Posthumanism, Virtuality, and the Arts

Dear Colleagues,

As was famously pointed out in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, the emergence of the posthuman key figure of the cyborg meant a dissolving of a whole row of dichotomies that have upkept the Western humanist subject: not only the defining one of organism/machine but also dualisms such as mind/body, human/animal, culture/nature, private/public, male/female, civilized/primitive, appearance/reality and maker/made. Quite logically, these hybridizations must also have epistemological consequences and blur the border between what C.P. Snow in 1959 termed “the two cultures”, the separation between the techno-scientific domain and that of art and the humanities. Broadly stated, art and its receivers in the aesthetic branches of the humanities, have got their special legitimization by addressing crucial aspects of the left row in the series of slashes, those emphasizing subjectivity and interiority (cp. mind, culture, appearance, the private, maker) in contrast to objectivity and externality (cp. body, nature, reality, public, made).

But whereas art and aesthetics autonomized those qualities into a special domain – named under terms such as imagination, fiction, the virtual, the sensual—in the posthuman condition they cannot so securely be separated from the other side of the slash, which was similarly drained from virtual and fictitious qualities in the specialization of technical and natural sciences. Rather, explorations of the virtual become an integrative part of our possibilities to act in that convergence between nature and culture, which constitutes the posthuman. If we want to responsibly probe future possibilities of technological infiltration of nature and the human body, we have to transgresses the purely objective categorization of material reality—culminating in the mathematically lawful and deterministic domain upon which the techno-sciences are still largely founded – and integrate those experiences of the virtual and playful, which are perhaps already hidden in the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics.

In the Special Issue of Humanities we thus encourage contributions that empirically analyze, or more generally theorize, how the whole field of the virtual—including, but not limited to, art and literature—might function and intervene in the emerging field of the posthuman. Possible questions to be explored could be, but are again not limited to:

• How are the fictitious worlds of art and literature, including those of science fiction, related to our emerging posthuman reality?
• How does the posthuman relate to the Anthropocene (including the relationship between utopian and dystopian futures, and between body and environment)?
• What is the relationship between the aspects of imperfection, which are so crucial for all modern and avant-garde arts (from narratives to formal languages) and the promise of enhancement pertaining to the posthuman? Can the relationship perfection/imperfection be mapped onto the the one between negentropy/entropy?
• In what ways could the virtuality of art be related to the virtuality of the world at large, as developed in, for instance, Deleuze’s notion of the virtual? Is human subjectivity just the tip of the iceberg of a larger field of self-organizing virtual forces that are immanent in matter, and does the posthuman imply a dissolution of subjectivity or a reconfiguration of it?

Prof. Jacob Wamberg
Prof. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
Guest Editors

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