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In the last 50 years, the sense of separation between technology and humanity has disappeared, and the enlightenment humanist paradigm with it. If only there were a way to see how it happened. Well, luckily, the art of cinema has been recording and projecting society's technosocial transformation since the moving picture came about, and television has been at it in earnest since the 1950s. By considering posthumanist themes and posthuman representations in film and television, we can follow how society has supplanted a dualist model of subjectivity — that set humans and technology in opposition — with a problematized notion of subjectivity, complete with collective angst about the resultant ways of living and being. While posthumanism comes in many forms (each of them valuable), here I will treat posthumanism predominantly as a discussion of technologically modified/constituted beings, such as cyborgs and robots or, in some cases, genetically modified beings. I do this primarily because technology has been the essential ingredient in fracturing the humanist paradigm and in inspiring ontological discourse that engages the distributed nature of our collective subjectivity. Using the notion of "paradigm shift" from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) as an expository device, this chapter will provide an overview of the transition away from an assumed humanist subjectivity, found in science fiction (SF) cinema and television of the 1960s, and towards an overtly emphasized posthumanist subjectivity, revealed in films and television series of the 2010s.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137430328_39

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