Participants & Abstracts
Dave LojekHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Dave Lojek received his MA here at Humboldt in 2004 in English & American Studies / Cultural Studies. He currently prepares a dissertation about Greg Egan. In the last few years Dave has also made several short films, given papers at conferences like this one, chaired creative writing seminars and a poetry club, worked at a cultural institution, published poetry. His interests focus on new media, scifi, postmodernity, travelling, and literature in general. In his spare time Dave organizes a group of PhD students and their monthly meetings, learns Swedish and works as film critic.
Paper:
Posthumans in Fact and Fiction
Notes on the Abolition of Death and the Transmigration into the Digital?
Regardless of their utopian or dystopian nature, imagined societies (or non-places) need participants or citizens. When one surveys (pre-)history to the present, there is one obvious constant: due to their decaying biological data carriers (bodies), all humans die individually. Even before the invention of alphabets or high cultures societies observed and understood death. To cope with it they invented the soul, afterlife, gods, providence, clerical hierarchies, erected necropolises, pyramids and ancestral cults, most of which still exist to this very day.
Yet something changes. An ever accelerating technological and scientific progress led thinkers to question the reign of death and to discard religion. While only gods were immortal in mythologies, man could now dream to attain a prolonged or even infinite existence.
This presentation will sample ideas from many sources (literature, science, film) that focus on posthumans. While cyborgs walk among us already, AIs and uploaded consciousnesses still seem to belong to scifi as long as the human brain puzzles surgeons, neuro-scientists and psychologists. Yet only with decoding and scanning brains and their content can humanity shed the genetically predetermined decay of bodies.
There will be intermediate phases where humans augment and improve their bodies and gradually begin to interface with the expanding cyberspace networks. Societies like those differ from ours in so many ways, that the presentation can only name a few highlights. Dave's dissertation expands on this issue with a focus on Greg Egan's work, which will be touched upon here but briefly.
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