Week 12 Tutorial Post: Post-Human Conclusions

Hello all.
Below is my tut presentation for tomorrow.
It revolves around what actually is post-humanism and what it entails

The questions I will ask in the tute, and I don't necessarily expect answers to. They are semantically and philosophically very complex.

Anyway, presented below the major points of the reading, some elaboration and interpretation, as well as questions for rumination until 11am tomorrow.

Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments (Katherine Hayles)

Hayles begins by asserting that the body is human form perceived from outside a cultural perspective. Embodiment is the experience from the inside.
Hayles suggests that body is in fact a term that means little. Her argument is that Western liberal humanism should be done away with. The Cartesian mind/body dualism does not hold. In the vein of Derrida and post-modern literary theory (and a little of Nietszche) everything boils down to relation.
“Propriocetion” the sense that gives us the feeling we in fact occupy our bodies rather than possess them.
Body arises from a dynamic flux of culture, biology, evolution and technology. Hayles resists the idea of some masculinised and patriarchal post-humanist thought idea that we can download our consciousness into virtual information.
Embodiment requires that we are already changing from information rich environments. She suggests that technologies have always co-evolved with the brain.
Her examples are the neuron growth as effected by information technologies and video-games as our keyboards and video-game controllers become parts of our body-interface, or mindbody as she calls it.
More radical examples include the Lamprey experiment, where cultured brain tissue interacts with robotic parts, the growing use and development of neural implants and pervasive computing.
For Hayles cognition involves the environment, this she calls the “extended mind”.
She also asserts that language is a parasite in symbiosis with us. We developed language and it has developed our neural arrays at the same time. We are inseparable from it.
Hayles cites the artist Maturana’s viewpoint is that we only perceive reality. This perception is based in reality itself. He goes on to suggest that simulation technologies are a continuation of western patriarchal military domination.
Hence the art projects Hayles makes reference to (Traces, Einsteins Brain, and nØtime) all play with this idea. They are concerned with tying virtual worlds to real world phenomena such as the moon cycle, peoples’ motions and the stock market. They create feedback loops where in input creates an effect, which will further stimulate input. The idea is to demonstrate to the viewer (and at the same time the subject) that there are no fixed objects, no unchanging contexts.
There is no autonomy, no freewill, rationality, individual agency, identification of consciousness as identity. We relate in order to exist.

Questions:
If our brains have coevolved with technology over time does this make us all cyborgs? Furthermore which other species become cyborgs? Dolphins? Apes? Monkeys? Cuttlefish?
If existence is relation, and there is not ultimate locus of cognition, does the term human mean anything at all? Is post-humanism therefore a perspective on the human condition? Furthermore does this imply internal contradiction?

Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations (Donna Haraway)

Haraway strarts her discussion on colonial memory. She suggest that decolonisation is a further western application of colonial techniques. We should now be caring for the land in harmony with ancient techniques and relation standpoints as opposed to trying to patch over the damage we have done with new-fangled postcolonial techniques. She suggests that this is not true reconciliation.
Haraway suggests that western thought is future-orientated, the present just a stepping stone to that future. The past is the past and we go forward from there. Indigenous thought is ancestor facing, with descendents coming up to take over responsibility. One has responsibility to both the past and future.
Haraway interprets Piccinnini’s art as reconciliatory. There is a link to introduced species and the efforts to conserve endangered species. Salvation is a western idea, a return to wild times and is ultimately using decolonisation to patch the damages of colonisation. We should instead care for the environment as we act. Ethics as continual responsibility, not clear cut moral actions.
The protector species that Piccinnini creates are playful and serious embodiment of that idea. They are the use of modern techniques to achieve a more ancient standpoint of interaction and relation to the environment to protect it. Piccinnini also asks on the subject of our future kin and creations that we made them but are we able to love them? Or are they to go the way of introduced species. Haraway makes the point that indigenous culture treats indigenous and introduced species without special differentiation. They both become part of the environment.
Technocultural people, she suggests, (and we are all technocultural) must learn to situate themselves facing ancestors of many different kinds and bearing the responsibility for those who come after.
The unbridgeable dichotomy of traditional and the modern is a myth.

Question:
Is Haraway’s argument of the post-human, as a need to adopt ancient kinds of “seeing” congruent? Or is it self-contradictory in its refutation of post-colonialist ideas?