If, as Rosi Braidotti suggests in Posthuman Knowledge (2019), transhumanist posthumanism privileges the ontological status of embodied (or disembodied) forms of the human-after-the-human, then critical posthumanism foregrounds epistemological questions stemming from such a critique, and the sentient and/or affective forms that emerge in the wake of the human. Among the most meaningful of the latter is memory. Generally speaking, theorists overlook or minimize the significance of memory to a thinking of the neo-, non-, or post-human. In this talk I explore the phenomenon of memory at the intersection of cinema and memory studies, with three contemporary films as examples: Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016), a big-budget Sci-Fi; A Ghost Story (Lowery 2017), an independent American film; One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Kunuk and Cohn, 2019), a Canadian-Inuit film.
In my reading of these films I link Gilles Deleuze's theory of the movement- and time-image to a bipartite temporal model, named for the Greek gods of time, Chronos and Aion. The latter resonates across a diverse range of critical discourses: film theory, feminist posthumanism, political theology. In the modern period Chronos and Aion have lent their personae to two complementary temporalities, two ways of conceiving of or experiencing time, with correspondingly different political and metaphysical valences. Chronos is the linear, unreflective, chronological (and providential) time of progress, and Aion is the complementary conception of time as 'crystalline' (to use Deleuze's term), a temporality in which past time co-exists with the present within the same audiovisual space. In themselves these structures (ultimately analogous to shot types combined with camera movement and specific editing strategies) are a-political formal-stylistic features. In the context of specific films, however, these images, and the forms and valuations of time they convey, represent radically different ways of seeing and of relating to the world both within and outside the frame, and therefore what we mean by human identity. The dominant tendency in posthumanist theory, with respect to memory, is to privilege stories in science fiction film, typically at either a dystopian or utopian extreme. This essentially transhumanist perspective, however, risks overlooking the more meaningful dimension of posthumanist memory manifesting on the level of film form. Close attention to audiovisual style facilitates the critical interrogation of the issues and questions around posthumanism, such as whether or not a given film actually represents or embodies a given posthumanist concept, properly speaking, or whether (as is most likely) the film, in the end, perpetuates some form of anthropocentric or neo-humanist understanding of the relations between the human as currently understood and what comes after. In this talk I explore the degree in which posthuman memory names a modality of human or posthuman experience that is as much about the present or future, where these temporalities are marshalled in the service of a memory that transcends a mere relation to the past, with the potential to operate at a global scale far beyond discrete social groupings.
