Love Objects and Transhuman Beasts? Riding the Technologies

Abstract

Technologies in the form of sentiency, objects, spatialisation not only enact the demarcations between nature and culture, human and alterate; technologies mediate the conditions of ableism remediating the ways the abled body and mentality can be known. This chapter implores the reader to think more deeply about technologies and disability. Although disabled people more so than other kinds of humans have had an erotic consubstantial liaison with technologies, it can be argued that more recent developments in the world of techno-science materially and ontologically usher in a kind of somatic fusion between the corporeally anomalous body and the artefact.¹ More than ever, I argue we are witnessing a new kind of human subjectivity — intersubjectivity if you like — technological humans — hybrids, cyborgs or monsters. What better place to extend our ideas about ableism and the production of disability than the subject of transhumanism with all its incumbent issues around ontology, humanness and of course the place of technology. We visit the relational ontology formed and invested through technologies as well as the Brave New World of the enhanced human, the extropian ideal of the überman who proclaims disability as a designation for the non-(re)constructed bodies of the Old World. An underlying question of the chapter asks whether there is a new relation between nature and culture, between human relations with objects, or are we just witnessing a new configuration of ableist relations based on an intrinsic human–technological relation?