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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
Media are the means to the evolution of posthumanity through their ever-intensifying feedback loop with our cognitive apparatus. They are also the expression of the universal human urge to exchange subjectivities, to achieve a form of telepathy. This article explores two images of the posthuman illustrating these concepts: Bruce Sterling's Lobsters from his story 'Cicada Queen', and the floppy, button-pushing prone being Derrida portrays in Of Grammatology. The path to these creatures is charted through our progressive conquest of the electromagnetic spectrum by technologies, and the Derridean dialectic between linear and non-linear writing in a feedback loop, through culture, with our brains.
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Bruce Sterling, in his short story 'Cicada Queen', describes one species of posthuman, the hyper-evolved Lobsters who have completely gone over to the other side:
The Lobsters hooked into fluidic computers or sheltered themselves from solar storms and ring-system electrofluxes.
They never ate. They never drank. Sex involved a clever cyber-stimulation through cranial plugs. Every five years or so they 'molted' and had their skins scraped clean of the stinking accumulation of mutated bacteria that scummed them over in the stagnant warmth [of their suits].
They knew no fear. [...] They were self-contained and anarchical. Their greatest pleasure was to sit along a girder and open their amplified senses to the depths of space, watching stars past the limits of ultraviolet and infrared. [...]
There was nothing evil about them, but they were not human. As distant and icy as comets, they were creatures of the vacuum, bored with the outmoded paradigms of blood and bone. I saw within them the first stirrings of the Fifth Prigoginic Leap [...] as far beyond intelligence as intelligence is from amoebic life or life from inert matter. (1)
In Sterling's futurescape, society is roughly divided by two powerful philosophical factions that have the compelling tradition, the sectarianism, and the power of state religions. Mechanists have embraced cybernetic technologies, prosthetics, software-brain manipulations, plug-ins, hardware gear, and neuromechanical enhancements as a means to obtaining amplified talents and gratifications. Shapers believe in the salvation and promise of biology and biological technologies, especially genetic manipulation assisted by pharmacology, physiochemical amplification, and biofeedback. The result is a world populated by a spectral array of posthumans who are constantly altering their bodies to achieve more outre and esoteric powers. Shapers, for instance, modify themselves genetically to replace intestinal bacteria with enzymes, and to sprout specialized limbs and organs.
By far the most radical of these bio- or mech-morphed beings are the Lobsters, who seem hyper-evolved and alien even to the other characters. As Sterling puts it, Lobsters have 'shucked their humanity like a caul'. In Sterling's bestiary they alone are produced by hypertropism of Shaper genetics and Mechanist cybernetics, encased in a cybernetic shell after undergoing preparatory genetic transformations for motives only they can comprehend, although those seem to include feeding off the high they get from tuning into incomprehensible frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The image of the Lobster poses a challenge, querying the intimate history between humans and our communications technology: How did we get out there on that spacegirder? What defines the trajectory from the past to the present that Sterling extrapolates into this Lobster future? What is Sterling telling us about our current frenzy in the mediasphere and our persistent compulsion to multiply channels of communication with our innovations? The present article attempts to chart this one road among many to posthumanity that takes us, by way of our media, through the electromagnetic spectrum. My premise is that among the many other mediations they effect, media are also the means to the co-evolution of our own future in an ever-intensifying feedback loop with our own cognitive apparatus.
We Have Always Been Posthuman
First, let us complicate our work before making it simple. Without cataloguing the bestiary of the posthuman in science fiction and their corresponding sciences and technologies, it is worthwhile exploring the very roots of the concept of posthuman and the edges of any reasonable definition in order to understand how universal and compelling the trope really is.
If we do not restrict the prefix 'post' to an index of 'what follows in time', but conceive it, rather, as 'what supersedes and goes beyond', then the notion of a 'posthuman' is as old as human imagination itself. The posthuman is our eternal Doppelganger, our secret sharer, our kissing cousin, the one with whom we might be able to procreate, although it is probably taboo and usually ill-advised to try. Every culture, especially polytheistic ones, have livened their cosmos with exciting hosts of superhumans and demigods and animal-human hybrids with special powers, human enough to share our passions and sensibilities and, on occasion, perhaps our genetic material too. Of course, even Western monotheisms include Nephilim (the giant 'sons of God' in Genesis 6. 4) and at least one God-man.
When defined thus broadly as 'super-', 'ultra-', 'extra-', or 'uber-', the posthuman includes almost any literary image of the hubristic hero--the hyper-human ('hubris' and 'hyper' share a common etymology in the Greek hubris). The monster created by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1817) is explicitly a posthuman, but do we include the moral monsters of fiction in the same category? Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter, who preys on Clarisse in four novels, most notably The Silence of the Lambs (1988) is a super, if sociopathic, human. However, is Samuel Richardson's Lovelace, who preys on the eponymous heroine of Clarissa (1747) any less posthuman?
Such literary delvings notwithstanding, in our global postmodern culture, the route to the posthuman inevitably passes through innovations in science and technology, and so contemporary SF literature and cinema are the quickest and most obvious genres by which to formulate those extrapolations and make them concrete and vivid. Virtually every new breakthrough in biology, biomechanics, and cybernetic technologies spawns a creature in SF (2) or film that looks back at us from the future with the posthuman's gaze. Furthermore, the distance traversed by that gaze, the border between our two species, child and parent, is usually contested, if not bloody and violent, territory. Like Darwinian Nature itself, the artificial means to evolving the posthuman is red in tooth and claw. The discovery of electricity and its effects on a frog's muscle inspired Frankenstein's monster. The discovery of genetics inexorably leads to our dark visions of mutant X-men and Ben Bova's multiple men (The Multiple Man, 1976) and Ridley Scott's take on Philip K. Dick's meditation on genetic manipulation in Blade Runner (1982). Even recent innovations in nanotechnology have already engendered a populous posthuman zoology. (3)
At its root, though, any definition of posthuman must entail the role of artifice itself. (4) The creation of an artificial being from human substrate, even if it is a projection of our intellect or episteme, produces a posthuman. Think of the many computers that spring into malevolent consciousness autodidactically: Arthur C. Clarke's HAL in 2001, SkyNet in The Terminator (1984), William Gibson's Wintermute in Neuromancer (1984), The Matrix in the Wachowski Brothers trilogy (1999-2003). By the same token, then, Hephaestos' creature Talus, Pygmalion's Galataea, and Rabbi Loew's Golem are clearly examples of the persistence of this thread of posthumanity in our imagination even before we had a word for it. Call them pre-posthumans. By extension, ought we to put subtler literary figures in the category? In Jane Austen's Emma (1815) the heroine 'creates'...
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