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Maria Voyatzaki’s chapter examines how contemporary speculations on matter shift materiality into the epicentre of architectural contemplation and affect its ethos and praxis. By encountering the emergence of a new paradigm for which the establishment of an overall orthodoxy is impossible, the chapter, following the contemporary quest for a better understanding of this model of reality, offers a profound insight into contemporary thinking and creating architecture in this new framework defined as posthuman. As architecture throughout its history has always been defined on the basis of a certain worldview and in reference to a certain conception of the human, what will architecture become in the posthuman turn or even more in the nonhuman? How are its broad spectrum of established ideas, values and practices problematised by this new philosophical debate on architectural thinking and practicing in our globalised and technologically mediated world? The chapter examines these questions in terms of three main issues: the new conceptions of architecture that could emerge from the contemporary materialisms, the new understandings of the material outcome of architectural creative work and the influences of the above conceptions and understandings on the development of the creative process.

In 1999, N. Katherine Hayles argued that ‘we are all posthuman now’ owing to our daily interactions with intelligent machines. If moral panics about the time teenagers spend with screen media are to be believed, then present-day adolescents may have evolved into another life form entirely.1 Hayles’s conception of the posthuman is tinged with concern for the future; the very notion of human consciousness merged with computers calls up an association with the monstrous. As will become apparent, the question of the monstrous is a significant one for the analysis of the teen movie, particularly given the history of teenagers themselves as liminal figures removed from the more clearly defined identities of child or adult. However, William Brown observes that, like many a ‘post’, the posthuman should not be conceived as an identity that is wholly removed from the human, but rather a viewpoint that offers a perspective on the contingent position of humans in the world. The posthuman, then, offers a critical distance from human subjectivity, which allows us to perceive the white, male, Eurocentric assumptions that continue to underpin not only the conception of the human, but the tenets of liberal humanism.

This chapter explores the theme of the becoming of the body through metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq’s writing, analysing the interweaving of Deleuzian traces with contemporary feminist thinkers Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti’s theories of performativity and parody. It then explores the interplay between simulation and dispersal in Darrieussecq’s work, relating this to a posthuman vision of the contemporary world within which consciousness is figured in terms of flux and folds. The chapter shows how Darrieussecq’s conceptually inventive writing illuminates Deleuzian notions of becoming and folding, not least in her reconsideration of relations between surface and depth in the torsion between mind, body and universe.

Chapter 1 discusses José Vasconcelos’s notion of a cosmic race through a posthuman reading of his seminal essay The Cosmic Race [La raza cósmica] (1925) and his largely forgotten play Prometeo vencedor (1916?). Because Vasconcelos and his Ateneo colleagues were all famously antipositivist, they were suspicious of scientific discourses that purported to hold a monopoly on the “truth.” However, they also lived in a twentiethcentury society in which scientific discourse had gained intellectual hegemony. My chapter begins by asserting science as one of many discourses that compose Vasconcelos’s philosophy of Aesthetic Monism, which subordinates human knowledge to an overriding aesthetic imperative. Afterwards I use a close reading of Prometeo vencedor to assert the key role of science—especially in the guise of technology—in establishing both a worldwide mestizo society and a spiritual, posthuman superation of the body.

Lysa M. Rivera, in “Critical Dystopia and Cyborg Consciousness: Ernest Hogan’s Chicano/a Cyberpunk,” examines the relationship between science fiction and experiences of mestizaje, colonialism, and survival within the greater Chicano/a cultural community. Concentrating on the work of Ernest Hogan, Rivera traces the ways in which Hogan embeds Mesoamerican indigenous mythologies in high-tech, technophilic science fictionalized futures and comments on the synergistic affinities between experiences of alienation under colonialism in the Americas (specifically Mexico) and experiences of posthuman, decentered technologies. Rivera then situates Hogan’s work within an electrifying but unexamined genealogy of Chicano/a cyberpunk produced in direct response to the shifting terrains of borderlands politics in a post-NAFTA late capitalistic world. Drawing on cyborg consciousness as an oppositional practice, Rivera expresses how Chicano/a cyberpunk represents a critical incursion into the classic cyberpunk of the 1980s.

What forms might critical theory take when the focus is not only on what a theorist writes, but also on the theory he or she acts out and performs? Chapter 4 addresses this question by means of a rigorous “piratical” reading of RosiBraidotti’s The Posthuman. Since the focus of this chapter is on how theorists act, it also explains the philosophy Hall is endeavoring to perform in some of the projects and actions he is involved with. Chapter 4 looks at two such projects in particular. The first is Open Humanities Press (OHP), a non-profit open access publisher Hall co-founded in 2006. The project covered in most detail however is a series of books Hall co-edits as part of OHP called Living Books About Life.

Chapter 3 analyzes two exemplary literary works dealing with the creation of new posthuman species as a consequence of contemporary consumer society. With liquid modernity commodifying all aspects of life, the logical extrapolation, made possible by genetic science rapidly closing the gap in the dimension of science-fictional possibility, is the commodification of all life itself, including the human. Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi discuss future worlds that build upon tendencies of an extreme consumer society and the sea change of human impact in the anthropocene. Both story cycles enhance present dystopian tendencies of liquid modernity to explore the consequences of the hypercapitalist commodification of life and its effect on human subjectivity. In both story worlds, zoe is reduced to its mechanical, material quality and appropriated for consumption, manifest expressly in the changing status of the human into the inhuman, non-human, and posthuman. The chapter discusses this shift in the perception of the human and the consequences of posthuman social development. Most importantly though, in exploring the posthuman as an alternative form of communal and social practice, both literary works provide for a eutopian moment in the dystopian imagination – allowing a hybrid, changing and multiple posthuman perspective to emerge.

Chapter 6 notes how both the concept of sexuality and the concept of the animal have been employed to construct distinctly human subjectivities. This constitutes one reason why Deleuze rejects these notions in favour of desire and becoming- animal. The chapter looks specifically at how his and Guattari’s notion of becoming- animal may help develop an understanding of a nonhuman orgasm. The possibilities, as well as the problems, of combining discussions of sexuality with ‘real’ animals is compared to ways in which becoming- animal of sexuality can break up Deleuze’s own deadlock positioning of the orgasm as speaking to an economy of lack. The chapter shows that while the economy of sexual pleasure that he rejects can be compared to the economy of domesticated animals, there is also the possibility of another, demonic pleasure and orgasm which corresponds rather to his and Guattari’s understanding of packs, rhythms and territoriality.

Focusing on four YA novels-—#16thingsithoughtweretrue,The Future of Us, Feed, and The Unwritten—Shannon Hervey describes how adolescent anxiety results from the realization that teens are not just addicted to the Internet; they are tech-human hybrids. Social media demands self-commodification with the capitalistic return of followers and readers, feeding the fear that the virtual self seems to create or at least control the material self. Three of the novels offer unsatisfactory endings, as withdrawal from social media is the only answer. The Unwritten, though, tries to work through the process of actualization and the acceptance of posthumanist subjectivities.

In her The House of the Scorpion and The Lord of Opium, Nancy Farmer narrates the story of Matt, a clone created to extend the life of El Patrón, ruler of the autonomous country of Opium between the U.S. and Mexico. Donna White explains how Farmer employs epigenetics to show that genes do not determine one’s destiny, and every clone of El Patrón is different. At first Matt learns to acknowledge himself as human, but eventually he learns to accept his multiple subjectivites of animal, monster, saint, drug lord, clone, human, and even El Patrón. Even though El Patrón uses posthumanist biotechnologies to maintain his position, he thrives on the power humanist beliefs give him. Matt, meanwhile, retains some of these humanist values while moving to embrace his multiplicity.

Inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, cybergothic texts from the late 20th and early 21st century have explored fears of posthuman becomings. While monstrous machineries and techno-hybridizations are, of course, central tropes of the Science Fiction genre, it is within a framework of Gothic textuality that these fears can be explored in a more self-conscious and theoretical manner. This chapter presents a reading of James Tiptree's 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In' (1974) in light of one of the most central questions of cyber-theory - that of control. Harking back to Frankenstein's struggle over narrative, scientific, gendered and otherwise embodied aspects of control, Tiptree's seminal novella proves to be an exemplary text within an emerging self- and theory-conscious, cybergothic mode, addressing questions of genre, gender, techno-embodiment, narrative construction, and the need for (cybernetic) control over our technological monsters in a manner that connects the Gothic with a number of cyber-theoretical concerns.

Stuart Murray Drawing on theory, clinical conceptions, ideas of possible medical futures, and writings from those with autism themselves, this chapter aims to think through the multiple and often confusing arguments that come with the juxtaposition of the terms autism and the posthuman.