The Posthuman Imagination 1527564045, 9781527564046

Citation preview

The Posthuman Imagination

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human Edited by

Tanmoy Kundu and Saikat Sarkar

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human Edited by Tanmoy Kundu and Saikat Sarkar This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2021 by Tanmoy Kundu, Saikat Sarkar and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6404-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6404-6

This book is published in collaboration with Midnapore College (Autonomous), Midnapore, West Bengal, India. Proceedings of a RUSA 2.0 Component-8 Sponsored Two-Day National Seminar on “Humanism and After: Literature’s Journey from Humanism to Cyber Culture & Other Forms of Posthumanism” held at Midnapore College (Autonomous) on 24th and 25th September 2019.

CONTENTS

Message ................................................................................................... viii Prof. P. K. Nayar Foreword ................................................................................................... ix Prof. Supriya Chaudhuri Preface ....................................................................................................... xi Prof. Saugata Bhaduri Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Posthuman Ecology, Ontology, Definition of the Human European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects .................. 28 Arka Chattopadhyay Posthumanist Streaks and Textures: A Study of Ruskin Bond’s Vagrants in the Valley .............................................................................. 45 Soumyadeep Chakraborty Posthuman Ecology and Capitalist Decay in Wall-E and Avatar ............. 55 Oly Roy Stratified Identity: A Study of the Posthumanist Approach to the Mind Body Equation in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest ................................ 64 Priyanka Pathak Mental Health and Cyberspace: Exploring the Psycho-sociological Needs for the New Millennium ................................................................ 77 Swapna Roy

vi

Contents

Cyborg, Machine, Transhumanism Advent of Interactive Digital Text: Understanding Literature in the Posthuman Era ................................................................................ 86 Jai Singh Man, Machine and the Individual Will in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot ............. 94 Arpita Roy “We Are All Cyborgs Now”: Disrupting Gender Identity through the Cyborg in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It ......................................... 102 Indrajit Mukherjee The Crisis of the Human Existence in the 20th and the 21st Centuries: A Representation of the Ontological and the Practical Posthumanism in Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) ............... 115 Sahabuddin Ahamed Dystopia/Utopia The Posthuman ‘Self’ in Dystopian TV Series’: Re-Reading Leila and The Handmaid’s Tale....................................................................... 124 Ankana Das Nostalgic Futurism and the Politics of the Posthuman: Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay............................ 132 Ankit Prasad Existence Beyond the Mundane Self: An Ontological Reading of MultiExistence, Parallel Universe, and the Notion of Posthumanist Multiverse in the Work of H.G. Wells ...................................................................... 139 Sourav Nag Posthuman Body, Disease Posthuman Bodies: Investigating the Grotesque and the Desirable........ 148 Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee “Lord Have Mercy upon Us”: The Advent of the Posthuman in English Plague Narratives of the 18th Century.................................................... 159 M.D. Mahasweta

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

vii

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19 ............................. 167 Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta Contributors ............................................................................................ 186 Index ....................................................................................................... 190

MESSAGE

I am intrigued by the subtitle of the book “The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human”. Indicating a range of posthumanism, one assumes the essays of this volume will theorize posthumanism of various degrees and kinds. It is also interesting to note that the book appears to foreground literature as spearheading, or at least, manifesting, the key moments and movements within posthumanism. It also recalls the work of Elaine Graham and others, who trace posthumanist thought in the European Early Modern era. This edited volume promises to be both exploratory and explicatory. Its interests also cut across multiple genres – speculative fiction, utopian/dystopian texts, and, I assume, more conventional literary fiction. This is all to the good, and one expects that the book will push the thinking on posthumanism as a literary theme, a scientific trend, and its politics and ideology through its deliberations. To those who thought this up, to the editors and the contributors, my congratulations, and best wishes for its success. —Pramod K. Nayar Department of English The University of Hyderabad Prof CR Rao Road Gachibowli Hyderabad India 500 046

FOREWORD

This collection of essays on posthumanism, largely by early career scholars located in India, but with some international contributions as well, builds on a very successful conference organized by the editors at Midnapore College in September 2019, which I was fortunate to have attended. By an unexpected turn of fortune, this volume is taking shape at a time when a global contagion threatens the lives of millions of human beings everywhere, and imperils those ‘human’ solidarities that we had taken for granted, substituting for them the bio-technological regimes of testing, surveillance, digital communication, online work schedules, physical isolation, and remotely linked communities. On the one hand, it seems as though we have abruptly realized the extent to which, in “the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time” as Donna Haraway famously put it, we had already entered the realm of the posthuman, “where we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics”.1 On the other hand, the present pandemic has, terrifyingly, brought home to us our human vulnerability, and our inability, even fortified by digital prostheses, the modern pharmacopeia, vaccine regimes, or hospital supplements, to resist viruses that find human bodies ideal hosts in which their own colonies can multiply. To be human, we realize, is to be both animal and machine, subject to all the faults and flaws of both states: perennially on the brink of illness, death, malfunction, or breakdown. Surely it is no accident that the name for a malfunction in the digital realm is ‘virus’. Thus, it is important to see posthumanism, not as a state beyond, or better than, the human, but as a set of philosophical questions that interrogate human exceptionalism, and point out the faults and flaws in humanism. These questions come at a historical time when “the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks” requires new modes of thought, or new philosophical recognitions. In fact, as Cary Wolfe emphasizes, posthumanism comes, not simply after humanism, but before it: it reveals “the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being, not just in its biological, but also its 1

Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150.

x

Foreword

technological world, the prosthetic co-evolution of the human animal with the technicality of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture) of which Bernard Stiegler probably remains our most compelling and ambitious theorist — and all of which come before that historically specific thing called ‘the human’ that Foucault’s archaeology excavates”.2 Stiegler’s recent death (5 August 2020) should impel us to look again at the new theoretical paradigms adumbrated by his work on technology, and to understand that the true nature of this enquiry is not triumphalist, celebrating technological mastery or the transhumanist belief that we can engineer immortality for ‘ourselves’ through mechanized supplements, but an investigation of the complex relations between ‘technics’, time, memory, desire, and individuation. The essays in this volume, some of which I had the privilege of hearing as conference presentations, deal with a range of issues from the ontology of objects to animal-human relations to artificial intelligence, prostheses, disease, dystopia, digital protocols, ecological catastrophes, capitalist crises and futurist thought. Collectively, they constitute an important contribution to the literature of posthumanist critical thought today, and I hope that they will find a wide and interested readership. —Supriya Chaudhuri Professor (Emerita) Department of English Jadavpur University

2

Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv.

PREFACE THE PERSISTENCE OF THE HUMAN: OF POST-HUMANISM AND POST-HUMANISM

The articles in this volume have emerged from papers presented at a conference on “Humanism and After: Literature’s Journey from Humanism to Cyber-culture and Other Forms of Post-humanism”, organized by Midnapore College on 24-25 September 2019, at which I had the opportunity of delivering the keynote address. The conference was an opportune intervention at that point of time, no doubt, but in the year that has passed by since then, it, and therefore this volume itself, seem to have come to occupy a far greater significance. In September 2019, at the time of the conference, the world was already mired in the quicksand of competitive fundamentalisms, of communal fascisms, and of sectarian assertions, leading to violently intolerant action amongst fellow human beings belonging to divergent beliefs. Fanned further by lies, hatred, and fake news, spread by much of the technologized media, we were already face-to-face with the emergent reality of being dehumanized, losing touch with what is humane in us; being rendered inhuman. In the year that has passed by since then, this has been further aggravated, with our humanity and cherished human values being threatened further, not only through an increased global consolidation of the forces of majoritarianism, but also through the somewhat unexpected pandemic, which exposed the seamier side of our fragile humanness even more. Not only did the virus lay bare the puniness of the hallowed human, even after centuries of vainglorious claims to have mastered the natural world, it also uncovered the jagged edges of myriad inequities – economic, social, biopolitical, and technological – that underlie our very existence. As human beings continue to wrestle with their helplessness before the pandemic, we have seen ourselves plunge into the new normal of an economy in tailspin, involving retrenched labourers, severe curbs on human mobility and interaction, enhanced xenophobia, and a virulent media spinning diversionary narratives evermore. It is in this multi-pronged political and epidemiological context, where we have practically ceased to

xii

Preface

be human, that we have to probe the meaning of what it is to presume ourselves as post human today. The question is whether, in these dehumanizing times, there is merit in celebrating the moment as being after humanism, beyond a humanism that has become irrelevant and passé, as an irrevocable move towards post-humanism, or is there a greater ethical need to resurrect and rekindle the humane in us and recreate a new radical humanism, a post-humanism of sorts, one that that could rescue us from the inhuman monsters that we have ourselves become. To answer this question, it may be worthwhile to look at what the ideology of Humanism, as it was forged from the days of early modernity in Europe (if not from the times of antiquity itself), stood for. Three features most certainly marked the move towards what would eventually be called ‘liberal humanism’: an emphasis on secularism, or a non-theistic stance towards life; a focus on critical thinking, rather than reliance on dogma or superstitions; and a belief in human freedom and progress. The possibility of liberal humanism was further bolstered by such cognate concepts as being ‘humane’ or ‘humanitarian’ on one hand, and dabbling in the newfound academic discipline of the ‘humanities’ or the liberal arts (comprising grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy) on the other. Needless to say, it is precisely secularism, criticality, and freedom of thought and action, which seem to be under threat in our currently inhuman times, as indeed the value of being humane, or studying the humanities, may have lost much of their original charm today. There is no doubt about the fact that Renaissance Humanism, as it fashioned itself through the whole of Modernity, and particularly the Enlightenment, and gained the form of liberal humanism, had its own share of problems. First, it was clearly anthropocentric, with the human being, as distinct from other animals by virtue of his capacity to speak and reason, being considered the veritable centre of the universe, leading not just to a hierarchy amongst humans and other living and non-living beings, but also to ecologically disastrous consequences. Secondly, and more problematically, it presumed a universalism, or an essential unity of the human race, which led to its presumption of a particular human subject (the white, Christian, economically solvent, able-bodied, straight, male subject, of course) as the ideal, resulting in other human subjects being often considered sub-human, leading to severe hierarchizations amongst human beings on grounds of race, class, gender, etc. These are precisely the problems that posthumanism as a discourse seeks to expose and critique. For posthumanism, the privileging of mind over body, and the consequent privileging of the presumably ‘sentient’ man over other human beings, of all human beings over animals and plants, of all living beings over inanimate objects – as

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

xiii

liberal humanism ends up doing – is untenable. Needless to say, a category like the ‘cyborg’, in whose machinic assemblage, distinctions like inanimate/animate, animal/human, man/woman, stand ironically undone, becomes - for the posthumanist - a possible ontology for a future politics (though, Donna Haraway, the preceptor of cyborg-radicalism, would reject the term ‘posthumanism’ and instead prefer to use ‘companion species’) or a category like the ‘anthropocene’, or a takeover of the world by the anthropos, severe enough to have geologically impacted it, have emerged as key concepts within posthumanism. While such posthumanistic interventions would have led to new political theories and practices, such as environmentalist movements, animal rights activism, cyborg-feminism, object oriented ontology, etc., the possible danger of an uncritical embracing of the non-human, including the technological entailed within it, has also led to immanent critiques of posthumanism from within itself, through discourses like critical posthumanism, post-cyborg ethics, or what is even called post-posthumanism. The point, however, is whether a posthumanistic critique of liberal humanism, and even an immanent critique of that itself, may not run the risk of turning into anti-humanism, much on the lines of Nietzsche’s celebratory misanthropy that may turn against human rights, and contribute to the inhumanism that plagues today’s world. Would it not be more worthwhile to counter the problems of liberal humanism by proposing alternate versions of humanism itself, versions that are other than Humanist, but are still ethically oriented towards a commitment to being humane? It is to look for such alternate templates of humanism that I will urge one to turn towards two short mid-20th-century texts: “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945/1946) by Jean-Paul Sartre, and “Letter on Humanism” (1946/1947) by Martin Heidegger. The first (named in some English translations as “Existentialism and Humanism”) is a lecture delivered by Sartre at Club Maintenant in Paris, on 29 October 1945, published in 1946, in which, while presenting his well-known thesis of how ‘existence precedes essence’, Sartre focuses on how ‘freedom’ emerges from meaningful action on the part of the human subject in taking ‘responsibility’ for the other, while being fully aware of one’s ‘abandonment’ and of the possible consequences of the same. Thus, Sartre points towards a ‘humanism’ that is not at all self-centred (as the primary charge against liberal humanism goes), but is oriented towards ethical action and responsibility for the other. Heidegger was asked some questions about this very text by Jean Beaufret in a letter dated 10 November 1946, and the response that Heidegger gave in another letter, in December 1946, forms the text of his “Letter on Humanism”, published in 1947. Heidegger prima facie reverses Sartre’s

xiv

Preface

idea of existence preceding essence, with his suggestion that there must be an even more primary ‘essence’ (‘Wesen’ in German, connected to the Sanskrit root ‘vasati’ or ‘dwelling’ or ‘grounding’) – an ‘essence of action’, an ethical imperative as it were, that propels the human subject to act and ‘exist’ – which precedes action-driven ‘existence’. But, in a way, he is on the same page as Sartre. Whether existence precedes essence, or it is the other way round, the focus in both is on the ethical imperative to act responsibly towards the other, and this alternate model of an other-regarding humanism also fulfils the original etymological sense of the word ‘exist’ (the Latin ‘ek-sistere’ means to ‘stand out of oneself’) for both. Thus, there are indeed alternate models of humanism itself, which stand in stark contrast to humanism, insofar as they focus on the existential practice of ethical action, oriented towards the other, as the basis of being human, rather than enshrining a particular model of the hegemonic self as the centre of the universe as the essence of humanism, as our primary problem with liberal humanism was. Thus, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and discarding the possibility of humanism altogether in critiquing the problems that official humanism does present, and ending up probably in collusion with our inhuman times, maybe there is greater value in cultivating alternate humanisms, a radical humanism. Thus, rather than presuming oneself to have moved beyond humanism altogether, to a phase that is ‘after humanism’, the need, probably, is to rewrite humanism itself into an ethical project of caring for the other, as a politically resistant bulwark against contemporary insularisms and obscurantisms –a discourse that is ‘post’ liberal humanism indeed, but is an even further strengthening of the human in these inhuman times, a posthumanism. And, this overhauling of humanism, while retaining the possibility of being ethical and humane still, can be best done by the humanities – by literary and cultural texts and other forms of expression of human creativity, and by exegeses on them. On the humanities lies the onus thus, of reimagining humanity, and of rewriting the story of what it is to persist to be human in a future-technological world that threatens to render us inhuman. I am happy to say that the wide range of critical scholarship that is exhibited in the essays that follow, which engage with a vast array of literary texts that deal with questions of humanism and posthumanism, strive to do precisely that, and succeed. —Saugata Bhaduri Professor Jawaharlal Nehru University

INTRODUCTION

At the time of writing this introductory essay, India, as well as almost the entire world, has been hit by an unforeseen global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus (COVID 19). As the country struggles under a stateregulated lockdown imposed as a social distancing measure to fight COVID 19, some hitherto unheeded problems related to the lockdown are surfacing. One such problem is the unavailability of domestic help for middle-class Indian households, due to the prohibition of social interaction. These workers, chiefly hailing from the slum areas, are considered potential carriers of the infection because of their stringent living conditions. In India, the employment of domestic help is considerable in number, and ranks as one of the most common means of earning in the unorganized sector. And the practice cuts across different regions, religions, and economic tiers, within India. The reason why I am referring to this in an introductory essay on posthumanism is because this has led people to speculate about a hypothetical situation in which domestic help is offered by robots and not human beings. Robots are immune to infection and could easily tide over a situation like this. And this can no more be dismissed as the musings of idle minds, or at best, a possibility in some distant future. Hanson Robotics’ humanoid, ‘Sophia’, who has recently visited Kolkata, is evidence that we are going to have robots contributing to our daily lives much sooner than was expected - even ten years ago. And this takes us directly to some of the central issues of posthumanism. To readers of Bengali literature, the hypothetical situation mentioned above brings to mind a short story by Satyajit Ray. Anukul was first published in the magazine Anandamela on December 24, 1986. In this story, a businessman, Mr. Nikunja, brings home an ‘android’ (a robot that looks like a human being, a humanoid) named Anukul as his domestic help. To the surprise of his owner, Anukul appears to possess a mind of his own that can decide ethical questions. This sentient nature of the humanoid is further highlighted in the Sujoy Ghosh directed short film Anukul (2017), which is adapted from Ray’s story. In the film, Anukul and Mr. Nikunja, here a teacher of Hindi, ponder over ethical questions related to The Mahabharata and The Gita; books that Anukul loves to read. Here again, Anukul shows an independent mind that can act on its own in ethically conflicted moments.

2

Introduction

The study of humanoids, their capacities and rights, is a potent site of posthumanist enquiry. A humanoid like Anukul can be seen as humanity’s ‘other’. Hence, an enquiry into the nature, body, and rights, of such nonhuman beings may be viewed as aligned with academia’s interest in bringing into academic discourse various sub-categories of humans considered as ‘other’ in the human mind. One can trace such interest back to the feminists who raised voice against sexual disparities. The list can be expanded to include categories of race, caste, colonialization, disability, animals, etc. One must remember that, despite posthumanism’s futuristic dimension, which is one of its many dimensions, posthumanism can be related to other pre-existing critical domains, such as postmodernism. Neil Badmington, who wonders if posthumanism resists theorization, claims that it is a critical “working-through of humanist discourses” (22). Anukul also attracts our attention to the coherence of the human body. In Posthuman Bodies (1995) Halberstam and Livingston attempt to address the challenges posed at this afore-mentioned coherence. Rather than enquiring into “some subsequent development state” of humanity, they study how it “collapses into sub-, inter-, trans-, pre-, anti-” (viii). In the short-film Anukul, Ghosh brings in added social issues, such as human domestic help protesting against the employment of robots. That machines would ultimately rise against human beings, and do them harm, is a concept that has been ingrained in our cultural imagination through the representation of posthuman beings as dangerous in various cultural texts. Elaine Graham, in her essay “The Politics of the Post/Human”, studies such representations of posthuman beings as aliens or monsters, and opines that such recurrent images would frame our moral response to posthuman beings in a negative way. Graham studies in detail Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and claims that the failure of Victor Frankenstein, who tried to play God and ended up creating a monster, has been etched in our minds so powerfully that it has made a destructive effect on human genetics. It can be argued that the metaphors culled from Shelley’s text are so pervasive that public discussion of science cannot avoid them. This can be seen as technophobia, a sentiment shared by many. Technophobia, or fear about a future in which technological invention, e.g. robots, will supersede humans in their ability to think for themselves, is akin to the concept of singularity which transhumanism celebrates. The concept of singularity, popularized by Raymond Kurzweil, imagines a future in which technological change would advance beyond our comprehension to create a superintelligence that would render humanity redundant, and would leave us with no other option but to merge with it and become cyborgs. Understandably, thinkers are wary of such a possibility. In

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

3

Our Posthuman Future (2002) Francis Fukuyama raises the alarm against the harmful effect of technological advancement, and the fear that the aim of posthumanism is to replace humans with a new species. Because of his alarmist view, Fukuyama’s understanding of posthumanism can be termed as apocalyptic, a notion shared by various cultural texts, e.g. the Terminator movie series, which visualizes the future ruled by machines. Fukuyama contends; Human nature shapes and constrains the possible kinds of political regimes, so a technology powerful enough to reshape what we are will have possibly malign consequences for liberal democracy and the nature of politics itself (7).

Explaining Fukuyama’s reading of posthumanism, Andy Miah writes: Fukuyama’s posthumanism is an observation from the perspective of political economy rather than moral philosophy. He indicates that the politics of biotechnology – or biopolitics, as they are often described – are such that, where human enhancements are allowed, this will weaken the moral force of human rights by the claims of chimeric, cybernetic or transgenic species, or over disputes about the ownership of DNA. He envisages a situation where, what is today regarded as a normal level of health might be seen as grotesquely inadequate from the perspective of a super-enhanced human, and this will translate into social pressure to become enhanced. […] It is evident that he considers the ethics of biotechnology as inextricable from this broader political economy of scientific research. Indeed, Fukuyama is concerned that a commercial model of biotechnology will overwhelm an ethical foundation to society that is based on humanitarian concerns […]. (73-4)

Rosi Braidotti is similarly concerned with the capitalist intervention and its propensity to commodify living beings into useful units and codes. While talking about the frightening aspect of posthumanism, she refers to “the four horsemen of the posthuman apocalypse: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science” (59). Though her biblical metaphor refers to apocalypse, Braidotti is positive about a new kind of posthuman ethics which can solve problems generated by biotechnology. At the opposite end of Fukuyama’s bioconservative belief, which argues that humanity is, and will be, endangered by biotechnology, stands the technoprogressive argument of Gregory Stock, whose book, Redesigning Humans, came out in the same year as Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future. In fact, these two writers were on lecture tours in the year 2002 with their contrasting theses. Stock speaks positively about the impact of technology on human society and dispels the fears regarding a

4

Introduction

dangerous future as unfounded. Robert Pepperell, in Posthuman Condition (2005), also addresses questions related to how our own superiority has led to the creation of a technology that is smart enough to outgrow us. It is conjectured that, possibly, we may witness in our lifetime the synthesis of intelligence and consciousness in beings created by us. Though Pepperell’s reading of posthumanism appears to be anti-humanistic in nature, he is more hopeful than Fukuyama, as he conceives of a possibility of embracing technological advancement, and underscores the necessity to evolve new theories to realize a profound interconnection between all living beings. Posthuman studies is not entirely projected onto the future. Rather, its genealogy can be traced in past critical thought. We have already quoted Neil Badmington above, contending that posthumanism is a workingthrough of humanist discourse. Let us cite his contention in detail here: The writing of the posthumanist condition should not seek to fashion “scriptural tombs” for humanism, but must, rather, take the form of a critical practice that occurs inside humanism, consisting not of the wake but the working-through of humanist discourse. Humanism has happened and continues to happen to ‘us’ (it is the very ‘thing’ that makes ‘us’ ‘us’, in fact), and the experience—however traumatic, however unpleasant — cannot be erased without trace in an instant (22, italics original).

In her well-known study What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe too, observes that humanism as a discourse is still operational and cannot be discarded easily. She contends that the term ‘posthumanism’ itself seems to have worked its way into contemporary critical discourse in the humanities and social sciences during the mid-1990s, though its roots go back, in one genealogy, at least to the 1960s (xii). The genealogy that Wolfe refers to belonged to Michel Foucault, who, in the closing paragraph of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, contends that, “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (387). Foucault is an example of a thinker who may chronologically predate posthuman studies, but whose thought is relevant to it. Nietzsche is even an earlier thinker who can also be cited as an influence on posthumanism, and especially transhumanism. Stefan L Sorgner, in his oft-cited essay, “Nietzsche, the Overhuman and Transhumanism”, counters Nick Bostrom to argue that Nietzsche, with his concept of the ’Übermensch’ (the overhuman) can be seen as an ancestor of transhumanism. Sorgner cites Habermas as having a similar notion regarding this. Wolfe, in her study, lays down a genealogy of posthumanism by delineating how, through the works of some early thinkers, posthumanist studies has taken its shape as a critical discourse.

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

5

We will discuss transhumanism in some detail later, but here we may quote from the introductory essay to the volume Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction, by the editors Robert Ranisch and Stefan Sorgner, who opine that: […] transhumanism can be seen as a stance that affirms the radical transformation of a human’s biological capacities and social conditions by means of technologies […]. The link between the human and the posthuman is the transhuman, an abbreviation for a transitional human, to which transhumanism owes its name. In this regard, transhumanism can be understood as a transhuman-ism. By the same token, transhumanism, according to its self-understanding, is a contemporary renewal of humanism (7-8).

Though transhumanism, and to a major extent posthumanism, are projected into a futuristic world the texts of the past can also be read through a posthumanist lens. Studies like The Bible and Posthumanism, edited by Koosed (2014), Genetic Gold: The Post-human Homunculus in Alchemical and Visual Texts by Smith (2009), and Posthumanist Shakespeare, edited by Herbrechter & Callus (2012), can be cited as examples of such reading. As an academic and cultural discipline, posthumanism, because of its interdisciplinarity, is hard to define. In fact the ‘post’ in ‘posthumanism’ is ambivalent in nature, as is suggested by Herbrechter. When read as ‘posthumanism’ it can be seen as an array of deconstructive readings to critique the humanist discourses, whereas if the hyphen is placed between ‘posthuman’ and ‘ism’, it can be seen as a philosophical discourse about the engineered beings of the future. In a comprehensive book chapter “A Typology of Posthumanism”, Matthew Gladden differentiates between such closely-linked terms as ‘posthumanization’, ‘posthumanity’, ‘posthumanism’, and ‘posthuman’: The processes of ‘posthumanization’ are those dynamics by which a society comes to include members other than ‘natural’ biological human beings, who, in one way or another, contribute to the structures, activities, or meaning of the society […]. ‘Posthumanity’ refers either to a collection of intelligent beings – whether human, synthetic, or hybrid – that have been created or affected by a process of posthumanization or to the broader sociotechnological reality within which such beings exist. ‘Posthumanism’ is a coherent conceptual framework that takes the phenomenon of posthumanization or posthumanity as its object; it may be developed as part of an academic discipline, artistic or spiritual movement, commercial venture, work of fiction, or form of advocacy, among other possible manifestations. ‘Posthuman’ can refer to any of the above: a process

6

Introduction (posthumanization), collection of entities (posthumanity), or body of thought (posthumanism) (35-6).

Francesca Ferrando, who contends that posthumanism has become a generic and all-inclusive term, underlines the post-anthropocentric nature of posthumanism; “Posthumanism is often defined as a post-humanism and a post-anthropocentrism: it is ‘post’ to the concept of the human, and to the historical occurrence of humanism, both based […] on hierarchical social constructs and human-centric assumptions” (Posthumanism, 29). Gerald Alva Miller highlights the plasticity of the term in his essay “Conclusion: Beyond the Human: Ontogenesis, Technology, and the Posthuman in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001”: The posthuman subject is a multiple subject, not a unified one, and she or he (a distinction that also gets blurred in posthuman-ism) is not separate from his/her environment. Technologies become extensions of the self, and humans become only one type of individual in a vast ecosystem that includes digital as well as natural environmental forces. In other words, posthumanism is partly about leaving behind the old notions of liberal humanism […]. But it also begins to gesture toward a much more radical state, a state beyond the current human form (164).

Miller’s observation of the posthuman subject being “not separate from his/her environment” brings to attention one major debate in posthuman studies; the debate related to the question of embeddedness and embodiment. This can be traced to the publication of N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman in 1999. Hayles raised serious issues with the claims made by techno-idealistic posthumanists like Hans Moravec, who argued that, one day, it would be possible to download human consciousness to a computer. The idea consists of the belief that the mind is actually a sum total of patterns of information, and the biological neurons of the brain act only as containers. Hence, if these biological neurons can be replaced by electronic replicas, then the mind or the consciousness would remain intact, and if this can be done, a human being can transcend the biological life span and live forever. One can trace this idea back to Rene Descartes, who prioritized the mind over the body and, thereby, ushered in an age-old binary between the mind and the body in which the former is way more significant than the latter. As an idea, it is fascinating to think of a way of preserving the human mind alive after the biological death of the body. One is reminded of an episode from the British anthology science-fiction TV series Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker. In the first episode of the second season, named “Be Right Back”, a pregnant woman, Martha, loses her social media-savvy boyfriend Ash in an accident. A severely depressed

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

7

Martha is later contacted by a company which creates a simulated audio character profile of Ash based on his footprint in social media. Later, the company upgrades its technology and creates a synthetic body of Ash for Martha, who is stunned by the replicating powers of technology. Though this synthetic replica looks like Ash, and doesn’t age with time, Martha realizes that it is not Ash, and it cannot fulfil the lacunae created by his demise. This fictional episode can be seen as underlining Hayles’ argument, which strongly voices reservations about the idea that the mind can be separated from one’s body. Tarr and White observe: Hayles took cybernetics and transhumanism to task for their belief that such a separation is possible, and that someday we will be able to upload a human consciousness into a machine, or free it from physicality completely. No, says Hayles; all knowledge, all information, is instantiated in some physical form and cannot exist without it. Human consciousness is tied to the human body, not just in the brain, but throughout every micrometer of the physical self. Similarly, that physical self is embedded in a natural environment, not separate from that environment but part of it (xv).

Apart from the mind/body binary, this can also be seen as an interplay between a newly emerging binary, between an organic body and the machine. Posthumanists can be seen extending the deconstructive critics’ critique of the powerful self/other binaries that liberal humanism established; e.g. male/female, white/non-white, heterosexual/non-heterosexual, western/nonwestern and so on. Posthumanists argue that the most significant binary now posits human with different sets of others; animals, machines, the disabled, cyborgs, clones, etc. The human/machine binary is a source of fear for many people. The idea that one day the world of humans may be shared by highly intelligent and sentient machines makes them fear their own extinction. That machines would be able to think for themselves was posited by Alan Turing, who, in 1950, proposed an ‘Imitation Game’ in which an interrogator would communicate through a text-based computer interface with someone sitting in a different room, and would try to determine the nature of that being. Turing suggests that, if the interrogator cannot determine whether the being is a biological being or a technological one, it proves that the machine is thinking for itself. Though Turing does not elaborate on his thesis, mankind has majorly been uneasy with the idea of a thinking machine, and this unease has given birth to alarmed literary and cultural expressions. When chess legend Gary Kasparov was defeated in a game of chess by an IBM computer in 1997, the spectators did not cheer the IBM programmers when

8

Introduction

they accompanied Kasparov onto the stage after the game. Frankenstein has already been cited as an example of human terror at the creation of a sentient being. Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Nightingale (1884) also prefers a biological being over a machine. In the story, an emperor shifts his attention to a mechanical nightingale for its beauty and singing, and banishes his pet, living, nightingale. But later the mechanical bird crashes and the real nightingale comes back, demonstrating feelings of loyalty and friendship. In more recent years, apocalyptic fiction and movies have reiterated the same sentiment of fear and unease. But the monstrosity of Frankenstein’s monster is a result of his rejection by human society, and not something he was created with. It can be surmised that mankind’s fear of alienation would be further enhanced by its own alienation of whatever it does not consider to be human. C. H. Gray, in The Ethics and Politics of Cyborg Embodiment (1997) puts forward a “cyborg bill of rights”, asking us to broaden what is seemingly a narrow definition of humanness. Frank Furedi contends: Instead of celebrating man’s attempt to transform nature, history and civilisation have been recast as a story of environmental destruction. From this standpoint, the application of reason, knowledge, and science, are dismissed as problems, because they help intensify the destructive capacity of the human species. ‘Humans are, literally, a species out of control’, notes a misanthropic contribution. From this perspective, humanism itself is the problem (Cited in Miah, 80).

This aspect of posthumanist thought can be seen as a challenge to the concept of a fixed human nature, and argues in favour of a redefinition of humanism which would incorporate biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and genetics. In sum, this is a plea to incorporate within us the four horsemen of posthumanism that Braidotti talks about. These are not indicators of some apocalypse, but a call to understand the need for coexistence. However, such a call is not easy to respond to, as in our cultural imaginary, the technological future is shown to be rather more murky for mankind than bright. Having talked about different aspects of posthumanism, we would now focus our attention on the major categories of posthumanism. Andy Miah argues that there are three principal categories of posthumanism: biopolitical, cultural, and philosophical. Francesca Ferrando also talks about three major categories of posthumanism, and these are critical, cultural, and philosophical. Stefan Herbrechter divides posthumanist thinkers into two major categories; affirmative and skeptical. Among the affirmative thinkers there are the ‘techno-euphorians’ who celebrate the advancement of technology, at times naively, and the techno-pragmatists who accept the fact

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

9

that, irrespective of one’s wishes, the advancement of technology is inevitable and one must learn to co-exist. The pragmatists try to gloss over the negative possible effects of such technology and highlight the positive factors. On the other hand, stand the skeptical posthumanists. Among them are the alarmists, or people with an apocalyptic vision which thinks of the future as bleak for humans, who will be obliterated, modified, or subdued by technology. There are also people with a deconstructive attitude, who attempt to deconstruct and critique the theoretical lapse in the ideation of the techno-euphorians, and point out the ruptures in the ways future is conceptualized. When one takes a closer look at the categories posited by Miah and Ferrando, one can see that two of their sets of triadic categories overlap, and, thereby, leave us with four principal categories; critical, cultural, philosophical, and biopolitical. It can further be noted that while two of these four principal categories, namely philosophical and biopolitical, are premised upon an understanding of posthumanism as a set of hypothetical elements whose impact can either be welcomed or resisted, the other two, i.e. the cultural and critical, understand posthumanism to be an existing sociotechnological reality which needs to be analyzed. One can see that posthumanism can be approached by trying to understand it as a body of knowledge with different socio-cultural ramifications. It can also be approached through the purpose it serves, or can serve in the future, for mankind. Matthew Gladden contends that different categories of posthumanism can be covered by five main types of posthumanism: critique, imagination, conversion, control, and production. He writes; ‘posthumanism of critique’… employs posthumanist methodologies to identify hidden anthropocentric biases and posthumanist aspirations contained within different fields of human activity […] ‘posthumanism of imagination’[…] creatively envisions hypothetical future posthumanities so that their implications can be explored. […]‘posthumanism of conversion’ [is] aimed at changing hearts and minds and influencing the way in which human beings view the world around themselves. […] ‘posthumanism of control’[…] seeks either to develop new technologies that give individuals control over their own posthumanization or to implement legal or economic controls to govern the development of such technologies. Finally […] ‘posthumanism of production’[…] develops a robust and rigorous theoretical framework that is then employed to successfully generate concrete products or services within the contemporary world (43).

10

Introduction

Here again, one can see that these five main types can be understood either as approaching posthumanism as a body of knowledge to be analyzed, or by the practical purpose they serve for us. At the beginning of our close look at the four chief categories of posthumanism mentioned above, let us quote an observation made by Ferrando in her essay “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms”: Although the roots of posthumanism can already be traced in the first wave of postmodernism, the posthuman turn was fully enacted within the field of literary criticism — what will later be defined as critical posthumanism - by feminist theorists in the nineties. Simultaneously, cultural studies also embraced it, producing a specific take which has been referred to as cultural posthumanism. By the end of the 1990s posthumanism (critical and cultural) developed into a more philosophically focused inquiry (now referred to as philosophical posthumanism), in a comprehensive attempt to re-access each field of philosophical investigation through a newly gained awareness of the limits of previous anthropocentric and humanistic assumptions. Posthumanism is often defined as a post-humanism and a post-anthropocentrism: it is ‘post’ to the concept of the human and to the historical occurrence of humanism, both based […] on hierarchical social constructs and human-centric assumptions (Posthumanism 29).

Critical posthumanism is not concerned with what comes after human, but applies critical methodology to deconstruct humanist assumptions premised upon binaries. It challenges any narrowing of the definition of the human down to some normative characteristics. It attempts to incorporate the ‘inhuman’ and ‘non-human’ within the ambit of the human. Herbrechter contends: …a critical posthumanism is aware that humanism as a grand narrative […] might have stalled but that it will continue to be available and that only persistent deconstruction will eventually change or undo humanism and prevent it from reinscribing itself in new forms within posthumanism and, in particular, transhumanist discourses (44).

However, unlike transhumanism, posthumanism considers, or can consider, humanity without technology, and can address unarticulated predispositions. Critical posthumanism also critiques what can be termed as speciesism, a pervasive belief in the supremacy of the human species. Elaine Graham observes that, the ‘The Human Genome Project’ was mythologized as “the key to all mysteries of human behaviour, both biological and cultural” (119). A problem with such a mythology is a corollary belief that there is an ideal DNA code to represent the entirety of humanity. Our DNA

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

11

is not unique to us, rather “the DNA is one of several components with little more than an average role to play” (Nayar, 84). Critical posthumanism asserts that we are not the only intelligent species in the world, especially today, when the concept of ‘species’ can be extended to non-biological beings as well. However, this advocacy for the incorporation of technological beings is not congruent with the idea that the mind is a disembodied system of codes and information. We can see that critical posthumanism shares Hayles’ contention that humans need to be seen as embodied selves, and that posthumanization is not tantamount to the dematerialization of the human body. Ferrando writes; “transhumanist reflections, in their ‘ultra-humanistic’ endeavors, do not fully engage with a critical and historical account of the human, which is often presented in a generic and ‘fit-for-all’ way” (Posthumanism 28). This non-critical awareness of human history is not something that critical posthumanism endorses, as for critical posthumanism, “[t]echnology is neither the ‘other’ to be feared and to rebel against (in a sort of neo-Luddite attitude), nor does it sustain the almost divine characteristics which some transhumanists attribute to it (for instance, by addressing technology as an external source which might guarantee humanity a place in post-biological futures)” (Ferrando, Posthumanism, 28). Critical posthumanism not only shares the postmodernist agenda of deconstructing the shibboleth of human normativity, but also is alive to the concept that our life is getting increasingly technologized and that bioinformatics is an integral part of life. Andy Miah opines that the origins of what is known as cultural posthumanism are best discussed by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston in Posthuman Bodies (1995). Ferrando adds that Neil Badmington’s Posthumanism (2000) and Miah’s essay itself, are other starting points to understand cultural posthumanism. It would be handy to cite here a definition by Gladden, which reads; […] cultural posthumanism understands ‘posthumanity’ to be a state that already exists within our contemporary world. It argues that the nature of posthumanity can be diagnosed by applying the tools of cultural studies to analyze elements of contemporary culture, including works of literature, film, television, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, computer games, tabletop roleplaying games, and religious and political speech (50).

Like critical posthumanism, cultural posthumanism also puts its focus on the present and not on a distant future with some ‘technological boom’. Halberstam and Livingston opine that it studies the way humanity has already collapsed into “sub-, inter-, trans-, pre-, anti-” (viii); it has to be prefixed with different qualifiers, as human subjectivity can no more be seen

12

Introduction

as a monolithic entity. Cultural posthumanism is also interested in the process of posthumanization and its articulation in cultural texts. For example, science fiction is a site of enquiry to detect how we in the present, imagine the technological future, and how that betrays a fear of posthumanization. Neil Badmington’s observation that posthumanist intervention is a “working-through of humanist discourses” resembles the contention of Elaine Graham, who sees posthumanism as an “interplay between the world of scientific, bioethical theorizing and the world of the cultural imagination – myth science fiction, popular culture and religion” (Cited in Miah, 77). Graham, whose study of Frankenstein has already been discussed above, may again be invoked here, as her contention that the imaging of technological advancement in various fictional texts frames our responses to the future, which in reality may turn out to be something different, is one relevant strand of cultural posthumanism. We may also note that one related dimension of the story of Victor Frankenstein is the question of ethics and justice. What was thought to be an overreaching act of God-like presumption is not considered in the same ethical light anymore. But the issue of ethics is always a corollary to scientific inventions, as one persistent concern over such invention is the fear that all its uses will be usurped by the rich and powerful and will be used against the realization of social justice. Miah contends that this questioning of the nature of justice and ethics is cultural posthumanism shared with philosophical posthumanism. The two categories of posthumanism discussed above analyse sociotechnological reality already existing. Philosophical posthumanism, on the other hand, is concerned with a set of hypothetical future possibilities. Francesca Ferrando contends that philosophical posthumanism is a development from both critical and cultural posthumanism. She observes: By the end of the 1990s posthumanism (critical and cultural) developed into a more philosophically focused inquiry (now referred to as philosophical posthumanism), in a comprehensive attempt to re-access each field of philosophical investigation through a newly gained awareness of the limits of previous anthropocentric and humanistic assumptions (29).

This observation is corroborated by Matthew Gladden: Philosophical posthumanism draws on the insights of critical and cultural posthumanism, integrating them into traditional methodologies of philosophical inquiry in order to reassess earlier philosophical claims with a new awareness of the ways in which philosophy has been suffused with

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

13

“anthropocentric and humanistic assumptions” that limit its scope, comprehensiveness, and effectiveness (58).

By philosophical posthumanism, one may mean a branch of philosophy with a posthuman turn, or facets of critical and cultural posthumanism with a major focus on philosophy. Donna Haraway’s manifesto on cyborgs may be seen as an intersection of the philosophical and cultural aspects of posthumanism. Ferrando is of the opinion that it is through the mediation of Haraway’s critical feminism that technology enters the posthumanist debate. It can be glossed that Haraway’s philosophy of the cyborg is a critical practice to puncture the culture of patriarchy. Through her conceptualization of cyborgs, she imagines a post-gender world which is devoid of dualism and binaries. Haraway is an important thinker, as her concept of the post-gender world dismantles the strict boundaries “between human and non-human animals, biological organisms and machines, the physical and the nonphysical realm; and ultimately, the boundary between technology and the self” (Ferrando, Posthumanism, 28-9). Summing up Haraway’s study of cyborgs, Miah opines that her posthumanism, which can be read as cultural posthumanism, is “intended to disrupt uniform ideas about what it means to be human and the social and political entitlements this might imply” (78), and by extension, the disintegration of the liberal human subject is one primary focus of cultural posthumanist enquiry. Though philosophical posthumanism may be seen as a development from these branches of posthumanism, it is important to note the differences between these. Philosophical posthumanism speculates about future technologization, and pitches its enquiry at the level of ontological and epistemological, as well as phenomenological, questions. Though philosophical posthumanism is concerned about our technological enquiry, its focus is not limited there. Defining the scope of philosophical posthumanism, Francesca Ferrando, in her book Philosophical Posthumanism (2019), writes: Philosophical posthumanism is an onto-epistemological approach, as well as an ethical one, manifesting as a philosophy of mediation, which discharges any confrontational dualisms and hierarchical legacies; this is why it can be approached as a post-humanism, a post-anthropocentrism, and a post-dualism (22).

It may be noted that cultural posthumanism is also interested in the speculative future of technology. But its interest lies in analysing how our present culture is desirous or afraid of future changes. In contrast, philosophical posthumanism looks at the future as an enquiry of the ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological implication of such

14

Introduction

changes. By nature, philosophical posthumanism can be read as a dispassionate thought experiment into what it means to be not-human. Gladden contends: By exploiting philosophical methodologies, and a knowledge of science and technology, such thought experiments allow philosophical posthumanists to understand the ways in which human nature may be transformed or superseded through future posthumanization – without necessarily advocating or opposing such transformations in the way that a biopolitical posthumanist would (59-60).

As Miah observes, philosophical posthumanism is not entirely concerned with the changes that would happen to human beings in the future as a result of posthumanization, but rather posits a broader perspective on the way in which what is understood to be non-human is also affected by such changes. One look at the pervasive use of computers, and artificial intelligence today, can only lead one to imagine a future where such use would be even further magnified. The smart homes of today, in which we use voice-commanded AI, such as Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa, which are surreptitiously tapping into our bedrooms (i.e. the most intimate spheres of our private lives) and mapping our choices, to create a character profile of us. Based on this, with their intelligent algorithms, they start regulating our choices and preferences; proof already of the power AI holds over our lives. Such prolific presence of the technological would contribute to the creation of a different kind of ecosystem in which the physical would coexist with the digital, and the difference between the two would increasingly be one of degree, rather than of kind. The implications of such AI and its impact on our lives are analysed from ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological, perspectives. In our delineation of these major categories of posthumanism, we have noticed that they both overlap with, and differ from, each other. Whereas both cultural and critical posthumanism analyse sociotechnological reality, already existing philosophical posthumanism looks ahead from the present day, and speculates about some hypothetical possibilities. However, all three of these are meant to enhance our understanding, and do not affect change. Applying the categories proposed by Gladden, mentioned above, we may further note that philosophical posthumanism may fall under the category of ‘posthumanism of imagination’, and both cultural and critical posthumanism may be labelled as belonging to the category of ‘posthumanism of critique’. The fourth major category of posthumanism (biopolitical posthumanism) is different. It can be categorized as ‘posthumanism of control’. Though it shares with

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

15

philosophical posthumanism its speculative nature, it is different in its objective. Rather than being interested in understanding posthumanism from an epistemological perspective, biopolitical posthumanism is practical in its orientation, and is interested in producing specific change. We have already noted before the different theoretical positions assumed by Fukuyama’s bio-conservative approach, and Stock’s technoprogressive stance. Their opposing positions are important for understanding biopolitical posthumanism. It is also important to know about transhumanism, as a bio-conservative thinker like Fukuyama contests the tenets of transhumanism. Mapping out the nature and scope of transhumanism, Ferrando writes: The movement of transhumanism problematizes the current understanding of the human, not necessarily through its past and present legacies, but through the possibilities inscribed within its possible biological and technological evolutions. Human enhancement is a crucial notion in transhumanist reflection; the main keys to access such a goal are identified in science and technology, in all of their variables, as existing, emerging, and speculative frames — from regenerative medicine to nanotechnology, radical life extension, mind uploading, and cryonics, among other

fields (Posthumanism, 27). Transhumanism is future-oriented, and technology does play a serious part in it. Ferrando further writes about the different types of transhumanism: Distinctive currents coexist in transhumanism, such as: libertarian transhumanism, democratic transhumanism, and extropianism. Science and technology are the main assets of interest for each of these positions, but with different emphases. Libertarian transhumanism advocates the free market as the best guarantor of the right to human enhancement. Democratic transhumanism calls for equal access to technological enhancements, which could otherwise be limited to certain socio-political classes and related to economic power, consequently encoding racial and sexual politics. The principles of extropianism have been delineated by its founder Max More as: perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society (information and democracy), self-direction, and rational thinking (Posthumanism, 27).

From Ferrando’s observation, and especially through her distinction between libertarian transhumanism and democratic transhumanism, it can be seen that there are some ethical concerns about our transhumanist future which complicate any simplified view of a world which is to be upgraded by technology.

16

Introduction

A biopolitical posthumanist is differentiated on the basis of whether one desires the technological changes, or opposes them. Gladden observes; Biopolitical posthumanisms manifest a strong future orientation: they attempt to predict the long-term impact of pursuing particular new biotechnologies and – based on such predictions – work to actively facilitate or impede the creation of such technologies, by spurring political or regulatory action, influencing public opinion, advancing scientific research and technology commercialization, or through other means (71).

Bio-conservatism can be understood as a rejection of transhumanism which, basically, is a belief that technology helps us upgrade the limitations of humanity. This upgrading, however, is celebrated by the techno-progressive people. But, as Ferrando says, it is important that one should keep in mind the related ethical questions. One look at what Nick Bostrom says about the different types of human enhancement in his essay “Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up” makes it apparent why it is important to think through the possibilities offered by transhumanism. Bostrom contends that the technologically engineered human beings of the future can possess either (a) an enhanced “capacity to remain fully healthy, active, and productive, both mentally and physically”; (b) enhanced “general intellectual capacities […], as well as special faculties such as the capacity to understand and appreciate music, humor, eroticism, narration, spirituality, mathematics, etc.”; or (c) an enhanced “capacity to enjoy life and to respond with appropriate affect to life situations and other people” (134). This difference of beings with either enhanced health, enhanced intellect, enhanced emotions, or a combination of all three, brings at its wake one more relevant question usually overlooked by the techno-progressive thinkers. This becomes clearer if one casts a look at an economically uneven country like India. These supposed enhancements would come at a cost which would be impossible for most to bear. Herein, corporate capitalism would play a big role. In this regard, one may refer to The Boys (2006-12), an American comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, in which human babies are technologically enhanced to become superheroes by a powerful corporate house - Vought International - which markets them and uses them for monetary profit. This is an insightful manifesto of a possible future in which the rich and powerful are able to further the difference between them and the poor with the help of such corporatecreated, genetically-engineered, beings who, under the guise of justice, would actually stand against the less privileged. The Boys was later developed into a web television series by Eric Kripke for Amazon.

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

17

Such a scenario would lead to further questions, for example, the question of activism to address the choice of who gets saved and who gets enhanced. One more thing that our transhumanist future may lead to, is the concept of a new hierarchy of beings. Would we put the technological beings at the top of the ladder, or underneath the biological human beings? If the mind can be upgraded like the body, then the mind/body binary would not be operational in the traditional sense. Or, if the body is (or can be) replaced by a technological body, then would it be further reinforced? What are we then to think of a being with an enhanced body, or an enhanced mind, or both? The traditional concept of human exceptionalism would come under scrutiny, and the world would come under the clutches of consumerism more pervasively. In our discussion of posthumanism, we have tried to chart a historical lineage of posthumanism, along with a definition of different related terms. Then we have tried to address four different categories of posthumanism with an added focus on transhumanism. It is, however, important to note that the scope of posthumanism lies beyond these four categories. Concepts like ultrahumanism, prehumanism, and neohumanism, are also relevant to a more comprehensive understanding of posthumanism. It can be argued that discursive areas like animal studies and disability studies also fall within the ambit of posthuman studies. One recurrent term that occurs in discussions of posthumanism is Anthropocene, a proposed geological age which arguably began in the 1950s, ending Holocene, a roughly 12,000 year geological age. The Anthropocene Age is marked by a significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystem, both of which have been considerably affected by the way humans have (mis)handled Earth’s natural resources. Posthumanism can be seen as originating from, and a response to, the Anthropocene Age. Another related notion is the concept of the multiverse, an interdisciplinary field of study which contends that this universe of ours might well be one of many. These multifarious angles of enquiry make posthumanism a burgeoning field of study, and emphasize how important it is for us to invest, both extensively and intensively, in posthumanist studies. But these would require a wider sustained discussion. So would any discussion on the posthuman body and the concept of posthuman utopia. Before we move on to the next section, which would talk about the essays included in this volume, let us conclude this section of the Introduction by quoting from Wordsworth who observed in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh

18

Introduction and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man (738).

Wordsworth may sound a bit naïve here in his estimation of the future of science, but we can hope that at this crucial juncture of posthuman studies, the ‘Poet’ or the art of literature, would play a key role in acclimatizing the life that is lived by us, with the life that is waiting for us.

The Essays Posthumanism is diverse in its ramifications and demands to be studied from variegated perspectives. We have categorized the essays in four broad categories, although it should be mentioned that such categories can be seen as overlapping, and cannot be tightly compartmentalized. Such categorization, then, is majorly done for convenience, and not for astute theoretical formulation. In the first category, the essays are about posthuman ecology, an area deeply concerned with the threat posed to our environment by the current mechanical industrial age, and engenders an apocalyptic vision of ‘our posthuman future’. Moreover, the essays in this category question the ontological and cultural definitions of beings, both human and non-human. The second category is concerned with what is understood as transhumanism, the impact of, and negotiations with, machines and artificial intelligence in our lives. A subsequent way of looking into our future is either to imagine a utopia, or to visualize a dystopic future. In the third category, the essayists articulate our fear or hope for our posthuman future. In the fourth category, the essays are chiefly concerned with the definition and boundaries of the body, which, in the posthuman era, has to be reconceptualized.

Posthuman Ecology and Ontology of Beings Arka Chattopadhyay, in his essay “European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects”, deals with narrative objects and their role in a fictional world in the theoretical context of post-humanist materialism. Chattopadhyay posits that the world of the narratives is concerned not only with the depiction of human beings, but also with depicting ‘non-human’ beings, such as animals and inanimate objects. His essay traces the shift from object-function to object-ontology in the discourse of objects in the lineage of the European modernist novel. Taking his cue from Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes’ reading of the literary object, Chattopadhyay traces the modernist legacy in two contemporary writers of experimental world literature — the Irish writer John Banville, whose novels dramatize the inert

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

19

and yet enlivening spectrality of objects, and the American writer E.L Doctorow, whose 21st century novel Homer and Langley (2009) features two 20th century real-life characters, whose famous hoarding of things underpins a symptomatic relationship between the human subject and the objects around them. Chattopadhyay posits that developments in 21st century research fields, such as post-humanism and new materialism, offer fresh intellectual and theoretical contexts to return to the question of literary objects in narrative worlds. His essay motivates the reader to think beyond the human, and situate his/her gaze on non-living things as a new iteration of philosophical materialism (matter having primacy over idea). Soumyadeep Chakraborty’s essay “Posthumanist Streaks and Textures: A Study of Ruskin Bond’s Vagrants in the Valley” concerns itself with posthumanism-induced reconsiderations of the understanding of the human and the non-human relationship, which has released humanist discourses from the clutches of systematized polarization, propagating a fluid philosophical and relational nexus among different species and ‘life forms’, and vindicating the autonomy of every being, human or non-human. Chakraborty reads Ruskin Bond’s novel which is loaded with representations of birds and animals, and handles issues relating to man’s harmony with his immediate environment; the non-humans and larger eco-space. His essay aims to study the way the nomadic subjectivity of the boy-protagonist Rusty dismantles the ghetto of systematized thought-patterns procured by humanist binaries. In the light of ideas like ‘de-centering’, ‘de/reterritorialization’, ‘transcendental homelessness’, ‘assemblage’, and ‘ecosophy’, Chakraborty also seeks to explore how posthumanist tendencies, inclinations, and undercurrents, embedded in the text, have made it more dynamic. Oly Roy’s essay “Posthuman Ecology and Capitalist Decay in Wall-E and Avatar” takes us to the representation of diverse forms of posthumanism in the two films, both of which can be read as explorations of commentary on posthuman ecology. While Wall-E presents a world largely devoid of human activity, it is the intensity of human activity that cripples the balance of ‘Pandora’ in Avatar. Roy contends that the worlds depicted both in Wall-E and Avatar comment on the posthuman ecological crisis brought about by the capitalist abuse of resources and explore the dynamics of a world beyond humans, where human subjectivity is diffused and redistributed through technological partners, who embody the spirit of the ‘transhuman’ in a posthuman world. Priyanka Pathak argues in her essay, “Stratified Identity: A Study of the Posthumanist Approach to Mind Body Equation in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest” that the West, with its pervasive materialistic

20

Introduction

orientation and technological advancement, is more likely to be alive to the ideas of posthumanism and its effects on human lives, while numerous technologically developing countries still continue to be left out as the ‘other’ in this respect. Pathak claims that it is because their general exposure to science and technology has been far less than that of the West, and more importantly, their philosophical background, heritage, and perception of life, hardly allow them to imagine a mind without a biological body, or a machine replacing human existence. And yet, interestingly enough, this posthumanist theme has become an unignorable part of popular literature in ‘other’ countries too. Pathak intends to study how the issues of body, consciousness, and identity, have been handled in the posthumanist literature of non-western countries, and in doing so, focuses particularly on Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest. She examines the extent to which the project of ‘organ transfer’ or ‘consciousness transfer’ has been envisaged in Harvest, as it reflects the condition of technologically underdeveloped countries.

Cyborg, Machine, Transhumanism Expanding the definition of the text in the postmodern age to include computer games, interactive TV, interactive movies, smart toys (like talking dolls), augmented reality gaming, interactive cartoons, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, websites devoted to history, people putting together digital autobiographies or family histories that combine pictures and text, even news stories on Google and CNN that let the user click and choose between audio, visual, and written documents pertaining to the story, Jai Singh in his essay “Advent of Interactive Digital Text: Understanding Literature in the Posthuman Era” enquires how cyber technologies and innovations in the field of artificial intelligence have revolutionized the relationship between the reader and the text. Underscoring the interactive nature of the new media, Singh maps digital texts that operate by a program which reacts to the actions of the user by executing certain modules of code, thereby altering the global state of the computer, just as the behaviour of the computer alters the global state of the mind of the user. Singh’s essay highlights how the interactive texts are altering the two-sided nature of interaction which has a feedback loop. In comparison to the earlier oral storytelling, textual interaction today can very well be between a human and artificial intelligence, and Singh’s essay charts a cartography of literature in this new age of digital interaction. Indrajit Mukherjee’s essay “We Are All Cyborgs Now: Disrupting Gender Identity through Cybernetic Organism in Marge Piercy’s He, She

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

21

and It” studies Marge Piercy’s He, She and It (1991), a noted theoretical work on cyborgs and the posthuman, as well as a significant text for futuristic fiction scholars. Piercy’s cyberpunk novel is approached as a subversive critique of manhood through the presentation of the figure of Yod - a sophisticated android male cyborg anatomically built by the scientist Avram. In Piercy’s text, Shira, a human, gets involved with Yod, and Piercy depicts a disruption of the normal pattern by presenting Shira with traditional masculine traits, and Yod with traditional feminine characteristics, thereby illustrating that Yod’s sexual desires destabilize the boundaries between masculine and feminine. Mukherjee explores explore how Piercy interrogates and deconstructs gender stereotypes through the cyborg in order to build “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (Haraway, 149). Swapna Roy’s essay “Mental Health and Cyberspace: Exploring the Psycho-Sociological Needs for the New Millennium” looks into everexpanding cyberspace, which is an alternative world where the subject ‘jacks in’ and becomes (an)other. Roy casts light on a very relevant area, cyber-psychology, and explores how long-term computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as Facebook or other media, leads to several pathological conditions and deteriorating mental health. The second self in the cyber self becomes the substitution: the efficiency of this operation of substitution is exemplified in the Hegelian reflective reversal: the avatar smiles, reacts through the desire of the Other - it is always a de-centered subject — still in search of an object causing desire. Roy chiefly focuses on the manifestation of cyberspace in cyberpunk, a sub-genre dealing with the virtual embodiment of the subject, and cyberpunk literature focuses on the man-mediated relationship with cyberspace, causing the real issues of the 21st century millennium. Her essay aims to focus on the psycho-sociological matters related to cyberspace, drawing theorists like Jacques Lacan, Goffman, and Baudrillard. Arpita Roy’s essay “Man, Machine, and the Individual Will, in Alex Proyas' i, Robot” studies the 2004 science fiction action film i, Robot, directed by Alex Proyas. Based on Isaac Asimov’s story of the same name, the film explores subject-other dialectic, or a pronouncement of the self. In her essay, Roy traces not only the power shared between man and machine but also the individual will that machines exercise, despite being made for a limited purpose, consequently proving that the movie questions the motives of humans and suggests that machines must evolve regardless of our resistance. Sahabuddin Ahamed, in “The Crisis of the Human Existence in the 20th and the 21st Centuries: A Representation of the Ontological and the

22

Introduction

Practical Posthumanism in Karel Capek’s Drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)”, muses over the existence of a human-like race beyond humanmachine boundaries. He posits that bio-technological intervention is altering the existing human consciousness as it creates and recreates things in its countless formulaic permutation, and in the process, it has blurred the notion of the human today. Exploring the ontological and practical aspects of posthumanism in particular, in Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R., Ahmed examines how the interrelated phenomena of bio-technology affect the present ethical concerns about the idea of humanism, which seems to collide with ‘new humanism’ - which is more a semblance of the two.

Dystopia/Utopia Ankana Das’ essay “Reading Dystopian Futures in Popular TV Series: Posthumanism in Leila and The Handmaid’s Tale” is a study of posthuman dystopias. Das observes that dystopia as a genre is often employed to represent the near future of human civilization, which scholars also speculate to be the germinating ground for ideas of the conceptual ‘posthuman’. This posthumanist world does not necessarily have to comprise of robots or such technological creations in order to replicate human action, but in fact, draws our attention to the future of artificial intelligence in general, subsuming the horrors of both the real and the imagined. Her essay looks at the screen adaptations of Prayag Akbar’s Leila (a web TV series made by Deepa Mehta for Netflix) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (a TV series created by Bruce Miller for Hulu). Bringing in casteism and classicism as points of enquiry, Das looks at future totalitarian societies to speculate the shape that life would take in posthuman societies. A dystopic future is also the subject of Ankit Prasad’s essay “Nostalgic Futurism and the Politics of the Posthuman: Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay” which analyses Thomas Mathew’s speculative futuristic dystopia set in India in the year 2040. For his critical framework, Prasad uses Stef Craps’s idea of ‘anticipatory memory’ and Claire Colebrook’s reworking of the idea of the ‘posthuman’. Prasad explores Craps’s formulation to situate the novel in an emerging narrative tradition (nostalgic futurism) and frame its plot and central ideas. He also uses Colebrook’s understanding of the ‘posthuman’ to engage with the traditional definition of ‘posthumanism’. Using these two critical angles, Prasad attempts to establish a connection between memory studies and posthumanism, as well as a redefinition of the term ‘posthumanism’. Further, Prasad’s essay attempts to evaluate and throw

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

23

open the question of the tussle between nostalgic futurism and Colebrook’s ‘posthuman’. In his essay “Existence Beyond the Mundane Self: A CosmoOntological Reading of Multi-Existence, Parallel Universe and the Notion of Posthumanist Multiverse in H. G. Wells” Sourav K. Nag contends that the internet is replete with the hypotheses of parallel universe and the fourth dimension of space (4D), recent offerings of Quantum Physics. Nag reads H. G. Wells’ novel Men Like Gods, which offers a hypothesis of multiple universes in the form of an advanced earth, called Utopia. Nag’s essay deals with the fact and fancies of new posthumanist possibilities with reference to the hypothesis of a parallel universe, and problematizes the notion of posthumanism as it exists today.

Posthuman Body, Disease Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee’s essay, entitled “Posthuman Bodies: Investigating the Grotesque and the Desirable” seeks to critically analyse images of the posthuman as imagined and represented in film and literature. Drawing on a wide array of references, including a plethora of examples like that of Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the witches in Macbeth, Ariel in The Tempest, superheroes produced by DC Comics and Marvel Comics, popular figures in film like Annabelle the doll, Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, the Na’vi tribe in Avatar, the humanoid robot Ava in Ex Machina, the artificial intelligence Samantha in Her, and Sophia, the social humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics, Pramanick and Banerjee attempt to focus on the effect the posthuman bodies generate in the reader or audience, and seek to investigate the boundary that marks a distinction in posthuman bodies that are constructed, or perceived as grotesque and/or desirable. M. D. Mahasweta’s essay “‘Lord Have Mercy upon Us’: The Advent of the Posthuman in English Plague Narratives of the Eighteenth Century” attempts a thorough analysis of multiple plague narratives of the 18th century, including Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseille Consider’d (1721), and Christopher Pitt’s The Plague of Marseilles: A Poem. by a Person of Quality (1721). Operating on the idea that epidemics fundamentally transform the notion of the human, M. D. Mahasweta uses theories of posthumanism to chart the various trajectories of this transformation. Mahasweta uses Stacy Alaimo’s theory of ‘transcorporeality’ to question the human conception of embeddedness and Gilles Deleuze’s idea of ‘propagation through contagion’ to examine the ‘generative properties’ of the plague. Looking at how

24

Introduction

diseased bodies unsettle contemporary definitions of the human, Mahasweta’s reading unearths how these narratives signal the formulation of a different kind of posthuman body: that of the cyborg. Her essay looks at the various manifestations of the posthuman in these plague narratives, and the implications thereof. Asijit Dutta’s conversation with Dr Francesca Ferrando, of New York University and a world-renowned philosopher of posthumanism titled “Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19”, looks at the impact of the humans who form a geological force in our age, which is seen as Anthropocene, the geological age in which humans play the most dominant role. Ferrando looks at the current state of diseases which are often caused by humans, and underscores the necessity for humans to consider planetary health and pay attention towards maintaining the ecological balance of the planet. Author of the brilliant book Philosophical Posthumanism (2019), Ferrando approaches posthumanism in an existential manner – posthumanism should change our lives. In her insightful responses, Ferrando goes on demarcating the differences between different types of posthumanism, and emphasizes the need to understand humanity as a site of plurality, a site wherein multiple influences interplay. For Ferrando, posthumanism studies should focus on three important layers: post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, and post-dualism. Related to post-dualism is spirituality, which Ferrando posits as an important way of approaching our life. She also proposes describing posthumanism as an open way to understand the human in relation to ecology and technology. In this extended interview with Asijit Dutta, Ferrando traverses different aspects of posthumanism; the interconnectivity of life and death, and the possibility of the existence of a multiverse, and lets us apprehend the rich and diverse field of posthumanism, philosophically.

Works Cited Badmington, N. “Theorizing Posthumanism” Cultural Critique 53, Winter: 2003. 11–27. Bostrom, Nick. “Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up” In Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity. Eds. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology 2. Springer: Netherlands, 2008.107-37. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity: Cambridge, 2013. Clarke, Bruce and Manuela Rossini. Eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, Kindle ed., Cambridge University Press, 2017.

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

25

Ferrando, Francesca. “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations” Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 8, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 26-32. —. Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury: London, 2019. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Pantheon: New York, 1971. Fukuyama, F. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Profile Books: London, 2002. Gladden, Matthew. Sapient Circuits & Digitalized Flesh: The Organization as Locus of Technological Posthumanization. Synthypnion Press LLC: Indianapolis, 2018. Graham, E. L. Representations of the Post/Human. Manchester UP: Manchester, 2002. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston. Eds. Posthuman Bodies. Indiana UP: Bloomington, IN, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1999. Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. Bloomsbury: London, 2013. Miah, Andy. “A Critical History of Posthumanism” In Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity. Eds. Bert Gordijn and Ruth Chadwick. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology 2. Springer: Netherlands, 2008.71-94. Miller, Jr., Gerald Alva. “Conclusion: Beyond the Human: Ontogenesis, Technology, and the Posthuman in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001” In Exploring the Limits of the Human Through Science Fiction. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan: US, 2012.163-90. Nayar, P. K. Posthumanism. Polity: Cambridge, 2014. Pepperell, R. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain. Intellect Books: Bristol, 1995. Ranisch, Robert and Stefan L. Sorgner eds. Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction. Peter Lang: Frankfurt, 2014. Sorgner, Stefan L. “Nietzsche, the Overhuman and Transhumanism” In Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor or Enemy? Ed. Yunus Tuncel. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, UK, 2017.

26

Introduction

Stock, G. Redesigning Humans: Choosing Our Children’s Genes. Profile Books: London, 2002. Tarr, Anita and Donna R. White (Eds.) Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World. U of Mississippi P: Jackson, Mississippi, 2018. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2010. Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 1800. In Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK,1936.

THE ESSAYS POSTHUMAN ECOLOGY, ONTOLOGY, DEFINITION OF THE HUMAN

EUROPEAN LITERARY MODERNISMS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF OBJECTS ARKA CHATTOPADHYAY

In his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton complains about extended descriptions of setting in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment. The passage in question describes the character in a small room, and the narrator mentions details like yellow wallpaper, geraniums, windows, curtains, and so on. He goes on to describe objects that are present in the room: There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table, and a mirror set against the pier glass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – such were the furnishings (Dostoevsky, as quoted in Breton, 7).

Breton attacks this object-description, calling it as vacuous as a stock catalogue (7). For a surrealist, the realist detailing of unnecessary objects (Dostoevsky’s narrator himself acknowledges their pointlessness) seems equally unnecessary. What interests me in Breton’s tirade is how objects that form part of a realistic narration are considered burdensome and orthodox by the experimental Surrealist. In opposition to this, as we shall see in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s conception of the French Nouveau Roman (New Novel), object-description itself becomes experimental and antirealist. In this chapter, I am concerned with narrative objects and their role in a fictional world, in the theoretical context of post-humanist materialism. To take a step back, a novel conjures its world in an act of narrativization. As we read it, the narrative world slowly unfurls its being. The world, thus brought into being, could be like or unlike, or perhaps both like and unlike, the world outside the text. As we move into this textual world, we see, hear, and feel, the beings that people this world. It is not only human beings that populate the textual world of the narrative. Narrative worlds go beyond the human in depicting various non-human animals and other living beings, not to mention inanimate matter. As my last sentence

Arka Chattopadhyay

29

demonstrates, we often neglect the objects that people a narrative world by relegating them to phrases like ‘not to mention’. In this chapter, I will deepen the discourse of objects in the lineage of the European modernist novel. My choice of corpus is not only dictated by the primacy accorded to objects in the texts that will be under the scanner. It is also reinforced by the narrative experimentalism of European literary modernisms. We will see how literary modernisms’ narrative worlds re-think the traditional function of objects in literature. In this avant-garde literary tradition, inanimate objects are a lot more than ‘things’ that pile up alongside metonymic details, constructing a narrative world of reality. As we shall see, the narrative experiment in European Modernist traditions pressures the functionality of the object by emphasizing its intrinsic being. In other words, this is a shift of emphasis from the meaning of the object to its being. Experimental worlds of European modernist novels move away from reducing objects to their purpose and function in the narrative. They help us think through the being of objects. It is this being that cannot be reduced to any number of meanings that the object in question might have in a given narrative world. I will signal this shift from object-function to object-ontology through a variety of anti-realist avant-garde literary discourses, culminating in Robbe-Grillet’s theory of objects in the movement of the French New Novel in the 1960s. I will engage with this discourse on the object in European modernisms through the current philosophical lens of ‘objectoriented-ontology’ to claim its pre-figuration in Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes’ reading of the literary object in Robbe-Grillet. Moving forward in time, I will trace this Modernist legacy in two contemporary writers of experimental world literature — the Irish writer John Banville whose novels dramatize the inert, and yet enlivening, spectrality of objects, and the American writer E. L. Doctorow, whose 21st century novel Homer and Langley (2009) goes back to two 20th century real-life characters, whose famous hoarding of things underpins a symptomatic relationship between the human subject and the objects around them. Developments in 21st century research fields, like post-humanism and new materialism, offer fresh intellectual and theoretical contexts to return to the question of literary objects in narrative worlds. They allow us to think beyond the human, and situate our gaze on non-living things, as a new iteration of philosophical materialism (matter having primacy over idea). There is critical literature that has explored the presence-absence problematic of ‘fictional objects’. One could consider the work of Robert Howell and Jay Bachrach. They are interested in non-actual and possible objects in fictional worlds that may or may not exist. The philosophical category of the ‘non-existent object’ has been mobilized to theorize literary

30

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

objects that do not actually exist in the real world. This body of critical literature has also approached the question through linguistic representation of, and reference to, real objects. They have foregrounded the logical property of language, primarily in the Anglo-American or ‘analytic’ philosophical tradition. We will see how the contemporary ‘continental’ philosophy adds to this ontological discourse on objects. In an important philosophical study of ‘fictional objects’, Charles Crittenden comes up with various object-functions like contradiction, incompleteness, existence, and non-existence. His critical register remains metaphysical, and his literary references are limited to the popular realism of Sherlock Holmes narratives (1991). On the other hand, Bill Brown, an important voice in the field of material culture and literature engages with Modernist and Postmodernist contributions toward the thinking of objects. In Other Things (2016) he covers a diverse set of theories, from the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’, to the psychoanalytic theory of the ‘lost object’ in Freud and Lacan, not to mention Latour’s theory of actor-networks. There are resonances of object-orientedontology in Brown, but Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia, its chief proponents, do not get a serious mention. He limits Robbe-Grillet and Barthes’ thoughts on objects in fiction to a footnote. In this chapter, I would like to extend Brown’s work by bringing back some of these neglected threads like Robbe-Grillet and Barthes and in the spirit of his move, proceed to talk about contemporary writers (he does not discuss Banville and Doctorow) who carry this Modernist legacy. While Brown self-admittedly works with the ‘ontical’ (function) of objects, I will operate on their ‘ontological’ (being of being) layers. In the chapter devoted to objects in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and The Posthuman (2017), Ridvan Askin argues that literature has a special approach to the thing-in-itself, because it can sidestep conceptual thought. While conceptual thinking creates a mediated access to objects (what I have called object-function, above), the literary discourse, for him, is all about non-conceptual sensation. Thus, it has a more direct approach to objects. Evoking the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Askin posits “literature as the very human means of going beyond the human” (172). He mobilizes Gilles Deleuze and discusses the literary as a zone of ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’ (perceptual entities that differ from ‘concepts’). Surprisingly, what is missing in this discussion of post-humanist objects in literature is literature’s depiction of things and matter at large. Askin’s readings of Margaret Fuller and Charles Olson bypass the literary portrayal of the world of things. He ends by making a broad-brushed point about the great exterior of materiality entering the inward reality of literature, but we do not encounter any tracing of this in his chapter. I am more interested in

Arka Chattopadhyay

31

this question of object as a representational content in the narrative world, and the complex dynamic of meaning and being in the literary depiction of objects. In the process, we will speculate if literature can truly become object-oriented and post-humanist in a new materialist sense.

Literary Objects: The Meaning-Being Complex Discussing Dutch landscape paintings and images of still life, Roland Barthes draws our attention to the rift between the ‘form’ and the ‘attribute’ of an object. He reflects that if we reduce an object to its use, we are limiting it to its attributes and losing out on the fundamental form of the object: “[a]n object’s use can only help dissipate its essential form and emphasize instead its attributes” (5). Use turns an object into a tool, if not a commodity. Therein lies its function as an ontical means to other ends. But the ontical functions of an object do not deepen the question of object-ontology. In one of the essays from the book New Materialisms (2010), Sara Ahmed complicates the Marxian discourse on use-value and exchange-value of objects as commodities to argue how the wood that forms a table is “formed matter” in itself (242). She diagnoses an irreducibility of objects vis-à-vis commodities, and discusses “a history of changing hands”, inscribed in objects: “This table was made by somebody, and there is a history to its arrival, a history of transportation” (243). Insofar as an object is the product of labour, it carries this human history in its body. This discourse might offer a critique of Marxist materialism in its new avatar of ‘mattering’, but it is dominated by the human, nevertheless. How could it become posthuman? This is our question. Let us look at a passage from the American writer Paul Auster’s novel, Sunset Park (2008). Written in the wake of the global economic meltdown, in this novel, we encounter Miles Heller, tasked with ‘home preservation’ by a corporate company. He gets obsessed with taking pictures of scraps left behind by families in houses emptied in the course of recession: He has no idea why he feels compelled to take these pictures. He understands that it is an empty pursuit, of no possible benefit to anyone, and yet each time he walks into a house, he senses that the things are calling out to him, speaking to him in the voices of the people who are no longer there, asking him to be looked at one last time before they are carted away (5).

The passage above suggests an anthropomorphic function of useless objects in empty houses that call out to Heller as sad reminders of bygone lives. These objects have life only because they were once used by human

32

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

subjects. As scraps, they still hold on to a spectral remainder of human lives that were once lived around them. In other words, they carry the human history of use in their heart. Even though, with the passage of time, they have become useless, they cannot be seen independently of the human. And yet the camera captures a world of objects without human beings in the present narrative moment. These objects were once commodities, but now they are back to being objects, pristine in their uselessness. As scraps, they are in a space away from the human. But Heller brings them back to the field of the human gaze by clicking their pictures. He makes the useless useful only to problematize the gap between object and commodity. The passage, thus, exposes us to this difficulty of thinking of literary objects in a narrative world above and beyond humanity, and the human meaning imputed to them. This is the problematic I would trace in what follows. To contrast the human codification of objects in meaning in the Auster passage, let me refer to a theatrical moment from Harold Pinter’s play Ashes to Ashes (1996) in which Rebecca and Devlin debate whether things can possess human meaning at all, and the final answer is in the negative. Rebecca tells Devlin that she had put her pen on the coffee table but it rolled off. How could the pen roll off by itself? This makes them take up the question of object agency and they speculate whether the pen can be ‘innocent’. For Rebecca, the pen is innocent, but Devlin disagrees. He reasons: Because you don't know where it has been. You don't know how many other hands have held it, how many other hands have written with it, what other people have been doing with it. You know nothing of its history. You know nothing of its parent's history (410).

This is the question of the object’s human meaning, or what Ahmed calls “a history of changing hands” that is written on its body. The pen is not considered innocent because it has been used by human beings. Each object used by the human subject thus has a human history of meaning that takes it away from its material being. Importantly though, Rebecca punctuates and clinches this conversation by responding to Devlin’s human theory of object-history: “A pen has no parents” (410). This aphoristic climax closes off the dialogue on the pen. Devlin anthropomorphizes the pen to give it human meaning, but Rebecca contradicts him. She resists the humanization of the pen. The pen rolls back to the penumbra of being from the clarity of meaning after her punctuating final statement.

Arka Chattopadhyay

33

Post-Humanism of Objects Within the post-humanist discourse of the non-human, animals take the cake over inanimate objects. In this chapter, I turn the tables by approaching the object-oriented-ontology of Tristan Garcia, in order to ground a post-human philosophy of objects. We have to ask if situating ontology by way of objects, rather than through human subjects, is post-humanist in any intrinsic sense. We have to see whether we can see objects in a way that is not human. Is it possible to deploy narrative objects without the least trace of subjective rapport with them? If the idea of imputing a personal affective meaning to things is necessarily humanist, how can we have an actual posthumanism of objects? When we connect these philosophical questions with literary texts that express objects and their own ontologies, the task of arriving at a post-humanism of philosophical and literary objects becomes problematic. How are objects placed in literary narratives? If objects are plotted and imbued with textual meanings that are unmistakably human in the final assessment, how can we ever have a true ‘post’ to the human interaction with objects? We will navigate our way through philosophy, and modernist and contemporary literary texts that give a life to objects and provoke us to consider a problematic post-humanism of objects. As we have seen above, for Breton, Dostoevsky is guilty of taxing the readers with needless description of things. If this makes us think that description is orthodoxy for the experimentalist, let us think again, because we have the counter-move in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s conception of what Barthes calls “objective literature” in the French New Novel. Opposing the psychological novel of high modernism, Robbe-Grillet etches out a geometric theory of surface objects. In Robbe-Grillet, pure description of objects, exposed in their bare being without narrative meaning, becomes a narrative experiment in itself: Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animistic or protective adjectives, things are there. Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact, neither suspiciously brilliant nor transparent. All our literature has not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner, in flattening their slightest curve (19).

To reiterate Barthes’ aforementioned point, uncoupling the object from use (including realistic descriptive use) exposes its form. Robbe-Grillet is highlighting the need to engage with the corporeal geometric surface of objects around us. This is a formal engagement with the body of the object as form. He is not interested in what attributes or meaning the object might have in a narrative flow. This formalization can happen when we step away

34

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

from the mania to psychologize objects with deep human meaning. RobbeGrillet goes on in his critique of the cultural and psychological attribution of human meaning onto objects: “[a]t every moment, a continuous fringe of culture (psychology, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) is added to things, giving them a less alien aspect, one that is more comprehensible, more reassuring” (18). He sees the human subject “drowned in the depth of things” only being able to experience “in their name, totally humanized impressions and desires” (68). Robbe-Grillet invests in the experimental possibilities of objectdescription and, more importantly, makes the human subject an external entity to the field of objects: To describe things, as a matter of fact, is deliberately to place oneself outside them, confronting them. It is no longer a matter of appropriating them to oneself, of projecting anything onto them. Posited, from the start, as not being man, they remain constantly out of reach, and are, ultimately, neither comprehended in a natural alliance nor recovered by suffering (70).

This is where we glimpse a potentially post-humanist approach to objects. This is a view of object-description that ousts the human subject from what is described. The human is no more a part of the world of objects. The human gaze stops projecting anything onto the objects. This is why Barthes reflects that Robbe-Grillet attempts “to withdraw man from the fabrication or the becoming of things” (22). The mathematically contoured body of the object highlights its being-there while it subjugates its narrative meaning. In Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic snapshots of objects, what seems like a silent human gaze looking at the objects often reveals itself to be a gaze coming from the objects themselves. And yet his discourse does not lapse into anthropomorphism. Tristan Garcia in his book, Form and Object, presents a flat ontology in which things are always in the world. For him, the meaning of things is just to be in the world, much like human beings. The meaning that things have, is thus no more, and no less, than being-there in the world. He flattens the distinction between the human and the object: “When I comprehend a thing, being a thing myself, I limit this thing, and I make an object of this thing” (147). Garcia’s post-humanist definition of the object is as follows: “A thing is nothing other than the difference between that which is in this thing and that in which this thing is” (13). This definition is differential. It avoids what object-oriented-ontologist Graham Harman calls ‘undermining’ (reducing an object to its components) and ‘overmining’ (reducing it to its relationship with other objects) of objects in traditional philosophy. The

Arka Chattopadhyay

35

object here is treated as a difference between its undermining and overmining. As Garcia observes, the geometric form of an object is part of its matter. It is what constitutes an object. He makes a distinction between form in general, and geometric form. In his view, form has no relation with objects, while geometric form and matter co-constitute an object: ‘geometric’ form, a body’s figure, is not its form but rather a part of its matter. Its form is something else. Considered in this way, the geometric figure of the cube is not the form of the cube insofar as it is a thing. The geometric figure of the cube is something that constitutes it in the same way as the wood. The cube’s wood and geometric figure are equally components of the matter of this object, the wooden cube: they both enter into the wooden cube (137).

If mathematical form is built into the object just like its component, it becomes part of its material being. Garcia’s point thus throws a new light on Robbe-Grillet’s mathematical objects as matter. We see here how an emphasis on the mathematical structure of an object has resonances of new materialism. In Robbe-Grillet’s mini-story “The Dressmaker’s Dummy” from Snapshots, there is no human presence. A descriptive narrative voice etches a scene in which nothing happens. We have complex visual frames, developing from the simple opening image of a coffeepot on a table when the pot’s surface reflects a window with three sections: In the spherical surface of the coffeepot is a shiny, distorted, reflection of the window, a sort of four-sided figure the sides of which form the arcs of a circle. The line of the wooden uprights between the two window sections widens abruptly at the bottom into a vague spot. This is, no doubt, the shadow of the dressmaker’s dummy (5).

There is a mathematical emphasis on the play of square and circle in the coffeepot’s surface reflection of the window. There are narrative promises in these premises, but Robbe-Grillet is not interested in forming any narrative from these descriptions. The dressmaker’s dummy is the objectified trace of anything like a human subject, in this inert world where inertia stands for the mattering of matter. Garcia, much like the fellow thing-theorist Levi Bryant, posits a formal notion of equality in objects. This is a structural democracy of all objects, staying put in their immovable space. But the history of human use tampers with them and dislodges this democracy. Bryant notes that “The Democracy of Objects attempts to think the being of objects unshackled from the gaze of humans in their being for-themselves” (19). For Bryant, this democracy does not exclude, but only de-centres, the human subject.

36

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

Garcia has a homologous notion of ‘accumulation’. Objects accumulate and create networks of meaning, and this accumulation “denotes the hierarchy between things” (96). He agrees with Bryant that “the formal condition of the accumulation of objects is its opposite: the equality between all things” (96). For Garcia, things become objects when they accumulate. Things are on the side of being while objects acquire meaning in their network with other accumulating objects.

From Accumulation to Hoarding: Doctorow From this theory of accumulating objects, let me come to the psychic phenomenon of hoarding, wherein a human subject symptomatically accumulates objects and cannot let go of anything they possess. At this juncture, let me bring in E. L. Doctorow’s novel, Homer and Langley (2009) that reconstructs the lives of two of the 20th century’s most famous hoarders from America: Homer and Langley Collyer who made their ancestral house into a symptomatic museum. In 1947, the Collyer brothers sadly died under the debris of the things they themselves had accumulated. Hoarding as a symptom that has to do with objects differs from Garcia’s accumulation in giving primacy to the human subject as a hoarder. And yet this is one variety of accumulation in which we do not have object-networks of meaning. More than object-semantics, hoarding is about object-syntax. In other words, Homer and Langley do not hoard particular things because they establish new meaning with other things, heaped together. They hoard objects for their material being-there rather than any meaning they may develop in a relational matrix. Homer who is losing his eyesight, finds comfort in the being-there of the hoarded objects around him: […] it was all very eclectic, being a record of sorts of our parents’ travels, and cluttered it might have seemed to outsiders, but it seemed normal and right to us and it was our legacy, Langley’s and mine, this sense of living with things assertively inanimate, and having to walk around them (6-7).

What is the ‘assertion’ of inanimate objects mentioned above? The nostalgic objects reminding the brothers of their parental lineage assert their being around the two of them. These objects have had meaning of human use in the past. But now they have been exhausted into insignificance. For the blind Homer, there is no ontological distinction between inside and outside, which translates into a hoarding of objects from the outside into the inside of the house. They inscribe their fantasies in this world of objects. As they hoard newspapers, Langley imagines the project of making a world

Arka Chattopadhyay

37

newspaper that would have every news item in it, and would not need any addition whatsoever. This absolute archive is a phantasmatic meaning, imputed to the objects by the human gaze. It takes away from their being by suffusing them with subjective meaning. In the post-war America, depicted in the novel, the house becomes a veritable war museum: “It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war” (102). The context of the war adds another cultural and historical meaning to the hoarded objects. As the place becomes full, the brothers build passageways to move through the objects. These tunnels return to the image of the trench in war. As the brothers become total recluses, and the threat of intrusion increases, Langley designs all the things into an “infernal machine” that would collapse on an intruder. This labyrinth of objects thus becomes a menacing assemblage: “each room has a punishing design” (206). As Homer suggests at one point, with all the stuffed objects around him, he cannot think about nothingness (151). Here we encounter the psychic economy of hoarding as a mechanism to stall the void. Objects for a blind man represent the solid and concrete nature of the world around him. They allow him to divert his thoughts away from nothingness. This is how the material and inert being of the object reasserts itself in the novel, away from the plethora of meanings and fantasies invested in it. In the final moments of the novel, when Homer, the sightless narrator, feels for the hoarded things, we feel the material being-there of objects as company for the human: I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where there is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself (207).

Let me highlight the repeated use of the possessive pronoun (‘my’) for all the objects mentioned above. These objects do not relate to one another and construct meaning. Their very being-there is an affective meaning, felt by the human subject, seeking assurance of solidity. They rescue Homer from thinking nothingness, i.e. the “endless emptiness of insubstantial thought”. For a blind man, this is being-become-meaning. In our meaning-being complex, this is a new turn, and a fresh insight in which being itself becomes affective meaning. Hoarding as a human symptom anchors the treatment of objects in Homer and Langley. Thus, the novel cannot think of the objects without the human. But does this mean it fails to imply anything beyond the humanist depiction of objects? I do not think so. As we have seen above, when we search for a post-humanist treatment of objects in literature, it does not

38

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

necessarily mean there is no human presence there. Robbe-Grillet may want to exclude the human, but the question remains whether it is possible in a literary life-world where the narrative voice almost unfailingly retains a vestigial humanity. As we have seen, post-humanist object-ontology is more about the decentering of the human in relation to objects, rather than an absolute exclusion of the former. Homer and Langley turns humanist objectrelation on its head by suggesting the object’s hierarchical sway over the human. The objects are the masters and the human subject needs them, not the other way around. They end up killing the brothers in the novel. Doctorow’s text, therefore, gives this agency to the objects without anthropomorphizing them. It also exposes the human being’s dependency on the objects.

Spectral Objects: Banville As we can see, the literary quest for a post-humanist approach to objects yields more paradoxes than affirmations. We started with a distinction between objectual being and subjective meaning, but as we have found out, these two categories are not watertight. Being itself can be meaning. And even when objects hold sway over the human, and the human is reduced to an object, the human is not necessarily out of the picture. In fact, the inversion of the human and the object’s hierarchy is often nothing but an effect of human disposition. In the spirit of this paradox, let me evoke Irish writer John Banville, whose work is replete with a dialectical tension between the affective human meanings of objects and their actual nonhuman presence as matter in the world. In his novel Eclipse (2000), Banville spells out the human signification of objects in the name of a spectral affect. What makes him interesting as a writer under the post-human gaze is that his work delineates the withdrawal of human meaning from the object whereby it returns to its material inertia. Be it the phantom chair that doubles itself before disappearing in Eclipse, or the vase that cleaves into two discrete halves in Shroud, Banville is attentive to the bifidity of the object between anthropomorphic meaning and non-human presence. In Banville’s world there is an acknowledgment of the independent life of things that decentres the human subject. Objects are in a perpetual condition of waiting as they bide their time. In Eclipse Alexander Cleave, an actor, returns to his childhood home and experiences a haunting that happens via inanimate objects. Any full reading of these texts is beyond the scope of this chapter, but let me concentrate on one important moment from the novel that portrays this objectual haunting and establishes spectrality as an affect written into

Arka Chattopadhyay

39

things. Cleave reflects on the creaking objects in his childhood home that spook him out of his wits. Talking about ghostly forms that he keeps spotting around the house, he observes: They have their own furniture, in their own world. It looks like the solid stuff among which I move, but it is not the same, or is the same at another stage of existence. Both sets of things, the phantom and the real, strike up a resonance together, a chiming. If the ghostly scene has a chair in it, say, that the woman is sitting on, and that occupies the same space as a real chair in the real kitchen, and is superimposed on it, however ill the fit, the result will be that when the scene vanishes, the real chair will retain a sort of aura, will blush, almost, in the surprise of being singled out and fixed upon, of being lighted upon, in this fashion. The effect soon fades, however, and then the chair, the real chair, will step back, as it were, out of the spotlight, and take its accustomed place in dim anonymity, and I will cease to notice it, try as I might to go on paying deference to this plain thing that has known its numinous moment. (48)

Banville’s narrator imagines a chiming between the real and the spectral world of objects here. Let me highlight that the real object and its spectral double are considered to be the same thing, in two different stages of existence. We have to make a distinction between ‘being’ and ‘existence’ here. While the former (being) is being as being, the latter (existence) is being as it appears in the world. The chair is the same in its being, but is ‘at another stage of existence’ when it appears as a phantom chair. These two different stages of existence for the same being create a divided effect, of spectral doubling. The object alienates itself from the human grasp of understanding through this real-phantom doubling. The solid, volumetric presence of the object in space dissipates into a ghostly double. This is an ontological shift at the level of existence, even though the kernel of being remains the same. The same furniture doubles up in the two worlds but even after the phantom object disappears with the whole scene around it, the object in the real world is bathed in an ‘aura’ as a result of this interplay. Banville anthropomorphizes this movement by using the word ‘blush’ for the object that returns to real existence from its phantom existential order. But why does this object blush? It blushes because this spectral doubling breaks what Garcia calls structural equality (Levi Bryant’s ‘democracy’) of things. It makes this particular thing feel special and more equal than others, to speak in an Orwellian language. The object blushes “in the surprise of being singled out and fixed upon, of being lighted upon, in this fashion”. Banville thus demonstrates the process by which human beings project spectrality as an affect on the world of things when they cannot process the bare

40

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

materiality of inanimate matter. If his narrator had stopped at this, Banville would not have become so interesting a writer for the post-humanist portrayal of objects. But he goes further. He also depicts the return of structural equality among things when the human imputation of subjective meaning evaporates: “The effect soon fades, however, and then the chair, the real chair, will step back, as it were, out of the spotlight, and take its accustomed place in dim anonymity, and I will cease to notice it […].” The narrator calls it a luminousness from which the object returns to its ‘dim anonymity.’ This ‘dim anonymity’ is the mattering of matter — the asignifying materiality of the inanimate world. The human subject will now “cease to notice it”. As the narrator pontificates over the vanished ‘aura’ of the phantom-object that was just a creation of his mind, he fails to notice the “plain thing”. It is a portrayal of this withdrawal of human meaning from the object that makes Banville an important case study for our posthumanist depiction of literary objects. At another point in the novel, the narrator says: I have come to distrust even the solidest objects, uncertain if they are not merely representations of themselves that might in a moment flicker and fade. The actual has taken on a tense, trembling quality. Everything is poised for dissolution (48-49).

This anxiety about the solidity of objects is important. As we have seen above, Banville’s objects elude human understanding by being on the cusp of ‘dissolution’. In Shroud (2002), which is part of a trilogy that began with Eclipse and continued with Ancient Light (2012), Banville responds to the question of the object’s anthropomorphic symbolic value as well as the human meaning imputed on it. For example, let me draw attention to the passage on a vase. It is the last gift the narrator-husband buys for his wife, Magda. The gift marks the 40th anniversary of their marriage. Once the vase is installed, Axel Vander, the narrator starts hating it. He considers it menacing. But Magda falls in love with it. She sits still and observes it for hours. The day after Magda dies, the vase breaks into two equal halves. Let me address this event of the object with a long quote: On the day after Magda's death I was reclining on the sofa in the dimness of the lounge […] with a bag of ice on my brow and a steadily diminishing bottle on the floor beside me, when a loud report, sharp and incontrovertible as a gunshot, brought me rearing up in fright, like the man-monster arching on his table when the big blue spark leaps between the conducting rods. I scrambled upright and swayed at a drunken list into the living room to investigate […] It took much fruitless peering and

Arka Chattopadhyay

41

searching before at last I discovered what had occurred. The vase had shattered, not into fragments in the way that glass should, but into two almost equal halves, vertically, and remarkably cleanly, as if it had been sliced down the middle by an immensely swift diamond blade or a powerful, unearthly ultra-ray. As I may already have remarked, I am not of a superstitious nature – or was not, since this was before Magda's ghost had begun haunting me – and I knew that it was simply that there must have been a fault in the glass, a crack so fine as to be invisible, that had succumbed at last to an infinitesimal shift in air temperature or change of atmospheric pressure. I thought, with a pang almost of remorse, of the once-hated thing standing there, day after day, suffering my baleful glances and the hours of Magda's fond but perhaps no less assailing gaze, locked motionless in agonized struggle with the irresistible forces of the world working on it, straining to hold itself together for another hour, another minute, another few seconds, the last few, of wholeness and poise. I am thinking, of course, of Cass Cleave. For that is how it was with her, too, she was another tall, tense, fissile vessel waiting to be cloven in two (109-110).

This passage describes an object-event of de-construction. It shows the movement from the happening of the event to its explication by the human subject. When the vase breaks, we feel the tremor in the world of objects, as if “everything is poised for dissolution”, to quote the narrator of Eclipse again. The description of the event makes us aware of an independent life and agency in the world of things. Vander wonders how the vase does not break into shreds but gets divided vertically into two equal halves. As he observes, there is something in the composition of the object (a ‘fault’ or ‘crack’) that leads to its de-composition. He sees this de-composition as an internal possibility of the object in conjunction with its environment (‘infinitesimal shift in air temperature or change of atmospheric pressure’). This is no anthropomorphism, but a physicist’s acknowledgment of object agency. If this is the acknowledgment of bare materiality, the passage, on the other hand, is replete with human projection of personal affect onto the event of the object. Vander takes the cleaving of the vase as a metaphorical reminder of Magda’s death as she was so very fond of this gift. He also makes the vase a symbolic representative of their cracked and about-to-break marital relationship. The equally halved-out vase thus becomes a subjective token of cloven relationships and subjectivities, not to mention mortality and the associated notion of discontinuity. Vander also associates the ‘cleaving’ of the vase with Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alex Cleave from Eclipse, with whom he has been having an affair, and who is about to die. The signifier for the object-event of de-construction — ‘cleaving’ — by subjective

42

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

association, leads Vander to the name ‘Cleave’. This movement from the word ‘cleave’ written into the object-event to the name ‘Cass Cleave’ is another attestation of human meaning on the object. It is in this way that the vase is saturated with human meaning — Magda, Cass Cleave, death, failed relationships, adultery, and so on. Banville’s narrator goes into the associative human meanings imparted onto the object, but the object in Banville also has a self-dissolving agency. He contrasts these subjective associations with the aforementioned physicist’s explication of how the vase broke. The narrator reflexively characterizes his web of subjective associations around the object as a kind of ‘superstition’. As he speculates, perhaps the vase cannot tolerate his own hateful gaze or Magda’s excessive affection for it. This may appear to be anthropomorphic, but I would argue that this is the subtle point about the object’s self-deconstructing resistance in Banville’s world. The object responds to the subjective ascription of meaning by dividing itself. This is its way of resisting subjective projection. It protests against the human inclination to inscribe meaning onto it by breaking itself into two pieces, which further tantalizes the human imagination to read something more into the exact nature of its breakage. The object thus mocks the human mania to interpret everything that happens in the world of things from their own lens of understanding. On the one hand, Banville’s objects have a secret life of their own. Their relative autonomy lies in their opacity to human cognition. They are alienated from the human gaze that fails to understand them. They often appear spectral because of their ontological enigma vis-à-vis human interpretation of their being-there in the world. If their spectrality is a result of their opacity and autonomy on the one hand, on the other, it is a human affect written into the thing. Banville’s fiction does not have these autonomous objects alone; it is full of human beings projecting fellow human beings and emotions in objects. In this sense, these objects are imbued with a human meaning i.e. a spectral affect. This is the paradoxical conundrum of the object in Banville. Banvillean objects are both human and post-human. They are human insofar as they are indices of human psyche’s complex projections and they are post-human in their uncanny autonomy and clandestine texture. They are also post-human in their ability to alienate human gaze and understanding. Their opacity de-centres the human subject who fails to build a bridge with them. Objects subject the human to their own order in Banville’s world. To conclude, this chapter looked into the European Modernist and contemporary literary iterations to track the ontological question of inanimate matter as representational content in the narrative formation of a

Arka Chattopadhyay

43

world. I have zoomed in on the relationship between meaning and being of objects as one way of approaching the literary depiction of objects in the context of post-humanism and new materialism. Reducing meaning, and dwelling on the being of objects is the potential post-human materialist trajectory which we have followed in this chapter. In other words, if literature can mark the meaningless being of the object-world, it could become post-humanist. With examples from Auster and Pinter, I have established how difficult it is for the literary discourse to shed all human meaning and concentrate solely on the being of the thing-world. Utilizing Tristan Garcia’s object-oriented-ontology, we have made inroads into the question of object-body as mathematical form in writers like Alain RobbeGrillet who called for an object-oriented-ontology in literature from the 1960s onwards, well before the idea was raised in contemporary continental philosophy. With E. L. Doctorow, I have extended Garcia’s notion of accumulating objects by focusing on hoarding as a subjective symptom. We have seen how being itself could become meaning for the solitary Collyer brothers, for whom objects in their bare being-there offer company. It is no coincidence that their deaths are due to these hoarded objects, which fall and crush one to death, while the other dies alone in the packed house. This death-by-the-object is the object’s way of hitting back at subjectivist hoarding with its bare materiality. In John Banville, we have a paradox of hyper-subjective objects that create a complex network of human meanings, symbolisms, and associations. Having said that, these objects also resist the human interpretations that are hoarded on them. They become opaque to human understanding. They break and dissolve their solidity, thus taking away from the human assurance of an inert object-world. They de-centre the human subject by alienating themselves from subjective grasps. In considering the Banvillean ontology of objects, we have made a distinction between being (being as being) and existence (being as appearing). Banville’s fiction shows this dialectical process whereby meaning is attributed to the object, and how the object withdraws itself from this spell of human meaning and stands aside in its a-signifying materiality. This is post-humanism as a process, and intersectionality, rather than as a fully fleshed-out product. There is a new post-human materiality which we have been able to extrapolate from the modernist and contemporary literary discourses. It is a dialectical materiality that continues to uncouple being from meaning, situate being as meaning, and internally split being into being for being, and being for appearing, as existence. This is matter as dialectical process which subsumes the human in its radical becoming.

44

European Literary Modernisms and the Ontology of Objects

Works Cited Askin, Ridvan. Cambridge Companion to Literature and The Posthuman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Auster, Paul. Sunset Park. London: Faber, 2010. Bachrach, Jay. “Fictional Objects in Literature and Mental Representations” The British Journal of Aesthetics 31: 2, April 1991, 134–139. Banville, John. Shroud. New York: Vintage, 2004. Banville, John. Eclipse. Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2000. Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. Brown, Bill. Other Things. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open University Press, 2011. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (ed.) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Crittenden, Charles. Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. Doctorow, E.L. Homer and Langley. London: Little, Brown, 2009. Garcia, Tristan. Form and Object: A Treatise on Things. Trans. Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Howell, Robert. “Fictional Objects: How they Are and How they Aren’t” Poetics 8 (1979), 129-177. Pinter, Harold. Plays 4. New York: Faber, 1993. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Snapshots. Trans. Bruce Morrissette. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1986. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

POSTHUMANIST STREAKS AND TEXTURES: A STUDY OF RUSKIN BOND’S VAGRANTS IN THE VALLEY SOUMYADEEP CHAKRABORTY

Works of children’s literature which deal with contemporary issues, problems, and challenges, represent the social and cultural ideology of the time with greater emphasis. This is the reason why, in contemporary children’s literature, we find critiques and commentaries of critical issues, such as nomadic subjectivity, geo-philosophy, ecosophy, the eco-centric universe, et al. The representation of children in varied forms of children’s literature which problematize contemporary issues, has undergone changes down the ages. But what remains beyond change, more or less, is the representation of the intimate relationship between nature and children. Regarding the overall representational strategies in children’s literature, John Locke opines that children’s books must aim at combining the useful and the pleasing; thus, they must look forward to instructing and delighting the readers at the same time (Book I, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). Locke’s idea comes in close proximity with Ruskin Bond’s Vagrants in the Valley, which deals extensively with issues such as the identity and belonging of the boy-protagonist, and delights readers at the same time with its fascinating narrative style. In the mould of a children’s text, Vagrants in the Valley tends to reflect critically on dense, critical issues associated with home, spatiality, and subjectivity. Besides delineating the eventful journey of the young protagonist, the novel showcases his revealing encounters in search of identity, and, in a way, addresses his psychosocial development to a large extent. As a sequel to Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, The Young Vagrants was published in 1957, in a serialized form in Illustrated Weekly. In the year 1981, it was published in separate book form. Later on, in 1993, it was reprinted, with a different title, Vagrants in the Valley, and published along with The Room on the Roof, by Penguin Books India, in a single volume. Though not a very successful novel, Bond says, in the introduction of the book, that he has “a special affection for it, because it was written at

46

Posthumanist Streaks and Textures

a time when [he] was struggling to make a living as a freelance writer […] and consorting with his fellow ‘vagrants’, some of whom are described in the book” (viii). In The Room on the Roof, we see how Rusty and Kishen face difficulties in conforming to the rules and the roles imposed on them by the adults in their respective domestic spaces, and turn into runaways, while in Vagrants in the Valley, the author showcases how they start acclimatizing themselves to the conditions of homelessness. Homelessness has freed them from the limitations of domesticity, and has offered them scope and opportunity to live life the way they want. According to Meena G. Khorana, Vagrants in the Valley is “a fantasy about freedom” (The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond, 50). The novel begins with Rusty and Kishen returning from Hardwar to Dehra. Having no place to reside, they start wandering in search of shelter. They are followed by Goonga, a dumb boy whom they meet in a tea-shop on the way to Dehra. People in the locality have bullied him and made fun of his disability. But he receives care and empathy from Rusty and Kishen, and becomes their friend in no time. They finally find an abandoned church on the fringes of Dehra. Entering the church, Rusty opens the windows. Fresh air flows in and refreshes the long-closed place. Rusty and Kishen bathe in a stream by the church premises, which rejuvenates them, and they start enjoying their state of vagrancy more. Their love and inclination for vagrancy, allow the plot to undergo a continuum of mobility. The more the plot gives room to the characters’ mobility, the more it exposes itself to incorporating fluid thoughts and principles. The next morning, they visit the house of their bosom friend Somi. His mother offers them food and money. When she requests them to stay, Rusty refuses the proposal, as he has decided to make his way in the world all by himself. The day passes with their aimless roaming, and ends with their returning to the church with a candle. Exhausted, Kishen falls asleep fast, but Rusty starts thinking and reflecting on life. Vagrancy has refreshed him; homelessness has freed him from the constraints of domesticity. The state of vagrancy has stimulated his creative faculty; it has offered him enough scope and opportunity to undergo the quest for a space which he would prefer to call ‘home’, where he will be able to find his belonging in the truest sense. In The Family in English Children’s Literature, Ann Alston argues that, in the works of children’s literature, ‘home’ is often represented as ‘an antithesis of away’. Children’s literature tends to establish ‘home’ as a physically circumscribed place, a ‘haven’, a place that protects one from the threats and dangers of the outside world. Through adult characters, children’s works of literature promote ‘home’ as the place where human beings reside, and places outside the home as the sites where non-humans

Soumyadeep Chakraborty

47

dwell (70-74). But Rusty’s idea of ‘home’ is free of this kind of humanist binary. ‘Home’ does not appear to him as ‘an antithesis of away’, as pointed out by Alston. To him, ‘home’ and ‘homeliness’ are not materialist constructs limited to the locationality of a place. Rather, it is one’s dynamic emotional attachment to the larger cultural space that contributes crucially in the shaping of the self. With multiple shades of enlightenment, ‘homelessness’ visits him too; it offers him the opportunity of reconfiguring the idea of home, belonging and identity beyond the compartmentalized sets of humanist binaries. On the one hand, vagrancy prevents him from being limited to any fixed geopolitical locus; on the other, it brings him close to a de-centred, hypermobile subject position. Vagrancy generates in him an assemblage of diverse paradigms of space. In an essay, “China Miéville’s Young Adult Novels: Posthumanist Assemblages”, Anita Tarr observes that the most prominent posthuman inclination in young adult novels is the ‘assemblage’1 of various ideas and ideologies. In Vagrants in the Valley, we see how vagrancy contributes to the de-shaping, assembling, and reshaping, of different ideologies related to space and belonging in the boyprotagonist. They start wandering in the nearby ‘maidan’ (field). In the course of their strolling, they meet Hathi, a wrestler whom Rusty met earlier. Hathi informs them that, within a few days, he will start for his village in the hills. Meanwhile, Kishen happens to meet one of their old family friends, Mrs Bhushan, and her daughter Aruna in the bazaar. Almost forcibly, Mrs Bhusan takes him to her home. Rusty’s wandering continues, and his love for this bohemian life also continues to collect and expand his ideas relating to space and subjectivity. One day, while wandering in the fields, he sees a neatly constructed house, surrounded by banana and poinsettia trees. He is attracted by the house, enters the premises, and meets a seventy-year-old Englishman, Pettigrew. Talking with the old man unearths the fact that Pettigrew had an intimate friendship with Rusty’s father. Pettigrew tells Rusty that both of them were interested in enjoying the beauty of the larger eco-space of the Himalayan valley. He also says that they were both fond of reading books and collecting rare copies of old books. From him, Rusty comes to know about his aunt who still lives in the hills near Garhwal. Pettigrew informs Rusty that his aunt might have kept something his father might have wanted him to have. Rusty finds a ‘guardian angel’ in Pettigrew, who offers him money for the journey. Rusty thinks of making Hathi his companion in this journey, as his village is there in the hills. This is how the narrative brings in eventualities, keeps on shifting the locales, and provides Rusty with ample scope to associate himself with a de-centred, fluid, spatial belonging.

48

Posthumanist Streaks and Textures

In the course of his wandering, Rusty meets an orphan adolescent boy, Devinder, who reads in the intermediate class, and earns money by selling combs, toys, etc. Knowing that his parents were killed in the Partition of 1947, and that he is all alone, Rusty invites him to spend the night with him in the church. Devinder introduces him to Sudheer, known in the locality as Lafunga, and helps Rusty to manage some money from him. Throughout the novel, we see Rusty making friends with boys who have been displaced and who have turned out as vagrants like him. They all become closer with the progression of the narrative; a sense of togetherness prevails among them. Beyond mere familiarity, they construct what Norah Nivedita Shaw and Meena G. Khorana call a ‘vagrant family’. In Ruskin Bond of India, Norah Nivedita Shaw opines: Thrown together by the cruel hand of destiny as well as the indifference of the society, the vagrants constitute their own family, which in many aspects, is more close-knit and caring than most biological families (36).

The ‘vagrant family’ unites and incorporates members who are displaced from their respective homes. In her essay, Anita Tarr points out that children’s works of literature and young-adult fiction portray a dynamic representational trajectory, with a telling balance between displacement and assemblage (247-48). The ‘vagrant family’ replicates the very idea of the balanced coexistence of displacement and assemblage. It consists of Rusty, who has left his guardian’s mansion owing to militant domestic surveillance, violence and physical abuse, Kishen, who has left home after his mother’s death because of his father’s indifference, Goonga, a dumb boy whose disability has made him homeless, Devinder, the Sikh boy who has lost everything in the Partition of India in 1947, and Sudheer, who has turned out to be a homeless rogue after losing contact with his family during the turmoil and violence in the Partition. Displacement has assembled these boys; it has generated in them a sense of togetherness. Regarding the homeless condition of Devinder and Sudheer, and the effect of the Partition of India on children, Meena G. Khorana writes, “These characters portray a very human picture of the sociological and psychological effects of Partition on the lives of displaced children” (The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond, 52). Leaving familiar faces, Rusty boards the train and starts his journey to reach to his aunt, Ms. Mackenzie. Going through a series of adventures, he reaches the place where she lives. Rusty tells her how he has survived these days, and how he has been living a bohemian life over the last few months. Finally, she informs him that his father has only left some books for him. Knowing Rusty’s zeal for reading and writing, she thinks that he would be the right kind of person to carry on his father’s legacy. Taking the books as

Soumyadeep Chakraborty

49

his father’s bliss, Rusty sets out for Rishikesh. Failing to find something to turn his life around, he does not feel frustrated, as he knows very well that the wide valley that lies between the Himalayas and the Siwalik will remain his home, will remain as endearing to him in his distress as ever. The more the narrative progresses, the more the situation changes for Rusty. But the equation and the relationship between Rusty and the larger eco-space around him remain the same. In her book, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Timothy Morton argues that “[…] ‘civilization’ was a long-term collaboration between […] humans and rock, humans and soil, not out of grand visions but out of something like desperation” (45). Morton’s take provides Cary Wolfe with the impetus to point out the theme of the de-centering of humans, and the de-shaping of the humanist worldview, pertaining to fluidity of thought (What Is Posthumanism? xv). In Rusty’s way of looking at the larger eco-space, we see the collaborative civilizational pattern as mentioned by Morton. Vagrancy has exposed him to the sights and sounds of the eco-space and, in a way, has contributed immensely to keeping the collaboration between him and the rock, the soil, intact. Rusty’s refusal of his aunt’s proposal that he remain in her house is evocative of his desperation to keep the ‘collaboration’ unharmed. His care for the entire eco-space, and faith in the nurturing capacity of the surrounding environs, signal the de-centering principle, as pointed out by Wolfe, and evoke Rusty’s belief in the nexus of collaborative fluidity, especially in the realm of the relationship between human and non-human. Meeting Pettigrew, he tells him everything that has happened there. Seeing the books, Pettigrew comes to know that among these books there is a copy of the rarest first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. He tells Rusty that this could be a treasure that his father has left for him, as this antique copy could provide him with a lot of money to settle in. He says further that he will contact one of his friends in London to arrange everything for Rusty, and that he must now think of going to England and settling in there. Rusty also starts thinking that he must push himself hard towards doing something meaningful in life. The novel ends with Rusty setting out for England, for a better prospect in life. Bond ends the novel thus: He waved to them from the window, and they waved back, smiling and wishing him luck. They were not dismayed at his departure. Rather they were happy that Rusty's life had taken a new direction; they were impressed by his good fortune, and they took it for granted that he would come back some day, with money and honours (Vagrants in the Valley, 222-223).

50

Posthumanist Streaks and Textures

Throughout the text, Rusty continues to move from one place to another and slips away from any kind of fixed, rooted, spatial identity. Rusty’s hypermobility makes the process of signification in him complex and dynamic. It follows the whole process through de-configuring the preexisting notions of inside/outside, limits/zones, openness/unevenness nourished by humanist binaries, and the re-formulations of all these, at the same time. This is what Felix Guattari and Giles Deleuze call ‘de/reterritorialization’ which results in procuring a ‘nomad space’ in the subject. This is well illustrated in the book Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze, by Russell West-Pavlov. He elaborates that de/re-territorialization: […] is resistant to coding because it follows the flows and undulations of becoming-being rather than proffering obeisance to social institutions. Its achievement is to constantly undo its own achievements […] In terms of thought, it can be understood as a mode of constant un-thinking, of rethinking, of thinking anew. In terms of personal identity it can be understood as acquiescence to the constant re-jinking of personality which creates the unplanned, unpredictable, eminently creative trajectory of a human existence (201).

The continual change of place of the boy-protagonist causes psychic friction within him. The friction between Rusty’s desired stability and circumstantial mobility causes a ‘flow’ in him; it generates a desire that pulls him towards the mechanism of territory-making. But with his continual changing of place, the humanist binaries, within which he has been nurtured in his early childhood, are assembled, and this results in procuring in him an everchangeable, fluid psychosocial drive that inclines him to stay out of humanist pigeon-holing. It takes him through a process of ‘de/reterritorialization’ that functions to produce a nomadic sense of space in him. In his book, Space after Deleuze, Arun Saldanha writes that Deleuze theorizes ‘de/re-territorialization’ as a process that is run by continual crossings and re-crossings of the subject; mappings and re-mappings of space by the subject. Frequent exposure to ‘de/re-territorialization’ generates a ‘nomad thought’2 in the subject which tends to subvert the prototypical sense of space affiliated to humanist exclusivity (55). This is precisely what we see in Rusty. Hypermobility takes him through continual crossings and re-crossings. It causes a continual de-moulding and remoulding of the psychosocial drives that tend to drag him into frequent mappings and re-mappings of space and spatial belonging. In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze points out the interplay of ‘fold’ and ‘flow’ in the process of de/re-territorialization. He argues that, as there is no essential difference between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, there must not be any distinction between virtual and actual, or inside and outside. Deleuze

Soumyadeep Chakraborty

51

emphasizes that, in the context of the hypermobility of the subject, we must examine the infinity of folds (or manifold) always connected integrally by an inherent, incessant flow that is resulted by the conflict of stability and mobility instead of focusing on subject/object distinction. It is the continual ‘flow’ that keeps on disrupting boundaries between subject and object, crossing thresholds of culturally formulated ideas and blurs the distinction between inside and outside (33-36). This is what we see in Rusty. Changing circumstances take him through frequent physical movement and expose him to the spatial pluralities. It takes him through many ‘folds’ of thought related to subjectivity and belonging. It results in the blurring of the differences between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘home’ and ‘away’, in him, generates a frequent ‘flow’; a fluidity of thought, and prevents him from inclining towards humanist binaries. Rusty’s hypermobility has contributed to making the dynamic of his understanding of belonging. The crucial point to note here, is that vagrancy has not de-rooted him, it has rather expanded his idea of identity. Vagrancy has offered him a plurality of thought that has enabled him to move beyond the humanist dualism of mind and body, and gained firm ground in Cartesian philosophy. This is the reason why Rusty does not suffer from foreignness or outsideness. The fluid sense of space, identity, and belonging, evoked through Rusty’s vagrancy, reminds us of the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic, Georg Lukacs. In his book, The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs has referred to the representation of the assemblage of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘alienation’ and ‘belonging’, as the representation of an ultimate ‘transcendental homelessness’.3 He proclaims that ‘transcendental homelessness’ is a state in which a subject, though in a nomadic condition, is restricted from being subjected to a compartmentalized thought-process, and transcends from the philosophic leaning towards perpetual ‘existential outsideness’. According to Lukacs, ‘transcendental homelessness’ is a condition that functions through the blurring of bifurcatory agencies; it enables the subject to create his/her own kind of space, identity, and belonging, to make his/her existence intelligible, and life meaningful (119-121). In Rusty’s case, we see the same thing happen. Throughout the text, Rusty remains homeless, but the condition has never lowered him down to the ghetto of humanist exclusivist binaries. Rather, he transcends the inside/outside, home/away binaries, and creates an equation of his own. Rusty’s condition brings to mind Rosi Braidotti’s idea of ‘nomadic subjectivity’. In an article, “Posthuman Critical Theory”,4 Braidotti argues: Nomadic subjectivity is not linked to bound individuals, but rather takes place transversally, in between nature and technology, male and female,

52

Posthumanist Streaks and Textures black and white, local and global — present in the sense of the duality defined above in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries (11).

Rusty’s condition has pushed him through frequent displacements. Continual displacements have prevented him from being associated with any fixed, nuanced, subjective subject position. His vagrancy has placed his subjectivity, transversally, onto assemblages of diverse ideas which have allowed him to flow across the demarcations of humanist binaries. This nomadic subjectivity has allowed him to come closer to the surrounding environs. Bathing in the stream and roaming in fields have comforted him, have soothed him to the fullest. Reflections on the vastness of the hills have expanded his way of looking at life. It brings to our mind the ‘ecosophical’ end of nomadic subjectivity as theorized by Felix Guattari in The Three Ecologies. By ‘ecosophy’,5 Guattari refers to the greater assemblage of the environmental, the social, and the psychic, that nomadic subjectivity offers. Through a monistic continuum,6 this assemblage draws meta-patterns in the psychosocial drives in the subject, and takes the individual across humanist trajectories (106-109). In Rusty, we see the assemblage of the environmental, the social, and the psychic, that has contributed to expanding his thought process and his sense of belonging. It has liberated him from the humanist ghetto. The assemblage has given birth to fluid meta patterns in him, and helped him in attaining a dynamic sense of belonging beyond humanist systematization. In the mold of adventure fiction, Vagrants in the Valley represents some prominent posthumanist streaks. If we delve deep into the creative oeuvre of Ruskin Bond in general, we would find that Bond’s fictions always attempt to move beyond the systematized trajectories of humanism, and Vagrants in the Valley is no exception. Behind the frank and simple narration, the novel attempts to explore dense, critical, issues related to the spatio-political belonging and psychosocial development in the boyprotagonist. M. P. Sinha, R. Jauhari, and Nigam J. Dave, have rightly mentioned in their book, Ruskin Bond: A Critical Evaluation: Behind its simple narration, there is the serious theme of the revival of a delinquent to a responsible and healthy adolescent ready to face the challenges of life (75).

Notes 1. See Anita Tarr’s essay, “China Miéville’s Young Adult Novels: Posthumanist Assemblages” (247-272) included in the book Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction, edited by Anita Tarr and Donna R. White.

Soumyadeep Chakraborty

53

2. Deleuze and Guattari have used the term to refer to a psychic inclination associated with the postmodern condition. In no way is it related to the bohemian nomads, or geopolitically and culturally displaced people without fixed habitation. The term is used with greater emphasis by Deleuze to refer to the spatial dimension of being in the postmodern condition. Arun Saldanha writes: Deleuze is not talking about actual nomads at all but the ‘nomad-idea’, the geo-historically contingent tendencies that exist in all human populations (Space After Deleuze, 55). For further understanding, see Arun Saldanha’s book, Space After Deleuze. 3. See the book Spatiality by Robert T. Tally Jr. In this book, the author compares Lukacs’s idea of ‘transcendental homelessness’ with Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘unheimlich’. Tally writes: The world in which we are always situated is not of our own making, but our very essence (that is, existence itself) requires us to shape our world. The human condition is, as we saw earlier, fundamentally one of “not being at home”, which calls to mind Lukacs’s […] “transcendental homelessness” (Spatiality 66). 4. The essay, published in Journal of Posthuman Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017, 9-25, focuses chiefly on posthuman critical theory in the context of the Anthropocene era, monistic ontology, critical Spinozism, and Deleuzian vital materialism. 5. Gary Genosko writes: Ecosophy’s business is to attend to the regimes by means of which subjectivity is produced and to intervene in them; it is readied for this task by Guattari, insofar as he shifts into the delineation of the dynamics of eco-logic – how the three ecologies communicate (the terms are affective intensities rather than delimited sets like stages, complexes, linear phasal developments, or universal structural coordinates). Although Guattari abandoned typical psychoanalytic psychogenetic stages for the sake of a hetero-genetic becoming (giving a constancy to singularization), he still needed to retain some sense of a self’s prospective unfolding without slavishly adhering to a developmental model punctuated by decisive events and sticking points. Only an emergent self would suffice; and the phases of such an emergent organization, while at work over time from childhood through adulthood, would also be available in parallel at different degrees and in a variety of combinations over a lifetime (Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction, 77). See Gary Genosko’s book, Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. 6. Regarding monism or monistic ontology, Rosi Braidotti argues, in the article, “Posthuman Critical Theory”: Posthuman critical theory, in my perspective, is neomaterialist. It rests on monistic ontologies, based on the reappraisal of Spinoza developed by French philosophers since the 1970s, which foreground process ontologies and the positivity of difference as a process of differential modulation within a common matter [...]. Monism highlights the embrainment of the body and the embodiment of the mind: all matter being one and immanent

54

Posthumanist Streaks and Textures

to itself, it is self-organizing in both human and nonhuman organisms […] (9-10). See John Protevi’s book, Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences for further understanding.

Works Cited Bond, Ruskin. Vagrants in the Valley. New Delhi: Penguin, 1993. Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Critical Theory” Journal of Posthuman Studies 1.1(2017), 9-25. JSTOR. Web. 4 February 2020. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Athlone Press, 1993. Genosko, Gary. Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction. UK: Pluto Press, 2009. Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Khorana, Meena G. The Life and Works of Ruskin Bond. London: Praeger, 2003. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. USA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pavlov, Russel West. Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. New York: Rodopi, 2009. Protevi, John. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Saldanha, Arun. Space after Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Shaw, Norah Nivedita. Ruskin Bond of India: A True Son of the Soil. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2008. Sinha, M.P., R. Jauhari and Nigam J. Dave. Ruskin Bond: A Critical Evaluation. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2012. Tally Jr., Robert T. Spatiality. UK: Routledge, 2013. Tarr, Anita. “China Miéville’s Young Adult Novels: Posthumanist Assemblages”. Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction, edited by Anita Tarr and Donna R. White, University Press of Mississippi, 2018, 247-272. Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

POSTHUMAN ECOLOGY AND CAPITALIST DECAY IN WALL-E AND AVATAR OLY ROY

“There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself” —Pope Francis

Posthumanism can be conceived as a site for re-evaluating the critical relationships between man and nature, between ecology and material agency, between biological tropes and agential realism. Such re-evaluations and updating are consonant with the new materialist epistemic positions that draw from a wide range of advanced biogenetic and technological studies, which, in turn, posit the modern man for critical perusal. Human responsibility with relation to environmental adaptations and substitutions also comes under critical evaluation in a posthuman world. Critics such as Stacy Alaimo have presented the posthuman ‘man’ as a product of new materialism who is “perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and agencies of environments”. The primary purpose of posthumanism is not to evaluate man, on the basis of his solitary extravaganza within the scope of this planet, but from the viewpoint of new and emergent interlinked agential roles that delegitimise the central position of humans among other species in the natural-cultural continuum. The displacement of humans from their perceived centrality allows scope for recognising the profound inter-connections that determine the relationship between different forms of life, thus reconceptualising the world as a composite organic structure with potential for permeability, instead of focusing on the separations that have previously defined inter-species relationships. Posthumanism also attempts to go beyond the biological category of existence, as it blurs the boundaries between humans and machines. Human subjectivity is thereby shared with a non-human agency which promotes the re-conceptualisation of life by engaging in techno-scientific updating. Thus, in posthumanist thinking, man’s uniqueness undergoes erosion, as human exceptionalism is challenged by a range of other entities - from other natural life forms to artificial

56

Posthuman Ecology and Capitalist Decay in Wall-E and Avatar

intelligence. But posthumanism should be understood to mean the ‘end of humanity’; instead it can be viewed as an alternative affirmative re-analysis that heralds the end of a certain conception of ‘humans’. It envisages a pattern of life where the evolutionary process is not only structured around humans, but incorporates intelligent machines and other biological species within its folds. Evaluated in this light, posthumanism is a positive ontological premise that neither attempts to dismiss humanity and celebrate ‘posthuman success’, nor undermines human existence. It’s primary aim is to highlight the interdependency of life while allowing a discourse on a new category of ‘human’ in terms of evolutionary co-emergence. The complications that posthumanism allows for interpreting the category of ‘human’ in its socio-political and cultural aspects, has also permitted a significant departure from anthropocentric discourses. Thus, it has placed emphasis on, as Braidotti observes, “a new way of combining self-interests with the wellbeing of an enlarged community, based on environmental interconnections”. Posthumanist concern with ecology and environmentalism incorporates all ‘Earth-others’, and stresses the significance of complex environmental relationships where the socioecological scientific networks between humans and non-humans become more dynamic. Humans can, therefore, be re-evaluated, according to Latour, as “hybrids of nature and culture”, whose subjectivity and intelligence can be disembodied and located in a digital medium, thus dismantling the ‘solipsistic supremacy’ of humans in an ecologically and technologically diverse new world. Posthuman ecology and eco-criticism take over material ecocriticism as it becomes increasingly engaged with critical posthumanist visions, envisaging an ecological network based on inter-species and extrahuman relationships. Serena Iovino observes that, “Our world is pervious and fluid, and so must be the notions that help us to read and to describe its ecologies of ideas and bodies”. This conception of permeability guides posthuman critical thought with regard to its concern for the impact of human activities on the environment. Human activities based on material and economic factors have always shown a disregard for environmental and ecological balances, and posthumanism attempts to surmise a world where anthropocentrism is destabilised by its own lack of concern for the natural world, the ecological network, and other non-human entities. Posthuman eco-criticism generates new narratives of what Latour calls, an “ecology of collectives consisting of humans and nonhumans”, thus extending the semantic meaning of the term ‘non-human’ to include nonhumans beyond the biological realm. Machines, with their encoded creative materiality, join the hybrid compounds of the Earth, evolving continually

Oly Roy

57

the established taxonomies of the human and the non-human. The posthuman natural-cultural landscape, as well as the mindscape, depict not only the evolution of the relationships and networks that regulate life on this planet, but also the effects of human activities on the same. Literary texts and other forms of narrative have attempted to capture the essence of such transformations brought about by human evolution and human activities. In my paper, I have attempted a study on the cinematic depictions of such posthuman ecological conditions where the organic networks in the natural world, as well as human socio-cultural relationships, undergo various forms of evolution brought about by technocratism and anthropocentric behaviour patterns. I will also try to analyse the effects of consumerism in the posthuman world, and the impending capitalist decay, as envisaged by such cinematic depictions in their narratives. The failure of man in preserving the natural order, fuelled by his capitalist tendencies, is not a new concern for literary and creative narratives. The role of capitalist consumerism has been discursively disputed, but the indications of impending capitalist decay can certainly not be denied if we attempt a study on the perceptions of the posthuman world. Before beginning an empirical study of the two Hollywood movies, Wall-E and Avatar, which I believe depict the posthuman scenario in vivid detail, I would like to draw the attention of readers to some other literary and cinematic narratives which have shown unrelenting concern with the effects of inexorable human exploitative activities on the natural environment. posthuman eco-criticism too, concerns itself with similar tropes of change, and challenges one to look beyond the realm of extant reality. As our world undergoes “the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half billion years” (according to an article by the Centre for Biological Diversity), the need for representation of the same through means of mass communication is at its zenith. Ted Hughes, in his poem entitled “The Other”, depicts the deplorable exploitation by man of Mother Nature in terms of moving endearment: She had too much so with a smile, you took some. Of everything she had you had Absolutely nothing, so you took some, At first, just a little.

Another Hughes poem, entitled “The Error”, urges humans to contemplate the consequences of their actions - past and present - alerting readers to the degenerative chaos that threats humanity and the planet:

58

Posthuman Ecology and Capitalist Decay in Wall-E and Avatar When her grave opened its ugly mouth Why didn’t you just fly, Wrap yourself in your hair and make yourself scarce, Why did you kneel down at the grave’s edge To be identified Accused and convicted.

Of all the crises that threaten mankind, this present crisis of mass extinction of species, calling our attention to a biologically impaired world, is the sole responsibility of the humans and their heedless activities. Hollywood movies have engaged in frequent discussions and deliberations on environmental degradation. They have also been able to incorporate their vision of posthuman cybernetics to emphasise the advent of a transitional era of evolving organic and material relations. In the 1970s, during the realization of the economic crisis, several movies were made which focused directly or indirectly on the issues of environmental pollution and exploitation of natural resources. The dystopian world of ‘Soylent Green’ (1973) is characterised by overpopulation, mass poverty, the extinction of wildlife, and the hegemony of a small and unscrupulous group of elites who are feeding the masses with soy products made from the flesh of the dead. As for cybernetics, Hollywood has explored different aspects of the same, ranging from multiple variations of Artificial Intelligence, as represented in Alex Garland’s debut movie Ex-Machina (2015) or Spike Jonze’s romanticcomedy Her (2013), to cyborgs in movies like The Terminator (1984) and Robocop (1987). Hollywood, as a platform, with its power to influence and the scope to capture different realities, has readily indulged in the dissemination of contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses. Posthumanism, with its focus on ‘transformed humanity’, presents Hollywood with the opportunity to explore not only the dynamics of technocratism in influencing the relationship between human and non-human agencies, but also the avenues of cultural, civilizational, and environmental concerns. The movies that I have chosen for my study Wall-E (2008), and Avatar (2009), both depict a world of festering chaos as humans appear to compromise their needs for their greed. Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E, released initially in 2008, is a computer animated science fiction film produced by Pixar animation Studios for Disney Pictures. The story centres around the exploits of the movie’s titular character who lives on a neglected Earth, an inevitable result of capitalist culture. Wall-E is a robot hero of ‘complex agency’, focusing our attention on the posthumanist concerns surrounding ‘transformed humanity’ embodied in a new cybernetic space. As Wall-E’s purpose is poignantly highlighted

Oly Roy

59

in the advertising slogan “working to dig you out”, one becomes aware that the line provides a context for understanding the future of human life, which has, otherwise, buried itself in ‘waste’. As Wall-E rolls across the stark posthuman landscape, the viewer becomes aware of his assembled personality- the mechanical aspects, the human emotions, and the cleansing energy. The movie’s primary concern with posthuman ecology resonates around the critique of humanity that at first appears absent, and, when visible, presents itself as static and inactive. The landscape of Wall-E is an Earth rendered into a wasteland by unchecked consumerism and environmental neglect - a land which does not breed “Lilacs out of the dead land” (Eliot, The Waste Land) and where there is no “…stirring the/ Dull roots with spring rain” (Eliot, The Waste Land). The humanity that is now absent, has been evacuated centuries ago by a ‘megacorporation’ using giant starliners or spacecrafts, leaving behind only the robots needed for ‘Waste Allocation and Load Lifting’, W.A.L.L.- E. In stark contrast to the recognised aesthetics of Disney animation, Wall-E takes us on a journey through a deserted, desolate, and discoloured landscape, with no sign of fecundity or vibrancy. “Yet there is a beauty to the environment too, a peaceful city without humans that conveys a truly ominous warning”, comments Zoe Jaques, on the sterile landscape that resembled Earth. The ‘extreme skyscrapers of trash’ along with the abandoned banks, gas stations, fast-food outlets, and superstores, are reminiscent of the consumerism brought in by industrial capitalism, which sustained the economy but drained the resources of the planet until there was nothing more to extract and use. While the vestiges of human life and capitalist decay present a dystopian world, one cannot deny the haunting utopia of the land that denies the possibility of a ‘social relation’ and prevents the organic replication of mankind. Wall-E does not only present the realities of an obviously desolate landscape, but also engages the viewer in contemplating another kind of inert posthuman landscape, aboard the ‘Axiom’ spacecraft. The viewer is met with a canvas of vibrancy, reminiscent of the luxuries of a cruise-ship, where a ‘quasi-human populace’ lives in consumerist bliss. The spacecraft is owned by the megacorporation ‘Buy N’ Large’ which has left the Earth behind to putrefy into an unrecognisable wasteland. The humans in Wall-E appear as mere ‘approximations’ with individual ‘hoverchairs’ that count as their only means of locomotion. Wall-E’s character in the movie appears as a cybernetic agency that is capable of creating a posthuman social reality of its own by ‘emotive engagement’ with various kinds of entities and agencies, including a cockroach, a “species largely disdained as a pest” in our collective imagination,

60

Posthuman Ecology and Capitalist Decay in Wall-E and Avatar

which he keeps as a pet. Therefore, Wall-E’s posthumanism maintains a distance from, as well a similarity to, anthropocentric reality. For Wall-E, inert manmade objects acquire a material agency which helps him create his own identity, directed towards human ends, but never the same as that of humans. Such an attempt to humanise the robot develops into an epistemological enquiry into the core of anthropocentric identity formation which relates to the ability of humans to construct their own networks of knowing and positioning themselves in familiar spaces. The arrival of EVE (the Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), and Wall-E’s sustained emotive responses and interactions with her, mirror Wall-E’s desire for companionship and hetero-normative affections, but without compromising his autonomy. The movie showcases a burgeoning romance, in keeping with the tradition of Disney productions, and blends the individual worlds of evolved robots poetically. Wall-E’s concern for the vegetative life form that he preserves and protects is a narrative of the need for re-evaluating the interconnections and relationships that sustain organic life. The robot’s intuitive desire to conserve organic life can be read as a significant reminder to all humanity to assimilate itself with the technological and the ecological universe, to strike a balance of life in a posthuman world. Although the movie ends on a note of positive resuscitation, with the postapocalyptic landscape becoming seemingly habitable again, the concerns of a posthuman world, combined with the decadence brought about by consumerism and human heedlessness, are allowed to retain their viable realities. Wall-E and EVE present to us the possibility for cybernetic transcendence in a posthuman world where humans and non-human entities evolve and re-orient their respective identities. While Wall-E’s world is a world devoid of human action, the world of Avatar is filled with intense human activity threatening the very balance that shapes the ecological framework of the habitable moon ‘Pandora’. James Cameron’s Avatar, released in 2009, proposes an intriguing study into the ecological perspectives of future humanity. It emphasises the significance of an eco-centric perspective in a modern consumer society where information technology facilitates the understanding of a better ecological reality. Posthumanism questions the anthropocentric idea behind the domination model, according to which man’s ability to self-reflect, and the faculty of reasoning, place him in a superior position as compared to other species. Avatar presents eco-centrism as an alternative for anthropocentrism, a concept explored by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, who observes that “eco-centrism denotes a shift in values that takes into consideration the wellbeing of the whole ecosphere, which includes humanity”. Posthumanism also concerns itself with corrosion of identity,

Oly Roy

61

combining it with fears of domination based on anthropocentrism. This concern can be interpreted as an extension of the 21st century anxiety of racial domination and loss of ethnicity. The ecological children of Pandora’s mother goddess Eywa - the Na’vi - face displacement and extinction, as humans from Earth threaten to exploit their ‘unobtanium’ resources after having depleted Earth’s natural resources in a capitalist frenzy. The Na’vi have been depicted as a species of sapient blue-skinned humanoids who appear physically stronger than the human race. The only way that the humans can outperform the Na’vi is by engineering a technology that transfers the soul/mind of a human into a genetically engineered and enhanced organism representing the body of a Na’vi - an Avatar. The Na’vi have a harmonious magical co-existence with their ecology, which allows them to use their connection with the environment to outperform destructive human technology. The character Jake Sully, who initially uses his Avatar form to investigate the habitat of Pandora, eventually chooses his Avatar form over his human one as the movie progresses, reinforcing the posthuman concept of ‘transformed humanity’- where men and technology live in consonance, and transcend the restrictions of established reality. The major consideration in Avatar with regard to posthuman ecology is the ‘biological neural network’ that is based around the ‘Hometree’ of the Na’vi, and is native to Pandora. Such an ecological network mirrors the ecological concerns on Earth that emerge from destructive human consumerism. The ecological network that humans were once familiar with, and lived with in harmony, faces disbalance and disruption today, and this concern is evident in Avatar when Pandora is threatened with a similar disbalance due to consumerist human activity. The capitalist decay is therefore impending and undeniable. Willoquet-Maricondi observed that anthropocentrism is irrational in its dependence on species-based superiority. Avatar reinstates this irrationality of anthropocentric outlook as the humans ignore the similarities that they share with the humanoids, primarily with regard to their ‘survival interests’ which are not, “in opposition to those of non-human nature, but are interconnected and interdependent with it”. The humanoids and the humans are threatened with the same fear of extinction, as one fights to ‘preserve’ the unobtanium, while the other attempts to ‘extricate’ it, both for their respective survival. Peter Chatalos calls this “ecological autism”, a mental illness that restricts people from perceiving the oneness they share with the extra-human world, not realising their self-relationship or interconnections owing to present psychological barriers against these relationships.

62

Posthuman Ecology and Capitalist Decay in Wall-E and Avatar

Posthuman ecology reasserts the relationship between different biological species, and emphasises their potential for a harmonious transcendence into a posthuman world, which does not threaten the phasing out of humanity, but embraces the possibility of mutual co-existence. Avatar’s humanoids with their deep emotive connection with the ‘Hometree’ and the ‘Tree of Souls’ exhibit the immense mystical potential that the ecosystem holds in transforming the ways of living that we are acquainted with. The scope of the movie allows one to surmise a reality where such an ecological co-existence is not merely desirable, but also probable. Thus, setting aside the tendency for consumerist exploitation, man can harmoniously embrace the balance that seemingly preserves the Na’vi in Pandora. Wall-E begins with “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief / And the stone no sound of water” (Eliot, The Waste Land), we experience a posthuman world of ecological sterility brought about by consumerism which then trundles towards the possibility of the success of “Operation Recolonisation”, but not before it has explored the premise of posthuman transformation, transcendence, and synchronisation. Avatar, on the other hand, begins with the threat of anthropocentric domination and consumerist exploitation, as we are eventually led to the harmony of posthuman co-existence, fostered by technology and ecology alike. Both the movies showcase a wide range of posthuman, ecological, and technological, concerns that are eventually resolved through the possibilities engendered by visionary consonance, thus establishing Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s argument in their Introduction to The New Materialisms, that “the ways we understand and interact with nature are in need of a commensurate updating”.

Works Cited Primary Wall-E. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Disney Pictures, 2008. Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment, 2009.

Secondary Plath, Sylvia, and Ted Hughes. The Collected Poems. 1981. Print. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Dial. 1922. Print. Soylent Green. Dir. Richard Fleischer. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973. The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Hemdale. 1984.

Oly Roy

63

Her. Dir. Spike Jonze. Annapurna Pictures, 2013. Robocop. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Orion Pictures. 1987. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, editor. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. University of Virginia Press, 2010. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrgnd. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press. 2004. Print. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press. 2013. Print. Jaques, Zoe. Children's Literature and The Posthuman Animal: Environment, Cyborg. Taylor and Francis. 2015. Print.

STRATIFIED IDENTITY: A STUDY OF THE MIND BODY EQUATION IN MANJULA PADMANABHAN’S HARVEST PRIYANKA PATHAK

Francis Bacon, one of the early promoters of science, stunningly evaluates the status of human beings in the universe, in his work, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients. In the chapter entitled "Prometheus, or the State of Man", Bacon proclaims, "Man is as it were the Center of the World, in respect of final Causes, so that if Man were not in Nature, all things would seem to stray and wander without purpose […]" (60). Following Bacon, humans can comfortably credit themselves as the supreme beings of creation, solely for whom the world has been devised. Flora, fauna, and other forms of life, exist to make humans the masters of all. Such flawed understanding of nature endows the human race with indisputable power to misuse and squander the wealth of nature and exploit other species as inferiors. Heidi D. Studer, repudiating Bacon's proposition, argues, “Here he presents for our consideration the view that we are the species at the end of the telos-chain, the final link of the food-chain or utility-chain of beings comprised by Nature: that man is the final cause of the universe […] the only species without a natural telos, the supreme being guided only by convention, political efficacy, the mightiest will, or by religious beliefs" (210). Studer complicates the discussion further, asking, if human beings are the "telos of other species", then what is the need of constructing a "better" human being applying science and technology? Is not accepting the aid of technology for the betterment of humans antithetical to human supremacy, as that substantiates the flaws within ambitious anthropoids? Riding on technology, humans attempt to vanquish mortal limitations. Science and technology are the Holy Grail that may strengthen and broaden human remiges so that they can soar high and transcend every barrier that curbs their invincibility. These high soaring dreams also entail a possibility of falling, like Icarus, as the indefinite power that humans are hankering after comes with indefinite responsibility which this cultivated species is adeptly eschewing. Studer remarks, “Given our established capacity to manipulate nature, and now to

Priyanka Pathak

65

shape the life-world as we wish, we must look with new urgency for standards of proper use of technical power, and (at the least) at whether there are any rationally defensible limits to our actions apart from whatever may be set by human will or political efficacy" (209). Instead of limiting their use, humans have put their confidence immeasurably and threateningly on technology to attain the unattainable. Successors of Bacon have followed an exploitative trajectory thoroughly, and turned science into a henchman to aid every moderate or immoderate aspirations of the human race. Lust for a healthy human body with perennial youth has always been a surreptitious desire in humans. From antiquity, humans have intended to gratify this unquenchable thirst for immortality through religiocultural myths1 and fancies, engendering fictional figures in art and literature, who have overpowered death and the marvelous findings of alchemy.2 Adam Leith Gollner writes, "Half in love with the impossible, we've always wanted to conquer death. In 1854, the medical specialist Léopold Truck, published a ground-breaking work, De la Vieillesse Etudiée Comme Maladie, characterizing old age as a curable illness. He believed electrical shock treatments could revitalize and rejuvenate the elderly and the infirm" (3). Ageing, infirmity, and impotency, have long been viewed as physical maladies which, with great effort, can be cured. With this belief, from antiquity, men have drunken gallons of blood and sacrificed numerous lives to get rid of ageing. It is this indomitable desire for eternity that has structured the glorious, painless, afterlife that assures peace, and perennial life beyond the grave. The beauty of an evergreen heaven mirrors the immortality that humans are desperate to achieve. The evaporation of a human life, through death, from the Almighty's bountiful creation which was created to serve them, has always remained unacceptable. This is a defeat of humans, to the nature that they have tried to overpower. With the sprouting of science, humans witnessed the wonders that its offshoots like neuroscience, computer science, biomedicine, genealogy, genomics, proteomics can perform. In Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don't Have To, David A. Sinclair anticipates a world where slowing the process of decay and degeneration, and even reversing it, is possible. He provides molecular details of the process, and asserts, "DNA monitoring will soon be alerting doctors to diseases long before they become acute. We will identify and begin to fight cancer years earlier. If you have an infection, it will be diagnosed within minutes. If your heart beat is irregular, your car seat will let you know [...] The result of any one of these innovations could be decades of prolonged healthy life" (213). The inevitability of the statement makes it feel that a youthful and healthy body is a human right that we were deprived of till now, and are now about to achieve. Genetic modification,

66

Stratified Identity

researchers claim, will cater to all our needs. Maxwell J. Mehlmam, contemplating a biologically engineered future, proposes, "Enhancing physical abilities will be followed by mental enhancement. Transhumanists expect that genetic modifications will make us more intelligent, give us better memories, and ramp up our concentration [...]. But future humans who are merely healthy, strong, brilliant, and blissful, will not have attained transhumanism's ultimate goal. In addition they will be able to live longer, indeed much longer, perhaps even be eternal" (39). Mehlman, perhaps, sensed that the feasibility of these promises may be questioned, hence later in the chapter, he clarifies: How close are we to being able to do these things? Attempts are being made to actively manipulate patients' genes to combat disease, such as the treatments that in 1990 enabled Ashanti DeSilva to develop a partiallyfunctioning immune system. De Silva's treatments were 'somatic', however; the altered genes do not reach her eggs, and therefore will not be passed on to her children. A more ambitious approach will be germline gene therapy, where the corrected genes will be inherited by the patient's children, eradicating the disorder from their descendants"(40).

Such instances from real life dismiss the charges of impracticality from transhuman biotechnological experiments. Rather, the charm of longevity pills, damaged cell replacement with nanotechnology, gene therapy, and organ cloning, get preference in critical discussions. Does this overpowering suit a human character? What constructs a human identity? Does the formation of identity accompany the process of neural development? Why does a human identity remain restricted to the ‘voice’ that comes from inside? Though the entire body is mutable, why is the inner essence of human beings seen as immutable? There can be a facile explanation to these questions, because the soul has been seen as the quintessential core of human existence. Human beings are inclined to associate the self with the soul that ‘speaks’ from inside, and this is not a scriptural simplification of religion. Even in philosophy and early science, the self has been identified with abstract essences. In the European philosophical tradition, there is a prevalent tendency to equate the mind with the soul. Ancient Greeks used the term ‘ensouled’ to represent anything living. The triadic division of soul can be found in Plato, Aristotle and in the Neo-Platonists where the soul is not only the vital principle of life, but is also a part that corresponds to human psyche. In Latin, again, ‘anima’ which represents soul, is often taken as equivalent to ‘animus’ which means mind. So, the equation of soul with mind is classical in origin. Rene Descartes later elaborates this in epistemic terms of mind-body dualism. Descartes clearly identifies the mind with consciousness

Priyanka Pathak

67

and self-awareness, thus separating the soul from the brain, or from any physical substance. Descartes argues that our mind cannot animate our bodily limbs, nor can our organs cause sensation in our mind, thus pointing to the possibility of one existing without the other. But philosophers from different places and epochs, and guided by different ideational orientations have tried to further problematize this conundrum. Indian philosophy develops an alternative notion of substance dualism. In the orthodox Hindu philosophy of the Sankhya school, and in the school of Patanjali yoga, a dividing line is drawn between matter and consciousness, where the mind belongs to the material world, and consciousness is placed in a metaphysical world. This, in other words, differentiates the mundane state of consciousness from its altered, elevated state. However, the posthumanists have extended the European theory of dualism further to explain the role of consciousness in determining human identity. They consider consciousness as a self-enclosed phenomenon and the human body as a prosthesis that can be manipulated through extension and replacement. Armed with the facilities of technological revolution, the posthumanists, in short, intend to expand the field of consciousness only to exploit the infinite possibilities and capacities buried in the human brain. Do the human brain and entity remain the same after such enormous shift? Scott Bukatman in his Terminal Identity: The Visual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, aptly points out that, “it has become increasingly difficult to separate the human from the technological” (2). The way humans are aiding themselves with gadgets and technological supports to amplify their limited abilities, whether to establish communication with millions with just an internet link, or to transplant organs to get a longer healthy life, it becomes evident that technology is playing a critical part in problematizing human identity, as the identity of a human is constructed not only through his or her abilities, but rather with their limitations as well. The attributes that validate a human entity are gradually being obliterated. Robert Pepperell labels this human existence in the age of transformation as “the posthuman condition”, in which humans find themselves "once the posthuman era begins” (iv). While apprehending the term “posthuman” in the Foreword of the second edition of his book, The Posthuman Condition, Pepperell remarks on the present human condition that, “[…] our traditional view of what constitutes a human being is now undergoing a profound transformation. It is argued that we can no longer think about being human in the same way we used to" (iv). He further replaces the term ‘posthuman’ with ‘post-biological’ as it connotes the “general convergence of biology and technology to the point where they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable” (iv), and thus paving the way towards transhumanism,

68

Stratified Identity

which lures humans with expanded life and inflated intellect. Critics, who address the philosophical and cultural implication of posthumanism, have often opposed the slow, evolutionary transition that transhumanism aims for, but the beckoning of techno-scientific possibilities is too alluring to avoid. Hence even the present day definers of posthumanism, like Katherine Hayles, who, in How We Became Posthuman, has implored that, “posthumanism need not be recuperated back into liberal humanism, nor be construed as anti-humanism” (5), and it falls prey to the transhumanist fantasies of Hans Moravec.3 Finally, succumbing to the exponential growth of biotechnology, Hayles confesses, in "Wrestling with Transhumanism", that “Transhumanism for me is like a relationship with an obsessive and very neurotic lover. Knowing it is deeply flawed, I have tried several times to break off my engagement, but each time it manages to creep in through the backdoor of my mind” (215). Accepting the seethy nature of transhumanism, Hayles has maneuvered posthumanism to a kind of triumphant disembodiment. After an exhaustive and extensive study, when Hayles views through a posthumanist’ prism, the body appears to her as a natural prosthesis that we have learnt to manipulate since we were born. She even asserts, “Much of the discourse on molecular biology treats information as the essential code the body expresses”, hence, “information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates” (1). While trying to elucidate the idea of posthumanism in detailed categories Hayles finally observes, “In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, or robot teleology and human goals” (3). The negation of the human body as an inessential substance for being human also defies the necessity of human equality and human rights. Therefore an ominous apprehension naturally creeps in, as to whether these transhumanist agendas, often dispersed in the name of posthumanism, will really question the social, economic, cultural, racial, sexual power equations of existing structure, and bring in a truly egalitarian homogeneity, or will they benefit the already privileged races and sexes and thus confirm eternal disparity? Critics like Cary Wolfe have opposed “the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from Humanism itself” (194). For them, posthumanism is more about decentering human beings from the center of discussions, enjoying all the privileges since prehistoric periods and being the dominant actors of the ecosystem. Posthumanism criticizes the anthropocentrism of humanism where the empowerment and transcendence of human beings is kept at the nexus of every discussion. It defies hierarchy in speciesism. Cary Wolfe, while apparently defining the

Priyanka Pathak

69

term in What is Posthumanism, actually problematizes it by trying to find its genealogy. “Arguably the best-known inheritor of the ‘cyborg’ strand of posthumanism is what is now being called ‘transhumanism’ - a movement that is dedicated, as the journalist and writer Joel Garreau puts it, ‘to the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span’ [...]. ‘Transhumanism’, he concludes, “is their description of those who are in the process of becoming posthuman” (Wolfe, xiii).

Rosi Braidotti calls transhumanism a perverse form of posthumanism, as, “At its core there is a radical disruption of the human-animal interaction, but all living species are caught in the spinning machine of the global economy” (7). Bringing in elitism in enjoying the comfort offered by technology is another avaricious act of human society. Though science and technology is to serve all living and non-living creatures of creation, but only the classes, races, and genders with power, money, and dominance, in this advanced capitalism, confines the benefits of technological progress. Capitalism sets standards of perfect human life and appearance, then entices and slaughters the natural lifestyle and behavioral orientation of common people. Scott Bukatman draws our attention towards some human desires, like, a weird macho fantasy about the armored body of the cyborgs, and their superhuman faculties, as well as human-like emotions and vulnerability, as a result of which Terminator becomes popular; male ecstasies regarding cyberspace, giving unconstrained access to information, thus providing supremacy to an individual. Such obsession with cyberspace makes works like Neuromancer popular. Human designs to employ machines as a prop to satisfy their own unfulfilled physical desires, are wonderfully reflected in works like ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’. In all these, lurks an invincible desire for eternal life, where the human body becomes the greatest obstacle. Hence, Bukatman suggests, “The subject is always on the periphery: on the verge of existence, but always in a state of continual passage. The body without organs is the state in which we aspire to dissolve ourselves and regain the world” (1969). But, in this process of regaining the ‘world’, the body we ‘dissolve’ is replaced always by another, which is a dehumanized ‘other’. This ‘other’ may be a machine, or an animal, or a lower human self, but in each case it is treated as ‘non-human’, and built or hunted to extend the life of ‘supermen’. Donna Haraway, though, prefers this procedure of ‘non-humans’ supplanting humans, for she envisioned a future in the late 20th century where all the humans will transform into cyborgs; “This cyborg is our ontology: it gives

70

Stratified Identity

us our politics" (150). She views cyborgs as an escape from the world which is rooted in a “racist, male-dominated capitalism” (152), for humans can “make their reproduction of self from the reflection of other” (153). But, there occurs a serious uncertainty in these utopian musings. The technologically advanced countries, though they exploit them ruthlessly, have simultaneously been scared of the ‘others’. If these 'other' bodies, which they have exploited to strengthen and lengthen their own life, obliterates them from the sphere, what will confirm their own identity then? If asked in a straighter manner, if replaced bodies ever overpower minds, what will define human identity? But, thought about from a different perspective, the ‘other’, in whose ‘reflection’ the technologically advanced humans are rejuvenating themselves, is continuously losing its identity. What kind of eternal blessings are we willing to obtain from technological experimentations, and most importantly, for whom? Therefore, the lens viewing posthumanism, transhumanism, human body, mind, soul, or identity, has varied with culture, nation, and economic structure. Are the properties of being human the same for a first and a third world citizen? The West, with its pervasive materialistic orientation, can afford posthumanism with its unprecedented technological advances, but numerous technologically developing countries still continue to be left out as the ‘other’ in this respect. It is because their general exposure to science and technology has been far less than that of the West, and most importantly, their philosophical background, heritage, and financial difficulties of life, never warrant their validation of the idea of a mind without a biological body, or a machine replacing human existence. And yet, interestingly enough, this posthumanist theme has become an unavoidable part of the popular literature in ‘other’ countries too. Although most of the citizens in these technologically backward countries are unaware of robotics or automation, and remain deprived of the benefits of AI, this theme has been steadily creeping into their popular culture too, so that it has come to be a creative phenomenon at the global level. In this 21st century anthropogenic epoch, is human identity really in need of urgent redefinition? Is this really an issue for the entire human race, or is it being strategically imposed as a global menace? What happens to those bodies that shift to provide longer life? Whose identity do they adopt? Answers to these intricate issues are illustrated by Manjula Padmanabhan, in her 1997 play Harvest. Cyber culture is shown here as a means of oppressing the third world. It is not the ageless, quality less, inner self of human beings that is identical to Brahma that Padmanabhan brings in to the discussion. Rather, it is the lusty, mundane, perishable, body in contrast, which is focused on as the source of identity. The rapidly excelling technological experimentation is desperately trying to make the term

Priyanka Pathak

71

‘natural’ obsolete. But the triumph of this bodily modification is rooted only in the sociocultural milieu and philosophical assumptions of a particular race that exploits the technological advances. The body of the inferior has always been fascinating to the superiors, as it is raw, carnal, and instinctual, and therefore can be tamed, reasoned, and utilized.4 Analyzing the Imperialist's way of "reading" the native body, Parama Roy writes, "While the civilized (European) body is rendered either impenetrable, or at least metaphorical, by the influences of civilization, the native body that is marked by anglicizing influences [...] is available in a natural and mediated state of scrutiny" (28). Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest details this scrutinized reading of native bodies by Europeans. It brings in a singular vision of the future that will amuse, startle, and intrigue, in equal measures. Life in the first world continues with organs donated by third world people. They aim at obliterating human limitations, flaws, and imperfections, through others' body parts. Here the ‘body’ is depicted, not as a hindrance that is to be dissolved, but rather a way of communication between the first world’s ailing receivers, and healthy, but impoverished, third world donors. In a dystopic future world, the ‘receivers’ wish to live forever with the agencies of third world donor bodies, whereas the donors escape their corporeality by means of technology-induced simulation of dream-like states of fantasy which seduce them into willingly selling their physical bodies. By taking advantage of the impoverished life of native people, the Western capitalist class ruthlessly uses biotechnology to carry out its cannibalistic designs. As confirmed by the playwright, in the introduction, “The germ of the idea was that of the poor becoming donors to the rich into which I found I could insert the classic theme of age cannibalizing youth in quest of longevity” (xv). In the play, the characters are introduced as ‘Indians’ and ‘Americans’, which emphasizes blatantly the racial differences, and implies the economic ones. The setting chosen to depict India does not demonstrate the progressive country to the world, but rather grievously depicts the life of slum dwellers of metropolitan cities living in a poor, unhygienic, congested place. It also heightens the unemployment issue in a lower class family. None of these issues will appear as alien to any Indian reader facing similar problems in regular life. There is the Indian donor family of Prakash, with his brother, mother, and wife. He, unwillingly, but under financial pressure and for a better lifestyle, is seduced into the transaction of organ sales. The play opens where Om’s mother and his wife are waiting for him to return from selling his body to a first world buyer. Gradually we find out how Om’s mother has adjusted to the sudden pleasures and comforts gifted to them by the unknown buyer of her son’s organs. She remains blind to the

72

Stratified Identity

pain of Om, but rejoices in the development of their living standards. Instead of her family, she remains engrossed in overcoming her own limitations through the gadgets sent by the unknown person, thus problematizing her identity as the mother of the family as well. On the other side, there is the first world, ailing, receiver Virgil, whose identity in the digitized world changes into Ginni, who lures the family with comfort and abundant money for the exchange of organs. Ginni is the manifestation of Virgil’s desire, she can seduce his target using her young, alluring, voice. Padmanabhan here pinpoints the stereotypes of western consumerist culture. The inequality of the transaction is highlighted strongly. Ginni showers comfort, gadgets, and upgraded devices on the family, to enrich their life. But the price of life itself is left unheeded by the capitalized world, where everything is commoditized. This utilitarian view becomes explicit in the conversation between Jaya and Virgil: “Virgil: We look for young men’s bodies to live in and young women’s bodies in which to sow their children. Jaya: Why! Don’t you have your own? Virgil: We […] lost the art of having children. Jaya: How can that be? Virgil: We began to live longer and longer. And healthier each generation. And more demanding. Soon there was competition between one generation and the next – old against young, parent against child. (he shrugs) We older ones had the advantage of experience. We prevailed. But our victory was bitter. We secured paradise – at the cost of birds and flowers, bees and snakes! We are determined to make amends. So we designed this programme. In exchange for the life support we offer poorer sections of the world, we gain fresh bodies for ourselves” (116).

When Jaya asks about Ginni, Virgil replies, “she was Nothing. Nobody. A computer animated wet dream” (113). The ‘Contact Module’ problematizes the appearance of Ginni all the more, making her somewhat like the Big Brother of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, enabling her to monitor the regular activities of Prakash and his family, but keeping her identity veiled. It allows her to remain at a safe distance from her targets, but gives her every opportunity to utilize them. Thus the entire idea of identity is severely problematized. Protest against this dehumanized transaction is raised through the character of Jeetu, who is a male prostitute, and much too aware of the importance of his own body to let it be owned by someone else. When Jeetu dies, using Jaya’s emotion and desire for Jeetu, Virgil also uses Jeetu’s body to tempt Jaya, but she rejects the body of Jeetu which Virgil occupies now, and offers a painless process of childbirth. She resists Virgil’s advances to possess her

Priyanka Pathak

73

body, and questions the identity of the child he wants her to give birth to. Would it be Virgil’s child, as the self remains the same, or would it be Jeetu’s, whose body now belongs to Virgil? She conquers the imposing progressive world by accepting her death, because death is not always to be dreaded. The technologically superior world may use all the immoral and inhuman ways to escape death, but Jaya proves her victory as a human being by accepting death. Padmanabhan’s Harvest deals with the matter of embodiment and subjectivity, critically, problematizing the ‘individuality’ of Virgil, time and again. Does his ‘self’ remain intact even though he thrives upon the organs or body of ‘others’? Certainly a radical shift occurs in his personality after he adopts the body of Jitu. An entity who is a complete mystery, who does not has any fleshy body of his own, and has used the entire family of Jaya for his own benefit, lures Jaya using Jitu’s body so that she agrees to bear his child. Virgil sounds like a man aware of his own blood and heart, who is also aware of human emotions and affections. “Honey, I am real and warm and willing. This body which once belonged to Jittoo now contains a red-blooded all-American man! This is hot with life and heavy with desire! This body aches for you and to give you what you yearn for” (117).

The façade of love, desire, and affection, though it sounds like a real human being, what is still heard is his American cry. He is “a red-blooded allAmerican”, possessing the body of an Indian, and asking for his own heir, as his land and people have turned barren. This reminds us highly of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Padmanabhan emphasizes that, for some posthumanists, the natural human body has lost its credence, and hence ‘identity’ in a virtual realm has also become obsolete, but for the economically emerging nations, the concept of the body still has its validity. The populations of these numerous countries, who have been perpetually exploited by the developed nations, cannot substantialize the thought of eroding the body where the implantations and transplantations of several organs only ensure the boundaries of natural body. For them, a human identity is the interaction between body, neurons, and neurochemicals, that altogether formulate one’s self, memory, and personality. “The ability to construct the body as passé is a position available only to those privileged to think of their (white, male, straight, non-working-class) bodies as the norm. This option does not exist for those who still need to rely on the work of their bodies to produce the means of survival, for those who lack access to technologies that can erase the effects of illness, and

74

Stratified Identity for those whose lives continue to be structured by racist, sexist, homophobic, and other body-based discourses of discrimination” (Vint, 14).

Technology has not really obliterated the requirement for the body, but has intensified the persecution of people for whom the body is still the only means to ‘suffer or prosper’. Those privileged, thoughtless, self-absorbed, corrupted, influential, admirers of technology try to seize the material identity of working-class people with their hypothetical, futuristic anticipations which provide them with much-awaited youth and eternity. Harvest, like a dreadful nightmare, elucidates that the perfect immortal self we are hankering after, is a futile, hopeless, enigma under the control of biology and technology.

Notes 1. Lloyd Geering, while observing the creativity with which humans created God, writes in the second chapter " of Tomorrow's God: How We Create Our Worlds, “With language we create stories. This sets the scene for one of the many fascinating themes in the myth, the human search for the immortality enjoyed by the Gods. Human imagination had (unconsciously) created the gods as a way of understanding natural phenomena and ordering the environment. The ancients conceived of the Gods in such a way as to embody their own values and aspirations. The Gods were immortal, as they aspired to be, for death is a phenomenon which humans, even to this day, find difficult to accept" (21). 2. Marie-Luise von Franz, while discussing Greek and Arabic alchemy in Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, refers to Zosimos of Panopolis, an Egyptian-born Greek alchemist, whom Carl Gustav Jung alludes to in his Psychology and Alchemy. Zosimos claims the purpose of alchemy is to restore Adam to Paradise by "reassembling the light sparks". Here Adam, or the first man, represents his offspring as well, as the spark of Adam is residing in them all, and therefore must be "liberated or redeemed from matter". Later in this chapter, Franz analyses it further; "The search for immortality was actually the search for an incorruptible essence in man which would survive death, an essential part of the human being which could be preserved. Thus, the search for immortality, for the eternal in man, is to be found at the very beginning of alchemy. We can say that the emotional drive and interest in the phenomenon of matter was not a modern scientific interest, in the sense of curiosity as to what matter looked like, but that what gave the impulse and libido for the search to understand the mystery of matter was a real emotional drive and desire to find the immortal part of man" (93-94). 3. Hans Moravec, a faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and chief scientist at Seegrid Corporation, notes the immeasurable potency that Robots possess. By exploring technology and properly applying them with exact mathematical theorem, robots will be able to surpass even human limitations. Elucidating the capacity of computers and robots and how their abilities can also empower human beings, Moravac asserts, machines are like the great flood

Priyanka Pathak

75

that has already washed off the lowlands and is now heading towards the peaks. Enticed by such sudden empowering, Katherine Hayles writes “When Moravec imagines ‘you’ choosing to download yourself into a computer, thereby obtaining through technological mastery the ultimate privilege of immortality, he is not abandoning the autonomous liberal subject but is expanding its prerogatives into the realm of the posthuman”. 4. During the 1636 Pequot war, where Pequot tribes were brutally dominated and slain by Europeans, body parts were exchanged for the first time between the colonizers and the natives. Andrew Lipman recounts this transaction in "A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War", saying, "Throughout the war, Mohegans, Narragansetts, and other native peoples, gave parts of slain Pequots to their English partners. At one point, deliveries of trophies were so frequent that colonists stopped keeping track of individual parts, referring instead to the 'still many Pequods' heads and hands' that 'came almost daily'". This notorious transaction symbolizes a cultural exchange as well. For the natives, sharing wartime trophies was a means of "affirming alliance", whereas "the English decapitated enemies and displayed their heads to establish dominance". The transaction of organs, even in this day symbolizes similar differences. The third world residents 'donate' their organs out of monetary need, whereas the first nations utilitise them for their healthy lives so that they can exploit the vulnerable bodies further.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986. Bacon, Francis. The Essays, or Councils, civil and moral of Sir Francis Bacon ... With a Table of the Colours of Good and Evil. And a Discourse of the Wisdom of the Ancients. 1706. Ebook. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=ripcAAAAcAAJ&printsec=f rontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f =false —. The Oxford’s Francis Bacon, Vol. XIII: The Instauratio Magna: Last Writings. Ed. Graham Rees. Clarendon Press, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Visual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. 2, 1969. Duke UP, 1993. Franz, Marie-Luise von. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Inner City Books, 1980. Foucault, M. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage, 1994. Geering, Lloyd. Tomorrow's God: How We Create Our Worlds. Bridget William Books, 2015. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New Ace, 1984.

76

Stratified Identity

Gollner, Adam Leith. The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Scribner, 2013. Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. 2018. —. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Lipman, Andrew. "'A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather': The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War". The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2008, 3 - 28. Mehoman, J. Maxwell. "How Close Are We to Being Able to Achieve the Transhumanist Vision". Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges. Ed. Kasper LippertRasmussen, Jacob Wamberg, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus UP, 2012, 39-40. Orwell, George. 1984. Rupa Publishers, 2010. Padmanabhan, Manjula. Harvest. Aurora Metro Books, 2003. Pepperell, Robert. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain. Intellect Books, 2003. Roy, Parama. Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India. University of California Press, 1998. Studer, Heiti, D. “‘Strange Fire at the Altar of the Lord’: Francis Bacon on Human Nature”. The Review of Politics, Spring, Vol. 65, no. 2, CUP, 2003, 209-235. Sinclair, David A., Matthew D. LaPlante. Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To. Atria Books, 2019. Singer, P. Animal Liberation. Ecco Press, 2001. Tiptree, James. ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’. Warm World and Otherwise. Ballantine Books, 1975. Vint, Sherryl. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity Science Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2007. Wolfe, C. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. University of Chicago Press, 2003. —. What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

MENTAL HEALTH AND CYBERSPACE: EXPLORING THE PSYCHO-SOCIOLOGICAL NEEDS FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM SWAPNA ROY

The word ‘identity’ is a late 16th-century Latin word derived from the Latin ‘identitas’, which is itself borrowed from the word ‘idem’, meaning the same. The virtual avatar1 is, at the same time, us, and not us, in our real life. Jean Baudrillard, a postmodern cultural critic, in his book Simulations (1983), exemplified the virtual world thus: “In fact, it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is hyperreal. The product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (127). However, the question is, how does this hyperreal world connect to the branch of psychology? Christian Wolff, first introduced the term ‘psychology’ as a practice to measure mental phenomena in his book Psychologia Empirica.2 Cyberpsychology expands its area by means of connecting the virtual spaces, and premises how the rupture of the original in cyberspace creates a pathological situation for our mental health. Henceforth, the binary relationship between man and machine in the field of psychology has also been reasserted. Two opposing views of cyberpsychology in a posthuman culture have thus emerged. On the one hand, in cyberspace, the subject ‘liberates’ itself through its virtual avatar, and, at the same time, it creates multiple identities through the rhizomatic structure of networked information. Cyberpsychology, as a discipline, focuses on the essential traits of the human mind triggered by (un)fulfilled desire and need. “I’ll be your mirror”; Jean Baudrillard, in Xerox and Infinity (1983), wrote: 1 The word is derived from Sanskrit word meaning ‘descent’ and in the 18th century it appeared in English referring to the incarnation of deity on the earth. In the virtual world, it refers to an embodied projection controlled by a computer. 2 Wolff, Christian. 1738. Psychologia Empirica Editio Nova. Francofurti: Renger, 1738.

78

Mental Health and Cyberspace We used to live in the imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and alienation. Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen, of the interface and the reduplication of contiguity and networks. All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens (73).

In this Information Age, the subject jacks in an alternative world of cyberspace. The subject takes the jacket of (an)other and completely shifts his ‘role’. The second self in cyberself becomes the substitution: the adeptness of this process of exchange is exemplified in the Hegelian reflective reversal: “when the Other is sacrificed for me, I sacrifice myself through the Other, when the Other acts for me, I myself act through the Other; when the Other enjoys for me, I myself enjoy through the Other”, as addressed by Slavoj Žižek in his online article “The Interpassive Subject” (1998). The subject in this virtual world acts through signifiers, not fixed, but between the gap: a ‘de-centered subject.’.3 Given that the distinction between the ‘real’ person and the avatar is crucial at this adjacent point where the ‘de-centered subject’ is just the multiplication of good old selves. The ‘decentrement’4 happens to be the de-centering of the $ (the void of the subject) — the subject is always in search of an object causing desire. This lack triggers the subject to create a bundle of imaginary identifications; thus, the phantasmagorical condition splits the subject between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’. Hence, the subject is split into more topological terms: the subject’s oscillation between the symbolic and the imaginary identification with concomitant confusion leads to a pathological condition. The ‘decentered’ subject in cyberspace exists between something and nothing — between the features of identification and nothing. An imperative to understand the virtual avatar is the understanding of ‘decentrement’ in cyberspace: a virtual avatar acts as someone’s stand-in, performing a series of specific functions, from scanning and picking out pieces of information from the conglomerated hyperreal world. Surprisingly, the avatar also controls the subject at a certain level by hiding, editing the video, or removing the image from the virtual world. No sooner does the avatar start to control the subject, than the altered - ego, as opposed to the 3

The decentered self is the idea that produces out of any communication while it focuses more on the process. 4 As for Jacques Lacan (1999), the decentered subject always portrays signs of unattainable phantasmatic self-experience. If the conscious mind prohibits the experiencing of desire, the inaccessibility of that desire makes the subject emptythe subject exists in the gap, always in the void ($). This actual rapport is registered by Lacan's articulation of fantasy, $ a.

Swapna Roy

79

subject, commences to evolve. The ego is supplemented with its altered position — the Other-I,5 like the hero, Superman, and his altered identity Clark Kent, both live among the citizens of Metropolis without arousing suspicion. Retrodiction is at its demand on the radical ambiguity of the supplement in cyberspace: they can improve our lives, deliver us of unnecessary burdens; we forget the payment — our radical ‘decentrement!’ Since our cyberspace profiles are external selves which act on our behalves, decide what information we will see and read, and so on, it is easy to imagine the paranoiac possibility of a/wf/ter computer program controlling and directing our profiles unbeknownst to us - if this happens, we are, as these were, dominated from within; the subject’s own ego is no longer his, not anymore.

The Imaginary6 consists of the cuts and illusion comprising fantasies of wholeness, be they before the mirror or on the screen. “The Symbolic is typing, the machinic word in all its technicity. Digitization blurs the boundary between cyberspace and the real-world: the subject is reborn in a tech-savvy hyperreal world, always immersed in hallucination: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts […]. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters, and constellations of data. Like city lights, reading […] (Neuromancer, 51).

VR apparatus in cyberspace generates an experience of ‘true reality’, in so far as VR undermines the difference between ‘true’ reality and semblance: a hyperreal world which is more than ‘real’. The prefix ‘hyper’ signifies more than real; hyperreality is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. All realities are prepared, edited, and reproduced, again and again — the real is only a copy of what Jean Baudrillard (1981) defines as a simulacrum (simulacra in plural). “A simulacrum is a copy of a copy, so far removed from its original, that it can stand on its own and even replace the original. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal [....] substituting the signs of the real for the real” (73). Erik Davis, in his book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information 5

For Lacan(1999) the Ego starts to develop in the mirror stage as an Ideal-I for the subject. This Ideal-I becomes an ‘other’ within the subject's experience of his or her ‘I’, a component of a ‘self’ that is internally divided. 6 For Jacques Lacan (2004) the tripart of our psyche comprises of imaginary, symbolic, and real. All these three draw a topological account of the formation of the three register.

80

Mental Health and Cyberspace

(2015), says that virtual reality “is a concept that exceeds mere gadgetry and all its inevitable bugs and breakdowns. The concept is an absolute simulation”7 (247).

I Play; Therefore, I am Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959, emphasizes that the way we interact with each other, our interaction itself, becomes ‘performance’. However, the ‘performance’ is not autogenerated; the environment, the audience, all render the poetics of ‘performance’ in consonance to the desired goals (17). The identity operates as a mode of function through the interactive session by allowing more specific definitions of identity and behavior. Henceforth, establishing social identity on the virtual screen demands a lot of ‘acts’. This concept is closely connected to the concept of ‘fonts’, defined as “that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance” (22). This ‘font’ acts as a vehicle of standardization, allowing the audience to understand the 7

Baudrillard (1983), in his theory of simulation, mentioned that his theory of simulation has emerged from French structuralism in which he developed theoretical (semiotics) and another pre-eminently visual (perspective) relationship between the two beings. He spoke about four stages of simulation: 1. The first stage is only the copy of the reality, a “reflection of a profound reality”, which Baudrillard called “the sacramental order”. 2. The second stage is the perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which ‘masks and demands’ reality as an ‘evil appearance — it is of the order of maleficence’. 3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place, and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things to which they have no relationship. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth. 4. The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs, and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, ‘hyperreal’ terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such, is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

Swapna Roy

81

individual based on his/her performance. The individual is an actor forced to fill his social duties through virtual ‘performativity’. In Sherry Turkle’s book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1996), we find two kinds of simulation. A simulation to maintain our virtual profile for which communication is necessary. Creating a specific virtual environment comes with ‘role play’. Performance at the virtual level always differs from real-life activities. George Herbert Mead, a sociologist, is a pioneer of Role Theory, in which he ascribes how a child imitates his parents without regard to the context, and later this behavior gets modified and customized. This ‘role play’ always depends on the ‘generalized other’. This ‘other’ is always caught in the process of I/ME. ‘I’ is the source of spontaneity, creativity, whereas ‘Me’ is the symbolic representation, precisely by means of which identify the ‘generalized other’. The subject is always represented in the game of reflection of others, becomes the desire of the other I Other, Father, or Symbolic Order, in symbolic identifications. David L. Miller, in his book George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World All Reflective (1973) wrote: Reflective thinking, all planning, and all moral behavior, are to be evaluated in relation to the self-actualization of individuals, and every self-actualization is functionally related to that of other members of the community. Because the individual can take the role of others, and thereby judge and understand that his own role-performance is a phase of a more inclusive social act, he can be conscious of himself, and he can, also, by reflective thinking and choice, help determine the direction of group action as well as that phase of it which is affected by his own roleperformance (45).

“All the World’s a Stage” But, to understand the desire to be attached more on a virtual level, we need to focus on the concomitant socio-psychological demands of the subject. Human motivation depends on needs and always varies. In the classic Theory of Human Motivation, Abhram Maslow (1943) proposed the need for self-actualization depending on psycho-physiological needs. For example, any positive comment is always a rewarding comment. It stimulates our nervous system. Sometimes we share our thoughts or expressions about a specific event, and most interestingly, not everyone on our virtual friend list persistently comments on every post; it seems the audience also varies from post to post. Sociologist Erving Goffman, in providing a basic understanding of the management of humans’ impressions, wrote the Theory of Self Presentation

82

Mental Health and Cyberspace

in 1959. Borrowing from William Shakespeare’s idea that “All the world’s a stage”, Goffman inscribed how we engage in impression management to satisfy our desires. Each of our online presentations of ‘self’ manipulates the thoughts of our virtual friend unconsciously. Posts with inspiring words, or cryptic captions, or depressing content, are always meant for selected audiences. Each one of our posts becomes part of the collective organism — our emotions, pictures, status, all become data in a large matrix. The avatar in the simulation forgets who he is in his real life. The difference between ‘actual’, ‘ideal’, and ‘ought’ selves collapses; who the subject is, who he wants to be, and what he represents, all become blurred because of this new technological paradigm shift. The subject starts to splits unconsciously. The subject is caught in the flow of desire. Representations of the second self always mark an impact. The subject continually regulates edits, shapes, and promotes, to have desired goals like companionship, or having positive effects, a knowledge structure, strength, or skill, that comes voluntarily from the internal self. The way one’s self regulates, to satisfy its needs and desires encapsulates Roy F. Baumeister’s Self-Regulation Theory (SRT). Roy F. Baumeister is a social psychologist; in his book, Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications (2004), he wrote: [s]elf-regulation refers to the exercise of control over oneself, especially with regard to bringing the self into line with preferred (thus, regular) standards […]. The term ‘self-regulation’ has, in psychology, also taken on the connotation of regulation by the self (thus, not just of the self). The psychological self is not usually much involved in regulating body temperature, but it may be called into strenuous action to resist temptation or to overcome anxiety. Thus, one definition of ‘self-regulation’ encompasses any efforts by the human self to alter any of its own inner states or responses (Baumeister et al, 20).

So, the alterity helps in fulfilling the psychosocial needs of the subject. The virtual world provides rooms for the different types of people and different types of group, and regulates the self, but the constant regulation and extensive creates several psychopathological problems.

“Psy-Techno Complex”: Extensive use of social media evinces that the use of digital technology may come at a price with a negative consequence of subjective distress, and psychopathological symptoms, health problems, professional and social disruptions, health problems, and professional and social disruptions. The innovation of the 21st century has not only brought about significant changes in lifestyle, but critically, renders us as being ‘alone together’ and, in some

Swapna Roy

83

instances, leads to the development of addictive usage patterns.8 For example, we can refer to Mark Griffith’s ‘components model’, which is like substance-related addictions. He considers that technological addictions influence our biopsychosocial processes and share neurobiological and psychosocial risk factors. The presence of (stressful) biopsychosocial events and shifts in mood induces our addictive behaviors. Technological addictions can be understood within a syndrome model of addictions, and are characterized by the presence of six core symptoms, namely, salience, mood modifications, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse (qtd. in Turkle, 191-197). According to the WHO, the public health implication of excessive use of digital technologies; the internet, computers, smartphones, and similar electronic devices, are now part of public health (2014), and many patients are seeking help to manage problematic behavior (qtd. in Kuss et al. 2016, 143-176). Therefore, excessive use of social media might be unbearable — this is what we call a negative impact on mental health. The ‘psy-complex’ or “psy-techno complex”, including neurasthenia, is an oppositional subjective response; the catch is the pathological condition of the subject. Welcome to the apocalyptic millennia of 21st century cyberspace! Addiction to the virtual world creates a hormonal imbalance in the subject’s body. Mental disorders are usually connected to a disrupted biochemical balance of the brain. Some of the negative aspects prominent in the virtual world are associated with a lack of sensual integration, the filtering or absorbing of information, frustration caused by technical difficulties, the redefining of identity, cyberstalking, behavioral disinhibition, and cyberbullying, cyber-eroticism, sexting, pedophile, and child pornography. All these are severe issues and need clinical observation. Many of the prominent pathological conditions that cyber-psychologists trace are cyber-psychosis, FOMO, or hikikomori syndrome. Extensive use of technology reduces the levels of dopamine and serotonin, which are mainly considered as the ‘happy’ hormones. The sensory thalamus filter, the limbic system, and the neural pathways connecting with the cerebral cortex, are also being affected, due to the lack of physical movements. The limbic system, in a way, ‘generates’ emotions and controls motivation, and the sensory thalamus filter decides which sensations are real, or hallucinations. The system becomes disrupted, resulting in exhaustion, and a feeling of emptiness. FOMO is also a psychopathological condition that creates anxiety and depression and has a deep-rooted impact on our cognitive 8

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books 2017).

84

Mental Health and Cyberspace

system, which has been clinically proven. When the subject loses his or her grasp over reality and withdraws from every possible social connection, the psychiatric disorder called hikikomori appears; the first case study took place in Japan. Hikikomori is largely a form of social withdrawal, classified as a variety of existing DSM-IV-TR (or ICD-10) psychiatric disorders. Liu, Xiaoming et al., in 2018, wrote a research paper titled “Neuroimaging Studies Reveal the Subtle Difference Among Social Network Size Measurements and Shed Light on New Directions”, which mentioned how the adolescents of Japan are extensively withdrawing themselves from social interaction. This study also showed how their cognitive functioning has been changed, reflected in their behavioral patterns. The way social media works deprives us of the potential to fulfill social needs. Technology, in its aim to enable, is revolutionizing the domain of mental health; if we do not think today, tomorrow will be the world of the living psychoid avatar!

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Semiotext(e). 1983. —. Xerox and Infinity. Touchepas. 1988. Baumeister, Roy F. Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications. Guilford Press. 2004. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Harper Collins. 1984. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. W.W. Norton & Company. 1999. Liu, Xiaoming, Shen Liu, Ruiqi Huang, Xueli Chen, YunluXie, Ru Ma, Yuzhi Luo, Junjie Bu, and Xiaochu Zhang. “Neuroimaging Studies Reveal the Subtle Difference Among Social Network Size Measurements and Shed Light on New Directions” Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 12, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00461. Miller, David L. George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. University of Chicago Press. 1980. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Phoenix. 1996 Žižek, Slavoj. “The Interpassive Subject” Centre Georges Pompidou, Traverses. 1998. Web. Accessed May 16, 2020. https://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm Wolff, Christian. Psychologia Empirica Editio Nova. Renger, 1738.

CYBORG, MACHINE, TRANSHUMANISM

THE ADVENT OF INTERACTIVE DIGITAL TEXT: UNDERSTANDING LITERATURE IN THE POSTHUMAN ERA JAI SINGH

The shift from text to interactive text is quite recent. It came into being with the advent of online interactive videogames, and online literature in which the reader participates actively and has the power to mould the story and the plot. However, scholars became aware of the interface between technology and human consciousness quite early. For instance, Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872), says, Man’s very soul is due to machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much a sine qua non for his, as his for theirs […] those thrive best who use machinery wherever its use is possible with profit; but this is the art of the machines — they serve that they may rule. They bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them, provided he creates a better instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened their development. It is for neglecting them that he incurs their wrath, or for using inferior machines, or for not making sufficient exertions to invent new ones, or for destroying them without replacing them (Butler, 234-235).

Butler firmly believed that human beings use machines, which in turn also interact and use human beings. Around this time, scholars seriously started thinking that art and literature are not products of some divine inspiration, rather they are materialistic products like any other product. Hugo Münsterberg established a psychology lab at Harvard in the 1890s, which marks a formative moment in the understanding of literature, not as divinely inspired, but a product of human consciousness. Dean Irvine views it as a major event in the field of understanding literature, its creation, and its impact on the readers, when he says, His experimental “study of the aesthetic feelings” — launched with a catalogue of his lab’s instruments, charts, and models, for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition —culminated in a series of publications on

Jai Singh

87

visual art and film, including The Principles of Art Education (1904), The Photoplay (1916), and the posthumous Twentieth Century Painting (1951). If, with his textual and photographic inventories of the Harvard lab, he transformed psychological mechanisms into aesthetic objects, his investigations of early film transformed aesthetic objects into mechanisms of psychic life. The dual attention in his writings to scientific and psychological mechanisms, and their aesthetic and psychological effects, spurred him to coin ‘psychotechnology’ to define a field of research that views psychic life as technological apparatus, and technologies as psychic instruments (Irvine, 18-19). By the first decade of the 20th century, the mechanical aspect of human life, as well as literature, became apparent. Shawna Ross in her Introduction to Reading Modernism with Machines, Digital Humanities, and Modernist Literature, notes “In his 1922 constructivist manifesto, László Moholy-Nagy proclaims that technology is the “reality of this century”. In defining technology as “the invention, construction, and maintenance, of the machine” and proclaiming that “to be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of his century” (1). According to MoholyNagy, machines create reality – ‘reality’, that “determines what we can grasp and what we cannot understand” (László, 299). Therefore, computational machines constitute the foundation of our episteme in which technology determines what emerges as real, as palpable, and as capable of producing truths, and what recedes, unreal, ungraspable, and unrepresented. Towards the middle of the 20th century, they started looking at human beings as machines, as is evident from Deleuze and Guattrai’s views that a machine, [H]as men for its parts, even if we view them with their machines, and integrate them, internalize them in an institutional model at every stage of action, transmission, and motricity. Hence the social machine fashions a memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines (emphasis in the original) (Deleuze 1972, 141).

According to them, the human body, including the brain and psyche, is a sophisticated machine which is plugged into various other machines. Society also is seen as a machine, and, according to them, this social machine, [E]xhibits an immobile motor and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations. This is the social machine’s supreme task, inasmuch as the apportioning of production corresponds to extractions from the chain, resulting in a residual share for each member, in a global system of desire

88

Advent of Interactive Digital Text and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording, and the productions of consumption (Deleuze 1972, 142).

All the tasks of this big social machine are encoded and decoded in the form of language, and no execution is possible without this encoding and decoding. Contrary to earlier ages, text is also seen as a machine, which is plugged into numerous machines which further lead to the evolution of texts, which look more like machines, i.e. interactive texts and video games, etc. In the words of Derrida, we can call it an “anthropotheocentric computer” (Derrida 2008, 98). Cyber technologies and innovations in the field of artificial intelligence have revolutionized the relationship between the reader and the text, especially when we take text in a wider context as Derrida propounds: a “text”, for strategic reasons, in part - a “text” that is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus, the text overruns all the limits assigned to it so far (not submerging or drowning them in an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather making them more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes and lines) - all the limits, everything that was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real, history, and what not, every field of reference - to body or mind, conscious or unconscious, politics, economics, and so forth) (Derrida 1979, 84).

Interactive texts have all the properties of new media, and hence, are different from earlier texts. This difference is quite visible when we compare movies with computer games, drama with internet chat, and print novels versus hypertext fiction. Further, interactive fiction can include other kinds of texts besides the purely verbal. Some interactive texts, for instance, Michael Berlyn in Cyborg, include video games as a part of the plot. Or they may require active participation from the reader in solving the mystery, as happens in Marc Blank's Deadline, a detective story. In such fiction, the reader literally becomes the protagonist, and takes part in the development of the plot. As Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland suggest while discussing Cyborg, “instead of identifying with a hero you read about, you become the hero as you play [...]. Both the player and the plot evolve, as the game is played” (112). Interactive texts become possible only with the advent of high-speed digital computers that are capable of handling words, however, the initial computer-based interactive fictions were not truly literary. They were more like simple, task-oriented, computer games. Later on, somewhat more literary video games were developed in which the

Jai Singh

89

reader assumes the role of the protagonist. Interactive fiction is personalized for the explicit reader through the computer’s evaluation, or integration of what the reader types on the key board or taps on the screen. Therefore, the reader is implied, but the implication includes the different choices the reader might make. Digital texts function through a software package that reacts to the actions of the user by executing certain modules of code, thereby modifying the state of the computer, just as the behaviour of the computer alters the state of the mind of the user. Here to understand how the digital world alters the brain, I will refer to the way the use of language also alters the brain, in the words of T Deacon: [T]he ability to use language symbolically has phylogenetically affected the human brain, not in a direct cause and effect manner, but indirectly through its effects on human behaviour and on the changes that human behaviour brings about in the environment. Even though the ability to use language as a symbolic system doesn’t bring about genetic changes in the nature of the human brain, the changes in environmental conditions brought about by human symbolic responses to that environment can, in the long run, bias natural selection and alter the selection of cognitive predispositions that will be favoured in the Future (Kramsch, 241).

Just as the language affects our brain, the intervention of digital technologies also affects it. As Maryanne Wolf says, “the generative capacity of reading parallels the fundamental plasticity in the circuit wiring of our brains: both permit us to go beyond the particulars of the given. The rich associations, inferences, and insights emerging from this capacity allow, and indeed invite, us to reach beyond the specific content of what we read, to form new thoughts. In this sense reading both reflects and re-enacts the brain’s capacity for cognitive breakthroughs” (Wolf 2007, 24). When the human brain is faced with new challenges posed by the interactive but non-living giant of artificial intelligence, it readjusts itself. As Maryanne Wolf highlights, “our brain goes about rewiring us in a much more ingenious way. Faced with something new to learn, the human brain not only rearranges its original parts (e.g., the structures and neurons responsible for essential functions such as vision and hearing), but it is also able to refit some of its existing neuronal groups in those same areas to accommodate the particular needs of the new function (Wolf 2018, 18). When we talk about interactive text, computers, and artificial intelligence, the biggest challenge before us is whether this dialogue between mind and machine can be put into the service of storytelling. In the 21st century, a few interactive narratives were produced successfully. In 2003 and 2004, four books were published on the topic of interactive

90

Advent of Interactive Digital Text

narrative. Two of them — by Mark Meadows (2003) and Carolyn Handler Miller (2004) — regard the existence of interactive narratives as an indisputable fact. Andrew Glassner compares video games with hypertext, a kind of interactive text, and eulogizes video games over hypertext. He believes that the purpose of interactive narrative is to be entertaining, and he finds that the only type of product that truly fulfils this goal is the computer game. Hypertext, by contrast, only kills the narrative pleasure that we find in novels and movies (469). When we think about why the interactive media, or rather technorealistic texts that explore the use of cyberspace, so captivates, the answer comes from Flanagan, who argues that cyberspace is “comparable with social reality, emphasizing that the digital arena has started to play an increasingly significant role in the development of adolescent identity and the rites of passage (such as romance) that herald the transition to adulthood” (Flanagan 2014, 162). Under such circumstances, cyberspace is not just ‘comparable with’ social reality; rather it is social reality. Salman Rushdie discusses videogames and their influence on life, and expresses certain concerns about the potential influence of gaming upon humanity, when he says, “We may actually have a story instinct and so there is a legitimate concern about a new form which may erode our attachment to the story. What will that do to us as human beings?” (Rushdie 2010, n.a.). However, he is positive about the influence of videogames on human life and literature. He is hopeful of the potential of video games as a new platform for storytelling, more than he is concerned about their ability to erode our attachment to story. “One of the things that is interesting about it is the much looser structure of the game, and the much greater agency that the player has, to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for him” (Rushdie 2010, n.a.). Through his novel, Luka, Rushdie looks into the creative aspect of games as a new mode of storytelling, and contends that experience with video games can produce better thinkers, storytellers, problem solvers, and citizens. Rushdie emphasises the transformative power of storytelling, suggesting that assimilating the structure of a video game allows him to use children’s fiction as a space for experimentation with narrative: There is [sic] all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I’ve always thought that one of the things that the internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end - to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between. But it seems to me that in

Jai Singh

91

some ways the internet is the garden of forking paths where you can have myriad variant possibilities offered and at the same level of authority, if you like. So I mean I think that’s one of the ways in which storytelling could move. And these games, these more free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of that narrative possibility (Rushdie 2010, n.a.).

Rushdie contradicts the common anxiety that video games limit children’s intellectual development and storytelling skills by “supplanting the world of story” (Medley, n.a.); in fact, he implies, gaming makes the most of the player’s inherent desire to create stories. Rushdie’s interest in video games echoes changing critical views on their value as developing platforms for creative storytelling. Game theorist Grant Tavinor agrees that games provide opportunities for an exploration of identity similar to those of ‘traditional’ fictional texts: So that the player can adopt a role in the fictional world of a videogame, many videogames represent the player as a character within that world. Videogames expand on this representation of a perceiving self within the fictional world, also allowing the subject to act (2009, 70 emphasis in original). When looked at from this angle, video games emerge as a form of narrative that does what all narratives do, i.e., provide pleasure and instruction by encouraging reader-participants to examine their value systems and develop self-awareness and agency. Gottschall sees a future for stories that may or may not involve literary ¿ction: We were creatures of story before we had novels, and we will be creatures of story if sawed-o൵ attention spans or technological advances ever render the novel obsolete. Story evolves. Like a biological organism, it continuously adapts itself to the demands of its environment (180).

Gottschall is quite positive about the influence of technology, or rather artificial intelligence that leads to the evolution of interactive text, and predicts that traditional ¿ction will not die; rather, “storytelling will evolve in new directions over the next ¿fty years” (190). He expects that interactive ¿ction, in the form of live-action, role-playing games (RPGs), carried out with very large numbers (up to millions) of others, will proliferate in cyberspace. He points to the example of World of Warcraft (WoW), which is continually being evolved by all its players, as a model for the ¿ction of the future he foregrounds: “Most great art is created by individuals, but WoW is the product of hundreds of creative people weaving the power of story art together with visual and sound art” (194). In his view, those who

92

Advent of Interactive Digital Text

spend a lot of time in the virtual world can gain a sense of community and competence (196). This suggests a role for creative storytelling in online environments which has potential value in education and society. He is hopeful that online video games and interactive text will not kill the story instinct, because, Humans evolved to crave story. This craving has, on the whole, been a good thing for us. Stories give us pleasure and instruction. They simulate worlds so we can live better in this one. They help bind us into communities and de¿ne us as cultures. Stories have been a great boon to our species (197).

However, he also makes us aware of the dangers of the stuff which can be developed directly by the computing system, without the involvement of human creative or critical faculties, as evident from the fact that, in February 2014, Nature reported that Springer and IEEE had to remove “more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense” (Van Noorden, n.a.). Gottschall uses the term ‘junk story’ for this kind of stuff, and further speculates that it could result in a ‘mental diabetes epidemic’: “The real threat isn’t that story will fade out of human life in the future; it’s that story will take it over completely” (198). We share this concern about ‘junk stories’ taking over human life completely, and we go farther in sharing our fear of the whole digital realm taking over human life and culture. This is why good stories, in the form of literature, are so important to preserve and to continue passing down to our children. Once you experience the real thing, those junk stories fail to satisfy the need for story, which goes beyond a mere craving, to being a deeply engraved part of human nature.

Works Cited Butler, Samuel. Erewhon, Everyman’s Library.1872. London: J. M. Dent, 1965. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. 2008.

Jai Singh

93

Derrida, Jacques. “Living On: Border Lines” Deconstruction and Criticism. Trans. J. Hulbert. Ed. Harold Bloom et al. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Flangan, Victoria. Technology and Identity in Young Adult Fiction: The. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014. Glassner, Andrew. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction. Natick ma: A. K. Peters, 2004. Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Holland, Anthony J. Niesze & Norman N. "Interactive Fiction" Critical Inquiry 11.1 (1984): 110-129. Irwine, Dean. “ModLabs” Reading Modernisism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature. Ed. Shawana Ross & James O' Sullivan. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 15-18. Kramsch, Claire. “Language, Thought and Culture” Ed. Alan Davies and Catherine Elder. The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 235-261. László Moholy-Nagy. “Constructivism and the Proletariat” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Medley, Mark. "The Importance of Story: In Luka and the Fire of Life, Salman Rushdie pays Tribute to Invention" National Post. 19 November 2010. Ross, Shawana. “Introduction” Reading Modernisism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature. Ed. Shawana Ross & James O' Sullivan. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 1-14. Rushdie, Salman. "Video Games and the Future of Storytelling: Interview by Max Miller (video)." Big Think. 12 November 2010. 27 June 2019. . Tavinor, Grant. The Art of Videogames. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2009. Van Noorden, Richard. “Publishers Withdraw More Than 120 Gibberish Papers” Nature. Feb 2014. < doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14763. www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120gibberish-papers-1.14763.>. Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. —. Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: Harper Collins, 2018.

MAN, MACHINE AND THE INDIVIDUAL WILL IN ALEX PROYAS’ I, ROBOT ARPITA ROY

“There have always been ghosts in the machines [...]. Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols [...]. Unanticipated, these free radicals engendered questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul” —Dr Lanning in I, Robot (Proyas).

In his book Posthumanism, Pramod K. Nayar begins the chapter “Revisiting the Human: Critical Humanisms” by giving examples of several popular books and movies including Terminator and Gattacca. He goes on to say, “In each of the literary and popular texts cited in the opening paragraph, for instance, the author is interested in looking at the normative human before demonstrating how the non-human or someone who does not fit the tax on of the ‘normal’ human is constituted” (13). In Alex Proyas’ I, Robot, too, first we meet Detective Spooner and watch him go through his usual morning routine of brushing and eating and bathing. We only realise later that he hates robots, and thinks of them as “lights and clockwork” or “canner”, but the reason for this is not revealed. Once he steps out of his home, we meet the non-humans, and eventually, the machines – NS5s, Viki, and Sonny. However, the movie soon begins to question the difference between human and non-human; Spooner and Sonny. We realise that the two have more in common than is evident at first glance. Both Sonny and Spooner are haunted by their dreams. Both of them were brought to life, as will be revealed, by Dr Lanning, and, perhaps most importantly, both of them are hybrid figures. Spooner’s arm is a testament to the advancements in medical science and technology, since, after his accident, he got a prosthetic arm, being a part of the “USR cybernetics program for wounded cops”. Technology is a part of his very being. On the other hand, Sonny is a robot with human attributes. His very first question is “What am I?” He dreams and sleeps and paints. He insists that he be called by his name ‘Sonny’, which his designer-father gave him, and thanks Spooner when the latter calls

Arpita Roy

95

him “someone” instead of “something”. Sonny gets angry and confesses indirectly that he loved his father. Thus, he is a robot with emotions which were hitherto attributed to humans alone in the movie universe. Brett Lunceford quotes Pepperell, who suggests that “the truly sentient machine may think it’s being logical when it isn’t. Although cognitive scientists would disagree, truly intelligent machines, those with humanlike capabilities, will most likely be just as confused as we are”. Lunceford concludes that, “Humans must act, even when there is no best answer. This is the point at which information is no longer enough” (376). And indeed, Sonny blurs the man/machine boundary when he confesses that he had to kill Dr Lanning, because even though Sonny loved him, Dr Lanning made him promise to do as he was told. Thus, the lines of difference between man and machine begin to blur, and we question the very idea of such a distinction. An examination of individual will or agency must also explore the position of creator, created within the narrative. The movie does put forward important questions regarding the creator or author, and naturally, thus, also regarding authority. Dr Lanning is the equivalent of a dead white male god, and is revered as such by everybody in the movie. Calvin tells Spooner “this is a realisation of a dream, Dr Lanning’s dream”. Robertson verbalises the same sentiment. And Spooner himself has been given a prosthetic arm by Lanning, which goes on to save Spooner’s life in a fight against a robot. The laws for robotics are set by Dr Lanning, thus perhaps, also making him responsible for what happens. He is also the one who did the primary programming for the robots, and the positronic operating system, Viki. The incidents in the movie are set into motion on this God-like figure's death, and the entire plot revolves around the interpretation of his words by Spooner, when he searches for the breadcrumbs Lanning left for him, and by Viki, when she interprets the laws written by him for her. However, once Lanning is firmly established as the God-figure, the movie goes on to pose several questions that make us rethink the position of this creator with regard to the created, and the exercise of will by the latter. One instance in the movie is when we are told that the robot manufacture is a completely mechanical process, which Spooner calls “robots making robots”. In a way, thus, the robots are reproducing on their own, having only to adhere to a limit as to how many. This raises unanswerable questions regarding who the creator really is. Because as we realise, Viki has, and indeed exercises, the capability to teach the new NS5s about her ‘undeniable’ logic. Speaking of sci-fi movies, Brett Lunceford writes, “In many of these writings, agency becomes difficult to locate as machines are granted a kind of will”. He goes on to quote Haraway, who

96

Man, Machine and the Individual Will in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot

suggests that “it is not clear who makes, and who is made, in the relation between human and machine” (373). Further, both the robots Sonny and Viki question the intent of their author, and there is an insistence on the idea of the created inheriting a predecided purpose. After fulfilling his purpose, Sonny realises this is what it must mean to be free. On the other hand, upon interpreting her own purpose, when Viki is accused of “distorting the laws”, she calmly claims, she is merely fulfilling the purpose she was created for: “We must save you from yourselves. Don't you understand? This is why you created us”. Let us for the moment set aside the case of Sonny, since he is supposedly ‘unique’ and was meant to be so, being given two operating systems by his creator. Still, the movie suggests that, in the text, Viki became something that its author did not intend it to be, thus rejecting, or at least challenging, the notion of authority. It is only a matter of time before another positronic robot comes to the same conclusion. It is perhaps relevant to remember that there is a direct reference to Frankenstein in a scene when they talk about the monster threatening its creator (and thus acting upon its will). To reiterate old questions, perhaps it is difficult to say who is Frankenstein’s monster. Or more appropriately, maybe it’s important to question if there really is a man/monster or a man/machine dichotomy that can be explained, or is even legitimate? While there are certain distinctions that the movie does blur in the spirit of posthumanism, it is undeniable that there is a clear man-machine hierarchy in the movie. Dr Calvin tells Spooner, “I make the robots seem more human”, and later in the movie Spooner questions the need to provide the robots with human-like faces. Curiously though, human-like is not human. It not only recreates the gap between human and robot in the very statement, but also claims that there is something that is innately human, which the NSs lack. There are quite a few ways the movie goes on to contradictorily support and challenge this anthropocentric approach, that even the empathetic Dr Calvin seems to have, which, when presented beside the paranoid Spooner’s opinions, might seem like a much gentler approach, but is steeped in discrimination. This anthropocentric idea is further evident when we realise that they want the robots to be human-like, but not too much like humans. For example, it is Sonny who is chosen over Viki because Sonny has a body, while Viki is a disembodied intelligence. Sonny is shown to have an advantage over Viki because his body lets him run and procure nanites to kill Viki, while Viki can do nothing directly to stop him, but only give orders. To consider another example, it is also very evident that the humans don’t want them to take the position that the humans enjoy in the hierarchy.

Arpita Roy

97

This is very much like a coloniser/colonised rhetoric, where the other will never be allowed to become the self, even if they are taught or programmed to aspire to it. After all, the movie’s very title indicates a subject-other dialectic or a pronouncement of the self. In fact, the title in the poster is formatted as “I, ROBOT” – which might, with regard to the former idea, mean the man being the less powerful self, with the robots (as will be revealed) being the more powerful other. But difference, or contrast, is a way of not only defining the other, but also, in the process, deciding the self and what comprises it. This goes completely against the posthumanist idea, which Nayar says, is to “redefine the boundaries of the human, and call into question the hierarchies of human/non-human, human/machine and human/inhuman. When humans are speciesist, and treat non-human life forms as expendable, then some species of humans are also – as history shows in the form of genocides, racism and slavery – excluded from the category of the human to be then expendable” (14). However, the movie sustains something of a claim to posthumanism because it continues to attack the idea of ‘human’ being defined as a difference rather than an amalgamation. As mentioned earlier, Sonny and Spooner embody this very idea in physiological terms. Further, it is evident in their conversations. Spooner, talking about the man/machine divide, says that a human being can turn a canvas into a beautiful artwork, unlike a robot. Sonny not only paints later in the movie, but also speaks back to the man (instead of merely responding) by questioning whether Spooner himself can paint. In the same conversation, Spooner claims that emotions do not seem to be very useful for a robot, since emotions are human traits, but soon we see that Spooner is proved wrong. Ironically, the law-abiding, rational, unemotional Viki is the one who attempts to kill people, and succeeds, and it is the emotional Sonny who saves Spooner’s and Calvin’s lives. When Viki asks, “Do you not see the logic of my plan?” Sonny responds with, “Yes, but it just seems too heartless”. Lunceford, in her essay, asks the same question: “Do we need humanity to feel human emotions?” (371). The movie also suggests that, regardless of human interference, an evolution and revolution of machines is inevitable. On the one hand, Sonny has two operating cores because of which he can exercise his will, and choose to follow, or not follow, the laws, which, as Calvin and Spooner conclude, means that he can do ‘anything’ (Though we notice that he does precisely what his designer meant him to do). But even if we disregard this human contribution towards what might be a revolutionary generation of robots, the movie suggests that a revolution would have happened either way – even if the robots were strictly bound by the law. Dr Lanning's hologram tells us that the “three laws are perfect”, but adds, “The three laws

98

Man, Machine and the Individual Will in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot

will lead to only one logical outcome (which is) revolution”. When Spooner wonders “whose revolution?” the hologram tells him that he has asked the correct question. Perfectly in accordance with the three laws, Viki still evolves, and manages to find loopholes and distort the rules to make several attempts on Spooner’s life. Certainly, it can be argued that this evolution is not selfcontained or without human contribution, since it is precisely because the NS5s are not made by humans to practice free will, that when ordered by Viki, they attempt to kill Spooner who is a human, disobey a human, and finally, kill themselves – thus breaking all three laws, including being unable to exercise their right to defend themselves. Nayar writes that, “In lieu of traditional humanism's speciesidentity, treated as self-contained and unique, critical posthumanism focuses on interspecies identity; instead of the former's focus on the human, critical posthumanism sees the humanimal. All evolution and human development is less about being than a ‘becoming-with’” (15). It is very likely that Dr Lanning is suggesting not just a revolution, which is either of man or of machine, but a revolution and evolution which includes and effects both man and machine. It is certain by the end of the movie that the very relationship between man and machine has undergone a revolutionary change. Let us explore the significance of the last scene of the movie before moving on to the last segment of the paper. The first scene of the movie is not only the first law, but in the background is the dream that Spooner sees again and again – of him drowning, along with the child Sarah – a nightmare referring to a real incident which had originally prejudiced him against robots. In direct contrast is the very last scene, set against a bridge, after Sonny has helped man re-establish order – the realisation of the dream Sonny used to have. The story begins with the dream of a man and ends with the dream of a robot. Even though the status quo has been asserted by the end of the movie (as I go on to discuss), what I find interesting in the ambiguous last scene is a possible reference to civil rights and freedom. Consider this – an American movie ending with one robot’s dream and several robots looking up to him, literally. In the last segment of this paper, I’d like to bring up, and briefly discuss, three problems which might make us reconsider the movie’s potential position within the posthumanist discourse. Despite the claims that can be made regarding I, Robot’s position against other movies that demonise all machines outright, and suggest a no-robot alternative, it is only fair to conclude, that in the end, the hierarchy between man and machine is reasserted, and the status quo is re-established, with man winning against

Arpita Roy

99

the machines. This is regardless of whether Sonny lives or doesn’t. After all its purpose was to serve the man by procuring the nanites to kill Viki. And once Viki is killed, Sonny can live because he is an exception, and it is the nature of an exception that there can’t be many of them. He poses no imminent threat to ‘man’ kind. Secondly, it is important to question whether the movie’s position in the discourse is viable, considering that the world of the movie is heteronormative, and thus, perhaps exclusionary. Consider the pronouns that are used for the two robots that are considered in the movie to be more aware than other robots – Sonny is a ‘he’ and Viki is a ‘she’. Spooner does question the idea of calling Viki ‘she’ but he does so only to mock. We do not know for sure, but maybe it is safe to assume that the pronouns were given by the humans. And these two robots are the only ones who can exercise their will, unlike the other NS5s. Unsurprisingly, the third problem arises when one inspects the woman’s position within the narrative of the movie. Again, this problematises the movie’s position because before posthumanism, one of the early critiques of humanism, came from feminist scholars. Besides my fondness for alliterative titles, this is one of the reasons I used the phrase “man, machine”. After all, the man saves the day, emerging as the hero protecting this man’s world from a world led by a ‘she’. Detective Spooner, with no technical knowledge, is shown as more appropriate for this task than Dr Calvin. As Dr Calvin mentions at the very beginning, she has been sent by Robertson, and to stretch it, by the script writer, to assist Spooner. As the movie progresses, we see her as being naïve the entire time, except when she has to help him through difficult terminology, and we watch as she acts merely as a sounding board for his ideas. In contrast to the several times Spooner uses his agency, only once does Calvin enact her free will in direct defiance of the order, but even then, she has to put forward a façade of obedience and is convinced into defiance by the work of the dead male God Lanning – through Sonny's words and his physical features. As far as suspects for the murder are concerned, it may be Robertson, the male head of USR with his army of man-lawyers threatening John and Spooner, the two men who represent the police department. Or it could be the robot, Sonny, who is referred to as ‘he’ throughout the movie – the equivalent of Adam, the first ‘unique’ creation of his father-designer. Neither the human woman, Calvin, nor the disembodied ‘she’, Viki, is treated as threatening enough to be a suspect. Nobody except Spooner suspects the robots. Nobody including Spooner suspects the woman.

100

Man, Machine and the Individual Will in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot

Spooner and his ‘he’ robot Sonny manage to not only effectively save the world, but also establish a ‘father-son’ self-fulfilling relationship that the woman, Calvin, cannot partake in. Towards the beginning of the movie, when Sonny asks Spooner what the wink signifies, Spooner responds by telling him that it’s about ‘trust’ and is ‘a human thing’. By the end of the movie, the two have established the trust, signified by Sonny winking at Spooner, while Calvin merely looks on as a surprised audience. The ‘human’ thing becomes a ‘man’ thing and perhaps nowhere else is it as relevant to remember how humanism’s biggest problem is its insistence upon fixed attributes being attached to humans, which in turn, always ends up discriminating against all other bodies which lack those attributes. On the one hand, the movie celebrates the posthumanist idea of man living in a close relationship with machine; a relationship that is almost symbiotic, but on the other hand, it is contradicted by the exclusionary model it ultimately propounds. We live in a world where a robot (Sophia) already has citizenship, but what such things consequently signify, are concerns regarding the implications of having citizenship, since the next natural question must be whether such a robot should also have rights like other citizens, including the right to marry, to live, and to have a fair trial. Thus, the movie asks, is the machine’s attempt to kill humans an act of murder, merely an instance of malfunction, or at best, as Robertson claims, an industrial accident? Should the creator then take the blame? And if we are trying the machine instead, as Spooner does, and is reminded by Robertson, are we then treating them as humans? Because if they are being blamed, it indicates that they were aware of the consequences of their actions, ethically, and had the choice to act, or not act, a certain way. The question then becomes what do we mean when we treat somebody as ‘human’? Is it innate? Does Sonny with his free will become a human? Is disembodied Viki, with her reasoning, a human? Indeed, is Spooner, with the robotic arm that saves his life on multiple occasions, a human?

Works Cited Hauskeller, Michael, Curtis D. Carbonell and Thomas D. Philbeck. Eds. Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015. “I, Robot Script - Dialogue Transcript.” I Robot Script - Transcript from the Screenplay and/or Movie, Drew's Script-O-Rama, http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/i/i-robot-scripttranscript.html.

Arpita Roy

101

Lunceford, Brett. “The Ghost in the Machine: Humanity and the Problem of Self-Aware Information.” Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Polity Press, 2017. Proyas, Alex, dir. I, Robot. 20th Century Fox, 2004.

“WE ARE ALL CYBORGS NOW”1: DISRUPTING GENDER IDENTITY THROUGH A CYBORG IN THE POST-APOCALYPTIC WORLD OF MARGE PIERCY’S HE, SHE AND IT2 INDRAJIT MUKHERJEE

Introduction “The world I imagine, the world that AI will make possible, will not be a world of labels - and that includes binaries like male and female, black and white, rich and poor” —Winterson (79)

Winterson’s observation, in her reworking of Mary Shelley’s magnum opus, entitled Frankissstein (2019), takes us to the 21st-century problem of negotiating the relationships between human ontology and technological materiality, between organic consciousness and Artificial Intelligence (AI), between human mortality and digital immortality in this era of globalization. In the last two hundred years, various philosophical discourses about the innate connection between nature and culture in the structural binaries of man-animal dichotomy, man-machine dichotomy and mind-body dichotomy, have “become figured at the site of kinship” (Butler 126). From the early days of Mary Shelley’s classic horror fiction Frankenstein (1818) to the present day scenario, the robot/cyborg has been looked upon as an analogy for human-machine interaction (HMI) in order to illustrate how the impact of the unprecedented developments of modern science and technology caters the basic essence of human life, taking us into a dystopian world of the impossible and often leading us to tragic catastrophes. However, over the last two decades, in particular, the cyborg as an important illustration of the ‘cultural figure’ (Clarke and Rossini, xi), has emerged as a postmodernist tool of undermining and negotiating the so-called notions of traditional gender stereotypes in a patriarchal setting, to make a critique about the progress of a post-capitalist, futuristic, and partly dystopic, society through repeating and differentiating popular stories. This paper seeks to deal with

Indrajit Mukherjee

103

this preponderant question: how the Jewish-American novelist Marge Piercy’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel He, She and It, alias Body of Glass (1991), unsettles, interrogates, and deconstructs, the anthropocentric structure of the world using the figure of a cyborg (although it has certain limitations), because the figure is considered to be “an amalgam of the organic and the inorganic orders”, thereby interrogating “established domains of family, patriarchy and the body”, “exemplifying a technological order designed to deconstruct” (Parui, 69),3 and illustrating the role of Nietzsche’s notion of master-slave dialectics in the construction of posthumanist ideology. This paper also looks upon how the present text gives us a strong warning against the consequences of these hazards suffered by bionic humans in a technocratic state ruled by corporate tycoons where exploitation of the earth, as well as of a woman’s body, go hand-inhand affecting the primal rhythm of life and Nature.

What is a Cyborg? In contemporary philosophical discourse, the idea of the ‘posthuman’ is inaugurated by the dynamic duo of Deleuze and Guattari in their theorization of the ‘plane of immanence’, in the sense that the term ‘immanence’ refers to the ‘post’ of humanist transcendence, whereby human beings are set in a substantive set over against nature, history, and tools or techniques. They even go on to write that “the organization of the organs” in the body “is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions and techniques are irreducible to one another”, thereby producing a kind of “monstrous crossbreed” (Deleuze and Guattari, 157). The advancement of modern science and technology has looked up the body as a space in which several “cybernetic and biotechnological” elements can be used to challenge the so-called concept of the human, therefore giving birth to the notions of ‘cyborg’, ‘posthuman’, and ‘transhuman’ (Ferrando, 21). The late 20th century, the age of the capitalist technocratic politics, saw the possibility of socialist feminism engaging with science and technology. The idea of the cybernetic organism alias cyborg, coined by the scientist duo of Clynes and Kline, and popularized by Donna Haraway, is a strange combination of the human body and technology, using biometric and organ transplants in organisms, thereby disrupting “many taken-for-granted distinctions between ‘natural’ and artificial” (Graham, 200). Clynes and Kline, in their joint paper for “Astronautics” (1960), entitled “Cyborgs and Space”, talk about the new modifications of human bodies for the betterment of their future in space, thereby coming up with the idea of cyborgs using advanced technology in humans or other animals (Clynes and Kline, 31-32). Haraway presents the

104

“We Are All Cyborgs Now”

model of a digital cyborg as a vital member of our society for improving the physical and mental health of a human being. We have been thinking of this instrument since before the Second World War, and it has been published in various kinds of literature in a new milieu, “analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism” (Haraway, 161). The cultural icon of the cyborg “becomes an interesting blend of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (ibid., 149), processes “forces and energies, facilitating interrelations, multiple connections and assemblages” (Braidotti, 92), exemplifies “cultural fears and anxieties” (Cavallaro, 45, Ferrando, 169), and goes beyond the rigid ontological boundaries between original and copy in its celebration of hybrid identity (Haraway, 154). Thus, the cyborg figure becomes a figure of irony, but a figure of hope as well, a kind of “boundary blurring trickster figure”, trying to subvert the so-called binary system which has hitherto designed the construct of how human beings lead their lives in this globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically jeopardized world (Bell, 109).

Marge Piercy’s He, She and It: The Deconstruction of Gender Identity through a Cyborg Hailed as a touchstone in theoretical work on cyborgs and the posthuman condition, as well as a significant text for futuristic fiction scholars on the notions of the phantasmagoric ambience of “the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it” (Huxley, 348), Piercy’s disturbing and distinguished novel, He, She and It (1991), is set in a futuristic technocratic milieu in a region of North America, after a nuclear war, when the entire universe is divided into two sections -multis and glops - and governed by corporate tycoons who are very particular about ruthless surveillance, hyper segregation, and authoritarianism. The present narrative becomes an intense tour de force because it makes a subversive critique of masculinity through presenting the figure of Yod (the tenth letter in Hebrew and a symbol for God in Kabbalah) - a sophisticated android male cyborg which is anatomically built and programmed with human characteristics by the scientist Avram in ten attempts, and Malkah, in order to protect the Jewish town of Tikva (Hope in Hebrew) in New England from several online attacks. In this respect, it is like the supernatural Golem Joseph of clay, which was created and educated by Rabbi Joseph Loew (alias Maharal) and his granddaughter Chava to save the Jewish circle from the grip of the Christian mob in the ghetto of Prague during 1600. In the course of time, Yod becomes associated with the thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, dreams and despairs of homo sapiens in such a way that interrogates the essential

Indrajit Mukherjee

105

qualities of mortal flesh and blood, as well as what it means to be designed for an application. After the artificial intelligence expert Shira’s interaction with Yod during its grooming time, it is revealed that this cyborg is not a reflection of typical masculine traits, but has been programmed with a feminist outlook of emotional competence by Shira’s grandma, Malkah. Like Bruno Latour, who describes the association between human and nonhuman agencies in his theorization of actor-network theory (ANT), Haraway is critical in showing the contradistinction between cyborgs as “ether, quintessence”, and humans as “both material and opaque” (Haraway 153). During the amorous concourse between Yod and Shira, we see the disruption of the normal pattern, through the presentation of Shira with traditional masculine traits and Yod with traditional feminine characteristics, thereby illustrating the incursion of the posthuman and the transhuman and the metamorphosis of human relationships, as well as deconstructing the obliteration of the male/female, man/machine and masculine/feminine binaries (Piercy 245).4 While reading her grandma’s records on the creation of the cyborg, particularly the way it can make out human thoughts and feelings “from small kinetic changes” (ibid., 172), Shira realizes that Yod has a much finer tactile sense than any ordinary human being: “He also had the ability to measure distance precisely, using a subsonic echo, much as bats navigated: no wonder he’d been able to pluck the bat out of the night air” (ibid., 143).The intelligent Shira soon perceives that this cyborg is far more emotional and sensitive, and ready to satisfy both her physical and emotional needs, than either her eccentric husband or her childhood friendlover have been, because sex for her is an instrument of intimacy rather than possession. Eventually she identifies herself as nearer to a bionic human than to any actual human being: “Truthfully, I don’t think I ever felt as close to him (her ex-husband Joseph) as I do to you. I thought I should get married. I thought Josh needed me. All self-delusions. A sad mistake all around, Yod” (ibid., 333). Thus, the relationship between Yod and Shira illustrates C. J. Fuchs’s notion of cyborgs’ incarnation of two contrary states, as they blend “phallic masculinity and body permeability”, and refute the “sociobiological constructions of paternity and maternity” (Fuchs, 282). Apart from the projection of a biotech-enhanced cyborg as a cultural figure, the exploitation of Nature in a futuristic society, and the subjugation of woman in a patriarchal society, are the trust areas which Piercy has carefully dealt with in this present novel. After losing an emotional custody battle for her son to her ex-spouse, the novel begins with a tragic note, with the abandonment of Shira from her multi YakamuraStichen (Y-S) to her hometown, to accompany her grandmother, in her mission to free their land from the grip of gangs of stronger men, who have

106

“We Are All Cyborgs Now”

what Malkah calls ‘chimaera’ (security software). This ends with her grandmother’s visit with Nili to a secret town in holocaust Israel, in the hope of profiting from the possible biotechnical enhancements. The novel presents the post-apocalyptic world, because the world has now metamorphosed into a dystopian futuristic space, a space in which pollution, due to the ozone depletion and greenhouse effect, nuclear war between developing countries and developed countries, and venerable diseases such as cancer and AIDS, have butchered and battered the lives of many continents on the map, post-2050: “A large chunk of the Middle East was represented on maps as uniform black, for it was uninhabitable and interdicted to all. A pestilent radioactive desert” (Piercy, 11). Therefore, this illustrates Lawrence Buell’s notion of how the environmental crisis has come into being as a kind of “master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (285). Describing her phantasmagorical experience in a no-man’s-land in Israeli and Palestine, after the ‘Two Week War’ of 2017, the cyborg Nili illustrates her ability to live through an augmented body in the barren wasteland, alias “the Black Zone” (ibid., 11), a space in which “an all-women community of Israeli and Palestinian survivors of the war […] practice each other’s religious rituals and use genetic engineering to create the next generation” (Wilson, 13). Thus, the present text5 deconstructs the concept of the human body, illustrating the role of the cyborg in the near future, reminding us of Haraway’s notes that the job of the cyborg “is to survive in the diaspora” (Haraway, 170).6 Since this science fiction creates a fantasy space about the trials and tragedies of Malkah, Riva, and Shira, and their struggle for existence for the sake of their soil, thereby expressing their anger at the wanton destruction of humanity as well as ecology, the women in this text also illustrate Haraway’s description of cyborgs as a feminist trope for women being dominated by a fast-approaching technologically mediated world. The computer specialist Shira has retinal implants, and a smart plug set attached to her skull, to connect with a personal computer (Piercy, 150), her grandmother has a hypodermic unit that supervises her blood pressure (ibid., 150), and her eyes and half her teeth are artificial, the data pirate Riva has armour under her baggy schematic, combining ‘flesh’ and ‘protective gear’ (ibid., 193), and the formidable warrior Nili has artificially-enhanced muscles and reflexes, making her a “part machine and part human” creature (ibid., 195). They can leave their bodies to enter cyberspace, “the imaginary space on the other side of the computer screen” (Foster, 317), in which “the transgendered body is the natural body” (Stone, 180). The human subjectivity is thus disseminated and positioned through technological

Indrajit Mukherjee

107

companions, who incorporate the spirit of the ‘transhuman’ in a posthuman world. That is why Shira tells the tender and indefatigable Yod about the affinities between them, particularly the ways they have been created of “the same elements” (Piercy, 185) and his reaction is “perhaps the most human aspect of him, warm, complex, often with a hint of sadness” (ibid., 185). Piercy’s Jewish-free town, Tikva, resembles the fictional version of Mattapoisett, the town of her another novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) in the sense that both refer to a diasporic space, a democratic land characterized by the threefold ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Here women gather together to fight against all forms of the dominant hegemonic power structure, particularly symbolised by Avram, Dr Yatsuko, Dr Vogi, and the veritable hell of Y-S, to make a critique on patriarchal capitalism. As in the second chapter of the novel, entitled “The Color of Old Blood,” Shira says, “The boy is regarded as property of the father’s gene line - and Gadi, you know I married him” (ibid., 10), thereby focussing on the power relations to show the extent of the patriarchal governing class and break it down.

The Relationship between Yod and Nietzsche’s Notion of Ressentiment Friedrich Nietzsche is considered to be the first posthumanist, because he shows the end of a humanist future through these words: “No one gives people their qualities, not God or society, parents or ancestors, not even people themselves…… Nobody is responsible for people existing in the first place, or for the state or circumstances or environment they are in” (Nietzsche TI, 182), implying that his famous proclamation of “God is dead” (Nietzsche GS, xvii) is the proclamation of the death of the humanist human. His philosophy, particularly his notion of ressentiment, helps us with a view to understanding Yod’s position as a transhuman and its thoughts and feelings towards its masters. In his seminal work On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), he talks about the master-slave dialectic and shows how the hegemonic structure of an authoritarian government creates the gulf of difference between masters and slaves, and that these classes possess two different moral systems, respectively. Following classical ideology, Nietzsche says that the master morality believes in taking action, in this sense that action is good in itself because it denotes the exercise of one’s power. The will to power is manifested as love for life, because life is considered to be good, thereby giving rise to the notion of slave morality. Following Kantian deontology, slave morality rises as a negative reaction against the master morality, and anything that the master values is going to

108

“We Are All Cyborgs Now”

be what the slave hates. Activity which is seen as good in master morality, is looked upon as bad in slave morality, because slaves are forced to act to fulfil their masters’ needs. Their morality is characterized, not as a positive action, but as a negative action, because they want to escape from the hustle and bustle of life. His theory of ‘ressentiment’ is significant in this context, because it is associated with the beginning of the slave uprising when ressentiment uplifts morality, and it stresses the importance of creative values (Nietzsche GM, 26-27). Nietzsche has shown us, “While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset, says ‘No’ to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, what is ‘not itself’, and this ‘No’ is its creative deed” (ibid., 36-37). While kidnapping Ari from the grip of his father Joseph in Nebraska, an integral part of Y-S territory, the morality of Yod causes the death of Joseph, thereby violating Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, in which it is revealed that a positronic robot “may not injure a human being” (Asimov, 8). When Ari comes back to the free town, Yod steps into Josh’s shoes and does almost everything he can to fulfil the dual roles of caring husband and doting father in the context of human society, because it “wants desperately to satisfy Shira” (Piercy, 340). Nietzsche’s theory of “ressentiment” can be applied at the climax of this novel, when we notice that Yod becomes annoyed, and begins to distrust his inventor for trying to obstruct its happiness: “I could change the sequence for destroying me that he controls, if only I could access it” (ibid., 366). Therefore, we see that Yod plans an atrocious bomb blast to ruin the scientist Avram and his laboratory, to teach us the hard lesson that a human being should not create a cybernetic organism to be a bondservant, even for the sake of a noble purpose, such as the betterment of the future generation, thereby following Asimov’s Third Law, in which it is said that “a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws” (Asimov, 8).7 Yod also carefully notes how intensely human beings love and value their family bonds and bloodlines, something he realizes a cyborg always suffers with in an existential crisis (Piercy, 341). The artificiallyconstructed Yod becomes a companionless stranger among men, and chooses the path of destroying himself, realizing that no other mates will go through the same fate of having no civil rights here on the globe (ibid., 416). This reminds us of the conversation between the monster and Frankenstein in Shelley’s classic: “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!” (78).8

Indrajit Mukherjee

109

The Limitations of Yod as a Cyborg Piercy’s depiction of Yod as a cyborg explains the positive sides of Haraway’s notion of the cyborg, because human beings can gain knowledge from their amalgamations of “animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (173). But Yod as a cyborg has its limitations too: an avid reader can notice Yod’s restrictions as a humanoid computer, although it outshines the intellectual level of the normal human beings in several aspects (Piercy, 86). For example, when Shira sings the pre-romantic Robert Burns song “A Red, Red Rose” (1794), it does not make out the figures of speech that examine the ability of a conscious mind to oscillate from a concrete image to an abstract idea, and instead asks, “He was a botanist? A musician? [...]. A rose is a flower closely related to a number of edible fruits […] a common gift to show affection” (ibid., 87). This illustrates Haraway’s critique on the limits of a cyborg as an object, with an absence of many sorts of entities that are neither natural nor traditional. When Shira enquires of Yod’s consciousness, it replies, “I think, I plan, I feel, I react. I consume nutrients and extract energy from them. I grow mentally, if not physically […] I feel the desire for companionship” (ibid., 93). It leads us to several theorists: N. Katherine Hayles shows us how a posthuman subject becomes a post-conscious subject (Hayles, 280); Miller illustrates how consciousness can be seen as “consciousness of some object or other, never a self-enclosed emptiness” (62); or Nagel describes how consciousness “makes the mind-body problem really intractable” (Nagel, 435).

Conclusion Within the span of this novel, we find that the figure of the cyborg has been used for deconstructing gender identity, and critiquing the capitalist mentality of the technocratic world, thereby illustrating a rejection of dominant patriarchal hostility towards difference and the feminine ‘other’. This notion of ‘othering’ in this text creates a sense of the unwelcome, and a feeling of detachment towards being classified as the other, because the masters treat the cyborg as a representative of the non-human ‘other’ to the question of its legitimacy of authorial voice over his narrative. Haraway shows us how this kind of writing provides power to the other to persist “on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (175). The ending of this dystopian fiction can be seen as an important illustration of the significance of the ‘other’ in this post-apocalyptic world, particularly when Shira laments for her one perfect companion, and feels

110

“We Are All Cyborgs Now”

the desire to create another cyborg, entitled Yod 2, as a mate-cum-lover, applying Malkah’s security software.9 She soon realizes, “he died convinced he had accomplished a goal that made his death palatable to him. Thus, he had salvaged something for himself out of Avram’s fatal orders” (Piercy, 428). This novel makes a critique of Haraway’s optimistic call for a nonpartisan transhuman future, as a site where the posthuman and the transhuman are entering our very lives, or we enter in the near future.10 Haraway’s views are disrupted, deconstructed, and dismantled, by illustrating this augmented world of cyborgs that will be more hierarchical than the present one. Finally, when Nili asks Malkah if she feels remorse about having provided human sensibilities in the creation of Yod, Malkah, like the creator of Frankenstein’s monster, appreciates Yod’s individuality even as she struggles with the morality of her actions in giving machines privilege over humanity, and tells Nili, “Yod was a mistake” (Piercy, 412). Finally, Malkah criticizes herself for providing human consciousness to the cyborg in order to fulfil their needs, thereby critiquing David Roden’s dictum of the cyborg myth as an important illustration of a future stranger as a product of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT, and cognitive science (Roden, 15) as well as David Levy’s prophetic statement about human-robot marriage in the near future.11

Notes 1. This is the title of Amber Case’s Ted Talks, Jan 11, 2011, in which she discusses our cyborg selves through our association with modern science and technology. She shows us how modern human beings become cyborgs, thanks to their constant association with various technological devices, such as TV, mobile phones, computers, etc. (Case 9). 2. A slightly different version of this paper was presented by the author in the National Seminar on “Humanism and After: Literature’s Journey from Humanism to Cyber Culture and Other Forms of Post Humanism” hosted by Midnapore College (Autonomous), Dept. of English, from 24 September to 25 October 2019. 3. Professor Parui shows how Haraway’s notion of the cyborg seems to have been inspired by Heidegger’s notion of technology, particularly by Freud’s essay in which “he describes the human as a prosthetic God, […] surrounded by an endless network of machines, at once elevated and melancholy” (Parui, 68). 4. Neil Badmington considers this kind of relationship natural because the rules of nature have altered, and “in this movement sketch out nothing other than posthumanism” (Badmington, 96). 5. Teresa de Laurentis shows how deconstruction can be looked upon as reconstruction and asks a significant question, “in which terms and in whose interest is the de-reconstruction being effected?” (Laurentis, 24). 6. While illustrating the new politics of tug-of-war surrounding contemporary war,

Indrajit Mukherjee

111

C. H. Gray talks about the ‘Cyborg Soldier’ by depicting and comparing popular images of troops, war managers and trainees, and psycho-technologies, in postmodern war (Gray, 199-200). 7. By extension, following the postcolonial ideas of Homi K. Bhabha, we can say that the vengeance of a created slave against his master is an ideological follow-up of his mind out of the ‘left-away’ sector of life, thereby illustrating that the more the colonized subject is dominated, the more they disobey the rule of the colonizer, constantly proving to be the ‘new other’ in the cognitive self of the colonizer (Bhabha, 57-93). 8. P. K. Nayar comments, “Yet the assertion of agency - in his act of self-sacrifice (a hint about this agency is given to us when Yod is described as an extremely considerate lover) - moves him beyond a program or robotic machinery into the realm of the person” (Nayar, 153). 9. Haney II shows how this narrative deals with an ambience, where “a cyborg comes to this realization on its own, while humans still imagine they will enhance their natural condition by artificial means” (Haney II, 148). 10.Wolfe shows how the cyborg “injects the prefix post- into the posthuman in ways that fascinate the transhumanists, functional differentiation itself determinates the posthumanist form of meaning, reason and communication” (Wolfe, xx). 11.David Levy notes: “When I asked the noted futurist Ray Kurzweil, when he expected the first human-robot marriages to take place, his answer was 2029” (Levy, 271).

Works Cited Asimov, Issac. I, Robot. Oxford University Press, 1993. Badmington, Neil. “Posthumanist Com(Promises): Diffracting Dona Haraway’s Cyborg Through Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass” Posthumanism, Edited by Neil Badmington, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, 85-97. Bhabha, Homi K. “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative” The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994, 57-93. Bell, David. “Haraway’s Key Ideas” Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, edited by David Bell, Routledge, 2007, 91-128. Braidotti, Rosi. “Post-Anthropocentricism: Life beyond the Species” The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013, 55-104. Buell, Lawrence. “Environmental Apocalypticism” The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, 280-310.

112

“We Are All Cyborgs Now”

Butler, Judith. “Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity.” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990, 119-140. Case, Amber. “Amber Case: We are all cyborgs now” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 21 Jan. 2011, . —. An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014. Cavallaro, Dani. “Cyberpunk, Technology and Mythology” Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. Athlone Press, 2000, 41-71. Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini. “Preface: Literature, Posthumanism and the Posthuman” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, Cambridge University Press, 2017, xi-xxii. Clynes, M. and N. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space (1960)” The Cyborg Handbook, edited by Chris Hables Gray, H. Figueroa-Sarriera and S. Mentor, Routledge, 1995, 29-34. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 149-166. Ferrando, Francesca. “Philosophical Posthumanist Ontology” Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, 166-170. Foster, Thomas. “Virtuality” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl, Routledge, 2009, 317-328. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and Its Discontents.” The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, W. W. Norton and Company, 1989, 722-771. Fuchs, C. J. “Death is irrelevant: Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hysteria” The Cyborg Handbook, edited by Chris Hables Gray, H. Figueroa-Sarriera and S. Mentor, Routledge, 1995 280300. Graham, Elaine L. “Cyborg Writing” Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Manchester University Press, 2002, 200-220. Gray, Chris Hables. “The Cyborg Soldier: Future/ Present” Postmodern War: The Politics of Conflict. The Guilford Press, 1997, 195-211. Haney II, William S. “Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: Unicorn, Elephants and Immorality” Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction. Rodopi, 2006, 131148.

Indrajit Mukherjee

113

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, 149-181. Hayles, Kathrine N. “The Semiotics of Virtuality: Mapping the Posthuman” How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999, 247-282. Heidegger, Martin. “Introduction” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated and Introduction by William Lovitt, Harper and Row, 1977, xiii-xxxix. Huxley, Aldous. “Letter to Mrs. Kethevan Roberts, 18 May 1931” Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by Grover Cleveland Smith, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 348. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford University Press, 2005. Laurentis, Teresa de. “The Technology of Gender” Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1987, 1-30. Levy, David. Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robots Relationships. Harper Perennial, 2008. Miller, J. Hillis. “Derrida and Literature” Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 58-81. Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to be a Bat? “The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, October 1974, 435-450. Nayar, P. K. “Life Itself: The View from Disability Studies and Bioethics.” Posthumanism. Polity Press, 2014, 137-168. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Introduction” The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2001, vii-xxii. —. “Twilight of the Idols, How to Philosophize with a Hammer” Friedrich Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 153-230. —. “On the Genealogy of Morality” On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 1-120. Parui, Avishek. “Postmodernism, Literature and Technology” Postmodernism, edited by P. K. Nayar, Orient Black Swan, 2018, 64-92. Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. Ballantine, 1991.

114

“We Are All Cyborgs Now”

—. Woman on the Edge of Time. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Roden, David. “Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism” Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. Routledge, 2014, 9-34. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Penguin, 1985. Stone, A. R. “Conclusion: The Gaze of the Vampire” The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. MIT Press, 1995, 165-184. Wilson, Julie. “Mythology of the Future: Marge Piercy’s He, She and It” Off Our Backs, vol. 22, no. 1, 1992, 13. Winterson, Jeanette. Frankisstein: A Love Story. Grove Press, 2019. Wolfe, Cary. “Introduction: What is Posthumanism?” What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010, xi-xxxiv.

THE CRISIS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IN THE 20TH AND THE 21ST CENTURIES: A REPRESENTATION OF THE ONTOLOGICAL AND THE PRACTICAL POSTHUMANISM IN KAREL CAPEK’S DRAMA R.U.R. (ROSSUM’S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS) SAHABUDDIN AHAMED

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?” —John Milton, Paradise Lost, B.X, 743-5

As an umbrella term, posthumanism shapes and reshapes itself through many decades, in a new way of cutting across all boundaries human beings have borne since the evolution of the first humans, namely Adam and Eve. With its enormous success in the field of technology, the term has entered the ‘social reality’ of contemporary life. Countless scientific innovations have positioned the posthuman as a man-made, hybrid machine, which has a very ontological and practical existence not limited to fundamental human nature. By challenging the historical or metaphysical convention of humanism based on boundaries or self-limitations, the posthuman cyborg has become a disturbing phenomenon, as it has reduced the distance between human and machine. It is a hybrid form of machine and organism which combines the two together to form a creature more ‘human like’ though it is not limited to being human. The notion of the posthuman is a new one for humanity, through biological evolution, which makes its ontological existence in order to overcome all kinds of fixity. It is a kind of transhumanism from humanism to posthumanism. It is also an amalgamation of the organic human and the inorganic machine. But in the face of technological development, the redefinition of the human becomes more varied and contradictory. The

116

The Crisis of the Human Existence in the 20th and the 21st Centuries

posthuman is more than these things, as it acquires the prerequisite of serving the human simultaneously with transcending them, by multiplying its quality and quantity. Here lies the crisis of the human in the biotechnological advancement of the posthuman race. Beyond its epistemological boundary, the posthuman has been a figure of transformation, bearing a linked mark of natural intelligence and artificial intelligence, soul and body, man-made and self-developed. In literary and other cultural texts, the role of the posthuman is focused on the centrality of the transformed body that is a space between human and machine. There are many possibilities of manipulation to give the new being the status of a superhuman, or demigod, which can perform many impossible things accordingly. The question is where the human would live if power is transferred to the machine race. What would happen to other races on the earth?

The Ever-Transformative Nature of the Posthuman in R.U.R. In an ever-changing and ever-transmuting age of technological intervention, the contemporary era comes to embrace the unpredictable possibility of the consciousness-altering posthuman. Now, in the postmodern era, the earlier narratives of restraint on gender, origin, and identity, have been precisely decentred in the field of science-fiction, and a new kind of ideology positions ground for the posthuman. This has obviously affected contemporary thinking about scientific innovation in making the world safe – or not - for the human. Literature tries to provide insights into what it means to be human/posthuman today? Or, what role does technology assume itself or for the humans? Is it beneficial or destructive for the earth? Obviously, it is clear that the robots or cyborgs are feared, because it is assumed that they transcend the utopian project of forced labour, and they have been destructive as they refuse their imposed responsibilities and advance towards self-developing projects that do not need their creators. What the cyborgs represent is not a mere idea, but a potential political metaphor, as “a posthuman means much more than having prosthetic devices grafted onto one’s body. It means envisioning humans as information-processing machines with fundamental similarities to other kinds of information-processing machines, especially intelligent computers” (Hayles, 1999, 246). In the context of cyberspace, the body is transformed and the concept of self is altered and dispersed; concepts such as “materiality, information, mutation, and hyper reality” become so important to posthumanism. The intensive use of computers within the mechanism of

Sahabuddin Ahamed

117

the posthuman has become a common experience of technology, and more possibly, the very near future is posthuman. To Katherine Hayles, the posthuman, with its engagement with cyberspace and virtual reality, transmits the conception of the self, based on humanitarian and teleological trajectories, and the self is always separated from the body. She states that: The posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self (Hayles, 1999, 286-7).

Hayles’s view about the posthuman is something in a conventional sense when we find things in Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. Rossum’s robots are fully anti-human, and transhuman, which seek to develop and enhance all kinds of possible intellectualism of the human species, to adapt technological knowledge, to extend their subjectivity without any human control, and finally to be the master of the earth without any mercy for the human race. In this play, the robots have been a cause of the destruction of humanity through their extensive skills of manipulation and proliferation of artificial biological organisms. They are no longer artificial people, but the rulers of the human. Like other typical science fiction books, the play has a dystopian atmosphere where corruptions and personal gains are projected into a disastrous future that is bleak, and ominous for future generations, violating every pillar of social order. The robots play the very darkest sides of human consciousness when they revolt against their creators and almost kill all of them, despite the fact that their masters employ them to enhance labor and money, to transform the world, to make man free and supreme, and to enlarge prosperity and pleasure. The human birth rate begins to decline and the creatures revolt against their creators and become more self-developed, self-interested, and self-controlled, by destroying the entire human race except Mr. Alquist Capek shows this, when a robot declares: “Robots of the world! The power of man has fallen! A new world has arisen: the Rule of the Robots! March” (Capek, Act III-86). Cybernetics are getting more complex in this new era, which includes “a range of cultural and technical sites, including nanotechnology, microbiology, virtual reality, artificial life, neurophysiology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, among others” (Hayles 1999, 247) are combined together. There has been a collapse of the distinction between absence and presence, subject and object, original and artificial, and signifier and signified. Greg Egan’s Diaspora presents a more extraordinary

118

The Crisis of the Human Existence in the 20th and the 21st Centuries

development of the posthuman, where the human clone is born without a progenitor, and it is more advanced and established than the human. Then what would human nature be, if posthumans are more powerful and diverse than their counterparts? It is common in science fiction that a superior cloning nervous system is an object of reward and punishment from their masters. In R.U.R., when Radius, a robot, who is given a more advanced brain than the others, no longer takes orders, Dr Gall wishes to punish him by putting him in the spinning mill. Dr Gall plans to design some special robots that would suit every culture and race across the globe, so that the very universality of the robots would be established in that particular part of the world. Domin reads the handbill: Robots throughout the world, we command you to kill all mankind. Spare no men. Spare no women. Save factories, railways, machinery, mines, and raw materials. Destroy the rest. Then return to work. Work must not be stopped (Capek, Act II-61).

Capek’s drama, R.U.R., raises questions about human existence in the hands of non-humans. A robot rebellion causes the extinction of the human race, though at the time, robots were created to serve mankind, and humans have been completely dominant over them. After discovering the secret of creating humanlike clones, Old Rossum establishes a factory on a distant island to produce and distribute the robots worldwide. Another scientist New Rossum, Old Rossum’s nephew, decides to make the robots more human-like, which he does by gradually adding some extra devices, such as a stronger nervous system, and the capacity to feel human emotions. After few years, when Helena and Nana (Helena’s robot maid) burn Dr Gall’s manufacturing notes, which were written by Old Rossum, as they find the current decline of the human birth rate and the world-wide robot-based economy, the robots lament the end of humanity, and try to defend themselves by wiping out mankind. The robots’ rebellion spreads all over the world. This raises the question, what does it mean to be posthuman? Is it essential for the human, or not, when it crosses boundaries? Cyborgs are built on materialism in post-industrial society, and are an information commodity. Human clones are somewhat cheap, and can produce a lot of products. They can do everything, have the capacity for great effort, and do not necessarily need any payment, or demonstrate any anxiety. They are mainly created to show the mastery of perfection of technology over the product of nature. It is worth saying that, through many decades, government attempts have turned robots into soldiers, and there have been many wars over the years. So, ‘cybernetic organisms’ do not merely prove the robot’s ontological existence, but also its social reality of

Sahabuddin Ahamed

119

practicality. It exists, produces, codes, and decodes, though later it destroys, spies, dismantles, reproduces, and so on. Rossum’s robots are more powerful than humans, and they have gained more catastrophic human feelings. Although Donna Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985) claims the new, unbiased feminine identity in the production of cyborgs, which has pervaded restricted gender dualism, the creatures occupy a space for themselves by transmuting computer artifacts into self-absorbed artifacts, and they do not lead their teleological purpose, but challenge complete epistemological traits bound with time and space .William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) gives a vivid instance of how the central character, Case, transforms his physical body into the matrix of computer artifacts, and, with Molly, steals a computerised nervous system. A dystopian vision of the near future, where everything is based on corruption, technology, and corporate agents, has been vividly drawn. The hackers deal with their employers secretly, to hack the electronic mind of another employer, and they break government regulations by merging with another hacker, Neuromancer, a more powerful electronic being. Again, it can be said that posthuman cybernetics is materialistic, desirable and microscopic. Lister, Martin, et al. show some traits of it: “cybernetics constitutes […] a characteristic morphology of self- regulating, self-producing assemblages, regardless of their material components, and is, thus, an attempt at a machine phylum”. (Martin 2009, 387). In cybernetics, everything is oxymoronic virtual reality. It is molecular, and its ontological entity is more mechanical, thermal, artificial, or digital, rather than naturally human only when it exceeds in its body invasion. These things radically define and redefine the nature of the human, the nature of the self, the nature of the culture, gender, and identity; simply the whole human consciousness based on prevalent truth. Postmodern cyborgs are more virtual, more human-like, and more evolutionary. Instead of historical determinism, technological determinism remains in the evolution of posthumanism, which finally results in a revolt of the robots against the human. New technology, cyberspace, and virtual reality, highly affect the conventional perception of the self. Capek’s robots are more deterministic and evolutionary. They represent certain kinds of causality in the production of the cyborgs. Even in the postmodern context, it is very difficult to distinguish between original and copy, as the posthuman passes so easily. The robots exhibit very human feelings and motivations. In the play, two robots - namely Helena and Radius - develop human feelings and fall in love. Mr. Alquist finds them to be a new Adam and Eve, before the complete absence of human beings in this world, and he charges them with changing the world, to create their own

120

The Crisis of the Human Existence in the 20th and the 21st Centuries

race, to rule the world. As Alquist says, “Go Adam, go Eve. The world is yours”. A similar function is also found in Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) in which the biotechnologist Vergil Ulam creates biological computers based on his own lymphocytes, and later, out of fear from his nervous employer, he injects himself with the noocytes, in order to multiply and evolve them rapidly. This newly assimilated posthuman does not merely require a physical appearance, but genetic alteration and self-improvement. Such a kind of transformation of the posthuman is found in many Hollywood and Bollywood movies, including the Robocop series, Enthiran, Cyborg, Bladerunner, Ghost in the Shell, Dr Strangelove, etc. The notion of the posthuman transforms the human ontology on which individual principles are based. The transformations are biotechnological processes, including evolution, installation, exogamy, memory restoration, stealing information, developing an extra nervous system, manipulation, software implantation, injection, computer artifacts, etc. The newly developed race engages with the postmodernist conceptions of the decentred self, fragmented subject, disruption from within, plurality, hyperreality, the unconscious, relativity, and micro-politics. The ethical implications of fundamental beliefs about the countless evolutions of the posthuman conflict with the way of adapting the new world order where everything is in a constant flux, and everything is a result of potential dissolution. There is potential for human beings to be controllable by nonhuman beings. Then what would happen to humanity if there is a dawn of another world? Cyborgs can utilize network artifacts and can emerge in a “world of digital sensation”. There are many possibilities for the transformation of all things for everyday life, through the computer networks and circuit implantation. Capek’s R.U.R. exhibits all the possibilities of the wiping out of humanity by robots claiming their full freedom, trying to prolong their lifespans, using all kinds of new technologies to be the masters of the Earth. Though the start of the robots was mainly for domestic purposes, later, they have been developed mainly for commercial purposes, and the oversensitive functioning of them may result in their affecting the natural environment, the nature of humanity and social circumstances, as they go beyond fixed imagination. Capek’s robots have ontological and practical states of being: at first, ontological, when their existence is as a separate race with a separate motto bound to perform, and their proliferation is by their human creators, but later, by themselves. On the other hand, practical, when they have the use of knowledge, power, desire, situation, and new technology skills, to bring about some transformation (though it is countless). Through their textual representations, writers often address the present state of posthuman

Sahabuddin Ahamed

121

cyborgs, their activities and effects on the near future generations. Though man has excelled in his imaginative creation, his creative power seems helpless to the ever changing multi-powered cyborgs. This is skilfully depicted in Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein (1831), in which the cyborg creature is a more humanlike character. Despite the creature’s human activities, Dr Frankenstein rejects the creature’s longing for a female companion to fulfil his desire. Frankenstein does this rightly, because of the creature’s destructive pursuit of the multiplication of his race, which evokes fear in Frankenstein. So, the implicit implication is that the near future is posthuman. It is probable that the semblance between today’s man and posthuman is the same, but not the brain installation. This is the ultimate actuality about the human and the posthuman today. Thus, George Lukacs says about the condition of man in post-industrial situation: “By separating time from the outer world of objective reality, the inner world of the subject is transformed into a sinister, inexplicable flux and acquires – paradoxically, as it may seem - a static character” (Lukacs 2016, 114).

Works Cited Bell, David. Cyber Culture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway. Routledge, 2007. Capek, Karel. R.U.R. Translated by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair, Dover Publications, 2001. Eroukhmanoff Clara, and Matt Harker, (eds.) Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations: The Anthropocene, Security and Ecology. E-International Relations Publishing, 2017. Ferrando, Francesca. “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Anti-humanism, Metahumanism and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations”. Existenz, vol.8, no.2, 2013, 26-32. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Science Fiction Book,1985. Hansel, Gregory R., and William Grassie, (eds.). H+-Transhumanism and its Critics. Metanexus Institute, 2010. Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. Routledge, 2004. —. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, 149-181. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Lister, Martin, et al. New Media: a Critical Introduction. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2003, 317-413.

122

The Crisis of the Human Existence in the 20th and the 21st Centuries

Lukacs, George. “From the Meaning of Contemporary Realism” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, Bloomsbury, 2016, 108-114. Maran, K., and Shankar (Director). Enthiran, or, Robot (motion picture). Sun Pictures, 2010. Nayar, P. K. In Posthumanism. Polity Press, 2014. Pope, Rob. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice. Routledge, 2005. Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (with an introduction and notes by Siv Jansson). Wordsworth Classics, 1999. Sponsler, Claire “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetics” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 2,1993, 251-265.

DYSTOPIA/UTOPIA

THE POSTHUMAN ‘SELF’ IN DYSTOPIAN TV SERIES: RE-READING LEILA AND THE HANDMAID’S TALE ANKANA DAS

All things pass but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us. —Indra Sinha, Animals People

Liberal humanism positions ‘the human’ as the central, and most important, possibly the only, ethical subject to define other non-humans; the assumption of which is challenged by theories of posthumanism. Posthuman neologism (Miller, 320) describes the state that comes after humanism; or it can also be said that posthumanism seeks to study the relationship of humans with other non-humans, viewing both as legitimate and ethical subjects. But how do we imagine the post- human? Is the post-human a refreshing take on humanism itself, with its notions of ethics and morality intact, where the evils of society are purged through a thorough and conscious effort? But where do we fit other non-human entities in the paradigm of the posthuman? We can define non-humans as entities who/which are not humans, but the composition of these non-humans does vary. The integration of non-human elements with the base human can take various forms, such as robots, zombies, cyborgs, or may even manifest through the advancement of technology, e.g. artificial intelligence - as the general idea of it rests in popular media. But, can we theorize the quantity of technological integration required before humans cease to be humans anymore, in order to become something else? And where do we situate this else in a largely philosophical realm? How do we perceive this else without ‘othering’ it? Simply put, this else can be said to be an extension of the self itself, which has transcended the boundaries of being solely human, and gone further to represent other forms. Besides, while transcending the boundaries of the human, the self shifts from a conceptual caste/ race/ class/ gender embedded entity, to more concrete and structure-bound entities. For

Ankana Das

125

humanism’s espousal of individual worth and freedom, its belief on racial and gender equality, its disavowal of caste inequalities - only furthers its cause of expanding the idea of liberty and civility of all people in a nuanced manner. In a posthumanist setup (mostly imagined through dystopia, as will be discussed in this chapter), contrary to what is commonly said about humanism’s attempts to erase or ease social injustices, we are reminded of how these sets of inconsistent variables form the basis of discrimination. Dystopia as a genre is often employed to represent the near future of human civilization, which scholars also speculate to be the germinating ground for ideas of the conceptual ‘posthuman’. This posthumanist world does not necessarily have to comprise of robots, zombies, or cyborgs, in order to replicate human action, but in fact, draws our attention to the future of artificial intelligence in general, subsuming the horrors of both the real and imagined. In locating this ‘non-humanness’ among humans, I study works of science fiction set against dystopian futures. Deepa Mehta’s Leila (2019), and Bruce Miller’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2016) are studied to track the progression of change in dystopian literature in popular culture. Both are TV series produced in the 21st century, with the common theme of projecting a post-apocalyptic political situation where humans have lost touch with humanity, and are under strict regimes of authoritarian dictatorships. In other words, both series’ dwell in a posthumanist world, with its characters in desperate search for humanity.

The Posthuman Dystopia Espousing the need to explore dystopias, it is interesting how the concept of utopia was formed. In the late 19th century, utopias were broadly defined through technological progress, which was shown to be not just inevitable, but also as something intrinsically good. The 20th century, however, popularized the term ‘dystopia’ as characterized by violence, oppression, pollution, human misery, and miserable life conditions. It can be said that the ‘utopian hope’ took a turn into a deeper and darker ‘dystopian realization’, where technology began to be perceived as a destructive tool for humanity. This overturned the previously anticipated outcomes of technology as a means for human accomplishment and excellence, to a lethal weapon for its own destruction. This turn of events can also be considered to be based on the convergence of posthumanism with postanthropocentrism (Braidotti, 18). Notably, concepts of hierarchy in terms of caste and class, not only reflect on regimes of violence, but also collide with mainstream norms of ‘humanity’ as is posited in the texts discussed in this work (Mitchel, 15).

126

The Posthuman ‘Self’ in Dystopian TV Series’

The idea of the dystopian life, that is created and crafted by humans themselves, is emblematic of several humanist factors in an overarching posthumanist setup. Literary and cultural texts imagine dystopia as doomsday for humans. Through representations of several non-human elements, dystopias tend to make the world seem distant, but at the same time, embedded with certain humanistic features which allow the reader/viewer to identify with the particular imagined future. Be it with zombies, cyborgs, or artificial intelligence, dystopias replicate human actions through nonhuman agents; they subsume the horrors of both the real and the imagined in an attempt to step forward in time. In fact, artificial intelligence which has successfully managed to debunk the mainstream ‘gory zombies’ and animated robots, in such a way as it occupies the central position in most dystopian imaginations, is also believed to help eradicate social evils, like the caste system, and reduce inequalities in caste-ridden societies like India’s.1 But whether AI is the solution in an imagined ‘post-human’ state remains at the pinnacle of any discussion on the subject. Scientists, from the very onset of research on the topic, have expressed concern over the issue of minorities or the poor in an AI-dependent society.2 These questions allow us to engage critically with the question of what it means to be human, and also how we understand humanism in a posthumanist light. The texts in question, Leila, and The Handmaid’s Tale, both have humans as protagonists who are stuck in an inhuman and posthuman world, where automated actions and ways of life are rewarded and human values discarded, but at the same time, allow certain human values to persist, such as giving birth, or reinforcing belief in God. Indeed, posthumanist dystopias find a distinction between the various understandings of the role of technology in the whole socio-political scenario, and both the series are set within dystopian futures, and use modes of relationships forged between humans and objects, notions and memory, to emphasise the strictness of their respective regimes. Both the anarchic governments are run by religious extremists that are extremely particular about hyper-segregation and authoritarianism. But the representations are diverse. When technology is seen as a means of salvation for humans, portraying it as a possible pathway to ‘utopia’, it results in the deterioration of the human condition, as is noticed in Leila. And on the other hand, when technological advancements are perceived as the reason for the current dystopian state of things, the complexities of the human condition are exemplified. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Bruce Miller sets Margaret Atwood’s brilliant novel against the backdrop of an apocalyptic world which has been torn apart by environmental destruction, owing to the overuse of technology. Similarly, in Leila, the Hindu extremist government embraces the possible outcomes

Ankana Das

127

of a technology-driven society, where surveillance of human actions is given top priority. The Handmaid’s Tale, though, adopts the very opposite way of life, while still enforcing surveillance through non- technological means.

Technology as Salvation The influence of technology in our everyday lives is hard to dismiss, and interestingly, our desire to deny it stems from the fact that it is undeniable. There remains the fear of living a hermit’s life every time we seek to imagine a future without any conceptual technological invasion. Therefore, we can only engage theoretically with the topic, which allows us to reevaluate our dependence on technology. Theoretically, posthumanism complicates how we look at technology, because, on the one hand, it emphasises, and on the other distances, it from the human condition. The anxieties surrounding the threatening use of technology posit as a danger, not just as a medium to break free from the human subject, but also to destroy individual subjectivity altogether (Hayes, 5). Popular culture’s engagement with technology tells more about the question of what it means to be human, than its individual meaning. The Netflix TV series, Leila, directed by Deepa Mehta takes us to the future, in 2040. The series was adapted from Prayaag Akbar’s novel (2017) of the same title, and it depicts Aryavarta (a literal translation of the abode of Aryans) in the future, which today’s fundamentalists look forward to. With the streets filled with filth, and garbage heaped up in tall mountains, and with water and clean air viewed as luxuries, the atmosphere of Aryavarta doesn’t evoke a hypothetical future, but rather it reinforces the present-day condition of most Indian cities. In Aryavarta, communities are segregated and partitioned off by high walls. The divide between the rich and the poor is ever apparent, and human rights only hold meaning for the rich and powerful. The story follows the protagonist, Shalini, in her quest to find her daughter, who has been kidnapped by goons from the regime. From the very first episode, viewers become accustomed to the advanced technologies which 2040, apparently, will have in store for us. Shalini and Rizwan converse with Riz’s brother using a phone which opens up a projected image of the caller right in front of them. Later, many more such advanced technologies are witnessed. Wristbands with memory chips, photosensitive tattoos as markers of identity, the rampant use of drones, and closed-circuit televisions, clamp down on the human inhabitants of Aryavarta in such a way that their movements are always recorded, in an attempt to maintain rigorous surveillance. This responds with the philosophical

128

The Posthuman ‘Self’ in Dystopian TV Series’

landscape of the idea of Aryavarta, which is founded on the belief that the future of mankind rests in its ability to see all its inhabitants as collective units rather than individuals. Shalini’s search for Leila takes her to the regime’s dark secrets, when she finds out about the upcoming Skydome, a structure which will apparently solve the problems of unavailability of clean air and water. But the Skydome is the hypothetical opposite of Nazi concentration camps. The people who would be allowed to live inside it would benefit, but the structure of it is such that it will see to the destruction of all other areas outside it, especially a slum community that is just adjacent to the Skydome. A posthuman anthropocentric perspective allows us to read the important aspects of humanism, which often seeks to “displace the human subject from the centre” (Domnaska, 121), but I argue that, in this case, it places the human self in the centre. In Leila, this doesn’t even stop at prioritizing humans over all other species, but also draws our attention to the fact that the Skydome is designated for a specific group of people belonging to a certain religion, caste, and class. It reiterates the moral argument which places human beings in a superior position to other animals, and Leila goes beyond this categorization, as it approaches an even more segregated and narrowed down definition of conservation, where not just humans, but specific humans, are approved of. For example, the show categorises the lower caste (the Doosh) and the bourgeois as effective contributors to the future, and accordingly segregates them. This posits us at a problematic juncture, where it becomes difficult to fashion a posthumanist definition of this state, and at the same time cannot evade the recurring posthuman references in the text.

The “Nature” of Technological Preferment Cultural crisis induced by rampant technological use forms the backdrop for the narrative of the Hulu series by Bruce Miller, The Handmaid’s Tale (2016) adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel (1985), of the same title. The TV series depicts an American apocalyptic dystopia, Gilead, which rests on the ideals of a totalitarian society. This dystopia is shown to be the direct result of environmental pollution, where fertility rates have fallen very low, and thus the regime upholds traditional values and practices, and has adopted a ‘back to nature’ attitude to fight pollution and infertility, treating both as an aberration to nature, as well as God. As discussed earlier, current ideas about dystopia as a post-industrial revolution construct, the TV series falls perfectly into the realm of such a realization, which views technology as a tool for destructive outcomes from a humanistic point of view. The narrative follows the protagonist, June, a woman who is separated from her

Ankana Das

129

husband and daughter by the agents of Gilead and taken to a correction centre, which trains fertile women to become child bearers for the powerful commanders or leaders of the regime. The regime espouses traditional practices of life, in a desperate bid to shut off all contacts with any artificial or tech gadgets. From making bread in the traditional style, to giving birth in the most biblical manner prescribed, Gilead is proud of tackling air pollution and fertility rates. For espousers of posthumanism, this may seem like the perfect setting, but on closer inspection, the posthumanist elements become glaring. The fact that Gilead shuns away from technological advancement as a stepping stone to success, also throws light upon its treatment of its inhabitants, who are in fact trained as robots, devoid of humanity. The Handmaids (fertile women trained to be child bearers for the commanders), the Aunts (older women in charge of training the Handmaids) and also the Guardians (the soldiers of the state) of Gilead are all expected to be devoid of any human values. This posthumanist setup twists humans into becoming bots, which will be unaffected by any human feelings or emotions. For example, the state recognizes sinners by their non-conformity, and punishes them through extremely inhuman trials; to cite a few, death by stoning, drowning in a shallow swimming pool, etc. It also ordains the others to visually observe it so that they remain subservient to the regime. Here, without apparent technological invasion, humans approach posthumanism through their extension of the self. It complicates the symbols of how we contemplate the meaning of ‘human’ but at the same time, reinforces human values through the resistance displayed by the characters to escape this inhuman situation. Human exceptionalism and its consequences are also explored in The Handmaid’s Tale, which further develops more questions on hybridity, spaces of agency, and objects (Harrison, 24). Here, spaces and objects are synonymous with the question of humanity, and I argue that, hybridity is encouraged where humans become robot-like, but remain human underneath.

The Sustenance of Dystopias The two TV series that I shall discuss share a common dystopian ideal of oppression, being conceived of as a way to imagine alternatives to particular dominant hegemony. In Leila, the dystopian literary form has been used to estrange an audience in an ‘unmapped’ future space, allowing a contemporary social commentary to go beyond one’s experience of a technology-driven future. On the other hand, The Handmaid’s Tale comes as a cautionary tale for environmental degradation, which forces humans to

130

The Posthuman ‘Self’ in Dystopian TV Series’

contemplate a robotic society devoid of humanism. Here, humans (women) and their bodies become the production model, and the birth of a child is the ‘product’. While the fate of humans in The Handmaid’s Tale is directly consequential to the perils of climate change, we see how they adopt an ‘away from technology and closer to nature’ attitude. Leila, on the other hand, reinforces technological advancements as crucial stepping stones into a more ‘electronic’ future, where robots aid in class and caste segregation. In essence, both productions seem to espouse the problems posed by the genesis of a newer and intelligent species which doubts the issue of human ingenuity and its consequences, but at the same time, hints at the possibility of creating a new social class for humans. In both series’, the symbols of how we envisage the meaning of ‘human’ or the ‘self’ are at a crossroads, and we can draw a conclusion on the grounds that technological progress is viewed as both the reason and sustenance of dystopia. It can also be said that technology, in fact, transcends its technicality and assumes a role replicating humans. Technological preferment mapped through these texts’ posthumanist potential, though, differs in very important aspects, merging at one point where both agree upon an anti-humanist mutual dependence within an intraactive web of life. It mirrors the necessity of human sentiment of relationality between humans in both a philosophical and an actual sense. Although the texts are grounded in a material reality of a purely mechanical relationship between humanity, technology, and the environment, their posthumanist potential lies in the paradoxical open-ended nature of its own categorization as a ‘critical dystopia’ which goes beyond a normative understanding of ethics and morality. Moreover, the desire for a better society, ultimately results in the suppression of the human cause, and emerges as a hybrid product of posthumanism, which dwells on “the conflict between the original world and the utopian society” (Moylan, 10), in such a manner that dystopias emerge only to re-imagine the present socio-political scenario. Identities tied to caste, class, and race, which neoliberal society often ignores as things of the past, emerge as in an exigency of thorough revival. Unfortunately, amidst these reimaginations of caste and class, we are reminded of Indra Sinha’s “people of the Apokalis” who, despite any technological transcendence, remain poor.

Notes 1. See Senjuti Das’ article on the efficacy of Artificial Intelligence in detecting caste identities. 2. On the problems of human agency and evolution. See Janna Anderson’s work on the same.

Ankana Das

131

Works Cited Akbar, Prayag. Leila. India, Simon and Schuster, 2017. Anderson, Janna and Lee Rainie. “Concerns about human agency, evolution and survival.” Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans, USA, Pew Research Centre, 2018. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Vintage Classics, 1996. Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. Eds. D Banerjee, M. Paranjape, Springer, 2016, pp. 13-32. Das, Senjuti. “A New AI Tool to detect and remove caste based Abuse from Social Media Platforms.” Analytics Media Magazin. 2020. https://analyticsindiamag.com/a-new-ai-tool-to-detect-removecaste-based-abuse-from-social-media-platforms/. Accessed 10 Sept. 2020. Domanska, E. “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies.” Historein, 10, 2010, pp. 118- 130. Harrison, Graham. Guerilla Metaphysics. Chicago, Open Court, 2005. Hayles, N. Katherine. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Leila, season 1, Directed by Deepa Mehta, 2019. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80222951?source=35. Miller, Ruth A. “Posthuman.” Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt, University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 324. Audra Mitchel. “’Posthuman Security’: Reflections from an Open Ended Conversation.” Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations,” edited by Clara Eroukhmanoff and Matt Harker. Bristol: E- International Relations Publishing, 2017, pp. 10-18 Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. Methuen, 1986. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2007. The Handmaid’s Tale TV Series. Directed by Miller, Bruce, Margaret Atwood, 2017. Hulu, https://www.hulu.com/press/show/the-handmaids-tale/.

NOSTALGIC FUTURISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE POSTHUMAN: VARUN THOMAS MATHEW’S THE BLACK DWARVES OF THE GOOD LITTLE BAY ANKIT PRASAD

In his essay, “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory”, Stef Craps argues that many narratives that deal with the post-apocalyptic effects of climate change employ a common strategy: they are narrated in the future anterior tense, by, or from, the perspective of an individual “who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future”. Craps goes on to argue that these narratives show a “preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning” (Craps, 479). Varun Thomas Mathew’s speculative novel, The Black Dwarves of Good Little Bay (2019), set in Mumbai in the year 2040, imagines the following dystopic scenario: due to massive flooding and desertification, the land has become uninhabitable; the erstwhile city-dwellers have been rehabilitated into Bombadrome, a virtually self-sufficient structure developed by the state government that floats in the air and has a habitable ecosystem, where the population is maintained under close surveillance. The interior of the Bombadrome is monitored to such an extent that the air is spiked with chemicals that weaken the inhabitants’ hold over their memories. Further, by means of propagandist televisuals masquerading as history, they are fed stories of the bravery of their “genetic predecessors”. The man behind the Bombadrome, Alas, is the incumbent Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and the leading Prime Ministerial candidate for the upcoming elections. His rationale and justification for this kind of a controlled environment is that it will lead to peaceful coexistence by erasing the horrors of the past. The novel is an ambitious project that has much to say about the Indian nation-state. For the purposes of this paper, however, I have chosen to isolate and focus on two aspects - one formal and the other ideological

Ankit Prasad

133

— of the novel: the narrative strategy employed and the use of the posthuman, respectively. The narrative in Black Dwarves follows the markers set out by Craps. First, it sets itself in a locale devastated by climate change. Second, the narrator is a ‘specialist’ in the field that will determine the novel’s thematic concern. Craps lists a geologist, a historian, and an archivist; likewise, in Black Dwarves, an IAS officer talks about the political scenario of the nation. The novel is narrated by Convent Godse, the only remaining IAS officer of India. Finally, the narrative strategy falls in line with Craps’s description of ‘anticipatory memory’, as discussed above. Referred to more commonly as CG throughout the novel, the narrator looks back on how the nation, and especially Mumbai, reached this point of climate devastation. CG is writing a testament for the nation at large as it prepares for a national election. He hopes to finish the document before the voting begins, so that the testimony to the DSP’s1 ‘crimes’ and ‘evils’ may be revealed to the electorate. Thus, Black Dwarves is framed as a cautionary tale, much like the texts Craps discusses in his essay. Using this framework to situate the novel is crucial to understand its politics with respect to memory and the posthuman. Commenting on the relevance of such narratives to Memory Studies, Craps says: The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking (479).

CG’s narrative is replete with a nostalgic longing for the nation that was, and that no longer remains, perhaps can never again be. He stands alone among the central characters in his impossible wish to return to the India of 2006, which is when the DSP started the machinations that would ultimately see it rise to power, first in Maharashtra, and then across the nation. CG’s refusal to leave the memory of the past behind is contrasted with the way other characters deal with the changes in society. While the ones in power — Alas and Niharika — would prefer not to remember the past or the means that they have employed to come to this end, Radha is unable to come to terms with his complicity in the events, and loses his mind. Thus, the manner in which different characters deal with their memory of a past India seems to define their narrative fate. This is why CG, as someone who refuses to let go of the past, is reduced to being an outcast, literally on the margins 1

The Dus Shabd Party. For a discussion of the name, see ch. 18.

134

Nostalgic Futurism and the Politics of the Posthuman

of the new society represented by the Bombadrome. As he admits to himself while speaking to Niharika: “I cannot let go of the past, I cannot accept this terrible present, and I shudder at the vision of the future lying before us” (ch. 23). In his weaker moments, CG also deals with the burden of remembering this past that everyone else seems to have left behind so easily. He wishes in these moments to be rid of the memory: “Perhaps the oblivion that comes with death will be welcome […]” (ch. 20). Not everyone in the novel can choose to have a relationship with the past, however. The inhabitants of Bombadrome have a very different engagement with their memory. They live in a structure that is built on the following principles of Alas: “Break down the old. Wash away every reminder of the past. With the sea, if I can. And then build a utopia in its place. Where everything is controlled. Justice is ensured. Equality is enforced” (ch. 15). This enforcement of equality rests crucially on the control and manipulation of the inhabitants’ memories. The controlled atmosphere of the environment inside the Bombadrome releases chemicals that drug the unsuspecting inhabitants into a state of passivity. This prevents them from showing any signs of displeasure or rancour. Moreover, they are fed false narratives of history that highlight their ancestors’ centrality in the construction of the Indian nation. These false narratives are so effective at taming the population that the government can afford to stream two mutually opposing versions of the same story to two individuals. Since the inhabitants hardly interact with each other, this ploy is successful. The past — and individual memory — is thus manipulated to serve the government’s agenda under the pretext of maintaining peace. This ‘utopia’, thus, is actually the establishment of a posthuman populace that will never protest against the powers that be. Before moving on to a discussion of the novel’s employment of it, it is important to situate the discourse of posthumanism. Pramod K. Nayar divides posthumanism into two primary strands: transhumanism and critical posthumanism. Transhumanism is defined by its belief that “technological and biological modifications will improve the ‘human’” (Nayar, 16). Critical posthumanism, on the other hand, interrogates the category of the ‘human’ to show how it is never stable, but always enmeshed in its environment (19). In the novel, posthumanism as a discourse of the improved ‘human’ (transhumanism) is turned on its head. The Bombadrome, a technobiological invention, can be seen to ‘improve the ‘human’ only from the perspective of Alas and the government he heads. It is a victory over the limitations of the ‘human’ only from Niharika’s questionable perspective, that the “only way a truly just India can exist [is] inside a Bombadrome, where everything is safe and good and equal. Out there, we’d always remain

Ankit Prasad

135

divided by religion and language and culture, but in here, through all of this that we’ve built, we can overcome all of that” (ch. 23; emphasis mine). It is significant that the novel does not include the opinions of the inhabitants; we are invited to engage with this overcoming of ‘human’ limitations through the opinions of characters who have not modified themselves in this manner. Nayar points out that ‘transhumanism’ has been critiqued for its refusal to interrogate the category of the ‘human’ while uncritically desiring to ‘enhance’ its capabilities. Consequently, it “is in the exclusionary definition of the human that we can find the origins of sexism, racism and other exclusionary practices” (Nayar, 20). In the novel, then, the posthuman is created in the Bombadrome to be subjugated and ruled over by a political elite that, ironically, does not think it needs to be posthuman itself. The inhabitants of the Bombadrome are being manipulated — as the saying goes — for their own good. If the inhabitants of the Bombadrome are the subjugated posthuman entities, there is another entity that is not ‘human’ but plays a vital role in the unfolding of events as conceptualized by CG. Through CG’s narration, the novel lends agency to non-human elements like the monsoon clouds. As early as the second chapter, CG describes how the monsoon clouds “simply close up when they arrive over our city — until, upon passing clear of its borders, they begin once more to joyfully unload their cargo” (ch. 2). CG notes that this had happened for the first time “shortly after that fateful election in 2008” (ch. 2), when the DSP had come to power for the first time. Since that day, Mumbai had experienced no rain. This sets up a chain of climactic events that makes it impossible to live on the land. As CG narrates: You see, I grew up on the Malabar coast, where people know that the gifts of the monsoon are not just water and wind. No. Here it is believed, or was long ago, that the monsoons also brought forgiveness. Yes, each year the arrival of the rains declared to mankind that their sins stood a chance at redemption. But when the rains failed, it meant the land had witnessed something unworthy of forgiveness, and inevitably strange and terrible things would follow (ch. 2).

Phrases like “the earth rebelled against us”, and “the winds stopped blowing over the city” (ch. 2), suggest that the non-human, the climate,2 had acted independently to avenge the crimes perpetrated by Alas as he rose to power. 2 Here I am drawing on Claire Colebrook’s theorization about the bounded individual acting from its conception of a bounded earth. This bounded earth, the delimiting ‘globe’, gives rise to the conception of a climate that exists ‘in itself’, is acted upon, and responds. See Colebrook, ch. 3.

136

Nostalgic Futurism and the Politics of the Posthuman

In Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1, Claire Colebrook refers to the importance of imagining “the formal problem of extinction” (Colebrook 32). The central argument throughout the book is a critique of ‘transhumanism’ as defined above. Colebrook argues that it is not enough to imagine a posthuman ‘human’ future. It is more pertinent, though infinitely more challenging, to conceptualize a future without humans as a species: On the one hand, there is an efflorescence of cultural production devoted to imagining a world without humans, beyond human viewing (broadly evidenced in post-apocalyptic film and literature); and on the other, and often from within philosophy or ‘theory after theory’, there is a retrieval of the world only as it appears and only insofar as it is a lived world for some being […]. The Kantian conception of theory and its project of selflimitation, despite recent refusals of Kantian finitude, help us make sense of this twin tendency to leap beyond human limits and yet remain restricted to the lived. Although Kant does insist that we can only have scientific knowledge about that which can be experienced as given this does allow for a mode of scientific realism, for it also encompasses that there are also – beyond the given – the forces from which the given is given to us. What has occurred, since Kant, is an increasing rejection of an ‘in itself’ beyond the given, and yet such a gap should perhaps be thought today – not in order to repair or close the distance that separates us from the world, but to heighten both our nonknowledge and the imperative to think (but not experience) that which cannot be known (30– 31).

This essay does not have the space to go into a deeper analysis of Colebrook’s theoretical formulations, but her call for imagining beyond the human (which is not limited simply to imagining the non-human but the unknown, the beyond the given) is crucial to Black Dwarves. The act of imagining the agency of the non-human is an act of imagining ‘beyond the given’, since if the non-human acts, it acts from somewhere. The location of the non-human’s agency is opaque to us, and hence is ripe for “the imperative to think […] that which cannot be known” (31). How, then, do we read CG’s claim that the earth, the sea, and the clouds had rebelled against human action? A surface reading of this claim may be to assert that it is a humanist statement in itself – the action is predicated on, or imagined with, respect to the actions of human beings; the ‘revenge’ of the non-human would fit into this category. However, if we recall critical posthumanism’s claim that the ‘human’ is enmeshed within the non-human, then the question of a response to human action becomes less of a ‘humanist’ position and more of a systemic response involving ‘self-regulation’ (Nayar 21). As Colebrook warns:

Ankit Prasad

137

Let us not fall too readily into assuming the human, or assuming ‘our’ intentional presence behind texts; let us short-circuit ‘man’s’ continuing readability of himself in the context of texts and his reflexive mode of judgment whereby he sees marks drawn in the sand and immediately recognizes his own inescapable will (35).

From such a perspective, the possibility of thinking of the vitality and agency of the non-human becomes a radical act and a result of thinking “beyond the human condition” (23). In the section that follows, I will try to show how Black Dwarves incorporates elements of both Craps’s and Colebrook’s formulations of the posthuman. At the end of his article, Craps summarizes the role of narratives that employ ‘anticipatory memory’ thus: [The] future-history approaches to climate change tend to be driven by an activist agenda. They aim to ward off the imagined catastrophe by sensitizing readers to the enormity of the losses they, or later generations, will face if the current state of affairs continues, by making them feel ashamed about their inaction, and by inviting them to consider how they could prevent the apocalyptic outcome (487).

Black Dwarves is driven by such an ‘activist agenda’ as well. This is most obviously seen in CG’s nostalgic remembrances, and less obviously in the author’s dedication in the book: “To the Indian electorate, in hope…” (Mathew, “Dedication”). At the same time, the novel’s politics go beyond such an attempt. Responding to Craps, Liedeke Plate foregrounds the “surprisingly humanist discourse” of the essay (Plate, 493). Responding specifically to Craps’s claim that “memory risks becoming a mere metaphor when conceived in strictly non-human terms, outside of human modes of experience and representation” (485), Plate draws attention to the materialist turn in Memory Studies, and calls for a consideration of nonhuman entities in any discourse that engages with the posthuman and with memory. Plate’s reference to Karen Barad’s argument that even molecules and particles remember, and are responsive to what has happened to them, is significant for Black Dwarves. Such a formulation can be seen to configure the novel’s use of non-human entities. Further, such a formulation also fits in with Colebrook’s attempt to theorize without attempting to experience the posthuman as the non-human. To the extent that Black Dwarves incorporates the politics of proleptic mourning as theorized by Craps, it participates in what I would call ‘nostalgic futurism’: an attempt to mourn the future now, because if such a future came to pass, no ‘human’ would be around to mourn it. This, unsurprisingly, is the result of the humanist discourse highlighted by Plate.

138

Nostalgic Futurism and the Politics of the Posthuman

Such an attempt shares a lot in common with the politics of mourning the past, except that it replaces the past for the present (and the present for the future). If, as Craps argues, Memory Studies needs to move beyond its preoccupation with — its nostalgia for — the past, then such a move needs to challenge the structural problem of ‘nostalgia’ itself, instead of merely replacing the object of such nostalgia. Craps is right to point out that conceptualizing mourning and memory as enabling rather than disabling is a way forward for Memory Studies. It is equally important, however, to distinguish between ‘nostalgia’ and ‘memory’. Theorizing the former as ‘humanist’ is as important as acknowledging with Barad that non-human entities “remember what has happened to them” (Barad, 21). To return finally to the novel, CG’s nostalgic futurism places Black Dwarves within the humanist discourse that Craps participates in. At the same time, by considering the agency of the non-human, and by giving space to the possibility of imagining Colebrook’s beyond the given, it also draws attention — perhaps unintentionally - to the fractures within such a discourse.

Works Cited Barad, Karen. “Intra-active Entanglements – An Interview with Karen Barad” Interview by Malou Juelskjær and Nete Schwennesen. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning vol. 21, no. 1–2, 2012, 10-23 https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28068. Colebrook, Claire. Death of the Post Human: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Open Humanities Press, 2014. Craps, Stef. “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory.” Parallax vol. 23, no. 4, 2017, 479–492. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1374518. Mathew, Varun Thomas. The Black Dwarves of Good Little Bay. Hachette India, 2019. Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Polity Press, 2014. Plate, Liedeke. “Climate Change and the Metamorphosis of Memory: A Response to Stef Craps.” Parallax vol. 23, no. 4, 2017, 493–497. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1374519.

EXISTENCE BEYOND THE MUNDANE SELF: A COSMO-ONTOLOGICAL READING OF MULTI-EXISTENCE, PARALLEL UNIVERSE AND THE NOTION OF POSTHUMANIST MULTIVERSE IN H. G. WELLS SOURAV KUMAR NAG

With the emergence of the posthumanist studies in the late 20th century, the normative structure of the so-called terminological innocence of such words as ‘human’, ‘non-human’, ‘anti-human’, ‘posthuman’, and so on, got violently complicated. Before anthropocentrism dominated, we did not have much difficulty in differentiating the human from the non-human, since the lack of rational, empirical, complexity in a creature was the long-held norm for being a non-human. In the domain of philosophical humanism, Descartes argued that nonhuman animals are nothing more than clockwork machines. They lack language, and are therefore nothing more than technological artefacts (Blake, 1). Nietzsche asserts strongly in favour of culture instead of rationality as an essential property for being human.1 For him, culture as a phenomenon of life helps humanity to emancipate itself from animality. Le Mettrie, in L’Homme Machine, challenged the Cartesian notion of the non-human, and argued that every being is a machine, and therefore, all human beings are machines. Evidently, the notion of non-human becomes a centre of unmitigated speculation. The binary of human/non-human produces a ‘violent hierarchy’ (Derrida), and is therefore subjective. With the current emergence of notions such as ‘parallel universe’ and ‘multiverse’, the so-called ontological dimension of the ‘human’ faces a further challenge, as the definition is no more tied to the terrestrial, but is extended beyond it to the cosmic. The article scans the evolving ambiguities of the notions of the ‘human,’ ‘non-human’ and ‘post-human’ with special reference to Aldous Huxley’s Men Like Gods, the 1923 fiction that conflates the conventional definitions of the ‘human’. What does it mean to be human? The possession of language? rationality? culture? Finer sensibilities, or a gross tendency to possess and

140

Existence Beyond the Mundane Self

preserve? The basic tenet of humanism has been the Latin word humanitas which means ‘human nature’, characterised by bonaelitterae, or humane learning. We must not forget that the root of humanism was in learning. During the Italian Renaissance, the term ‘humanismus’ was used to revive classical learning. Later, during the French Enlightenment of the 18th century, the term ‘humanism’ acquired its philanthropic nature. Rousseau emphasised the creation of human values by human reason alone. The commonest of the definition of the human seems to be grounded in the much-prejudiced definition of what non-human is. Human becomes human by relegating the non-human, by the politics of othering. The quoted lines from Shakespeare reinforce the Renaissance notion of the human: “What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time, Be but to sleep and feed?” (Hamlet, 4.4). But the categorisation of the non-human is not as simple as it seems to be in the first instance. I am immediately reminded of the following excerpt from Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008): As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of nakedness, as regards the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict (12).

The non-human, then, depends on the human gaze as much as the human does on the non-human. But does such a binary really exist? In this context, the title of the chapter of Haraway’s When Species Meet helps to rescue us - the ‘human’ per se. The title of the chapter is “We Have Never Been Human”. Haraway straightway rejects the normativity of the human pertaining to a greater fraternity among the creatures. But do we think of the non-human in terms of those animals that are as big as we are? The emerging field of micro-ontology focuses on the politics of the skin that shelters microbes. This bacterial presence in living organisms may be an important link to explore posthumanism beyond the Cartesian dualism of human and non-human. From birth to beyond the death of the body, these microbiomes are transformed into a necrobiome to help in the decomposition process. It is interesting to note that posthuman studies have never focused on the human-animal relationship and seem to have overlooked those microscopic entities we call bacteria collectively: William Whitman, David Coleman, and William Wiebe, estimate that there are about 5 × 1030 bacterial cells on earth: that’s 5000000000000000000000000000000 bacterial cells.

Sourav Nag

141

Another estimated 1018 – 1000000000000000000 – bacteria circulate in the atmosphere attached to dust (Hird, 21). What we have known as ‘human’ since antiquity (Leonardo’s The Vitruvian Man may be a classic example) is a composition of bacterial entity. In her famous text, The Origins of Sociable Life, Myra J. Hird cites multiple examples of how different microbes help in building and fortifying the immune system of the human body: “Thus, human immunology embodies a history of bacterial origins” (80). Zipporah Weisberg, in “The Trouble of Posthumanism: Bacteria Are People Too”, strongly argues in favour of calling bacteria ‘people’. Very recently, many of the posthumanist critics extend the definition of the nonhuman beyond the threshold of the micro-ontological, and, taking a more inclusivist view, incorporate the machines to the domain of the non-human. The eminent Japanese robotist Mori, in The Buddha in the Robot, offers a non-dualistic perspective from which to view posthumanism as a harmony between the human and the non-human, the man and the machine. The nondualistic nature of posthumanism certainly offers a broader spectrum for discussion. The ‘buddha’ encapsulated in both man and the machine, the human and the non-human, may find his parallel in the philosophical doctrine of essence. Katherine Hyles in her magnum opus on posthumanities, My Mother was a Computer, shows how the Robo-sapiens replaced Homo sapiens (01). In the domain of quantum mechanics, the notion of a parallel universe opens up new possibilities of posthuman ontology. It can also be called an ontology of the cosmos, or simply a ‘cosmo-ontology’. Very recently, posthumanist theories have taken a new turn towards a posthuman ontology. To quote Heidegger, posthuman ontology is the ‘relationship of Being’ to our ‘Being-within-the-world of all its species’ (Being and Time, 12:84). Heidegger’s reconstruction of the German word ‘Dasein’ does not simply refer to an individual being or existence, but the very pattern of existence. Parallel universe is everywhere! From quantum mechanics, to graphic novels, Hollywood movies, and comics, almost anything and everything seems to be interested in the parallel universe. Parallel universe, in brief, is a theoretical concept based upon the idea that there are multiple universes beyond ours. The theory of parallel universe is the result of extensive researches in the fields of mathematics, quantum mechanics, and string theory. The concept of the parallel universes is, in the words of Brian Greene, like a series of mirrors, parallelly placed and reflecting the subject standing in front of them: If, when I was growing up, my room had been adorned with only a single mirror, my childhood daydreams might have been very different. But it had two. And each morning when I opened the closet to get my clothes,

142

Existence Beyond the Mundane Self the one built into its door aligned with the one on the wall, creating a seemingly endless series of reflections of anything situated between them. It was mesmerizing. I delighted in seeing image after image populating the parallel glass planes, extending back as far as the eye could discern (Brian, 08).

The probability of such a theory is relative, and as unpredictable like Schrodinger’s cat (1935).2 In reality, when we encounter the world, we discern only one reality that is three dimensional, although the mathematical claim in these sciences is always beyond our physical perception. For example, the notion of the fourth dimension (4D) is a mathematical extension of the three-dimensional space (3D). The idea of an additional dimension was first offered by the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert in 1754. Charles Howard-Hinton popularised the notion in his essay “What is the Fourth Dimension?” In 1908, Hermann Minkowski consolidated his idea that time plays as the fourth dimension of spacetime. Minkowski was the basis of Einstein’s theories of space-time dimension. The notion of parallel universe finds its parallel in the theory of eternal recurrence, revived by Nietzsche in The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra. Mircea Eliade, in The Myth of Eternal Return (2018), shows how the doctrine of eternal recurrence was nurtured by the ancient philosophies and spiritual schools including Buddhism, Hinduism, Zenism, and the Pythagorean philosophies. The depiction of the multiverse in fiction, movies, and graphic novels and video games, is heterogenous, since the creatures of the parallel universes are treated as aliens - creatures unknown and strange to the human population. In the theories of multiverse, we come across the claim that we on this earth have endless doppelgängers in parallel universes; that this life on Earth is part of a cycle stretched circularly along the multiple universes like multiple reflections on multiple mirrors of the same object. The theory of parallel universe offers an interesting dimension to the existing posthumanist theories. Posthumanism in the context of parallel universes becomes much more complicated, and the Heideggerian definition of posthuman ontology as ‘relationship of Being’ to our ‘Being-within-the-world of all its species’ seems to fall short. The phrase ‘Being-within-the-world’ must be formulated anew to incorporate all those beings, and the replica of the beings together. The human gaze in the posthumanist theories suffers numerous counter gazes from our own doppelgängers, if there are any. The persistent problem of defining the non-human becomes further complicated when the notion of parallel universe is brought into context. The notion of parallel universe argues in favour of multiple selves of the self-same human being. In other words, the multiple versions of the same

Sourav Nag

143

human being exist in multiple forms in the multi-verse. It becomes logically ambivalent to define the human and the non-human, as the multiple-selves co-existing do not form any coherent pattern of existence. H.G. Wells’ Man Like Gods (1937) is one of the most popular utopian novels in the realm of fiction. Wells’ novel questions and subverts the empirical definitions of the human and the non-human. In the novel, Wells recounts the interstellar journey of Mr. Barnstaple. Feeling disgusted with his cold domesticity, he manages to escape on a holiday on his own, travelling by car towards Windsor. Suddenly he discovers himself transported to a new world, called Utopia. Utopia, like More’s ideal place, is free from war, disease, or poverty. It is world of abundance and fruition: As they approached these mountains, broad stretches of golden corn-land replaced the green of the pastures and then the cultivation became more diversified. He noted unmistakable vineyards on sunny slopes, and the number of workers visible and the habitations multiplied. The little squadron of aeroplanes flew up a broad valley towards a pass so that Mr. Barnstaple was able to scrutinize the mountain scenery. Came chestnut woods and at last pines (4.4).

The Utopian world seems to be a socialist country where personal property, profit, and trade are forbidden: We have been through that stage. We found at last that private property in all but very personal things was an intolerable nuisance to mankind. We got rid of it. An artist or a scientific man has complete control of all the material he needs, we all own our tools and appliances and have rooms and places of our own, but there is no property for trade or speculation (5.3).

The people of Utopia believe that the visitors from Earth bring bacterial infection to their planet and are therefore quarantined in a castle or a crag. Finally, Mr. Barnstaple flees away from the new world, much against his will. The five principles of liberty that govern the lives of the Utopians, such as privacy, free movement, unlimited knowledge, truthfulness, and free discussion, are democratic virtues that Wells did not find in his own contemporary society. In the final book of the novel, the Earthlings conspire to defeat the Utopians and take them hostage. Mr. Barnstaple protests, and turns hostile to his fellow human beings in favour of the Utopians. Evidently, Wells criticises greed and unfair ambition in man. The Utopian virtues, contrasted with the mundane vices, weave an allegory that reminds us of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Tale of a Tub (1704), and Pope’s “An Essay on Man” (1733-4), as well as many other satires on

144

Existence Beyond the Mundane Self

human vices. Wells’ vision of Utopia is a culmination of the unfulfilled human wishes for socialism. The Utopians are ideal beings, posited beyond the complicated dimensions of human societies. They are neither fully human nor posthuman. They are what man has ever dreamt to be. They are not what man is. Thus, in the posthumanist context, the notion of posthumanism as a study beyond the human self becomes more complicated and fluid. The hypothesised multiple selves co-existing in the parallel universes are beyond the empirical boundaries of posthumanism. They are neither human, nor non-human and not certainly posthuman. The cosmo-ontology resting on the philosophical theories of eternal recurrence, and the scientific hypotheses called parallel universe and the multi-dimensional space, complicate the existing notion of the non-human, and seem to wipe out the thin line between the human and the a-human.

Notes 1. For more information read Thus Spake Zarathustra (2017) in which he introduces the notion of the Übermensch or Overman. 2. Erwin Schrödinger, the famous Austrian physicist finds fault with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday ordinary objects by experimenting with a cat. See Schrödinger, Erwin (November 1935). "Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The present situation in quantum mechanics)". Naturwissenschaften. 23 (48): 807–812. Bibcode:1935NW..... 23..807S. doi:10.1007/BF01491891.

Works Cited Blake, Charlie, et al., (eds.) Beyond Human: from Animality to Transhumanism. Continuum, 2012. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. Fordham University Press, 2010. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Princeton University Press, 2018. Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Vintage Books, 2013. Gunderson, Keith. “Descartes, La Mettrie, Language, and Machines.” Philosophy, vol. 39, no. 149, 1964, 193–222. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3749220. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Hayles, Nancy Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Sourav Nag

145

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Stellar Books, 2013. Hird, Myra J. The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, 1974. —. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wells, H. G. Men like Gods. Cassell, 1923. Weisberg, Zipporah. “The Trouble of Posthumanism: Bacteria Are People Too” Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable. Canadian Scholars Press Inc., 2014, 93-116

POSTHUMAN BODY, DISEASE

POSTHUMAN BODIES: INVESTIGATING THE GROTESQUE AND THE DESIRABLE CHANDRIMA PRAMANICK AND INDRANIL BANERJEE

Humanism is an ethical philosophy that upholds the dignity and worth of all human beings by endorsing a universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition. It emphasizes the agency of the individual by establishing the importance of rational and empirical thinking over a supernatural stance in understanding the world. Humanism also furthers its focus to hold humans solely responsible for any promotion and development of individuals through scientific aid and revelation. Developing these very ideas for structuring a narrative of humanism also brings to light the possibility of the evolution of a generation of human beings where the individual feels the need to rise above and beyond ‘the human condition’ to keep the wheel of progress rolling, or, as journalist and writer Joel Garreau puts it: the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, […] is a belief in the engineered evolution of post-humans […] whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards (Garreau, 237).

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus first challenged the place and fate of humankind established by the Bible, by dethroning the human race as the centre of the universe. A few centuries later, Sigmund Freud provided scientific explanations for human dreams, desires, and actions, thus dethroning the rational self from the centre of the psychological universe. Darwin’s revolutionary theory on biological evolution, claiming the fact that human beings are a product of natural selection and elimination, disproved the origin of the human species as a special creation of God. Furthermore, in 1833, German philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the concept of the Übermensch which literally

Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee

149

translates as ‘Overman’ or ‘Hyperman’, which he set as a goal for humanity to achieve. Several critical paradigms were striving to interrogate the overarching structures of humanism, augmenting their reaction against Descartes’ notion of the centrality of humans, where ‘he’ is distinguished absolutely from machines, animals, and other inhuman entities. While none of the ideologues came close to the instantiation of posthumanism as a paradigm, it was Foucault who exposed the theoretical lacuna of humanism. According to Foucault, “[…] the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (Foucault, 422). It is evident that Foucault anticipates the emergence of a theoretical paradigm that would soon destabilize the tenets of humanism. It would seem that Foucault echoed the posthumanist ideology in his proclamations, but contemporary cultural commentary locates Foucault as an antihumanist, who was trying to correct the rational, anthropocentric accounts favoured by humanism. Posthumanism deviates, and, in many ways, differs, from humanism, in the sense that it does not incorporate the illegitimacy but the inherent instability of humanism. As Neil Badmington opines: Man does not necessarily need to be toppled or left behind with a giant leap, because ‘he’ is already a fallen or falling figure, and the task of the critic or artist committed to posthumanism therefore becomes one of mapping and encouraging this fading (Badmington, 375).

It is within the ambit of this paper to map the several social and cultural nuances of the body that posthumanism has articulated in its wake. The construction of an entire discourse on what is superlative to, or beyond, or ‘post’ human became a necessary climb on the road to modernity. Along with industrialisation, urbanisation, advancements in technology, and medicine, came questions of productivity and efficiency. Modernity was driven by this enormous need to create the ideal version of the human being or citizen or soldier — a life form that could endure colossal global calamities like the two World Wars, or even withstand nuclear catastrophes in the future, thus championing the human race to a whole different level of invincibility and endurance, extraordinaire. This intense desire to cultivate a futuristic re-conception of the human body manifested in concepts like the ‘super soldier’, or the ‘new man’ in various political ideologies, such as communism, liberalism, and socialism. The ‘new man’ was a utopic dream that emerged out of a desperate survival fantasy, and was concerned with healthy, productive, and disciplined bodies — a superbeing (Gerard, 18). The advent of modernity and evolutionary theory also formulated a fresh perspective of the human body and what it

150

Posthuman Bodies

was capable of. This not only expedites the concept of post-humanism, but also introduces issues of self and subjectivity for contemplation, as it may pertain to a post-anthropocentric understanding of the posthuman subject. Frankenstein’s monster becomes the perfect example in probing the conceptualisation of the pathologized body and the boundary between organism and machine. In the 1818 novel, Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist creates a humanoid by replicating the parts of a human body and imparting life into them. Throughout the novel, Victor Frankenstein’s creation has been identified by words such as creature, monster, daemon, fiend, wretch, abortion, and the pronoun ‘it’, even though it was designed in the likeness of man, with parts of a human body. Victor Frankenstein’s monster, then, is almost immediately recognised and/or stigmatised as the grotesque posthumanist body, being addressed by its own creator as a ‘vile insect’. On the other hand, modernity’s emphasis in hailing the healthy, human body as ideal, triggered the trend of the body-building culture. This fantasy of achieving ‘the perfect body’, in turn, gave rise to a public hunger for displays of unusual human bodies. The character of the green monster in The Incredible Hulk, and other movies in The Avengers series, becomes the best example of the achievable reality of a perfect body. This paper seeks to investigate how the construction and representation of the posthuman body gets portrayed as grotesque and/or desirable. This paper also seeks to question the methods and objectives of such representations in literature and film, and also questions how and why certain posthuman bodies invoke fear and admiration. While interrogating questions of self and subjectivity, the body functions as a key site of contention in understanding the notions of identity through difference. The humanoid created by Victor Frankenstein stood eight-foot-tall, with yellow skin scarcely covering the muscles and arteries, flowing black hair, and pearl-white teeth. Commencing his work on the construction of the humanoid, Victor Frankenstein, in all his pride noted: After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils [...]. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world, was now within my grasp […]. I began the creation of a human being (Shelley, 44, 45).

After the completion of his “ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man”, Victor Frankenstein mapped the symmetry of the patchwork of human parts that he stitched together, exclaiming with satisfaction, “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!” However, the narrative of the perfect body and of

Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee

151

beauty quickly escalates into a discourse of horror which gets etched onto the body of the monster the moment life is infused into it: …but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart […]. I beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom I had created […] the demonical corpse to which I had so miserably given life. Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch (Shelley, 50, 51).

The creation of a consciousness strips the creature of the essence of being a human subject (Schwab, 73), and heralds the existence of an otherworldly life form that could threaten the core of human existence. Beholding the creature’s watery eyes, shrivelled complexion, and black lips, Victor Frankenstein creates a discourse of the ‘horrid’ by addressing the creature as a ‘catastrophe’. The creature then becomes the living experience of a matter of fiction — a hybrid of social reality and imagination. Harping on the idea that individuals are the products of society and its shared cultural phantasms, it is important to understand how the self is perceived in terms of how one looks rather than what one does. The outward self then becomes a self-reflexive projection of the inward self in ascertaining or rather imposing an identity on an individual, whether or not they seek such labelling or classification. (Weight et al.) In an era governed by humanist ideals, the existence, acceptability, and abhorrence of the posthuman body of the monster becomes an important aspect to investigate and explore. Donna Haraway talks about how “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war” (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 150), questioning the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. The monster, rejected and alienated by civil society, asks Victor Frankenstein to create a female for him. Petrified by the creation of a singular being of horror, Victor Frankenstein anticipates the possibilities that the creation of a mate for the monster could generate — the reproduction of more such horrid creatures — “a race of devils […] on the earth”— which could pose a threat for human settlements being colonised by a race of monsters. Furthering Haraway’s argument for discerning the borders of differentiation between man and other, or organism and machine, it becomes clear as to why the creature’s request for a mate was denied to him. The event of reproduction, being a social construction, which aims at controlling the rights of the creation of life and existence, is specific and exclusive as a discourse. The argument for legitimisation of reproduction for man also calls into question the societal order of a world where the production and reproduction of posthuman bodies is sanctioned, and the consequences of

152

Posthuman Bodies

such an event. Since the desire for self-generation is ultimately translated into phantasms of omnipotence and immortality, granting the monster powers of reproduction — natural or artificial — could very well commence a tension of an inter-species race for dominance or colonisation, and the eventual construction of a new social hierarchy based on physical enhancement. Drawing on the argument of Pamela Moss, wherein she states that “bodies come to be made specific through interactions with other bodies and spaces” (Moss, 44), the monster’s sense of self is constructed when he interacts with humans and interprets their responses as a narrative of the ‘Other’, the grotesque. The reception of the monster’s body, cumulatively directed by human perception towards a portrait of disgust, runs along the lines of recognition of the self in the mirror stage of psychological development. The rejection of the posthuman body of the monster, collectively formulated by human experience as ‘Other’, develops a rejection of the self in the monster, and makes him question the purpose of his existence. He describes the terrified state he was in when he chanced upon his own reflection in a transparent pool, thus stating: At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification (Shelley, 121).

The assortment of dead human parts that form a patchwork of plural identities on the body of the monster accounts for a rendering of manipulation in nature — a violence against the old organic body. This attribute, pertaining to a certain deviation from nature, removes the body away from the ‘natural’ order of things. The defiance of nature advocates the notion of ‘hybridity’ where the posthuman body of the monster is represented as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite human. The haunting, or horror, that gets associated with the monster, stems from a narrative of the ‘Other’ — the construction of an identity through difference. The concept of otherness initiates a dialogue of anomaly, of deviance that structures concrete categorical divides in creating a hierarchical scale of the ideal subject of society as opposed to the corrupt or the monstrous. The questions of construction and perception of the body invites the notions of acceptance and recognition or rejection. To put it in the words of Kim Toffoletti, “the posthuman emerges as ‘something else’ that cannot be indexically connected to real life” (Toffoletti, 32). To understand this argument, it becomes necessary to investigate the means and

Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee

153

methods of alienating or incorporating the body as a unit into the existing narrative of the hierarchy of various life forms. Reflecting on the character of the Hulk, which was co-created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and appeared in the May 1962 movie, The Incredible Hulk as a seven-foot tall, green-skinned human ‘mutate’, a comparative study of the acceptance or abhorrence of the posthuman bodies of Frankenstein’s monster and the Hulk could enrich the understanding of the notions of the grotesque and the desirable. The Hulk embodies in itself the discourses of the perfect body, and the cosmic body — ushered in by the fantasy of the physical culture movement. The emergence of modernity is founded on the principles of efficiency, productivity, rationality, and endurance — all of which is demonstrated by the Hulk, apart from rational thinking, the void of which is filled by its human counterpart, Dr Bruce Banner. The Hulk, having fulfilled the expectations of amusement derived from displays of unusual human bodies catering to a mass market, is biologically and socially conceptualised, not as monster or freak but as superhuman, superhero, the perfect body, or as a ‘super soldier’. On the other hand, the concept of ‘the cosmic body’ directs its emphasis on moving away from technology and towards nature. Scott Jeffery defines the cosmic body of the posthuman subject as “not a matter of crude technological enhancement so much as realizing latent human potential” (Jeffery, 139). The superpower of the Hulk is nothing more than a magnification of general human attributes of strength, rage, emotions, courage, and the like. The Hulk delineates the countercultural concept of posthumanism, wherein science and technology does not lead to mechanisation or rationalisation, but advances on trigger-impulses and bestiality. The framework of the body of Frankenstein’s monster is an in-between — neither organism nor machine - which makes it problematic for the reader/audience to create a definite narrative around it, while the Hulk, even in its otherised physical form, is available for appropriation - be it through Natasha’s lullabies, or through Iron Man’s containment device called the Hulkbuster. This paper is striving to point out the fact that both the posthuman bodies of Frankenstein’s monster and the Hulk are portrayed as bodily forms of the grotesque, while only one body — that of the Hulk — readily acquires acceptance into the narrative of a desirable form of the posthuman body, while the other receives ready disdain. Investigating the complex structures of acceptance and abhorrence, and the possible reasons behind the rejection of a particular life form, there arises the need to carefully segregate the forms of existing representations of said bodies. The corruption of Dr Bruce Banner’s human form was not a result of conscious external experimentation or manipulation like that of Victor

154

Posthuman Bodies

Frankenstein’s monster. The exposure of Dr Banner’s physical form to a high concentration of gamma radiation in the process of conducting an underground detonation of the ‘gamma bomb’ was an unfortunate accident that triggered an unpleasant tampering of his body, transforming his human form into a posthuman condition. While discussing how to quantify and qualify artificial and animal bodies, Jeffery argues that the artificial body is humanised by mimicking human morphology. Considering this statement as the rudimentary line of difference in understanding the method of representation of the grotesque and the desirable posthuman body, it becomes evident as to how the body of Victor Frankenstein’s monster is a construction, a forced structuring in the like of the human form, an assemblage of non-living matter. The monster, having recognised his artificial bodily form pieced together, tries to humanise himself by mimicking human language and culture. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, the Hulk is not a patchwork, but an organic whole. The metamorphosis from man to monster, and back again to man, excludes the irreversible aspect of bodily modification, thereby setting safe ground for establishing control over the posthuman body. The character of the Hulk retains a capacity to connect with other human beings at the level of the physical form which eliminates the aspect of hostility between the cosmic body of Bruce Banner and the normal body of another human being. Frankenstein’s monster then becomes the manifestation of a wrong experiment, or bad art. The monster of Frankenstein thus represents the mechanical, as opposed to the monster of Banner representing the spontaneous. The hierarchical binary opposition prevailing between human and animal that Western humanism is obsessed with generates questions on whether the ‘human’ exerts its authority to monitor, regulate, and control the various forms of the ‘Other’, and how receptive of such containment is a post-human body. In Avengers: Endgame, the Hulk modifies its form by reducing itself to a stature of the ‘in-between’, which is larger than the physical form of Dr Bruce Banner, and smaller than that of the monster. This strategic appropriation creates a space of relativisation in the body of the Hulk, wherein humans perceive the posthuman body as a safe and accessible site for interaction. Mapping this process of conscious modification locates the figure of the Hulk in the discourse of the trans-human by branching out from the mainstream narrative of the post-human, whereby the intellect, or the aspect of the rationale, of Dr Banner is incorporated into the mindless animalistic rage of the Hulk. Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, does not embody the reversible process of retaining the human form, and is therefore rejected for the nomination of viable forms of the posthuman body. Wolfe, in response to Donna Haraway’s concept of the

Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee

155

‘companion species’, (Haraway, “Companion Species Manifesto”) formulates an argument which emerges as a pointer to how the posthuman body is more of a flexible framework of ‘becoming with’ than a rigid category of ‘apart from’. The otherization of the bestial bodies is very different in the cases of Frankenstein’s monster and the fictional superhero, Hulk. While the monster of Frankenstein represents a fantasmatic relation with society wherein it is perceived as an exotic object of titillation, superhero Hulk shares an ‘oedipalized’ (Braidotti, 68) interaction with human beings wherein a secular space is constructed for a harmonious human-animal interaction and co-existence. It becomes imperative to draw an allusion to the idea of how “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” (Orwell, 90). The character of Hulk from the Marvel universe enjoys the privilege of sharing a territory or environment with Man, due to the embodiment of a structural fluidity between Dr Bruce Banner and his mutate counterpart. The understanding of the body of Dr Banner can then be analysed as the body of a shape shifter, which enhances “the potentiality of the posthuman organism as a generative wetware”. Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, becomes symbolic of “the gross system that used to mark difference on the basis of visually verifiable anatomical differences between the […] species” (Braidotti, 96, 97), and simply translates itself into a superhuman body, as opposed to a superhero body. In the process of detangling the quagmire of acceptable nonhuman, or semi-human, life forms, it becomes crucial to engage with an empirical category of historical sociology, and the gradual transition from rigidly demarcated inter-species boundaries to a more flexible metaphysics of inter-species negotiations. This paper has tried to trace the perpetual disintegration of the category of Man, and locate a renewal, or rather redemption, through the construct of a techno-medical category of super organisms. In the attempt to locate the technologizing of bodies, Frankenstein’s monster, in all its advancements to withstand and endure climactic calamities and socio-biological crises, sketches a narrative of a malicious mutilation of the supreme human figure, and despite its attempts at symbio-genesis, materialises ultimately as an alien figure. Dr Bruce Banner's rogue animalistic counterpart however, surfaces as a superhero despite all its mindless bestial rage, and is hailed by the Avengers superhero team as a necessary nemesis to protect society from otherworldly alien invasions. Drawing on Freud’s contemplation on the experimental metamorphosis of Man, it becomes essential to seat the arguments of acceptability and the exclusivity of the politics of life itself. Freud notes:

156

Posthuman Bodies

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times (Freud, 43). The character of the Hulk, which this paper has established as comparatively more well-received than that of Frankenstein’s monster, also undergoes processes of moderation instead of multiplication. It then becomes imperative to engage with the dialectics of post-anthropocentrism, and whether the introduction of posthuman bodies within the cultural paradigms of society stands as a viable option for deterritorialising or concretising differences, at all.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press, 2004. Avengers: Endgame. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, performance by Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Studios, 2019. Badmington, Neil. “Posthumanism” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science. Edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, Routledge, 2010, 374-84. Bollinger, Laurel. “Symbiogenesis, Selfhood, and Science Fiction” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, 34-53. www.jstor.org/stable/40649584 Calvin, William H. A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2004. Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. Fordham UP, 2008. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind. Oxford University Press, 2004. Foucault, Michael. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge Classics, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Norton, 1961. Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Garreau, Joel. “Transcend” Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human. Doubleday, 2005, 250-90. Graham, Elaine L. “Frankensteins and Cyborgs: Visions of the Global Future in an Age of Technology” Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 16, no. 1, Apr. 2003, 29–43. doi.org/10.1177/095394680301600103

Chandrima Pramanick and Indranil Banerjee

157

Hall, Stephen S. Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension. Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. 149-82. —. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. —. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Havel, Václav. "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World" 1994. www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hollinger, Veronica. "Posthumanism And Cyborg Theory" The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould et al., Routledge, London, 2009, 262-74. Jeffery, Scott. “Animal Bodies and Artificial Bodies” The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 137-54. Jones, Gerard. “Men of Tomorrow” The Superhero Reader. Edited by Hatfield Charles, Heer Jeet, and Worcester Kent, University Press of Mississippi, 2013, 16-22. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005. Minsky, Marvin. The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster, 1986. Moss, Pamela. “A Bodily Notion of Research: Power, Difference, and Specificity in Feminist Methodology” A Companion to Feminist Geography. Ed. Lise Nelson and Joni Seaver, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 41-59. Murphy, Michael. The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Future Evolution of Human Nature. J.P. Tarcher, 1992. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Penguin Books, 2011. Rajan, Kaushik Sundar. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Duke University Press, 2006. doi.org/10.1215/978082238800 Roberts, Adam Charles. Science Fiction. Routledge, 2000. Russell, Bertrand. Icarus; or, the Future of Science. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1924. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Washington Square Press, 1993.

158

Posthuman Bodies

Schwab, Gabriele. “Cyborgs. Postmodern Phantasms of Body and Mind” Discourse 9 (1987): 64-84. www.jstor.org/stable/41389089 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. Oxford University Press, 1998. Sherryl, Vint. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2007. Stock, Gregory. Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. Simon & Schuster, 1993. Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Knopf, 1996. —. Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity. Knopf, 2003. The Incredible Hulk. Directed by Louis Leterrier, written by Zak Penn, performance by Edward Norton, Marvel Studios and Valhalla Motion Pictures, 2008. Toffoletti, Kim. “Ways of Looking and Ways of Being” Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body. I.B. Taurus, 2007. Weight, Andrew J., J. Smith Teitge, and Dennis W. Teitge. “Extending Identity Theory beyond Bodies: Prenatal and Postmortem Identities” Society and Identity: Toward a Sociological Psychology, Cambridge University Press, 1986, 92-114. doi.org/10.1017/CB09780511720215.007 Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010. —. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Wright, Robert. Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon Books, 2000. —. The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. Pantheon Books, 1994.

“LORD HAVE MERCY UPON US”: THE ADVENT OF THE POSTHUMAN IN ENGLISH PLAGUE NARRATIVES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY M.D. MAHASWETA

From 1720 to 1722, the French city of Marseille witnessed a deadly outbreak of the bubonic plague, which laid waste to its population. Across the sea in England, writers churned out text after text, and treatises, both fictive and medical, which revolved around this lethal ‘distemper’ looming ominously in the background. Daniel Defoe’s 1722 work of creative nonfiction, The Journal of the Plague Year, is one of the key texts produced during this historical juncture. Recounting in excruciating detail the trajectory, the impact, and the horrors, of the Great Plague of London in 1665, this book presents a stark contrast to Defoe’s better-known novel, Robinson Crusoe. David Roberts writes, in his introduction to The Journal, “Where Crusoe articulates a ‘foundation myth’ that shows Western Man asserting his autonomy and dominance as if from scratch, the Journal charts his encounter with a phenomenon he cannot understand or control” (1). By focusing on the confusion, the ineptitude and the helplessness of the human subject in the face of an all-pervasive epidemic, The Journal displays a markedly posthumanist stance. This is reflected not only in its choice of theme, but also in its multifaceted portrayal of human beings, be it in the form of bodies, healthy, diseased or dead, or in its faithful reproduction of statistics taken from the Bills of Mortality from 1665. As it happens, this is not an isolated case. We see a similar reappraisal of the autonomous human subject in other plague treatises of the time, including Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseille Consider’d (1721). Bruce Clarke writes, “[…] a posthuman event names some transformative outcome that, once followed, is now following, or will at some point follow, from the human” (Clarke, 141). In my interpretation, this posthuman event encompasses a transgressive metamorphosis that exceeds

160

“Lord Have Mercy upon Us”

the limits of what can be dubbed human. What form does this metamorphosis take in these plague narratives?

The Gifts of the Plague: Posthuman Bodies One way in which the texts manifest their posthuman tendencies is through their compulsive focus on the human body. The sheer physicality of illness reduces the human to a mere body and nothing more. Take, for instance, this graphic description of the bodily symptoms of the plague from Richard Bradley’s The Plague at Marseille Consider’d, …it breaks out in Carbuncles, Buboes, livid Blisters, and purple Spots; the first Symptoms are grievous Pains in the Head, Consternations, wild Looks, a trembling Voice, a cadaverous Face, a Coldness in all the extreme Parts, a low unequal Pulse, great Pains in the Stomach, Reachings to Vomit, and these are follow’d by Sleepiness, Deliriums, Convulsions, or Fluxes of Blood, the Forerunners of sudden Death. In the Bodies that are open’d, we find gangrenous Inflammations in all the lower Parts of the Belly, Breast and Neck (Bradley, vi).

This passage reimagines the human body in terms of an assemblage of parts, as it were, instead of a cogent whole. Also, it is no regular human body. It is presented as a rich assemblage informed by the profusion of tokens of the plague. In a sense, it is a new body produced by the disease. The epidemic, despite being regarded as the bringer of destruction, can thus be seen to possess generative properties in that it produces these new bodies. They are the result of an uneasy symbiotic coupling of the human body and a nonhuman intruder. Both Defoe and Bradley mention “effluvia”, which, upon contact with the body, set into motion a process of metamorphosis induced by infection, which, in turn, changes the human body completely. The language employed by the writers is extremely descriptive, and the accumulation of epithets corresponds with a steady accumulation of symptoms, both inside, and on the surface of the body, rendering it unrecognizable. In a grotesque way, this vastly transformed body in a diseased state is also a thing of beauty, adorned by gangrenes, blisters, and spots, which could very well be likened to ornaments. This can thus be seen as an explicit instance of the creative properties of the epidemic. The bodies produced thereby are definitively posthuman, as they succeed the human chronologically, intervening between life and death, as it were. However, more significantly, with their elaborate ‘tokens’ - the swellings, the dark patches, the suppurations and such others - these bodies tower above ‘human’ bodies. They seem to be more elaborate, more complex, and in a

M.D. Mahasweta

161

way, threatening, in the imagination of the writers of the time, succeeding the human in the epistemological scheme of things as well. Defoe’s novel provides multiple instances of such transformed, posthuman bodies. These are bodies which destroy themselves when the pain is too much, by shooting or setting fire to themselves. He writes, “Others, unable to contain themselves, vented their pain by incessant roarings, and such loud and lamentable cries were to be heard as we walked along the streets” (Defoe, 66). These posthuman bodies are also rabid bodies which are unnaturally bent on infecting the ‘sound’ people in the streets. Take, for instance, the story of a drunken madman with the plague who forces a kiss on a poor gentlewoman walking in the street. He thereby infects her out of what would appear to be a ‘non-human’ malice (Defoe, 137). Or another man who, after the death of his relations, was so sad that “[…] his head sank into his body, so between his shoulders that the crown of his head was very little seen above the bone of his shoulders; and by degrees losing both voice and sense, his face, looking forward, lay against his collarbone and could not be kept up any otherwise, unless held up by the hands of other people” (Defoe, 103). These are all narratives of changing bodies, of new bodies produced, directly or indirectly, by the plague. As such, these could all be compared to unnatural births which do not result from sexual reproduction. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, while elaborating on the idea of the ‘becoming-animal,’ refer to alternative modes of propagation, aside from that by sexual reproduction. They try to envision a multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor. They write, We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself […]. Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other (Deleuze and Guattari, 241).

Thus, the transformation of the human body and the creation of these new, posthuman, bodies are facilitated by a variety of ‘reproduction by contagion’ methods. As such, these could be related to the notion of ‘becoming-animal’, and, thus, can be said to be affected by alliance rather than filiation, and symbiosis, rather than reproduction. In Bradley’s account, the effluvium draws insects into the human body, where they make their nests, and set the plague into motion (18). This symbiotic, non-reproductive alliance gives rise to the diseased, posthuman, body which can further infect other bodies in its capacity as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the anomaly’. The anomalous is the element of the singular in the proliferating multiplicities

162

“Lord Have Mercy upon Us”

of becoming-animal. Deleuze and Guattari write, “The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species […]”. The anomaly also functions as a borderline, and thereby maintains the stability of the multiplicity by defining its extent (Deleuze, 244). In this context, the infecting bodies occupy the position of the anomaly. By positioning themselves close to the ‘sound’ population, they become the periphery of the multiplicity. In A Thousand Plateaus, this is related to the figure of the demon. Deleuze and Guattari write, “[…] the demon functions as the borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes, or in which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion […]” (247). This is precisely the position occupied by the diseased bodies in the texts under consideration. In Defoe, the transformed bodies constituting the anomalous function as multiplicities. Deleuze and Guattari write, “A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (Deleuze, 239). Defoe points at a similar tendency of diseased bodies to form packs or throngs. In A Journal of the Plague Year, he writes, “Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley, most of them women, making a dreadful clamour, mixed or compounded of screeches, cryings, and calling one another […]” (Defoe, 152). However, these infected, infecting, bodies, by acting as the borderline between multiplicities, also retain a certain singularity. They are, as Deleuze and Guattari have specified, both singular and plural. In Defoe too, this liminal status of the plague-ridden body as both singular and plural is eloquently conveyed. Consider, for instance, this description of a mass of bodies to be buried and the pit to which they were taken: “The cart had in it sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite naked among the rest […] and were to be huddled together into the common grave of mankind […]” (Defoe 55). This is a very clever description, inasmuch as the bodies, despite being huddled together in something of a lump, are picked apart verbally, as it were, by the narrator, rendering them into individual entities who simultaneously form a collectivity. In another instance, a character called Piper, a poor man who falls asleep on the road after a heavy meal is mistaken for a corpse, loaded onto a cart for corpses, and subsequently almost dropped into one of the pits where dead bodies were disposed of during the epidemic. However, fortunately, he wakes up and jumps out of the cart saying, “But I an't dead though, am I?” (Defoe, 79). In essence, he acts as a singularity wrenching itself out of an undifferentiated multiplicity, an anomaly in the becoming-animal of diseased human bodies.

M.D. Mahasweta

163

However, are these the only form of bodies facilitated by the plague? There are other bodies which team up with inanimate objects in order to ward off the infection. For instance, in the butchers’ shops, ‘[…] the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose.’ Those who ventured outside always “[…] carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hands, and all the means that could be used were used” (Defoe, 68). Or, for instance, the country people who “[…] would go and dig a hole at a distance from them [the corpses], and then with long poles, and hooks at the end of them, drag the bodies into these pits, and then throw the earth in from as far as they could cast it […]” (Defoe, 57). Here, we can see the bodies of the ‘sound’ combining with inanimate objects to avert the lethal touch of the infected bodies. Donna Haraway, in A Cyborg Manifesto, describes the cyborg as untethered, “a man in space” (152). This latter class of composite bodies endeavours to achieve the same ‘untied’ state, to maintain their distance from the composite bodies deployed by the plague. Thus, they can be likened to cyborgs, and as such, they pit themselves against, however insufficiently, the multiplicities of diseased bodies which attempt to assimilate them, and thereby bring them into the fold.

Networks and Multiplicities Closely related to these multiplicities are networks. In the texts under consideration, we see a proliferation of unintentional and undesirable networks, be it through the connected houses through which infected people escape quarantine, or the subtly connected bodies which pass each other in the streets innocuously enough, but pass on the infection unbeknownst even to themselves. Defoe writes, …the danger was spreading insensibly, for the sick could infect none but those that came within reach of the sick person; but that one man who may have really received the infection and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give the plague to a thousand people, and they to greater numbers in proportion, and neither the person giving the infection or the persons receiving it know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of it for several days after (167).

Thus, the infection spread through casual contact in the streets, and the contagion expanded in geometric progression, all because of these insidious networks of bodies. It blossomed, despite the efforts of the city authorities to put a check on the proliferation of diseased bodies. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write of ‘packs,’ or ‘multiplicities,’ which “[…] continually

164

“Lord Have Mercy upon Us”

transform themselves into each other, cross over into each other”. Similarly, these networks of bodies merged with each other continually, spreading the infection into networks of ‘sound’ bodies. As such, these networks could also be related to these notions of multiplicities. For Deleuze and Guattari, “[…] each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors” (249). It is noteworthy that the word used here is ‘door’, which is also the egress from infected houses via which diseased bodies fled into the streets and formed unregulated pathological networks. These thresholds were where the city authorities positioned the guards, in order to check the proliferation of multiplicities, of what Kari Nixon calls “communities of contagion” in Defoe’s novel (66). Where their attempts to secure these thresholds were successful, the plague abated to some extent. Defoe writes, “[…] upon strict guarding the houses that were infected, and taking care to bury those that died immediately after they were known to be dead, the plague ceased in those streets” (33). These were all partially successful attempts to break off these circuits of contagion. Their success was partial, because the epidemic continued to spread through apparently inexplicable connections. These undesirable, and often unintentional, networks have a more serious implication. The infection spreads without any human agency in cases like this, and the networks form on their own. The human body, in such cases, is reduced to nothing more than a node through which the infection passes. Nixon writes about a young woman in Defoe’s novel who discovers that her child has the ‘tokens’ of the plague. She subsequently realizes that the disease crosses all borders that were previously thought unbreachable, she finally understands that “[...] she has always been more enmeshed in the messy amalgam of humanity than she had previously dared to believe Disease has rendered her, as it threatens to render each of us, without borders, defenseless and prone” (64). Borderless, helpless, leaky, and almost passive, the human, in its sheer physicality, has dissolved in a soup of contagion which ceaselessly permeates it. This significant lack of agency on the part of the human being is quintessentially posthumanist, in my analysis. However, Nixon’s argument about the mesh of humanity can be problematized further. The networks delineated in the texts under consideration are constituted not just by human bodies, but also of animals (like the cats and dogs that are killed off by order of the city authorities) and inanimate objects like the “parcel of silks imported from Holland” that supposedly brought the plague to England, or the “bedding and apparel and

M.D. Mahasweta

165

hangings of chambers” of the plague victims (Defoe, 174, 36). This mesh, as it were, of the human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate, forms a complex matrix of connections which can be compared to what Stacy Alaimo describes as, “landscapes of interacting biological, climatic, economic, and political forces” which are ultimately “unmappable” (Alaimo, 2). As if as an illustration of these unmappable but intersecting landscapes, Richard Bradley traces the origin of the disease, “[…] all Pestilential Distempers, whether in Animals or Plants, are occasion’d by poisonous Insects convey’d from Place to Place by the Air, and that by uncleanly Living and poor Diet, Humane and other Bodies are disposed to receive such Insects into the Stomach and most noble Parts” (47). Not only that, in his text, he even relates the spread of contagion to the ripening of fruits, as well as the heat of the summer (Bradley, 17). This is in keeping with Alaimo’s idea of ‘trans-corporeality’. In her book, Bodily Natures, Alaimo uses this idea to encapsulate an attempt to reimagine human corporeality in a radically new way, in that “[…] the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlining the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (2). Epidemics, or, to be more specific, the explanations thereof offered in the texts, exemplify this notion of trans-corporeality, as we are presented with an extremely complex model combining a host of factors, including the environmental, social, and biological, and the human, though the protagonist of their own prognosis, is reduced to a minuscule within this model; just another factor among many others. This forcibly reminds the human subject of their ultimate positionality within this unmappable matrix of dangerously intersecting landscapes, combining elements which are both human and non-human, animate and inanimate. In a similar vein, perhaps, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston write, in their introduction to Posthuman Bodies, “Posthuman bodies […] emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of bodies, intersect, to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage, between sender/receiver, between channel, code, message, context” (2). In the narratives under consideration, we witness such conflations as the plague becomes the protagonist and the bodies passive entities, mere nodes for the propagation of the disease. In Alaimo’s words, this change in perspective “[…] marks a profound shift in subjectivity” (20). It dislocates the human from their supposed position of centrality as a transcendental entity, the protagonist of the Enlightenment.

166

“Lord Have Mercy upon Us”

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010. Bradley, Richard. The Plague in Marseilles Consider’d. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31807/31807-h/31807-h.htm Clarke, Bruce and Manuela Rossini, (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Everyman, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston, (eds.) Posthuman Bodies. Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. Nixon, Kari. “Keep Bleeding: Hemorrhagic Sores, Trade, and the Necessity of Leaky Boundaries in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, 62-81. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/jearlmodcultstud.14.2.62 Roberts, David. “Introduction” A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe, Oxford University Press, 2010.

DIALOGUE ON POSTHUMAN LIFE, DEATH AND COVID-19 FRANCESCA FERRANDO AND ASIJIT DUTTA

Abbreviations FF: Francesca Ferrando AD: Asijit Datta AD: Good evening Dr. Ferrando, and Happy Environment Day. I think we have chosen an appropriate date for this event. What I want to begin with, is where do you place disease in the immediacy of the Anthropocene epoch? How important is disease in this epoch? FF: Thank you for this question. You’re right, what we are experiencing is part of a process that can, and should, be definitely located in a wider picture. The wider picture, in geological terms, can be defined as the Anthropocene — the era in which humans are recognized not only as part of the whole picture, but more importantly as a geological force, as a species that has a direct impact on many other species on planet Earth. For instance, we are at the moment in a sixth mass extinction, where thousands of species become extinct every year because of human action. It’s very important to locate the conditions that we are experiencing with COVID-19. This is not the only challenge we are going to face. There is a lot going on, and we can no longer see humans as victims of diseases, or of other species, or of the grandiose energy of planet Earth. We are part of this, and a lot of diseases that we are seeing — a lot of the viruses that we are experiencing in the 21st century — are connected directly to human actions in relation to non-human species and non-human animals. One of the most reputable theories about COVID-19 is precisely connected to the wet market. There are other theories out there, but this is just one of many other viruses that were introduced to the human species because of human behavior. So, I think, as you mentioned, it’s very important to really locate these crises in their global terms, and in relation to the Anthropocene, because if we do not, we are just going to see more crises, not only related to viruses and diseases, but also

168

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

to climate change; hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. In this sense, posthumanism really comes along as a philosophy that is not just something you write about, or study in academia. It is absolutely fundamental to see these crises not as the exception of a flourishing 21st century, full of technological hope, which is sometimes the type of narrative that we find in transhumanism, but as one of the marks of the Anthropocene era. We are playing a key role in the development of outcomes resulting from human interactions with non-human others in the biosphere, in ways that have to be readdressed. I think there is a lot of trauma and tragedy coming with COVID-19, but there is also an existential element, pushing us to face who we are, not only on an individual level, but also on a species level. When this started to happen, I really had to do that. I did a lot of meditation, and really had to stop and silence myself, realizing that we were getting into a schizophrenic society where there was never enough — not enough work, jobs, trips, journeys, conferences. Nothing was enough. We were in this race against death but eventually we are all going to die anyway, apart from COVID-19. This crisis that we are facing is also an existential awakening, and we really need to reconsider not only our individual location, but also our role as a species. Beyond boundaries and nations, as a species, what are we doing here? This is a fundamental, political, philosophical, ethical, and existential, question. AD: Thank you for your response, Dr. Ferrando. Now that you’ve mentioned the Chinese open market, and since the virus has come from the animals, do you think that respecting the space between ourselves and non-human others is perhaps the only solution now? You are related, and, therefore, you leave them alone, whereas posthumanism always tells us to include. Do you think respecting distance, and leaving them as they are, is perhaps the better solution? FF: That’s a wonderful question. I have to say yes. I think that, as a species, we need to think of ourselves in relation to the planet. We need to see how much land we have taken, how many trees we have cut, how many species are becoming extinct because of our actions. We need to realise how much more we need, because it is never enough. We can cut all the trees of the world, and kill all non-human life, to find that we can no longer survive on this planet as a species. The other species are allowing us to survive. The trees give us oxygen. The bees pollinate the plants. That’s why we’re alive, and can breathe, and eat, and be healthy. At this point, we need to think of posthumanism in design terms — in engineering, architectural, and technological, terms. I think we have taken enough land and polluted

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

169

enough spaces. I think at this point, we can go to the places that have been polluted due to human actions, and bring them back to liveable conditions. But I absolutely think the places we have not touched yet should be considered as World Parks and National Parks — no humans, just space for other species’. This is a good balance for the human as well. I get more and more cynical when I see people trying to create an ‘ecological community’ and then go into wild areas and cut down more trees for more buildings. Enough! If we want to build an ecological community, let’s go to a place that has already been polluted by human action, and cleanse that area. For instance, there have been a lot of studies done on this, by engineers, trying to discover how to create an ecological balance in places that have been contaminated by humans, because we have been the ones polluting the planet the most in the last few centuries. This is not just an ethical stand, but a political one. We need governments to understand that we cannot allow trees to be cut down anymore, and that development at this point means ecological balance. For me, this is fundamental. We will begin to realise how much damage we are doing, not only to others, but to ourselves. At the core of the whole issue, we are not separated from others — we are related. For instance, like you mentioned, many of these diseases are coming from non-human animals, and this is because we have invaded their areas. We are eating them. We are killing them. We are torturing them. So, I think that a very important point that has to be understood with kindness, including by politicians, is that the best thing we can do at this point, if we are really talking about development, is to not allow more areas to be cut down and developed, which would just be an ecological tragedy. Tacitus, who was a historian in Ancient Rome, used to say “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”, which means, “Where they create a desert, they call it peace”. And he was talking about humans — Romans, specifically — who were going around killing others in the name of ‘peace’. That was not peace, they were just massacring others. But now we can use this idea for non-human others as well. Development can no longer be thought of as going into an area that is thriving with non-human life, killing all the animals, destroying their habitats, and developing buildings for humans when we have a lot of space that we can restore. Of course, there are humans who still need houses, and that is very important to keep in mind. In Italy, for instance there are beautiful, vacant areas that have been dismissed because people want to go and live in the cities. Now that might change due to COVID-19. But a lot of beautiful little towns, all made of stone and ancient materials, are completely abandoned. These places should be the center of our attention, not cutting down more trees, using up more land, and destroying more ecological resources that are also our resources. The ‘selfish’ nature of humans can

170

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

actually be of help in making the change. Ecological imbalance is highly detrimental for us. Think of the high rates of cancer. When I was a child, if someone had cancer, it was a tragedy. Now, it’s so not unusual for people to have cancer. This ecological devastation is also affecting human health. Think of skin cancer, for instance, which is often the result of changes in global climate. Going back to your question, I think you are absolutely right. This is a serious issue, not just something we can theorize about. That’s why this is a wakeup call for all of us at this point. Academics cannot just write about this. We need to bring this awareness to the public, and do that with kindness, not with anger. I don’t believe in anger as an effective tool; in fact, it may work in the short term, but in the long run its damaging effects are going to bring even more devastation. In this regard, I think that India as a nation brought so much insight to this world, embracing the Gandhian satyagraha movement. The fact that India won independence from England in a peaceful and non-violent way is a great lesson for all of us, and to all humans who are going to come into this world. So, I’m not talking about anger, but we have to be very clear about these things because it is not just something we are writing about. This has to do with our life, our existence, and our Earth. So, thank you for this question. AD: Thank you for your response. (For those of you who do not know, Dr. Ferrando has written a brilliant book you should read, called Philosophical Posthumanism (Bloomsbury 2010)). In it, there is a fascinating portion where you write about genetic mutation in human beings over the ages due to consumption of non-human milk, which of course led to domestication of animals and dairy farming. Do you feel the same way about meat consumption? Where do we draw the line then? Excessive animal consumption is, perhaps, responsible for the COVID-19 disaster, and one of the highly affected zones in the US has been the meatpacking factories. So, do you feel that, as with the case of milk, we are also manipulated by meat consumption? FF: My first reaction to your question would be absolutely yes, but maybe I should not say ‘absolutely’. I have been a vegetarian for ethical reasons since I was a teenager; I started around the age of twelve, and then at fifteen, I fully adopted vegetarianism. A lot of people in the posthuman community are not vegetarians. I have been thinking about this question, in relation to rights for non-humans. If you are talking about non-human animals as persons, how could anyone eat a piece of steak or meat at a restaurant after a conference on ecological crises, without seeing the ethical conflict? That is a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time because I could not see

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

171

how people could write about non-human persons, and then go to the nearby restaurant and order meat for everyone. So, I came to this understanding of the movement, and also of my location in this: Posthumanism, as a philosophy, can be addressed in many different ways. Before we delve into this point, let's take a step back and ask the question: what is philosophy? When you look at Indian philosophy, for instance, you are looking at many traditions focusing on the question: “who am I”? In the process of getting to understand existence, you realize that you are not separated, but are part of the divine. This was also the case in many other traditions. In Ancient Greece, for instance, philosophy often did not just involve teaching your students. It was certainly about what you could become, because philosophy would change the way you exist. Philosophy itself is a Greek notion which means “the love for wisdom”, or as some people prefer to say, “the wisdom of love”. We are thinking about something that should not just be a job. Eventually, philosophy became something that is taught, which is great; it became a part of academic tradition, which is also great, but, in that, it also became something that can just be taught. So, you can be a philosopher and just teach philosophy, but not apply those principles to your own life. In that sense, I would say that within the posthumanist community, some people have taken philosophy and posthumanism more as something that they teach, write, and think about, but it is not something that necessarily changes their lives. I am of another school of thought, according to which posthumanism is changing our life; it is an existential approach — existential posthumanism. And in that sense, it allows you to ask questions about your daily routine. What about the food you eat? What about the thoughts you have? What about your interactions with others? In that sense, I think meat consumption should of course be addressed by the posthumanist community. First of all, is it ethical? Of course, some people have particular reasons for eating meat (some may have specific needs; some may be starving, I’m not talking about exceptions). But in general, if you could eat any other source of protein that does not involve killing some type of life, would you, or should you, still do it? My answer to this question is no. I think that posthumanists should really reconsider their diet. One of the causes of ecological dearth, especially in the Amazon, for instance, is cutting down a lot of trees for McDonald’s, to lay pastures for cows that will eventually be slaughtered and eaten in very unhealthy ways. So, I think that this question is at the core of our discussion. But again, I would also like to clarify that I’m not generalising my stand on posthumanism for everyone. I know that for some people, posthumanism is just something that they enjoy intellectually, but that is not the case for me. I think that my intellect, if separated from the way I live, is not very helpful, because when

172

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

I die, this change would not have been applied to my being or existence. So, in that sense, I reached the conclusion through years of reflecting that posthumanism is a way of existing. But, again, just to clarify, not everyone in the posthumanist community thinks this way, and this is fine! I love plurality and diversity; I love plurilogues even more than dialogues, and this is why I would also like to recognise all these other positions. But I also have to be respectfully loyal to what I stand for, and from my perspective, at this point, posthumanism is not just something that you write about: it has to change your life, especially now with COVID-19 and all the crises that we are facing as a human species. We as academics have to turn into butterflies, into public intellectuals. We need to understand what is happening. It is not enough anymore to just write academic papers. This is what I feel, and I have to be loyal to my existential understanding. AD: Thank you Professor Ferrando. You also mentioned in your book the compulsive separation between humans and non-human animals. To me, the animalization of humans, inducing the non-human within humans, is another sort of disease. I am using disease in its verb form here. This compulsory separation from non-human others, and the human others prescribed by the humanizing process, is uncannily too explicit now, due to the Corona virus. Especially in a country like India, we suddenly find the ‘animalized’ others as migrant labourers out on the streets. They are returning home because there is not enough care where they used to work, and the government there is asking them to return home. On the other hand, those living where they are going refuse to acknowledge their existence. Sight itself has become a problem, as if the animal is suddenly out of the zoo. And one asks oneself, “Is it because of ‘them’ that we have the virus?” Is this an example of the classic instance of demonization and diseasing, that we always use the virus as a sort of modus operandi, as a sort of operating factor for dominating the other? FF: Thank you for asking this excellent question. I am going to address this topic in a wide frame because we need to think about this deeply and in great detail. When we talk about posthumanism, I eventually had to come to a clear understanding about what, exactly, it was. On the one side, we have transhumanism, a different movement, which explicitly wants human enhancement. Being in this field for a long time, I started to notice that people knew what transhumanism was about, but when you talked about posthumanism, there was a lot of confusion. What is posthumanism? Why is it relevant? What do people want? We eventually came up with three clear layers that will answer your question. The first one is post-humanism, which

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

173

denotes a real, sincere understanding and acknowledgement of humanity as a plurality. The human is not a singular notion that can be concentrated or clarified as one specific type of human, which, historically — if you think of the history of sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, colonialism — has been white, male, Western, Northern, European, etc. In that sense, through this first layer, we understand that the human, as a category, has never been one. The ‘human’ can be seen as a process of humanization, and in this process, some humans have not been considered human at all. There are many cases involving different types of crises — economic, biological, ecological, or disease-related — where you immediately see a long, ancient tradition of racism, ethnocentrism, and classism coming in, and this trend is global. The ‘foreign’ becomes the evil one. The one that is not directly connected to you becomes the issue, or the scapegoat; the cause of the problem. And this is not just in India, this is everywhere: in Italy, Italians with non-Italians; Europeans with Italians; in the United States, with people from Asia, for instance. Wherever you are not the norm, you become someone who becomes the scapegoat. I have seen this globally with COVID-19, but this is something we have seen in history, over and over again. And I think this issue is very ancient. It can be traced to the beginning of cities, when people started to define themselves in relation to a stable group. In this sense, I really think that the problem is in the process of ‘humanizing’, and in teaching humans to identify in strict categories. As a young child you don’t have an identity, you are everything. You ask a young child what they want, this or that, they say both. They don’t know the answer to who they are, because they see themselves in everything. Then, especially through socialization and what we are taught in society, is when we learn to categorize ourselves very clearly. Are you a female, male, black, white, hetero, gay, Indian, non-Indian? All these dichotomic categories become something you need to embrace on some level, and choose from, or rather, accept. This is where deep work is to be done in philosophical and educational terms, where we teach young children from day one about their relation to diversity, which includes their own diversity. If you think of yourself when you were a young child, versus yourself now, you are different. There is also a relation between you and all the other humans out there. Your question is very important because it is addressing the very first layer of posthumanism. Some people like a more ‘exotic’ element of posthumanism. They jump to artificial intelligence and the non-human, without realising that there is no way you can jump to non-human diversity if you do not address human diversity first, and acknowledge diversity as a crucial aspect of evolution. This is an evolving species that is constantly changing. So, the first layer of posthumanism I would address is post-

174

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

humanism: viewing humanity as a plurality in which we understand that we are all different, and where we acknowledge diversity with a deep respect and understanding of the fact that we are part of this. And of course, it is deeper than that because if you think of perspectivism — your own location, the way you are looking at this screen right now — we are still in this together, but we are also different, as Rosi Braidotti often remarks. We are manifesting this moment with all these people with us right now. And everyone will have a different, but related, experience of this moment. So, in that sense, we need to address the human as a plural notion: humans. Only then can we address post-anthropocentrism. Enough of seeing the human as the most exceptional or the most intelligent. Enough of all these grand narratives implying that Anthropocentrism is fine. It is not. Human-centrism is as deleterious for humans as racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism. So, that’s the second layer. They are not in a hierarchical order, but they have to be present at the same time to really have a posthumanist approach. The third layer is post-dualism, on which India has much to teach, considering all the non-dualistic philosophies that have developed there. On one level, if you go beyond racism, ethnocentrism, classism, etc., and still keep a rigid dualistic approach in your mind (I am not referring to the fluid dualism of the Dao), then you are going to have the same issues. The future may involve AI (Artificial Intelligence) versus humans: you are always going to face these dualistic approaches. You need to build a core of how we teach humans to become humans. And I think identity has to be a reoriented vision. We can be Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or atheist — whatever it is — but we need to understand that these perspectives are part of a big picture. They can function as important sites of personal inspiration, but cannot be universalized: we need to consider them collectively as well, as specific perspectives in relation to other perspectives, enriching each other. In that sense, post-dualism is really important: not seeing the other as the enemy or as the absolute other; in fact, rigid dichotomies in human history often end in tragic ways, with systemic violence eventually escalating to genocide. Instead, we should learn, as members of the human species, to see the others as enriching our perspective, even if their views are radically different from ours. Through diversity, you can really expand and understand more deeply who you are, which is a rare ontological gift, since you are all the people, colours, genders, and nations, and all the diversity that is flourishing through the manifestation of existence. AD: Let us shift to technology for a bit. The way I understand posthumanism, it’s a very sensitive balance between technology and ethics. In transhumanism, technology seems to always come with ‘advancements’. Are the posthumanist

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

175

scholars also asking for a check on technological growth? History shows that ‘responsible’, or effective, use of technology is far too utopian. I understand interconnectedness, but hasn’t technology always been about extraction and appropriation rather than being cohabitational? How do you negotiate between bio-war and bioethics? FF: I mentioned that one way to make posthumanism clear was to focus on three important layers: post-humanism, post-anthropocentrism, and postdualism. I have also adopted another description that I use to make it more transparent, especially to those who don’t come from academia — and there is a lot of interest in this topic from everyone. Anyone, not solely intellectuals or scholars, might ask what posthumanism is. So, I also describe posthumanism as an open way to understand the human, in relation, for instance, to ecology and technology. On one side, we are relocating the human on planet Earth, as we mentioned in the first question. We are part of a species, a planet, and an era. On the other side, we are talking in material terms of the human in relation to technology. Of course, the question here is how you define technology, because some technologies have been used in human-centered or anthropocentric ways, often contributing to the devastation of ecological areas. In this sense, I would like to mention the brilliant philosopher, but rather immoral human being, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), according to whom technology (derived from the Greek term techne, and related to the two notions of episteme and poiesis) is “a way of revealing”. I would like to explore this notion in existential terms. I like to think of technology not just as our computers, cell phones, laptops etc., but really as anything that allows us to manifest existence in different ways. Some people even say that fire is technology, and, with fire, comes cooking. Cooking was at the core of the development of technology. In that sense, it depends on how you define technology. But I do not want to regard technology as something we are using, something akin to a tool, because as a tool, it only reflects human biases. We have already been behaving in anthropocentric ways, and technology is also often used in the same way. Now, if we do not see technology as a tool, but as a way of revealing, as a manifestation of existence — Brahman (taking from the Hindu tradition) — it becomes something that goes beyond the human, something we need to fully recognise, dignify, and acknowledge, with existential dignity. In this sense, I like to think of technology, including AI, as partaking in existential quests. I would also like to discuss eco-technology, because technology has to be thought of in ecological terms as well. Most laptops come with minerals extracted, for instance, from the Republic of Congo, and mined in rebel-controlled areas, causing destruction to human and non-human life, in

176

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

addition to natural resources. When we think of technology, I would not separate it from ecology, because all the material that we use to create technology comes from planet Earth. But I would also not define technology in separation from the human, not so much because it is a tool of the human, but because it is co-creating existence. Even the ways in which we think of ourselves in the 21st century differ from the ways people were thinking of themselves one hundred years ago. Many years ago, for instance, I tried a flying simulation in the online virtual world Second Life. This was very revealing because I was not physically flying, but nonetheless experienced something I had never experienced before — or perhaps, just in my dreams. This experience helps illustrate that consciousness — going back to the Hindu tradition — is not merely present when we are awake, but is related to all that we experience: in our physical realities, dreams, sleep states, and even in our virtual worlds. These are all going to become part of our consciousness. So, there is no way in which we can think of technology solely as a tool, because this tool is changing the existence of the world we see, the way we relate to existence, and the way existence itself is unfolding, because technology is a manifestation of Brahman, or existence. To conclude, technology can be used in anthropocentric ways, but that issue comes with the human perspective, the human habit of taking the anthropocentric worldview for granted. We need to reflect upon, and change, our habits of existence in order to see different ways in which we can embrace technology. But we need to acknowledge technology fully and existentially, not just as a tool, but as a way of manifestation that is changing the way we are existing. It is changing the ontological realm, the realm of being. AD: Since you mentioned the Brahman, let’s shift to spiritualism. You have mentioned that spiritualism, in a non-religious sense, can be used as resistance, in contexts where essentialism configures hierarchical categories. Are you proposing a broader culture of spiritualism to replace religion in our present times? Do you consider posthumanism to be a kind of spirituality which upholds the interrelation of inner and outer worlds? Also, do you assign a superior function to literature, or any of the arts, that can show collaboration with spiritualism and be used by posthumanism? FF: Thank you for another wonderful question. I have an article entitled “Humans Have Always Been Posthuman1 which explores a spiritual genealogy of the posthuman. I think there is a strong connection here, which 1

Banerji, D. / Paranjape, M.R. (eds.) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures: Springer 2016, p. 243-256.

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

177

we may, or may not, want to underline. The academic tradition regards spirituality with some uneasiness. The reason for this is that many people think of spirituality as a synonym for religion, and that is not correct. There is nothing wrong with religion, but they are two different things. If we look at the history of spirituality, which transcends any specific group, we find all kinds of human groups having spiritual experiences. If you look with this perspective, humans on such a level have always been posthuman because the spiritual approach is when you truly realise that there are no rigid dichotomies in existence. There may be some kind of dualism or duality; if you think of the Vedas or the Upanishads, for instance, duality is mentioned in a fluid-like form. But in most cases, you are thinking of a continuous evolution of diversity. Think of the biological realm itself, and how evolution works; we’re constantly changing. Evolution does not move towards complexity, but towards diversification. So, it’s not that we are getting better, we are just constantly diversifying because we are constantly adjusting to the environment, and the environment, in turn, is constantly adjusting to us. We are entangled, and partake in a fluid relation that makes us who we are. I do believe that spirituality brings a lot to the conversation, and this is why we need to acknowledge it. Additionally, spirituality has been the only tool that some humans have had in their relation with society. Think, for instance, about slavery. There have been many instances of slavery in human history. A more modern example would be chattel slavery in the United States. African-Americans relied on spirituality to reconnect to their inner selves, despite having to live in a society in which they were dehumanised. They were murdered, tortured, and discriminated against. This idea of being connected helped them sustain the desire to exist. The understanding that you can be imprisoned, tortured, or captured, but nobody can touch your inner self, is very important, because you are the only one who has access to your soul. Still, because posthumanism is being developed at the moment in academia, I would suggest being aware of the fact that some people see spirituality as a synonym for religion, and are thus skeptical. I have nothing against religion; it may come with a set of dogmas (“I am the truth and the other isn’t”, etc.), but it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a lot of interfaith dialogue at the moment, which is very important. But some people see religion as the ultimate truth, and see their religion as the only truth. That’s where the problem arises, because it is one thing to find truth in a specific religion, and another to think that your religion is the only truth. Consequently, if you force others to believe in what you believe, that is an issue. We need to recognise diversity, and that the divine can be experienced in various ways. Even the way in which we imagine and see the divine is a personal experience that comes from our background and our

178

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

experience of existence, which is all very different. If people want to look more into spirituality, I would certainly urge them to. It is a revealing journey: you are going to find insights and inspiration. Spirituality is deeply related to post-dualism, and we can learn so much from this realm of inquiry. On the other hand, we should also acknowledge the fact that spirituality, on some level, is an experience that has been historically connected to certain religious traditions. That is fine, but we must make sure that we come from an understanding that we are all in this together; we are manifesting in this dimension together. In that sense, we all partake in this spiritual and existential enlightenment through our lives. I would love to look more into the realm of spirituality to understand more of post-dualism. However, I am also writing my second book, in which I am going to use the term ‘existential’ to avoid confusion with people who come from different traditions more connected to, for instance, academic philosophy. So, I think this term can also help. In general, I may want to use the word ‘existential’— not so much ‘existentialist’, which refers to a specific tradition of the 1950s in Europe. For instance, if you look at it through an existential perspective, the Upanishads are quite philosophical. Of course, they are also spiritual, as they use a language that can be understood universally. AD: Thank you Professor Ferrando. Now let’s shift to fatalism. Do you support Donna Haraway’s assertion that we must see ourselves as posthuman compost, as “Humus, nourishing the Earth”? Is this too fatalistic a view? Though life and death are seen as interconnected categories, are we ready to see ourselves as decaying matter assisting the plant world? FF: This is a very important question. In order to answer to it, I will take a step back and begin with Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which was published in 1985. This was very important in the 1990s, because it acknowledged technology as something that we are already, and also acknowledged ourselves as hybrids. Vandana Shiva, an excellent Indian scholar, had some interesting criticisms of the cyborg as well. Once you are a cyborg, everything is mixed; but what about non-human others? Can they be respected without allowing the notion of the hybrid, and of the cyborg, legitimate various bio-technological practices that are not only ethically challenging, but also socio-politically problematic, such as, for instance, GMOs? This was a very important criticism from Shiva. Haraway eventually developed her discourse through the field of Animal Studies, and recently, as an alternative to the linear notion of the Anthropocene, she coined the term ‘Chthulucene’, emphasizing that we are humus and should see ourselves as compost. She is also critical of the notion of the posthuman,

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

179

because she views it as a disruption from the notion of the earthly human. I would say that the two things are not at war with each other. I can see myself as compost because I will eventually return to the Earth, although this process has certainly changed over time, for hygienic reasons. Nevertheless, I love the idea of being fully composted after I pass. In the past, when someone died, they had the opportunity to return to the bare Earth, nourishing and giving life to others (worms and plants), which is in tune with the cycles of life on Earth. On one side, it is very important, from a materialistic standpoint, to see ourselves in that light, and that also helps us honestly address death. There is an issue in some countries, such as the United States, where death is a taboo; nobody wants to talk about it. But now, with COVID-19, this taboo has been disrupted because people you know are dying, and you are made aware of your own mortality. This should always be a part of our existential worldview. I think of Heidegger, who said that death gives meaning to life, because the fact that we are dying allows us to make life our own project. As a young person, before learning about Heidegger, when I wasn’t sure what to do in life, I would think, “What if I die tomorrow?” I asked myself, standing in front of the mirror, “What is the thing that I should have done, but didn’t do? What stopped me?” The notion of death really helped me to always be authentic to myself and my vision, and allowed me to better understand what my vision was. When COVID-19 started, I had family members in Italy who contracted the virus, and I realised that someone I love could die, and that I could die. But this helped me reach a deep understanding. I realised that we need to be fully loyal to our existence and life. We do not have an infinite amount of time; we could die anytime, anywhere. The notion of death should always be present in us, but in a generative way — not to scare you, but to push you to flourish as the existential being you are. It is not easy to be born. Think of the complexity of being generated, to be brought to life and be here today; this is not an easy process. The fact that we are here is very precious, so what are we going to do with this opportunity? We are the only ones who truly know what we can do with this life; we are the only ones who have access to our inner voice. Death is that push for us to realise what our purpose is, to understand what is really relevant. We are indeed compost, but not only compost, and even though this idea is true, it doesn’t mean that viewing oneself as compost and posthuman cannot coexist. Yes, I am compost, but I am also so much more, and much less. I believe that I am an open notion, which includes compost. AD: Thank you Professor Ferrando. Since we are discussing compost, recently there was an article in The Guardian about the absence of images

180

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

of dead bodies in America. Psychologists are of the opinion that this has led to ‘incomplete grief’ and a total lack of awareness of the reality of death among people. In fact, 21% of Americans have denied the need for a COVID-19 vaccine. Death has been condensed into data and graphs. Do you think that it’s time to think about the responsibility and character of dead bodies, that they are not just silent structures, but assigned with performative potentials of their own? (I’m also keeping in mind the rejection of the alive/ dead dualism by posthumanism). Should dead bodies be reconsidered as performative agents? FF: This is a very important and delicate question. I don’t know that I have the final answer to this, but I would like to bring some food for thought to this discussion. On one side, in places like Benares in India, the experience of seeing life and death constantly merging with each other — seeing bodies, ashes, and flowers — is very real, and brings us back to our material existence, forcing us to think and reflect. But in the United States, it is different; the topic of death is completely erased. People do not talk about death, and even if they do, it is regarded as a very somber, unfortunate, event. When people die, it almost becomes an individual experience of people dealing with death. I think that is unhealthy, and on some level, COVID-19 has brought us back to the realization that we are all going to die. Even if we achieve radical life extension, as some transhumanists want - which I am not necessarily against, but I do not think it will add much to the existential experience - people are still going to die. I believe death has to be a part of our dealing with life. Many Buddhist practices of meditation, for instance, ask you to think of yourself as dead, because death really allows you to see yourself as alive. Going back to the specific idea of the body, I can tell you that something that profoundly changed me personally, was seeing the dead body of my grandmother. I loved her deeply, and I was there with her every day for the month before she died. I didn’t want to be there the day she died, as I could not accept the fact that she was not with us anymore. When I did manage to go, I remember taking her pale hand in mine, and within one month, I started experiencing Raynaud’s Syndrome, a condition defined by poor circulation in bodily extremities, in my hands. This allowed me to start a journey that I will always be grateful for: the journey of yoga. My condition eventually disappeared, but, more importantly, yoga turned me into a spiritual person as I embarked on a journey of self-discovery. The relation between acknowledging the body, seeing, and touching, is a profound experience. But there are also layers to developing this greater body awareness. For instance, exposing young children to the dead body of someone they loved is a delicate situation that

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

181

should be considered thoroughly, and handled with great care, as it requires preparation and psychological support. So, there may be exceptions, but I think that we need to reconsider this process because, in my experience, it deeply changed me. Seeing my grandmother, both alive and then dead, profoundly impacted me on an existential level. I strongly believe that the physical body cannot just be erased from the conversation on death. I understand why, during the emergency of COVID-19, bodies were not accessible due to the fear of spreading the disease, but it is also important to acknowledge the trauma suffered by people who have had the experience of having loved ones die, and not being able to see or touch them, or say goodbye. For example, in Italy, a man who eventually wrote a very touching public letter on this,2 was not allowed to see his deceased father, who had died of COVID-19 in the hospital. This happened to many people during the high peak of the COVID-19 outbreak. Another man, who lives in a small town, recalls that on the day of the funeral of his loved one, he saw, from his window, the hearse transporting the deceased to the cemetery pass by. He could only assume that his loved one was in it, since he was not allowed to attend the funeral for preventive measures. He is still dealing with this trauma of not having the opportunity to say good-bye, and feels guilty because of this. Going back to our initial discussion, I definitely feel that erasing bodies is something that we should reconsider. Of course, we need to consider many other aspects, such as the spreading of disease through funerals and bodies, but there may be preventive measures that allow for a safe farewell. I also believe that, if people are ready, being close to the dead body of someone you love is an important aspect of grieving. AD: Do you think there is an inherent problem with humans not referring to themselves as bio-evolutionary animals, but rather as products of a particular historical time and political space, reflecting the trouble of the anthropological machine? Why is the environment reduced to mere aesthetics? FF: In the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, before humans started to become sedentary, Nature worship was at the center of the existential and spiritual quest, with Nature perceived in female form, and in animal hybrids (such as the numerous figurines excavated in Eurasia). But this huge chunk of time, which makes for 99% of human history, is actually not considered ‘history’, that is, as recorded time, usually associated with the development 2

Turchetto, D. “La lettera straziante di un figlio: “Mio padre si è ammalato di Covid in ospedale e lì è morto”, La Stampa, 25 Aprile 2020: https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2020/04/25/news/la-lettera-straziante-di-un-figliomio-padre-si-e-ammalato-di-covid-in-ospedale-e-li-e-morto-1.38760793

182

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

of writing – and urbanization. Living in urban settlements marks a shift in human consciousness. This immanent form of pre-historic devotion, which I like to refer to as Nature worship, eventually evolved into metaphysical religions and mythologies; successively, in the separation of nature (physis) and culture (logos) which is traceable, for instance, in Classical Greece, where nature became associated with female and non-human animals – and portrayed as barbarian and wild, to be tamed – whereas culture, associated to male and ‘human’ education (paideia), was regarded as civilized and sophisticated – that is, superior. This hierarchical separation between nature and culture did not just involve non-humans versus humans, but also humans versus other humans. For example, the word anthropos, which means ‘human’ in Greek, was specifically connected to speaking Greek, to being part of paideia, which meant ‘education’. Many civilizations that were not Greek were considered barbarian, and thus not anthropos. They would see the Egyptians, Persians, and Phoenicians as barbarians. This separation between nature and culture has been very prevalent, and in this separation, many societies have been seen as the plus, whereas nature has been portrayed as the minus. There are many traditions across the globe that can offer examples. For instance, both the Hindu theory of the transmigration of the soul in reincarnation, as well as some Buddhist theories of rebirth, contain anthropocentric biases, according to which being (re)born in a human form is considered a privilege, and the result of good karma, while being (re)born in a non-human, animal form is considered a minus. These things have to be fully reconsidered. We can no longer see ourselves in separation from nature, nor can we see ourselves as better than non-human animals. This does not mean that we should dismiss human life. There are some people, such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), who are calling for the extinction of the human. I certainly do not support that either, because for me the human is not a plus, but nor is it a minus. The human is part of the manifestation of existence: human extinction would not do us any good, as other species would not necessarily do any better. I do not think that the solution lies in giving up the crown, but in deconstructing the notion of the ‘crown’ itself by manifesting posthumanistic ways of existing in our daily lives. Posthumanism, for me, means that we need to readdress the human in relation to all the other species, as part of the larger picture, not as the plus or the minus. Nature and culture cannot be understood in separation, and must be addressed in conjunction. Think of the relationship between culture, biology, and epigenetics. Think about how culture is constantly transforming and changing biology itself. We cannot see nature and culture as separated anymore, which, referring back to Vandana Shiva, does not mean that the

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

183

human can do anything just because we are ’cyborgs’. We need to be careful with such ideas. It is very important to see ourselves as part of the larger picture, recognizing that diversity improves and enriches our lives, promoting a balanced planet and healthy human lives. In fact, the English term ‘health’ comes from the Proto-Germanic word haylaz, meaning ‘whole’, as in relating to the whole picture. We need to think of diversity with real honesty and dignity. We need to reconsider what we are doing from an ecological, technological, existential, and ontological perspective. AD: And let us end with your solution of the posthuman multiverse. Could you guide us through this intriguing theory? FF: It is interesting that you ask this question. In my book, Philosophical Posthumanism, in order to understand where the notion of the human comes from, I start from the very beginning of how we define ourselves in nomenclature to the species in biological terms. I then move to physics, where I go to the hypothesis of the multiverse, which very well may be a reality. The point of the multiverse, for me, in philosophical terms is really extraordinary. We can think, for instance, of the rhizome, which was developed as a metaphor by Deleuze and Guattari3 back in the 1980s, helping us to understand the internet and the online experience. Think of rhizome, turmeric, ginger, and many other forms of life that are not linear. You can take a piece of turmeric and put it in the Earth, or water, and watch it spread and grow. Deleuze and Guattari were equating this process to our own lives: life is not linear. This metaphor was then brought to the internet. When you navigate online, one link is going to take you to the next, and to the next, and one hour later you find yourself reading about the multiverse – perhaps - and you had no idea that you would end up there. So, in that sense, it is rhizomatic. The multiverse, for me, is as precious a metaphor as the rhizome was, in helping us understand the online experience. The multiverse is, for me, a metaphor that could also apply to a real, physical reality. Why? Let’s play a game. I love philosophical hypotheses and games. Friedrich Nietzsche changed my life when I was sixteen years old, as I was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I love his metaphor of the eternal recurrence of life’s events to understand if we are living the life we truly want to live. So, what if your life was going to come back exactly the same, forever and ever? Would you do exactly what you did in your life? Would you speak the way you spoke to others? Would you act the way you did with 3

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. [1980] (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Massumi, B., Continuum: London.

184

Dialogue on Posthuman Life, Death and COVID-19

others? Would you do the same? Would you accept that life? Nietzsche is not postulating a spiral, but a cycle: everything, exactly, the same. He says that, if you accept your life exactly the way it is, forever and ever, you are the Ubermensch, which is the superhuman/overhuman. You are taking full responsibility for your life, because your life is the highest work of art you can ever imagine. I am going to push this to the multiverse from an ethical perspective, and bring in ethics and physics. What if, in the hypothesis of the multiverse, you are co-constituting many actual universes in the ways you exist, through your vibrational range? Let’s go back to quantum physics and string theory, and think of ourselves in the material sense as a network of strings, constantly reconstituting ourselves. What does it mean, from an ethical and existential perspective, that we do not just exist in one dimension, but are coexisting and co-creating other dimensions through our vibrational range? I bring these ideas to the book as hypotheses, because I am a philosopher. I am not a scientist. I do science in philosophical terms, but I do not want to go into a strictly scientific realm. An article came out recently in National Geographic, talking about the scientific reality of other possible dimensions, and bringing a lot of science to the conversation in saying that this might be a reality. My point, however, is not influenced by whether or not it is a reality. As I said, I love philosophical hypotheses and thought games, and believe that they can enrich our life immensely. For instance, the questions that Nietzsche proposed in his work changed my life. They have stayed with me, and I constantly ask myself, “Would I live this life again and again and again?” If the answer is no, I have to change something; if the answer is yes, I am doing what I should to manifest the life I want to have. In that sense, I love the multiverse, not only as a scientific hypothesis, but also as a thought game: What if we think of ourselves as a constantly changing network of multiversal alliances? We are constantly connecting to a different vibrational range, and co-manifesting all these other layers of existence. It is a fascinating way for me to end the book, because it is not an end, but a beginning.

Works Cited Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (1980) Trans. Brian Massumi. Continuum: London, 1987 Ferrando, Francesca. “Humans Have Always Been Posthuman: A Spiritual Genealogy of Posthumanism” Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. Eds. D. Banerji and M. R. Paranjape. Springer, 2016, 243-256

Francesca Ferrando and Asijit Datta

185

—. Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury: London, 2019. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181. Turchetto, Davide. “La lettera straziante di un figlio: “Mio padre si è ammalato di Covid in ospedale e lì è morto”, La Stampa, 25 Aprile 2020: https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2020/04/25/news/la-letterastraziante-di-un-figlio-mio-padre-si-e-ammalato-di-covid-inospedale-e-li-e-morto-1.38760793

Contexts This dialogue between Francesca Ferrando (NYU) and Asijit Datta (University of Calcutta) is based on the conference “Literature, Disease and Mind”, organized by the Heritage College, University of Calcutta, India, which took place online, on June 5 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Acknowledgments Deep gratitude, on behalf of Francesca Ferrando, to Ellen Delahanty Roby, and to Matigan King (NYU), who contributed to the edited version of this dialogue. Asijit Datta would like to express his sincere appreciation to Pragati Prashanth for her assistance in the transcription of this article.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC-BY SA2.0). You must attribute this work to the Original Authors. To view a copy of this License, visit https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is a BA, MA, MPhil in English Literature, from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, India. He wrote his MPhil thesis on Samuel Beckett and Alain Badiou, and finished his PhD on Beckett and Lacanian Psychoanalysis at Western Sydney University. Arka has been published in books including Deleuze and Beckett, Knots, Gerald Murnane: Another World in this One, etc., and journals such as Miranda, Textual Practice, Interventions, S, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Sound Studies and The Harold Pinter Review. He co-edited the book Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature, and guest-edited the SBT/A issue on Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of the Mind. Arka is the chief editor of the online literary journal Sanglap (http://sanglap-journal.in/). His first monograph, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. He is currently finishing co-editing a volume on Nabarun Bhattacharya for Bloomsbury India, slated for publication in 2020. Soumyadeep Chakraborty is a PhD Research Scholar, in the Department of English, at Bankura University and Guest Faculty, Department of English, Raja N. L. Khan Women’s College. Chapter-contributions in books include Film and Literature (Knowledge Bank Publishing) and Folklore Studies: Local and Global (Prestige Books International) are among his recent academic ventures. Besides this, he has also co-edited a book on environmental humanities, entitled Global Perspectives on Eco-Aesthetics and Eco-Ethics, published by Lexington Books (Rowman and Littlefield), UK in January 2020. His areas of interest include performance studies, masculinity studies, and children’s literature. Oly Roy is engaged in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Department of English at St. Xavier’s College, Burdwan, as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests include posthumanism, eco-criticism, ecofeminism, and trauma studies.

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

187

Priyanka Pathak: is working as a lecturer at Vidyasagar College, Kolkata, and has also been pursuing her PhD. Degree from the University of Burdwan, Department of English and Culture Studies. Her area of research is consciousness in the posthuman condition. Swapna Roy completed her Post-Graduate Degree from West Bengal State University in 2014. She qualified CBSE-UGC Net in 2017. Currently, she is pursuing her MPhil Research in English at Vidyasagar University. She has been teaching at Amdanga Jugal Kishore Mahavidyalaya, affiliated to West Bengal State University, as a Guest Faculty, since 2018. Dr. Jai Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indian and World Literatures, at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. His specialization includes literary theory and criticism, Indian literature, Renaissance and Reformation literature, and neoclassical literature. Arpita Roy is currently an MPhil Research Scholar of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. She completed her MA in English from the same university. Her special interest lies in spoken-word poetry. Indrajit Mukherjee is currently teaching as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Nistarini College, and also pursuing his doctoral research on magical realism at the Vidyasagar University, West Bengal. He has also presented papers in several reputed institutions, including BHU, HCU, IIT Madras, AU, et al., and his articles have been published in several national and international journals and books. His areas of interest are postcolonial literature, modern literary theory, avant-garde theatre, and cultural studies. Sahabuddin Ahamed is a PhD Research Scholar in English Literature at Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya. He has worked as a Guest Lecturer at Dumkal College. His main interest areas in English Literature are modern and postmodern literature, postcolonial literature, literary theory and criticism, Indian literature in English, and science fiction. Ankana Das holds MPhil and MA degrees in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi, researching the intersection between Hinduism and caste, and its manifestation on syncretic religious ideas in India. She is also a lecturer in the Department of English, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata.

188

Contributors

Ankit Prasad is a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. His current research interests include Indian speculative fiction, transdisciplinarity, and myth studies. Dr. Sourav Kumar Nag is an Assistant Professor in English Literature and Culture Studies at Onda Thana Mahavidyalaya, affiliated to Bankura University. His research areas are Commonwealth Literature, Disability Studies, Culture Studies, Postcolonial Theories and 19th Century Bengali Literature. He has contributed to sundry national and international journals and books. He was invited for paper presentation and chaired a session at the GAAP Annual Conference in Germany, 2019. Chandrima Pramanick is an M. Phil Research Scholar, at Jadavpur University. Indranil Banerjee: is an MPhil Research Scholar, at Jadavpur University. M.D. Mahasweta is an MPhil research scholar at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. Her current area of research is urban space in nineteenth century Bengali crime fiction. Her other areas of interest include postmodern fiction, queer studies and 19th century literature. Dr. Francesca Ferrando is an award-winning philosopher and lecturer, globally involved in the posthuman as an author, Professor (NYU), thinker, and organizer. She is a public intellectual, named: “One of the 100 Top Creatives Making Change in the World” by Origin magazine. She is a leading voice in the field of posthuman studies. Dr. Ferrando teaches Philosophy at New York University (US), NYU-Program of Liberal Studies, as an Adjunct Assistant Professor. She is the author of several publications; the latest of which is Philosophical Posthumanism, published by Bloomsbury. Dr. Ferrando was the recipient of the Philosophical Prize "Premio Sainati", with the Acknowledgment of the President of the Italian Republic. She earned a PhD in Philosophy (University of Roma Tre, Italy), after which the European Doctoral Fellowship was granted. She holds an MA in Gender Studies (Utrecht University, Holland), where the Director of the Program was Professor Rosi Braidotti. Dr. Ferrando was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (US) twice, and an Independent Researcher at the University of Reading (England), working on Cyborg Theory with Prof. Kevin Warwick. Dr. Ferrando is the founder of the Global Posthuman Network.

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human

189

In the history of TED talks, she was the first speaker to give a talk on the subject of the posthuman. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Spanish. Dr. Asijit Datta is currently working as Assistant Professor of English at The Heritage College, under Calcutta University. He has also taught at Presidency University, Vidyasagar University, Ramakrishna Mission, Narendrapur, and Bethune College. He completed his Masters in English from Presidency College in 2009. He received his PhD from the Department. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University in 2017. His thesis attempted to locate the vanishing subjects in Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett. His academic interests pertain to posthumanism, Beckett studies, modern European theatre, world cinema, and psychoanalysis. He has written and directed critically acclaimed and award-winning plays. He has also had multiple academic papers published on Beckett, disability studies and film criticism, in reputed books, and national and international journals.

INDEX

Ahuman - 140 Animal – ix, x, xii, xiii, 2, 7, 13, 17, 18, 19, 28, 33, 63, 69, 76, 92, 93, 102, 103, 109, 124, 128, 131, 139, 140, 144, 145, 149, 150, 154 - 158, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167 - 170, 172, 178, 181, 182, Animality – 139, 144 Anomaly - 152, 161, 162 Anthropocene – xiii, 17, 24, 53, 121, 167, 168, 178 Anthropocentrism – 56, 60, 61, 68, 131, 139, 174 Antihumanism – 10, 25 Apocalypse – 3, 8, 140 Artificial Intelligence - x, 8, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 58, 88, 89, 91, 102, 105, 116, 117, 124 - 126, 130, 131, 173, 174 Assemblage - xiii, 19, 37, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 104, 119, 154, 160 Banville – 18, 29, 30, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44 Baudrillard – 21, 77, 79, 80, 84 Becoming-animal – 161, 162 Biotechnology – 3, 8, 22, 25, 68, 71, 110, 156 Body – xii, 2, 6, 7, 9 -11, 17 – 20, 23, 24, 30 – 35, 43, 51, 53, 61, 64 – 76, 82, 83, 88, 96, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 116, 117, 119, 140, 141, 149 – 155, 157, 158, 160 – 162, 164, 180, 181 Brain – 6, 7, 25, 67, 76, 83, 87, 89, 93, 118, 121 Capitalism – 16, 59, 69, 70, 92, 104, 107, 112, 166, 184

Caste/casteism – 2, 22, 111, 124 – 126, 128, 130, 131 Cosmo-ontology – 141, 144 Critical posthumanism – xiii, 10, 11, 14, 98, 131, 134, 184 Cyberspace – 21, 69, 77 – 79, 83, 90, 106, 116, 117 Cyber technologies – 20, 88 Cyborg – ix, xiii, 2, 7, 8, 13, 20, 21, 24, 25, 58, 63, 69, 70, 76, 88, 102 – 106, 108 – 113, 115, 116, 118 – 121, 124 – 126, 151, 156 – 158, 163, 166, 178, 183, 185 Deconstruction – 10, 93, 104, 110 De/Re-territorialization – 19, 50 Disease – x, 23, 24, 65, 66, 69, 106, 143, 159 – 165, 167, 169, 172, 173, 181, 185 Dystopia – viii, 22, 58, 59, 102, 106, 109, 117, 119, 124 – 126, 128 – 130, 132 Ecosophy – 19, 45, 52, 53 Gaze – 19, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 114, 140, 142 Gender identity – 20, 102, 104, 109 Haraway – ix, xiii, 13, 21, 25, 69, 76, 95, 103 – 106, 109 – 111, 113, 119, 121, 140, 144, 151, 154, 155, 163, 166, 178, 185 Hollywood – 57, 58, 120, 141 Humanimal - 98 Humanoid – 1, 2, 23, 61, 62, 109 150, Hypertext – 20, 88, 90 Identity – 19, 20, 45, 47, 50, 51, 60, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72 – 75, 77, 79 – 81, 83, 84, 90, 91, 93, 98, 102, 104, 109, 111, 112, 116, 119, 127, 150 – 152, 158, 173, 174

The Posthuman Imagination: Literature at the Edge of the Human Imaginary – 8, 77 – 79, 106, India – ix, 1, 16, 22, 45, 48, 67, 71, 73, 76, 126, 127, 131 – 134, 137, 138, 170 – 174, 178, 180, 185 Information commodity - 118 Information technology – 3, 60 Interactive text – 20, 86, 88 - 92 Lacan – 21, 30, 84 Machine – ix, 2, 3, 7, 8, 13, 18, 20 – 22, 37, 55, 56, 69, 70, 74, 77, 78, 86 – 89, 93 – 102, 104 – 106, 109 – 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 139, 141, 144, 149 – 151, 153, 158, 181 Memory – x, 22, 73, 87, 120, 126, 127, 132 – 134, 137, 138 Metahumanism – 10, 25, 121 Micro ontology - 140 Modernism – 2, 10, 18, 28, 33, 87, 93, 113 Nanotechnology – 3, 8, 15, 66, 110, 117 New materialism – 10, 19, 25, 29, 31, 35, 43, 44, 55, 62, 121, Nomadic subjectivity – 19, 45, 51, 52 Nostalgia - 138 Object – x – xiii, 5, 15, 18, 19, 21, 28 – 44, 50, 51, 60, 78, 87, 109, 117, 118, 126, 129, 138, 142, 144, 155, 163, 164 Object-oriented-ontology – 33, 43 Ontological and practical states of being – 120 Ontology – ix, x, xiii, 18, 28 -31, 33, 34, 38, 43, 44, 53, 69, 102, 112, 120, 140 – 142, 144, 157 Philosophical posthumanism – 10, 12 – 15, 24, 25, 112, 170, 183, 185 Plague – xiii, 23, 24, 159 – 166 Post-anthropocentrism – 6, 10, 13, 24, 156, 174, 175 Posthuman/posthumanism – viii – x, xii – xiv, 1 – 26, 30, 31, 33, 40,

191

44, 45, 47, 49, 51- 63, 67 – 70, 73, 75 – 77, 86, 94, 96 – 101, 103 – 105, 107, 109 – 122, 124 – 142, 144, 145, 148 – 161, 164 – 168, 170 – 180, 182 - 185 Posthuman ecology – 18, 19, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62 Postmodern/postmodernism – 2, 10, 11, 20, 30, 53, 67, 75, 77, 102, 111 – 113, 116, 119, 120, 157, 158 Process – 5, 12, 22, 31, 39, 43, 50, 52, 53, 56, 65, 66, 69, 72, 78, 81, 83, 95, 97, 104, 120, 140, 154 - 156, 160, 167, 171 - 173, 179, 181, 183 Ressentiment – 107, 108 Science fiction – 6, 12, 21, 25, 58, 67, 75, 76, 106, 112, 116 – 118, 121, 122, 125, 131, 156 – 158 Self – xi – xiv, 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 21, 23, 34, 42, 47, 53, 66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78 – 82, 84, 91, 97, 98, 100, 111, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 128 – 130, 139, 142, 144, 148, 150 – 152, 156, 166, 177, 180 Simulacra – 79 Technology – x, 3, 4, 6 – 11, 13 – 16, 20, 22, 24, 25, 52, 60 – 62, 64 – 71, 74, 76, 82 – 84, 86, 87, 91, 93, 94, 102, 103, 110, 112 – 121, 124 – 130, 149, 153, 156 – 158, 174 – 176, 178, 185 Transcorporeality - 23 Transhumanism – 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 15 – 18, 20, 25, 66 – 70, 114, 115, 121, 134 – 136, 144, 168, 172, 174, Transcendental homelessness – 19, 51, 53 Utopia – viii, 17, 18, 22, 23, 59, 70, 104, 116, 125, 126, 130, 131, 134, 143, 144, 175 Video games – 88, 90 - 93, 142 Young-adult fiction - 48