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This article explores the links between posthuman philosophical movements, cybernetics, and early modern automata. Within posthuman philosophy, object-oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism have been at the forefront of attempts to decenter the human. Yet their approaches are very different. As a branch of speculative realism, OOO (Harman, Bogost) argues that there is always more to reality than humans are able to grasp. Similarly non-anthropocentric are its other claims—that objects have agency in the same way as humans, that everything is an object and humans are but one kind of object among others, and that in order to grasp the world we need to consider not only human-to-human and human-to-object interactions but also the relationships between one object and another. Likewise focusing on decentering the human, the new materialists view the world in terms of continuities, paying attention to the entanglements between the subject and the world beyond it. Karen Barad, for instance, upholds a conception of matter based on physicist Niels Bohr’s assertion that there cannot be a separation between the observer and the observed. She proposes a posthumanist performativity that challenges the divisions between human and nonhuman, while Jane Bennett highlights the agency of matter. Both OOO and new materialism put humans and nonhumans on a par, but whereas OOO emphasizes the autonomy of all objects, new materialism upholds relationality and subject-object entanglements. This paper will show how the differences between these two posthuman philosophical movements play out in certain cybernetic artefacts dating back to the 1940s and in late twentieth-century automated artworks that appear to possess agency. These artefacts and artworks, which include Grey Walter’s cybernetic tortoises, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960, and Chris Burden’s Samson, 1985, likewise explore the relation between human and object, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. Blurring the limits between life and non-life, they call to mind the early modern automata, which also appeared to possess what we would today call agency.

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Decentering the Human in Philosophy, Cybernetics and Early Modern Automata

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Rahma Khazam

摘要

This article explores the links between posthuman philosophical movements, cybernetics, and early modern automata. Within posthuman philosophy, object-oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism have been at the forefront of attempts to decenter the human. Yet their approaches are very different. As a branch of speculative realism, OOO (Harman, Bogost) argues that there is always more to reality than humans are able to grasp. Similarly non-anthropocentric are its other claims—that objects have agency in the same way as humans, that everything is an object and humans are but one kind of object among others, and that in order to grasp the world we need to consider not only human-to-human and human-to-object interactions but also the relationships between one object and another. Likewise focusing on decentering the human, the new materialists view the world in terms of continuities, paying attention to the entanglements between the subject and the world beyond it. Karen Barad, for instance, upholds a conception of matter based on physicist Niels Bohr’s assertion that there cannot be a separation between the observer and the observed. She proposes a posthumanist performativity that challenges the divisions between human and nonhuman, while Jane Bennett highlights the agency of matter. Both OOO and new materialism put humans and nonhumans on a par, but whereas OOO emphasizes the autonomy of all objects, new materialism upholds relationality and subject-object entanglements. This paper will show how the differences between these two posthuman philosophical movements play out in certain cybernetic artefacts dating back to the 1940s and in late twentieth-century automated artworks that appear to possess agency. These artefacts and artworks, which include Grey Walter’s cybernetic tortoises, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960, and Chris Burden’s Samson, 1985, likewise explore the relation between human and object, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. Blurring the limits between life and non-life, they call to mind the early modern automata, which also appeared to possess what we would today call agency.