Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
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Название: Posthuman Feminism

Автор: Rosi Braidotti

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Социология

Серия:

isbn: 9781509518111

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СКАЧАТЬ qualified or – as the South Korean film maker Bong Joon-ho points out in the remarkable 2019 film Parasite – they may just not smell right. The suppression of human labour, that is to say of disposable bodies, is a qualitative change: ‘to be rendered surplus is not to be paid less, it is to be left dying or for dead’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 20). It operates by de-skilling, exploiting and eliminating various sources of waged labour. The dehumanizing tendency built into capitalism is accelerating in the posthuman convergence, as an ongoing form of dispossession.

      The sense of emergency arising from the posthuman convergence introduces new patterns of discrimination upon older modes of oppression. It exposes the inner power structures of advanced capitalism and the sexualized, racialized and naturalized political economies of exploitable labour and dispensable bodies that support it. Importantly, it combines this analysis with a sense of urgency arising from the spectre of the Sixth Extinction, the ecological crisis and climate change. Environmental scarcity clashes with technological abundance within the fast flows of capital, triggering a short-circuiting of planetary dimensions.

      Cognitive bio-capitalism is an internally fractured system that combines high degrees of technological mediation with deep social and economic inequalities. It manages to combine the free circulation of data and capital with a neo-colonial order of migration, control of borders and movement which, like all colonial contact zones, is fraught with violence and struggle (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Tofighian, 2020). The flow of capital controls the space-time of human mobility and migration through disciplinary regimes and highly selective mechanisms of technological surveillance and control (Braidotti, 2011b; Zuboff, 2019). Advanced capitalism functions as the great organizer of the mobility of commodified products.

      What counts as ‘life’ is not only the embodied and embedded realities of bound individuals, but also the specific properties, propensities and inclinations of matter itself: genes, cells, codes, algorithms, stocked in databanks that can be stored, sold and exchanged. Knowledge is mediated and the true capital is the generative power of matter itself. This intense degree of technological intervention produces a de-materialization of the lived experience of empirical humans, but also their re-materialization as retrievable and sellable data on a global scale. The posthuman turn is at work right there, in this schizoid double pull between the de-materialization of production – given that what is produced are data and information – coupled with the re-materialization of exploitative, embodied labour conditions. As the case of Dolly proves, biology gets technologized as much as technology gets biologized. Advanced capitalism is thus a research-driven knowledge economy bent on profit.

      Trans-feminist theorist Paul Preciado stresses not only the mediated materiality of technoscience and bio-engineering, but explores its subversive potential in terms of gender identities. Biogenetic technologies invented by advanced capitalism can be appropriated to construct radically different bodies. Acknowledging that bodies are malleable and transformable, Preciado puts it as follows: ‘the success of contemporary technoscience consists in in transforming our depression into Prozac©, our masculinity into testosterone, our erection into Viagra©, our fertility/sterility into the Pill, our AIDS into Tritherapy, without knowing which comes first: if depression or Prozac©; if Viagra© or an erection; if testosterone or masculinity; if the Pill or maternity; if Tritherapy or AIDS’ (2013b: 269). For this branch of posthuman feminism, bio-technosciences and queer and trans subjects are actually joining forces to re-design biological structures and defy determinism. They are bio-hacking the future.

      Posthuman feminist scholars take a materialist, but not necessarily socialist, approach to the analysis of the embodied and waged aspects of post-industrial labour. In keeping with the politics of locations, they focus on the embedded and embodied materialized relations of work and production and take critical distance from any claim that the global economy is virtual and de-materialized. In addition to issues of wage inequalities, СКАЧАТЬ