Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Knowledge”

okay I think we'll get started

my name is John May I'm the director of

the EM DES program here but also the

area head of the history and philosophy

of design and Media Group which we are

co-hosting this event with GSD women in

design and I want to thank women design

for co-hosting Rosie and for hosting her

for the event this morning I'm honored

to welcome Rosie bow Brad o T to the GSD

it's no exaggeration to describe Rosie

as one of the most important living

philosophers and a central international

figure in feminist and posthumanist

thought her intellectual project sits at

the convergence of some of the most

difficult conditions of our time asking

questions that cut across all of lived

life questions of gender and sexuality

of Technology and materiality of

politics power and marginalization and

increasingly of ethics and the earth the

past year has been an emotional one in

the design fields perhaps nowhere more

so than at the GSD and as we reckon with

a troubling history of institutionalized

gender discrimination and frequent

misogyny we are also dealing with an

equally troubling persistence of those

realities in the present when this

reckoning began I felt it could be

meaningful to place these issues in a

broader intellectual framework to ask of

their relationship to the history of

Western humanism and to enlightenment

liberalism more generally these long

unfolding cultural projects that have

produced both good and evil in our time

Rossi's was the first name that came to

mind when i tried to imagine who was

best able to help us in this project at

a moment when our political culture is

completely defined by kind of deepening

anti-intellectualism it seems important

now to reaffirm the basic principle that

complex social realities require an

intellectual engagement commensurate

with those complexities that engagement

takes hard work and patience and

commitment and energy these are

qualities that have defined Rosie's life

rossi braduti is distinguished

University professor at Utrecht

University founding director of the

Center for Humanities at Utrecht she was

the founding professor of the Women's

Studies Program at Utrecht established

the first official ph.d program in

Women's and Gender Studies and for 17

years directed the utrecht linden

studies center a center whose enrolled

student cohort now numbers in the

hundreds she helped establish and later

directed for 10 years the athena network

an extensive community of European

scholars and activists committed to

women's studies that included at its

height over 130 member instant

institutions all over the EU and in 2010

Athena was awarded with the erasmus

prize for its outstanding contributions

to fostering social inclusion through

education rosie was born in italy and

grew up in australia where she received

first class honours degree from the

Australian National University in

Canberra

in 1977 and was awarded the University

medal in philosophy she then moved on to

do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne

where she received her degree in

philosophy in 1981 her publications have

consistently been placed in continental

philosophy at the intersection with

social and political theory cultural

politics gender feminist theory and

ethnicity studies throughout her work

she asserts and demonstrates the

importance of combining theoretical

concerns with a serious commitment to

producing socially and politically

relevant scholarship that contributes to

making a difference in the world so

please join me in welcoming Rosie Brett

Doty

[Applause]

thank you so much dear John for that

exhausting introduction very lovely

great pleasure a great honor to be here

and enormous pleasure to see some of my

old friends some of the oldest friends I

have Alastair Dean and I were graduate

school together in the days when

everybody was in Paris and lovely to see

verinha currently one of the pioneers of

Delors studies in the days when people

didn't know anything about new

materialism well I only had 50 minutes

to solve the problems of the human post

human condition so I'll try to use the

slice to my best advantage there are

many issues of method and meta

methodology that are left totally

unexplored and as to why I do philosophy

as cartography so I just want to

annotate that and say I'm not going to

say anything about it but I'm very happy

to return to this as the opening

question if you wish what I would like

to do is simultaneously evoke a number

of critical conditions and around the

state of what counts as the human and

how that affects the practice of the

academic and humanities and then

immediately be very affirmative and very

optimistic about the future of the field

insofar as the critical post humanities

are up and running really new fields of

knowledge productions that should make

us dream and hope for the future but

let's start with a couple of critical

remarks thinking about the human and

what counts as the human is not

something that humanists do humanists

talk about the humans as polities as

cultural entities as as political

organizations and we are very very happy

to actually leave the detail discussions

as to what defines the human to

anthropologist biologists and all of

those people there are the specialists

of life and a paradox built into

humanity

who prefer to take the human for granted

and define it by what it is not and so

the human is men and men is not woman is

not animal is not nature it is not and

it is definition by negation begs the

question of what actually is our

consensus and about being human and what

counts as the point of reference the

basic unit by which we would define the

human amuse yourselves to go and have a

look at how many festivals of the human

and festivals of the humanities are

taking place

you're the designers and the architects

in the cities of the world from Dubai

Melbourne London and being human and

entire cities going out of the way to

try to festival eyes an idea that we

actually have no conceptual rigour about

being humans now a situation that I call

the posthuman convergence which I'm

going to go and try to define for you in

the next slide forces us to actually

confront the aporia's and a little sort

of forms of avoidance that we have

developed as humanists around the notion

of the human and of course if you come

from the radical epistemologies my

political families feminism and anti

racism anti-fascism you would have an

open quarrel with and the human and I

will return to that in the course of the

talk as well and and if you come from

the critical traditions then you will

know that the human is anything but a

neutral term and that man is defined as

much by what he includes in his

definition of his humanity is by what he

excludes and then not only is it not

universe so it is highly culture

specific and and it is a term really the

human that indexes access to power to be

human enough or not human enough and is

an indication of power and anything but

neutral the condition that I define as

the posterman condition brings all of

this to the fore ever saw that I could

just buzz this and it will happen here

it is I described the predicament that

we are in as a convergence so if you do

Google posthuman or do a series library

search on the posthuman you will find

everything and the opposite of

everything so let's proceed in order and

describe it as a convergence phenomenon

between critiques of the humanistic

tradition and critiques of

anthropocentrism now depending which

theoretical political ethical tradition

you are emerging from you may think that

one follows necessarily from the others

and Derrida argues that if you critique

humanism necessarily anthropocentrism

would have to come to the fore and if

you look at the empirical reality of the

scholarship that does not bear and to

the evidence and a very strong tradition

of critiques of humanism that really

begins at the 18th century and we had an

intern Universal Declaration of Human

Rights with a French Revolution 1792

almost immediately a woman with the name

of a lamp

de Guiche notices that the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights only applies

to free man and rights the alternative a

universal declaration of women's rights

does anybody know what happens to a lamp

de guiche anybody knows that heroine

shield her grave is up in the 16th

arrondissement of Paris she sent to the

guillotine immediately because life is

short and we got a revolution to run

Thank You brothers 1792 to sell new

vector in the middle of the French

Revolution Universal Declaration of

Human Rights he says well that's this

applied to the slaves and the humans to

surge any truth will have the same

speech in the 19th century but in 1793

for to send over to

triggers the haiti revolution liberates

all the slaves establishes a free

democratic and republic on the basis of

the principles of the french revolution

what happens to to stand up after the

french imperial army goes in squashes

the whole thing and he dies in captivity

Thank You brothers

it is the critique of humanism is

actually simultaneous with and

absolutely coextensive with humanism

itself a point that Edward Said was to

make later in the second half of the

twentieth century

as one of the reasons for the great

longevity of humanism that it produces

its own modes of critique so you don't

have to wait for this crazy French

postmodern is to come in with critiques

of the universal it's always already

been there and and it is I repeat the

strength as well as and the weakness of

the humanism so you can do all of that

and at no point interrogate what past

anthropocentrism puts on the agenda that

is to say species supremacy and the idea

over species anthropos that has granted

themselves the right to access every

body every organism that lives

regardless of all the sociological

variables class ethnicity race religion

or the mantra of the variables

anthropocentrism the two things run

parallel but do not necessarily

intertwine until we get to the

convergence that we are in and a

convergence is a set of cross over it's

a set of interrelations it's not a

linear phenomenon it's a very rise or

make a thousand plateaus nomadic

phenomena says zigzagging patterns of

resonating causes and issues carried by

the two fundamental events that

structure historicity the fourth

Industrial Revolution the knowledge

economy also known as cognitive

capitalism Arvid

and on the other hand the sixth

extinction and the dying of the species

the dying of this planet these two

events are happening simultaneously it's

not as if we have climate change on

Monday and an AI and synthetic biology

of Tuesday it's happening at the same

time how to think the simultaneity of

boom and bust on this scale on this

scale multiscale or mighty dimensional

is the first human challenge you can say

maybe this has happened before I do not

know

it certainly is causing a great deal of

panic on the one hand as we will see in

a minute and an incredible excitement on

the other these are really the best of

times and the worst of times and but how

to think such dissonance such incredibly

opposite almost event demands skills of

endurance of imagination and of

transversal connectivity trans versality

is really the key term here you need to

draw a line across and events that are

not at all and similar or parallel even

at runs the future is in the trans

versality of almost everything so the

argument I want to make we now need to

look at this two phenomena look at the

chain of theoretical social and

political effects that they are causing

and sort of try to steer a course that

would allow us to actually have

something productive affirmative

propositional to offer but in saying we

I will be honoring my French teachers

and I'm a proper French person from the

Sorbonne so don't accuse me being it's

an American French theorist and European

and we the category we like all category

is not unitary and we is not one we need

to be put carefully in inverted commas

grounded accorded

to the politics of eminence which my

great teacher and favorite philosopher

Jill dealers talked us very carefully

grounded and feminism politics of

location speak from somewhere and

anti-racism anti-fascism be grounded be

accountable for a specific location

indigenous epistemology perspectives all

of these and are the ways in which you

can ground your statements which allow

us to do a critique of universalism

without falling into relativism the

opposite of universalism is not

relativism the universalism is

perspectivism multiple grounded

perspectives and so we is not one and

the same but we are in the posthuman

convergence together and it is a hell of

a headache because we need to be able to

think this the coming of lovely robust I

love the kids under fantastic look at

them cute and that will do amazing work

for us will take a great deal of of our

work and away and the drudgery of it

they will look as kind of clean as

caring as possible but we also have to

think this and and I refer to the work

of Jennifer Gabe Ruiz on digital garbage

and you will even have trouble finding

images of digital garbage on on the nets

and because Apple and the other giant

make sure that the only images of

rubbish you see is organic rubbish an

electronic a particularly branded one a

dirty old Apple computer being

dismembered by the same people that made

them cheaply in some faraway land with

the lithium batteries exposed with other

toxic elements and pouring out you're

not going to find many of those so

jennifer Gabrus goldsmith on digital

garbage we need to think I think I can

go back right

amazing when those machines work this

and this and this and while we reach out

for the first gin and tonic of the day

keep thinking how am I going to make

sense of all of this I will have a lot

of these pauses because they're you know

to be tiring so another quick run then

you reach out for the gin and tonic and

you have your meditative pose so crucial

thing then perspectivism to enter this

convergence you need to do your own

cartography your own analysis of your

point of entry people are working in

design I mean it's almost ideal you've

got the earth you've got the structures

you've got the the three colleges that

fellows guattari spoke so eloquently

about the environmental the social the

psychic you have a market to deal with

you have and all of this and so your

point of entry at least at the level of

discourse and is pretty much framed and

ready to go how one enters it ethically

effectively epistemic Lee is quite

another and meta people can go into

total euphoria about the great

perspective of this particularly the

Silicon Valley type of people and other

thing into profound posthuman

melancholia thinking and the Disgaea is

falling that it is all over and if you

look again at the scholarship learning

to die in the Anthropocene is the light

motif there was a great deal of

scholarship of the lament circulating

about the sky falling and and the sort

of the proximity of something that looks

like extinction so let's get rid

immediately of this Anthropocene shall

we first of all for your applications

don't use it it has no scientific value

it has been discarded so you use climate

change science that's what gets you the

grants Anthropocene went back and forth

but basically the geological society has

not been convinced we don't have enough

traces in the substructure of a planet

over earth that is the different strata

over over of planetary rocks there's not

enough human presence to justify the

change of our geological era to

Anthropocene and beside the Anthropocene

has become an entrepreneur

I'll let you read it because it's as

clear as look again the farofa did it

totality of my presentation look at the

day's look how recent and all of this

stuff is it has entered a spin and and

entering a spin is a form of epistemic

acceleration ISM that I analyzed with

the philosophy of dollars in Watari in

terms of territorial ization x' and D

territorial ization you take an idea a

really good idea a minute later it goes

wild capitalist interpreter and this is

a very partial list people keep sending

me new ones so please if you find more

send them I collect them and because

this I'm very interested in the speeds

why by which this spins and take over so

for me the Anthropocene is very vital

because if you can have this amount of

epistemological energy you are onto

something good but also to fluid and in

many respect it misses the crucial point

of the convergence effect and that we

really need to be looking at something

that is not only an ending not just an

extinction but also of course an

incredible period of growth and an

amazing scientific revolution let's face

it with all of the consequences that it

entails swinging moods is definitely an

element of the anthropogenic landscape

and the imaginary of disaster that the

Hollywood machine pumps out there is

really money in extinction there's money

in catastrophes you know that and and

it's always the same story

white man dog rifle pickup truck and

then

planet is dead and it's always about men

with a dog and a picker trap looking for

the one remaining girl think of the

second Blade Runner what a tragedy but

but it's kind of like something like a

format it's a template and that really

codes the social imaginary or disaster

and it prevents us to look further to

look at all the other elements of a

complex affective landscape and D I

prefer being a scholar to draw your

attention to the serious scholarship of

anxiety quite quite a bit of that and if

you know some of my previous work on the

posthumous posthuman glossary you will

know I've commented on this Fukuyama and

posthuman future isn't it funny the guy

who didn't want to regulate anything now

he wants to regulate human nature a bit

late but ordinary Habermas and after he

converted to Catholicism the future of

human nature his conversation with

Cardinal Ratzinger oh my god what is

happening to human nature Stroh denied

Peter slaughtered I agree writing

Heidegger's letter and humanism with

this thing of the human Zoo and His

Holiness Pope Francis and will find very

sympathy k-- wonderful in cyclic a

letter on caring for our common home

watch out for Francis for as long as we

have him how long he lasts but he is

very much a climate change person

actually is a capitalist in person

blaming capitalism for it when he ran

his seminar Acastus and over condole fur

on the Anthropocene he chose his own

keynote speaker and of course all the

Cardinals at their classical people and

you may know who Francis invited to the

Vatican to brief him on the climate

change of course he invited Naomi Klein

who else would Pope Francis invite you

should sit is worth looking at the faces

of the Cardinals interesting you can

take a couple of pages of that inside

Foucault lesser I do that as a teaching

exercise take off the name of the author

and then I project him and I ask my

students who has written this and

year almost two thirds of the classes

Felix Guattari because it's very very

close

it is it is continental naturalism but

of course in the case of Pope Francis we

have the whole sort of fabric there of

natural philosophy and in the case of

guattari we have spin noses vitalism two

very different things

okay so we can't do much with the

Anthropocene but we take note of the the

moods the anxiety the fear the

melancholia let's face it depression and

if it is true that we have 12 years to

irreversibility of climate change well

you know what's the point

you may remember early 1970s when it was

still possible to mention Woody Allen is

a famous film where he shows a little

kid saying if the universe is expanding

why do I have to study now if if the end

is coming why bother

the why bother part and I think it's

very much part and it hangs over the

future of the Millennials like a

particularly heavy generational question

mark and so to kind of lift the spirits

a bit and make things thinkable instead

of making them so intrinsically opaque

and oppressive and I would like to

propose that we enter the discussion

through a critique of the Negro

political just cheerful character of

cognitive capitalism and let me just

give you the image and the consumption

of commodities and the sell ability of

everything this is the Vitruvian don't

have to tell design and architecture

people what the Vitruvian image is

completely commodified into a system and

we're actually planned obsolescence and

design that kills time is part of what

we do part of the game capitalizing at

top speed on all that lives

codes algorithmic codes biogenetic codes

codes that are quantified capitalized

formed for every bit of information that

they can give us and data mining as the

true capital and I don't want to you

know talk about Piketty and the great

great concentration of wealth or the

great tech firms that run our universe

but you do know that we are in a period

of capitalism where the concentration of

wealth is higher than it was when

Charles Dickens first denounced the

first capitalism and we have a

concentration of wealth that is just

abhorrent and with the twelve riches

whatever people on earth owning and as

much as half of the the rest of the

population and this concentration of

wealth at a time like this with the

great disparities create enormous

problems but let's not be simplistically

Marxist Leninist

and that is an ideology of the previous

century that didn't produce great

results and let's take stock of the

contradictions of the sixth in dust or

the fourteenth of the Revolution and the

sixth extinction let's try to be what's

the term and sentimental and a little

bit lucid about it and partly because as

people of science as scholars as

particularly you people are in the best

university in the world we really owe it

to our intelligence to also rejoice in

what we have produced as a most

extraordinary scientific technological

apparatus this is extraordinary and

let's and that's where the next gin and

tonic comes and synthetic meat how many

vegans we have of course there's always

a little bit of stem cells even a

synthetic meat but a first syntactic

Amburg are made in the netherlands the

AEA in 2013 the first one cost three

hundred twenty-five thousand dollars and

few years later the price prices dropped

to 11 bucks per synthetic hamburger we

should be dancing with joy if we can may

synthetic meat think of what this could

do in terms of completely reorganizing

the cattle industry the hoof what we

used to call agriculture what he would

do to the planet would be enormous and

sort of becoming vegan of the planet and

and yet every time I showed these images

there is a slight sense of discomfort

and I can see your faces but very often

I get this utterly disgusted feted we go

like like they look normal but they're

not so can you hold the frame there for

a minute

what do you miss when meat becomes de

materialized and when we are extracting

the meat and or it could be the tomato

and from its organic roots this is

called eco nostalgia and I do think it's

a far more widespread sentiment then we

have had the opportunity to look about

and it's one that we should definitely

hold on to because it shows to what an

extent anthropocentrism in our own

belonging to a species how deeply it

goes and while it remains actually

unthought critically and kind of sitting

in our system and oh yes actually yeah

mmm synthetic meat yeah then you may not

even particularly like meat yourself ok

cognitive capitalism read with the

layers in Watari they are the people to

read a thousand plateaus capitalism

schizophrenia on a system that

absolutely capitalizes on all that lives

that has no teleological system to cut a

long story short why am i quoting the

lesson Watari because they are bringing

a Spinoza's ontology to bear on our

understanding of capitalism in contrast

to the dominant Marxist Leninist reading

and of advanced capitalist it's really

Spinoza versus Hegel in a famous book

summarized by Pierre mashrae a book that

was written in 1979 and was translated

into English in 2011

- back with the dollars the explosion of

interest in the laws if people had read

pierre mechain between Hagen and Spinoza

in the mid of the great the radiant

deconstructive wave we would have saved

ourselves a lot of trouble because we

would have understood that the turn was

from a direct dialectical system of a

position to an actually monastic system

of variations within a common

meta-cognitive capitalism is something

that capitalizes on living system

natural cultural making money out of

everything without any possible and way

of containing it the biopiracy remark of

and Anna Shiva very important if we are

all part of a system that capitalizes on

all that lives we remember position

differently in different perspectives

and need to work from within to make

differences that actual matter and among

the natural political aspects of a

system that profits from life the world

machinery as a private industry without

humans in sight and the fleet of drones

that China and the United States are

building a most extraordinary advanced

and systems and hardly any human in

insight I have an alliance in the

Netherlands with the Military Academy I

work with them and they are very very

worried about drones for two reasons

they are suppressed in the jobs of

soldiers or more job suppressions

because of automation and secondly

soldiers are humans they have a code of

conduct for how to kill and there is no

sense and a clear sense of what exactly

is the code of conduct of drone firing

so look at the war machinery the natural

political governance is something that

really belongs to the conversation about

life - to say capitalism is a system

that the commodifies and profits from

life includes death includes the necro

political includes various sectors of

the population and there are simply

infrahuman

non-human and that we label refugees

because we need to deprive them of the

last vestiges of their humanness so the

necro political is very much part of

this this is at lecture on its own so I

need to move on so I got two totally

depressed I'm really happy because now

I've got you in the middle of all of

this wonderful things are happening and

the posthuman convergence is a kind of

way of framing this oscillating and yes

but elements and which could also be

described as where critical thinking is

going in an era where theory is

completely at a picture and the stems

and life sciences are so central to the

wealth and the power and the influence

and of our countries of our of our

culture and people would say of our

civilization so the posture man is an

indicator of our historicity and it is

also a navigational tool the lens would

say a conceptual persona that helps us

illuminate what's happening to us where

are we at and this is how I kind of fell

upon it when I started reading it but

ten years ago I thought let me see the

fucose question what kind of subjects

are we becoming what is happening to us

I do this as excursions into the

scholarship and what are the discourses

are ongoing about our common humanity

and I started coming across not what

just one but multiple forms of post

humanism like multiples and I let you

read this and if you I will give you in

a minute the slide or the posthuman

glossary last year I put out a posthuman

glossary for Bloomsbury you will find

all of this defined in great details and

if you look at that but the posthuman

manifestos 2003 already so it's been

going on for quite a while and and and

and the differences between them which

are try to illuminate later in a slide

lays around are less relevant really

than the commonalities these are all

discourses that come out from you

that still call themselves the

humanities they come out of complete

massively and of what used to be

cultural studies media studies and

please notice the studies because I'm

going to come back to them they come

back they emerge from areas that call

themselves studies to a very large

extent I have to mention my own

political family out of loyalty I would

say feminist theory feminism together

with afrofuturism together with forms of

anti racism or the theories that pioneer

a sense of exiting from the human and

what has the human ever done for me and

why should I be loyal to a category that

has only ever described innate 'add

against me if you look at and Octavia

Octavia Butler is an example but any

elements of politicized science fiction

you get this

I think hilarious Alliance Tim Morton

would call it weird I think it is a

perfectly reasonable alliance of all the

marginals the excluded and the

downtrodden the disqualified and women

abilities trans migrants tada the

animals the machines all united against

the Empire of white men that takes care

of almost the totality of science

fiction and in the 50s and 60s and very

strong enough for futures get me out of

here why would I be loyal to this

category I think it would be very

interesting to see how this mode of

weirdness and evolves and and changes in

the Anthropocene moment we're actually

out of what out of what could we

possibly go as the planet dies under our

very eyes how the the post

anthropocentric twist really changes and

the dates they the frame that

conversation here it is wonderful I

can't say much about it was two years of

work and worth every minute and and very

useful hundred and two different entries

giving you a sense why am I saying all

of this to give you an idea of the scale

and the quantity of the work being done

in the posthuman converges to call it a

crisis doesn't even approximate and the

quantity and quality of the work being

done this is no crisis this is a

completely new start this is a change of

paradigm I know you don't believe me so

let's go to the institution's let's

start from not just any universe it is

up there with you people

Oxford transhumanists a Nick Bostrom

that I show you in the other slide and

Oxford transhumanism this is Oxford so

we don't have time to waste the

Institute is called digital for the

future of humanity

you know nothing less than incredibly

interesting google it go and have a look

at it and a full posthumanist strand and

yes it is the Silicon Valley ideology of

transhumanism but this is oxfords we've

got big brains here very cleverly

reformatted in a language that gives you

what I think is the axiom of cognitive

capitalism and so when you do your

applications you do what the Oxford

Center does and the axiom is as follows

analytically you are posthumanist you do

know I mean you're you do know that we

have a fourth Industrial Revolution a

sixth extinction we have AI and we have

a problem with climate change we have

synthetic biology and we have droughts

and bush fires so analytically you're a

posthumanist normatively you're a neo

humanist you better make that very clear

and that's exactly what buster is where

he gets all the money in other words he

presents did the post German evolution

as the accomplishment of the

Enlightenment enlightenment after all

was a rationalist project of the perfect

ability of humanity through science and

society and technology and so now we

have a humanity that is failing under

the weight of the incredibly intelligent

computational systems that we have

created our brain

how your yo-yo is much slower than the

computational system we have created

mark Hanson is edited a lot of the

people of Media Studies are onto it

support are we going to do we are going

to enhance the human and accelerate our

brain human enhancement and that is the

core the arcs for transhumanist the

project is called super intelligence and

it is extremely well-funded and you

would do well to go and spend some time

there Cambridge is trying to ram it it

and they cute they always do this and

the end of Agartha they obviously to

Cambridge as a center for the study of

existential risk and run by a data

genius Martin Rees an astronomer royal

strawberry guy and they assess the risks

of this which are not nothing

considering that we are talking about

human enhancement and it's a all

feminist and anti-racist I would like to

know who gets chosen for enlight for the

enhancement and who actually doesn't

even qualify for the selection but ok in

your app a little bit more diversified

Sweden has been up there the post

humanities hub it's been running for

over 10 years go and have a look at it

very well-funded and there they do bring

in both the critique of humanism and the

critique of anthropocentrism they do the

race they do the feminism they do the

migration they do all the variables as

well as looking seriously at the

environment god bless the Social

Democrats of the north

the Germans millions over 50 million

euros for the Anthropocene program that

the deutsche museum has could have the

world Rachel Carson Institute in Munich

and followed by the Technosphere project

which is still ongoing now design media

trying to come to terms with the big

convergence very interesting here the

role of design media museums non

academic institutions you will find this

a feature of past human scholarship

their big impact of non-academic venues

for knowledge production but that is one

of the features of cognitive capitalism

that knowledge is not

longer the monopoly or the prerogative

of institutions like the University

which for centuries have been the

producers of knowledge now knowledge is

now commenced coextensive with the

social field as a whole and there's so

much knowledge may be produced outside

the academic institutions and with the

post human condition it's it becomes

almost painful I would say the good side

of it is that we need the creator's the

designers the artists the engineers of

the imagination we need all of those

people to help us but the question of

what the universities itself can do and

how the academic disciplines will

interact with this is as my rector says

a very good question look at Canada

Brock and just outside Toronto a whole

posthumanist Research Network very well

funded by the federal research council

and the people of our house in Denmark

with and at seeing is a permanent

visitor again Danish Research Council

money journals up and running and

stopover on dates and they're older

roads seem to lead to Korea but they

editorial boards are of course

international so we have a very

well-established emergent field emergent

but actually institutionalizing very

fast and notice the capital coming in

the money going in these two grants and

it's not outside the flow of capital far

from it okay academic response and

probably I'm going to run out of money

how is the posthuman convergence

registered within the academic world

with the explosion of fields that are

the critical post humanities they call

themselves ecological environmental and

sustainable organic greater exactly

cetera have will come but this is just

the first taste of it and I'll come back

to them in more details in a moment what

is crucial about this field is that they

called themselves the you

manatees and and I'll give you an

example of how else this could have gone

if you look at how generations of

critical studies since the seventies

addressed similar questions you can look

at the what I call the first generation

of critical studies gender feminist

queer race post-colonial subaltern

cultural film and television actually I

remember theater studies and I'm that

old

television and media is and performance

that studies I think what we have here

is this mushrooming infrastructural

effect which was the evolution of the

studies discourses that really promoted

interdisciplinarity connection to the

real world a radical thinking theory and

for decades and some of it are still

there not all but some of them are still

there I see the first generation of

critical studies as event basically

taking on humanism taking on the

limitations of a certain idea of men and

what most of them do particularly the

race post-colonial the feminist is they

expose the compatibility of rationality

and violence a reason an exclusion and

they do so in a manner that makes the

voices of the excluded not only audible

jirobo visible but it makes them

productive of knowledge it's a way of

showing the knowledge that is being

produced at what we used to call the

margin a second generation of studies

emerges more recently the 90s where we

have non-human object of studies animal

studies and eco criticism would be

almost emblematic of this but we then

media theory that I will give you a

special slider because Media is again

the indicator of this the shift from

critiques of representation to code to

analyzing code and those shifts and

where representational

shoes are left behind and you're looking

at the material structure of the

discourses this this is also known as

new materialism or a turn to more

object-oriented way of looking at the

object of studies which is very very

recent in relation to the more critical

tradition here it's man and his others

here it's known humans keep coming in

and very big time and my favorite for

the moment is critical planned studies

but that is also going to evolve and so

if you find anything else and please

tell me notice how critical comes up my

favorite is critical management studies

and I would love to know what is

critical about that one but you get more

object and oriented way of giving of

giving an object of inquiry near media

remember when we had new media and my

favorite lemon is post node and studies

but that's also it's also evolving and

what used to be necro political is now

breaking down to a number of other areas

where the inhumane aspects of the

present conditions are in unfocus death

studies enormous because of the

appalling statistics of so young sort of

beautiful suicide and general burnout

look at the University of Bristol and

bath in the UK death study is a growing

area there'll be jobs there Martin I

don't mean this cynically and very

interesting forms of transdisciplinarity

so all of this we have always had but

the critical post humanity is a

qualitative leap it's a different

ballgame and and and it's a very recent

one and it's this I'm repeating the

first slide that you already seen I'm

adding another one Medical Humanities

and remember the days when the Medical

Humanities basically did death studies

it was about accompanying people in a

therapeutic manner through the ending of

their diseases now it's a whole lot of

things and

neural evolution humanities criminal

resilient money public humanities civic

humanities and you will not be surprised

to know that the meta discourses are

also following that there are multiple

discourse that the matter Pat earning is

already happening and and I wish I had

written the one about nomadic humanities

but it didn't even occur to me and it's

Kate Stimson they did it but all of

these are very recent publication I

think Kate Hale with the digital

humanities has to be given her dues here

so the question here is what is

happening to post human knowledge

production to go from this reliance on

critical discourses disgusted at a

critical of humanism or critical of

anthropocentrism to a different ballgame

which is actually coming up with his new

humanities of which every major

university is richly endowed I think the

center for environmental humanities

environmental history at Harvey is one

of the pioneers of this and digital

humanities and Duke pioneers but by now

every research university has its

environmental manager digital management

it's like the new mantra so what is

involved in this and this is the

subjectively new book human knowledge

coming out great and order it terrific

but I will give you the quick and

version of this critical post humanities

no longer assume that the subject of

knowledge is hormone a merciless and or

anthropos they are assuming a transverse

so knowledge production and entity

transversality and more complex embodied

embedded nonunitary relation and

effective transversal semi-nomadic

subjects is an example of these but

people are doing complex assemblages

with all kind of other philosophies you

will find a lot of Whitehead you will

find a lot of Vidkun Stein you will find

a massive return of the American

pragmatists varied complex process

ontology is coming in to give us a

transverse or subject position but that

transversality being able to sustain the

effort to think the

human convergence and and I think the in

terms of the work ethics linked to a

collaborative mmm a collaborative

morality and the collaborative morality

is the ethics that we get from Spinoza

and contemporary reading of Spinoza and

I was interviewed by one of your people

on the but I think it's on the website

of your school so if you want to know

more about the affirmative part of the

story please look at that text because I

can't go into it right now so neither

another universal nor anthropocentric a

collective assemblage I think you will

find the term assemblage in a lot of the

meta discourse certainly in Katherine

Hale in the London in my work as a way

of positing a trans type of subject that

can hold in there in a process of

metastability and in in order to cope

with the challenges and try to make

sense of what is happening to us of what

can we make of this particular political

economy of knowledge production in terms

of attempting a critique one thing is

obvious and clear that the missing

people are missing and the usual

suspects are not actually being

capitalized and not being territorial

eyes to the same extent and I haven't

seen non nationally indexed humanities

in the literature feminist queer

humanities I haven't seen any

institutionalization of that black

humanities migrant diaspora humanity

poor trailer-park humanities I owe this

to Richard Rorty

in his 1998 masterpiece I think

accomplishing our country and in that

incredible analysis of where America is

going and he's talking about poor

trailer-park humanities nobody's looking

at the poor decolonial humanities

haven't seen the child's humanities

otherwise able or disabled humanities

you will find the scholarship but not

the institutional reality

so do we have a situation here where the

people that have been the usual suspects

of exclusions and marginalization are

once again being left out of the picture

or are there science that actually there

is a convergence there between the

socially excluded and the new discourses

of the humanities pathological optimist

that I am I couldn't leave you of course

and with something negative so yes there

are strong and evidence now of planetary

differential post humanities as I call

them indigenous environmental and

digital humanities quite a movement led

by graduate students budding and

emerging but very strong online and web

sites networks but the indigenous

perspective land rights perspective meet

the Anthropocene meets the legal issues

meets the representational issues meets

the cognitive issues producing a

different way of doing the post

humanities post-colonial Green pretty

establishing complete transnational

environmental literary studies queer new

humanism Zinn in a variety of ways but

very much at the center of the

discussion because of their perspective

estrade indigenous knowledge and

cosmologists and we just put out an

edited collection called posthuman

Ecology's where the issues of land

rights indigenous philosophies and post

human thought is debated afrotheria not

at all

you know harmonious synthesis an area

contestation but incredibly alive that

does not forget that for so many

populations under the sun population

that have been depleted by colonial

violence extinction is a sad reality and

that they are the engineers of survival

as well as the oldest shepherds of the

earth so the whole discussion of what

used to be post-colonial theory being

reshaped in a very material manner

through the encounter with indigenous

epistemologies but for me then the issue

more than ever is how can we

as people who are committed to think way

through this posthuman convergence how

can we who are in this together but are

not one and the same develop a set of

values of attributes of terminologies

whereby we can think differentially but

together but the challenges the

contradictions the exhilaration and the

exhaustion of the fourth Industrial

Revolution and the six extinction

together in a materially embedded way

becoming in and with the world because

guys we only have one of those thank you

very much

[Applause]

so we have some time for questions I'm

gonna start with one and then we can

there's some microphones we can pass

around

Rosi I'm just curious one of the issues

I think that has arisen at the GSD and

I'm sure in many other institutions is

what to do with the Canon I mean that's

not really a new question in a lot of

ways but I wonder if you could just give

a few of your thoughts because you're

quite open in your own work about the

debt that your work pays to to the

philosophical traditions that were that

in certain ways may have been

exclusionary of or carry many of the

exclusion 'el kind of aspects that

you've described tonight and so I guess

how do you take on this kind of

double-edged sword of of the Canon in

your own teaching and we're dealing with

it here the GSD not only in terms of the

textual Canon but also the the

architectural Canon and and how we might

restructure certain kinds of courses to

simultaneously open those up but at the

same time retain what was good and what

we what can be retained of the of the

tradition of humanism one of the easy

questions thank you thank you very much

so then I have of course like many

people in my generation a double

disciplinary origin and very much part

of the continental philosophical

tradition and very much part of radical

feminism radical anti-fascism and

radical anti racism so multiple

genealogies and I would say that is true

of most critical thinkers and that you

of course you rely on a Canon and you

grew up in a can and you indulge in a

Canon but you are fed by multiple other

sources and and I think that's crucial

because I would not want any

disciplinary purity innocence I don't

even believe that researcher thing is a

Canon but there are disciplinary

ecologists of belonging and I noticed a

morning if anybody's in philosophy out

there that as one girl grows older your

original discipline becomes back and

texts that you used to read 20 haunt you

back in 10 I can't believe I'm rereading

this one again so a discipline is an

incredible passion and philosophy is a

hell of a discipline but

are the radical epistemologies that led

to the critical work on this so how I do

this is again by complexify in the

issues and Spinoza's diligence is that

is the Neo spinosus because it brings in

a continuum nature culture and we are

all part of the same matter there is one

nature and we are part of it we are

variation within the same matter now if

you are in neurosciences and think of

DiMaggio or if you are in genetics to

say we're all part of the same meta is a

banality if you say that in the

humanities particularly with the history

of Vital materialism being complicit us

with fascism and with colonialism and if

you're in this within the humanities we

say you know we are in a continuum with

nature and people get really strappy and

you'll get yourself in real difficult

and situations so in relation to this

particular problem which

methodologically translates into the

fact that our dominant hegemonic

methodologies social constructivism one

is not born one becomes and if that is

still they did early 20th century method

then we indeed we can't think a nature

culture continuum in relation to that

then I do a de leurs in the sense that I

say you know what within our own

tradition within our Canon we have texts

that allow us to think this Spinoza

allows us to think a nature culture

continuum that's what he does and that's

why Hegel was so irritated with him and

that's why the Marxist but you G's are

so irritated with neo Spinoza's to which

de leurs is the most eminent but of

course Negri of course and bali-ba Marty

Horvath it's a long list

in fact what people known as

post-modernism was simply post Marxism

it was the switch to Spinoza and that's

what went on there but de leurs is at

the core of this and didn't quite get

translated as quickly and his impact on

the anglo-american world was not as

large as Derrida and the more linguistic

oriented

so this fundamental point some hot and

was delayed but we do have this in our

tradition I think it's safer

also for youngest researchers to go back

to the past and say we have the Stoics

stoicism is learning to die Marcus are

aliens and Montaigne Seneca these are

incredible thinkers who prepare us for

to die so don't get into a fit of

Anthropocene anxiety or it's and Seneca

do some stoicism and then maybe we can

have this conversation without

completely falling out of the discussion

last point and all of this plays in

relation to the spatial archive of the

discipline but the loss is also helpful

in another level is about the

temporality of this and the Burke

Sounion turn that de leurs activates in

his thinking allows us to in a brittle

but is I did it in the Tanners at Yale

and also is very strong in them in the

next book the present the present is not

one block of either anxiety or of

excitement it's not one thing it's a

thousand plateaus of temporal

complexities in fact the formula that

they offer is the present is both the

record of what we are ceasing to be and

the seed of what we are in the process

of becoming simultaneously and the

actual and the virtual so you can do the

present like the record of what we are

seizing to be and we are ceasing to be

men you see if I care

we are ceasing to be anthropods but

we're in the process of becoming a

thousand other things as some of them

wore me sort of a little bit and if we

are looking at this list of what is

missing and what is being proposed well

things can happen in here some of them

you think of him but we are in the

process of becoming something so it's

dissimilarity of temporality that is

also important the crucial thing is to

get activated to think through and not

cave in thinking this

is the unthinkable and why would a

convergence however multi scalar and

complex be unthinkable and what is the

regime of think ability that we are

applying to the analysis of this work

and part of my contributions to try to

make this very thinkable in chunks that

are possibly and to go I'm also very

cautious in relation to the starting

researchers don't fall out of the Canon

we want you to go on get your PhD become

professors around the world run Harvard

so don't drop out drop in then do the

work and revive within the tradition and

other sources in a dialogue with

multiple other sources that come from

other cultures and other traditions and

hard work but hey we can we can do it

I'm not sharing so and enough

Thank You professor for the excellent

speech Janice from East Asian Studies

civilizations so as an area studies

scholar my question is if post humanism

can truly offer a point of entry for

scholars like us what area studies were

you know that's the all the studies that

you present is that areas that this is

missing so where do I engage with the

posthuman era thank you

fantastic yes this is one thing I'm so

glad because this allows me to make my

method methodological point one thing

about cartography is like this survey

you're the designers an architect this

is a way of surveying the field

it comes from my perspective so it is

limited and it is very partial that

partiality does not make it and invalid

it makes it objective within very

limited parameters there's a whole

discussion about this in feminist

epistemology the work of Sandra Harding

on the privilege of partial perspectives

and I couldn't possibly be all

comprehensive and couldn't and I

wouldn't want to and I think the idea of

cartographic renderings of a field of

research is very important because then

the dialogue would consist in comparing

cartography and and and and I think

that's how Foucault actually was

thinking and then it was too young and

and and I think that that cartographic

method is a way of daring to take on the

present and and I always take on the

present as more what were in the process

of becoming then what we're seizing to

be but many of my colleagues are

focusing more on what we are seizing to

be if you look at biopolitical

scholarship it's all about death and

destruction and what we're seizing to be

extremely valid extremely important and

the bio political and bio power is very

very alive but it's not what I do I

terms of what we should do with the

station studies you just given yourself

a task but what I do know is that the

the Asian region is a whole as married

into transhumanism massively really up

Korea I mean the two journals that I

showed you come out of Seoul

in the both the transhumanism and the

posthuman studies eternals and up and

running did you owe me to show you two

slides again Korea is producing some of

the most cutting-edge work on this

Singapore as well but very much within

the Silicon Valley ideology not not this

is a short term for the transhuman that

we would simply download whatever there

are consciousness into the computer that

dead Saddam's sort of summarizing a much

more complex story and there's much less

critical post humanism there's a lot of

interest particularly emerging from

Buddhist circles or critical Buddhism

reaching into Spinoza Zhan Spinoza and

Taoism work really well together

a lot of work in pockets in China but I

think you have to go to Korea bits of

Japan Singapore to see this happening I

think I think the other place where this

is playing is of course in the East

Asian empires and notably the Chinese

Empire in Africa where the Chinese are

building universities at a speed that is

breathtaking and they've simply phased

out the humanities is it's its own stem

and engineering and and the humanities

is not something although they did the

People's Republic of China's has built

humanities in China that with this talk

of two thousand you humanities faculties

but in in in the new empire that is

Africa this is not happening so you have

already a model that that has phased out

the humanities so I think it's a fully

absolutely lively and airy I see East

Asia as an imperial power colonial power

as well as as local and and with vast

repercussions and I would I was if I

could

my work is translated in Korean Chinese

in all those languages and people say

yes we need the critical humanism bring

in the body is the perspectives and not

just the algorithms and so I'm very

hopeful but I am a pathological optimist

sir

I think thank you for your presentations

it's very engaging my question is in the

context of cognitive capitalism as you

said the institutions are very advanced

to rethink those you would say

insufficiencies of the previous

humanities are the ones that get that

needs to get fund in other words they

are where the capital the capitals in

the academia converges so how do you

think of this paradise it's precisely

who who is at the height of this

hierarchy of capitalism of or of this of

inequality that's rethinking about it

and would you think that would produce

some sort of in part partiality or would

you think that would be a acceptable

phenomenon enshrined into the second

half of your question but the role of

the universities in this is capital

literally and its central and the

university is us and I happen to be

profoundly in love with the university

as an institution and and I'm not saying

that to be slimy because this is an

Harvard I would say it in any other

university you know

universities are centuries years old and

Bologna the oldest we have in Europe is

nine hundred years old and Coimbra is

seven hundred years old my little

Utrecht is three hundred sixty-five

years old we've been there for a long

time and we've been training partially

with difficulties business with

exclusion but we've been training young

people through massive crisis and we

survived the introduction of the of the

printed press we survived it do you know

the emancipation of women and we

survived decolonization we almost

survived internet it's a brilliant

institution it's a brilliant institution

why should an institution with such

pedigree with such energy with such

nobility in the heart take as its model

the corporation a fraudulent bankrupt

dishonest very recent institutional

structure that actually has

gotten one thing right certainly not

since 2008 why should that be the model

and not us

we've been training training decent

discerning creative critical citizens

for centuries now give us a break we are

the model and we need to remain the

model for a 21st century democracy of

cognitive critical capitalising citizens

who can make a difference that's our job

and if you look at the charter of the

great university Edinburgh but Harvard

also essentially we are charities with

big endowments on the stock exchange but

we're a public good we're here to do

things for the love of the world that

has to stay our central function and I

think that's what it critical the

critical thinking cannot just be

negative and scoring points and

spreading nihilism cynicism and

depression and you know just gin and

tonic is good but let's not go overboard

we need to energize we need to give

people a sense of the possible we need

to put the DD active back into activism

and thinking is really about dreaming

possible scenarios and only the

University can do that you guys your

intelligence I don't even want to know

the scale of your intelligence you can

go through Harvard with a pinking

playing ping-pong with the other hand

and and or even noticed that this is

happening we are under employing your

resources massively not because we don't

know how to do it but just because the

means of cognitive access that you're

disposed are enormous and imagine that

we actually activated everything that

you're capable of doing and thinking

imagine being penalized

being potentiated to the nth power of

what you're capable of doing

just imagine not in the Silicon Valley

merging with the Machine going singular

and running the globe but in the sense

of opening up to the possibilities that

the world is giving you Spinoza's

definition of the ethical life as the

opening up taking in the world taking it

on taking this convergent shaping it in

the direction of general

positi solidarity fun as well as profit

and how about saying capitalism is a

really bad interpretation of the market

economy there are different forms of

market economy that we could do Commons

oriented and more shareable and that's

really in the hearts of the Millennials

everything you stand for

is sharing and not leaving anybody with

different forms of the market economy

why couldn't we use a university not

just to apply the banality of what

already is the case and is already

ceasing to be but also the university is

dreaming up what we in the process of

becoming we've done it so well in the

past now more than ever I think so

universities let's let's end on that I

just also want to announce for anyone

who's interested in continuing the

conversation we have a session with

Rossi tomorrow from 3 to 5 p.m. here in

gondhal in the Stubbins room which is

rich if you can't find it ask a tired

architect who's walking around the

building because I don't know the number

but it's called the Stubbins room it's

adjacent to the cafe from 3 to 5 p.m.

tomorrow and that's just an open forum

to continue this conversation

thanks very much to Rosie