[...]/= (liberatory promises of) ‘flow’

(each articulating opposing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating

primal technology

proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life***

Campbell --> a posthuman biology (an ethical imperative that in a technological age, that life is not just life)


Golem --> perennial horror in western imagination
Jewish psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb and'>& nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]

Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind

*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman

*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological

(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror


(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life

(let's have atavism instead of activism)

Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}


primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)

technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> technology referred to the ways in which realities are brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing reality (hervorbringen) [=/= mere means or instrument]
+ every unconcealment of reality is also by necessity a concealment of another reality
*poiesis: bring hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment* --> techne = tech + art

paleolithic hunters (so-called primitive societies) have been shown to have been affluent and technologically advanced

technological primitivism, as aesthetic in subcultures of high-technology, incorporating into their philosophies icons of: shamanism, esotericism, hermeticism, the occult, mythology
=/= my ajayeb.net


horror in commercial images (Campbell's investigation =/= fear appeals that act to discourage or warn)
horror (like primitive) is a historically specific form =/= an eternal constant (~ whay is horrific today might be completely unhorrific tomorrow --> for example ajayeb's horror)
horror = science fiction + primitivism

liberatory/avant-garde horror
female-as-victim
female-as-horror
--> apparatus of phallogocentrism
--Campbell--> *horror works to produce figures that contain within them an overflow of contradictory signs*


20th century high-tech machines induce horror : depiction of *technology out of control* inducing horror in the humanist consciousness (for example Black Mirror TV series)
(both primitive and'>& technical) borderline figures of contemporary culture: replicants, androgynes, zombies, androids, posthumans, avatars, clones, undead
}--> *almost-not-quite ontologies* <-- displacing the unitary subject of classical humanism <== {new processes and quasi objects} <==create== ***{globalization, questions of history, social change, political movements, collapse of communism, fundamentalism, feminism, post-communist nationalism, global immigration flows, transnational projects such as human genome, digital human}***

•mothers
•machine: the scientific, political and discursive field of technology
•monster: emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biological sciences + their relation to difference and different bodies

enlightenment ==> a comprehensive philosophical and scientific discourse of positioning “people of color, native australians, females, slaves (+ scaipods, cynocephali, tailed men, giants) = nearly-human =/=liberal human subject (white male)
-in the interstices between humans and apes, there was plenty of space to locate speculative or imaginary creatures: *similititudines huminis* (beast-men, monsters with human resemblances, degeneracy)


posthuman
•celebratory declaration of the end of humanity as we know it
•heralding an era of:
◦human being will be superseded by technical being (+ ironically promissing to vouchsafe human being for eternity)
◦(liberatory seeks to) displace the arrogance of the human (as the ultimate and sole authorities of meaning)
•replete with ideological positions (ranging from horrific to hopeful)
•concerned with deconstruting the human as an ancient concept [~?~> dissatisfied and alienated by nature]

ectogenetic foetus (growth of an organism in an artificial environment)
surrogate mother جایگزین
pregnant man {in the fear-fantasy of miscegenation

(crossing:)
animal
  human
inanimate
   technologies
    }==> horror (accompanying the posthuman)



[title]
monstrous logic of ajayeb

monstrous =/= neat categories

teratology
in a wider context of studies of monsters
written texts (not only physical manifestations) ~ defy canonical categories

[*]gothic: (not only a genre,) any type of text that makes coherent interpretation fail*** <== text suffers from an overload of contradictory meanings which make it literally fall apart at the seams


(Derrida:) monster: *species of the nonspecies* = as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself --> make people turn their eyes away
-the figure of the monster embodies a means of thinking otherwise
-event of the Derridean text signalling a rupture with the discourses in which it is gestated
--Campbell--> both Derrida and Darwin were engaged in the *practice of revealing monstrosity to the world*
[...]