The latecoming of the posthuman, or, why “we” do the apocalypse differently, “now’”

In an early passage in Specters of Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida comments with some asperity about the [m]any young people today (of the type "readers-consumers of Fukuyama" or of the type "Fukuyama" himself) [who] probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the "end of history," of the "end of Marxism," of "the end of philosophy," of the "ends of man," of the "last man" and so forth were, in the '50s our daily bread. We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980, the "apocalyptic tone in philosophy".peer-reviewe

What’s wrong with posthumanism?

Theory has always been aware of its other(s). It could scarcely have been otherwise. Theory's own sustained and variegated concern with the nature and structure of alterity, the unignorable realities of the institutional and interdisciplinary "resistance to theory," and dissension within theory's conceptualities and constituencies have all contributed to otherness being constitutive of theory. One might even want to hazard the kind of provocation which would say, in the tradition of statements like "deconstruction is justice, theory is otherness." To speak of Theory's Others, as this collection of Rhizomes invites us to do, is therefore potentially to speak of everything within and without theory: to include everything and exclude nothing according to a logic of such capacious comprehensiveness that differences between the proper and the other become almost obscured. Hence for the sake of rigor, if for nothing else, a narrowing focus must be selected here. And ideally it would be one that could allegorize the general relation between theory and otherness. [excerpt]peer-reviewe

Nonhumans in participatory design

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines the role that nonhumans play in participatory design. Research and practice concerned with participatory design mostly focuses on human participants, however nonhumans also participate in the design process and can play a significant role in shaping the process. This article focuses on how nonhumans participate in the design process. An empirical case study is used to illustrate how humans and nonhumans assemble to form networks in order to effect a design. Nonhumans increase the level of participation in a design process. The case study reveals how nonhumans help to maintain, destroy or strengthen networks by substituting, mediating and communicating with humans and often, in doing so, making human actors more or less visible in the process. Nonhumans play a part in configuring the social. Revealing the presence and roles of nonhumans is an important means through which to increase the democracy within the design process