Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

My presentation interrogates discursive polarities of the posthuman. By contrasting “technocratic” with “critical” framings of the “human condition”, I show how AI discourse serves as a catalyst for renegotiations of the human subject, both along and against established epistemic orders.

Paper long abstract

The “floating signifier AI” (Lucy Suchman) acts as a catalyst for “polarising forces” regarding not only how “intelligent” technologies are developed, but also moral, political, and epistemological questions. It encompasses controversial entanglements between humans and non-humans while constituting an imaginative space where experiences of difference and ambivalence are situated within specific narrative configurations.

Crucially, the question of the “conditio humana”—and who qualifies as a sentient, intelligent subject—is being renegotiated. The “human” is framed in divergent ways: on the one hand, as “evil” or “inferior” compared to “his” machines, consequently requiring a “solutionist” approach. On the other hand—and to a certain degree complementary to this—the “human” primarily denotes the “modern,” Western, white, male subject.

The research question for my presentation is how the “critical” posthumanist question—what role humans can and will play in a more-than-human world—stands in a constitutive polarity to “technocratic” transhumanist/posthumanist framings.

Based on an analysis of how media engage with “AI” and how these narratives are received in online comment sections of news dailies in Austria, I will demonstrate how “critical” and “technocratic” framings are being enacted. I argue that an ambivalent stance toward technology is paralleled here by an almost cynical attitude regarding the role of “the human,” a dynamic which effectively reproduces and stabilizes established epistemic orders.

Focusing on the thematic complex of AI, my presentation seeks to interrogate the interplay of these polarising frames regarding emergent human-technology relations, highlighting the intersections and pitfalls, as well as the potential for a nuanced anthropology of the more-than-human.