Wendy Mitchell as an Epitome of a Posthuman Subject

Abstract

Abstract Memories work through encoding, processing, consolidation, and retrieval, as well as absence and interruptions. The retrospective and anticipatory activity of the brain accounts for continuity in human life. Any cognitive impairment in the brain disrupts this process and alters the order of things. L. Malafouris suggested that cognition exists not in the brain but in interaction with the material world, and different forms of material culture enable these cognitive capacities and processes or change them over different periods. This vital, enactive, and constitutive quality of material things/technology in shaping the memory, and consequently the human subject, is investigated in the epiphanic memory narrative of Wendy Mitchell’s Somebody I Used to Know. This article foregrounds the optimistic essence of a posthuman subject through Wendy Mitchell’s life, as well as how technologically mediated relations are foundational for the construction of life. It reflects on the postanthropocentric view of the world by demonstrating how dementia narratives are critical for comprehending the material/technological world’s role in the formation of life.