“Embodied Narrative” in Transhumanism: Notes on Emerging Models of Ethos
James S. Baumlin | Missouri State University
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 4
Excerpt | [It is only] with legal ideas about rights, Christian ideas about the soul, and Cartesian ideas about the ego that our modern, categorial self is born.
—Martin Hollis, “Of Masks and Men” (223)
But should we in turn wish to “look into the future” and form an image of what it will be, there is one childish error we must avoid: to base the man of the future on what we are now, simply granting him a greater quantity of mechanical means and appliances.
—Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life (246)
It is a Western rhetorical model that Martin Hollis addresses in the epigraph above, and it’s from within that version of the “categorial self” that my own comments proceed. I am, by training, an historian of rhetoric whose research has focused on classical models of ethos and their postclassical advancements. Our transit through antiquity to the 21st century is marked, in large part, by a gathering up of rights, roles, and affordances, each pressuring the “category of the person” (Mauss). These have granted (to some people at least, some of the time) rights of self-possession (separating citizens from slaves); rights of class, inheritance, and occupation (establishing medieval castes and aristocratic privilege); rights of privacy and private possession (preconditions both of individualism and early-modern capitalism); rights of citizenship within modern nation-states (a precondition of capitalist expansion and colonialism); and, much later in Western society, rights pertaining to gender (including suffrage and bodily self-possession/control).
Key words | Embodied Narrative, Transhumanism, Ethos, homo narrans, Actant, Cyborg, 4e Cognition, Marco Caracciolo, Karin Kukkonen
James S. Baumlin (jbaumlin@missouristate.edu) is Distinguished Professor of English at Missouri State University, USA, where he teaches coursework in early-modern English literature (Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton), critical theories, and the history of rhetoric, having published extensively in these fields. He has also widely published in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. His current research focuses on the history of Western ethos from antiquity to the present day.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Baumlin, James S. ““Embodied Narrative” in Transhumanism: Notes on Emerging Models of Ethos.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 11 Oct. 2023, pp. 1.45–1.59, http://ellids.com/archives/2023/10/5.4-Forum-Baumlin.pdf