ARCH-4980.3 | Carla Leitao, Adjunct Professor

ALTERITY AND THE POST-HUMAN

MICHAEL VILLARDI

Uexküll argues that organisms retain a level of complexity suitable to the environments in which they are subjects to; for example, ticks ¬only respond to a handful of environmentally stimuli, as their environment only necessitates actions to the smell of butyric acid in the air from a nearby mammal, warmth of a blood-filled body, and light to ascend to the top of a blade of grass. Humans have biologically evolved to meet the needs of a much more vast list of environmental inputs; we are more complex than the tick, and we are subjects to a much more complex paradigm. However, technology has become faster than biology; humans, as multiform agents, are losing a race to remain equally as richly articulated as our environment. To remain subjects of this new world order, we must adopt a vehicle through which we become more complex (the body) and a method in which we increase our complexity (the prosthesis).

The particular moment in our history when we rely on tools more than our biological processes marks the conception of the Post-Human. This notion refers to the continuation of the human species through the next stage of evolution; removing ourselves from the anthropocene, understanding the universe from a non-human perspective, and actively using technology to extend the envelope that defines human capability. Presence of the Post-Human creates a condition of alterity, of an ‘otherness,’ on multiple scales; the one in which we engage the prosthesis to become post-human and the collective distributed network of post-humans bodies.

The tool has in many ways subsumed the role of evolution; apparatuses evolve iteratively and faster than the environmentally-induced and morphologically random mutations dictating biological evolution. The tool can be considered both physical and virtual, as it can manipulate and articulate matter equally as well as it can ideas or concepts. The tool or prosthesis, has allowed us to extend our physical and virtual reach into previously unreachable territories, as a means of “supplementing our natural capabilities, since nature is indifferent, inhuman, and inclement; we are born naked and with insufficient armor,” as Le Corbusier states.