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New Materialism, Relational Holism, and Posthuman Life (Free Webinar)

Insights from twentieth century science and shifts in culture have given rise to new materialisms. Matter is not viewed as something static, fixed, or passive, waiting to be molded by some external force; rather, it is emphasized as a process of materialization. The term “new materialism” was coined by Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s and refers to the idea that mind is always already material, and matter is necessarily something of the mind. The complex interaction among multiple forces spawns and re-configures in the new materialist and posthuman thinking whereby relationships are constantly being formed, unformed and reformed. The new materialisms pose no division between language and matter: biology is culturally mediated as much as culture is materialistically constructed. The "posthuman" has become a key term to cope with an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human. whereby the distributed cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with the distributed cognitive system as a whole: “thinking” is done by both human and nonhuman actors. Hence the posthuman ability to conceptualize oneself as autonomous being, exercising one’s will through individual agency and choice, gives way to distributed personhood where conscious agency is never fully in control. This talk will examine the posthuman in light of technology and the new materialisms, with an emphasis on Teilhard de Chardin’s insights on theogenesis and noogenesis, and his ideas on a new religion of the earth.

5:00 PM EDT
4:00 PM CDT
2:00 PM PDT
10:00 PM London, UK

Dec 10, 2020 04:00 PM in Central Time (US and Canada)