PROJECT INTENTIONS
By shedding new light on the intersection of critical posthumanism and memory studies, this project, titled ‘Futures of Memory’, encourages critical conversations between and among scholarly and non-academic communities. Our project challenges traditional critical-theoretical boundaries by examining how received conceptions of the human are inflected by our understanding and valuation of memory; how memory, in short, may be the way to salvage what is best in the human as traditionally conceived. This project therefore aims to advance knowledge around the current state of memory studies within a critical posthumanist framework and encourage an expanded appreciation of a wide range of films and literary texts, many of which have not been investigated from this interdisciplinary perspective. Another potential outcome is the generation of enhanced curricular and teaching material, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Through the ‘Futures of Memory’ blog-archive, which we are launching here, we will make our findings accessible for scholars to include in their own courses on such topics as science fiction film and literature, memory studies, critical posthumanism, as well as courses on specific films, texts, genres, theories, or theorists.
This project also aims to enhance knowledge of the ways that digital technology, social media, and the online attention economy influence the dissemination of knowledge of the past in relation to human self-understanding. Today, more than ever, it is important for academics, educators, writers, and filmmakers to take a leading role in discussions about the significance and value of memory for an ethical life in a culturally and economically globalized, and ever-more technologically supported world. The research represented here will enrich and enliven discussions about these topics, especially as they pertain to the everyday lives of ethically minded, socially engaged people, at the same time helping us to see a bit better the world in all its complexity. If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that learning can and must happen beyond the boundaries of campus, traditional classrooms, and scholarly methods of disseminating knowledge. For this reason, some of this project’s key knowledge mobilization activities will take a virtual form (such as this blog). All research materials will be posted and archived on our blog to enhance their accessibility and international reach.
What is posthumanism, or the posthuman?
It is our contention that the posthuman is the analytical category for the present moment of cataclysmic change, as inclusive and as multidisciplinary as it is urgent, and the place to begin is with the ongoing ‘deconstruction’ of the humanist subject, historically configured as male, white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and so forth. In the posthuman era, conventional understandings of what it means to be human have come under critique. For many people, the category of the human, as placeholder for a person who is white, privileged, and so on is no longer sustainable as a basis for individual identity or collective action. Critical posthumanist thought is based in the de-centering of the human species from its position of ontological and ethical privilege, and the critique of human exceptionalism that has underpinned much of occidental culture since the 18th century and the emergence of the modern period. Posthumanist philosophers tend to agree that transhumanist posthumanism—as in the augmented or artificial ‘humans’ in science fiction—privileges the ontological status of embodied (or disembodied) forms of the human-after-the-human. In other words, one becomes posthuman by transcending the ‘merely’ human by technological or other means. Critical posthumanism, by contrast, foregrounds epistemological questions stemming from such a critique, and the sentient and/or affective forms that emerge in the wake of the human. In this project, therefore, to be posthuman means to embrace radically new ways of imagining the all-too-human faculty of memory in the absence of the human subject as conventionally conceived.