CNR 2015: Lectures: Louis Armand (AUS): De-Evolution: Human Robots, Interpassivity & the Metamorphosis of Being
De-Evolution: Human Robots, Interpassivity & the
Metamorphosis of Being
In a series of essays published in 1998 on the "interpassive
subject," Slavoj Zizek inverted a commonplace assumption
about technology as a "prosthesis of experience" that, in the age
of virtual reality and AI, experiences phenomena on our
behalf, to posit instead a state of affairs in which it
is only ever the Other that experiences: that the
human subject is in fact, and from its origin, the prosthesis of a
certain technology; a "prosthesis of a prosthesis." That, in other
words, its experience is only ever that of
a separation from experience itself. And
that its perceived "selfhood" is really the passive agency of a
(technological) evolutionary process to which it is a
contingent adjunct and which is ambivalent to
it. In this sense, the "human hypothesis" is the extension of
a technological idea rather than the contrary.
Confronted with the prospect of an ongoing "machine metamorphosis" independent of human agency, Zizek's argument receives renewed validation. From originary technicity to the technological sublime, the immanence of "human obsolescence" has come to stand in place of the escatological view of the "perfectability of man" in the figure of an apocalyptic god. To paraphrase Heidegger, the "essence" of humanity is nothing "human." Where Fukuyama's "posthuman future" is really only humanism by other means, Zizek's "interpassive subject" points to a primordial "simulacrum" at the origin of the "human hypothesis," whose evolution is in fact the prosthesis of an impossible experience: the becoming-technology of a technological "consciousness," by way of the simulacrum of a becoming-human.
[image source: Louis Armand]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]
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Louis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague.
De-Evolution: Human Robots,
Interpassivity & the Metamorphosis of
Being
Louis Armand will present his lecture "De-Evolution: Human
Robots, Interpassivity & the Metamorphosis of Being" at Cafe
Neu Romance on the 26 November 2015 at IIM.
IIM (Institute of
Intermedia)
Hall H25 at FEL CVUT
Technická 2
CZ-160 00 Prague.
Czech Republic