Blockchain Papers

Owen Marshall

No abstract is available for this record.

P. H. T. Trung, T. D. Khoa, Thanh Pham Nghiem, T. B. Nam · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Nicolás Rojas Cortés

Have you heard that some people wrote a story about the future? What? People can’t write a story of what hasn’t happened yet? Well, Nietzsche was also told that a philology of the future was impossible. To be precise, the new version of the Posthuman Studies Reader is not exactly a story in the historiographic sense, but rather in a relaxed sense; more that of a guide that will allow us to understand the assumptions on which we will draw to live in the near future. We find ourselves, in this sense, with a compendium capable of introducing us in the process of becoming self-aware of our limits—biological, educational, philosophical—as a human species.Structurally, this work is made up of an Anti-Prologue, an Introduction, and four sections, which I will focus on in this review. From the beginning, both in the Introduction and in the first section, “A. Pedigrees of Posthuman Studies as an Academic Discipline and Contemporary Posthuman Movements,” one may be pleased to find that progress in academic disciplines related to posthuman studies is real.It was already several years ago that Nick Bostrom presented “A History of Transhumanist Thought” (2005), and it is today that, thanks to this Reader, we can find a series of indications that allow us to expand our knowledge of the common roots not only from which transhumanist thought has emerged, but also that give birth to ways of thinking that generally seek to go beyond humanism. As the editors claim, the “pedigree” that we are able to find here does not emerge from a specific form of philosophy, but rather from a “critical posthumanism,” a “field of a gradual integration among Transhumanism, Metahumanism and Posthumanism, an evolving but firm ground, wide open to the new philosophical concepts about a less anthropocentric, less racist, more ethical and more clearly politicized future” (11). The roots of our past, then, will mark the path of our future.I cannot help but notice that the inspiration generated by the scholarly works of Stefan Lorenz Sorgner can already be found in the Introduction, and this is not surprising, since it is sufficient to look at the word “pedigrees” in the first section to understand that we are dealing with a work that is fully aware of the latest research in this field. Let us remember that Sorgner had already produced a study called “Stammbäume des Meta-, Post- und Transhumanismus,” contained in his book Transhumanismus: “Die gefährlichste idee der Welt”!? (2016), originally written in German. However, I would dare to say that the book’s first section seeks to mark the route of what I have called a history of the future rather than to make a deep and exhaustive reflection on the roots of “Critical Posthumanism,” which is fully understood as long as we, citizens of the future, also make our contribution to discover, reconstruct, and explain how is it that our humanist, classical, modern, and enlightened roots were able to generate the conditions for sensing the possibility of surpassing ourselves as a species.If we compare the names of philosophers, scientists, and scholars presented in the Introduction to Posthuman Studies Reader with the names presented by Bostrom in his “History” (2005), we will find that the keynotes that configure “critical posthumanism” go beyond humanism and rationalism. It is the presence of the “scientific cosmist,” of Nietzsche and his idea of the “overhuman,” of contemporary scientists—among which I can highlight my countryman Francisco J. Varela and the Buddhist Jon Kabat-Zinn—and representatives of feminism and the LGBTQ+ movement oriented toward posthumanism that we can say that this book is the result of long debates, and that it presents itself as a work that is coherent with the world in which we live and with the world in which we are going to live: that is, a world neither humanistic, nor Western, nor solely masculine.Following this route, we find ourselves with our first stop on the road to our future, section B, “Transhumanism” (41–136). The section begins with an excerpt from the text Knowledge, Morality, and Destiny by Julian Huxley While the text is notable for being the first publication in which the word “transhumanism” was presented, Huxley also assigned to human beings a descriptive note that we share with nature itself, namely that all reality is a process. This allows us to outline an approach to self-transformation that is wider and more universal than that of the already known humanisms. This characteristic note will be complemented by the proposal of FM-2030, who in his text “Transhumans-2000” already hints that we are “biofluid,” that is, a biological entity that can flow beyond its limitations. However, it is not until the appearance of Natasha Vita-More’s “Transhumanist Manifesto” that we are able to find a proposal to systematize the conditions that underpin the transhumanist project: (a) challenging aging; (b) enhancing and improving our bodies and brains; and (c) understanding ourselves as a life form that is not restricted by others. These conditions allow us to begin to systematize the transhumanist project as a philosophical worldview. They do not point strictly to human biological evolution, but rather refer to the need to control uncertainty in order to control perpetual progress and, consequently, achieve self-transformation into a transhuman existence. It is noteworthy that Natasha Vita-More has the intuition that a transhuman existence does not imply only adding gadgets to our bodies or designing bodies without a transdisciplinary strategy and perspective, since the transhuman cannot participate in a social existence without a perspective capable of confronting political absolutes and biases. Thus, self-transformation as such implies existing beyond modern morality, beyond an economy of scarcity and beyond discriminatory cruelty.On this basis, it is easy to understand the composition of the section. Going beyond the three elements recently mentioned implies a reflection on specific experiences of our existence. Transhumanism, as a philosophy, cannot be conceived as an a priori reflection and must confront our actual experience. David Pearce, with his manifesto “The Hedonistic Imperative,” is the first to confront us with the possibilities that nanotechnology and genetic engineering present when dealing with the experience of both physical and mental pain. Already, in 1995, Pearce detected what today is a devastating and real emergency, that global suffering should be a topic of global policy discussion. Depression, manic states, and bipolarity are mentioned by the author as examples that show contemporary health standards to be pathologically low. Nonetheless, an existence at the level of our current possibilities can take care of these health standards by developing the possibilities of not only suppressing the psychological states of euphoria, but also programming ourselves with a kind of euphoria that allows us to abandon our lugubrious present. This last possibility can only be conceived from a discussion that takes us into account not only as objects of transformation, but also as subjects capable of deciding on our transformation.In this way, Anders Sandberg’s “Morphological Freedom. Why We Don’t Just Want It, but Need It” argues for the need to extend the “personal right” to modify our bodies according to our own desires in order to pursue happiness. This right implies maximum personal autonomy, an idea that would directly confront contemporary ethical debates, namely women’s right to their own bodies, reproductive rights, or euthanasia. In this sense, morphological freedom would require a tolerant society that does not allow its ethical judgments to be clouded by paternalistic ways of relating to individuals. This morphological freedom, which implies understanding self-transformation as an ongoing process and not as an ideologically determined telos, is also an invitation to get hold of the different types of health that already exist, as in the case of disabled people who do not want to be “repaired” because they have already learned to cope and live with their own existence. In short, Morphological Freedom is a commitment not only to the notion of maximum personal autonomy, but also to a tolerant and pluralistic society.The inclusion of Fukuyama is necessary at this point in the narrative. His popular work “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas: Transhumanism” may, in fact, kick off this whole Reader; is there a greater representative of the bioconservative than he? There may very well be, but his naïve and uncritical ideas end up strengthening authors such as Max More and his proposal of “The Proactionary Principle.” Although the intentions of people like Fukuyama may be good at their core, they are still blinded by prejudices and weak methodological approaches. In this sense, “The Proactionary Principle” is a coherent and rational response to the impossibility of denying technological progress, but also to the need to be ethically responsible for the inevitable development of science and technology.I believe that the inclusion of “Democratic Transhumanism 2.0” by James Hughes is a sufficient gesture to refute Fukuyama and, at the same time, demonstrate that the transhumanist movement is not as naive as the bioconservatives depict. Hughes’ self-awareness when characterizing the transhumanist and bioconservative discussion as another dimension of the complexity of contemporary politics is remarkable, because if a reflection seeks to match up to the height of our times, it must be able to offer a radical interpretation of democracy in order to support a coherent relationship between (a) new social possibilities brought about by emerging technologies, (b) a state policy capable of anticipating and dealing with threats from the misuse of emerging technologies without bioconservative biases, and (c) the multiplicity of perspectives involved in defending the dignity of all people who fight for the right to control their own bodies without being coerced by society to adopt ideologically “normal” bodies. This is why I believe that Hughes’s work is an incredible contribution not only to the teaching process of what transhumanism is, but also to show that if we want to think about the present, it is necessary to adopt a multiple perspective.Unfortunately, I do not agree with the inclusion of the following text. In its defense, I understand that the content is expressed in a rather literary way; however, beyond the metaphors and literary style, Nick Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia” manifests what I consider to be a naive transhumanism. It is enough, for example, to take into account his considerations on suffering (131) to understand that, beyond the rhetoric of his approach, Bostrom’s utopian transhumanism overlooks many moments in the history of philosophy. There is much debate on suffering—from the Epicurean philosophers or Nietzsche, just to name a few—for a specialist at Bostrom’s level to present the ideas contained in his paper. Nevertheless, as I have argued throughout this review, I am more than convinced that philosophy as a discipline progresses and, in this sense, “Letter from Utopia” has allowed great scholars such as Hauskeller (2012) and Sorgner (2018) to respond to these ideas and push transhuman researchers to the limits of the question for this movement.In this sense, it appears as a great achievement to me that “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner is the article that coherently connects this first section with the rest of the book. It is necessary for me to be honest and thank Professor Sorgner for inviting me to participate in this review; however, I cannot deny that it is also difficult for me to be objective with this text, as it is because of this reading that I first became familiar with transhumanism. While the article is a direct response to Bostrom’s History (2005), it also, in my view, represents an excellent exercise in pushing transhumanism out of the comfort zone of its presuppositions. The goal now is not only to overcome our condition through genetic improvement, but also to reconsider our relationship with science, values and culture. Thus, Nietzsche’s “dynamic philosophy” in Sorgner’s perspective makes it possible to coordinate a new face of transhumanism in a coherent fashion: a transhumanism that is no longer naively materialistic or scientistic. Beyond the specific content of the article, it is necessary to highlight the level and number of discussions that were born thanks to this paper. The sole mention of Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor or Enemy? edited by Yunus Tuncel (2017) is enough to highlight the impact of Sorgner’s proposal in the academic field. The reception of his proposal has been diverse, with both support and criticism, but Professor Sorgner’s production has not yet concluded, and, in later works, he has even admitted “a weak Nietzschean or posthumanist version of transhumanism” (2016). I believe that it is this version of Nietzschean transhumanism that editors Sampanikou and Stasieńko had in mind when coordinating the content of this Posthuman Studies Reader, as the following sections of the book seek to exhibit an overcoming of our condition by destroying the assumptions that hold us subjected to humanist ideas. This thought could not be more Nietzschean.The next section, “C. Posthumanism” (137–278), is the longest in the book and the one that also, in my view, provides the most significant contribution to the task of expanding a notion of transhumanism that attempts to think beyond its human condition without relying exclusively on technology.I find interesting to begin by mentioning that one can find the aforementioned Nietzschean heritage already at work in the excerpts from Donna Haraway’s works. It is undeniable that one of Nietzsche’s greatest scholars clearly has something to contribute to the goal of characterizing ourselves, and Haraway senses this insofar as her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” can be understood from the biopolitical reflection of Michel Foucault. When she affirms that “The Cyborg is our ontology” (143), what is being affirmed is a decision in the face of humanist dualism. From this starting point we can no longer take as a given our dependence on dual separations (mind–body; animal–machine), but rather, just like a mythological tale, Haraway’s works are the starting point for doubting the boundaries that have ideologically determined us. And one may wonder what these boundaries are. I believe that the first question, in a primordial sense, should be “What are we?” in order to be able to understand what is at stake when we ask ourselves about the meaning of the posthuman. I think that N. Katherine Hayles recognizes this methodological step when she says that “human being is first of all embodied being, and the complexities of this embodiment mean that human awareness unfolds in ways very different from those of intelligence embodied in cybernetic machines” (163). With this in mind, rather than an anti-human perspective, one should create perspectives capable of understanding ourselves as the result of historical evolutionary processes that do not end in the use of technological prostheses but culminate in a different understanding of ourselves.I emphasize that Hayles’ characterization leaves room for the question of “What is a human being?” and it seems to me that the inclusion of Neil Badmington’s “Posthumanism” is a good way of illustrating the power of the issue just mentioned, for it seems that if one wanted to the question “What a is human being?” with a form of as the one could that to that is, the possibility of an to that question will on a of boundaries that are In this ideas are in the of in her of the and in of when the technologies of the the of what is a human being would be and our current idea is by itself in the face of what is different from an and one who would be as an existence that these limits or and even on the ideas of one could as an entity in the process of his own allows to extend the limits of our embodied human one I believe does in her an of to on indications in order to allow such as to generate for a methodological debate with humanism. I then, that of is an excellent of how posthumanism is capable of confronting humanism. also and assumptions into question, and this is it necessary to reconsider the elements that had been by the humanist perspective, namely on an capable of the from which we can understand ourselves in order to understand ourselves as of the world and neither nor from nor from its descriptive In a and to we could say that when “What the of posthumanism with that posthumanism is “a of that is, to ourselves no longer from the of but to do on new that can the limits that humanism on out the of a one wonder this approach could have in the It seems to me that an to this question should be a and about this is what we find at the end of this section. In the excerpt from The we find the of “a posthuman in the when a is the of the I believe that this exercise is necessary even if one does not the of since could it even to us in a of ethical that for the complexities and actual of the to and more than on the of all that has been presented However, one can the humanist and ask “What of the if at we say is is the question that could configure the of this section, a by text a text that is not only because it is a between Nietzschean and and but also because it a of that like humanism and itself in that are still of ourselves at their However, seems to that the possibility of thinking beyond the of the in the need to in a way, which is in her perspectives have been an overcoming of what we are by of and an overcoming of what we are by of a And one may what is transhumanism overcome its and itself with posthumanist This question that I ask is even a personal as I would like to do research on this topic and the possibility that a form of transhumanism capable of care of is to of itself about its doubting and give birth to new without naively limits such as in science or is The Reader do not mean as an one last overcoming of our human the proposal by both Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and the last section the book with a proposal that in of one of the that has been a of this the that philosophical reflection can can it not if in his “The of and the and in a that the of transhumanism are the and and its of the and affirms the and not only firm in this but also takes the ideas of and and a philosophy of I were to present a of his I would say that is an an for an politics in which it makes no to the what we can think is already the future is and of believe that the intuition the word may be the to understanding for that can be in of this new way of thinking is no longer thought out as a to philosophical rather, is a on a Nietzschean that, now without without concepts such as and which the of a new of ourselves, and not the of and that can us in the still present and in the in the last Reader text, I would like to point out that, in my view, Sorgner presents at ideas for namely and by ourselves to our through a of and could we and in this of that we cannot step into do I this in several This Reader is a guide to get into philosophy. I would like to have the to this content in my in the near future. I am to be able to point out that, beyond the different perspectives in this Reader, what its is an ethical toward we are not able to on ourselves and our existence how can we even begin to face the that are is only a of the of not thinking about ourselves beyond In this last sense, this Reader will be a of the people who to give an to the very same that will how we will live in the near future.

Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Alex Taylor, Ruth Catlow

The relationships that constitute the global industrial food system tend towards two dominant values that are creating unsustainable social and environmental inequalities. The first is a human-centered perspective on food that privileges humans over all other species. The second is a view of food as a commodity to be traded for maximum economic value, rewarding a small number of shareholders. We present work that explores the unique algorithmic affordances of blockchain to create new types of value exchange and governance in the food system. We describe a project that used roleplay with urban agricultural communities to co-design blockchain-based food futures and explore the conditions for creating a thriving multispecies food commons. We discuss how the project helped rethink algorithmic food justice by reconfiguring more-than-human values and reconfiguring food as more-than-human commons. We also discuss some of the challenges and tensions arising from these explorations.

Kyo Maclear

“Care is the antidote to violence.” —Saidiya Hartman at In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe (2017) “The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away.” —Naomi Klein (2015) “Y’all better learn how to survive now.” —Miss Bathsheeba, Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) Louisiana. A dark boiling sky. Beasts of the Southern Wild opens in an anarchic place of car scrap and driftwood, feral animals and tumbledown shacks. We are at the end of the world in a swampy bayou way out in the Gulf of Mexico. A young black girl lays her hand against the body of a pig and tilts her head to listen for the heartbeat. A few moments later, she holds a baby bird to her ear, listens deep, eager to get to the heart of the matter. Animals, for this girl, are close as kin. Their heartbeats (which we also hear, thump-thump-thumping) bespeak the ebb and flow of life. As the girl’s opening voiceover tells us: “All the time, everywhere, everything's hearts are beating and squirting, and talking to each other the ways I can't understand. Most of the time they probably be saying: I'm hungry, or I gotta poop. But sometimes they be talkin' in codes.” The heroine and narrator of Beasts is six-year-old “Hushpuppy,” a preternaturally wise, motherless kid played with mesmerizing force by Quvenzhané Wallis. When we meet her she is stomping around her cardboard-and-tin home dressed only in a dirty undershirt, panties, and rubber boots. Semi-orphaned, Hushpuppy lives in a Louisiana tidal basin—dubbed the Bathtub—with a rowdy, multiracial group of misfits and a sickly, floundering, alcoholic father named Wink (Dwight Henry) who swings between harshly neglecting and aggressively mentoring his daughter. Vulnerable to floods and storm-surge waters, the Bathtub is separated from the mainland or “dry side” by a levee. On the dry side sits a blurry factory, industry, consumerism, and a filthy haze. It may be “rich” and “safe” but it is spiritually desiccated. Life in the Bathtub is bare, bufferless, and broken but it is also full. Full of booze, junk, bacchanal, decay, fireworks, grief, experience, knowledge, extremes of catastrophe, and drunken rapture. People and animals roam freely, untethered to wealth or materialism. Life may tilt toward tragedy in the Bathtub but it is juiced with uncommon liberty and moments of pure communal joy. If this is the frontline of climate change, then carpe diem. A festive fireworks celebration during the opening sequence captures something of the film’s “precarity be damned” ethos. Faced with brewing storms and floods, The Bathtub locals are determined to hang on and protect their autonomy and collective way of life. It is better to be wet and alive in their view than to live in a “dry world”—better to experience self-sufficient squalor than soulless state-dependency; better to stay in place than endure the violence of resettlement. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) is one of the most influential and most discussed “climate change” films in recent American history. On the fifth anniversary of its release, I excavate scholarly and popular debates about the film to probe the film’s virtues and blindspots. Is Beasts of the Southern Wild a means to symbolize “climate resistance” (Mirzoeff 2012) or a naturalizing of “black suffering” (Brown 2013a)? What might we learn from the disunity of response to this film?1 Five years after its release, Beasts continues to offer its viewers various ways of thinking through the present-day world in the context of climate change, neoliberalism, and racialized violence. There are many themes drifting through Beasts of The Southern Wild, several of which I will parse later in this essay, but the central one is a celebration of resilience and independence in the face of durational loss or “slow violence.” The film offers a booming tribute to the tenacity of the Bathtub’s multiracial outliers, who go to extreme lengths to defend their homes and their magical if improbable community in the wake of climactic disaster. (The improbability of this community will be a recurring motif in criticism of the film, as I will soon discuss.) In this all-but-drowned place, there is no character more emblematic of this gritty survivalist spirit than Hushpuppy. Ever capable, Hushpuppy cooks (catfood) and cares for herself and a posse of domestic animals. Ever resourceful, she lives bare and in the near open without even proper attire to protect her from the elements. Her very features, from her wild hair to her fierce scowl to her honed stare, appear sculpted by years of sparring and inclement weather. Her big six-year-old eyes seem to have already absorbed it all—scenes of slow catastrophe and unexpected tenderness. The film’s power derives in large part from its faithfulness to Hushpuppy’s feisty and elegiac perspective. She is the only focal point of a disintegrating world. The camera floats and tilts in her direction, capturing the ruined textures and tones of her tenuous surroundings. She is the story’s motor and momentum. She is the community’s storyteller, recording their history for the benefit of “the scientists of the future.” Her freeform delivery, fanciful, laced with wonder and ecological anxiety, narrates what it means to love a wounded place with all your wounded heart; and, by extension, what it means to be fervently attached to all fragile places (be it a post-Katrina bayou, a grief-stricken community or the planet itself.) Through her empathetic eyes we are connected to the weave of the universe, from visions of particles flying through the air, to melting ice caps to Arctic avalanches to prehistoric creatures. The viewer’s proximity to Hushpuppy’s inner life is deeply stirring but also, as some critics and scholars have argued, gravely unsettling. The film taps into a series of concerns about what it takes to “survive” in a time of growing instability and climate change. 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Margherita Long

Hagio Moto’s Nuclear Manga and the Promise of Eco-Feminist Desire Margherita Long (bio) In April 2012 the leading shōjo manga artist Hagio Moto published a collection of five new works in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Titled Nanohana (Rape blossoms), the volume was hailed by a review in the Mainichi newspaper as proof that manga subculture responds to societal problems “more quickly and more incisively than any other medium” (Figure 1). 1 But the Mainichi review, like those in the Yomiuri and Asahi Weekly, stopped short of spelling out the exact nature of Hagio’s insight. 2 And there were also disgruntled otaku bloggers who complained that Nanohana merely repeats the same antinuclear slogans (“It’s not safe!”) we have already been hearing for decades. 3 In this essay I propose that what is interesting about Hagio’s contribution to Japan’s denuclearization debates is the way she connects the problem of the nuclear with the problem of desire. In “Purūto fujin” (Madam Pluto) and “Ame no yoru: Uranosu hakushaku” (A rainy night: Count Uranus), radioactive elements take human form and become irresistible to everyone but a tiny minority who refuse to forget their chemical properties. With wry precision, Hagio equates the ability to be humanly wanted with the inability to be materially questioned or acknowledged. The target of her critique is our dominant [End Page 3] model of desire, in which it is only after some original, physical object goes missing that we can begin to desire its substitute, which is de facto entirely cultural. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Cover image from the first edition of Nanohana (Rape blossoms) (Shōgakukan, 2012). This essay expands my reading of Nanohana by drawing out its affinity with an earlier and much longer work by Hagio, Sutaa Reddo (1980, Star Red). Here Hagio not only sharpens her critique of desire-as-usual but offers a brilliant alternative. The heroine Sei is a galaxy-traveling shōjo who refuses to accept “love” as compensation for the destruction of her beloved planet, Mars. In the process, she teaches her lover Erg how to go back to his own culture’s dead planet. There, at her insistence, he relearns human love by reawakening his capacity for human/nonhuman interaction. The result is joyously eco-positive—the rebirth of a planet! And yet, in the rich body of [End Page 4] Japanese feminist writing on Hagio, this eco-critical element has gone mostly unremarked (Figure 2). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Cover image from a later edition of Sutaa Reddo (1980, Star Red) (Shōgakukan Bunko, 1995). At stake, I think, is how we conceive our relation to material origins. What does it mean to love a planet the way Sei loves Mars? Do we really need to sever our relation with the physical object before we can begin to make sense of it? Desire it? Desire each other? Indeed, what would it mean for intra-human relations if they were not founded in a prior sacrifice of the material world? These are questions that a group of North American feminists has recently begun to ask under the rubric of “new materialism.”4 What I propose in this essay is that a similar set of questions is key to a rich but tantalizingly incomplete debate that has been swirling around Hagio’s work since the 1980s: the debate about the hyper-girl. [End Page 5] “Hyper-girl” (chōshōjo) is a term coined in 1984 by critic Miyasako Chizuru in her study of Hagio’s early manga, Chōshōjo e (1984, Toward the hyper-girl). Miyasako argues that we can situate Hagio’s heroines along a continuum of feminist progress from the shōjo demanded by patriarchy, to the hishōjo (anti-girl) of works like Heart of Thomas (1974, Tōma no shinzō) and Pō no ichizoku (1972, The Poe clan), who seizes agency as a “boy with no genitals.”5 Then, even more positively, we have the chōshōjo of Star Red, who takes the stage emphatically as a girl. The chōshōjo draws her identity...

Gillian Rudd

AttheBorders oftheHuman.Beasts, Bodies andNatural Philosophy intheEarlyModern Period. Ed. by ERICA FUDGE, RUTH GILBERT, and SUSAN WISEMAN. Basingstoke: Macmillan;New York:St Martin'sPress. I999. xii + 369 pp. ?42.50. Perceiving Animals:HumansandBeastsin EarlyModernEnglish Culture.By ERICAFUDGE. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 1999. x + 232 pp. ?42.5o. Arguably, a mark of a good conference is the 'buzz' effect, by which every paper (including, naturally,one's own) seems linked in dynamic ways to every other, an amazing number of illuminating connections are made between sessions and papers, and no defence is needed for the conference theme, its statusbeing so selfevidentlybeyond doubt. All of which goes to prove exactly how importanta topic it is and how right one was to go along. With luck, such satisfyingeuphoria lasts one out of the conferencevenue and at leasthalfan hourinto thejourney home. Perhaps a collection of essaysthat requiressimilarconnective skillsof its readers should be effective likewise, but while it is possible to make links between the various contributionsto AttheBorders oftheHuman, I am less confidentof a resultantbuzz. According to the preface, this collection investigatesdefinitionsof 'the human' in the early modern period, focusing on three particular areas where the borders between human and non-human are most challenged: human/animal; organism/ machine; physical/non-physical. This is a wide and, it transpires, diffuse remit, resulting in a lack of conviction for the collection and a lurkingsuspicion that the attempt to bring several trendy but disparatetopics under the same umbrella has proved too much. A diffuse whole does not preclude good individual elements, however:therearecertainlysome good thingshere and some intriguingassociations for the reader to make. Brian Cummings reveals the flounderingat the borders of what is mental and what isphysical,exposed by discussionsof shame, which trouble the distinctionsbetween man and beast or Spaniard and Indian. Margaret Healy offers an interesting discussion of human/inhuman behaviour which reveals the porous natureof the body, liable to invasionby devilsor (ifone isverylucky)angels, but ends at the point where fuller discussion of effortsto control these boundaries would be appropriate.The resultantsense of curtailmentis also felt when reading Alan Stewart'sandJulie Sanders'scontributions.Stewart'sdiscussionof intellectual pursuit ('the humanities') as proof of proper human status, as opposed to the nobility's preferredpursuit of hunting, contains an interestingenough description of the one-upmanshipbetween Erasmusand Bude over poverty,but failsto develop its relation to the collection's theme. Sanders's piece on the role of the midwife suffers doubly. Not only it is abbreviated, but it also seems oddly out of place. Clearly there is something worthwhile to be said about the sleight of hand of Jonson's TheMagnetic Lady,by which the substitutionsof female control of the birth chamber and literal substitutionof children can be read as a commentary on the role of midwives and suspicion of male denigration of that role, but Sanders has neither the space not the context to develop it here and I was left wishing for the differentarenathatthisparticularpiece seems to deserve. Bacon's emphasison visualproof tenuouslylinksSanders'spiece to the restof the collection and is again exploited by Erica Fudge on vivisection, and Ruth Gilbert, who declares a focus on the anatomy/erotics boundary, but in fact more simply brings together a selection of hermaphroditetexts as viewing becomes voyeurism. Peter, the Wild Boy, is also subject to a gaze that hovers between voyeurism and scientific scrutinyas Michael Newton intelligentlypresents Defoe's intriguingand generallyoverlookedAlereNATUREDelineated and the questionof where the human begins is raised. SusanW^iseman and Mary Peace furtherexplore this topic in their 264 Reviews YES, 32, 2002 discussionsof apes and women respectively,both of which left me unsure.I am not convinced that for Tyson the 'fragileborders'and 'temporallyalterablegradations' between human and ape are 'at stake' exactly. There is clearly a fascination here, but confidence in mankind'sposition at the summit of the process emanates from Tyson and denies the phrase 'at stake'.In this the early modern outlooks seem free of the paranoia of the late twentieth century. When it comes to women, of course, there is an unease, which Peace traces in terms of sentimental discourse, but while her concluding assertionthatwomen can be regardedas bestial is credible, it is not secure and is untouched in the...

Monica Dall’Asta, Alessandra Chiarini

Women's interest in found footage and compilation has been extraordinarily intense from the very beginning.1 Even the origins of this peculiar mode of film production are tied to a woman's name, that of Esfir Shub, the great director of Soviet cinema who was the first to create an essayistic feature by putting together pieces of archival footage.2 Her seminal film of 1927, Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), depicts the collapse of the Tsarist empire from the February Revolution to the October Revolution of 1917 purely by means of a montage of preexisting footage. Followed by a handful of other films she made with the same method in subsequent years, this first experimentation in compilation film was an opportunity for Shub to demonstrate the creative power of montage, showing how even the most resistant, unyielding materials can generate an entirely new meaning from the way they are combined—as for example in the case of the numerous shots taken by the camerapeople of the Tsarist film industry, which were transformed through her editing into incontrovertible proof of the necessity of the Revolution. In a way, then, Shub's work can be considered the most advanced result of all the philosophy of the Soviet avant-garde, for her films test Lev Kuleshov's intuition about the signifying power of montage by reworking preconstituted materials that had been originally produced to respond to a completely different, and sometimes even opposite, ideological project.3Many more women after Shub have adopted compilation as their privileged approach to film production and experimentation. Once a marginal form even in the documentary field, found footage cinema is now enjoying an extremely vital phase, fostered by both the exponential growth of the audiovisual archive and the improvement of digital editing technologies that have made film images all the more usable. Up to the 1950s and through the appearance of new avant-garde movements at the end of that decade, the history of found footage cinema consists of very few names and a similarly small number of film titles. And yet, even in the first half of the twentieth century women are a notable presence in the field, not only for their sheer numbers, but also by virtue of the quality and originality of their work. In this context we need to cite at least the name of Germaine Dulac, whose archival film of 1935 anticipates many typical concerns of the contemporary debate about the historicity of the film image. Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (Cinema at the Service of History) was assembled by Dulac during a period of intensive archival research at Gaumont, where she had been employed until the previous year as coeditor of the company's newsreel, France Actualités. Her monumental film is constructed from fragments taken from Gaumont newsreels from 1905 to 1935, and presents itself as a recollection, as well as a critical assessment, of the historical experiences made by a generation, her own, that was equal in age with the cinema: the generation born during the Belle Epoque, educated in the myth of progress, and doomed to witness its ruinous dissolution in the disaster of World War I, only to find itself confronted with the advent of dictatorships and totalitarianism. Made in the political-cultural context of the Popular Front (the film was made to be screened on the occasion of the opening of an independent “all-newsreel” film venue), Cinema at the Service of History reveals a thorough confidence in the testimonial power of cinema.4 It is at once a requiem about the atrocities of war and its moral, social, political, and economic consequences, and a warning to the present about repeating the mistakes of the past.Alongside Shub and Dulac, the third female master of found footage cinema before the 1960s is no doubt Nicole Vedrès. Her innovative work on Paris 1900 (1947) combined a “classical” approach to compilation film, based on exclusive use of documentary sources, and a more definitely modern approach, which regards the products of narrative cinema as no less legitimate sources of historical knowledge than documentary materials. Vedrès's work anticipates by several decades the awareness, typical of the debate on film and history of the early 1980s, that every film, whether narrative or documentary, bears a number of specifically historical traits—or, rather, what Vedrès characterizes as a specific form of historical truth that expresses itself in a visual quality on the order of photogénie.5This early phase of the history of found footage cinema, where three women play a primary role, draws to a close at the end of the 1950s. A more critical, irreverent, and playful attitude toward archival images, and a tendency to employ the past to produce an allegory of the present, and often quite a complex one, appears in the work of diverse experimental filmmakers, including Isidore Isou, Stan VanDerBeek, Bruce Conner, and Guy Debord. Again, several women participate as well in this new moment that marks the evolution of found footage film as a major form of experimental cinema, often referred to as collage film. Though the women's names are more obscure today than the filmmakers we have just cited, their position in this shift is far from secondary in terms of their critical awareness and their innovations.Already in 1959, Jane Conger Belson Shimané's Odds and Ends offered a precocious example of a collage film that mixes outtakes of travelogues with abstract animation, both painted on the filmstrip and created with paper cutouts. Since then, the ranks of women involved in the deconstruction of the codes of contemporary culture—and often particularly of its sexist stereotypes—through the reworking of preexisting footage has not stopped growing. Filmmakers such as Anita Thacher, Chick Strand, Dara Birnbaum, Peggy Ahwesh, Michelle Citron, Abigail Child, Hito Steyerl, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Eve Heller, Vivian Ostrovsky, Nina Fonoroff, Sabine Hiebler, and Frédérique Devaux, or, among the younger ones, Lana Lin, Naomi Uman, Deborah Stratman, Caroline Avery, Cheryl Dunye, Cathy Joritz, Barbara Meter, Louise Bourque, Magda Matwiejew, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Rebecca Baron, Meike Fehre, Meryll Hardt, and Lisa Reboulleau—and those whose work is analyzed in this issue of Feminist Media Histories: Myriam Borsoutsky, Cecilia Mangini, Cécile Fontaine, Barbara Hammer, Valentina Monti, and Alina Marazzi—make us tempted to describe found footage cinema as a field where gender parity is close to being finally attained.Yet we want to resist explaining away such a proliferation of female auteurs who choose a most difficult manner of expressing their own imagination and thought—through images created by others in different places and times—with some sort of specific or “essential” female inclination toward montage, maybe even by invoking its similarity to the tailoring operations of cutting and sewing. Such essentialist comparisons can certainly be suggestive, but they hardly help us understand the reality of women's experience in the sphere of filmmaking. Even less could we endorse a thesis that would interpret women's bent for compilation films as an ability to excel exclusively in contexts characterized by a minimum creative coefficient. On the contrary, the innovative content of cases such as those we briefly recall above should demonstrate the opposite—that is, women's extraordinary creative capacity, evidenced by their ability to extract the maximum coefficient of originality from seemingly inert materials.But this would be a simplification, too, a sterile generalization based on a purely reactive attitude. A more interesting approach begins when one considers the apparent affinity between women and the practice of found footage, on the one hand, and on the other the material conditions of film production—more precisely, the difference that exists between the labor involved in editing and researching and that involved in shooting, especially in commercial cinema. All available data show that commercial cinema, which, as everyone knows, is basically a narrative and fictional type of cinema, is a field where only a few women succeed in reaching and holding directorial roles. We are then prompted to ask whether the specific difference that is responsible for found footage cinema being such a favorable field for women's initiative should not be sought at the level of what we mean by “film directing” in the first place.Cameraless cinema does not imply “directing” in the common sense of the word. Women working in found footage do not direct actors and technicians on a film set; they do not preside over complex organizational machines from the apex of the film set's hierarchical system. If they work in a group, they do so by choosing a few close collaborators, often other women. Their work more closely resembles conducting a research project, including immersive sessions in archives and philological interrogations about the materials, than directing a film set. This amounts to saying that women, in the absence of directorial opportunities within the frame of institutional cinema, may have elected the practice of found footage as a way to build an autonomous space of creativity that allows them to transform limitations into a stylistic peculiarity.6The subtitle of this issue, “Women Without a Movie Camera,” alludes in a clearly provocative way to the objective condition of limitation that women experience in their attempts to access professional opportunities for directing in the mainstream film industry, a situation that, in our interpretive hypothesis, can explain better than any tailoring metaphor the remarkable intensity of female creativity in found footage cinema.7 More than a yen for reusing archives, the breadth of female presence in the history of films derived from found footage proves women's tenacious will to make cinema at all costs, even if it means inventing their own modes of independent production under conditions of limitation and lack of means. Clear evidence of this is that even when they leave the particular sphere of found footage and take up the camera, these filmmakers usually keep working beyond the borders of mainstream narrative cinema, that is, in the fields of documentary, experimental, or animated cinema.Put another way, if an affinity between women and found footage cinema exists, most likely it is not because the process resembles “cutting and sewing,” but because cameraless cinema appears as a utopian mode of production that can be practiced in perfect autonomy, or together with a small group of trusted collaborators, in which a lack of means can be countervailed with patience and flair. It is a cinema that, as in the case of Cécile Fontaine, can even be executed at home at the kitchen sink.The remarkable number of women filmmakers who are or were active in found footage cinema could then be taken as confirmation of the famous hypothesis advanced by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929), that we would now have many more female names in the history books if women had had their own rooms where they could work in peace, away from the stereotypes and performative codes of patriarchal culture. The separateness and seclusion of the editing room are more than just metaphors for Woolf's idea of the room of one's own as a space of autonomy and expressive freedom.The field at stake is obviously much larger than is possible to analyze within the limits of the present publication. Unable to cover the entire, rich spectrum of women's contributions to the history of found footage cinema, we chose a series of studies on a few individual figures who represent various different approaches.8The issue opens with a selection of articles by Esfir Shub, as yet unpublished in English, introduced and edited by Liubov Dyshlyuk. The publication of these materials drawn from Shub's autobiographical book Zhizn' moya – kinematograf (Cinema Is My Life, 1972) is a deserved homage to a figure who is regularly presented as the most influential pioneer of compilation film, but whose poetic reflections are almost completely unknown in the Western world. Dating back to the time of the making of The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Shub's writings in this issue document her extraordinary awareness in tackling the task of assembling in a coherent montage a host of such heterogeneous materials as old newsreels, home movies, and institutional documentaries. In their rigorous as well as impassioned tone, which continuously emphasizes the political valences of filmmaking, these articles confirm the fundamental position that Shub occupies not only in the practice of, but also in reflections about, the practice of compilation cinema.Monica Dall'Asta's essay on Myriam Borsoutsky and Nicole Vedrès focuses on two French figures who are almost completely forgotten today. In the virtually perfect obscurity of Borsoutsky (better known as Myriam)—who was Sacha Guitry's editor during the 1930s, before collaborating with Vedrès on Paris 1900 and codirecting La Course de taureaux (Bullfight, 1951) alongside Pierre Braunberger—Dall'Asta finds a clue to retracing a possible female genealogy of French found footage cinema. The rediscovery, or rather the discovery, of Myriam, whose skills in editing were so outstanding as to be called “diabolical” by André Bazin, discloses a whole cultural scene that includes as many different figures as Braunberger, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jacques Brunius, Denise Tual, Victoria Mercanton, and Yannick Bellon. Paradoxically, Myriam's obscurity becomes the crucial element that illuminates a gray area in film history, beginning with Vedrès's groundbreaking work.Better known for the documentaries she shot—which register, with the precision of an anthropologist's eye, the transformations of Italian society between the 1960s and the 1970s—Cecilia Mangini also belongs to the crowd of forgotten women filmmakers. Her films based on the technique of assemblage are examined in deep detail in Dalila Missero's essay. Mangini's work in the archives began with the making of All'armi siam fascisti! (To Arms! We're Fascists!, 1961–62), the film she made with her husband, Lino Del Fra, and the socialist film critic Lino Micciché, and continued with Stalin (1962–63), codirected with Lino Del Fra and the great Marxist poet Franco Fortini. As with Dulac's and Vedrès's earlier works, To Arms! We're Fascists! offers a critical reading of the historical experience of the authors' generation, born under the Fascist regime and subjected to the destructive fascinations of its ideology. To find the documentary materials for both this film and Stalin (issued in 1963 in a version reedited by the producer and disavowed by the authors), Mangini conducted research in several archives around the world, facing huge difficulties. Her interest in the meaning effects attainable through the recombination of stock footage is further documented by an intense sequence in her film of women's emancipation, Essere donne (Being Women, 1963–65), of which Missero proposes an extremely accurate analysis.Barbara Hammer's first feature, Nitrate Kisses (1992), is examined by Alessandra Chiarini as an example of a film based on the construction of a complex relationship between stock footage and original shots. In conceiving of her cinema as a means for the expression of “feeling-images,” that is, “inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement,” Hammer is in search of an alternative style to the linear narration of mainstream cinema.9 In the movement of thoughts and emotions that spring from the flow of images in the film, Chiarini sees a method of assemblage that is reminiscent of Maya Deren's theorizations about “vertical cinema.” In Nitrate Kisses this method is adopted to a history of the twentieth century by and footage and original shots are combined in to a critical about history that into the and of between past and present, individual and very different case is presented in essay on Cécile A French who is very of what Nicole has called a approach to found footage, the of preexisting images by way of on the film a of that in and of or of the film her on the relationship between the stylistic and and that the mode of La to the construction of The are where a with the of the film is with an to the content of the the most original of the the of footage to the that her to her from when she was a In these materials a complex whose and quite result is the of the of of film archives to create new films is the of essay. More particularly the with the complex creative and process the making of a film constructed from fragments from the of the an Italian Made by Valentina with at the editing is just the in a that has produced an a and a film, Dating from the the images as of a the of and and document the of the between and is to describe the work of and as a time with the the images, which to the women of the and at the same time the rigorous approach, no less than with which women images of women to a montage of in the with and Alina that the issue, these two of contemporary found footage cinema their experiences and their creative and professional by by film Barbara and filmmakers demonstrate a awareness in their approach to the practice of cameraless cinema. who is the of films in the political of Italian has been regularly working with the early with first feature, More with their has of interest and is the case of More with which the of who only a few after by materials from her home by her and after a time from an old her and and from the of the on a visual history of women's in that, among a host of different materials, includes fragments from films by the during the to on complex such as the of preexisting images, the of archival footage as a of and the relationship between found footage and women's cinema, and a series of very original which the of montage in the expressive of women's by the creative that exists between and the of this of also alludes to the editing room as room of one's a space where women, over the of almost a have the of Woolf's The editing room as a of separateness and autonomy is a space where women have to make of their a a of movement in the of the film If this is then we that found footage cinema should an in film We more new research will to the work of not just the filmmakers, but also so many obscure the of these