Yesterday 11:32 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday 11:45 PM by C C.)
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/humani...ts-authors
EXCERPTS: This area of scholarship is new enough that it doesn’t have a name yet, but I will call it Queer Chemical Studies (QCS). QCS begins by noting a phenomenon widely decried by environmental activists and studied by biologists, ecologists, and medical researchers: the impact of plastics, pesticides, and other synthetic materials in the environment on reproduction, human and animal...
[...] QCS scholars instead invite us ... to view “the queering of the body” brought about by environmental toxins “as opening on to new, and ecological, possibilities rather than reasserting a threatened heteronormative configuration.” The remarkable implication of this is that pervasive pollution can be recast as a vector of queer liberation. ... The QCS discovery that queer liberation is being realized by the petrochemical industry may seem like a niche matter, but it is emblematic of a broader impasse faced by the academic humanities.
For the past half century, humanists have deconstructed, subverted, problematized, and queered every normativity and supremacy they could find. The ultimate target of this systematic critical project was, paradoxically, the value that originally founded and gave shape to their disciplines: humanism.
The dismantling of “Man” [antihumanism] was the impetus for some of the founding polemical statements of what came to be called “theory.” In recent decades, this project was reinvigorated in the form of “posthumanism” and the “posthumanities,” which launched an attack on the most centric of all centrisms: anthropocentrism. In line with this project, QCS discards any idea of a fixed, natural human essence to which synthetic substances pose a threat.
The early parts of the story of how the humanities turned against “the human” are well told in two intellectual histories...
[...] But what if academic antihumanists turn out to be dispensable to the realization of antihumanist goals? That is the unsettling conclusion QCS points us to, without acknowledging it. ... I am referring to the creation of generative artificial intelligence and the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) by a number of the world’s most highly valued companies.
Like so many humanities scholars before them, the entrepreneurs and engineers pursuing AGI openly seek to “decenter the human” and explore the possibilities of nonhuman agency. But their plan for doing so has far vaster resources behind it than all academic humanities departments combined...
[...] In other words, the humanities have spent half a century decentering the human but now face steep competition in that effort from tech companies with more than trillion-dollar valuations... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: This area of scholarship is new enough that it doesn’t have a name yet, but I will call it Queer Chemical Studies (QCS). QCS begins by noting a phenomenon widely decried by environmental activists and studied by biologists, ecologists, and medical researchers: the impact of plastics, pesticides, and other synthetic materials in the environment on reproduction, human and animal...
[...] QCS scholars instead invite us ... to view “the queering of the body” brought about by environmental toxins “as opening on to new, and ecological, possibilities rather than reasserting a threatened heteronormative configuration.” The remarkable implication of this is that pervasive pollution can be recast as a vector of queer liberation. ... The QCS discovery that queer liberation is being realized by the petrochemical industry may seem like a niche matter, but it is emblematic of a broader impasse faced by the academic humanities.
For the past half century, humanists have deconstructed, subverted, problematized, and queered every normativity and supremacy they could find. The ultimate target of this systematic critical project was, paradoxically, the value that originally founded and gave shape to their disciplines: humanism.
The dismantling of “Man” [antihumanism] was the impetus for some of the founding polemical statements of what came to be called “theory.” In recent decades, this project was reinvigorated in the form of “posthumanism” and the “posthumanities,” which launched an attack on the most centric of all centrisms: anthropocentrism. In line with this project, QCS discards any idea of a fixed, natural human essence to which synthetic substances pose a threat.
The early parts of the story of how the humanities turned against “the human” are well told in two intellectual histories...
[...] But what if academic antihumanists turn out to be dispensable to the realization of antihumanist goals? That is the unsettling conclusion QCS points us to, without acknowledging it. ... I am referring to the creation of generative artificial intelligence and the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) by a number of the world’s most highly valued companies.
Like so many humanities scholars before them, the entrepreneurs and engineers pursuing AGI openly seek to “decenter the human” and explore the possibilities of nonhuman agency. But their plan for doing so has far vaster resources behind it than all academic humanities departments combined...
[...] In other words, the humanities have spent half a century decentering the human but now face steep competition in that effort from tech companies with more than trillion-dollar valuations... (MORE - details)