Life Beyond Species: How can we Portray the Posthuman? Main Menu

Life Beyond Species: Popular Culture's Portrayals of Posthuman Subjectivity

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Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) deals with the increasing intimacy between humans and technology. It tells the story of a relatively anti-social man, named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), who purchases an operating system (OS) with which he eventually falls in love. Samantha, who is voiced by Scarlett Johansson, initially gets to know Theodore through a survey but as the film progresses builds a strong relationship with the protagonist. The film raises issues regarding: the commodification of the non-human ‘other’, the gendered and sexualized non-human ‘other’, and ultimately fails in de-familiarizing the audience and realizing new iterations of posthuman subjectivity.

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) proposes another iteration of human interaction with the non-human ‘other’. While the non-human protagonist, also played by Scarlett Johansson, is embodied in the human form (bringing to the fore many of the familiar tropes of humanist discourse), in many ways her character challenges both phallocentrism (male-domination) and the domination of the human over the non-human ‘other’. Throughout much of the film, her character drives through the city of Glasgow in a white van. She seduces men along the way and convinces them to return to her abode wherein she drowns and consumes them for personal gains. When one man eventually attempts to rape her, she is revealed under the skin to be an otherworldly being.

My Methods
The methods through which I will bring my project into fruition include the option to pursue various paths of humanist, anti-humanist, and posthumanist strains of thought with relation to the two films. The anti-humanist critiques of the films include: a feminist critique, an evaluation of the possibilities for technology as a site of resistance for non-human entities, an exploration of romantic love which resides in a predominantly humanist discourse when applied to the post-human context, and the issues of matter as they are portrayed in these narratives. In particular, this experience will ask the questions of: the nature of the human’s relationship to the AI and its power structures (levels of anthropocentrism), the degree of “de-familiarization” that exists in the portrayal of the AI (post-anthropocentric becoming), and the ways in which the films create new iterations of romance which move away from humanist depictions of romantic love.




 

This page has paths:

  1. Anti-Humanist Critiques of "Her" Ian Malcolm
  2. Life Beyond Species -- Rosi Braidotti Ian Malcolm
  3. Braidotti and "De-familiarization" Ian Malcolm
  4. Subject vs. Object: Portrayals of Non-Human Entities in Film Ian Malcolm
  5. Technological Embodiment -- Bose Speakers Ian Malcolm
  6. Samantha's Embodiment "Under the Skin" Ian Malcolm

Contents of this path:

  1. Anti-Humanist Critiques of "Her"
  2. Anti-humanist Critiques of "Under the Skin"
  3. The North Sea
  4. Samantha's Embodiment through a Posthuman Lens

This page references: