[...]ocess that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (other ways of being with each other) --> important normative function [at the cataclysmic endings =/= catastrophic ending]
3. a way to think about temporalities (when a bacterium nestled into a simple cell, creating an intimacy that has lasted four billion years)
4. a template for unlikely intimacies

Harman's philosophical monologue on social theoretical practice (which might yet be remedied by actual dialogue with social theorists) ==> performative fallacy (<-- common in artist writing)

@apass****
(Campbell asking) why has object-oriented ontology become such a popular force in other disciplines?
<== complex interplay between sociological + logical factors
+ rise of *para-academia*

@artist (in proliferation of artist writing)
****speculation = the alibi for a doctrine that wishes to spare itself the trouble of justification****
--> we need closer attention to rationality as the basis of judgement when we talk about speculation
--> we need to be more informed by (sciences) when we stretch relations to our rational outposts, without ignoring their appeals

...................................

posthumanism --> any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, humanities --> (21st century) technology is the center of critical thought about culture and about nature

[*]posthumanism: a structure of feeling (sense of an era starts to be experienced in the social imagination --> social forms become more recognisable when we had some time to classify them, articulate them, theorize them)

(Williams > Campbell) structure of feeling
we can point to times in the past and say that as an X sensibility (they were romantics, enlightenment, postmodernism) =/= sensing here and now --> practical consciousness, a period at an embryonic stage, at the very edge of *semantic availability*

what structure of feeling is forming in the contemporary western world? --> posthumanism
(postbiological, postcorporal, cyborg existence, etc.)


to be human <--attack-- genomics, global finance, nature of social in virtual communities (telegram) ==> yet-to-be formalized paradigms of human experience

==> fracture  the concept of legal self [legal theory (arbiter of human rights) --> concerned with what is to be human]

(taxonomies of the human species at its time -->) humanitas: legal term used in public in ancient Rome to distinguish Romans and Greeks from Barbarians


humans in persistent vegetative states
international trade of human organs
human genome project
xenotransplantation
technological unconscious

(tree of life replaced by) a model that:
•classifies species according to DNA
•disregards morphological type (how elements of body appear)
•reveals human to be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity


classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world


humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense

human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose

August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb


Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*


in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market

--Campbell--> how can interpretative consumer research benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?


the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others

cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity

**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass

21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches

(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject

posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)


20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)

robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution


(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans

(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•

consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer


(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [for example “living-product” metaphor]


(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideol[...]