Photography and the Posthuman

1. Photography and the Posthuman

2. Humans and Representation • Model of traditional representation: signs and images represent an already existing reality and being. • Model of performativity: signs and images actively shape our sense of the world and ourselves. • Supplementary nature of the sign (or image): may replace the original. (See: Belting on Greek statues.) • Baudrillard's simulacra: a copy without an original

3. Barbie as Simulation

4. The image in techno-culture • Contemporary technology stresses the performative, supplementary aspect of the human being's relation to images: • Cosmetic surgery • Surgical implants: dental, orthopedic, breast, penile • Traditional prosthetics: joints, limbs, cosmetic • Intelligent prosthetics (bio-robotics, neuro-control) • Augmented reality (AR) • These technologies challenge traditional concepts of reality and representation: the primacy of reality over the image is lost

5. Augmented Reality

6. The posthuman • „It is at the site of the collapse between reality and fiction, referent and image, that I locate the posthuman as a figuration that reformulates identity as a process of transformation.” (Toff 17) • „...to be posthuman is to construct a notion of self within a culture of simulation, virtuality and the digital.” (28) • The idea of the posthuman „disavows identity” (21) • The PH does not imply a being after human, but rather a concept of the human that has always already been changing, in interaction with its environment

7. Posthuman Images • „By the term 'posthuman images' I am not referring to images that depict or reference reality, but as performative acts/events/processes in their own right that function to destroy coherent meaning about the human as an originary form.” (T. 32.) • As reality is produced by signs (acc. to Baudrillard), human identity is produced by images: identity as simulation

8. Barbie, Capitalism, Feminism „By playing with Barbie dolls girls learn that in order to be successful and popular women, just like Barbie, they must look good. Importantly, this fashioning of the self relies on buying clothes, make-up, and material luxuries.” (T 66) „Barbie is said to embody the idea that women in capitalist culture are themselves commodities to be purchased, consumed and manipulated.” (T 60) „as the distance between ourselves and our cultural objects falls away, the place of the subject at the centre of the world is destabilised, creating the potential to rethink subjectivity as always in process. Reconfiguring the idea of plastic in the cultural psyche is an attempt to disturb the unity of the subject in favour of a more fluid conception of self.” (T. 72) „plastic subject”