Utopischer Posthumanismus - zum Zusammenhang von Technik, Subjekt und Gesellschaft am Beispiel feministischer Science-Fiction
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
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Abstract
Utopias - these are dreams of another, a better society. Dreams of a life that is fundamentally different from the one in which the utopia was written. Despite divergent forms of representation, utopias can be found throughout history, its societies and cultures. At the same time, social change and progress are often associated with technology. The hand axe and the wheel, for example, represent the first uses of technology that fundamentally changed the lives of humankind and made other forms of community possible in the first place. The plow, the steam engine up to genetic engineering or artificial intelligence are further waypoints of the technologized mankind. With the implosion of the Soviet Union and the associated further spread of the market-based economy, utopias began to disappear more and more. Another society thus became increasingly difficult to imagine, while at the same time groundbreaking technical innovations were developed in ever faster succession. Developments that, for example, through biotechnology and genetic engineering or through artificial intelligence, have the potential to fundamentally change people and their societies. This dissertation is focused on disentangling this apparent contradiction.
It examines what constitutes the potential for change of these new technologies at its core and where the utopian can be found in it. For this purpose, existing feminist utopias are looked at, in which the 'courage to use technology' has always been particularly strong.
In a theoretical discussion, utopia is first derived historically and it is shown that utopia is not a genuinely 'Western' phenomenon, but exists interculturally. In examining the function of utopia, particular attention is drawn to the two-step process of critique and normative outlook that is constitutive of utopias. Dystopia as the flip side of utopia with independent characteristics is also emphasized, as well as science fiction and cyberpunk as today's effective cultural productions of the creation of technology-based, alternative societies. The complex of feminist utopias is presented in detail, including their histories, social resistances, thematic emphases, and structural characteristics. Here, in addition to the thematic emphasis on the category of gender, a structural processuality of the utopias is particularly noteworthy, which in their peak phase from 1968 revived the then stagnating utopian landscape.
The potential for change offered by technologies is understood with the help of the theoretical strand of posthumanism. Here, starting from a critique of humanism, at the center of which is the hierarchizing dualism associated with it, the effectiveness of which can hardly be overestimated since the Enlightenment. With the help of theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, it is shown that technology can be a means of dissolving and irritating these social dichotomies. This irritation as a utopian potential, which initially shows itself in newly imagined forms of subjectivity and the body, and from which it is intended to have an effect on society as a whole, is contrasted with the regressive, authoritarian potential of technologies, which are developed according to logics of exploitation in a capitalist, patriarchal world ordered according to categories of inequality.
From the theoretical examination of this contradictory process, categories are formed with which four novels of feminist science fiction are analyzed in a modified qualitative content analysis. The aim is to identify technology-related patterns and narratives - i.e. how technologies are represented in these novels and what effects they have on the subjects and societies described there - in order to be able to describe the possible role of technologies on today's utopian potentials in a second step with reference to the preceding theoretical work.
The novels studied - Joan. D. Vinge: "The Snow Queen" (1980); Joan Slonczewski: "A Door Into Ocean" (1986); Larissa Lai: "Salt Fish Girl (2001); Nnedi Okorafor: “Binti” (2015-18) represent a range of feminist science fiction written after the feminist utopias, in which utopian as well as dystopian set pieces can be discerned.
The analysis of the works shows that genetic engineering, biotechnology, and robotics in particular offer great potential for transcending the seemingly fixed image of subjectivity, while at the same time always considering the possible dystopian downsides of this technology.
It is pointed out that posthumanism and utopian thinking have a multitude of connecting points and thus create space for synergy effects, which were accumulated in the course of the dissertation in the term 'utopian posthumanism' introduced for this purpose.
In this 'utopian posthumanism' it could at least be conceivable again to dare to dream of a better society, of utopia.
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Created: 2021Issued: 2022-05-25Updated: 2022-05-25
Faculty
Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie
Publisher
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Language
ger
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DoctoralThesis
Keywords
utopianismfeminist utopianismposthumanismcyborgsscience fictiondystopiaCyborgsfeminismtechnologyTranshumanismusutopiatranshumanism
DFG-subjects
FeminismusPosthumanismusScience-FictionUtopieTechnikTechnologie
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100
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Habbel, Niklas: Utopischer Posthumanismus - zum Zusammenhang von Technik, Subjekt und Gesellschaft am Beispiel feministischer Science-Fiction. : Philipps-Universität Marburg 2022-05-25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/z2022.0122.