Posthumanism Through the Lense of Cinema Main Menu Posthumanism Through the Lense of Cinema

Posthumanism and Cinema

42493
As posthumanism pushes us to imagine a future outside of humanism's imagination and to reject the futures imagined by humanism, in my project, I will look at the place of technology in the future in relation to human life. With technology constantly evolving, concerns and fears about technology are becoming more prevalent.

We are at a point for humanity where I believe we are all aware that the future will be much different than the present we are currently experiencing, whether it be due to technological advancement, the environment or politics. The feverishness and fear of the future of humans are felt more than ever. We try to imagine these futures and illustrate them in many contexts that we can see in literature and movies. For this reason, to explore the different imaginations of the future of humans with technology, I decided to take the medium of cinema. It is an art form that is said to be fiction, and yet it is one of the adequate mediums to illustrate the future we are heading towards. Even if literature offers a good overview of the posthuman future in both theory and fiction. Films have been my way of understanding theory in class throughout the semester. I will be analyzing three films in an attempt to answer my questions and draw my own conclusions. I have decided to take WALL-E (2008), I, Robot (2004) and Her (2013). 

In this project, I am trying to answer questions that are way too big and will never have a clear answer, so here it is about the process of how I am trying to make sense of those big existential questions. To give more structure, here are the questions that direct my project:

WhatWhyHow
So while I am trying to move away from a more theoretical framework by looking at popular culture, I will look at the contradiction of humans' fear of technology and its evolution. However, we can deny the relationship between humans and technology, especially their co-dependency. 

As a point of entry in my project Rosi Braidotti with her book "Posthumanism," is the foundation of my project. The chosen contradiction of technology and human fits into the module of the course on "Posthumanism as a relational ontology - becoming" as we're looking at new forms of living in this module. We can't obscure the idea of becoming- whether it is a machine or other transformative becoming as it has taken fundamental importance recently with famous transhumanists, and it's a narrative that has been heavily used in movies. I chose this contradiction as it was my first contact with posthumanism and critique of it; I thought posthumanism meant transhumanism but found out it critiques it but doesn't deny the presence of technology. I will try to explain it and find solutions, as the subject has always been very popular. An excellent way to observe the different alternatives of becoming-machine is to turn to films that give us an excellent visual representation of the contradiction to analyze.

I will conduct my final project by analyzing selected films, their content, and their message to find possible alternatives to the relationship between humans and technology and possibly a solution to envision a future with them. I will deepen my analysis with the help of different articles and books that will allow me to approach the films from another angle. I have chosen to answer this contradiction with the use of film as it is a medium with which I am most familiar and entertains me the most. However, Braidotti expresses that a great way to understand the inhuman that is caused by technology that causes stress which is a way to find it is in art. She explains that “mechanical ‘others,’ from impressive industrial machinery to banal household appliances, are the coveted objects of collectively funded and socially empowered scientific practices. They are yet another expression of that mixture of fear and desire for technology that art and cinema make manifest. The inhuman aspects, including cruelty and violence, are crucial to the scientific ratio in the modernist era.” (Braidotti 108) Therefore, Cinema reflects the complexity of posthumanism as so many narratives and stories in movies give several alternatives to the human species. It reflects the multitudes of options we can imagine in the future while trying to conceive something other than humans as the central species. On the other hand, my project will not have a clear conclusion, so I invite you to follow me on this journey and path that will allow me to draw my conclusions
 

This page has paths:

  1. Posthumanism Through the Lense of Cinema Diliana Proulx-Castro

Contents of this path:

  1. The lense of Posthumanism
  2. I, Robot (2004)
  3. WALL-E (2008)
  4. Her (2013)
  5. Post-Anthropocentric Cinema
  6. Conclusions