A line is simultaneously a colour, a texture, and a tone: it is the abutting edge of positive and negative, the breaking up and adjoining of two planes, the touching point of autonomous bodies. To see form[1] as relational, is an undoing of the human—no longer at the centre, or with a centre, from which […]
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‘There are countless forms of narrative in the world’, begins an influential essay by structuralist narrative theorist Roland Barthes.[1] But, for all their multiplicity, these forms—like the languages they are transmitted in—bear the unmistakable signature of human experience, including our bodily make-up, our mortality, our web of attachments and ambitions of social standing. Throughout the […]
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Lady Gaga’s work demonstrates an intriguing mix of elements from within posthumanism, as her work seems to destabilise a number of humanist, binary categories including human and machine, human and animal, subject and object, self and other and male and female. In some ways, Gaga embodies what we might consider the figures of the posthuman […]
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Genealogies are about ancestors, lineages, progeny and the knowledge they produce. They are historical in the sense that they trace past developments to investigate how ‘things’ have become the way they ‘are’ (or, at least, were at a certain time). In the humanities and social sciences the concept of genealogy is mainly linked to both […]
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Identity questions over the borders of the human are complicated in novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Ninni Holmquist’s The Unit (2006) and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind series (2007–2014), which explore the role of new biology, and new life forms, in future societies.[1] In these texts, the survival of the human depends […]
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