Rethinking Subjectivity: Technology, Ecology, and Critique



Over the last twenty years, ecological and technological developments have prompted a rethinking of human subjectivity: in the age of the Anthropocene and an increased hybridisation of technology and biology, we are no longer sure about the limits of the human subject. As Rosi Braidotti therefore writes: ‘We need a subject position worthy of our times’ (Posthuman Knowledge (2019)). These seminars interrogate what such a subject position might look like through the study of literature, film and philosophy from the last couple of decades, but also going back to earlier texts that may inspire new approaches to the present challenges. Engagements with late-Enlightenment writing and Romantic natural philosophy reveal parallels with contemporary debates in ecology and pharmacology and provoke new questions to be asked. Likewise, modernist engagements with biology and technology in literature and film remain a key reference point for current theories of non-human subjectivities and speculative materialisms.

This special subject will thus engage with three key questions: are we still ‘human’, were we ever ‘human’, and if so, what did and does ‘we’ mean? Topics and names discussed may include: cybernetics, general ecology, the world brain, science fiction, cyborg, contagion, pharmaceutics, posthumanism and transhumanism, Gregory Bateson, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Stéphane Mallarmé, Franz Kafka, Alain Resnais, and Elfriede Jelinek. 

Some suggested reading: Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019); Donna Harraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016); N. Katharine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012)