Annotate This! Semiotization, Automation and the Recursive Causality of Images

It is common enough question: What is the human? Sure enough, it is also a question that has troubled some of the greatest minds to walk this planet. Nevertheless, one might wonder, is it really a good question in its own right? To show our allegiances from the outset, we categorically declare it an extremely bad question – in the sense of being unproductive. Like most “what is” questions, to ask “what is the human” cannot avoid but fall victim to an implicitly essential and reductionist definition of the human that would, in addition, aspire to remain eternal and unchangeable, a supposed one-size-fits-all account. However, many of those same “what is” thinkers have appraised the human as the greatest among animals, the one who possesses logic, the one who can adapt to anything that this harsh and cold existence throws at it. The contradiction becomes obvious then: how can there be a universally applicable and everlasting definition of the human if the human is the animal that can (supposedly) adapt and transform better than any other? To avoid this conflict, we propose to follow Gilles Deleuze (who, on this topic, followed Marcel Proust) and adopt what we can call minor questions: when, where, how and for what purpose is the human?1 Such questions do not essentialize but rather impose an approach that demands to be returned to experience itself and therefore provide plastic – as in, transformable and open to revaluation – definitions.