News & Updates

Professor Russell Kilbourn is set to speak at the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative on Tuesday October 28th in Blandijnberg, Belgium with a lecture titled “Immanent Frames: Non-Human and Posthuman(ist) Memory in Postsecular Narrative Cinema.” For more information about the event, please see here.

Abstract

This talk compares a set of films in which the human subject is de-privileged or -centred, despite narrative cinema’s historical dependence on the human face, body, and voice. Another way of talking about the postsecular era, Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘immanent frame’—“the disenchanted worldview of the secular age” (Caruana and Cauchi 2018)—also references the literal frame that determines the filmic image, imposing formal, semantic, and ontological limits on the onscreen world, reinforcing the properly immanent status of film form, denying in its very materiality the possibility of transcendence. Reflexive and self-critical, the postsecular represents an “incredulity toward the secularist narrative” supposedly constitutive of western modernity in which the question of belief or faith has never gone away (Caruana and Cauchi 4). The postsecular frames the privileging of immanence over transcendence fundamental to many posthumanist critiques of the Humanist tradition. This talk puts the postsecular into conversation with the posthumanist critique of the Humanist philosophical legacy as it manifests in select films that explore the convergence of memory and the question of the human.

Transhumanist deference to a technologically augmented or artificial memory must be measured against the idea of an always already technically supported ‘natural’ memory. Arguably, memory has always been posthuman because it has always had a technological or prosthetic dimension. The distinction is between a posthuman memory symptomatic of the transformation of the human subject’s cognitive and emotional relation to time, and a posthuman-ist memory that comes after the human: after the time of the human, when ‘we’ are no longer here. ‘Posthuman memory’ is still human memory, whereas ‘posthumanist memory’ is memory no longer understood in (purely) humanist terms, as something belonging wholly to ‘man’. To take account of the future of memory in a posthumanist context is to acknowledge that there is another kind of memory that demands to be thought in a post-anthropomorphic context, challenging us to conceive of a nonhuman, radically other, agent of memory/remembering. The most urgent question is: Who/what does the remembering, in the time of the posthuman?