This essay takes as its chief point of departure Jacques Ellul’s contention that imaginative treatments of malevolent technology in antitechnological science fiction, by way of inviting rejection, refusal, dismissal, or condemnation, conspire in facilitating human acceptance of and adjustment to technology as it otherwise presently is. The author extends Ellul’s argument to accounts of cryonic suspension, or “cryonics,” the practice of freezing human corpses, by way of gradually subjecting them, at the moment of legal death, to extremely low temperatures in (...) hopes that medicine will at some future point achieve the necessary kinds and levels of technology to facilitate “reanimation.” The author maintains that, analogous to Ellul’s treatment of science fiction, most extant accounts of cryonic suspension, by focusing almost exclusively on issues pertaining to the scientific legitimacy and technological feasibility of the practice, fall prey to the performative conventions of a discursive- cum-epistemic trap, one that ultimately works to facilitate the acceptance of and adjustment to technology as it otherwise presently is. (shrink)

In the 19th century, ‘scientific archaeologists’ split from their antiquarian colleagues over the role that provenience (context) plays in the value of an artifact. These archaeologists focus on documenting an artifact’s context when they remove it from its original location. Archaeologists then use this contextual information to place these artifacts within a particular larger assemblage, in a particular time and space. Once analyzed, the artifacts found in a site or region can be used to document, to understand, and explain the (...) past. Given the central place of context for archaeological excavation, archaeologists have done everything in their power to combat the black market. Hoping to stem the tide, archaeologists have leveled attacks on those who excavate these materials, those who traffic in them, and those who purchase them. Unfortunately, despite decades of argument and legal wrangling, archaeologists have been unable to stop the black market. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this failure from the supply side (what archaeologists call looting) and to suggest better ways to engage other stakeholders to the benefit of most, if not all. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with the theme of ‘process over product’—a theme that is argued to be increasingly problematised as an influential narrative in the construction and transmission of a philosophy of early education. The importance of producing children of ‘competence’ through appropriate educational processes is associated with assumptions regarding what counts as an appropriate educational journey for children before they reach school age. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, and Jean‐François Lyotard, this paper considers the purpose and tensions (...) of articulating process as more important than product in early childhood. It is argued that the articulation of the child as a particular kind of process‐oriented player leads to an uncritical acceptance of technologies of governing the child. Furthermore, discourse asserting the importance of processes of play reveals a crisis in understanding what it means to be a player, and what the purpose of the process of play might be. Process contributes to a narrow understanding of a performative purpose of play as a processing of information. A role of the educator, this paper argues, is then to critically engage with the transmission of the theme of process. (shrink)

As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary reference (...) to any kind of society or population. Tracing the evolution of that discourse, the article argues that existing social and political theory has failed to make sense of this shift. It concludes that in order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies and a political imaginary without the presupposition of collectivities. (shrink)

In utopian/science fiction literature, comprehensive knowledge is a familiar motif that also inspires recent policies to screen society through surveillance. In the late 20th century, a digital archive promised to facilitate quick access to abundant information and effective strategies to confront myriad challenges. Yet, today, the scale and scope of information accumulation in national and corporate repositories is reaching proportions whose intelligent processing excedes human capabilities, and triggering a shift in focus from dumb repository to artificial intelligence. Processing such accumulation (...) of knowledge necessiates skills commonly attributed to divinity. Without a theory that recognizes this condition and informs the operations of artificial intelligence, the latter is likely to fail in human ways, e.g., by perceiving false patterns resulting from flawed theories assigning meaning to knowledge. For successful pattern recognition to occur, theories must rest on science fiction and a digital ontotheology of the machine as the form this archive assumes. (shrink)

This thesis interrogates Nietzsche's ubermensch, a figure capable of overcoming the universal absence of value, and asks how it might logically be realised in light of postmodern developments in nihilism, capitalism and technology. We argue that in order to exist beyond the nihilistic nature of capitalism, one possible solution might be superintelligent artificial intelligence. We first explore the oft-overlooked problem of the village atheist, who rejects god whilst still clinging to theological values. We next look to nihilism in postmodemity, analysing (...) semiotic and hermeneutic developments and highlighting the forces that dictate contemporary society. We then tum to capitalism, understood as a repetition of Christianity, redefining the village atheist as a figure trapped in the nihilism of semiocapitalism. Finally, we tum to technology and the future, where we reject transhuman narratives as farther repetitions of salvation, instead developing an understanding of superintelligent AI as ubermensch based on its potential to exist beyond the trappings of manmade value. This thesis simultaneously outlines the difficulties of overcoming nihilism through transhumanism whilst highlighting the dangers of embracing ubermensch, instead suggesting that a reclamation of the human posits greater grounds for survival, where the embrace of a hermeneutics of nihilism allows for smaller short-term truths. (shrink)