Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
In her chapter entitled Life Beyond Species, Rosi Braidotti outlines her objective to depict the post-anthropocentric subject as detached from the globalized economy. She proposes vital materialism, a monistic theory, as a framework through which to move away from anthropocentric thought. She argues that the current advanced capitalist structures in place act to commodify all forms of life.Braidotti advocates for a zoe-centric perspective which paves the away for a post-anthropocentric worldview as it assigns value to all life.
In Her, the OS (Samantha) is purchased by the protagonist (Theodore) and therefore falls into the traditional anthropocentric commodification of machine life. In this way, Her fails to propose a post-anthropocentric understanding of machine subjectivity.
Through an exploration of portrayals of gender, romance, and emotion in these films, this project seeks to critique the ways in which the demands of popular culture are prone to reverting to humanism– even when the intention is to re-imagine post-human subjectivities. The objective is to distinguish instances of “de-familiarization” from the “perpetuation of familiar regimes” within these films. (Braidotti)
