haraway

This paper explores the pervasive presence of literature, film, speculation, fabulation, and other genres of invention in the theoretical writings also known as “critical posthumanism.” Identifying a set of different appropriations of fictional discourse in theoretical work by, amongst others, Astrida Niemanis, Stacy Alaimo, Rebekah Sheldon, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett, the paper asks why theorists united by a common interest in “getting real”, to use Karen Barad’s phrase (1998), often turn to a type of discourse that is defined precisely by not committing itself to reality. What, in other words, do genres and rhetorical devices that deliberately and explicitly make stuff up allow thinkers within critical posthumanism to do that traditional academic styles of writing do not?

To answer this question, the paper adopts key concepts from fictionality theory and utilize these in order to trace three distinct modes through which fictional discourse is put to use in the field of critical posthumanism. These modes are distinguished by inventing 1) non/human entanglements, 2) scientific knowledge, and 3) future societies respectively; yet all of them, the paper argues, fictionalize with the primary aim of imaginatively and affectively grasping phenomena that in principle reside beyond the limits of intelligibility.

In critical dialogue with Slavoj Žižek, who have accused this field for ignoring the question of epistemology, I will try to show that fictionality is adopted, here, precisely as an epistemological tool for envisioning that which cannot (yet) be perceived as “true.” On this basis, the paper intervenes in recent debates on the modes of theoretical argumentation in critical posthumanism, arguing that fictionality – in contrast to “literature”, “fabulation”, “speculation” or “wor(l)ding” – is a particularly attractive type of discourse for attempts to move beyond anthropocentric regimes of truth.

In their article "Electronic Literature and the Effects of Cyberspace on the Body" Maya Zalbidea and Xiana Sotelo discuss how new technologies are facilitating the emancipation of subjugat- ed subjects aimed at transforming unequal social relations through an intersectional and performative approach. This perspective is discussed through the exploration of the so-called intersectional ap- proach described by Berger and Guidroz, Haraway's situated knowledges, and Butler's performative agency based on transgressions. Framed within the posthuman, post-biological deconstruction of so- cial and cultural hierarchies, Zalbidea and Sotelo argue for the value of a conjuncture between post- colonial post-modern/post-structuralist literature and the field of feminist cultural studies. Based on previous theories of gender and bodies in cyberspace, Zalbidea and Sotelo develop ideas about bodies, gender, and anxieties, and how these theories may be illustrated metaphorically in electronic literature and new media art works.

Alex Reid examines a cross-section of essays in Prefiguring Cyberculture, a work that historicizes the future as neither alarmist nor utopian.

Salvatore Proietti straddles science and fiction to offer an interpretation of a McElroy Cyborg.

Matthew Fuller on The Cyborg Handbook.

The Cyborg Handbook tells the story of how one particular model, or one cluster of models grouped under the term cyborg (cybernetic organism), has come to occupy a key place as a meaning-making apparatus that either actually or rhetorically involves such disparate areas as: the invention of new emotions; self-directed evolution; combat and medical augmentation; the prediction, monitoring, and control of body movement; farming; automatism; remote or prosthetic operations; reproductive technology. Culling material from a wide variety of academic sources, The Cyborg Handbook follows the lead of Donna Haraway, who adds an image-rich foreword to the book, in putting cyborgs on the map of cultural criticism.