ENGL 0297-001 POST-EVOLUTION (HNRS), FALL 2007
WEB RESOURCES
DR. MICHAEL FILAS
| The following content provides links to assigned and supplemental course readings. A number of additional course resources, especially youtube content and other links, are collected in my post-evolution blog, which I developed and update regularly as an additional supplement to our class materials. It can be found at http://postevolution.blogspot.com.
Click here for a link to the course syllabus online. Warning: some content and links in the post-evolution blog may be offensive or too graphic for some readers. Such material is flagged accordingly within the blog. |
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| Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) | There are links here to the entire text and back to an excellent Darwin homepage with history, pictures, and much more. | |
| Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) | Lamarck's theory of evolution preceded Darwin by nearly sixty years, as he began working on his theory in 1801. | |
| Evolution Overview Site | Excellent, accessible presentation of the topic and its many dimensions. | |
| Intelligent Design (pro) | These sites represent the regional, political, front lines in the marginalized faith-based challenge to the dominant paradigm accepted by the scientific community. The con site is from Ohio in 2002, the pro is form Kansas 2005. The controversy marks the importance of evolution, and its alternative theories, in our cultural spectrum and belief systems. Here is a second pro-ID site that is more current and comes from a broadly engaged right wing think tank, the Discovery Institute. | |
| Devo: video of song "Jocko Homo" | In 1978, when punk was first breaking, Devo hit the scene with an oddball sound and oddball ideas from Akron, Ohio. Art school dropouts whose first album was produced by Brian Eno (who produced many albums by Talking Heads and U2). The relevant thing here is their camp theory of de-evolution and how they integrate this with an overall critical perspective that involves punk social critique combined with a naked embrace of capitalist trappings, like merchandise and the aesthetics of fun. Here's a link to Devo's official site.
Speaking of devolution and fun, I have recently become a Korn fan through the backdoor, so to speak. Check out this site for a mock documentary project Korn has put together on devolution, for which they credit Devo as their forerunners. The three video previews (which I think are the entire project) are hilarious. |
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| Stelarc | Stelarc is the Australian performance artist who is, as much as anyone, the poster boy for this class. He demonstrates, in his experimental performances, the frontier possibilities for human-machine integration, and the human body as obsolete flesh. Like any good zealot, Stelarc believes in what he does, and can initially appear merely disturbed, but a close look reveals his vision is an integrated invention using today's technology. He takes the theories of post-evolution--distributed consciousness, virtual presence, and connectivity over subjectivity-- and shows how they can be realized. We will spend a good deal of time on Stelarc, so any time you spend at his website will pay off in the long run. | |
| N. Katherine Hayles | Kate Hayles has spoken at WSC before as port of our guest lecture series. She has written extensively about the posthuman, defining it as a theoretical construct in which pattern and randomness, information and noise, become the critical elements in understanding the changing ontology of humanity in a hybridized state with technology. | |
| Hans Moravec | Hnas Moravec is a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pitsburgh. He has been a leading advocate of a post-evolutionary future, especially the falling importance of flesh embodiment for human consciousness. His work involves developing the technologies that will make possible synthetic senses, especially sight and 3D perspectives. | |
| Donna Haraway
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Sociallist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" |
Donna Haraway is a trained anthropologist working as a professor of feminist studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her "Cyborg Manifesto" is the most widely referenced critical document in cyborg studies. | |
| F. T. Marinetti | The Futurist Manifesto provides a historical look at a collective, a fascist collective, that embraced the violent imposition of technology (automobiles, aeroplanes, speed) on humanity. The Futurists welcomed the implied violence of the new technologies and saw their impact as necessary and needed. | |
| Louis Althusser | Louis Althusser is a French Post-Marxist theorist who describes, in the linked essay, the way in which a person's identitiy and subjectivity are formed by the way in which they are defined from the outside, by the way in which they are called or "interpellated" by those who would be models or "super subjects." | |
| Jean Baudrillard | Jean Baudrillard, who died earlier this year (2007), is a French theorist whose ideas about signification, and the dilution of fixed meanings, helps explain the theoretical underpinnings of reconceiving the human as a post-evolutionary being. His theory in the essay linked the left is not easy reading, but it establishes in critical terms the flexible way in which meanings are exchanged in our culture. | |
| Transhumanism | This website has the edgy enthusiasm of Stelarc without the artistic expression meant to inspire a strong emotional reaction. There is a positivistic tone here in the presentation of all technological and scientific developments towards a post-evolutionary state of being. | |
| Luddism | The Luddites were an early nineteenth century collective of workers striking out agsinst the machinery that was taking away their employment in factories. They destroyed the machines, and have since been a referent for anyone who has a strong revulsion for, or animosity for technological progress in any form. As an alternate source of information to the link at the left, see this essay by the well known author Thomas Pynchon, who reviews the movement and its contemporary manifestations here. |
Last updated August 30, 2007