Youth trilogy "Mind-stretching!" - Clifford Pickover, Ph.D.
Download or read book What is Posthumanism written by Cary Wolfe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.
Download or read book The Chaos Conundrum written by Aaron John Gulyas and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "The Chaos Conundrum," historian Aaron John Gulyas examines how the paranormal has intersected and influenced our culture in myriad ways, from the conspiracy beliefs of William Cooper and Exopolitics to the challenge that the stories of Gray Barker presented to our concept of self and time. He looks at the maelstrom of personalities, agendas, impressions, data, confusion, and contradictions that can be found in the world of the weird, and demonstrates how they have become an integral part of our lives, whether in the form of flying saucers, hauntings, religious revelations, psychic abilities, or dozens of other guises. Gulyas delves into the stories of the people who have attempted to create order out of the chaos. Along the way he recounts his own journey from enthusiastic believer in the "shadow government" and their underground bases to jaded academic skeptic, and then finally to someone who thinks there might just be something to the paranormal after all... but not what we have been led to expect or believe!
Download or read book Dispatches from Blogistan written by Suzanne Stefanac and published by New Riders. This book was released on 2006-09-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "blog" wasn't coined until 1999 and yet by 2004, it had become Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Globally, the number of blogs is doubling every six months, with more than 50 million blogs online today. Here to offer a unique overview of the emerging phenomenon that even armchair observers will find curiosity-satisfying is Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger. Filled with practical, easy-to-implement advice for making blogging more enjoyable, useful, and profitable, this book covers everything from blogging and how it fits into the history of journalism to practical tips for planning and managing a blog, attracting and retaining an active readership. Written by noted technology journalist and interactive media veteran Su zanne Stefanac, the book features a fresh and succinct approach; quotes and commentary from noted and celebrity bloggers (author/futurist Bruce Sterling, NPR commentator Farai Chideya, Craig Newmark of craigslist.com, and Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing editor and science fiction author, among others); an accompanying blog site (dispatchesfromblogistan.com); and more. Stefanac explores issues of trust, influence, privacy, discovery, and the power of collaborative discourse, making this is a blog book like no other!
Download or read book Inter Facing Death written by Sam Han and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere. (Inter)Facing Death analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced," that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death.
Download or read book The Other Side of Truth written by Paul Kimball and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Other Side of Truth, filmmaker Paul Kimball crosses the Rubicon of the imagination to explore the idea that what we call the 'paranormal' is actually a form of artistic expression created by an advanced non-human intelligence to inspire us to think about who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. Using his own journey of discovery as the starting point, Kimball presents the 'other side of truth' - the world not as we have been told it is, but as we are being encouraged to imagine that it could become.
Download or read book The Future of Post Human Performing Arts written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the performing arts really supposed to be so radical that, as John Cage once said in the context of music, “there is no noise, only sound,” since “he argued that any sounds we can hear can be music”? (WK 2007a; D. Harwood 1976) This radical tradition in performing arts, with music as an example here, can be contrasted with an opposing view in the older days, when “Greek philosophers and medieval theorists in music defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies, and vertically as harmonies. Music theory, within this realm, is studied with the presupposition that music is orderly and often pleasant to hear.” (WK 2007a) Contrary to these opposing traditions (and other views as will be discussed in the book), performing arts, in relation to both the body and its presence, is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Needless to say, the challenge to these opposing traditions in performing arts does not imply that performing arts are worthless human endeavors, or that those fields of study related to performing arts like aesthetics, acoustics, communication studies, psychology, culture studies, sociology, religion, morality, and so on should be rejected too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of performing arts, especially in the dialectic context of the body and its presence—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. In other words, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transdisiciplinary theory of performing arts) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about performing arts, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate.
Download or read book Prisoner of Infinity written by Jasun Horsley and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2018 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using UFOs and the work of "experiencer" Whitley Strieber as its departure point, Prisoner of Infinity explores how beliefs are created and perceptions are managed in the face of the inexplicably complex forces of our existence. While keeping the question of a nonhuman and/or paranormal element open, the book maps how all-too-human agendas (such as the CIA's MK Ultra program) have co-opted the ancient psychological process of myth-making, giving rise to dissociative Hollywood versions of reality. Prisoner of Infinity examines modernday accounts of UFOs, alien abductions, and psychism to uncover a century-long program of psychological fragmentation, collective indoctrination, and covert cultural, social, and mythic engineering.
Download or read book Art and Posthumanism written by Cary Wolfe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sustained engagement between contemporary art and philosophy relating to our place in, and responsibility to, the nonhuman world How do contemporary art and theory contemplate the problem of the “bio” of biopolitics and bioart? How do they understand the question of “life” that binds human and nonhuman worlds in their shared travail? In Art and Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe argues for the reconceptualization of nature in art and theory to turn the idea of the relationship between the human and the planet upside down. Wolfe explores a wide range of contemporary artworks—from Sue Coe’s illustrations of animals in factory farms and Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the famous performance pieces of Joseph Bueys and the video installations of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, among others—examining how posthumanist theory can illuminate, and be illuminated by, artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world. Looking at biological and social systems, the question of the animal, and biopolitics, Art and Posthumanism explores how contemporary art rivets our attention on the empirically thick, emotionally charged questions of “life” and the “living” amid ecological catastrophe. One of the foremost theorists of posthumanism, Wolfe pushes that philosophy out of the realm of the purely theoretical to show how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings help to develop more potent ethical and political commitments.
Download or read book Posthuman Community Psychology written by Michael Richards and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Posthuman Community Psychology is an exploration of mainstream psychology through a critical posthumanity perspective, examining psychology’s place in the world and its relationship with marginalised people, with a focus on people with disabilities. The book argues that the history of modern psychology is underpinned by reductionism and individualism, which is embedded within the contemporary psychology that we know today despite the challenges from critical and community psychologists who seek a more empowering, inclusive, and activist psychology. The posthuman community psychology ideas that emerge in this book examine and intersect with mainstream psychology, critical and community psychologies, critical posthumanities and disability studies to propose an imaginative, reflective, and relational new psychology that represents a collection of possibilities that do not remain entrenched in older ways of thinking about humans and human connections. Richards proposes that psychology has the potential to evolve and make a powerful and profound difference for marginalised people, but a genuine desire for change from psychologists is essential for this to happen. Illustrating the important considerations needed when examining the relationship between the discipline of psychology and marginalised people, this book is fascinating reading for community psychology students and academics, aspiring professional psychologists, community workers, and policy makers.
Download or read book Matters of Care written by María Puig de la Bellacasa and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
Download or read book The Future of Post Human Sports written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are sports really supposed to be so competitive that, as Henry R. Sanders once famously said, ""Men, I'll be honest. Winning is...the only thing!""? (WK 2012) This competitive view of sports can be contrasted with a critical view by William Shakespeare, who wrote in Othello (Act. iv. Sc. 1), ""They laugh that win."" (BART 2012) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones, as will be discussed in the book), sports (in relation to both training and winning) are neither possible (or impossible)...
Download or read book Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures written by Debashish Banerji and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a critical exploration of multiple posthuman possibilities in the 21st century and beyond. Due to the global engagement with advanced technology, we are witness to a species-wise blurring of boundaries at the edge of the human. On the one hand, we find ourselves in a digital age in which human identity is being transformed through networked technological intervention, a large part of our consciousness transferred to "smart" external devices. On the other hand, we are assisted---or assailed---by an unprecedented proliferation of quasi-human substitutes and surrogates, forming a spectrum of humanoids with fuzzy borders. Under these conditions, critical posthumanism asks, who will occupy and control our planet: Will the "superhuman" merely serve as another sign under which new regimes of dominance are spread across the earth? Or can we discover or invent technologies of existence to counter such dominance? It is issues such as these which are at the heart of this new volume of explorations of the posthuman. The essays in this volume offer leading-edge thought on the subject, with special emphases on postmodern and postcolonial futures. They engage with questions of subalternity and feminism vis-à-vis posthumanism, dealing with issues of subjugation, dispensability and surrogacy, as well as the possibilities of resistance, ethical politics or subjective transformation from South Asian archives of cultural and spiritual practice. This volume is a valuable addition to the on-going global dialogues on posthumanism, indispensable to those, from across several disciplines, who are interested in postcolonial and planetary futures.
Download or read book The Future of Post Human Semantics written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seminal project aims to fundamentally change the way we think about semantics, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its 'post-human' fate.
Download or read book Re Entering the Dollhouse written by Heather M. Porter and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Premiering on Fox in 2009, Joss Whedon's Dollhouse was an innovative, contentious and short-lived science fiction series whose themes were challenging for viewers from the outset. A vast global corporation operates establishments (Dollhouses) that program individuals with temporary personalities and abilities. The protagonist assumes a different identity each episode--her defining characteristic a lack of individuality. Through this obtuse premise, the show interrogated free will, morality and sex, and in the process its own construction of fantasy and its audience. A decade on, the world is--for better or worse--catching up with Dollhouse's provocative vision. This collection of new essays examines the series' relevance in the context of today's social and political issues and media landscape.
