The politics and poetics of spaces and places: mapping the multiple geographies of identity in a cultural posthuman era

As transcendent technologies, ICTs exist beyond the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as race, gender and class, as well as operating outside traditional binary oppositions such as good/bad, love/hate, rational/irrational. Whilst a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains a necessary prerequisite of interaction with virtual systems, a vast collection of technological applications now exhibit some degree of agency as they interact with humans and their environment. This development has enormous consequences for human life, human flourishing and social organisation; raising significant ethical concerns relevant to public and policy debates. It is, therefore, pertinent to explore key epistemological questions relating to the radical and accelerated remapping of the limits of what it now means to be human. Whilst this paper does not purport to offer a pragmatic solution, it constitutes an interdisciplinary conceptual platform from which to consider the nature of the evolving human-nonhuman-machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity, civilisation and other forms of social organisation in the modern hypermediated world. It is suggested that by reflecting on the various representations of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology from the perspective of the arts and humanities, it may be possible to isolate those important questions which relate to subjectivity, ethics, community and social transformation in order to prepare the groundwork for a comprehensive and critical theory of technology.