The transhuman condition: Rhetoric and ethics in the cybernetic age

Emergent technoscientific reconsiderations of human bodies and categories of human agency have challenged traditionally humanist conceptions of ethics and epistemology as well as more recent postmodern and poststructuralist critical and cultural theory. Whereas typical posthuman politics emphasize the shared identities of humans, animals, and/or machines in order to critique liberal humanism, this project argues for a transhuman rhetoric and ethics that productively deploys capacities for persuasion, response, and conditioning emergent in our interactions with contemporary technologies and our imbrication in an increasingly networked cybernetic society. Chapter One introduces the rhetorical dilemmas at the center of endeavors to think in a non-humanist or non-anthropocentric manner: the seeming paradoxical attempt to conceive of an ecology in which human conception will itself have undergone radical change. Chapter Two argues for a set of critical and pedagogical practices focused on our ability to manipulate ours and others' affective responses and cognitive responses to visual and electronically mediated material as opposed to our abilities to interpret or critique them. Chapter Three examines the interrelated research in artificial intelligence and neuropharmacology in reference to the contemporary use of antidepressants and related ethical and political controversies; parallels and intersections in these two genealogies resulted in the production of various techniques of persuasion and transformation inspired by research into neural nets and the establishment of the network as a conceptual paradigm. Chapter Four turns to the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke to stage an intervention in contemporary rhetorical scholarship on subjectivity and the relationship between rhetoric and the body. Chapter Five develops an "aesthetic ethics" for contemporary rhetorical pedagogy based on the training of capacities to flexibly respond to others. Finally, Chapter Six explores the concept of "control" or "cybernetic" societies in the works of Gilles Deleuze and William S. Burroughs and concludes with a proposal for fomenting ethical and political activity without recourse to traditional tropes of critique or resistance.