andrew.pilsch.comAndrew Pilsch's Professional Website

Andrew Pilsch See Content Related To: All Research Teaching Blog Close All About I am an Associate Professor at Texas A&M in the English Department . My current research project is a media archaeology of computer bugs. My first book focuses on the rhetoric of transhumanism . I am broadly interested in rhetorical constructions of fate and human destiny in response to the radical technological changes of the digital. My research and pedagogical work touches on facets of digital rhetoric, digital humanities, emerging media, and technical communications. View my ORCID Profile View my Amazon Author Page View my Google Scholar Profile View my Dotfiles View my Mastodon Profile Transhumanism Published Book My first book project (published by University of Minnesota Press, Fall 2017 ) explores the rhetoric of the transhumanism movement with regards specifically to its Utopian content. Order Transhumanism on Amazon! Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia Order Transhumanism on Amazon! This project develops the rhetorical mode of evolutionary futurism” and the rhetoric of the transhumanist movement. While transhumanism is usually dismissed by scholars of rhetoric, technology, and culture as a fringe movement with limited scope, my project instead argues that transhumanism” is a name for a much more pervasive rhetorical mode that considers technology as a vector for evolutionary change operating on society, consciousness, and biology. I call this rhetorical mode evolutionary futurism,” and, in tracing this formation throughout 20th and 21st century culture, I suggest that transhumanism, rather than a fringe movement of renegade scientists and philosophers, is actually a postmodern form of Utopia in line with Fredric Jameson’s discussion of the concept in Postmodernism . My book then traces the rhetorical, Utopian mode I call evolutionary futurism” through a number of important moments in the 20th and 21st centuries. Chapters Summaries The first chapter considers the origin of evolutionary futurism in continental modernism. Specifically, the chapter traces out the reception of Nietzsche’s übermensch as a figure for radical evolution rather than enlightened self-interest. Theosophist P.D. Ouspensky and Futurist Mina Loy are considered as guides for this particular uptake of Nietzsche. The second chapter explores evolutionary futurist rhetoric in pre-WWII American science fiction during the superman boom,” my term for the period immediately before and during the start of the war in which John W. Campbell solicited a considerable mass of stories about genetically evolved superhumans for his magazines. Concomitant to this publishing fad, SF fan culture also became intersted in actualizing this evolutionary futurist in its calls for an evolved fannationalism.” The third chapter is about the role of suffering and hedonism in an evolutionary futurism. Questioning the dominant transhuman rhetorical mode in which evolving beyond the human will be blissful, I explore the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit who first coined the term transhuman” in its modern usage, as a model for an evolutionary vanguard not tied to dubious notions of winner-take-all evolution. The fourth chapter asks after aesthetics and evolutionary futurism. In the realm of high art, I consider the impact of Natasha Vita-More’s manifesto for transhuman art and the work of Arakawa and Gins, who adopt principles of evolutionary futurist rhetoric to art and architecture. I juxtapose this aesthetic with the transhuman inaesthetic,” my term for the often bland and beige futurism of transhumanists such as Raymond Kurzroach, as they can leave my course with marketable, new media skills in addition to a better understanding of the rhetorical stakes of technical writing. More importantly, I stress the importance of developing digital problem solving strategies, rather than specific tool use, so that students in my classes can be better prepared for a changing, evolving digital workplace. My teaching of science fiction, which is a new experience for me, affords another opportunity for dealing pedagogically with the tenants of transhumanism. Where the technical communications classroom becomes a workshop for applied transhumanism, I view the science fiction classroom as focusing on the philosophical implications of this discourse. By focusing on close analysis of various texts that grapple with the nature of a radically altered future, I attempt to direct students toward thinking seriously about the ethical, moral, and philosophical issues raised by the rapid technological change experienced by the United States following World War II (which corresponds to the high point of American SF). Additionally, as many of these processes of change and acceleration are ongoing (especially with regards to emerging Internet technologies and mobile computing), I view science fiction pedagogy as an opportunity to raise my students’ awareness that the issues raised in SF are, increasingly, being raised in their lives and their futures. In both of these cases, I find focusing on the ongoing evolution of the human condition, by viewing my pedagogy from a transhuman perspective, both personally rewarding and hugely beneficial to my students in the classroom and beyond. While also helping them learn the course material at hand, my transhuman perspective allows students to step out of the classroom and the university with highly valuable take-away” skills that can be applied in their future lives as students and as professionals. As such, I look forward to continue to explore this perspective in new and exciting pedagogical environments. The Ethos of Mr. Robot Published Article This article discusses the presentation of anti-corporate resistance in Mr. Robot . The Ethos of Mr. Robot This article considers Mr. Robot as an important moment in the presentation of the outsider ethos in contemporary cultural texts. Specifically, the article doubly considers the show’s presentation of the hacker as a revolutionary outsider, co-opting the language and imagery of the collective Anonymous and it’s situatedness as part of USA Network’s successful corporate rebranding as an edgier network that appeals to millenials. By considering the show’s blatant commodification of dissent, the article asks after the true shape of anti-corporate ethos in the present and questions the revolutionary potential of popular entertainment in a network, globalized era. We twiddle … and turn into machines”: Mina Loy, HTML, and the Machining of Information Published Article Chapter on Loy, HTML, and the emergence of contemporary information. We twiddle … and turn into machines”: Mina Loy, HTML, and the Machining of Information This chapter argues that Mina Loy—avant-garde poet, fierce critic of Italian futurism, collage artist, and mystic—anticipates in her poetry written between 1910 and 1930 the turn from a concept of the machine as physical to the machine as information, a transformation also developed in 20th century Marxist thought. I base Loy’s informatic futurism on discoveries made in translating her typographic fractals into HTML for online consumption. Loy’s usage of an informatic machine critiques both the masculine ethos of her Futurist interlocutors but also interrogates the rational afterlives of this machismo in web design practices that inherits principles developed by avant-garde movements. Thus Loy’s poetic account of machinic being serves as a potent site for exploring and resisting informatic rationality in the present. Collection is edited by Shawna Ross and James O’Sullivan and published by Palgrave. Insect Capital Published Article Uses the pattern of insect imagery in William Gibson’s Neuromancer to talk about a theory of corporate culture informed by German Media Studies. Read the article online . Insect Capital Tracing an inhuman theory of the corporation, this article uses Friedrich Kittler’s...