Roar HØSTAKER

The project takes as a point of departure a line of inquiry emerging in Anglo-American literary studies from the mid-1990s claiming that the introduction of information technology and cybernetic regulation has made us, human beings, posthuman. Since then ‘posthuman’ has become an open signifier for all kinds of perspectives. It has become a way of speaking about the future, but to what extent is the way it speaks about the future in any way relevant?
The project concentrates on a number of authors whose work is sometimes called "posthuman", but who have not themselves in any way acknowledged this label although their theories share some of the same views on human agents as the posthumanists. This includes Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler and André Leroi-Gourhan. A common theme of these authors is their argument for a close relationship between human beings and techniques and this relationship is a defining element of human evolution. These different theories have their background in our unsettled times and it is a goal for the project to contribute to the discussion about new relationships between humans and machines and our instable ecological niche.

Roar Høstaker is a professor of sociology at the Department of Organization and Management, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences specialising in sociological theory with an emphasis on the relationship between sociology and philosophy, biopolitics and the study of the "machinic" in societies. His main work in this field is the book A Different Society Altogether: What Sociology Can Learn from Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour (2014). He came to Lillehammer University College in 1998 after completing his doctorate at the University of Bergen, Norway, in the study of higher education politics. His previous studies at the same university was in history, philosophy and administration and organization theory, completing his master’s degree in 1992.

HØSTAKER, Roar. "The Rhizome, the net and the book", in Empedocles; European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, no.3, vol.8, 2017, pp.151-165, doi:10.1386/ejpc.8.2.151_1.

HØSTAKER, Roar. "Is a Neurosociology Possible?", in M.Oelbani (ed.) Le cerveau comme enjeu philosophique, Tunis: Éditions Nirvana, 2017, pp. 43-72.

HØSTAKER, Roar. A Different Society Altogether: What Sociology Can Learn from Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

HØSTAKER, Roar and VABØ, A. "Knowledge Society, Higher Education and the Society of Control", in Learning and Teaching, no.1, vol.1, 2008, pp.122-154.

HØSTAKER, Roar. Latour - semiotics and science studies, Science Studies, vol.18, no.2, 2005, pp. 5-25.