It means a collection of things (human or not) that relate to each other and do things. For example, guns don't kill people, nor does people kill people. (Gun + people) kill people.

Thinking we know everything also makes us think there's nothing left to learn.

This has really important consequences in terms of post-humanist thinking! If we presume that there is a true definition of anything, we are allowing experience, culture, language to limit us. It is better to presume an every shifting definition of the human that responds to the situation at hand. Starting a discussion of the human with the idea that we all obviously know what a human is, is extremely limiting.

This is still humanism, but perhaps a humbler humanism. Descartes still looms large. The objective capital T truth is still out there somewhere, and we can tell that it is perceived because of the universal rules, but the human is fundamentally not the kind of thing that can perfectly perceive objective reality because the organs of internal sensation don't work well enough, or reliably enough.

This is stuffed to the gills with assumptions. And while there is a good deal of boilerplate Enlightenment business going on, Hume also seems to be planting the seeds later authors will reap.

Hume is requiring of the listener/taster/receiver, which is not new. "You think rap is good because you don't understand 'art' " is a common refrain. The elites have always used exposure to canonical works and forms as a method of discrediting those outside the circle, and have dismissed emerging works and forms as "lowbrow."

What strikes me about Hume, and perhaps posthumanism (along with Foucault) would find this noteworthy, is that this "violence on" a person is not done by the community, but by the person themself.

I'm not exactly sure what to do with this yet, but I want to note that here, Hume is comfortable speaking metaphorically of the human as a machine. In the older stuff, agricultural metaphors are preferred.

Sweet, Locke.

Now do "human."

This kinda sounds like a posthuman critique of humanism.

HU clap MA clap NI clap SM clap

"this shit sucks. There is certainly some ideal way it ought to work, so lets make it better and better because we can and we know how things work and how they ought to and we're smart and in control!!!"

What's the posthuman approach to language, in short? Maybe we can substitute words to come up with a different way of seeing it, like "one task of rhetoric is to invigorate language."

posthumanism as a TOOL to understanding

and creating, as Braidotti says elsewhere

posthumanism as knowledge creation

Again, tagging for definition

tagging for definition

This quote makes me think of a poem by Robinson Jeffers: Shine, Perishing Republic

While I'm sure Jeffers wasn't after furthering the cause of posthumanism, it seems like an especially interesting piece to give a posthuman reading to.

Now, someone please do that because I do not understand how the hell to do it.

the posthumanities are nomadic because they don't fit in traditional disciplinary camps, right?

This strikes me as a key distinction between postmodernism and posthumanism. Postmodernism can be thought of as post-utopian, while posthumanism works toward an affirmative, generative future. I don't know if posthumanism is utopian, per se, but it doesn't seem to be dystopic in the way that postmodernism often is.

Perhaps this is a clue to what I was asking above. While there is a way of reading "leftist" critiques of capital as believing themselves to be "apart from capitalistic structures," even if only in their minds/opinions/etc., posthumanism says "look, we're in it. Rejecting it is senseless. Instead, we ought to ask 'now what?'"

Indeed, it might. Might it not?

I'm not being coy or trying to build my annotation count, I'm after something in particular here. Here, experiment and improv are suggested because they might lead to progress. My question is: What fencepost does the posthumanist leave unmoved? Is anything sacred? Is anything best left alone, without being subject to "experiment and improvisation?"

Will this serve as a suitable definition of "posthumanism," or is it merely what's at stake? This refiguring of relations seems to be what Dr. Rivers is after at times, especially the "move beyond the binary" and "I'm not saying humanism is wrong, I'm just saying we're after something different" talk.

just like a distributed computer system uses more than one computer to run an application, this is the notion that the idea of "human" is social/communal, and does not exist on the individual level.

Another good way to articulate the mission of posthumanism--challenging distinctions between subjectivities (the arbitrary, "man-made" [?] characteristics we assign to human and nonhuman categories).

Society itself is post-human, but computers and mechanical technologies just make it increasingly apparent. I would make a similar argument for our understanding of postmodernism as well.

So for her, posthumanist rhetoric means refusing to focus on a single/stable object but on works with similarities key to her argument. Other readings for this week seem to do something similar, such as Muckelbauer and Hawhee writing about eXistenZ and Foucault.

Sounds a lot like something from Tufekci, in Whitehead & Wesch. ISBN-13: 9781607321699

Self-driving cars aren’t merely a technical issue.

I love this connection. Spider Jerusalem is one of countless reclusive characters that we love. The grinch is one example. Holden Caulfield is another. Bruce Wayne, who also retreats to a mountain-based home, also counts. Even Yoda could sort of count. All of these characters have a strange relationship to the city, yet they always seem to return to it. I wonder why we, as cultural consumers, flock to these characters. I guess we relate? We all love to criticize the places we live, yet we don't leave. It's the now-memed trope of living in the wrong generation.