politics of the posthuman

I love the luxury of part time honours! I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot from watching everyone's thesis evolve over the next year.

My still nebulous thesis is beginning to coalesce around ideas about the intersection of technology and the body. For the last decade theorists have been talking about the end of the human era, suggesting it is giving away to a new (post)evolutionary step; the 'posthuman' - a hybrid of organism and cybernetic mechanism.

I'm going to argue that this human/posthuman distinction is artificial. technology is a central part of human oncology; we have always augmented and extended ourselves through tools and technologies. Technologies aren't artificial or unnatural; they form a central part of who we are. Cyborgs don't break with historical continuity, they do not represent a new species or way of being; they are the logical next step for us homo faber.

My thesis will probably look at cyborgs in theory and in fiction focusing on our uneasy relationship with technology, especially technologies that permeate the membranes of our bodies.

I'm sure this is all going to change drastically over the next 12 months, but i guess this gives people a basic idea of what I'm interested in.