In posthuman studies today, there is a trend towards isolation over connection. This direction is put most succinctly by Graham Harman, one of the foremost thinkers in Object-Oriented Ontology, who states: “There is no greater Imperialism than the philosophy of mutually determining things, stripped of all retreat from the system of the world.” Harman’s condemnation of sociality is a direct retort to Bruno Latour, who has argued, instead, that “there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the character that is the focus of attention.” The antisocial—and, to some, anti-human—claims in Harman’s posthumanism have led critics like Kyla Wazana Tompkins to sound the alarm. “It is of deep concern to me,” Tompkins writes, how Object Orient Ontology “cannot deal with race; how it ignores or misreads the work of feminist and queer theory; and how the move to a kind of ontology-centered hermeneutic suppresses the question and problem of [human] difference.”

Through an attention to visual aesthetics, the panel we propose seeks to join those resisting this ethically problematic trend in posthuman studies by keeping the human—in relation with the things that entangle the human in the posthuman condition—ever in view. And we mean “view” quite literally, as we consider the visual consequences of posthuman relationality, contra Harman and his ilk. Our focus is therefore on visual representations of posthuman forms, displayed in photography, fine art, and film and produced across continents over more than a century. Our curiosity is piqued by the ways in which the human interacts with some other thing—of animal, vegetable, or technological original—to produce a third thing that is no longer quite human, at least in a traditional sense. Our scope of study therefore parts ways not just with Object-Oriented Ontologists but also with earlier definers of posthumanism, such as N. Katherine Hayles, for whom biology is thought to be a disposable “prosthesis” and information the essential defining factor of the posthuman body. For us, in contrast, centaurs are as posthuman as cyborgs.

Papers are organized chronologically, and we begin with Geoff Bender’s examination of F. Holland Day’s photograph The Vision (1907), a depiction of Orpheus exiting the mouth of Hades without Eurydice, topped by an enlarged portrait of his face superimposed on an overhanging rocky cliff. The superimposition of face over landscape creates a relationality between the two surfaces, Bender argues, so that Orpheus, now partially composed by rocks, shrubs, and trees, has become a visual hybrid. Bender’s claim is that while Day has created a figure that, today, would be recognized as posthuman, today's posthuman explanatory frameworks, such as those proposed by Object-Oriented Ontology, are yet ill equipped to explicate the figure’s visual identity. Its doubleness, slipping between landscape and humanity, is, instead, more compellingly understood by Derrida’s conception of the frame, the parergon, which, Bender argues, best elucidates the posthuman queerness of Orpheus’s body and so rightfully deserves to be located among the apparatus of posthuman thought.

In the presentation to follow, Ryan Leach sustains a critical examination of the interplay between human and nonhuman entities in his analysis of two films by David Cronenberg, Videodrome (1983) and eXistenZ (1999), which figure posthuman bodies as a complex amalgam of the biological and the technological. In Videodrome, for example, Max Renn’s abdomen opens to receive Betamax cassettes, while characters in eXintenZ develop bioports at the base of their spines to receive game pods. Leach uses these images as evidence to reverse Hayles’s argument about biology’s prothetic relationship to posthuman embodiment. Instead, he contends, Cronenberg offers a contrary scenario in which technology is biologized as bodies metamorphose to accommodate game features. Such metamorphosis, Leach maintains, manipulates categories of gender and sexuality as humans grow orifices, in the form of vaginal and anal openings, respectively, to render humans penetrable to the technology grafting onto them, even as human biology redefines the game design it becomes.

While Cronenberg’s films stress the biologization of technology, as Leach asserts, Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai’s paper explores an inverse phenomenon, the technologization of human biology, in Lilian Lee and Fruit Chan’s film Dumplings (2004). This film presents the postsocialist, postcolonial consumerism of China through the trope of cannibalism, where a wealthy class consumes the fetuses of unwanted Chinese bodies—of the poor and women—to attain idealized bodies against the course of biology. Fetuses are thus refashioned into a technology that bestows youth and beauty, a technology whose incorporation, developed as a relationality-via-ingestion, creates affluent bodies that are posthuman not by their veering away from human physique but, instead, through their heightening of it. Drawing on the works of Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway, Tsai argues that Dumplings confronts Chinese audiences with a dehumanized postmodern landscape as it visualizes posthuman excess bearing a deeply human cost.

The concluding paper in this panel, by Xiaoli Yang, effects a shift in tone from Dumplings’s dystopian bleakness to the posthuman possibilities of the Buddhist mandala in the artwork of two practicing artists: Beijing-based Tian Xiaolei and Taipei-based Lin Pei-Ying. In her analysis, Yang argues that artistic reconfigurations of the mandala, over a series of relations with the human body, including incorporation into the human body, produce both symbolic and biological syntheses reflective of Buddhist spirituality. As such, works such as Tian’s Greatness (伟大, 2017) and Unlimited (无限, 2017) balance a reciprocal craving between the human and the technological, animating intricate relations as both entities gesture at a posthuman future tempered by uncertainty yet replete with wonder. As she looks closely, Yang draws on the theoretical work of Francesca Ferrando, who is, she maintains, more attuned to the precepts of Eastern spirituality than other Western posthumanist thinkers, in order to articulate the delicate synthesis this art displays.