technoculture314-09

Hey, not a proper blog but before the cyborg topic slips into oblivion on here, i wanted to ask, does anyone else think it is unethical to start talking about 'post-humanism' when overcoming the problems of our own 'humanity' still seems so far beyond our grasp (inequality, poverty, hunger, child labour, war, genocide for example) It seems a bit of a bourgeoisie project, as well as being all a bit abstract - e.g. one of the posthumanists said something about "no more gods, no more faith, lets blast out of our old forms" (something along those lines) but firstly, overall the world is becoming more religious (west is secularizing but 3rd world is increasing in religiosity) and secondly, where exactly are the posthumanists blasting off too? Stelarc for example has hung himself from a ceiling via meathooks, but apart from achieving a re-enactment of that scene from The Last King of Scotland, has he accomplished much else? Stelarc's clique seems more like an ELAM avant-garde movement with no real objective other than exhibitionism (which is ironic because as someone in tutorial pointed out, he's no oil painting). I think the post-humanist examples in Dennis's article are shaping up to be more signficant in terms of where we are actually headed (scarily). Callum