Citações DANIEL

Se pensarmos a ciência como meio “scienceasasourceof illumination,power,progress,

and even redemption” p. 33

Herbert George Wells em A modern Utopia ‘‘man is the unnatural animal, the rebel
child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful
hand that reared him.”

Closing the gap between superstition and rationality, Dr. Frankenstein replaces
occultism and alchemy with electricity in order to bring his technological creature to
life. P. 41
For the nineteenth century as well as future generations, Frankenstein represents a
pessimistic vision of science and its potentially dire effects 41

As Langdon Winner puts it, “Provided with no plan for its existence, the technological
creation enforces a plan upon its creator.... He [Dr. Frankenstein] never moves beyond
the dream of progress, the thirst for power, or the unquestioned belief that the products
of science and technology are an unqualified blessing for humankind.” In the twenty-
first century, Frankenstein—with its technophobic projection of an artificial human—
also crystallizes troubling posthuman issues that center around robots, androids,
cyborgs, clones, nanobots, and the genetic technology that engineers life 43

The gothic myth of artificial humans—the golem, the homunculus, and the Frankenstein
monster—will transform into the robots, cyborgs, androids, and clones of science
fiction. 45
ungrammatical monster. 55

Dr. Frankenstein asserts authority over nature, over the body. His manufacture of the
biotechnological creature—stealing organs from corpses, grotesquely suturing body parts
together, and animating the dead meat with electricity—encourages a condescending view of
human physicality. As such, Frankenstein reiterates a recurrent theme in dystopian science
fiction—what Chad Walsh describes as ‘‘the disparagement of the physical universe, nature and
the human body.’’ Frequently, oppression of the flesh represents the dehumanizing effects of
technology, such as the devolved flabby bodies that resemble large chunks of mozzarella in
‘‘The Machine Stops,’’ or the stoop-shouldered, jerky bodies of the workers in Metropolis. 56

HAYLES
POST HUMAN 1 = HUMAN + INTELLIGENT MACHINE

WHAT IS POSTHUMANISM? What is the posthuman? Think ofit as a point of view

characterized by the follOwing assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or
definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety ofsites. It is meant to be
suggestive rather than prescriptive.) First, the posthuman view privileges informational
pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen
as an accident of history rather than an inevitabilityoflife. Second, the posthuman view
considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition
long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an
evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only
a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks ofthe body as the original
prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other
prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth,
and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human
being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the
posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism,
robot teleology and human goals. P2
The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a
material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and
reconstruction. P.3
it is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does not require the
subject to be a literal cyborg. P.4
If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories
rather than the ground ofbeing, my dream is aversion ofthe posthuman that embraces the possibilities of
information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied
immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands
human life is embedded in a material world ofgreat complexity, one on which we depend for our
continued survival. P. 5

JUDITH
The importance of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1816) within the Gothic tradition, modern
mythology, the history of the novel, and a cultural history of fear and prejudice cannot be
emphasized too strongly. Frankenstein not only gives form to the dialectic of monstrosity itself
and raises questions about the pleasures and dangers of textual production, it also demands a
rethinking of the entire Gothic genre in terms of who rather than what is the object of terror. By
focusing upon the body as the locus of fear, Shelley's novel suggests that it is people (or at least
bodies) who terrify people, not ghosts or gods, devils or monks, windswept castles or labyrinthine
monasteries. P. 28

The monster, in various readings then, is literature, women's creativity, Mary Shelley herself; the
monster is class struggle, the product of industrialization, a representation of the proletariat; the
monster is all social struggle, a specific symbol of the French Revolution, the power of the masses
unleashed; the monster is technology, the danger of science without conscience, the autonomous
machine. As Franco Moretti so aptly states, like Dracula, Frankenstein's creature is a "totalizing
monster"2 — one, in other words, who threatens to never be vanquished, one immune to
temporary restorations of order and peace. 29

The chameleonic nature of this monster makes it a symbol of multiplicity and indeed invites
multiple interpretations. 29

The form of the novel is its monstrosity; its form opens out onto excess because, like the monster
of the story, the sum of the novel’s parts exceeds the whole. P. 31

The question, What is it? in other words, has to be directed both at the book and the monster. […]
What is it? The answer, of course, lies in the impossibility of pinning definition to this peculiar
form. 31

Gothic, I suggest, beginning with Frankenstein, is a textual machine, a technology that transforms
class struggle, hostility towards women, and tensions arising out of the emergent ideology of
racism into what look like sexual or psychosexual battles between and within individuals. 33

Monsters, like the one Frankenstein builds, embody a multiplicity of fears and invite the reader to
participate in charting the shapes and contours of each one. 34
WOLFE
posthumanism may be traced to the Macy conferences on cybernetics from 1946 to 1953 and
the invention of systems theory involving Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Norbert
Wiener, John von Neumann, and many other fgures from a range of felds who
converged on a new theoretical model for biological, mechanical, and communicational
processes that removed the human and Homo sapiens from any particularly privileged position
in relation to matters of meaning, information, and cognition. Xii

Arguably the best-known inheritor of the “cyborg” strand of posthumanism is what is now
being called “transhumanism”—a movement that is dedicated, as the journalist and writer Joel
Garreau puts it, to “the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional
capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of
life span xiii TRANSHUMAN
As one of the central fgures associated with transhumanism, the Oxford philosopher Nick
Bostrom, makes clear, this sense of posthumanism derives directly from ideals of human
perfectibility, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism and the
Enlightenment. FOY NICK BOSTROM xiii
POSTHUMANISMO FOR HER: Against this background, I emphasize two crucial points
regarding my sense of posthumanism in this book. The frst has to do with perhaps
the fundamental anthropological dogma associated with humanism and invoked by Balibar’s
reference to the humanity/animality dichotomy: namely, that “the human” is achieved by
escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary,
but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether. In this
respect, my sense of posthumanism is the opposite of transhumanism, and in this light,
transhumanism should be seen as an intensifcation of humanism xv
posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being “after” our
embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the
fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly
criticizes. xv
My sense of posthumanism is thus analogous to Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical rendering
of the postmodern: it comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names
the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its
technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools
and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture) of which Bernard Stiegler
probably remains our most compelling and ambitious theorist—and all of which comes before
that historically specifc thing called “the human” that Foucault’s archaeology excavates. 12 But it
comes after in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering
of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is
increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of
new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us), a new mode of thought that comes after
the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as
a historically specifc phenomenon. Xv-xvi
As R. L. Rutsky points out with regard to Hayles’s governing theoretical model, “The
posthuman cannot simply be identifed as a culture or age that comes ‘after’ the human, for the
very idea of such a passage, however measured or qualifed it may be, continues to rely upon a
humanist narrative of historical change. . . . If, however, the posthuman truly involves a
fundamental change or mutation in the concept of the human, this would seem to imply that
history and culture cannot continue to be fgured in reference to this concept.” Xvii -> R. L.
Rutsky, “Mutation, History, and Fantasy in the Posthuman,” in
“Posthuman Conditions,” ed. Neil Badmington, special issue, Subject Matters:
A Journal of Communication and the Self vol. 3, no. 2–vol. 4, no. 1 (2007): 107.