02 Inhuman Symposium – Rosi Braidotti

Thank You Ana it's a great honor and a great pleasure to be here quite intimidating to be at the Freddy CRM this high tempo of Contemporary Arts as well as one of the last places where critical theory is still being done in the European landscape great honor to be here I wouldn't dream in my wildest dream to bring any images so the screen stays like this you can project what you want to knit and if anybody wants to do it would it be Maps you're very very welcome I will try to keep you awake with some reflections on what exactly is happening on scholarship around a human non-human in human posthuman and derivatives and I'm also launching an appeal for any other neologism that you come across concerning this field if you could please send it to me it is a field incomplete explosion and and I would have a whole discussion who with the of course the curators of the exhibition to know why it was inhuman that one out this particular cat in a time I think in itself it would be a discussion point it is undeniable that over the last 10 years the explosion of scholarship on what exactly counts as the basic unit of reference for the human is completely on the cards and and I think it has been the largest quantitative outpour that have seen and since the early days of post-modernism is like everybody has the bug of the human the number of exhibitions and reflections that is at the moment I know of at least five exhibitions that I know of and I'm not particularly the person around the question of the human so I would offer the posthuman as a navigational tool as a way of illuminating a certain field and then raised a few questions of you concerns a few hopes and around this particular planet I'll define the posthuman as a convergence issue it's the convergence of anti or post humanism on the one hand and post anthropocentrism on the other if you can pronounce it you already have way there and I know that this discussion these discussions are very different histories in different countries and the Netherlands where I have the fortune of living is a very humanistic country the Erasmus of Rotterdam has to remain the prototype of as far as the Dutch are prepared to go in critical intellectuality and you touch humanism at your own risk and peril in countries like the Netherlands because humanism is seen as the bastion or democratic criticism I suspect something similar may play in Germany I however was trained in France I studied with the Giants of pas structuralism with Foucault with the lerz with the rigour and anti humanism is very much part of my way of thinking an anti humanism is a combination of Nietzschean critique of no deaths of God death of man crisis of humanism and a sort of my own disenchantment with some of the premises of the Great Western philosophical tradition when it comes to freedom to democracy and to social justice so you can say anti humanism is both a tradition of thought but also a formal sensibility a mood and I think of how attached we feel to the category of humanist values is ver very singular a very sort of almost at times and private questions and when we should actually have the courage and to come out as closeted humanists and not neohuman is a la Martha Nussbaum no neo-kantian new humanism but actually close that humanist wishing aspiring to justice freedom peace love and understanding even when the epistemologies are radical even when the politics are impatient there is a humanistic faith a humanistic sort of so we call it effect at work and I think we would actually I would like to put that on the agenda because it seems that the art world also a lot of the artworks that we are being exhibited express ultimately a humanistic hope for what would be a question that I want to return but it is not cool to be a humanism it's a little bit sort of sentimental so I want to provoke that back into our thinking and also come out as an anti humanist by tradition and I think that puts us into a minority we have to be very aware of that a minority that has a real true disenchantment with the unkept promises of Western humanism and today the the fuko's lesson about the death of man the crisis of humanism 1966 was postulated in the context of the Vietnam War and the growing disenchantment with the Soviet experiments it was a disenchantment with Soviet humanism as well as with Western humanism if you are post 1989 you might think the socialist humanism is a contradiction in terms think again socialist humanism was there in this in the 18th century in the utopian socialist Karl Marx took it from them and the rest is the history that we know but there's a return of socialist humanism which is the belief in progress and as Jacques Lacan not my favorite but it turns our good in the long run exactly I can pointed out for as long as you believe in progress you are a believer for you as long as you believe in social justice you are a believer and I think that was a lot of what so that wonderful paper that Helen just gave that expressed a profound aspiration to justice and to freedom to democracy so are we really crypto humanists even when our epidemiologist and our politics are coolly not and in that field so at the year we need to reconsider and particularly Soviet associate social humanism Simone de Beauvoir forever and and all the complications of that of that tradition and I would then have a discussion here about the effective turn there's about three conferences a day in academia about the effective turn going in all directions which is perfectly fine I would connect the effective turn to the particular effectivity the particular sensibility of humanism is a radical aspiration to freedom Edward Sayid type of humanism I think belongs to the conversation of today but again I don't know whether that works and as clearly in in Germany post anthropocentrism is a very different story as I said already pronouncing it if you thought Farrell Agha centrism was bad try this one taking distance from our species is a very different story and in the humanities in philosophy we don't even have a language to talk about species we don't think of ourselves as anthropos not in philosophy it is of course and man the measure of all things that we would actually be after primates or animals is simply not part of our training if you take the four and horsemen of the possibility apocalypse of modernity Marx Freud Nietzsche and Darwin's according again to my teacher fuko's cartography we got doses of of Marx and Freud good lord we grew up with that need to crawl back in essentially thanks to dollars and bit of Derrida so we got Nietzsche in the 1980s Darwin it's not part of our terminology it's not part of our genealogies we simply cannot think animal we cannot think beyond anthropomorphism at best so the post anthropocentric challenge and to which I will return more in detail in the second half of the paper thinking in terms of species brings could even continental philosophy hybrid and contaminated is it as it is brings into places where we cannot be we cannot think beyond or without the centrality of anthropos distinct thing that is of course and the source of all pride and joy as well as all sorts of issues and complications I challenge you again stand in front of the mirror and do the mantra or critical theory I am against capitalism yeah I am against social injustice yaha I am against normativity yeah I am against war yeah I am against the human species oops maybe those of you who have a punk a punk background maybe but even then so we have here a new ecology of belonging that is emerging and an ecology of belonging to a species which we perceive at the very moment where that sense of belonging is challenged if not completely lost because of a number of reasons that I will return to so a lack of a critical dictionary and the terminologies that are missing genealogy that are missing if you look at the scholarship on Darwin there's nothing there's Hilary rose in the nineteen nineties and then Elizabeth gross yesterday and in-between nothing we don't even have a critical discourse on evolutionary theory in your country because of the aftermath of fascism you can't even think about it you just go completely freaky the moment we talk about evolution because of the long long specter of eugenics that is simply lobotomized philosophy from being able to think animality evolution selection and survival that is the post anthropocentric moment and it coincides institutionally with the crisis of the humanities which are being devoted out there listen my part of the world budgetarily and institutionally completely destroyed currently because we are not considered useful to the current production of knowledge as one of my dear friends colleagues a new trick booted you humanists cannot possibly answer the great scientific issues of today because you still believe in the centrality of the human and because you saw national stick methodological nationalism Ulric back rest in peace and the question of anthropocentrism the two pillars on which the humanities may not be able to negotiate the transition to the 21st century but of course there are other resources there as well this is a brief definition of why the posthuman is a useful navigational tool because of this particular convergence and this is why anti humanism posthumanism post anthropocentrism they are not the same they carry very different archives they carry very different problems and the convergence between the two is a real conflagration that is generating and all of these side effects that I'm telling you this true proliferation of discourses exhibitions publications so we need to actually compare notes and we need to make the cartography the object of exchanges and we need to be a little bit meta discursive and see a little bit how this discourse is circulates I'll give you two examples of institutional responses to this conflagration this explosion of knowledge and I hope you will forgive the Anglo centrosome but that's how it goes Oxford University has set up a few years ago a massive Institute run by Nick Bostrom it is called I'm glad you're sitting down the Institute for the future of humanity the ethos of the Institute is transhumanism transhumanism is human enhancement human enhancement through brain implants or rather interfaces between brains computational systems clinical psychology philosophy of mind millions in subsidies incredible postdocs and PhDs so get in there artists are very welcome so long as you have your maths and physics under control program the project its Oxford the project is very simple it it just it tells you everything we need to know it's called super intelligence and the idea is to assist human species in this transition towards higher levels of computational ability Nick Bostrom had gave a bad review of my book is as well optimistic to think that we're already posthuman our brains is much too slow we cannot keep up with the computational networks we need quite a lot of enhancement to keep up with the speed of our computer networks you wish that we were post human we are still all too human incredibly interesting because then you get the massive investment somebody has invested millions in the super intelligence program this is actually considered a serious scientific project you try to go in ask for money for a critical posthumanist project or please and the people the Grants Commission will tell you that this is really not a priority but super intelligence is notice the entrance the entry point for computational networks the computational net was that run our economy the stock exchange our defense system algorithmic culture as Matthew fula and my Goldsmith colleagues call it the computational nature of our social Nexus is at the heart of it and in relation to the computational networks our brains are a little bit on the dumb side we are slow and and and the species need to be enhanced at the brain they don't talk about of course and the rest just the brain will be very interesting to see the division of labor here between brain and body how there is a definition of the brain as just this black box that can be plugged into computers nobody there the disembodiment factor incredibly crucial to the way the transhumanist work because if we if the body could enter the discussion of course a couple of elements would change to disengage the brain from the rest of the body and the brain is not embodied the body is not in brained there is a Cartesian dichotomy at work here that's ops for some of you can really get a career there so put it on your list Cambridge of course it's a bit like the regatta they never do one a Cambridge answers and they answer with the usual Cambridge compromises with a new Institute which is open only about four or five months ago the Cambridge Centre for the study of global risk and what is the global risk well they said it's a do it's a do all sort of takes it's some of it is all rigged that type of risk the risk that computational networks may take over the human species but much stronger risk for them is that the human species may not be able to catch up with the computational systems so that we have to assist the humans in this transition in this mutation they also do some of the Anthropocene they look at some of the devastation caused by the times but global risk enters the issue and and massive doses of ethics massive doses of neo-kantian Martha Nussbaum frontiers of justice and ethics and a dialogue with Oxford that is interesting to say the least I would check these two very carefully in a peer aware academia is starved for resources these two institutes are gathering millions in subsidies the message seems to me clear if the two top university of the world in my part of the world are going this way the idea of a mutation of our species is absolutely on the board it's absolutely oh it's an open secret something here is shifting pretty massively and and this and whatever is shifting has enormous importance and for policymakers and i would argue for our economy in a minute so much so that we are devoting whole Institute's to the future what do we call the entity that we are so very anxious about the entity whose transition whose mutation we are trying to monitor we are calling that entity humanity and I want you to put that and park that idea for the moment because that humanity I think is one of the issues that I want to take up in work if you want to look across the field of scholarship anxiety about the US the human is everywhere before he died and I miss him every day Ulrich Beck was working on negative cosmopolitanism a sense of being together in on a sinking ship is the Titanic syndrome we are in this together we is humanity this is the Anthropocene the unemployment crisis the feminization of labor this is the catastrophe and we is the subject or the catastrophe I would say literature cinema is so into the past anthropocentric demise horror films and disaster movies and how many times have we watched in Hollywood films the destruction of humanity I think times and I think this that there's an exercise to be done here comparing the halation in the Cold War the nuclear war with the type of devastation that were getting in post Cold War disasters movie and for those of you that thought that the film avatar was the future apart from think again I think you're in the middle of this disk absolute projection of a new humanity on the ruins of the previous body avatar is a crippled war veteran the projects himself into this absolutely new world the new humanity digitally mediated multi sex multi species humanimal as Stacy Elana public humanities and of the new and a kind of kind a queer theory and my political culture we are in it with a vengeance and there is a long long tradition in queer he'll be GT politics to Ally the margin the socially marginal people with extraterrestrial entities from Australia going to all of feminists nonfiction you get the alliances of women gays dogs migrants and extraterrestrial united against white men there's a lot of literature on Barbara Creed is my favorite on the the monstrous feminine and and if you know the classic postmodernist trilogy which is important in fact for films of aliens you get a complete breakdown on this multiple sexuality multiple genders multiple reproduction species and system in outer space that's the only problem there in outer space and so that trend has now become what I which I called the Gothic tradition the extra-terrestrial as a rebellion tradition is rampant in queer theory and the best example would be Jack Judith harbors time with Lady gaga feminism where you get the combination of monstrosity mutation digital mediation and wanting out out of the humans I think if there is a category that is not nostalgic about the human spirit has to be the radical edge of queer theories I am out of here sort of thing but out of here is really out of the human species with that old antiquated biblical and type of reproduction and by the way I can imagine us going up to the Oxford Institute and say I heard you're redesigning humanity can we actually design it together I would personally like to phase out menstruation completely completely just it's a mistake of evolution it has to be how can anything so inefficient and be still around but and IO can end up being your laughter actually confirms the absolute in political impossibility of such a statement whatever redesigning of you the humanity is going on here it does not involve there's sort of major deviations from the biblical script one way or the other and I think the very reason why we even have these institutes in the UK to begin with I want you to remind you of academic politics is that the George Bush administration had banned biogenetic and stem-cell research in the United States as being non-christian it was a religious reason for banning biogenetic research and as a result biogenetic research migrated to the UK to China and at the moment China is doing even more advanced research than we are so the reason the source of this already a veto a Christian veto from the United States and this is where the USA only do information technologies are pretty hopeless at biotech which is a British thing giving us a new brand of biogenetic critical theory coming out of the UK that we hadn't seen in a long time so these are example but I would like to hear more from you in the art world and the extent to which and a sort of anxiety and fascination for the capacity the capacity for mutation the way in which that is being constructed and circulating in social theory it is sheer panic but that the Christian religion is the only religion that has an intrinsic link to reason Christianity is the only religion that has an intrinsic link to reason if this is so a burma's is quite justified in being in a fit of panic about what is happening to us Fukuyama 2002 slaughtered our 2009 and 9 by now moral in cognitive panic about what is happening to us is at an element of social theory which is being counteracted by a massive return of very traditional ethics neo-kantian ethics and say Martha Nussbaum two down today is really almost the flagbearer of the return of classical values and not only humanity but the humanity that defines itself as transcendental consciousness moral universalism and a European specificity in being able to identify Europe as the place where those issues are considered a serious and so that keep Nussbaum in mind because she pops up everywhere and I think it is the dominant line this means that if you want your research grants that is the line that you run called the research grant that's what you run for real life to keep intelligent you have to read Donna Haraway 1985 the Jane Eyre figure of the human is in trouble it was already clear in the early days of Margaret Thatcher the queen of camp the woman of masculine masculine Isis masculinized as politics she handbags people when she needs to she cries when she needs to straw Denari piece of work but what a tragedy for the working class what a tragedy for all of us on the Left heroine I tell mid-90s talks about the extent to which the authenticity of our species is now in the human genome program program the man the taxonomic type becomes a man the brand and I think this this kind of that human did the genomic moment as the end of a generic understanding of the human is scientifically and of the greatest importance brian Masumi coming in from the delors camp talks about x-men a genetic matrix embedded in the materiality of the human species integrity just a set of biochemical modes expressing the mutability of our species heart and Negri from a very different tradition not that they know more about science but they talk about an anthropological exodus from the dominant the definition of the human and again a little footnote if you look at the scholarship there is a really interesting division of labor shaping up since the 1990s you get the great criticism of globalization you get hard to Negri Lazaretto the Italian school looking at labor relations looking at the new precariat looking at the macro political but not getting at an idea of what contemporary science is and I get contemporary scientists redesigning the 21st century without any idea about social justice and some crossovers very very few it is now with the generations of the 40 year olds of today that we actually have people with scientific groundings being able to hold a political discourse there is nothing more pathetic than a philosopher trying to pretend that you understand modern science it is pathetic it's a very very complicated field we get it almost obviously wrong this is why I'm very careful and I'm going on secondary literature Lovely's gross but I think the Darwin book is just wrong it is not so and between Darwin and now we've had generations of evolutionary thinker Stephen Jay Gould alone would have to be addressed as a major figure also because is the left-wing scientists so here we have for : analysis of discursive fields that need to be reconnected and a job for the art world to do that you are the great bridge builders and you can use bits of science and connected to the bits of the political because you're allowed to in academia with the scientific rows and rows of assessment it is a lot more difficult I hope to have convinced you that there is an explosion of the human to convince you that our institutional interest a stake and a massive scholarship on it I'm now going to demolish that argument by saying excuse me but we were not humans in the same way to begin with to introduce another line of argument which is coming into this discussion from post-colonial race feminist and queer theories well I'm really very sorry that the human is in trouble but was I human were women human were blacks Jews and gays transgender people human since when as the human be taken as an all-inclusive category and the moment you enter the discussion with this first of all you need the first gin and tonic of the day because it demolishes the premise argument after 11:00 it Austria was allowed so I thought we are safe so it's all of a sudden it illuminates retrospectively everything I've been saying until now where is the post-colonial andreas analysis in the Institute for the future of humanity where are the radical epistemologies for the last 30 years have shown that the human is a normative category that indexes access to power to be humanized means you are giving a number of privileges Linnaeus classification of species has the animals starting at the African that the last of the humans the first of the animals humans women when did we become fully human according to Aristotle our intelligence is limited to the nicest necessities of reproduction we have lacked speculative reason until yesterday according to the white male philosophers this is why we couldn't be educated may I remind you universities are 900 years old in Europe we've been in at best for 80 years on a good day there's a connection between women and animals between Jews between blacks non Europeans and animal animal ization bestial ization the gays the transgenders these are not for the humans so if we are not fully human to begin with the whole discussion or the posterman needs to be twisted again and we have to suit it through with other categories intersectionality but also the idea of not assuming that the posthuman is past power but it is post class plus post gender and this is the debate with the Cree abrogate is very cute but it is not immediately posted post human does not equate post gender just be pure and Livingstone very strong on this reintroducing the classical sociological variables of power and difference in this debate that tends to be abstract in a very effective and also cognitive manner we know that the standard by which the human was defined where here we go again the humanistic the human is men the measurable things that's the human the human of humanity is what de leurs calls somebody who is implicitly assumed to be masculine white urbanized speaking a standard language heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full taxpaying citizen of a recognised polity that is the human how many make the great how many actually marry Monday before Immanuel Kant a citizen was precisely one of those accountants it enos is a free man who does not have to work for his living by Kant definition I don't think anybody here would be a citizen because I believe that even the men here have to work for their living well that was enough for Immanuel Kant not to be a citizen can you see my auntie humanism emerging my skepticism of this and it is yes thank you very much sir but really if you happen to be one of the historical categories that don't make the grades quite frankly you're human doesn't do much for me so for human very welcome what a chance for those who were not human to begin me can you see of course it is not that simple because those who were not human to begin with even discursively enhanced to the production of the radical epistemology that we call critical theory over the last thirty years even through post-colonial race and feminist theories those marginal subjects do not make the did not do not make it to the control room of the great post human mutation and I don't think anybody is inscribing post-colonial race of feminist theory in the script of the posthuman we critical post humanists are doing that and is precisely the purpose of my book to bring critical post human perspective saying remember that we were not all human to begin with though is that kind of not an issue anymore and and I think that the extent to which discussions about the posthuman are why ping out all the political debates on differences on fragmentation marginalization and forms of uttering that is one of the great concerns that I have with the state of the scholarship at the moment and I repeat the Oxford Institute for the future of humanity has to inscribe some sort of understanding that marginalization class segmentation and new forms of labour oppressions are everywhere and they are still being carried by the same empirical social subjects that have been historically the representative of negative difference sexualized racialized naturalized others are still doing the bulk of the labor so thank you for Humanity but what is this humanity and what are the terms of our engagement with it I don't want to take more time on Foucault and anti humanism I am very happy to have you disagree with me and say well humanism is the best that we have for me humanism is an overinflated definition of man as the measure of all things that defines himself by what it excludes as much as by what it includes and I cannot share humanistic faith be it in March the news bonds version or with Simone de Beauvoir and socialist humanism I would rather run with the Wolves with the bacteria's with the chic heads and I'd rather go with the animal and others any time but I am most very aware that is this is a mood a sensibility a bit bizarre I must agree but I think it's important in our discussion so you're very happy - I'm very happy if you are more in love with anthropos that I am I would have the the cats and the dogs and the chickens and the bats ended up dolphins any time now third element of this then I promise you I am a delusion so we go by plateaus and each and each plateau contradicts the previous one so at the end you have a choreography of a epistemological differences that you can work with all of these discussions guess what are not happening in a vacuum these discussions are happening in the context was a very specific economic system that we will call for the lack of a better word advanced capitalism why advanced has always been my question this is one the most brutal primitive system of accumulation why call it advanced I suppose because it rests on the technology okay let's swallow the bitter pill advanced and capitalism which functions on computational system we have understood that from previous conversation it functions with high levels of technological mediation without computational system there is no stock exchange there is no economy there is no defense system there is no university we run on machines our lives are run by algorithms as donna haraway put it again in the middle of the 80s machines are so alive while humans are so inert and isn't that true we are so depressed what a bunch of nincompoops but there with our machines that do all the relationality for us great paper by Helen the global economy in other words is post anthropocentric in its basic structures it runs on machines it's so technologically mediated that we know that the Oxford Institute is saying our brains are too slow thank God we have the computational system so we have a techno scientific culture built on the convergence between biotechnology and information technology which makes the cognitive ability to control the informational codes of all that lives makes that the single most important concern of capitalism but in the cooper advanced capitalism is a system that capitalizes on life and life means the informational codes of all that lives go into the discussion with Vandana Shiva than a Shiva biopiracy what is she teaching us just teaching us that one company Monsanto is the legal owner of the genetic codes of every grain every type of grain available in the market wheat rice barley etc they sell those grains after having them genetically mutated manipulated so that they produce only for one year so you sell it to the farmers of the world they produce products for one year because they've been genetically modified and the year after that they have to buy the seeds again bio piracy but at the source of it one company that owns the genetic code of all that line of what we used to call natural products same for apples for carrots for chickens for the human genome bio genetic control don't go German on me don't freak out put put the universities in the heart of this and the universities are at the core of it Life Sciences is what we get Nobel Prizes for Life Sciences is the pride and joy of our university system they take all the budget of the university as well and two-thirds of the budget European Union research budget garner value Kuwait life sciences buy your genetics the informational code of all that lives now let's stay with that all that lives means all the naturalized sexualized and racialized others all of them no distinction between anthropos and the other species as far as advanced capitalism is concerned they're mixing and matching Tran species with great Glee and we great ease uncle my sister on the one hand various types of xenotransplantation and cell research a nanotechnology to make completely new materials to create new life-forms eight months ago Delft University and MIT synthetic biology the first synthetic hamburger was born had I been a vegan which I will be in a future life I would have popped the champagne synthetic meat we don't have to get it from animals we don't have to raise animals we don't have to kill them I thought half of your vegetarians would be kind of celebrating so why do you look like zombified synthetic me it has all the proteins we can't taste it yet because our nervous system has not been geared but they will wire our brains soon we will be able to taste this isn't this fantastic so why do you look depressed what are you missing what's missing here synthetic biology there's remaking of nature so we have a double-shot barrel here advanced capitalism is a system that capitalizes on life all life forms not only the human and a reverse capitalism us the university being able to make life-forms both with information technology second and biogenetics stem cell nanotechnology we are making life what a moment what excitement so why do you look so depressed what are you missing so the idea here of a post anthropocentric turn in capitalism is perverse opportunistic post anthropocentrism it puts the human at the same level as other species and so far as we can sort of data mining it's about mining information out of all that lives that is the capital melinda cooper calls it life as surplused and melinda cooper being as a feminist connects the life or surface our ability to financial eyes by extracting informational code Malinda connects it to the devastating labor relations that happen in advanced capitalism and whether it is today global chain of care that Helen described whether it is true bodies that don't matter of refugees and asylum-seekers they are trying to enter our shores whether it is in many unregistered invisible type of labour that is very much there but those bodies and as Rumsfeld said in relation to the first Gulf War those body counts don't interest me in visible labor financialization of life advance capitalism is a cognitive system a super clever system and a disaster for those of us who are in the business of producing knowledge because we're in the thick of it again return to my teacher Foucault it is when he took his chair the caleche de France 1966 and on the footsteps of a Polish and a great professor Foucault takes the professorship and it makes his inaugural speech by saying Here I am a great professor following a great professor we're on the eve of May 68 you know what I'm going to do I'm going to turn my professorship into a critique of the power of the professors and and I think I think that move of critiquing power from the location that you inhabit is the beginning of the politics of radical imminence which I will entertain you for the last five minutes but fuko's insightful prediction that the people are in the production of knowledge will be caught in systems for whom the production of knowledge is a high social and economic investment that prediction has turned completely true and the extent to which bio political discourses need to be inserted in our own very practice is absolutely crucial I try to do this in neutral by going to my rector and say you given again three five times more millions to the life sciences than to the humanities and why is that see they make us money through patenting through the production of medicine and in vaccines they generate income what income do you generate pathetic neutral University last year posted a profit it is extraordinary for a university to post a profit so ever guess how much profit did Utrecht University made your life science university make last year 42 million euros thank you okay check what profit University made that's what we are looking at and it is the first time in the history of the monastic academic tradition that we in Europe in the United States the universities are private companies so they have to make a profit in Europe with public with public services what is happening here advanced cognitive capitalism production of life and farming out life putting us very much in a spot so that the best that we can do is itemize and do a cartography of this power relation saying what is up here whatever you're calling the human whatever that is you're making a lot of money out of it whatever that is and it's a good investment this human thing and life is a good steak actually I should invest a bit in lies it's a very nice thing and so you can see that the perversity of this and the complication is this is the same system and Wendy Brown calls it the moral neoliberal system is the same system that when call to accountability will respond through moral responsibility and human rights that is the official ideology of this same system human rights for everybody Martha Nussbaum human rights for plants for animals for cells for bacteria let's give human rights to everything so we can protect it it's very generous on her part because that's the only legal system that we have to protect no newman's its property laws so let's make them human and then we can protect them this is my bacteria that is my cat this is my Fox and we know some of our great activist Donna Haraway are co-owners of way and if anybody kills my whales I can sue them to death it's the only law that we have to protect them so let's give them human rights but you do see how inadequate this is and the ethics of moral responsibility of the individual protects not to talk about power we are making our students cumulate gigantic deaths working in conditions both in time and space that are ridiculous in relation to what the baby boomers had and what we give them is an ethos of individual responsibility be a good entrepreneur of your human capital just look at the missions of the university morale enterpreneurship you are the entrepreneur of the capital that you possess and if you don't do an investment of it don't come and ask for help there's no welfare state there that is going to actually help you under 30 year old bankruptcies in the United Kingdom at the highest levels ever debt due to tuition fees rising progressively and this is the reality the other side of this discuss and I think we can as academic and professors at least build that it but conceptually I think that we need another move we need to go into monastic philosophies that allow us to think the unity of being without going into the rhetoric of a new humanity in other words we need Spinoza the other missing link of critical theory Spinoza as the antidote to Hegelian dialectics the French Spinoza as they call it disparagingly because it is introduced in France and in the 1960s and 70s by the students of a loser and you get an avalanche of phenomenal books you get Pierre master a 1979 Hegel ah Spinoza you get Delors three incredible books of Spinoza and you get early belieber you get of course the first Tony Negri savage anomaly absolutely best book with a preface written by shield dealers in which it says this is an incredible book and of course Tony negra is a very well known terrorist he is wanted by every single police system in the world because of his connection to the Italian terrorism so Foucault has really upset that the lerz befriends this terrorism we have the famous falling out de leurs Foucault over the figure of Navy but the savage anomaly is a fantastic book on the role of the imagination in Spinoza so the friend what we called the post-structuralist were really past Marx's in the sense of post dialectics people they didn't want anymore the dualistic system they went into demonic monism of Spinoza one system one meta intelligent and self-organizing one meta in brain meant of the body embodiment of the brain the brain is in the body sorry Oxford you're investing in the wrong box you generate knowledge at every corner of the human body and you also generate pleasure in every corner of the human body as we know from radical feminism but that's another discussion to disengage the production of intelligence from the embodiment is a crime and it is a scientific era Spinoza reread with Derrida with the lerz bringing in a different philosophy of time that allows us to think the autopoietic nature of what we used to call nature we're all part of it Jenny Lord my beloved teacher two fabulous books on Spinoza part of nature and Spinoza ethics and moral guidance and Jenny Lloyd collective imaginings trying to big Spinoza's politics into the discussion how about we start from another political ontology yes one matter but differentiated and trance PCs and differentially oriented capable of meta stability through careful negotiations and we can talk about the politics of this yes a new transmission alliances but does it have to be a humanity that brings back the same old dudes I'm quoting an Allen because I love that dude part the same of image of thought as that man does that have to be the common denominator or do we need a new humanity that is postulated on fear the humanity the emerges from the tragedy of the Anthropocene we are in this together but we cannot be considered as fixed category humanity is not there waited to be in this together humanity is a missing people it's something that we need to reconstitute multiple humanity's in trans-species alliances capable of becoming world in a variety of ways diversity complexity hybridization thinkable within a monastic philosophy it's all within a reach so why are we once again narrowing down the possibilities and bringing back that tired of man in relation to which my generation made it quite clear god is dead man is dead and I'm not feeling too good myself but there's no reason to keep on fighting and keep on thinking thank you for thank you thank you very much shoot there's so many questions back left begging some looking forward to yeah so please don't thank you very much for a wonderful presentation in the aspect of reflection of their more than an tapas in Christmas three series today popular that is post humanity inhumanity and trans community related to transhuman t I want to yeah actually explained its near theory of Wolfgang garish yeah ahead put forward a theory transhuman other trans woman with this serie he tried to find the combination of human beings as cultural beings and natural being that is on one side human human beings are premyer primarily natural beings that intervenes that is all that his cancer kappa capabilities are developed in the context of nature yeah natural characters on the other side in comparison to other natural spaces human beings have abilities with which other natural spaces out as natural animals are not comparable yeah with this series we tried to find a balance point it's a human vision a net nature and culture yeah or sethonium and this endeavor thank you but this is the the transhumanist is the domina didn't have this particular variation but it's a variation on the oxford team you just you just pitch the human on a certain Spinoza would say on a certain faculty now neural power and effectivity reproduction you define the human as a specific capacity and then you make that the basis for every construction of something that you would call humanity in negotiations with technology I think it begs the question I think I think that for me it's a reductive methodology and I can see why it serves in the Oxford case advanced capitalism because it promotes robotics and it promotes all computational systems but in terms of reconstituting social communities we have to bring in all the stuff that and the transhumanist don't want to see the body corpses waste rubbish and the dead breeze of modernity the devastation of modernity you see public immediate theories that I love dearly is looking for two things together with Jennifer gabrels they're looking at digital waste what happens to laptops and computers when they die and they usually get shipped back to third world countries get dismembered and by the same people that assemble them in the first place so there is a digital proletariat that is disassembling dead technologies this one trackers and digital waste is a whole thing because then is this part of computational network or is it something else is the media a material foundation or is it just discourses and this material is if the media is a material foundation then we're going to have digital garbage and and we're going to have a discourse and a practice about this the other thing that you see Parrikar does that makes it again a new materialist is it takes a laptop or an iPhone and this progresses according to its elements to the chemical and mineral elements using the table of periodicals and it's done a studies of the type of minerals that are necessary to bring you to the last generation of superfast chips that activate your iPhone 6 or 37 whatever you have this week it only lasts a week anyway you're already late immediately at least you being one so you see this creates the computer brings it out to the mineral traces the minerals to the mines and the mines - geopolitical relations we are fighting a lot of wars to protect our minds I mean that type of discussion of computational networks is what I would like to see materially grounded media is not a theory or sexist glamorous pictures of perfect bodies floating on our screen it's hard labor relations it's mining companies it's China buying up every lithium deposit they can put their hands on much to the distress of the Western Allies who are trying to contain the massive power of this mining giant it is it is wars it is corpses is it so I would like to bring all that stuff in that transhumanist is much too clean it's a very very reductive I think we have to look at the rubbish that we have in orbit in our atmosphere this is so much rubbish in orbit around the earth that there are laser projects that their communication arrays are not going in so we need to clear up the garbage that we put in outer space it's this sort of thing that I would like to see a much more embedded a relational centrally driven neo Spinoza's materialist account of what could be new humanities and crucial to pluralize them not to come in with the new humanity because there we have a few difficulties and that new humanity will be absolutely transnational but it would be very much class indexed and it will be a certain global class and across the world living the disposable bodies everywhere disposable body is also a good way to enter this discussion it's a big one so I keep it short do we have any more what do you think of a non eugenic perhaps like turtle article transhumanism one which is not clean but will still engage biotechnical or manipulation it's one absolutely only possible futures one that I would definitely need endorse it's a variation on the Alliance of social minorities with hybrids from outer space and possible futures there's a long tradition of techno teratology as you know I've written extensively about this of imagining new monstrous formation but with a faction not with any just fascination for the different the field where this research is happening is disability studies and but there are now new brands and the work that you do on think complex health studies but you presented yesterday which him is and it's broadening to different types of bodies saying this body belongs to hey humanity to Karl Lagerfeld again not my favorites but I read such thing Karl Alfred said recently that is very very happy with media culture because media culture has improved the looks of the species I swear to God it has because everybody's is following a certain format throw in Botox and plastic surgery everybody is imitating certainly more so indeed there is a new uniformity emerging and you must have edge experience of going to non-western countries and seeing crippled bodies and otherwise form body think oh my god by biodiversity we don't have it in the West anymore we all more or less anatomically morphologically configured according to a model it's called progress I'm not going to be nostalgic but there is a uniformity yes so biodiversity and this will have incredible consequences there are a couple of essays from race studies say let's treat a non non-white African American as a different type of human let's embrace difference under the heading of biodiversity and make that spin assist eclis nonessential is because Pinos has been processed but allowing Vitara here that the basic unit of reference to reconstitute another type of community and that would put femaleness in a very different story from femininity which we can absolutely let go a float in the market of advanced capitalism but femaleness as the capacity of certain bodies to do the unimaginable to create other bodies but it's Ordinary what an incredible power that is of course the gender system has ruined it okay but leave that aside for a moment look at it as a capacity the certain bodies have to do that if you're going to be Spinoza's politics this flips into a line of becoming and and this would be a line of really interesting becoming from a materialist radical feminism based on femaleness and not on the trappings of femininity just an aside because I adore her virginia woolf in love with Vita sackville-west saying she's more female than feminine and then people say that Virginia didn't understand sexuality they just don't never a clue what it's a more female and feminine and less my to go this I was expecting question on the political great nobody I just want to push you on whether or not there's a tension between the Neo spinner systick valorisation of the body and the fook or D an idea of the self is something which is constructed and imposed upon the body so particularly in the sort of critical posthumanist criticism of transhumanism as being obsessed with disembodied notions of minds such as the idea of you know applauding you know your personal neural network and simulating it on a computer the critique seems to be the best in what seems to be what seems to me to be some conception of the embodiment of subjectivity as being somehow more natural there seems to be in this kind of deal spin assist ik criticism the Alliant sort of theological normativity that seems to be at all this with a certain accordion conception of of self construction so great question is would require much more time than we have but I try to do my best on this let's start from the end and then we can go to this kind of bifurcation Foucault Delors in this because there is a problem with a biopolitical here clearly but let's start from this idea of embodiment as being necessarily a naturalised sort of ontological site and that would make and all kinds of transformations difficult to and would make processes of change difficult sorry morning with a bad throat this is essentially Hegel's critique of Spinoza which is repeated today in buhdeuce critique of the lowers and it's a really interesting debate history philosophy is intensely political and we could ask ourselves the question if Spinoza had in the 17th century already an understanding or the unity of matter with flows what speaking my language with flows of becoming how come his philosophy disappeared and we are in for two and a half century of Descartes because that is a Foucault lien analysis of disgust how come because dualism of course is a much simpler system of governance if there is a Jew allistic oppositional mind-body us then male-female nature culture ladies and gentlemen you can run the world on this and we did because the dualism asked them is the political ontology peon Imperialism it makes us go into the world bringing them what humanism right reason and the Enlightenment so it is an instrument of governance and and I think the dualism is really with the humanistic sauce poured on it has been the pretext for the multiple Wars we've been fighting especially to the 19th century and and many many people converge on this so we lose Spinoza I think he goes critique of Spinoza as some sort of mystical plunging nature passive quietest and completely kills the guy until we get him resurrected much more recently I disagree with the reading not only on the basis of what the nurse does to him which would be another question but I disagree with that real really in on the basis of Spinoza himself Spinoza was a laborious Spinoza was a man who worked with his hands it was kicked out of academia it was kicked out of the Jewish community he lived in a little shed making instruments that manual element of his life because I am still enough of a materialist to look at the resonance between material conditions of production and discursive formations shows in his work his idea of nature contains artifacts for Spinoza there is no ontological difference between the lenses that he was making and a pair an airport or a human in terms of the fact the criteria that he uses is the capacity the potential the level of intensity of that particular thing how it functions and negotiates in the world whether the thing is born or made for Spinoza in the 17th century already is not an issue it has a nature culture philosophy which already displaces the centrality of anthropos a we can do certain things you know animals can do other things among other things animals suffer so it's a famous letter on suffering spirit of extraordinary stuff and I think we need to ask ourselves why are we still going with e regalian reading ah Spinoza can't we give him a chance and really mean his own terms enters but you and dollars repetitive same story but use critique of Delors oh yeah this is a kind of plunging into monastic ontologies then we cannot possibly have a politics as if the only definition of the political had to be the oppositional us and then enters Carl Schmitt if somebody can tell me why what's left of the left has to go to couch meet the legal theorist of the Third Reich to get a political theory somebody will do me a favor it's just I think it's it is just like a symptom of debacle that we have to fish out an oppositional theory of friend and enemy to give the left apologies no wonder we're losing every single possible election this is bankruptcy why not redefine the political as the reconstitution of communities the planes of eminence the missing people and recompose the political as differential variations within a common plane of becoming why is it not enough to have the political as the radical imminence subversion and recording of power in the places where we are exercising why do we always need a Winter Palace a Bastille somebody to kill and then we have the political there's something here about the role of violence in the political ontology that really needs to be put on the agenda the only people who read Spinoza with any degree of understanding are the environmentalists and the peace movements essentializing him gaya iPod gaya Juan Lovelace it's a Spinoza for kids but making him holy which but but if you then shoot the lerz through it is in the antidote you have a perfectly good political philosophy one that assumes that human beings like everything that lives have potential act as empowerment's have capacities the distinction potestas potentia the two phases of power and Foucault the positive phase of power and on the basis of that reconstituting patterns of becoming that would allow us to actually and become a political subject why is that not enough why do we need meta revolutionary theories I think that that would be the quarrel here you

Channel: Fridericianum

Views: 18,695

Rating: 4.799283 out of 5

Keywords: Rosi Braidotti, Fridericianum (Museum), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Symposium (Type Of Conference), Contemporary Art (Art Period/Movement), Inhuman (Exhibition)

Id: gNJPR78DptA

Length: 66min 57sec (4017 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2015