Université Savoie Mont Blanc 's Laboratoire Langages, Littératures, Sociétés, Études Transfrontalières et Internationales (LLSETI) is organizing a "Text, image and digital arts" seminar on the theme of "In search of the glorious body: transhumanist worlds and posthumanist issues in Black Mirror". The seminar will be attended by Sara Touiza-Ambroggiani, PhD in philosophy, affiliated with the Laboratoire d'études et de recherches sur les logiques contemporaines de la philosophie(LLCP) at Université Paris 8.
The seminar will be held on Friday March 6, 2020 from 2 to 4 pm in amphitheatre 11 000 of building 10 on the Jacob-Bellecombette campus.
About the seminar
Black Mirror, the anthology series imagined by Charlie Brooker, explores the ambiguity that characterizes our relationship with today's dazzling technological advances. Both fascinated and frightened by the artifacts they use every day, Black Mirror viewers are faced with their own contradictions. The first is to witness, in front of a screen, the staging of his own addiction to screens. Many scenes in the various episodes play on this mise en abyme. The latest opus, Bandersnatch, pushes the mirror effect to its extreme by making the streaming platform Netflix one of the characters in the interactive film.
The worlds depicted in the various episodes have a disquietingly familiar feel, and the reflexive loops that take place within them hint at the inevitability of human technological hybridization and moral decay. The place of the body is central to this fall. The body is both "the tomb of the soul" in the Platonic sense, and the vector of a hoped-for redemption. The connected bodies we encounter in the Black Mirror universe all seek to enhance human capacities (increased perception, memory, feelings) via technological artifacts. This is a straightforward presentation of the transhumanist ideal.
However, and this is the philosophical interest of the series, augmentation constantly comes up against issues of personal identity, of the feeling of being oneself. It's as if this feeling couldn't be satisfied with an extended consciousness, and drew its sap from the entrails of a human body that could simply be corrupted. The worlds exposed by the series are clearly transhumanist, but the problematic issues revealed are indeed posthumanist in the sense that the characters experience - in their flesh - the very possibility of a renewed thought of subjectivity, no longer considered as "interiority", but as a space of permanent negotiation between different beings, a space distributed over several poles (natural/artificial, organic/mechanical). Even when consciousness manages to free itself from bodies, as in San Junipero or White Christmas, the latter is not "erased", but always replaced by a digital body, a fantasized body, a glorious body in the sense of Christian mysticism.
The characteristics of the glorious body are those of these body projections: impassivity, clarity, agility and subtlety. But the body of flesh always resists its replacement, persisting despite our determination to surpass it. This opens up a second line of inquiry: the body is what we seek to surpass, transcend and erase, but it is also what resists technological hubris, what derails us in our attempt to totally master human destinies. Flesh bodies are like glitches in the fluid universe of ethereal digital consciousness, constantly frustrating the fantasy of their total overcoming.
Based on an analysis of selected episodes, we propose to explore the fate of flesh bodies in the face of digital bodies in the Black Mirror series.
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- Admission free and open to all
- Contact: Anais Guilet