Posthuman Imagination: From Modernity to Augmented Reality

ABSTRACT Is human imagination a stable faculty that operates the same way across generations? Do we produce new ideas and new images in the same way as our ancestors? In this article, I seek to show how imagination has been transformed in the passage from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, how it reflects the technologies of the relevant periods, and how it is shaped by these technologies. My claim is that modern imagination consists of searching after new points of view, as reflected in the operations of photography and cinema. It follows Heidegger’s concept of “world picture” and it is demonstrated by Walter Benjamin’s work on mechanical reproduction. Contemporary imagination, which I term posthuman imagination, functions in layers presented over the real, similarly to augmented reality technologies. My notion of posthuman imagination is based on the theories of Don Ihde and N. Katherine Hayles, according to which our bodily perceptions are technologically saturated and our cognition is computationally distributed between humans and nonhumans.