Posthumanism and India: Envisioning and Manifesting
An Inaugural Online Symposium Co-organized by
Center for Comparative Social Theory
Dept. of Sociology, West Bengal State University
( 4th, 5th, 11th and 13th June, 2021 – Click here for the Detailed Schedule):
We stand today at the threshold of a crisis and a reimagination of ourselves. We find ourselves in the thick of a global climate crisis that scrambles and disrupts our geological foundations, unleashing frequent mass-scale life-threatening events.The tight co-dependence of global psychosystems and ecosystems are forcing a transversal splicing of life-elements leading to unprecedented hybridities, such as our present protracted pandemic. These conditions force us to rethink our future. Such a rethinking cannot be a set of surface patches to help us return to our comfortable human business as usual, it needs to address the unprecedented nature of our historical location, and our philosophical, psychological, political, cultural and technological norms of human existence. Posthumanism promises new possibilities and directions in this context. It constitutes a revised understanding of the planetary situation helping us to re-envision our imminent future.
Posthumanism and India is a weeklong symposium, from June 5-13, 2021, interested in opening this field of inquiry in its various ramifications in the Indian context. The overarching areas we wish to examine include:
(1) Globalization and technological ontology:
Neo-liberal globalization is swiftly normalizing itself across the subcontinent, offering the lures of franchised and name-branded material and subjective desire, the semblance of an infinite freedom to pursue innumerable multiplied flavors of categorized consumption while being manipulated algorithmically through profiling by the industries of persuasion. This simulated freedom and horizon of infinite consumption forms the heaven of contemporary liberal desire. It is premised on the disappearance of a world-wide computational machine into the human to form a global technological ontology. This posthumanist ontology centred in multinational capital is increasingly extended by all the institutions of our time, political, cultural, fiscal and pedagogical. Its omnipresence drives out or co-opts into its economy all alternatives or forms of resistance, such as the revolutionary potential of the humanities or other trajectories of becoming.
Considerations within this area may include:
– Adoption of colonial anthropocentrism in national policy-making
– Neo-liberal casteism, othering and thanatopolitics
– Scientism and technological overdetermination in human normativity
– “Not Quite/Not White”: Wombs for sale, cyber coolies, ethnic zoos and dumping grounds of the fully human
– Technology and the manufacture of national memory
– Posthumanities in a postdisciplinary academy
– Collective subjects and anarchist polities
– Understanding the Anthropocene in postcolonial nations
(2) Internal normative humanisms and their others:
Below the urban and institutional surface, India is made up of a large number of contested norms of humanity. Of these the religious landscape forms an overriding determinant, dominated by Hinduism and its peripheral others, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zorastrianism, Judaism and a variety of named and unnamed tribal and heterodox religions. These religions are themselves reified identities in our times, partly the result of modern governmentality and nationalist politics and partly premodern doxic interactions. Among these and within some of these, particularly Hinduism, are a variety of norms and degrees of human privileging and othering, as of genders, castes and outcastes, sects, orthodoxies and heterodoxies. In a postmodern scenario, these norms coexist with the humanist norms of modernity, forming power hierarchies. Under contemporary posthumanist conditions of the bankruptcy of modernist humanism these norms are relativized and become contested humanisms along with the rights of quasi-human and non-human others.
Considerations within this area may include:
– Posthuman Indian feminisms
– Cyber-identities: liberation or subterfuge?
– Caste and gender hierarchies
– Modernity and its others
– Hindus and their others
– Heterodoxies and hybrid humans
– Human/Non-human relations in pre-modern Indian cultures
– Boundaries of the human: Religious minorities, Dalits, abjection and rejection
(3) Existential posthumanism and Indian philosophies:
The variety of Indic philosophies (darshana), tied to psychospiritual technologies of becoming (yoga) have a long history of plural understandings of the human as a transitional form moving towards chosen ontological destinations. In this sense they may be thought of in parallel with the Nietzschean understanding of the human as a becoming reaching towards the overhuman or with Michel Foucault’s idea of aesthetics and technologies of the self. This field has also been impacted by premodern sectarian politics and modernist identity politics. It also includes, in some cases, unexamined implications counter to the egalitarian flourishing of life. A contemporary posthumanist approach to this field would acknowledge the hegemonizing tendencies within such coexisting fields of becoming and their relative soteriologies of hierarchic subordination and attempt to develop frameworks for plural forms of posthuman destining.
Considerations within this area may include:
– Yoga and existential posthumanism
– Modern and premodern epistemologies of becoming
– Ethics of the will to power in posthuman becoming
– Climate change, yoga and becoming-cosmos
– Human/Non-human communication
– Singularities and universality in the posthuman cosmopolis
– Boundaries, liminalities and relations of the living and the dead in Indian traditions.
(4) Posthuman Cultural Imaginaries:
Whether in traditional Indian literatures, arts and performative traditions or modernist/futurist genres, a vast plurality of human self-conceptions have developed their own imaginaries regarding identities, capacities, affects, destinies and relations with others of their own and other kinds. A posthumanist future must develop its own ethics to accommodate such intersecting and porous pluralities.
Considerations within this area may include:
– Supernaturals, animals, plants and “non-living” others in premodern cultural imaginaries
– Contested and alternative human identities in premodern texts
– Imagining Gender, Gender-Identity, Gender Expression and Sexual Orientation in nationalist/postcolonial spaces
– Dalit and minority imaginations of posthuman destinies
– Contemporary Indian science-fiction
– Siddhis and supernatural powers in contemporary cultural imaginaries
– Neo-liberal futures and cyborg imaginaries
Symposium Format:
There will be two sessions dedicated to each of the above four areas. The symposium will be conducted in the form of panel discussions of 2 hours duration with four to five participants each. Participants papers will be archived on the conference site for all participants and attendees to read before the session. Participants will not read papers during the session but introduce their ideas briefly in not more than 8-10 minutes and conduct a discussion among themselves and with the audience. Participants will be selected by the organizers based on their proposals (200 words).
For more information, email info@posthumanism.in