Title page and contents of the issue

Er(r)go… ,

… the situation is getting complicated: machines are running rampant, artificial intelligence raises ethical, moral and ontological questions, the tyranny of algorithms is spreading, capitalism corrupts desires – in short, humanism is crumbling. As someone says, if crocodiles practiced philosophy, they would most likely postulate crocodilism (Józef Bocheński), of course, in place of humanism. On the horizon lurk post-machines, biomachines with autonomous ethical intelligence, institutions eliminating the human factor for humanity’s own good, alternative circulations of knowledge powered by algorithmic engines, atrophy of individual capacity for moral judgement, privatization of affects and the inner life, machine as knowledge clothed in flesh, society under palliative care, and here and the re a dodgy synthesis of mysticism and science. 

Hounded by techne we seek shelter in geo, elbowing our way through various labyrinths: over here – technoscience, technocracy, technopoly, technology, technological artefacts, technological exclusion, technological systems, ordinary technicality, technicization of human behaviour, self-techniques, technological-corporate habitat, a regime of technical existence, techno-daily life, and even a technical poet; over there – geological wilderness, geopower, geontopower, geoknowledge, geontology, geomorphology, geomantics, geoengineering, geo-perspectives, and finally geo/techno-assemblages. And on top of the se, culture, ideology, and the reign of the algorithm. How to live one’s life, Professor? How about ethical anarchism as a cure for all evil?

To make matters worse, other questons multiply, too: how to teach morality to a machine? Does the machine have a conscience? How to widen the scope of moral norms to include intelligent non-human beings in the future? How to secure humanity’s safety? (What a pipe dream!) Is it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression? Will machines rule over us? How to eviscerate the power of the algorithm? How to adjust an employee’s interior to external requirements? And what is an employee’s interior in the first place? Should everybody perceive their own interior as a corporation? Is the Neganthropocene an alternative to the exploited notion of the Anthropocene? How many Anthropocenes are there anyway? Should a bodiless being have its own gender? This last question is perhaps the most inquisitive.

And in the texts, as per usual, curious things: chatbot Taylor masters the principles of Internet hate-speech within just a few hours while the children of the Enlightenment remain in the shadow of ignorance; the ontology of some theory turns into the epistemology of the recipient, our clicks from the past shape our future, variant digital technologies diversify models of intimacy, organs smoothly turn into machinery, meditation appears to be the reproduction tool for a bourgeois individual and follows the logic of lubrication, sharpening or replacement of used parts, the private sphere loses its cultivated gentility and becomes a network entity, post-Gibsonian theory replaces the animal with the agent, and a different Gibson wanders around Singapore with the death penalty, contemplating Disneyland and fishing for things that broke down to finally move his ass to Hongkong; there emerges the anthropology of machinery, here and there neuroscience and Buddhism are cast in the roles of leading authorities, mindfulness becomes capitalism’s new spirituality, scientistic rhetoric replaces true science, and, by and large, the Neganthropocene requires the post-Anthropocene.

Art and literature offer but a modest consolation. Here, the poem works in an extremly asynchronous, automatized and algorithmic technological environment facing up to ecological imperatives; there, already quietened, the poem underlines the muteness of a useless cigarette butt, after all, we recognise a poet by their silence. As usual however, interesting things happen among the artists: a dead spider grows back its limbs, someone chokes on the prospect of being non-oneself, non-human Sophie punctures spectators with her punctum, human and non-human beings mix with one another, the hero has to kill the monster-mother but the mother never dies, human organism feeds (on) convictions, but when brought before the altar of discursive machines it becomes their engine (Bartczak), the last and ugliest dog on Earth loves drinking whisky, and a poem about America, written for fifty years, remains unfinished.

Various fascinations permeate the minds of artists and critics alike: affective flickering between bodies, silence as the domain of oppression, petrological wisdom, translation from legal language into legal language, thinking oneself into Being itself, a man with balls the size of durian fruit, love relationships between humans and non-human entities, awareness of the impossibility of full blown titanicity, relationships between men and non-human creations with unmistakably feminine traits, corporatized and precarized academia, ponderous lumps of bronze with equally ponderous holes through them, pianolas as musical equivalents of an artificial lover, human-non-human entanglements in love stories, anti-feminist clichés resulting from masculine solipsism. In the midst of all this circulate humans, non-humans and post-humans, gynoids, couch entities, artificial women, all manner of zooproletariat, digital mistresses, perfect post-human mistresses, biocybernetic animals, fembotic beings, animoids, replicants, marionettes, artificial bodies of machine-women, post-human children, and all of the remaining post-humanist ladder of beings.

And, in the end, the symbolic misery of the capitalist society: thoughtlessness, stupidity, docility, infantilization, non-reason.

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734 

The ever-accelerating progress in the area of smart technologies gives rise to new ethical challenges, which humankind will sooner or later have to face. An inevitable component of this progress is the increase in the autonomy of the decision-making processes carried out by machines and systems functioning without direct human control. At least some of these decisions will generate conflicts and moral dilemmas. It is therefore worth the while to reflect today upon the measures that need to be taken in order to endow the autonomous, self-learning and self-replicating entities – products equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of independent operation in a wide variety of external conditions and circumstances – with a unique kind of ethical intelligence. At the core of the problem, which both the designers and the users of entities bestowed with artificial intelligence must eventually face, lies the question of how to attain the optimal balance between the goals, needs and interests of both sides of the human-non-human interaction. It is so, because in the context of the expansion of the autonomy of the machines, the anthropocentric model of ethics does no longer suffice. It is therefore necessary to develop a new, extended and modified, model of ethics: a model which would encompass the whole, thus far non-existent, area of equal relations between the human and the machine, and which would allow one to predict its dynamics. The present article addresses some of the aspects of this claim.

The article offers an analysis of the problems of technology in the context of exercising power in an organization. The power of the system today is addressed in terms of the “rule of numbers,” based on the impersonal authority of the algorithms which is an extension of the modern concept of the instrumental reason. In keeping with the rules of efficiency the employees manifest modes of behavior analogous to those characterizing the functioning of technology and specifically emphasized by Max Horkheimer and Jacques Ellul. In the author’s view, the rule of the algorithm-based technological systems leads to the atrophy of the moral responsibility and the loss of agency. Attempting to defend the idea of man’s free agency in the context of the algorithm-based technological system, the author invokes Hans Jonas’s theory of moral responsibility and refers to the concept of “ethical anarchism” as proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the production strategy and functioning of the ecological discourse within the Anthropocene. The author asks about the peculiar popularity of climate denialism in public discourse. In the paper, the discourse production is considered in the context of zoe/geo/techno assemblages (Braidotti), as well as the functioning of algorithms and search engines on the example of the Youtube platform. The author concludes that climate denialism should be considered as an equivalent ecological narrative to avoid the expansion of alternative knowledge cycles. In this context, he proposes to turn to the Neganthropocene proposal formulated by Bernard Stiegler.

Mass Media, as one of the emanations of new information technologies, strongly affect the process of shaping individual identity, enabling creation, selection and evaluation of social and cultural patterns. As a result of progressing convergence and mediatisation, hitherto stable values ​​have been “liquefied”, and community categories have been replaced by individual ones. One example of these transformations are changes in the perception of privacy. Under the conditions of the new media ecosystem, this enduring construct, despite its own discursiveness, becomes susceptible to changes and, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, “momentary”. The purpose of this article is to capture the shifts within the dichotomous relationships that shape the meaning of privacy, which are caused by the binary structure of the media focused on satisfying individual needs. Based on the analysis of privacy in the media, defined through bipolar oppositions of private–public, authentic–intentional, relevant–irrelevant and allowed–illegitimate, the labile and simulacratic nature of privacy is revealed.

The article presents selected threads of poststructuralist discourses, such as posthumanism and post-anarchism, to point out the affirmative understanding of the changes in human subjectivity and identity within the networked reality of transnational capitalism. The starting point for the argument presented in the text is Rosi Braidotti’s concept of the nomadic subject, functioning in a post-anthropocentric world inhabited by non-anthropic consciousness and anthropotechnical hybrids. The identity of such a nomadic subject is variable, flexible, and queer. The strategies of digital nomads, avoiding permanent points/places, and thus eluding essentialism, are presented as liberatory strategies of resistance.

The article is an attempt at a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of the “mindful revolution” using Max Horkheimer’s concept of instrumentalization of reason and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, as well as findings of Ronald Purser. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the discourse of mindfulness and Buddhism and neuroscience. According to the thesis of the article, mindfulness is recognized as a technology of power for capturing the affects resulting from functioning within the neoliberal economy and producing a form of subjectivity that captures its emotionality in accordance with the principles of economic rationality.

The aim of the article is to indicate the possibilities of interdisciplinary cooperation, combining the specifics of research on culture and related to information and communication. The article is also a voice in the discussion related to changes in the classification of fields of science and scientific and artistic disciplines. Selected examples of research problems functioning between culture studies, bibliology and information science have been identified and discussed. These include, for example, the culture-forming function of information and communication; changes in cultural artefacts (books and documents) in a digital network environment; the work and its relationships with recipients, and management of information about works in the communication process. Several research questions and proposals have been formulated. The article indicates the legitimacy and benefits of interdisciplinary research between culture studies and bibliology and information science.

The essay proposes a reading of Polish poet Kacper Bartczak’s collection Naworadiowa (2019) through the prism of the philosophical reflections of Catherine Malabou and Bernard Stiegler. Naworadiowa, as part of Bartczak’s original concept of “poetics of plenitude,” becomes a manifestation of the imperative of thoroughgoing rethinking of both the way in which the poetic form operates in the world’s dynamically changing technical landscape and transformations of psychopolitical reality accompanying these changes. I examine the question of plasticity of poetic form, its interaction with the social environment and potential for mobilizing psychic individuation, as well as the question of the poem’s work, seen in the context of Stiegler’s reflections on neganthropic work, that is, the individual and collective effort of transforming the landscape of the Anthropocene and inventing a new form of the sculpture of contemporary reality, defined in his philosophy as Neganthropocene.

Aglaya’s Apocryph, a techno-thriller by Jerzy Sosnowski, is more than a postmodern intertextual palimpsest openly flirting with kitsch, fraught with references to, among others, Stanisław Lem. It is, above all, a story of transgressions of identity by simulating relations with a gynoid. The ostensible feminist elements and cultural clichés matter far less than the posthumanist perspective. The psychological experiment deploying a female cyborg tasked with seducing a young pianist results in personality disintegration both for the ignorant victim and the robot’s navigator. Irena uses the avatar to feel the initially fascinating immersion, while Krzysztof can realize his amatory phantasms. The novel reflects on the process and results of crossing human borders with the aid of technology: combining the human with the inhuman.

The article analyzes human-non-human love relationships shown in two American science fiction films representing the Third Culture cinema: Benjamin Dickinson’s Creative Control (2015) and Logan Kibens’s Operator (2016) in the context of critical theory of posthumanism by Rosi Braidotti, Katherine Hayles, Anne Balsamo and Kim Toffoletti with regard to the sexuality in a posthuman reality. Sexuality is understood here as a complex force with the power to transcend binary oppositions of human sex (Braidotti) and corporality as always marked by gender (Hayles, Balsamo). The power of posthuman images is also pointed out in the context of the celebration of the complexity of posthuman experience (Toffoletti). The analyses of intimate relationships between men and women depicted in the films are also placed in the context of the “ideal woman paradigm” (Julie Wosk), present in numerous cultural texts in which artificial creatures were built for the purposes set by men to meet their needs. The essay seeks to answer the question of whether love of man and machine, as shown in the new science fiction cinema, is an expression of the “posthuman moment” in the text of culture, as defined by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, whose purpose is to violate the coherence and integrity of human experience and to undermine the existence of the “essence” of humanness.

The plot of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the creators of screenplays for the movies Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Apart from the often discussed theme of the cogito of the androids, the Blade Runner trilogy also contains narrative strategies that allow researchers to analyse it from the perspective of animal studies. Of particular importance are the ontological discontinuities of cyberbiological animals (animoids) and the idea of ​​interspecies links between organic and technological beings, which is interpreted here as a criticism of consumer society. The foregoing narrative strategies, linked to the spectre of the ecocatastrophe, introduce intertextual references related to the Anthropocene and the crisis of spirituality. They also indicate the necessity of rethinking some of the rudimentary means of cultural categorization.

The article examines the ways in which American Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) rewrites and compiles excerpts from US archival legal records in his epic-like Testimony. The United States (1885–1915): Recitative (published from 1965 to 1978) so as to represent the social and economic changes, particularly within the context of industrial accidents and child labor, during the late phase of the Industrial Revolution in America. As is argued, the poet’s often uncritically accepted assertion that in his ‘recitatives’ he engages with depositions of authentic witnesses given in a court of law in an unbiased, objective manner is not confirmed either in close reading or in the juxtaposition of particular fragments of the book with the original documentary material on which they are based.

This article attempts to read William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) within the recent theoretical framework of the Anthropocene. It pays particular attention to the local appearance of the Anthropocene in the interwar American South, which became visible in flooding and deforestation. It argues that the story of the hill-farming Bundren family requires more than an ideological reading that would emphasize the eventual assimilation of the family to the modern market in the New South. It advances instead an ecological-historical interpretation, central to which is a reading of the deceased Addie Bundren as a topographical figure for the toxic southern soil. Her family are seen as continuers of a tradition of “agrilogistics” (Timothy Morton) that dates back over twelve thousand years to Mesopotamia. The article tries to identify the consequences of this reading for Faulkner’s representation of character, which can be seen as a static product of the deep time of geological periods. Finally, it argues that Darl Bundren’s subjectless, extreme consciousness is the only one in the novel that has some comprehension of the advent of the southern Anthropocene, although he has no way of extracting himself from this advent apart from absolute madness.

The article offers some introductory considerations on this part of Julian Kornhauser’s poetic oeuvre that comprises the texts with silence in its diverse functions: compositional, theoretical, structural, and thematic. These considerations are based on the category of muteness as found in Martin Heidegger’s late works, that is, in the sigetics project. Additionally, the author endeavours to describe the levels on which researching silence in a poem (and poems’ silence) is justified. As a result, five working perspectives are proposed: (1) thematic, (2) poetologic, (3) formal, (4) contextual, and (5) generic. They become the frames for the discussion about the significance and place of silence in Julian Kornhauser’s poetry.

The first Polish translation of William Gibson's text “Disneyland with the Death Penalty,” originally published in the Wired magazine (September/October 1993, no. 1.4. https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/). The translation, created by Marzena Kubisz and Marcin Mazurek, is hereby published by permission of the Author.

Philosophical Posthumanism is a unique intellectual proposition – one in which Francesca Ferrando not only presents and expands but also celebrates posthumanist thought. The monograph is an open invitation to explore new horizons by de-familiarizing classical humanist thought embedded within the Western civilization. Explicitly deconstructing classical humanism, Ferrando offers her readership a versatile insight into the complexity of the polyphony of new voices including, but not limited to, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, and Antihumanism – contributing to the discourse, which, as the author affirms, is tantamount to the “philosophy of our time.”