2016, Vol.9, No.3

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 2092-6081 / eISSN : 2383-9899
https://journal.kci.go.kr/eih

April 2016 was the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Michel Foucault’s monumental study Les Mots et les Choses (1966), translated four years later as The Order of Things (1970). This contribution wants to revisit the enigmatic last part of Foucault’s book in the light of the past half century of philosophical thinking, more particularly with regard to the post-humanist condition. Although Foucault’s thesis of the “end of man” is an obligatory reference in studies on post-humanism, the specific presuppositions and implications of Foucault’s so-called anti-humanism generally remained unexplored. In this contribution, Foucault’s The Order of Things is re-evaluated, considering its potential for the project of “critical post-humanism.” In this context, the following questions are taken into account: What humanism is targeted by Foucault’s critique? What are the specific aspirations of Foucault’s so-called “anti-humanism”? And, what is the latter’s critical potential for the development of a post-humanist philosophical anthropology understanding post-humanism as a continuation-through-transformation of humanism? Further expanding on the fore-mentioned questions, this contribution reconsiders Ian Hacking’s Historical Ontology (2002) as a further elaboration of the Foucauldian enterprise. In line with both Foucault and Hacking, the conditions of a posthumanist “historical ontology” of man are questioned in order to consider a philosophical anthropology for the 21st century.

The article deals with the question: What role does the medium of writing play concerning academic texts? If we take into consideration that the medium does not simply carry or record “contents,” as can be characterized by a constitutive operation, the material presence of writing has to be handled as inevitable. When reading the texts of Marshall McLuhan and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, we have to face this question not only because in their books, the operations of writing are especially apparent, but also because the texts themselves reflect these aspects in many, though highly different, ways. Taking into account the works that are relevant from these perspectives may show that possible concepts of mediaanthropology can contribute to the understanding how the materiality of writing comes into focus as an active medium of academic — or any kind of — texts. Mediaanthropology, questioning the relation of the human and technology, provides a broader perspective here, as it may point at the medial precededness of the anthropos. The insight that technology has always already been there for human beings throws a different light upon the constitutive operations of writing.

This article aims to draw a picture of how we currently visualize human vs. artificial intelligence. I will use movies as an informative medium for the question of how we culturally reckon with the question of future human development. Science fiction movies show images depicting the transcendence of the human, which I take to be significant for the contemporary conditio humana. I will examine how movies like Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) or Transcendence (Wally Pfister, 2014) imagine human and artificial life. My main focus will be on the concept of disembodied intelligences, which has become a central topos in contemporary cinema. Portrayals of future artificial intelligences or superintelligences (a merger of human minds with technology), use the image of an artificial neural net, which is omnipresent (e.g. the Internet), but exhibits no concrete form of embodiment. Such a net structure expands the image of the neural net into a global dimension. These superintelligences are represented as disembodied, but as I will show, the unfolding narratives use images of embodiment to explain the genesis of these intelligences. I will show how the presentation of technology as a highly complex and dynamic net-structure relates to neuroscientific imagery and the characteristics of the human brain. In this article I attempt to clarify how the neuroscientific reduction of consciousness to cerebral processes informs images of disembodied superintelligences in contemporary cinema.