The (un)Certain Future of Empathy in Posthumanism, Cyberculture and Science Fiction [1 ed.] 9781848883369, 9789004374416

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The (Un)Certain Future of Empathy

Critical Issues Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher

Lisa Howard

Advisory Board Simon Bacon Katarzyna Bronk John L. Hochheimer Stephen Morris Peter Twohig S Ram Vemuri

Ana Borlescu Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Bray

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Ethos Hub ‘Visions of Humanity in Cyberspace’

2015

The (Un)Certain Future of Empathy: Posthumanism, Cyberculture and Science Fiction

Edited by

Elsa Bouet

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-336-9 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Elsa Bouet Part I

Effective Communication, Empathy and the Body Toying with Intention: Embodiment, Empathy and Programmed Intentionality in New Media Mari-Lou Rowley

Part II

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3

Virtuous War and UAVs: The ‘Inhibition’ of Friction and the Banalization of Violence Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron

17

Serial Communication Experiments: You Can (Not) Advance Antony Chun-man Tam

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Cyberculture and Ethics in Generation A and Super Sad True Love Story Reinhold Kramer

41

Prospects of a Fleshless Humanity Of Flesh and Bone: Finding Human Sameness in the ‘Skinjobs’ of Battlestar Galactica Teresa Bothelho

57

Dreams of Sheep: Humanity as a Discursive Formation in Battlestar Galactica Yonatan Englender

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In the Absence of Flesh, Bodies Made Anew: Transparency, Avatars and the Holographic Body in Hollywood Cinema (1980-2010) Pia Pandelakis

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Part III Posthuman Scepticism and Hopes The Technological Utopia in Hollywood: The Surrogate as Contemporary Paradigm for Posthumanity in Surrogates (2009) and Gamer (2009) Mehdi Achouche

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Part IV

Marge Piercy´s Body of Glass and the Cyborg-Human Relationship: Fear or Hope for the Twenty-First Century Miguel Nenevé and Nayra Gomes

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Digressions in Progress: Posthuman Loneliness and the Will to Play in the Work of the Strugatsky Brothers Julia Vaingurt

111

Codifying Body and Mind Bodily Imagination from Suprematism to Cyberpunk Colleen McQuillen

123

The Colonized Pastoral: Africa, Myth, Alienation and Blackness in Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels Selena Middleton

133

Imprisonment in the Fiction of Christopher Priest Elsa Bouet

143

Totalitarian Literature: Realism and Reality Luana Signorelli Faria da Costa

153

Introduction Elsa Bouet The conference titled Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction, which took place in July 2014 in Oxford, UK., offered a platform for academics and researchers in Film Studies, Literature, Art, Sociology, Neuroscience, among other fields, to discuss the impacts of the increasing use of and reliance on technology, social media and other online and virtual means of communication on humanity and human networks. The aim of this volume is to present the research, debates and ideas pertaining to the changes humanity faces due to this increase in the virtualisation of the self. Challenges to the current definitions of humanity and posthumanism in relation to cyberspace and cyberculture are here explored, notably by examining their impacts on empathy and cognition and their representations in films, literature and art. The advent and increase use of social media and other virtual tools of communication is a central focal point of the volume. This volume addresses the discussion on posthumanism that surrounds this increase in our use of technology, and assess their impact on human interaction and definitions of human communities and humanity. It assesses humanity’s increasing subservience to technology and investigates the reconfiguration of human networks and the impact of cyberculture on what it is we call human. Doing so the volume explores the centrality of face to face interaction and embodiment to humanity, questioning whether cyberspace constitutes the abandonment of humanity. This anxiety about posthumanism, which envisages humanity being overcome by or merging with technology, technology becoming intelligent and aware to the extent that humanity can no longer control it or can no longer do without it, allows for an examination of the future of humanity and for reconsidering the definition and features of humanity, by looking at how and if empathy, community formation, the body, but also the propensity for cruelty and physical and ideological violence are affected by cyberspace and posthumanism. Posthumanism takes many forms: from human creating and interacting with robots that have better cognitive capacities, the striving to modify the human body so that it can defy death and overcome its physical limits, or finding ways to upload the mind into cyberspace, into cybernetic entities or even creating or exploring alternate spaces. However, the research conducted by the contributors reflects that that posthumanism is not simply an issue of technological corporeal enhancement, but that it is also an ethical concept which raises ideological and discursive questions. Posthumanism implies bodily modification, thus changing the human body and its ability to create meaningful communities, but it also suggests ethical and ideological modification, in which the capacity for empathy might be threatened. Looking at posthumanism offers a mirror allowing for reflections on what exactly humanity is, whether it is a body, an entity capable to feel empathy, to

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__________________________________________________________________ think, or if it is a combination of these elements. Thus the volume assesses whether posthumanity constitutes an abandonment of humanity and humanism, or can offer a replication of it. Interestingly, most chapters express anxieties over the capacity to feel empathy in a posthuman age. As empathy is mostly felt during face to face interaction, what occurs when our interactions are displaced online, through artificial bodies and through the mediation of a screen? Also, if humanity becomes able to defy and to transcend death, what does this mean for the care of the self and the care for the selves of others in fragile, fallible bodies? Science fiction films and literature imagine the dreary consequences of losing empathy for others: if we cannot feel anything towards others, the process of reciprocation essential to the grounding of identity and the formation of the self is impeded, which leads to the dissolution of communities and an increase of perverse violent acts of cruelty towards others. These dystopian depictions of brutality however are not fully fictional; as research in neuroscience shows, the mediated human interactions, in which the body is removed from communication by a device, causes inauthentic experiences from which emotional intent and impact are removed. This volume also reflects the centrality of the embodied human experience, which is essential to the ability to feel empathy. However, the body is also a site of discursive and political differentiation between the human and the posthuman, which raises questions on how different cybernetic sentient beings of the future might be from humans, as they too might be able to feel, might want to assert their rights and duties, but also might want to affirm their humanity. Creating posthuman bodies engages with the very essence and mutability of humanity, and therefore, as humanity interacts with the posthuman other, we might need to reconsider exactly what is the nature of being human, opening up our modalities of categorisations and cognitive boundaries. This shows that posthumanism is not necessarily a thing to fear, but might be capital stage in the evolution of our concepts of humanity and humanism. This volume considers the possibility that posthuman entities might retain human characteristics; as such, they mirror and highlight the divisions we create within humanity and force us to reconsider how we create otherness and exclusion. But if human, there is always the possibility that these posthuman entities will also retain the human potential for cruelty, already suggesting humanity’s inherent lack of empathy, even without the use of technology or cyberspace. Dystopian and science fictional literature and films reflect cultural, political and social moments at which humanity perpetrates acts of violence against its own kind, demonstrating a lack of empathy, not necessarily through the medium of a screen or cyberspace, but through the medium of ideology, which also creates alternative environments and discursive alternate bodies. Therefore, posthumanism offers a myriad of possibilities for humanity, suggesting the potential for our opening up ourselves to difference and otherness, deconstructing our modes of exclusion, while also

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__________________________________________________________________ threatening the foundations of humanity, our capacity to form community through meaningful, empathic communication, but also reflecting our intrinsic capacity for cruelty. The parts of this volume reflect these debates and this progression in ideas. The first part of this volume will explore anxieties and concerns raised over the virtualisation of the self. The four chapters included in this section expose how cyberspace, the use of virtual environments and online communication devices impede our ability to empathise, thus disrupting our ability to communicate emotionally accurately and to form meaningful ties, but also easing our ability to use weaponry in warfare. This part also explores how these ideas are represented in literature and animes. The first chapter, written by Mari-Lou Rowley, explores the question of digital subjectivity and asks whether new media and digital communication tools benefit or impede communication. Her research in psychological and anthropological sciences and neuroscience assesses the impact of digital communication on the self. She explores how the interface becomes an obstacle to effective and emotive communication. As the body is removed from direct face to face communication by various interfaces, the ability for a self to foreground itself in the lived experience is challenged, which has direct consequences on its ability to empathise. While these tools can be useful in extending human bonds in space, Rowley also raises question in regards to the impact these technologies may have on the relation between individuals and on the development of the self as part of a community. Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron directly exposes the effects of using an interface can have on empathy. His research exposes the increase in use of drones in warfare during the Obama administration. Reis Peron’s chapter focuses on the ways in which warfare is virtualized through the creation of justification of warfare and the use of drones, achieved through mediatisation and mediation of the conflict by removing the combatant from the zones of conflict, thus reducing soldiers’ casualties. He argues that the use of drones is an instrumental way in creating further distance from the violence of warfare, not only physical, but also emotional. Not only does the use of drones ease the ability of the operator to kill, but it also enables, as Reis Peron argues, to facilitate the government to justify and cover its actions. The lack of empathy that both Rowley and Reis Peron present is also criticised by fiction. Reinhold Kramer’s chapter explores the satirical nature of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Gary Coupland’s Generation A. Both novels exploit the fears associated with the use and rise of social media on the self, taken over by technology and cyberculture. Kramer analyses how these two novels depict the impact of cyberculture on the self, community and communal action, which have all broken down because of the overt dependence of users on their technology and because of the removal of the body from communication. The novels also express concerns over the decline of reading, a lowering of the ability

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__________________________________________________________________ to sustain attention and a decline of empathy which are all detrimental to our capacity to create change and to take positive action. Antony Chun-man Tam also exposes how two animes, Serial Experiment Lain and Neon Genesis Evangelion, hint towards a circular mutability of the concept of posthuman holism, wavering between collective inclusiveness and loneliness. The very nature of communication itself, Tam argues, prevents posthuman holism. As the two animes show, communication is never complete: the nature of verbal messages is arbitrary and does not accurately convey thoughts and true feelings, and the material body does not convey desires, feeling and thoughts. As communities attempt to privilege either the physicality or the content of the message, they create different parameters of inclusiveness, and thus waiver between inclusion and exclusion of otherness. Tam argues that imagination and empathy and understanding are crucial in being able to imagine the other’s true thoughts, implying that they are essential components in accepting otherness and creating dynamic communities. All these papers hint to the central role of the body to create meaningful communications and communities capable to empathise. Part II further explores whether the body and the flesh are central to the definition of humanity. Teresa Botelho explores the tension between humans and the sentient androids, Cylons, depicted in the series Battlestar Galactica. Botelho argues that the series raises fundamental ethical questions regarding the status of robots of the future. She argues that the series centres on the difference between human and Cylon bodies: both sides’ experiences are anchored in their bodily ability to feel pain and their emotional makeup allowing all to feel, to desire and to love. The series increasingly portrays both sides reaching a degree of sameness and eventually of acceptance of their bodily otherness. Also it is through their bodies that individuation is made possible, which in turns enables individuals to make ethical decisions. Botelho suggests that a degree of openness needs to be retained not to other entities and beings who might require a treatment equal to ours. Yonatan Englender’s chapter also looks at Battlestar Galactica. However, his chapter explores the extent to which Battlestar Galactica depicts humans and their synthetic counterpart manmade Cylons are similar, that no bodily or emotional differences can be drawn between members of the two sides, but that behavioural, emotional and ethical differences are down to the various individuals on each side. Englender argues that the difference is mainly discursive, not physical or emotional: humans attempt yet fail to differentiate themselves from Cylons, who display human traits and therefore a degree of sameness to humans. Englender posits that the series hints to posthumanism being inherently human: Cylon machines equate to humanity because these posthuman entities retain within themselves traces of humanity, who only tries to perpetuate itself within its own creations. Pia Pandelakis’ chapter centres on the exploration of fleshless bodies that are cinematographic holographic entities. Pandelakis’ chapter investigates the

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__________________________________________________________________ mechanisms that enable holographic entities to assert and foreground their selves, thus reflecting and questioning the ways in which we construct and perceive ourselves as individuals and subjects. But, while they represent the processes of asserting themselves, holograms’ ability to manipulate language and light creates deceitful and uncomfortable illusions of presence, projection and embodiment. This, she argues, is why they are useful, as their hollowness reaffirms the centrality of the human body to human experience. The third part of this volume focuses on how films and literature represent the hopes and fears that posthumanism creates, and engages with the impact of technological enhancement on the human body, but most importantly, ethical framework. Miguel Nenevé and Nayra Gomes’ chapter opens the section by considering posthuman concerns raised in Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass, also known as He, She and It in the U.S. Their paper addresses how the novel suggests the need to transcend epistemological categories and cultural practices as the narrative creates a new bodily category which does not fit in the known cognitive models in the persona of Yod, a cyborg. Nenevé and Gomes argue that the body of Yod represents a multi-faceted site of knowledge, opposed to the traditionally strict categorisation of gender, space, power and knowledge. They argue that the novel advocates that these strict boundaries need to become more fluid to demarcate themselves from the official discourses. In doing so, they also argue that the novel questions critical definitions of science fiction as pertaining mainly to technological modalities of cognition. While the novel depicts characters fearing and unable to transcend the traditional modes of cognition, it expresses the hope that posthumanism might offer us alternative ways of thinking. Julia Vaingurt’s chapter focuses on the Strugatsky Brothers’ shift in attitudes towards technology and posthumanism. Vaingurt argues that the fiction of the Strugatskys is more than socio-political and that is entrenched in Russian Cosmism, a philosophy which seeks to render humanity self-renewable and immortal through technology. Vaingurt exposes how the Strugatsky explore these ideas in their fiction, which questions whether there is something in humanity worth preserving. While their fiction exposes the successful transformation of the human body into immortal beings, it also depicts this posthumanity becoming self-satisfied, disinterested and cruel, thus anchoring humanity’s capacity for empathy in the finitude of its body. Their exposition of progress therefore questions the very nature of technological advances, deeming them inhuman. Mehdi Achouche analyses two films, Surrogates and Gamer, which portray how technology and body enhancements are used to perverse ends. In Surrogate, humans choose to remain sheltered from one another and instead interact through their use of surrogate, cyborg hosts which they can pilot remotely. In Gamer, users can transfer their minds into the bodies of other humans. Achouche exposes how, in both films, the use of a surrogate body causes a breakdown in communication between people, leading to the withering of humanity – both physically and

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__________________________________________________________________ mentally – and a decay of empathy, as users are able to inflict violence onto a body that is not their own. Achouche’s chapter therefore explores how these two films express anxieties as to what posthumanism has to offer, threatening empathy and the human networks necessary to form communities. The final part of the volume focuses on the ways in which art and fiction represent the body and the mind being subjected to mechanisms and apparatuses of control, through language, history or totalitarian enterprise, and assess the effects of liberation from constriction. Colleen McQuillen’s paper introduces Deleuze’s concept of a Body without Organs, a metaphor suggesting the liberation from the fixity of social structures. She then explores how this idea is instrumental in understanding the work of the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich and the fiction of Andrei Tiurin. Their works both create mathematical and computerised abstractions of the body, in geometrical shapes in Malevich’s art, and the cyberaltered bodies in the fiction of Tiurin, enabling the liberation of the body from constrictive structures. McQuillen explains that these works warn against such a fantasy – which the work of Deleuze fails to do – since they indicate that total liberation might lead to lawlessness and a lack of governability. Selena Middleton’s chapter investigates how Greg Bear’s novel, Queen of Angels, depicts a society in which people are able to undergo therapy, making people safe, and to change their appearance through nano-technology, which is said to create a utopia. However, these possibilities mask the truth of the brutality of Western colonialism behind the mythological past of this society, by locating the divine origin of humanity in a pastoral Africa which never existed and displaced into the mythological landscape of Guinée. Middleton explores how the mythological construction of an idealised past affects the characters, who, when confronting the actual cruelty of their past, break down and murder others. The novel illustrates how the past can corrupt the present and addresses the violence of alternate cognitive and ideological spaces. Elsa Bouet’s chapter focuses on the virtual environment created by ideology and bodily control in the early fiction of Christopher Priest. The narratives written by Priest depict insular environments, which, as the stories progress, unravel themselves to be similar to prison. The characters imprisoned in theses spaces become inmates who are tortured, transformed and made to relinquish their pasts. Bouet’s chapter explores the effects of the carceral environments as presented by Priest: as the characters face bodily and psychological transformations, they are forced to question the rationality of their ideological torturers and are made to relinquish control over their own bodies, highlighting the ideological and cruel nature of alternative spaces. Luana Signorelli Faria da Costa’s chapter focuses on dystopian narratives, namely Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She explores how these works, although fictionally dystopian, reflect social and political dimensions of the time at which they were

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__________________________________________________________________ written, and therefore, despite their potential science fictional nature, these works can be read within the framework of realism. Their fictional depiction and criticism of totalitarianism, Signorelli Faria da Costa argues, are crucial in reflecting real concerns over the place of art in society and the importance it holds in subverting ideologies which attempt to create conformity and subservience, not just of their times, but also of today.

Part I Effective Communication, Empathy and the Body

Toying with Intention: Embodiment, Empathy and Programmed Intentionality in New Media Mari-Lou Rowley Abstract Digital technologies are transforming our lives. Friends and loved ones are now only a text, Facebook post or Skype call away. But is ‘being in touch’ the same as intimacy, and is face-to-face communication required for empathy? If ‘interface’ is the site of interaction with a medium or system, does the digital interface facilitate or impede human interactions that lead to empathy, and is it ‘enactive’ in Maturana and Varela’s sense, where user and system co-evolve? If so, what are we evolving into? And in the rush to develop the latest technological toys and tools, where is the body in all of this? My chapter examines these issues in light of new media and digital subjectivity, psychological and anthropological research on mirroring and empathy, and research in behavioural neuroscience. I link these lines of enquiry with a critical and understudied aspect of social media—the concept of intentionality in light of Don Ihde’s phenomenology of technics. When we interact in new media environments our actions are not only mediated by embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations with the interface, our interpretation and communication is mediated by the program we are using, a phenomenon I call programmed intentionality. The critical discourse is not so much if and how digital technologies are changing us, but why it matters. Key Words: Digital subjectivity, embodied simulation, empathy, enactivism, intentionality, Mirror Neuron System, social media. ***** 1. Empathy and the Shifting Self: A Brief Introduction The concepts of the ‘self’ and ‘empathy’ are inextricably linked. While the examination of their etymology and evolution from a cultural and historical perspective is beyond the scope of this chapter, Richard D. Chessick states that the concept of an inner, core, essential self ‘was conceived of first in the Renaissance as developing in itself prior to or pari passu with the usual influences on selfformation such as the mother-child interaction.’ 1 The mother-child relationship, introduced by Nietzsche emerged as a turning point in Freud’s theory of self.2 As a developmental mechanism, Freud’s theory of primary narcissism revealed two ideas crucial to the study of empathy: healthy self-development requires other selves; and, a narcissistic (borderline) personality is unable to love or empathise.3 Nietzsche, considered a visionary of postmodernism, also believed that the private, essential, core self was an illusion.

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__________________________________________________________________ In Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle describes the self as ‘multiple, fluid, and constituted in interaction with machine connections.’4 In her recent book, Alone Together, Turkle is more pessimistic about our evolution with/through technology whereby our ‘tethered selves’ trade intimacy for information, prefer a text to a phone call and would never consider dropping in for a face-to-face visit. Turkle describes robot companions such as AIBO that can be programmed by the owner. These devices deny alterity, or ‘the ability to see the world through the eyes of another, and without alterity, there can be no empathy.’ 5 Mirroring through the interface mimics the narcissistic gaze—a one-way mirror reflecting back a grandiose self.6 In addition, Turkle notes that the ‘on-demand attention’ required by instant messaging, texting and other social media leaves little room for reflection, introspection and alterity—all required for empathy. 2. Living in Languaging As a poet, my interest in empathy, intentionality and new media is rooted in my interest in language—how it defines us as a species, constructs us as social and moral beings and how we co-evolve with changes in ‘languaging and emotioning’ or the dynamic manner of human ‘being in language’ postulated by Maturana and Varela.7 Their theory of enactivism is a cognitive and biological systems theory of co-emergence, where interaction between a system and a medium is the mechanism by which both change, adapt and evolve. In the enactivist view, language is not synonymous with communication, since it is experienced in tandem with emotions. The phenomenon of communication depends on not what is transmitted, but on what happens to the person who receives it. And this is very different from “transmitting information.”8 Now that so much of our ‘languaging’ is digitally mediated, and much of that is unvoiced and faceless, how does that affect our experience of self and other, and our ability to reflect and empathise? Maturana and Varela’s theory has implications across the disciplines of my enquiry. Echoes of enactivism are audible in intersubjectivity and new media theory as postulated by Joanna Drucker,9 where information and human perceiver are ‘mutually embodied.’ For Drucker, aesthetics and subjectivity are both experiential and emergent, and the subject ‘is positioned and constituted within discursive sensorial networks.’10 But is the digital interface of new media ‘enactive’ in Maturana and Varela’s sense, where user and system co-evolve? If so, what are we evolving into? 3. Technologies-R-Us: Techno-Embodiment and Intentionality Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology has provided a phenomenological grounding and remains a major motivation of my research. The

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__________________________________________________________________ word technology derives from the Greek technē, which, as Heidegger explains, ‘belongs to bringing-forth, to poiēsis; … technē is linked with the word epistēmē. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense.’11 ‘Technologies–R–Us’ is my Heideggerian aphorism to sum up his ideas: For Heidegger, the essence of modern technology is not an application or a tool, a practice or an extension of man’s physical body; it is a way of being and its origins are bound up in the highest human aspirations.12 Intentionality in the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is the embodied experience of being-in-the-world, which, as Don Ihde states, involves ‘a total directness toward the world on the part of the human knower.’13 Max van Manen defines intentionality as ‘the inseparable connectedness of the human being to the world,’ and clarifies two categories: specific intentionality, which refers to the here and now directedness of specific actions and thought; and general intentionality, which refers to ‘how we find ourselves present in the world.’ 14 My intentionality is shaped by my experience as author, poet, English speaker, Canadian, woman, prairie dweller, etc. Embodiment in existential phenomenology refers to how we come to know and experience the world through bodily engagement.15 Embodied knowledge, then, is a web of knowledge—constructed, created, contextual, lived, intuited, assimilated—that is woven together with passion, experience and embodied individuality.16 If intentionality involves an embodied knowing and experience of the world, how is the body experienced in new media environments, and how/does that affect empathy and intentionality? 4. Programmed Intentionality In his seminal work Technology and the Lifeworld, Don Ihde describes technics as ‘the symbiosis of artifact and user within a human action,’ 17 and explains four existential relations by which humans interact with or engage in the world through technology. The first, embodiment relations, pertains to the use of technology as an extension of the body or the senses, such as eyeglasses, prosthetic devices, a cane, a car. Once the enhanced activity (walking, seeing, driving) is mastered, the device becomes transparent to the user and ‘withdraws’—we no longer notice the rim of our glasses, or have to search for the right gear. Importantly, he states: ‘the experience of one’s “body image” is not fixed but malleably extendible and/or reducible in terms of the material or technological mediations that may be embodied.’ 18 Additionally, Ihde acknowledges the desire for ‘total transparency and embodiment’ and that ‘by extending bodily capacities, the technology also transforms them […] In that sense all technologies are non-neutral.’19

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__________________________________________________________________ Ihde’s second phenomenological relation with technology, hermeneutic relations, refers to any action that involves interpretation of language, codes or reading, where writing is not only technologically mediated language, it is an embodied hermeneutic technics.20 Interestingly, Ihde suggests that movement on the human-technology continuum is from embodiment relations toward hermeneutic relations. I earlier argued that the more visual nature of virtual technologies would reverse the directional trend. 21 Now I am not so sure either is valid, as networked systems transcend the concept of spatial or directional continuum. Our interaction follows a more complex trajectory—an iterative, enactive feedback loop—a topology of emergence and co-evolution in languaging embodied with/in digital media. In his third category, Ihde describes the quasi-otherness of alterity relations, where ‘what is needed is an analysis of the positive or presentential senses in which humans relate to or with technologies, to technologies-as-other.’ 22 For Ihde, the quasi-otherness of the interface as represented in a video game, for example, is a contemporary manifestation of our historical fascination with automata, and this fascination is further enhanced by the desire for total embodiment. When attention becomes focused on the interface, rather than the use-value of technology-as-tool, our involvement with technology, or ‘intentionality’ changes. Today, we are an interface-watching society whose ‘tethered selves’23 are not merely monitoring our devices, but constantly on call to respond. Although Ihde was writing when digital technologies were still in their infancy, his work envisioned crucial ways in which new media transforms individuals and societies. He described a fourth phenomenological engagement with non-focal technologies as background relations, a kind of ‘present absence’ that functions in the background.24 In Saskatchewan winters, a furnace is necessary for survival; it is a technology that functions in the background, unnoticed until it malfunctions. Digital technologies are increasingly background as well. As Ihde states: Background technologies, no less than focal ones, transform the gestalts of human experience, and precisely because they are also absent presences, may exert more subtle indirect effects upon the way a world is experienced.25 Don Ihde’s phenomenology of technics has implications for our ability to empathise on several levels. First, the embodied aspect of empathy becomes filtered by the physical properties of the interface. Second, our attention is not merely focused on who we are communicating with, but also on the interface as pseudo-other. Third, our emotional, experiential, cognitive, and imaginative understanding of the other is mediated by the program running the application.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ihde’s phenomenology, then, suggests a mediation whereby the interface replaces the face as primary object of attention and intention. Finally, the very programmability of new media makes it unique from previous technologies.26 Programmability defines how we search, how we play and how we communicate in online environments. When we interact in new media our actions are not only mediated by embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations, our interpretation and communication are mediated by the program running the application—a phenomenon I call ‘programmed intentionality.’ In the industry quest to commoditise emotion, such as research in affective computing for use in social (empathic) robots, the term ‘telepresence’—or the sense of immersiveness in a virtual environment—has been transformed and truncated into ‘presence.’ 27 No longer the essential phenomenological relationship of humans in the world, presence in the AI industry is the ‘illusion of nonmediation in which users of any technology overlook or misconstrue the technology’s role in their experience.’ 28 This type of presence epitomises Heidegger’s danger of being ‘enframed’ by the very technology that we as humans are destined to create.29 5. Empathy, the Self and Other Contemporary concepts of ‘self’ and ‘empathy’ are not only linked, they are culturally and socially defined. Anthropologist Douglas Hollan states that empathy is a combination of emotional, experiential, cognitive, and imaginative understanding to try to see or feel a situation from another’s point of view: It is the felt, embodied aspect of empathy that gives us a more first-person-like perspective on another’s circumstances, that helps to understand how and why a person feels or experiences what they do, not just that they do.30 Hollan and Throop define four dimensions of empathy: temporality, intentionality, discernibility, and appropriateness or possibility. 31 Importantly, these parallel van Manen’s four existential themes—all fundamental to understanding the lived experience of new media: ‘lived space (spaciality), lived body (corporality), lived time (temporality), and lived human relation (relationality or communality).’32 From a humanities and social science perspective, the ability to empathise requires reflection, which is challenged by the increasing deluge of digital distractions.33 From a psychological and phenomenological perspective, empathy requires self-awareness in order to understand the other, or ‘a sense of similarity between the feelings we experience and those expressed by others, without losing sight of whose feelings belong to whom.’ 34 From a behavioural and social neuroscience perspective, empathy is a social phenomenon that ‘facilitates care of offspring, enables us to live in groups, […] paves the way for the development of

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__________________________________________________________________ moral reasoning and motivates pro-social altruistic behaviour.’35 Empathy, then, is an embodied experience that involves intentionality. As stated by Bernard Steigler, the development of empathy is part of the process of psychic and collective individuation, which is ‘constituted by the attentional forms of knowledge: knowhow, lifeskills, cognitive and theoretical knowledges.’ 36 Attention—the heart of collective individuation according to Steigler—is not only running at a deficit in our ‘planetary network society,’ but it is being deformed and commoditised into metadata. 6. Empathy, the Mirror Neuron Systems and the Developing Brain Mirror neurons are a specific class of neurons that discharge on both execution of a motor action and observation of another executing a similar action. Since their discovery in 1996, by Gallese et al, and Rizzolatti et al.,37 the mirror neuron system (MNS) has been shown to be involved in interpreting the emotional state of others,38 and in human social interactions such as empathy.39 Several neuroimaging studies have shown a lack of empathy in perpetrators of cyberbullying.40 Studies on the effects of communications technologies on young people found that although texting and instant messaging may benefit adolescents with ‘perceived low-quality friendships,’ when they used the Internet for surfing, watching videos etc., depression and social anxiety increased. Participants with good quality friendships were unaffected by either type of Internet use.41 Online encounters even via Skype and FaceTime alter our ability to ‘read’ and respond to facial expressions and body language; we are not only limited by the size of the screen, the quality and speed of the modem and digital connection, and the position of the camera in relation to eye contact, which appears to impact the MNS response to mirroring, 42 we are missing a myriad of other neurological systems and biochemical signals that are transmitted in real-life, face-to-face encounters.43 One of the most important theories to emerge from functional neuroimaging studies (fMRI) over the past decade is that of embodied cognition: ‘the general theory that perceptual and motor systems support conceptual knowledge [or] that understanding or retrieving a concept involves some degree of sensory or motor simulation of the concept.’44 Gallese and colleagues discuss empathy in light of embodied simulation (ES)— a phenomenological, physiological and neurological understanding of another’s emotions, actions and intentions, which leads to ‘intentional attunement.’ 45 In contrast to the top-down, cognitive theory of mind (ToM),46 embodied simulation is a bottom-up ‘mandatory, nonconscious and prereflexive [and] a prior functional mechanism of our brain.’ 47 As summarised by Raz et al., 48 the mediation of empathy involves two neural networks: the bottom-up, automatic processes of embodied simulation (ES), and the top-down, reflective process of standard simulation, or theory of mind (ToM). As noted by Giedd ‘the central hub of

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__________________________________________________________________ circuitry related to social skills is the late maturing, highly plastic prefrontal cortex,’ 49 where discernment of nonverbal cues such as eye movement, body posture, eye gaze, involve mastery and practice. 7. Concluding Questions Gallese’s concept of embodied simulation ‘focuses on the role played by the lived body in the constitution of the way we understand the world of others.’50 It is a neuro-phenomenological approach to social cognition where one’s bodily self resonates with other selves in an enactive, intersubjective, pre-reflexive, multimodal sensorial dance of understanding. There is something innately feral about this—the body reading/responding to body. But when the body is absent and our reading of the other is mediated by technics and modulated by programmed intentionality, human social interaction will undoubtedly change. Yet how is the ToM pathway of empathy altered by new media, along with other moral, social and creative processes and decisions that require reflection? How is this all affecting today’s youth (and tomorrow’s leaders) who are most engaged with these technologies, whose brains are still under development, and who have little or no memory of life without—or outside of—the digital interface? Should we jump on Ian Bogost’s (2012) bandwagon and adopt an ‘alien phenomenology’ where we relinquish humanness for thingness to recapture a sense of wonder?51 (Bogost’s intentionality is shaped by his background as a video game designer, after all). When the essence of technology is no longer a ‘tool-based’ destining and ordering but a ‘toy-based’ commoditising, which changes the nature of technē to poiēsis … whereby we no longer ‘know in the widest sense,’ who will even be able to ask Ursula Franklin’s question for whose benefit, and at whose/what cost? 52 A renowned Canadian research physicist and writer on technology, Franklin’s statement sums up my motivation—and the need—for this research: There are no shortcuts to the investment of time and care in friendship and human bonding...When human loneliness becomes a source of income for others through devices, we’d better stop and think about the place of human needs in the real world of technology.53

Notes 1

Richard D. Chessick, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Autochthonous Self: From Italian Renaissance Art and Shakespeare to Heidegger, Lacan, and Intersubjectivism,’ Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 38. 4 (2010): 625-653.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. M. Faber with S. Lehnmann (University of Nebraska Press, 1984), sec. 379. 3 Maria-Louise Rowley, ‘Virtual Reality, Narcissism and the Disintegrating Self’ (Masters Thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1998). 4 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 15. 5 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 55. 6 Rowley, Virtual Reality, Narcissism and the Disintegrating Self. 7 Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (Boston: Shambhala, 1987). 8 Ibid., 196. 9 Joanna Drucker, ‘Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory’, Culture Machine 12 (2011): 1-20; Joanna Drucker, Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009). 10 Drucker, Speclab, 185. 11 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977), 14. 12 Rowley, ‘Virtual Reality, Narcissism and the Disintegrating Self’, 22. 13 Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities (Albany, NY: SUNY Press 2012), 90-91. 14 Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (London, Ontario: The Althouse Press, 1990), 181-82. 15 Jonathan A. Smith, Paul Flowers, and Michael Larkin, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research (London, UK: Sage Publications Ltd, 2009), 17-19. 16 Karen N. Barbour, ‘Embodied Engagement in Arts Research,’ The International Journal of the Arts in Society 1.2 (2006): 85-91. 17 Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press 1990), 72. 18 Ibid., 74. 19 Ibid., 75. 20 Ibid., 81-84. 21 Rowley, Virtual Reality, Narcissism and the Disintegrating Self. 22 Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 98. 23 Turkle, Alone Together, 11, 155. 24 Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 108. 25 Ibid., 112. 26 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 2002), 47.

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__________________________________________________________________ 27

Jonathan Steuer, ‘Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence,’ Journal of Communication 42.4 (2006): 73-93. 28 International Society of Presence Research, Accessed 23 November 2012, http://ispr.info. 29 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 2627. 30 Douglas Hollan, ‘Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood,’ Ethos 36.4 (2008): 480. 31 Douglas Hollan and C. Jason Throop, ‘Introduction: Whatever Happened to Empathy?’ in Ethos 36.4 (2008): 385-401. 32 van Manen, Researching Lived Experience, 101. 33 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2011); Turkle, Alone Together. 34 Jean Decety and Sara D. Hodges, ‘The Social Neuroscience of Empathy,’ Bridging Social Psychology: Benefits of Transdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Paul A.M. van Lange (Psychology Press, 2006), 107. 35 Jean Decety, ‘The Neuroevolution of Empathy,’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1231.1 (2011): 35-45. 36 Bernard Stiegler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon,’ Culture Machine 13 (2012): 2. 37 Vittorio Gallese et al., ‘Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,’ Brain, 119.2 (1996): 593-609; Giacomo Rizzolatti, et al., ‘Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,’ Cognitive Brain Research 3.2 (1996): 131-141. 38 L.F. Häusser, ‘Empathy and Mirror Neurons. A View on Contemporary Neuropsychological Empathy Research,’ Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie 61.5 (2012): 322; Jennifer H. Pfeifer et al., ‘Mirroring Others Emotions Relates to Empathy and Interpersonal Competence in Children,’ NeuroImage 39 (2008): 2076-2085. 39 David D Franks and Jeff Davis, ‘Critique and Refinement of the Neurosociology of Mirror Neurons,’ Advances in Group Processes, 29 (2012): 77-117; Marco Iacoboni, ‘Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons,’ Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 653-670; Vittorio Gallese, Morris N. Eagle, and Paolo Migone, ‘Intentional Attunement: Mirror Neurons and the Neural Underpinnings of Interpersonal Relations,’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55.1 (2007): 131-175. 40 Rebecca P. Ang and Dion H. Goh, ‘Cyberbullying among Adolescents: The Role of Affective and Cognitive Empathy, and Gender,’ Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 41.4 (2010): 387-397; Özgür Erdur-Baker, ‘Cyberbullying and Its Correlation to Traditional Bullying, Gender and Frequent and Risky Usage of Internet-Mediated Communication Tools,’ New Media and Society 12.1 (2010): 109-125; R. Renati, C. Berrone, and M.A. Zanetti, ‘Morally Disengaged and

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__________________________________________________________________ Unempathic: Do Cyberbullies Fit These Definitions? An Exploratory Study,’ Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking 15.8 (2012): 391-398. 41 M.H. Selfhout et al., ‘Different Types of Internet Use, Depression, and Social Anxiety: The Role of Perceived Friendship Quality,’ Journal of Adolescence, 32.4 (2009): 819-833. 42 Schulte-Rüther et al., ‘Mirror Neuron and Theory of Mind Mechanisms Involved in Face-to-Face Interactions: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Approach to Empathy,’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19.8 (2007): 1354-137. 43 Decety, ‘The Neuroevolution of Empathy,’ 35. 44 Jeffrey R. Binder and Rutvik H. Desai, ‘The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory,’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15.11 (2011): 527. 45 Vittorio Gallese, ‘Bodily Selves in Relation: Embodied Simulation as SecondPerson Perspective on Intersubjectivity,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 369.1644 (2014): 20130177; Gallese et al., ‘Intentional Attunement.’ 46 Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith, ‘Does the Autistic Child Have a “Theory of Mind”?’ Cognition 21.1 (1985): 37-46. 47 Gallese et al., ‘Intentional Attunement,’ 143. 48 Gal Raz et al., ‘Cry for Her or Cry with Her: Context-Dependent Dissociation of Two Modes of Cinematic Empathy Reflected in Network Cohesion Dynamics,’ Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9.1 (2014): 30-38. 49 Jay N. Giedd, ‘The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution,’ Journal of Adolescent Health 51.2 (2012): 104. 50 Gallese, ‘Bodily Selves in Relation,’ 2. 51 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What It's Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 52 Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology (Concord, Ontario: CBC Enterprises, 1990), 124. 53 Ibid., 108.

Bibliography Ang, R. P. and D. H. Goh. ‘Cyberbullying among Adolescents: The Role of Affective and Cognitive Empathy, and Gender.’ Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 41.4 (2010): 387-397. Barbour, Karen N. ‘Embodied Engagement in Arts Research.’ The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 1.2 (2006): 85-91. Baron-Cohen, Simon, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith. ‘Does the Autistic Child Have a “Theory of Mind”?’ Cognition 21.1 (1985): 37-46.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It's Like to Be a Thing. U of Minnesota Press, 2012. Binder, Jeffrey R., and Rutvik H. Desai. ‘The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory.’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15.11 (2011): 527-536. Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. WW Norton & Company, 2011. Chessick, Richard D. ‘The Rise and Fall of the Autochthonous Self: From Italian Renaissance Art and Shakespeare to Heidegger, Lacan, and Intersubjectivism.’ Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 38. 4 (2010): 625-653. Decety, Jean. ‘The Neuroevolution of Empathy.’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1231.1 (2011): 35-45. Decety, Jean, and Sara D. Hodges. ‘The Social Neuroscience of Empathy.’ Bridging Social Psychology: Benefits of Transdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Paul AM van Lange. Psychology Press, 2006. Drucker, Joanna. ‘Humanist Approaches to the Graphical Expression of Interpretation.’ Humanities + Digital Visual Interpretations Conference. MIT World. (2011). Viewed on 13 October 2012. http://video.mit.edu/watch/humanistic-approaches-to-the-graphical-expression-of———. Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory. Culture Machine 12 (2011): 1-20. ———. Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009. Erdur-Baker, Özgür. ‘Cyberbullying and Its Correlation to Traditional Bullying, Gender and Frequent and Risky Usage of Internet-Mediated Communication Tools.’ New Media and Society 12.1 (2010): 109-125. Franklin, Ursula. The Real World of Technology. Concord, Ontario: CBC Enterprises, 1990. Franks, D. and Davis J. ‘Critique and Refinement of the Neurosociology of Mirror Neurons.’ Advances in Group Processes, 29 (2012): 77-117.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gallese, Vittorio. ‘Bodily Selves in Relation: Embodied Simulation as SecondPerson Perspective on Intersubjectivity.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 369.1644 (2014): 20130177. Gallese, Vittorio, Morris N. Eagle, and Paolo Migone. ‘Intentional Attunement: Mirror Neurons and the Neural Underpinnings of Interpersonal Relations.’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55.1 (2007): 131-175. Gallese, Vittorio, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. ‘Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex.” Brain, 119.2 (1996): 593-609. Gay, Peter ed. The Freud Reader, 1st edition. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1989. Giedd, Jay N. ‘The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution.’ Journal of Adolescent Health 51.2 (2012): 101-105. Glaskin, Katie. ‘Empathy and the Robot: A Neuroanthropological Analysis.’ Annals of Anthropological Practice 36.1 (2012): 68-87. Häusser, L. F. ‘Empathy and Mirror Neurons. A View on Contemporary Neuropsychological Empathy Research.’ Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie 61.5 (2012): 322. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977. Hollan, Douglas. ‘Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood. Ethos 36.4 (2008): 475-489. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop. ‘Introduction: Whatever Happened to Empathy?’ Ethos 36.4 (2008): 385-401. Iacoboni, Marco. ‘Imitation, Empathy, and Mirror Neurons.’ Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 653-670. Ihde, Don. Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities. SUNY Press, 2012. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 1990.

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__________________________________________________________________ International Society of Presence Research. Viewed on 23 November 2012. http://ispr.info. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Motilal Banarsidass Publishe, 1996. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 2002. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. The Tree of Knowledge. Boston: Shambhala, 1987. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human All Too Human. Translated by M. Faber with S. Lehnmann. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Pfeifer, J. H., M. Iacoboni, J.C. Mazziotta and M. Dapretto. ‘Mirroring Others Emotions Relates to Empathy and Interpersonal Competence in Children.’ NeuroImage 39 (2008): 2076-85. Raz, Gal, Yael Jacob, Tal Gonen, Yonatan Winetraub, Tamar Flash, Eyal Soreq, and Talma Hendler. ‘Cry for Her or Cry with Her: Context-Dependent Dissociation of Two Modes of Cinematic Empathy Reflected in Network Cohesion Dynamics.’ Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9.1 (2014): 30-38. Renati, R., C. Berrone, and M.A. Zanetti. ‘Morally Disengaged and Unempathic: Do Cyberbullies Fit These Definitions? An Exploratory Study.’ Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15.8 (2012): 391-398. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, Luciano Fadiga, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogass. ‘Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions.’ Cognitive Brain Research 3.2 (1996): 131-141. Rowley, Maria-Louise. Virtual Reality, Narcissism and the Disintegrating Self. Masters Thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1998. Schulte-Rüther, Martin, Hans J. Markowitsch, Gereon R. Fink, and Martina Piefke. ‘Mirror Neuron and Theory of Mind Mechanisms Involved in Face-to-Face Interactions: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Approach to Empathy.’ Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19.8 (2007): 1354-137.

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__________________________________________________________________ Selfhout, M. H., S. J. Branje, M. Delsing, T. F. ter Bogt, and W. H. Meeus. ‘Different Types of Internet Use, Depression, and Social Anxiety: The Role of Perceived Friendship Quality.’ Journal of Adolescence, 32.4 (2009): 819-833. Smith, Jonathan A., Paul Flowers and Michael Larkin. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London, UK: Sage, 2009. Steuer, Jonathan. ‘Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence.’ Journal of Communication 42.4 (2006): 73-93. Stiegler, Bernard. ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon.’ Culture Machine 13, 2012. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Van Manen, Max. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. London, Ontario: The Althouse Press, 1990. Mari-Lou Rowley is a poet, science writer and interdisciplinary PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She has published nine collections of poetry, most recently Unus Mundus (Anvil Press 2013), and her work has appeared internationally in literary, arts and science-related journals.

Virtuous War and UAVs: The ‘Inhibition’ of Friction and the Banalization of Violence Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron Abstract The Revolution in Military Affairs in the 80s and 90s was a watershed in the conduct of US military operations and military technology. All operations, in order to combat the terrorism as an atomized menace, were figured as surgical actions enabled by the use of several types of visually mediated technologies and remote control interfaces, such as standoff weapons including Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. It is possible to consider valid, at this point, the argumentation of Der Derian that the US military operations are going ‘virtuous’ – a process in which the virtual mediation of military technologies results in a reorganization of the way that violence is actualized, and in a legitimisation of the way it is promoted: supposedly clean and ‘tragedy-free’. This presentation seeks to understand, through the debate between Der Derian on the virtual, and Jean Baudrillard on simulacra and hyper-real in what ways technologies in the context of the ‘Virtuous War’ have led to the reframing, or destruction, of the sense of reality, contributing to the banalization of the use of violence with the reduction of the friction effect in the combat. In this case, supported by Clausewitz’s definition on friction, through which all abrasion, constraints and risks of the conflict, act in order to reduce the efficiency and the moral of the combatants, driving the conflict to a ‘natural’ end, it is possible to argue that the ‘Virtuous War’ not only inhibits the friction through the distancing, but also alters the way the violence is perceived. Key Words: Drones, virtuous war, modern warfare, surgical war, virtual mediation, simulation, military technology, friction. ***** 1. Introduction Based on a discourse of surgical precision and preservation of the integrity of the combatants, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), brings more than just one technical solution to the continuous dismantlement of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) and to the problematic of the public antagonism to ‘never-ending’ high-casualty military campaigns – which produced the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. In truth, the RMA characterizes the development of a new model of war, which fits in the ongoing discourse of a prolonged irregular warfare on terror. However, the constant employment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones in this modality of irregular warfare, especially in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan in the past ten years, has been a point of great controversy in what concerns their legality and legitimacy. The operations

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__________________________________________________________________ denominated ‘Targeted Killing’ – or latter critically called ‘Hunt and Kill’ – oriented to eliminate specific targets related to terrorist activities, occur in a context of profound generalisation, of the battlefield in those territories considered ‘Failed States’, and of the civilian targets as potential terrorists. This chapter relies on Jean Baudrillard’s interpretations on the aniquilation of the senses in society and war guided by signs, argued in his essays Simulacra and Simulation and ‘The Gulf War did not Take Place’. Also, it is connected to the studies of James Der Derian, who seeks to compose a narrative about the modern war, by criticising the technological trajectory of the U.S. armaments technology, which values the distancing and the cyber-mediation of the conflict, and also the media coverage and representations of the contemporary conflicts. According to the author, there is a connection between the way war is fought and represented, that drives it into the realm of virtualization, of discourses, enemies and combats in what he claims to be a Virtuous War.1 In distinct periods, Jean Baudrillard and James Der Derian develop similar critical issues, about the process of technical mediation and mediatization of the North-American military campaigns. Comprehending that the discourses and practices of war are disassociated from the way the events take place and seek to build a morally justified space of intervention, both authors denounce the emergence of a hyper-reality through the process of virtualization of war. These categories expose a process of development since the Vietnam and Gulf wars that reaches its peak during the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and with the discourse of ‘Global War on Terror’, with the ‘spectaculization’ of this discourse and practices through the media, and with the massive employment of high technologies in the context of ‘shock and awe’ doctrine of operations. Der Derian then understands it as the emergence of the Virtuous War, in which the element of disruption in relation to the preceding wars is not only the artificialization of the narratives that justifies the interventions, but also the characteristics of a war fought as a simulation – through technical means that depersonalise the enemy and the act of killing into a rational and technical interaction.2 The main point of this criticism, close to Baudrillard’s observations on the Vietnam war, is that the mediation and ‘mediatization’ of the conflicts, that configure the idea of Virtuous War, produce an ‘aesthetics of disappearing’ that eliminates the principle of reality of it, and leaves only a kind of ‘tragedy-free’ spectra of the conflict.3 The objective of this chapter is to comprehend how the dynamics of the operations ‘Targeted Killing’, that seek to eliminate potential terrorist targets in Pakistan, and Yemen, is easing the political use of force of the Obama administration. It would be possible to categorise it as a contemporary manifestation of Virtuous War, due to the condition of how these conflicts are conducted, through the extirpation of the combatant from the operational theatre, his reallocation as an instruments operator, and his submission to a socio-technical

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__________________________________________________________________ environment that simulates and depersonalises the war. Our hypothesis is that the war fought as simulation in Pakistan is easing the decision to apply force by the Obama administration, even in high risky cases that could compromise the life of civilians. 2. The Revolution in Military Affairs, and the Discourse on Surgical Weapons Through the work of Kaldor on the dynamics of production of military technology in U.S. during peace times, it is possible to argue that an alternative mechanism would be responsible to determinate the process of succession of armaments and assimilation of new technologies. In this case, the preferences of the state are subjectively defined by institutional demands, while the possibilities of supply emerge from the operational requirements of the supplier institutions.4 Then, it is possible to affirm that the political and social context of the 80s and 90s, during which claims for a change in the way war should be conducted were made, conformed with a whole new kind of subjectivity in the preferences of the state: weapons that could allow higher efficiency of the military campaigns, with more security to the combatants, accuracy in the attacks, and less collateral damage. The advent of new threats in the global scenario, and the emergence of new informational Technologies contributed to the ‘efficiency’ of the interoperability in the United States Armed Forces among the tactical and decision-making levels. The application of these technologies for the development of instruments that support the military operations subsidises the discourse of ‘modern war’, lean and surgical in its representations. What we can observe through this section is that, in fact, there is a discontinuity in the way military operations were conducted, mainly because of the adoption of new technologies, and development of doctrines and new combat tactics. However, the idea of ‘new’ and ‘modern’ in the contemporary military operations is rather tributary to the privileged character of the information management and the distancing start to have in the design of operations, than to the supposition of precision and legitimacy. Therefore, according to Shimko, the RMA could be understood as a set of interests and perceptions that evolves through a distinct political-economic context and begin to constrain the public policy agenda in what concerns the production of new technologies of warfare, and the way it shall be conducted and commanded.5 Then, the development of the RMA is due to factors such as: (i) the murky outcome of the Vietnam War, responsible for the development of the collective aversion in great proportions to conflict – the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ – which could compromise more soldiers’ lives and which governs the social perception about the US military campaigns;6 (ii) the substantive reduction of the governmental spending with military P&D, at the same time it started to spend in the same amount in the civil sector – based on the perception that the dynamic core of new technology follows the flux of ‘spin-in’, rather than ‘spin-off’; (iii) the profusion of

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__________________________________________________________________ information and communication technologies with possible applications in the military technological systems; (iv) and finally, the perception of a substantial diversification in the nature of threats to national security, which stimulates the reorientation of the defence policy, and consequently, of the operational concepts.7 Among the technological systems of great expression developed in the period, there are systems of satellite communication and live feed, stand-off weapons (mainly UAVs), sensorial system for targeting in Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and UAVs. These systems allowed not only the development of C4IRS (Command, Control, Communication, Computing, Information, Reconnaissance and Surveillance), that optimised the ‘shock and awe’ campaigns, but also grant the Armed Forces access and control to the whole flow of information about war, conforming also to the dynamic of ‘network-centric-warfare’, preconized by Cerebrowsky.8 This happened, according to Bellamy, both for the development of ‘surgical’ strategies in tactical level, the acquisition and destruction of data in cybernetic environment, or to control the spreading of information in the public about the war.9 In this context, the way in which the U.S. promotes its military campaigns becomes legitimated by the perspective of revolution in military affairs, which develops promises of surgical actions, through the new technological means associated with the doctrine of ‘shock and awe, the new conception of C4IRS, and to the discourse of ‘war on terror’, during the Bush Administration. Somehow, this discourse seeks to answer the problems of excessive deaths of soldiers, at the same time as fitting in with the new perspective of international security to combat ‘asymmetric threats’ in the context of irregular warfare. However, this discourse of precision – which brings the idea of reduction of frictional elements – are extremely controversial, since it is not difficult to demonstrate the amount of civilian deaths side by side to the supposed enemies in this surgical campaigns, the problems relative to ‘friendly fire’, and problems related to lack of interoperability, such as the ‘Digital Divide’.10 3. ‘Targeted Killing’ in Pakistan: Manifestations of Virtuous War? The 9/11 attacks, as Ferreira argues, provoked a sensible change in the security policy of the country, changing even its state’s organization – amplifying the power of the Department of Defense (DoD), and creating Homeland Security – and transforming the ‘war on terror’ to one of its main focus of action.11 This way, the discourse of global war on terror spread widely in the period and opened a political precedent to justify interventions based on the supposition of terrorist activities ongoing in any territory, as Byers posits: the extension of the right of self-defence to the use of force against terrorists overseas, would certainly attend to the interests

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__________________________________________________________________ of the United States, neglecting the perspective that another country could exercise the same right on American soil.12 Thus, even when the military interventions with intense mobilisation of contingents in the Middle East are finished, it is possible to verify that the operations ‘Hunt and Kill’ still operate on the same prerogative as the war on terror: to eliminate potential terrorist threats. Nevertheless, the technical means developed along the RMA, allowed the elimination of ‘asymmetric threats’ by remote control, which opened space to the development of a discourse on surgical combats. In this context, the concept of Virtuous War developed by Der Derian is valid to discuss these operations, since the technical means allow for a distancing through virtualization of the combat, and consequently corroborate to the development of a discourse on ‘surgical means’ that hides a practice full of legal and moral controversies – as the works of O’Connell will point out.13 As a direct result of the technological advances in RMA, the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) started to be regularly employed in the US campaigns and military operations, mainly after the intervention in Kosovo, when the trade-off between mobilising troops and using drones was extremely evident. Since 2001, the spending of the Department of Defense (DoD) on UAS has been increasing, from US$ 363 million in 2001, to US$ 2.9 billion in 2013, which directly impacts on the amount of this equipment in the U.S. arsenals: while only 5% of the aircrafts in 2005 were UAVs, amounting to 163 aircrafts, by 2012, they made up one third of the whole amount of aircrafts, amounting to 7454.14 More than just a consequence of the defence contractor’s lobby – whose contributions to electoral campaigns raised by 13% between 2000 and 2002, and by around 28% between 2006 and 2008 – the growth of drones is related to a perception of wide security, in which the terrorist threats confuse the civilian and military spheres, and also transform sovereign spaces into battlefield (‘failed states’).15 Therefore surgical pre-emptive attacks are seen to be the most efficient solution to the ‘war on terror’. In order to legitimate this practice, it becomes common to invoke the prerogative of ‘Failed States’ by the Obama’s administration, to nominate territories that could be a shelter for people related to terrorist activities.16 According to the New America Foundation Drones Database, between 2004 and 2007, in Pakistan, there were nine drone’s strikes; in 2008 this number raised to 33, in 2009, 53; in the beginning of Obama’s administration this number increased to 118 in 2010 and 78 in 2011.17 Opening the ‘black box’ of these strikes, the project ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ – based on the data of the New America Foundation and the joint report of Stanford University and NYU named Living Under Drones – reveals that between 2004 and 2013, the drone’s strikes in Pakistan killed around 3213 people, of whom only 50 (1%) were ‘high profile’ targets, 2453 (76,3%) were considered potential terrorists by the American

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__________________________________________________________________ government, 536 (16,7%) were proven civilians, and 175 (5,4%) children.18 The high number of ‘non-priority’ targets eliminated deeply contrasts with the 1% that belongs to the ‘kill lists’, which indicates a profound controversy over the discourse of ‘surgical war’ and precision attributed to the ‘Hunt and Kill’ operations. Conduced together by the United States Air Force (USAF) and the CIA, these operations are performed through an intricate command network, structured in several hierarchical levels and dispersed in many different bases in the world. This, drives Bhatt, in his research about the human rights in the new condition of war, to affirm that besides the geographic distance between the operational base and the operational theatre, the drone operator would be close to the act of violence, once he is submitted to a high resolution graphical mediation, therefore he would be fully aware of the violence employed.19 In this case, considering the excessive number of non-justified deaths in the operations in Pakistan, and those that plague Yemen (88 strikes between 2002 and 2014, with 945 deaths, in which 134 were civilians),20 it is possible to question the perspective presented by Bhatt. In this point we advocate in favour of the idea that, although there is a proximity to the violence through a graphic representation, much like the simulated battle space, the virtualization of the war through the technical mediation – as pointed out by Baudrillard and Der Derian– eliminates the authenticity of a physical and continued conflict, provoking a kind of ‘moral disengagement’ in the ‘cubicle soldier’ in relation to the violence employed.21 We could consider at this point that this moral disengagement allowed by the virtualization of the battle in the drones operations could be provoked by the reduction of what is called ‘Friction of War’, by the time it brings more certainty and rationalizes the way violence is promoted. The term ‘friction of war’ is defined by Clausewitz as the ‘invisible factor’ that always governs the changes of the theoretical and descriptive simplicity of the strategy of war, to the complexity of the real. All the dangers that the war produce, as to the physical efforts required, contribute, according to Clausewitz, to intensify the malaise of war, configured therefore, as the biggest problem to be faced in the march of the conflict. Thus, the dangers and the physical wear figurate as the main variables that constrain the rhythm and the development of the soldier and the battalions at war.22 Friction, then, would be everything that makes what seems to be easy at war difficult. In this sense, it is remarkable that the experience of war, the everyday battle, the coping, the weather condition and the theatre of war, among other adversities, are elements that influence and constraint the conflict and its dynamics. The main reality of war, its brutality and violence are elements that can compromise its continuity. In what concerns the ‘cubicle warriors’, subjected to a moral disengagement, it is possible to argue that a great portion of the friction is eliminated, precisely that related to any constraints with the contact with the battlefield. As Royakkers and Van Est state, the socio-technical organization of the

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__________________________________________________________________ simulated theatre of war split means and ends, making the operator lose sight of the means to employ violence, eliminating the resistance and difficulty to kill, and the fear of being counter-targeted, once he is displaced from the front.23 What we could observe so far in our debate, is that it is not a mistake to establish a correlation among the adoption of weapons that excel in distancing the soldier from the conflict, with the increase of the power of destruction, without compromising the strategic maintenance of the coldness and indifference in relation to the violence and the horror inherent to the war. A similar discussion is developed by Grossman, in which the distancing from the battlefield and from the enemy, and the consequent socio-technical organization of the instruments of war, tend to reduce the inhibition to kill.24 In a certain way, the reduction of friction through the socio-technical configuration of the drone, and the drone operations, eases the act of killing by the time it depersonalises the war, what is in consonance with the idea of a Virtuous War, in which the battle is fought the same way it is represented: rationalised, graphically mediated, ‘tragedy-free’ (or ‘in-vitro’, as says Baudrillard).25 Therefore, not only the discourse that surrounds it, but also the war fought through simulated means allow us to categorise the ‘Hunt and Kill’ operations as Virtuous Wars. This is possible once the socio-technical organization of the instruments concerning the drone operations redefine the conduct of killing by the time it extirpates the operator from the battle and mediates it as a simulation. 4. Conclusion Our intention in this chapter was to suggest that, in this modality of conflict conducted mainly during the Obama administration, the use of drones eases the political and moral act of killing. This could be argued since the socio technical organization of the instruments, conceived during the RMA, suggests that there is a depersonalisation of the combat, which changes the nature of the combatant, reducing the frictional elements that could affect its moral resistance to kill. With the combatant secured, and the supposition of efficiency of this technology – through the media representations – the political decision of killing is eased, and atrocities related to civilians deaths by the generalisation of the enemy and the battlefield into civilian spaces are ‘collateralized’. In the context of the Virtuous War theory, as Der Derian points out, not only the enemy but also the aggression are virtualized into the technical means in a process of ‘aesthetics of disappearances’.26

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Notes 1

James Der Derian, Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2009a), 244-247. 2 Der Derian, Critical Practices in International Theory, 247. 3 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network (New York: Routledge, 2009b), 121. 4 Mary Kaldor, ‘The Weapons Succession Process’, in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald Makenzie and Judy Wajcman (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 416. 5 Keith Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 02. 6 Ian Buchanan, ‘Treatise on Militarism’, Simploke 14 (2006): 155. 7 Zbigniew Brzezinsky, American Security in an Interdependent World: A Collection of Papers Presented at the Atlantic Council’s 1987 Annual Conference (University Press of America, 1989), 03-04. 8 Arthur Cerebrowsky, ‘Military Responses to the Informational Age’, The RUSI Journal 145:5 (2000): 27. 9 Christopher Bellamy, ‘What Is Information Warfare?’ in Managing the Revolution in Military Affairs, ed. Ron Matthews and John Treddenick (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 61. 10 Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution, 170. 11 Marcos Ferreira, ‘Panorama da política de segurança dos Estados Unidos após o 11 de setembro: O espectro neoconservador e a reestruturação organizacional do Estado’, in Do 11 de setembro de 2001 à Guerra ao Terror: Reflexões sobre o terrorismo no século XXI, ed. André Souza, Reginaldo Nasser, Rodrigo Moraes (Brasília: IPEA, 2014), 45. 12 Michel Byers, A lei da guerra: direito internacional e conflito armado (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2007), 84. (Author’s Translation) 13 Mary Ellen O’Connell, ‘Seductive Drones: Learning from a Decade of Lethal Operations’, Journal of Law, Information and Science (2011): 24. 14 Abigail Hall and Christopher Conye, ‘The Political Economy of Drones’, Defense and Peace Economics (2013): 09. 15 Abigail Hall and Christopher Conye, ‘The Political Economy of Drones’, 10. 16 Chetan Bhatt, ’Human Rights and the Transformation of War’, Sociology 46 (2012): 818. 17 New America Foundation, ‘Drone Wars Pakistan: Analysis’, Viewed 12 April 2014, http://natsec.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan/analysis. 18 Out of Sight, Out of Mind, ‘Attacks’, Viewed 16 May 2014. http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/. 19 Bhatt, ‘Human Rights and the Transformation of War’, 820.

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__________________________________________________________________ 20

New America Foundation, ‘Drone Wars Yemen: Analysis’, Viewed 12 April 2014, http://natsec.newamerica.net/drones/yemen/analysis. 21 Làmber Royakkers and Rinie Van Est, ‘The Cubicle Warrior: The Marionette of Digitalized Warfare’, Ethics Inf Technol 12 (2010): 293. 22 Carl von Clausewitz, Da Guerra, (São Paulo: Editora Martins Fontes, 2010), 8385. 23 Làmber Royakkers and Rinie Van Est, ‘The Cubicle Warrior: The Marionette of Digitalized Warfare’, 293. 24 Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009), 142. 25 Jean Baudrillard, La Guerra del Golfo no ha tenido lugar (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1991), 16. 26 Der Derian, Virtuous War, 121.

Bibliography Banta, Benjamin. ‘“Virtuous War” and the Emergence of Jus post Bellum’. Review of International Studies 37 (2011): 277-299. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994. ___. La Guerra del Golfo no ha tenido lugar. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1991. Bellamy, Christopher. ‘What Is Information Warfare?’ In Managing the Revolution in Military Affairs, edited by Ron Matthews and John Treddenick, 56-75. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Bhatt, Chetan. ‘Human Rights and the Transformation of War’. Sociology 46 (2012): 813-828. Buchanan, Ian. ‘Treatise on Militarism’. Simploke 14 (2006): 152-168. Byers, M. A lei da guerra: direito internacional e conflito armado. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2007. Brzezinsky, Zbigniew. American Security in an Interdependent World: A Collection of Papers Presented at the Atlantic Council’s 1987 Annual Conference. University Press of America, 1989.

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__________________________________________________________________ Cerebrowsky, Arthur. ‘Military Responses to the Informational Age’. The RUSI Journal 145: 5 (2000): 25-29. Clausewitz, Carl von. Da Guerra. São Paulo: Editora Martins Fontes, 2010. Der Derian, James. Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Routledge, 2009a. ___. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. New York: Rouledge, 2009b. Ferreira, Marcos. ‘Panorama da política de segurança dos Estados Unidos após o 11 de setembro: O espectro neoconservador e a reestruturação organizacional do Estado’. In Do 11 de Setembro de 2001 à Guerra ao Terror: Reflexões sobre o terrorismo no século XXI, edited by André Souza, Reginaldo Nasser, Rodrigo Moraes, 45-64 . Brasília: IPEA, 2014. Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009. Hall, Abigail, and Christopher Coyne. ‘The Political Economy of Drones’. Defense and Peace Economics (2013). International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law. Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan, 2012. Kaldor, Mary. ‘The Weapons Succession Process’. In The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Donald Makenzie and Judy Wajcman, 406-418. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. Keagan, John. A History of Warfare. London: Pimlico, 2004. Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. New America Foundation. ‘Drone Wars Pakistan: Analysis’. Accessed 12 April 2014. http://natsec.newamerica.net/drones/pakistan/analysis. O’Connell, Mary Ellen. ‘Seductive Drones: Learning from a Decade of Lethal Operations’. Journal of Law, Information and Science (2011) EAP 1-27.

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__________________________________________________________________ Out of Sight, Out of Mind. ‘Attacks’. Accessed 16 May 2014. http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/. Riza, M. Shane. Killing without Heart: Limits on Robotic Warfare in an Age of Persistent Conflict. Washington: Potomac Books, 2013. Royakkers, Làmber, and Rinie Van Est. ‘The Cubicle Warrior: The Marionette of Digitalized Warfare’. Ethics Inf Technol 12 (2010): 289-96. Shimko, Keith. The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Singer, P. W. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Walzer, Michel. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron is a PHD student in Scientific and Technology Policy at Unicamp – Brazil. Graduated in International Affairs, in Economics, and with a master degree in Scientific and Technology Policy, the author was professor of International Affairs’s graduation at Facamp, coordinator of OFTA, and is a member of GAPI – Unicamp.

Serial Communication Experiments: You Can (Not) Advance Antony Chun-man Tam Abstract Though critical posthumanism proposes the formation of an ultimate inclusive community, there is a lack of a practical solution. Through analysing two anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-) and Serial Experiments Lain (1998), this chapter explores how this ideal holism can be achieved through pursuing effective communication. In contrast to traditional posthuman beliefs, this chapter argues that holism is never a stable state. Referring to the informational nature of universe, the development of the posthuman instead forms a cycle. This chapter starts by analysing the barriers to effective communication. In the two anime, the message form determines the communication process. This materiality prevents the exchange of true thoughts. Characters tend to stress only the information instead of its materiality. Yet as the stories develop, it is revealed that materiality is also an important piece of information of individuality. If materiality is also informational in nature, the whole universe is essentially composed of information. In this sense, the true barrier to effective communication is the incomplete information transfer. The two anime hypothesise the condition in which effective communication can be achieved. Through the condensation of information, a divine (omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent) collective consciousness, or God, is formed. Nonetheless this being is destined to self-dissolution, as it is in need of understanding its identity and power. After all, information is only valuable when it flows. The traditional posthuman holistic ideal is thus rejected. One can never completely understand or be understood by others. To end the loneliness resulted from the incomplete information transfer, one can only identify with those who have similar qualities and form groups. Yet when a group becomes too inclusive, collective consciousness would again be formed, resulting in a loop. This circular vision of the posthuman implies a cynical yet existential view of the popular culture upon life. Key Words: Critical posthumanism, science fiction, anime, Serial Experiments Lain, Neon Genesis Evangelion, communication, materiality, information, collective consciousness, God. ***** 1. Practicality of Critical Posthumanism Critical posthumanism emphasises futurity and interconnectedness. For futurity, human beings recognize their limits and seek enhancement. The human is only provisional.1 For interconnectedness, the other has always been essential for the human’s formation. Consciousness for example, emerges from the information

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__________________________________________________________________ exchange with the environment.2 An enhanced state – species cosmopolitanism – is foreseen to be formed by increasing interconnectedness between species. As an ethical project, speciesism will be rejected; an ultimate inclusive community will be formed: ‘the sharing of consciousness and nervous systems, of thought and body’.3 Survival of all species will be ensured. Practicality remains one unsolved problem of critical posthumnaism. Nayar suggests that genetic engineering would be a practical method: through hybridisation, a species would not only gain corporal but also moral enhancement. Since the hybrid species holds memberships of more than one species, empathy can be extended beyond the species.4 Waiving the impact to the whole ecosystem aside, according to Nayar’s argument, even if there remains only a super-hybrid species in the world, what truly holds individuals together is the assumed empathy between members. Yet in modern human societies, empathy does not necessarily come alongside membership, for alienation and loneliness are prominent phenomena. Keysers would argue that empathy can be amplified biologically by stimulating mirror neurons.5 By observing the other’s actions, one’s mirror neurons are activated, creating in his mind ‘representations of other people’s minds’.6 Thus one’s feelings will be affected. Still, it is suspected that what empathy enables after all is merely an imagination of the other’s feeling instead of the sharing of true thoughts. Communication naturally becomes the starting place for this investigation. To achieve holism, Koivukoski proposes ‘high-speed thought’ as the only way for a community to form one singular experience.7 Through analysing two anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE) (1995-) and Serial Experiments Lain (SEL) (1998), this chapter investigates how the posthuman holistic ideal can be achieved through effective communication. Yet referring to the informational nature of the universe, this chapter argues that in contrast to traditional posthuman beliefs, holism (condensation of information, collective consciousness, or God) is never a stable state. Instead, the development of the posthuman forms a cycle. 2. Materiality of Communication ‘Communication occurs when one person (or more) sends and receives messages that are distorted by noise, occur within a context, have some effect, and provide some opportunity for feedback’. 8 To Devito, effective communication occurs when the message sent is identical to the message received without noise interference.9 Yet to Hall, instead of noise, the main problem of communication (both verbal and non-verbal) is related to the production and consumption of the message. On the one hand, a thought (a raw historical event) must first be encoded into signifiers according to the producer’s meaning structure; on the other hand, meaning is decoded from the message (in the form of signifiers) according to the receiver’s meaning structure, which may be different from the producer’s. 10 In

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__________________________________________________________________ other words, the message form (materiality) determinates the communication process.11 The message form contributes to the failure of communication in both anime. Verbal human languages are ambiguous. The literal can be totally different from the symbolic. This is also reflected in the Japanese language by the two concepts tatemae (建前, what is said/done) and honne (本音, what is really meant).12 Conflicts arise from the ambiguity of language in NGE. The story is set in Tokyo-3 in 2015 (15 years after a major catastrophe called the Second Impact). There exist giant extraterrestrial mighty beings called Angels (shito, 使 徒, messenger, children of a godlike being called Adam). It is believed that if the Angels are able to contact Adam/Lilith (godlike beings), another catastrophe would result. Thus humans pilot the Evangelions (EVAs, artificial reproductions of Adam and Lilith) to defend the Angels. The literal meaning of both Angel (messenger) and Evangelion (carrier of evangel) suggests that they are carrying a message from God (the truth). Nevertheless, the message can never be exchanged. What the characters say does not reflect what they think either. The protagonist Shinji, the pilot of Evangelion unit 01 (EVA 01), is an indecisive person.13 In the new movie version You Are (Not) Alone (2007), his personality is intensified in the way that he always says sumimasan (‘sorry’) and hai (‘yes/no’).14 However in the Japanese language, these words are ambiguous. One main function of sumimasan is for others to ‘feel good’, advocating superficial harmony, despite the fact that the speaker does not really think in this way.15 Hai can be used both in positive and negative responses to a question. 16 Indeed, as revealed in the end of the story, Shinji only wants the others to understand and love him.17 Asuka, the pilot of EVA 02, acts in an individualistic and bossy way, saying that she is ‘not a child’, and ‘grows up faster than anyone else’.18 The honne nevertheless, is that she only wants to catch her psychopathic mother’s attention.19 Indeed, some are unwilling, or even unable to encode their thoughts in language. There are moments when the word is lost to articulate a particular feeling. Set in the present, SEL describes a number of introverted youths. The protagonist Iwakura Rein (Lain) for example, a non-fashionable teenage girl, is reluctant to speak to her classmates as well as her family. In ‘Layer 03: Psyche’, after witnessing a drug addict committing suicide in the bar Cyberia, Lain remains quiet when being interrogated by a police officer. When answering her best friend Arisu’s question if she is alright, she can only articulate ‘A…ri…su’ in an interrupted manner.20 Upon the failure of verbal languages, some return to the body (non-verbal language) for encoding thoughts. In NGE Episode 15, Shinji and Asuka engage in occasional sexual experiments. The sexual encounter however cannot represent their desire to be understood. 21 The body therefore is condemned for its untruthfulness. Rei, the pilot of EVA 00, denotes that she ‘hates meat’ (flesh, the body).22

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__________________________________________________________________ Since the form (materiality) of the message is considered unreliable, people tend to stress solely the information. This fantasy of abandoning materiality for communication is noted in SEL Lain’s classmate Chisa, who also has an introverted character, committed suicide in the first episode.23 Strange things begin to happen afterwards, for everyone in the school receives an email from Chisa, even Lain, though they only walked home once.24 3. The Informational Universe Extraction of information/consciousness is a marked idea of critical posthumanism; as Hayles claims, ‘the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation’. 25 This idea is made possible by technology. Still as illustrated in the two anime, it appears that this is not the complete picture. As Hayles further points out: ‘the posthuman considers consciousness ... as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow’.26 The exploration of the technological nonconscious gives insight to the nature of individuality. Hayles argues that ‘natural language’ (‘human-only languages’) is ‘not whole of the mind’.27 In computer-mediated communication, natural language is decoded in the form of computer code.28 This enables communication between people speaking different languages. Moreover, humans can communicate with programmable media in computer code without awareness, thus tasks can be performed without being structured in conscious natural language thoughts. Therefore, computer code simulates a certain part of consciousness, forming the ‘technological nonconscious.’29 In SEL, Chisa claims that she is still alive after her suicide, and invites Lain to join her in the internet-like Wired, for ‘God is here’. 30 Knowing nothing about electronics, Lain starts exploring the Wired. She discovers that another ‘Lain’ always exists in the Wired. In ‘Layer 08: Rumors’, there is a rumour in the Wired that Arisu has sexual fantasies of a male teacher, while it is said that Lain has spread out the rumour.31 Lain claims that this Wired Lain is ‘acting like the part of [her] that [she] hates’. 32 This evil twin of Lain represents the technological nonconscious, causing a ‘crisis of subjectivity’.33 Yet it is curious that while Lain can generate another ‘self’ with a full body in the Wired, the others are essentially ‘organs’. In ‘Layer 06: Kids’, the user ‘Cheshire Cat’ is only able to appear as a mouth. He explains that this is because of the difference in ‘user levels’, for ‘most people can only manage ears’.34 In ‘Layer 09: Protocol’, people in the Wired further claim that ‘information does not always go both ways’.35 In other words, for all information to be exchanged freely, the whole body has to be uploaded onto the Wired. This also implies that the body (materiality) is also an important piece of information of individuality. Lain can always exist in the Wired as she is only a human-like autonomous program linking

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__________________________________________________________________ the reality and the Wired.36 Or in fact, all individuals are programs, information in nature. A similar view of individuality is also illustrated in NGE by the concept of A.T. Field. It is an impenetrable force field generated by the EVAs and Angels both for attack and defence. Apart from a battlefield, it can also be applied in human interactions. In Episode 24, Kaworu (the 17th Angel, in human form) reveals that the A.T. Field is ‘the manifestation of the physical and mental divisions between beings, “light of the soul” and “the wall that everyone has in their heart”’.37 To overcome the A.T. Field is to reduce a person into LCL fluid (the ‘source of life’).38 In other words, the body is essential for the phenomenon of individuality to emerge. If individuality (both consciousness and materiality) is a pattern of information, the only possible explanation is that the universe is made up of information. This matches with the cellular automata (CA) model of universe proposed by theorists like Wolfram. In this model, the universe is a finite cellular automaton, or computers closely packed with each other, like ‘a lattice network of cells’.39 Each cell can take a finite number of states; and to the simplest, it can be imagined as having two states, either ‘on’ (1) or ‘off’ (0). 40 The states of the cells will be updated synchronously.41 The rule for determining the state of each cell is the same for all overtime; which is a simple mathematical function that depends on the centre cell and the adjacent cells’ current states.42 At the initial state (t=0), the state of each cell is determined out of randomness, forming chaos. 43 Yet from this moment onwards, patterns begin to form, like ‘the structure of matter, energy, space-time – indeed, of everything that exists’.44 In this sense, ‘reality is a program run on a cosmic computer’.45 4. Effective Communication The informational view of the universe can be used to account for the failure of communication. Since an individual is informational in nature and is provisional, a conscious thought is merely the resultant phenomenon of the pattern which forms the individual at that particular moment. In this sense, a thought cannot be fully represented by any message form besides the individual at that particular moment. In addition, transfer of information always takes place in the form of energy. During the process of energy exchange and travel (for example, electric energy in the neural system  mechanical energy of sound), information must be lost in the form of energy to the surroundings, according to the law of conservation. Therefore, only a very small percentage of the information pattern of the original thought can reach the receiver. This does not necessarily mean that a thought would always be retained in the speaker however. Despite the fact that the CA model is unable to predict future trends of the information patterns (in Fredkin’s words, ‘in general, physics is computing the future as fast as it can’46), by observing simple computation models,

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__________________________________________________________________ it suggests that entropy will eventually decrease even with a chaotic initiation. More and more complex structures will be formed slowly. In the two anime, this integration process is accelerated artificially. Technology is used to transform an individual directly into information for integration. In SEL, Eiri, the Chief Researcher of the 7th-gen Wired Protocol, transforms his individuality into a string of information in the Wired. As Lain is also a program, an amazing communication effect is achieved in their first encounter. They can read each other’s mind, and read out the lines for each other.47 Eiri even claims that Lain is the only person who ‘loves’ him as a god in the Wired, as ‘he is Lain’.48 Integration of information is achieved to form holism. The informatisation of an individual is measured by the degree of ‘synchronization’ in NGE. To pilot an EVA, a person has to achieve a certain degree of synchronisation (expressed in percentage) with it. The pilot’s and the EVA’s nervous system would be merged once they are synchronised to certain extend. ‘Effective communication’ is often observed when synchronisation reaches an abnormally high percentage. In Episode 20, Shinji completely merges with EVA 01 when the synchronisation reaches 400%. In this condition, his A.T. Field is gone. His body becomes puddles of LCL fluid. He is then able to get in contact with the consciousness of his mother, who previously accidentally merged with EVA 01 as well.49 5. Condensation of Information Artificial integration of information is then extended to the global scale, forming a collective consciousness. In Episodes 25-26 of the NGE TV series and the movie End of Evangelion (1997), ‘Human Instrumentality Project’ – the central plot of the story– is introduced in detail. Seele (soul), a secret organization controlling all governments around the world, is aware that an individual is incomplete. To complete oneself with another, the project’s ultimate aim is to reduce all humans to the sea of LCL (the sea of life). This is achieved by the Anti-A.T. Field resulted from the artificial contact between the EVA and the remains of Lilith and Adam. To maintain a holistic vision, a person (who turns out to be Shinji) who has minimal individuality must pilot the EVA and govern the sea of LCL. 50 Upon the completion of the Project, three divine qualities can be observed: (1) Omniscience. Shinji sitting on the EVA unit 01, experiences a flush of information into his mind. He sees different faces, hears different voices, and experiences different memories. 51 He integrates different perspectives by condensing all the information. (2) Omnipresence. Scenes of the real world are suddenly shown (a cinema, a train, etc.). 52 This implies that the collective consciousness breaks through reality/unreality and exists everywhere, as it is basically everything.

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__________________________________________________________________ (3) Omnipotence. Voices are presented alongside the real scenes, like the collective consciousness’s internal dialogue. One voice (Shinji’s) asks ‘what is a dream’; while another voice (Rei’s) cannot answer. After a short silence, words appear on the screen: ‘it’s alright right now, isn’t it?’ 53 Indeed by forming a collective consciousness, it is already everything. What can the ‘dream’ be? SEL suggests a similar point. Eiri proposes the development of a worldwide neural network. All consciousnesses can be connected to the Wired without any devices. Having the benefit of controlling the design of the Wired, he however changes certain settings of the protocol, so that he ‘lives as an anonymous entity in the Wired, and rules it with information’.54 Influencing people’s thoughts, he will be worshipped like a god in the Wired. To complete this project, Lain is the essential software breaking through the Wired/reality. Yet Lain finally destroys Eiri and becomes a divine being: (1) Omnipresence. In ‘Layer 13: Ego’, Lain appears on a computer screen. She claims that though she only exists in those people who are aware of her existence, she is indeed everywhere in the Wired. The reason for Lain’s omnipresence is when people abandon their individualities and connect to the Wired, they all share Lain’s consciousness. As there is only one consciousness, they ‘all love Lain’.55 (2) Omniscience. After condensing all information, Lain walks alone in a still city. Through conversations with different Lains (imitating an internal dialogue), she realizes that the condensation of all information is not really ‘an upper plane for existence’.56 (3) Omnipotence. Encompassing all information, Lain can reformat the world in the way she likes. In the end, she lets information flow again by recreating individuals.57 6. Self-Dissolution Despite its divineness, the collective consciousness is not stable. In Episodes 25 and 26 of NGE, Shinji, as the collective consciousness, exists both as everything and nothing, without knowing who he is and what he can do. From his internal dialogue, he learns that to see himself, he has to create his boundaries (a body). To see what he can do, he has to create an environment to act on. To know his nature, he has to observe a similar embodied being as reflection.58 In SEL, Lain resets the world. This is because being a god all the time is not easy. Information is only valuable if exchange is allowed. This time, individuals are recreated. Lain meets her best friend Arisu again, though Arisu is already an adult and has no memory of Lain.59 7. Conclusion Assuming the informational nature of the universe, the posthuman must be articulated alongside the flow of information. In this way, traditional posthuman

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__________________________________________________________________ holism ideal is rejected, as the condensation of information in the two anime must self-dissolve to prove its identity and power. One can never fully understand or be understood by the other. To end the loneliness which results from the incomplete transfer of information, one can only identify with those who have similar qualities and form groups. Yet when a group becomes too inclusive, collective consciousness would again be formed, resulting in a loop. This circular vision of the posthuman implies a cynical yet existential view of the popular culture upon life. In other words, to be misunderstood is not desirable, yet it must be accepted.

Notes 1

Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter, ‘Posthumanism,’ The Routledge Campanion to Critical and Cultural Theory, ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake (New York: Routledge, 2013), 144. 2 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (UK: Polity, 2014), 40. 3 Nayar, Posthumanism, 155. 4 Nayar, Posthumanism, 148. 5 Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature (Social Brain Press, 2011), 117. 6 Daniel J. Siegel, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 168. 7 Toivo Koivukoski, After the Last Man: Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System (New York: Lexington Books, 2008), 90. 8 Joseph A. DeVito, Human Communication: The Basic Course (12th Edition) (Hong Kong: Pearson, 2012), 8. 9 DeVito, Human Communication, 11. 10 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding (1980),’ Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 164. 11 Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ 164. 12 何志明, 從日語看日本文化 (香港: 香港中文大學出版社, 2010), 96-97. [Chiming Ho, Understanding Japanese Culture through Japanese Language (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010), 96-97, official English translation.] 13 Neon Genesis Evangelion, dir. Hideaki Anno. Tokyo: Gainax and Tatsunoko, 1995, TV series, Episode 3: ‘A Transfer.’ 14 Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone, dir. Hideaki Anno. Japan: KlockWorx and Khara, 2007, DVD. 15 何志明, 從日語看日本文化 , 89. [Ho, Understanding Japanese Culture, 89, official English translation.]

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Jeffrey Angles, Ayumi Nagatomi and Mineharu Nakayama, ‘Japanese Responses hai, ee, and un: Yes, No, and Beyond,’ Language and Communication 20 (2000): 57-58. 17 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 25: ‘Do You Love Me?’ 18 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 8: ‘Asuka Strikes!’; Episode 22: ‘Don’t Be.’ 19 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 15: ‘Those Women Longed for the Touch of Others’; Episode 22: ‘Don’t Be.’ 20 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 03: Psyche’. 21 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 15: ‘Those Women Longed for the Touch of Others.’ 22 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 12: ‘She Said, “Don’t Make Others Suffer for Your Personal Hatred.”’ 23 Serial Experiments Lain, dir. Nakamura Ryutaro. Tokyo: Triangle Staff, 1998, TV series, Layer 01: Weird. 24 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 01: Weird’. 25 N. Katerine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2. 26 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2-3. 27 N. Katerine Hayles, ‘Traumas of Code,’ Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 157. 28 Hayles, ‘Traumas of Code,’ 136. 29 Ibid., 139, 157. 30 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 01: Weird’. 31 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 08: Rumors’. 32 Steven T. Brown, Tokyo Cyber-Punk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture (US: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 175. 33 Brown, Tokyo Cyber-Punk, 175. 34 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 06: Kids’. 35 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 09: Protocol’. 36 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 10: Love’. 37 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 24: ‘The Beginning and the End, or “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”’; Carl Li, Mari Nakamura and Martin Roth, ‘Japanese Science Fiction in Converging Media: Alienation and Neon Genesis Evangelion,’ Asiascape Occasional Papers 6 (2013): 6, viewed on 30 December 2013, http://www.asiascape.org/resources/publications/asiascape-ops6.pdf. 38 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 20: ‘WEAVING A STORY 2: Oral Stage.’ 39 Joel L. Schiff, Cellular Automata: A Discrete View of the World (US: Wiley, 2008), 39. 40 Stephan Wolfram, ‘Algebraic Properties of Cellular Automata,’ Communications in Mathematical Physics 93 (1984): 219, viewed on 30 December 2013,

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/algebraic-propertiescellular-automata.pdf. 41 Wolfram, ‘Algebraic Properties of Cellular Automata,’ 219. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 11. 45 Ibid. 46 Quoted in Schiff, Cellular Automata, 65-66. 47 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 10: Love’. 48 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 08: Rumors’. 49 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 20: ‘WEAVING A STORY 2: Oral Stage.’ 50 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 25: ‘Do You Love Me?’; Episode 26: ‘Take Care of Yourself.’; End of Evangelion, dir. Hideaki Anno and Kazuya Tsurumaki. Tokyo: Production I.G. and Gainax, 1997, DVD. 51 End of Evangelion. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 10: Love’. 55 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 12: Landscape’. 56 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 13: Ego’. 57 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 13: Ego’. 58 Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 25: ‘Do You Love Me?’; Episode 26: ‘Take Care of Yourself.’ 59 Serial Experiments Lain, ‘Layer 13: Ego’.

Bibliography Angles, J., A. Nagatomi and M. Nakayama. ‘Japanese Responses hai, ee, and un: Yes, No, and Beyond.’ Language and Communication 20 (2000): 57-58. Brown, Steven T. Tokyo Cyber-Punk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. US: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Callus, Ivan and Stefan Herbrechter. ‘Posthumanism.’ In The Routledge Campanion to Critical and Cultural Theory, edited by Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, 144-153. New York: Routledge, 2013. DeVito, Joseph A. Human Communication: The Basic Course (12th Edition). Hong Kong: Pearson, 2012.

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__________________________________________________________________ End of Evangelion. Directed by Hideaki Anno and Kazuya Tsurumaki. Tokyo: Production I.G. and Gainax, 1997. DVD. Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone. Directed by Hideaki Anno. Japan: KlockWorx and Khara, 2007. DVD. Hall, Stuart. ‘Encoding/Decoding (1980).’ In Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 163-173. UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Hayles, N. Katerine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. –––. ‘Traumas of Code.’ Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 136-157. Keysers, Christian. The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes Our Understanding of Human Nature. Social Brain Press, 2011. Koivukoski, Toivo. After the Last Man: Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System. New York: Lexington Books, 2008. Li, C., M. Nakamura, and M. Roth. ‘Japanese Science Fiction in Converging Media: Alienation and Neon Genesis Evangelion.’ Asiascape Occasional Papers 6 (2013): 1-16. Viewed on 30 December 2013. http://www.asiascape.org/resources/publications/asiascape-ops6.pdf. Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. UK: Polity, 2014. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Directed by Hideaki Anno. Tokyo: Gainax and Tatsunoko, 1995. TV series (26 Episodes). Schiff, Joel L. Cellular Automata: A Discrete View of the World. US: Wiley, 2008. Serial Experiments Lain. Directed by Ryutaro Nakamura. Tokyo: Triangle Staff, 1998. TV series (13 Episodes). Siegel, Daniel J. The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Wolfram, Stephan. ‘Algebraic Properties of Cellular Automata.’ Communications in Mathematical Physics 93 (1984): 219-258. Viewed on 30 December 2013. http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/algebraic-propertiescellular-automata.pdf 何志明. 從日語看日本文化. 香港: 香港中文大學出版社, 2010. [Ho, Chi-ming. Understanding Japanese Culture through Japanese Language. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010. Official English translation.] Antony Chun-man Tam is an MPhil candidate of the Department of English (Literary Studies) at Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is interested in the issues of communication, psychology, theology, and cosmology in science fiction. Apart from English literature, he also studies Japanese anime. His current research and writing is devoted to the role/place of God in contemporary transhumanist literature.

Cyberculture and Ethics in Generation A and Super Sad True Love Story Reinhold Kramer Abstract A number of complaints have been levelled at cyberculture, notably that commitments beyond the self are declining. Recent fiction, meanwhile, has engaged cyberculture in several ways. Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) appears to dive headlong into cyberculture, incorporating fake web-pages and Internet links, but ultimately remains a traditional story that doesn’t address cybercultural change. Surgically implanted communication devices appear in Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death (2010), but in the real world, the implantable ‘VeriChip’ that debuted a few years earlier failed to catch on. More compelling engagements with cyberculture occur in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation A (2009). Shteyngart’s close attention to the rise of social media appears in the äppärät that every character carries. The äppäräti’s ‘RateMe Plus’ and ‘Form a Community’ features are at once plausible and highly satirical, and Shteyngart’s account fits with the deleterious effects of cyberculture documented by sociologists (Robert Putnam), psychologists (Ethan Kross and Philippe Verduyn, Gary Small), and others (Nicholas Carr). In Generation A, Coupland’s description of the community-weakening drug ‘Solon’ makes it a metaphor for the effects of living online. Both novels imply that cyberculture has particular difficulty maintaining empathy and addressing moral problems that require communal action. The two novelists seem to hope for agreement around certain ethical values, but are unable to solve the problem of communal action. Key Words: Cyberculture, American fiction, Canadian fiction, Gary Shteyngart, Douglas Coupland. ***** 1. A Post-Literate Age Everybody who cares about books worries about cyberculture. We’re told that between 1979 and 1999 the length of a Time cover story dropped from 4,500 to 2,800 words. Who, nowadays, has the leisure to listen to those interminable TV sound bites that in 1965 clocked in at a sleepy 42 seconds. We’ve shaved them down to 8 seconds, more in tune with our busy Internet-surfing schedules. Evgeny Morozov claims that like a dishwasher the Internet merely does old tasks more efficiently.1 However, in a world where point-and-click so quickly brings us pleasure, information, and the consumer goods that we want, it’s difficult to credit Morozov.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nicholas Carr has described how the Internet is geared to short-term memory, rather than the long-term recall associated with the ‘deep reading’ of books. In web-browsing, mental resources are diverted towards quick navigational judgments, and away from comprehension, retention, and deep thinking about content. Eye-tracking shows that Web users read the tops of pages and the beginnings of lines, before moving to the next page, usually within 19-27 seconds. This holds true for academic researchers too. Given that neuroplasticity and the brain’s easily distractible state are evolutionary adaptations, neural pathways favourable to the Web are easier to develop than pathways for deep reading. Although high school math scores remained steady between 1999 and 2008, reading, writing, and especially literary reading scores went down.2 Near the end of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), when everyone’s äppäräti (the smartphones of the novel’s near-future) go down, Lenny tries to read Kundera to his girlfriend Eunice. But she can’t make the leap from scanning. Eunice isn’t alone. Lenny, twice her age, also struggles, and says, ‘People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age.’3 Douglas Coupland hints at the problem in Generation A (2009), where the young people tell miniallegories, two of which involve loss of literacy. This is only slightly hyperbolic. Carr cites a number of educated people who have begun to graze rather than read, because they’re convinced that they can gather more information that way.4 Phil Davis, a doctoral student in Communications writes, ‘I have very little patience for long, drawn-out, nuanced arguments, even though I accuse others of painting the world too simply…. I hate reading the humanities literature, where there are no abstracts, and the thesis could be hidden somewhere in the long, unstructured paragraphs…. The Internet may have made me a less patient reader, but… it has made me smarter.’5 I don’t want to disagree completely. In the era of ‘infoglut’ – actually in any era – we decide what knowledge we can acquire more quickly and cheaply. But we occasionally get reminders that what is cheaply obtained may also be just plain cheap. A 2012 Israeli study found that engineering students’ comprehension on screen was worse than in print, even though the students believed that their screen comprehension was better.6 Multi-tasking, cited as one of the virtues of constant smartphone connection, consistently fails to live up to the promise of its name, and studies on multitasking report that better results are obtained when people stay on ‘a single sustained task.’7 Multi-taskers merely convince themselves that they are being very productive, because the brain’s neuro-chemical reward system kicks in.8 When cyberculture was shiny and new, it promised not just the dissemination of knowledge, but the ethical improvement of humankind. John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace begins: Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On

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__________________________________________________________________ behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone…. You have no sovereignty where we gather.… Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge…. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.9 In 1996, infinite ethical promise; now, not so much. We recognise that, for all its good, the Internet also faithfully reproduces every human folly. Shteyngart goes further. His character Lenny says, ‘I’m learning to worship my äppärät’s screen… the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.’10 ‘Only’. As cognitive theorists such as Lisa Zunshine show, learning to pick up cues into the mind of the author and/or the characters is a crucial good of fiction.11 To infer the attitudes and predict the behaviour of others is not only basic to human social functioning, but also to empathy. Steven Pinker, who once subscribed to the cheese-cake theory of art (i.e. that art is an evolutionary by-product, not something selected for) has in The Better Angels of Our Nature recognized literature as an empathy technology that contributes significantly to the ongoing Humanitarian Revolution, which itself figures prominently in the relative decline of violence.12 With excessive exposure to digital technology, the brain becomes a more ‘male’ brain, showing similar effects to excessive testosterone: ‘poorer eye contact and less ability to make empathetic connections.’13 As Robert Putnam puts it, face-toface communication allows for interruption, correction, and feedback, while computer-mediated communication is often more egalitarian, frank, and taskoriented, but also displays severely narrowed interpersonal dynamics.14 2. Should Eunice Leave Lenny? Recent fiction has engaged cyberculture variously. Although the content of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film (2013) is fairly traditional, it incorporates fake webpages, as well as directing readers to a real web-page that allows tech-savvy readers to download apps and find ‘easter eggs’ inside the novel. Rick Moody’s overcooked Mars expedition in The Four Fingers of Death (2010) includes surgically implanted communication devices. In the real world, devices such as the ‘VeriChip,’ a microchip implanted under the skin, had been touted in the mid2000s as an expedient way of storing credit card or medical information. The Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, for example, encouraged patrons to get VeriChips implanted into their arms and receive VIP treatment. By the time of the novel’s publication, however, the real-world verdict had gone against the VeriChip, with concerns about cancer and security, though the technology thrives in livestock and

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__________________________________________________________________ pets (for identification, not for pets to make credit card purchases or receive VIP treatment). More consistently responsive to cyberculture are Super Sad True Love Story and Generation A. These witty and captivating near-futures, address not only the decline of reading, but also the problem of ethics in an individualistic age. Richard Joyce argues that morality bonds individuals ‘in a shared justificatory structure.’15 We can add that literature naturalizes this shared morality. Among the moral questions that arise in Super Sad True Love Story, two of the most significant are 1. Should Eunice leave her lover Lenny and cohabit with the more powerful Joshie? 2. Should the novel’s characters stand in solidarity with the protests against the American Restoration Authority (ARA) or should they protect themselves by avoiding political action? Neither question can evade the context of the novel’s cyberculture. Eunice stands as the equivalent of today’s Millennial generation and is closely tethered to the most recent technologies.16 In 2010, 75% of Millennials had created social networking profiles, compared to 50% of Generation Xers 30% of Boomers and 5% of the Silent Generation.17 Like Lenny, Shteyngart, a Generation Xer, was inept when it came to social media, so he hired an intern to get him on Facebook and iPhone. These devices changed his life, he says, with their seductive instant gratification.18 The smartphones in the novel – the äppäräti – contain ‘RateMe Plus’ and ‘Form a Community’ apps that aren’t available on contemporary phones… yet. These features allow anyone to link immediately with other nearby äppäräti to ‘Form a Community’ – to FAC – (say, in a bar) in order to rank each other in terms Hotness, Personality, and Sustainability (i.e. net worth). Lenny discovers that in terms of male hotness, he ranks 7th out of the bar’s 7 males, and that the attractive girl across the room has scored him 120 out of 800 for Hotness, 450 for Personality, and 630 for Sustainability. Such apps are at once plausible and satirical. The careful gardening of Facebook pages by 1.23 billion users19 suggests that FACing is well underway, though without numerical scores. Not that social ranking was invented by Facebook or by RateMe Plus, but the pressure of ranking seems more constant and less soluble when the technology constantly intrudes upon the human encounter. One recent psychological study text-messaged 82 people 5 times per day for two weeks to examine how Facebook use influenced subjective well-being. The authors found that the more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time they were text-messaged; the more they used Facebook over two weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined. Direct social interactions, on the other hand, led people to feel better over time.20 One may speculate that in direct social interactions, ranking is mitigated by

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__________________________________________________________________ pleasure in each other’s company, wherein we no longer fear that everyone is having a more fun and friend-filled life than we are. Lenny’s relationship with Eunice, and her eventual choice to leave him follows from the cybercultural ranking system. Eunice, her Hotness ranking high, has reason to parlay it into a more optimific relationship: not good for Lenny, but good for Joshie, good for Eunice’s family in troubled times, good for Eunice. With Joshie’s string-pulling, she hopes to become a fully-fledged artist, so selffulfillment is in the cards, and perhaps she’s less of a consequentialist than an ethical egoist. To the question, ‘Generally speaking, on what do you base your moral views?’ 43% of Canadian Millennials answered, ‘how I feel at the time.’ Far fewer – 16% – based their views on their parents’ views, 10% on religion, and 12% on nothing.21 Eunice mourns Lenny slightly, but like the people who told MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle that the loss of their cellphones felt like a death,22 Eunice mourns more when the web goes down, repeatedly and pathetically trying to shop online with her non-functioning äppärät. Others in the novel feel the loss even more keenly: four commit suicide, writing about how they can’t see a future without their äppäräti. Lenny, in contrast to Eunice as their relationship ends, seems to put her interests above his own, acting not just according to self-interest, but according to a maxim or to an obligation to the Other as Emmanuel Levinas urges.23 It’s possible, though uncertain, that protecting her family is Eunice’s primary consideration in leaving Lenny. However, when we look at how the characters respond to the ARA’s abuse of power, no such ambiguities exonerate them. In the US, Putnam has found declining commitments beyond the self, and a reduction in political volunteering. This can’t be blamed only on cyberculture – the process has been under way since the 1960s24 – but cyberculture intensifies the problem. Eunice is apolitical, and scolds her sister for getting involved in the protests. When the Rupture occurs, people begin calculating whether they would survive better alone, the very calculation already chopping away at the collective good. During the Rupture, a friend of Lenny’s, Amy Greenberg, streams about her wardrobe and boyfriend troubles. Lenny, older, is not necessarily more concerned about the community. He counsels himself, ‘I just have to be good and I have to believe in myself.’25 It’s the kind of language that Hal Niedzviecki found to be ubiquitous at Canadian Idol tryouts. Everybody expected to become a star. This belief in the self was combined with a distrust of institutions and an interest only in what directly affected the self.26 Although Lenny understands more than Eunice about why collective protests might be important, he doesn’t get involved. Shetyngart’s wit is sharp: Lenny’s strategy for short-term survival includes his rule #4, ‘try to create a sense of community with BFFs.’27 Not a bad idea, but a community of free riders won’t be easy to sustain.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. How Shall We Jointly Prevent Environmental Degradation? Two of the moral questions that haunt Generation A are communal in nature. 1. Since the drug Solon is destructive of community, how can we limit its use? 2. How can we get people to act jointly to prevent environmental degradation? As can be seen by these questions, the problem is one of moral enforcement: how much should we infringe on individual freedoms in order to pursue what is ethically right? And, more pointedly, how can we convince ourselves to take action?28 A central feature of the novel is Solon, which allows one to live in a constant present, taking away loneliness and anxiety about the future. ‘I'm happy to think about next year's product lines,’ says one character, ‘but I don't want to think about next year's Web headlines and enter a doom spiral.’29 Solon’s use has reached epidemic proportions. People don’t mind being alone: they stop dating, voting, and seeking religion, families disintegrate and crime flourishes. It’s implied that environmental degradation is linked to this lack of interest in future problems, and the disappearance of the bees is explicitly linked to Solon manufacture. Faced with the drug’s depredations, the Haida – who on their traditional territory of Haida Gwaii were the custodians of the last beehive before all the bees disappeared – have made Solon possession a capital offence. But making a categorical imperative of Solon abstinence fails. And it’s an eerie sight near the end of the novel when the remaining 100s of Haida drink the postmodern Kool-Aid together, silently, beside the empty hive. I would argue that Solon is a way of speaking of the Internet. This may be slightly controversial, since Solon users get ‘a sense of calm individualism… like that achieved from reading a novel.’30 Coupland, when pressed, said that the closest equivalent to Solon is books.31 But for two reasons my claim is less than surprising. Firstly, taking one Solon is the emotional equivalent of ‘reading 1000 books in 24 hours.’32 This means that Solon is reading extended exponentially. Coupland wouldn’t want his metaphor of Solon reduced to a single allegorical interpretation, but the Internet, too, vastly extends the technology of reading, allowing us to make contact with non-present humans and their thoughts.33 Secondly, there is a symbolic parallel between books and the Internet, since despite their many communal aspects, both have served to heighten solitary individualism. In any case, the moral question of Solon use is tightly wound into the question of environmental degradation in Generation A. Outside of the novel, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter suggest the market as a neat solution to problems such as global warming, which, they correctly point out, are collective action problems. We pluralists can’t agree on ‘the good,’ but the market pricing of goods flies in to save

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__________________________________________________________________ the day: simply create incentives to lessen emissions and disincentives against atmospheric pollution.34 Only we can’t agree on the good, and political parties that propose carbon taxes are defeated at the polls, so we’re back where we started. Not only do we have to agree on some ‘good,’ some Kantian maxim that cuts across pluralistic lines, but Generation A suggests that we also have to convince ourselves to act. This is the cybercultural problem of ‘slacktivism’: we’ll sign Avaaz online petitions (since that doesn’t require us to leave our computers) but we’re not prepared to become actively politically involved. Any technology – drug, cellphone, or book – that severely limits our face-toface interactions with others will bear the problem of communal action. Since almost everyone in the novel is shacked up with Solon, we can’t be sure that collective action will occur. Although volunteering was increasing slightly among those in their twenties (Generation Xers) when Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, community projects were on the decline, and cyber-communication contributed to that decline. For most problems, computer-based groups come up with more alternatives, but find it harder to reach consensus, and are worst at creating trust. People are quicker to cheat and renege on promises in computer-mediated communication. This is because computers miss ‘eye contact, gestures (both intentional and unintentional), nods, a faint furrowing of the brow, body language… even hesitation measured in milliseconds.’35 Like literary reading, bodily proximity can create empathy.36 And it is estimated that every hour spent on computer cuts face-to-face interactions by about 30 minutes.37 It’s too much to expect novelists to solve the problem of communal action. By having his five narrators metabolize anti-Solon and begin turning into a ‘superentity,’38 Coupland is imagining a partial retreat from individualism and from cyberculture. In the past, religious faith solved the problem of collective action, of cooperation without kinship,39 and it might be possible, even necessary, for established religions or political parties to renew themselves with a strong environmental message. But Coupland’s bee-driven superentity seems like a deus ex machina. It looks like the beginnings of a mystical social contract rather than one based in a faith practice or in a Rawlsian consensus. If the decline of reading issued simply in a lowered ability for sustained attention, our concerns might be balanced by the Internet’s many gifts. However, the suite of changes that occur when we transfer reading and much of our lives to the screen includes a narrowing of empathic opportunities. This doesn’t augur well. Sébastien Charles says that in postmodernity, the ‘institutional brakes holding back individual emancipation have been taken off. The age of emptiness has dawned, but ‘without tragedy or apocalypse.’’40 Nevertheless, Shteyngart and Coupland aren’t prepared to cheer (as Charles does) Gilles Lipovetsky’s ‘responsible hedonism.’ Neither will the two novelists return to an absolute ethics that imposes communal rules. Shteyngart and Coupland seem to hope for a coalition around certain ethical values, but find such a coalition difficult to imagine.

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Notes 1

Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 49-50. 2 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010), 122-5, 134-6, 63-4, 31, 145-6. 3 Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story (New York: Random House, 2009), 277. 4 Carr, Shallows, 8, 138. 5 Phil Davis, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nope!’ The Scholarly Kitchen, 16 June 2008, Accessed 9 June 2011, http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/06/16/is-google-making-us-stupid-nope/. 6 Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith. ‘Metacognitive Regulation of Text Learning: On Screen versus on Paper,’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17:1 (March 2011): 18-32. 7 Gary Small, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 34, 68. 8 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 163. 9 Quoted in Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004), 302. 10 Steyngart, Super Sad, 78. 11 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 18, 160-1. Ellen Dissanayake, Art & Intimacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 28, 39-40, 44-5 12 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2011), 175-6. 13 Small, iBrain, 92. 14 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 176. 15 Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 117. 16 Coupland himself, born in 1961, is a baby boomer, though he has often been treated as the voice of Generation X because of his first book. 17 Pew Research Center, ‘Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next,’ Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, 25, 24 February 2010, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-confident-connectedopen-to-change.pdf. 18 Shteyngart, in Lindesay Irvine, Interview with Gary Shteyngart, Guardian, 14 Apr 2011, Accessed 2012, 4:47, 5:45.

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.youtube.com/user/kevinpkavanagh#p/u/40/Y737fdfJE2o, In order to sell Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart did a faux-documentary with James Franco, in which it was ‘revealed’ that the celebrated author could barely read. More recently, the two did a 4-min long comic skit in which Shteyngart must not only endure Random House forcing him to entitle his about-to-be released memoir Little Failure, but he also discovers that his husband, James Franco, will beat Little Failure to the bookstores with a memoir of his own, 50 Shades of Gary: An Erotic Journey. 19 This is an estimate from 31 December 2013. ‘Facebook,’ Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook, accessed 5 August 2014. 20 Other factors such as the size of their Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, didn’t seem to dampen the effects. More surprisingly, neither did gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression. Those with moderate and high levels of direct social contact showed significant decline in well-being after Facebook use, while those with low levels of direct social contact (one standard deviation below the sample mean) didn’t. The authors add that ‘a number of recent studies indicate that people's perceptions of social isolation (i.e., how lonely they feel)—a variable that we assessed in this study, which did not influence our results—are a more powerful determinant of well-being than objective social isolation’ (Ethan Kross, Philippe Verduyn et. al., ‘Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well Being in Young Adults,’ Plos One, August 14, 2013, Accessed 29 September 2014,http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.00 69841 ). ‘We don't count on cyberfriends to come by if we are ill, to celebrate our children's successes, or to help us mourn the death of our parents’ (Turkle, Alone Together, 153). Alan Kirby wittily notes that ‘As time goes by, your input into Facebook comes to feel like the electronic nourishment of your friendships,’ a comment that helps explain why Facebook communities lack important aspects of real friendships. Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How the New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009), 122. 21 Reginald Bibby, The Emerging Millennials: How Canada's Newest Generation Is Responding to Change and Choice (Lethbridge: Project Canada, 2009), 8. It may be that the teens undervalue outside sources for their ethics because they don’t fully understand where their views ultimately come from, particularly their strongly-held views. However, in some moral areas, particularly in respect to relationships, the teens do seem to be articulating a sort of Zeitgeist. In his interviews with young people, Christian Smith found several repeated themes when relationships were under discussion: ‘the amorphous mass of intimate relationships, the normalcy of casual sex and difficult breakups, the readiness to cohabit.’ One young man voiced this, ‘unless you do something really horrible, you know, kill someone, it doesn't really matter, right or wrong.’ Christian Smith

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__________________________________________________________________ (with Patricia Snell), Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), 179, 203. 22 Turkle, Alone Together, 16. 23 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, [1961]1969), 215. 24 ‘By the time that the Internet reached 10% of American adults in 1996, the nationwide decline in social connectedness and civic engagement had been underway for at least a quarter of a century.’ Putnam, Bowling Alone, 170. 25 Steyngart, Super Sad, 5. 26 Hal Niedzviecki, Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (Toronto: Penguin, 2004), 62-5, 43-4. 27 Steyngart, Super Sad, 51. 28 Although the characters in Generation A face individual moral questions, because there are six main characters, and because much of the last half of the novel consists of the characters’ stories, the individual questions become less pronounced, while the communal questions become increasingly central. 29 Douglas Coupland, Generation A (Toronto: Random House, 2009), 135. 30 Ibid., 255. 31 Coupland in Jian Ghomeshi, ‘Q with Jian Ghomeshi: Douglas Coupland on Q TV,’ Dec 7, 2009, accessed 29 September 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1l-gJ1qM1U. 32 Coupland, Generation A, 284. 33 Internet viewing massively extends the freedoms from time, space, and reality implied in the act of reading. 34 Heath and Potter, The Rebel Sell, 332, 326-7. 35 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 128, 176. Putnam sees signs of hope in the increase in volunteering, but the fact that it is not closely tied to a particular community means that volunteering depends ‘on single-stranded obligations, without reinforcement from well-woven cords of organizational involvement.’ Putnam, Bowling Alone, 129, 133, 175. 36 It’s neither surprising nor a blow to Nicholas Carr’s thesis on the value of reading that active participation in conversations with friends provides even better memory recall than does passively reading a stimulating book or watching a stimulating TV show (Small, iBrain, 117). Plato knew this in Phaedrus. 37 Small, iBrain, 2. 38 Coupland, Generation A, 295. 39 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Random House, 2012), 257.

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Sébastien Charles, ‘Paradoxical Individualism: An Introduction to the Thought of Gilles Lipovetsky,’ in Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, trans. Andrew Brown Malden (Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2005), 8-9.

Bibliography Ackerman, Rakefet, and Morris Goldsmith. ‘Metacognitive Regulation of Text Learning: On Screen versus on Paper.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 17:1 (March 2011): 18-32. Bibby, Reginald. The Emerging Millennials: How Canada's Newest Generation Is Responding to Change and Choice. Lethbridge: Project Canada, 2009. Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Norton, 2010. Charles, Sébastien. ‘Paradoxical Individualism: An Introduction to the Thought of Gilles Lipovetsky.’ In Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times. Translated by Andrew Brown Malden. Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2005. Coupland, Douglas. Generation A. Toronto: Random House, 2009. Davis, Phil. ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nope!’ The Scholarly Kitchen. 16 June 2008. Accessed 9 June 2011 http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/06/16/isgoogle-making-us-stupid-nope/. Ghomeshi, Jian. ‘Q with Jian Ghomeshi: Douglas Coupland on Q TV,’ Dec 7, 2009. Accessed 29 September 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1l-gJ1qM1U. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Random House, 2012. Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004. Joyce, Richard. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Kirby, Alan. Digimodernism: How the New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum, 2009.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kross, Ethan, Philippe Verduyn, Emre Demiralp, Jiyoung Park, David Seungjae Lee, Natalie Lin, Holly Shablack, John Jonides and Oscar Ybarra. ‘Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well Being in Young Adults.’ Plos One, August 14, 2013. Accessed 29 September 2014. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0069841. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, [1961]1969. Lipovetsky, Gilles. Hypermodern Times. Translated by Andrew Brown Malden. Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2005. Moody, Rick. The Four Fingers of Death (with ‘Reading Group Guide’). New York: Little, Brown, 2010. Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. Niedzviecki, Hal. Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity. Toronto: Penguin, 2004. Pessl, Marisha. Night Film. Toronto: Random House, 2013. Pew Research Center. ‘Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next.’ Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends. 24 February 2010. Accessed 29 September 2014. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-confident-connectedopen-to-change.pdf. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin, 2011. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2009. Small, Gary. iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

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__________________________________________________________________ Smith, Christian (with Patricia Snell). Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Reinhold Kramer is Professor of Canadian Literature at Brandon University. He has published Scatology and Civility in the English-Canadian Novel, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain, and, with Tom Mitchell, Walk towards the Gallows and When the State Trembled.

Part II Prospects of a Fleshless Humanity

Of Flesh and Bone: Finding Human Sameness in the ‘Skinjobs’ of Battlestar Galactica Teresa Botelho Abstract Warnings about the consequences of human hubris and overreach in the creation of artificial life, going back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, tap into an undercurrent of cautionary myths and narratives that rework the Promethean allegory and predict that the forbidden creation will eventually destroy its creator. Contemporary imagination, shaped by the familiarity (if not complete understanding) of the tenets of the Singularity Theory, has gradually re-modulated the discourse about the intelligent robotic other, moving away from an antitechnology telos, to consider new possibilities of connectivity and re-examine the boundaries of the human. This chapter examines a science fiction television series, the millennial Battlestar Galactica (2004-9), and discusses how it maps out the pathways into consciousness and individuality of the anthropomorphic Cylons, which have evolved from the earlier bio-mechanical models designed for military purposes. It will discuss how humans understand them as radical others unable to transcend the boundaries of their mechanical selves, and why this failure of imagination at the core of the devastating conflict between the species is gradually overcome by the facts of the Cylons’ new embodied existence, when they become ‘skinjobs’ with flesh and bone that feels and hurts, undistinguishable from that of humans. The mapping of this process of recognition of a kind of sameness in a body that feels will be discussed in terms of the phenomenological concept of the ‘lived body’, a hypothesis that teases the imaginative constructions of selfsustained artificial intelligence and evokes some of the contemporary debates about ethics and robotics. Key Words: singularity, cybernetic other, science fiction, television, Battlestar Galactica, Cylons, consciousness, individuality, bodies, ethics ***** 1. Under the Shadow of Singularity Singularity Theory, which Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. describes as the ‘quintessential myth of contemporary techno culture’1 predicts, as first articulated by mathematician Vernor Vinge in a foundational paper delivered to NASA in 1993, an increased acceleration of technological progress that will culminate in the ‘imminent creation of entities with greater than human intelligence’, effecting a change of such magnitude and unpredictability that can only be compared ‘to the rise of human life on earth.’2 This paradigm shift that predicts the emergence of transhuman and post-human reconfigurations is described by Landon as ‘a barrier

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__________________________________________________________________ that will be inexorably breached’, bringing about ‘a kind of future we can’t imagine but know will be there.’3 This imagined future brought about by a combination of body-enhancement technologies that will weaken the borders of the biological, human-scale Artificial Intelligence that will be able not only to pass the Turing Test but have a reasonable claim to be conscious,4 signalling, as futurologist Ray Kurzweil predicts, ‘a complete merger of the species with the technology it originally created’,5 has become an irresistible topic for the science fiction literary and filmic imaginations. The possibilities of what the protagonist of Marge Piercy’s He, She and It describes to Yod, her android lover, as a world where natural humanity has been superseded by various combinations of the machine/human combine, making him just ‘a purer form of what we’re all tending to’ as ‘we are all cyborgs now,’6 have been systematically scrutinized on the page and on the screen in the last few decades, mirroring the uncertainties and fears of the present. An examination of the discourses of Singularity theorists exposes a gamut of predictions about the modalities of that change, which Landon systematizes, from ‘accelerating change’ associated with linear extrapolation (it will happen and it is predictable when it will happen and how it will happen), to ‘event horizon’ (it will happen and all else is unpredictable), to ‘intelligence explosion’ (assuming a harmonious partnership between humans and intelligent machines), to ‘apocalyptism’,7 invoking equally diverse responses to the quasi-inevitable transhuman and post-human future forecast which range from an optimistic sense of wonder to a resigned dread. Science fiction has mirrored these responses, imagining landscapes that appear to celebrate the liberation of the human from its biological limitations (most cyberpunk), scrutinising the optimism of theorists like Ray Kurzweil, namely his insight that any emerging intelligence will ‘continue to represent human civilization’ and will ‘appear to be our devoted servants, satisfying our needs and desires’,8 or foregrounding the apocalyptic consequences of a failure to understand the necessity to share space and resources with non-human intelligence. This chapter examines a highly acclaimed tele-visual science fiction series, the millennial Battlestar Galactica (2004-9), and discusses how, shaped by these transitional anxieties, it maps out major interrogations about the post-human condition through a narrative of the relationship between humans and sentient anthropomorphic Cylons (Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes), which have autonomously evolved from the earlier bio-mechanical models designed for military purposes, and interrogates the givens of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics in tension with the pragmatism of Turing’s Test as sentient androids demand a share in the human civitas. It will take the reality of the Cylons’ new embodied existence, when they become ‘skinjobs’ with a body of flesh and bone that feels and hurts, as a point of departure in the politics of recognition as humans gradually perceive a degree of

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__________________________________________________________________ sameness dependent on the phenomenological concept of the ‘lived body’, opening a speculative horizon of post-human mutual dependence and complicity. Battlestar Galactica re-imagined the 1978 format of the same name and has generated an extensive body of scholarly analysis that has mostly read it as a dystopian allegory to the post-9/11 world, dramatizing the struggle for survival of the remnants of humanity after the destruction of their world by the Cylons, an enemy of their own making, a generation of religious monotheist anthropomorphic cyborgs intent on the destruction of their parents and creators. The dystopian landscape is established as the foregrounding narrative: after a devastating attack by the Cylons that destroyed most of humanity, for the fewer than 50,000 survivors stranded in space in a civilian fleet under the command of an aged Battleship, survival implies the acceptance of a diminished life regulated by a militarised state of emergency in constant friction with what is left of the democratic, legal and civilian order, under the constant pressure of a technologically superior enemy which has acquired an anthropomorphic identity that renders it unrecognisable as a machine, and which cannot be defeated because it does not fear death and, in fact, cannot die as conscience and experience is downloaded into a new body. This recognisable dystopian positioning which is reinforced by the narrative arc of the series is naturally open to scrutiny. Dystopias have long been conceived in terms of the critical horizons they open, in particular those imagined within the conventions of science fiction which permit the projection into another time and space of contemporary social or cultural issues that are best examined through an estranged gaze. Work within the utopian studies tradition has long established a distinction between what Moylan has called open critical dystopias where a core utopian commitment underlies their formally pessimistic overtones and closed antiutopian dystopias where pessimist despair is more than formal, invalidating all possibilities of imagining human enablement and agency, whether individual or collective.9 This distinction is particularly useful to the reading of contemporary post-crisis and post-apocalyptic texts which interrogate a recognizable now projected into the future, foregrounding a critique of present cultural and societal tendencies but also opening horizons of possible counter-futures, thus functioning as cautionary warnings for a humanity with some choices left. The registers of Battlestar Galactica are ambiguous enough to sustain a debate about the quality of its pessimism and the scope of its critique, a characteristic that seems inherent to the tele-visual format of a long-running series, which allows the juxtaposition of a utopian impulse in the treatment of the relational dynamics between humans and the embodied Cylons that survives the circular pessimism of the overall diegesis. This conservative narrative is first introduced in the pilot episode when, a few hours before the catastrophic Cylon attack that interrupts the 40-year truce since the first interspecies clash, Admiral Adama departs from his prepared speech at the

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__________________________________________________________________ decommissioning ceremony for the old Battlestar he commanded and offers an impromptu reflection on human folly that is key to the series’ philosophical arc. A veteran of the First Cylon War, he muses: You know, when we fought the Cylons we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question “Why?” Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept responsibility for anything we have done. Like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God. Create life. When that life turned against us we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it wasn’t our fault. Not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things you’ve created. Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.10 Against the reassurances of Kurzweil, the words of the old Admiral foreground the apocalyptic interpretation of the singularity. Humanity played God by creating artificial life and that life turned against it. The irreversible mistake, one which ‘has happened before and will happen again’ and is therefore not preventable because it is part and parcel of the human make-up, is, in the words of Adama, human hubris. The speech introduces the viewer to a recycling of the trope of the symbolic violation of the natural order that Bachelard has called the Prometheus Complex, referring to the pursuit of interdicted knowledge that ‘may give power’ but also ‘set lose havoc in the world’ when it exceeds rather than equals that of the previous holder.11 Rabkin has renamed this the Eden Complex, referring to the mythical trope that is part of the symbolic system of most human cultures and indicates the search for the kind of forbidden knowledge that allows humans to ‘create in their own image.’12 In parallel with a reinforcement of the apocalyptic visions of singularity of the supermachines-taking-over variety, science fiction has provided alternative takes on the act of artificial life creation, where the thing created is not hostile to its creator, ever since Asimov’s Bicentennial Man.13 In the re-imagined replay of the myth of the Jewish Golem of Prague set in a futuristic setting by Marge Piercy in He, She and It, the embodied robot Yod develops human sentiments, and ultimately loves, is loved and makes choices that reflect abnegation and selfsacrifice, an evolution that parallels that of the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica. What neither Adama nor the series explore directly are the modulations of the human responsibility invoked. They do not explicitly address the past treatment of the intelligences created nor consider the ethical obligations inherent to the creation of sentient machines.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nevertheless, the narrative arc of the series opens alternative interpretative horizons to rethink the relationship between humans and their children, as the embodied Cylons think of themselves, moving away from the refusal to imagine the possibility of personhood and individuation in the ‘toasters’ – or ‘skinjobs’. If contact creates doubts, and doubts bring an opening of the mind to new conceptual possibilities of a kind of sameness, this process is mediated by the recognition of a living body that can no longer be described as mechanical. 2. The Flesh of Humanity’s Children For most humans the transformative encounter that establishes personhood is mediated by the suffering body of the other, so much like their own. The first of these encounters that map out the human learning curve occurs in episode 8, ‘Flesh and Bone’, organized around the arrest, interrogation and torture of Leoben, a Cylon captured on one of the human ships. Aware that there may be other Cylons hidden in the fleet, the military authorities select Lieutenant Starbuck, a tough nononsense woman pilot, to extract information from the prisoner about the suspected infiltration. Her first sight of the Cylon is mediated by all her assumptions about mechanical bodies. He is lying prone on a table, sweating profusely in the intense humidity of the cell, but the only reaction this provokes in her is astonishment at the technology involved: ‘Gods,’ she comments, ‘they went through a lot of trouble to imitate people.’14 When asked if he is sleeping, Leoben replies that he is praying, to which she is only able to respond with derision: ‘I don’t think the Gods answer the prayers of toasters’.15 Even when the methods she uses to try to extract information escalate to severe beatings and water-boarding, causing Leoben visible distress, she still suspects what she sees; if the body is not real, the pain is not real, she rationalises. This imaginative trap informs her taunting, which denies Leoben the truth of his suffering by denying his body and its evidence: Starbuck: Did that hurt? Leoben: Yeah, it hurt. Starbuck: Machines shouldn’t feel pain... shouldn’t bleed, shouldn’t sweat. (...) Starbuck: See, a smart Cylon would turn off the old pain software about now. But I don’t think you are so smart. Leoben: Maybe I'll turn it off and you won't even know. Starbuck: Hmm. Here’s your dilemma: turn off the pain, you feel better, but that makes you a machine. Not a person. You see, human beings can’t turn off their pain. Human beings have to suffer and cry and scream and endure because they have no choice. So the only way you can avoid the pain you are about to

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__________________________________________________________________ receive is by telling me exactly what I want to know. Just like a human would.16 Seemingly unaware of the contradictory circularity of her own words and actions – making Leoben suffer is her strategy, one that would not work if Leoben were a machine that could ‘turn off’ pain – Starbuck has to keep reminding herself that the tortured Leoben is a ‘fraking machine’ created by humans and not by God as he claims, a soulless nothing whose body can be assaulted because, as she tells President Roslin: ‘It’s a machine, sir. There are no limits to the tactics I can use.’17 But she is not immune to the blood, the wounds and the suffering presence of Leoben’s body any more than she is to his mystical meanderings; and after seeing President Roslin treat him as a person when she needs his cooperation (she goes as far as to call him a man), obtaining answers to her questions only to then order his execution, Starbuck is struck by the depth of her sense of protectiveness towards her prisoner and voices her opposition to his killing. Questioning her initial assumptions and her own actions, in her first act of recognition of sameness she quietly prays after his death: ‘Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer. I don’t know if Leoben had a soul or not, if he did, take care of it’.18 The suffering body of the enemy is further raised in season two in the episode ‘Pegasus’ when Admiral Cain is shown to have allowed the systematic torture and rape of Gina, a model Six Cylon prisoner who had lived as a sleeper in the ship. The image of her battered body wearing a cloth sack, tethered to the floor and covered in bruises, is, by that point in the series, so intolerable to the crew of Galactica that a revulsion borne by a kind of sympathy towards suffering flesh, even if not of the human kind, spurs them into action. The body of the Cylons is fundamental to understand not only human recognition of sameness but their own process of individuation, suggesting an investment and logical inversion of the phenomenological concept of the ‘lived body’, which argues that the external world is always encountered, interpreted and perceived by a body and that conscience cannot exist without one. Invoking Lyotard’s claims against the separateness of thought and body that imagined the existence of disembodied thought and conscience, so fundamental to the aesthetics of cyberpunk, the creators of Battlestar Galactica could be said to have expanded on his idea that thinking is undetectable from suffering and that ‘as a material ensemble, the human body... our phenomenological, mortal perceiving human body is the only available analogon for thinking a certain complexity of thought’19 and gone on to suggest that having autonomously created a human-like body that feels, desires and hurts, the Cylons cannot but evolve and develop a subjectivity that mirrors that of the humans. Their bodies that think, love and decide are seen to progress towards individuation. Battlestar foregrounds this process by the narrative strategy of the hidden Cylons whom the viewer first knows as fully developed humans and who

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__________________________________________________________________ are originally unaware of their nature until it is revealed to them and to the audience simultaneously. The earliest plot of revelation and individuation is enacted in the parallel stories of two number Eight models, Sharon Valerii (Boomer) and Sharon Agathon (Athena). The first, a sleeper agent unaware of her nature, who has lived and loved amongst humans and has exclusively human loyalties, is seen struggling to understand her actions, when the programming she has been fitted with is activated at regular intervals, by emotionally rejecting the in-betweeness of her positioning. When she is killed, she is downloaded into a new model, a second Sharon who is and is not the same. Athena, who is fully cognisant of her Cylon identity, shares many of Boomer’s memories but is seen to be qualitatively different. That difference is narratively established through love. Boomer loved Chief Tyrol but Athena loves Lieutenant Agathon. It is true that in her love for him memories of her previous self are not ignored. When she first meets him, she already has memories that belong to Boomer but her individuation is processed though an emotional shift. What was for Boomer a professional camaraderie becomes for Athena an intense love, acquired and cemented through experiences that are her own. Despite having no doubts about her identity, she nevertheless deliberately chooses to throw in her lot with the humans, their mistrust notwithstanding, asserting her independence from the Cylon plan. And not only does she love but she is loved in return by Agathon, who accepts her alterity because he has experienced and known her uniqueness and can see and feel her individuality beyond the machine mode of interpretation that still obfuscates the gaze of most humans. If humans change their interpretative paradigms, the embodied Cylons are equally affected; even before the majority decide to suspend hostilities and accept separate futures, a significant number of Cylons abandon their companions and, caught in the romance of humanity, hungry for love and procreation, align their fate with that of the surviving humans. It is significant that their first decision is to renounce immortality by doing away with the technology that permits permanent downloading, thereby establishing the ultimate condition of sameness – a common sense of the vulnerability of the body and its inevitable death that cancels formerly perceived differences. Eventually, it is in a hybrid child, Hera, the daughter of Athena and Agathon, that the promise of an inter-species future is projected as the survival and prosperity of humans and Cylons on the new planet they find and settle together can only be achieved through common acceptance and recognition of mutual dependence. In conclusion, my argument is that to reduce the polysemic interpretative horizons of Battlestar either to an anti-utopian text that aligns itself with the apocalyptic interpretations of the consequences of the singularity or to a more general warning against overreaching human technological hubris fails to recognise its allegoric power to speak to the anxieties and transitional concerns

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__________________________________________________________________ about the modalities of a post-human future. Tracing the contours of the challenges discussed in the new and as yet speculative fields of machine morality which, as Wallach and Allen articulate, ‘extends beyond concerns for what people do with their computers to questions about what machines do by themselves’20 to robotics ethics that considers the robots of the future as agents with moral obligations (as moral producers) but also with moral rights (as moral consumers) to use Torrance’s definitions,21 the series asks us to contemplate the future implications of our technological inventiveness while also foregrounding processes of contemporary construction of inter-human alterity that amplify difference and reduce the possibilities of a life of mutual dependence enacted without a paralyzing fear of all those Others that we define as ‘not us’.

Notes 1

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 262. 2 Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive the PostHuman Era,’ Paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium, sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center, 1993, Accessed 20 May 2014, http://wwwrohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html. 3 Brooks Landon, ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Plurality of Singularity,’ Science Fiction Studies 39.1 (2012), 4. 4 Turing’s Test, devised in 1950, claimed that if a computer was indistinguishable from a human during text-based conversations then it could be said to be 'thinking.' In the most recent claim of a supercomputer passing the text, which requires 30% of human interrogators to be duped during a series of five-minute keyboard conversations, Reading University announced that "Eugene Goostman", a computer programme developed to simulate a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33% of the judges that it was human. ‘Computer Simulating 13-Year Old Boy Becomes First to Pass Turing’s Test,’ The Guardian, 9 June 2014, accessed 24 June 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/08/super-computersimulates-13-year-old-boy-passes-turing-test. 5 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 256. 6 Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), 150. 7 Landon, Ibid, 3. 8 Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2005), 30. 9 Tom Moylan, Scraps of Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 156-157. 10 Pilot Episode, Battlestar Galactica. (author’s transcription).

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__________________________________________________________________ 11

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 13. 12 Eric Rabkin, ‘Eat and Grow Strong: The Supernatural Power of the Forbidden Fruit,’ in Violence, Utopia and the Kingdom of God: Fantasy and Ideology in the Bible, eds. Tina Pippin and Gene Aichele (London: Routledge, 1998),16. 13 Isaac Asimov, The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (New York: Doubleday, 1976). 14 ‘Flesh and Bone’, Battlestar Galactica, Season 1 Episode 8 (author’s transcription). 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Jean-François Lyotard, ´Can Thought Go on Without a Body?’ The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1991), 22. 20 Wendell Wallach and Collin Allen, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. 21 Steve Torrance, ‘Will Robots Need Their Own Ethics?’ Philosophy Now 72 (March-April 2009), 10.

Bibliography Asimov, Isaac. The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by Alan C.M. Ross. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Battlestar Galactica, Developed by Ronald D. More, Prod, David Eick Productions/NBC Universal Television, 2004-2009. ‘Computer Simulating 13-Year Old Boy Becomes First to Pass Turing’s Test.’ The Guardian. 9 June 2014. Accessed 24 June 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/08/super-computer-simulates13-year-old-boy-passes-turing-test. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Landon, Brooks. ‘The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Plurality of Singularity.’ Science Fiction Studies 39.1 (2012): 2-14. Lyotard, Jean-François. ´Can Thought Go on Without a Body?’ The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Cambridge: Polity Press (1991): 8-23. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. Piercy, Marge. He, She and I. New York: Balantine Books,1991. Rabkin, Eric. ‘Eat and Grow Strong: The Supernatural Power of the Forbidden Fruit.’ Violence, Utopia and the Kingdom of God: Fantasy and Ideology in the Bible, edited by Tina Pippin and Gene Aichele, 8-23. London: Routledge, 1998. Torrance, Steve. ‘Will Robots Need Their Own Ethics?’ Philosophy Now 72 (March-April 2009): 10-11. Vinge, Vernor. ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive the PostHuman Era.’ 1993. Accessed 20 May 2014. http://wwwrohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html. Wallach, Wendell and Collin Allen. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Teresa Botelho is Associate Professor of American Studies at the NOVA University of Lisbon. Her research interests focus on critical race theory, identity and performativity as related to artistic and literary expressions, and on dystopian narratives and science fiction.

Dreams of Sheep: Humanity as a Discursive Formation in Battlestar Galactica Yonatan Englender Abstract Following Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner, television series Battlestar Galactica dealt extensively with the notion of the humanoid cyborg, or as they are called in the series – Cylons. This paper first establishes that in the world created by the series no real difference exists between the human and the artificial, the only separation between the two groups is a discursive one. This amounts to an understanding of humanity as no more and no less than an abstract idea, one that cannot be empirically differentiated from artificial life. Then, the paper asks why the Cylons would want to resemble humans and suggests that human creations – be they robots or works of art – will always have in them a trace of human values and ideas. In the same way reason cannot be attacked except by reason’s instruments and formations, human art cannot comment on reality except by humanist values. Key Words: Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Phillip K. Dick, Cylon, Replicant, Cyborg. ***** In 1968, Phillip K. Dick posed a question: do androids dream of electric sheep? The issues raised by this question have perhaps been touched upon before this, but Dick's question, the title of his book which was later also adapted into the film Blade Runner, encapsulates the main issue perfectly. ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ can be understood as two different but connected questions: first, do androids, that is, humanoid synthetic organisms, dream? And the second, given that they do dream, do they dream of things artificial or of things human? These questions, in essence, ask us to investigate the nature of what we call ‘human’, and to question whether this nature can be artificially reproduced. Famously, both Dick's book and Ridley Scott's film present a fictional world in which the opposition between human and artificial is, as Neil Badmington calls it, ‘unsustainable’.1 In both texts, androids, or ‘Replicants’, are supposedly different from humans in that they are not as emotionally developed, due to a built-in limited life span of four years. They don't have the time to grow emotionally as a human does. However, somewhat paradoxically, it is this limited life span which eventually makes them most similar to humans – nothing is more human that the fear of death. Regardless, what is suggested here is that excluding this limitation, Replicants are completely identical to humans, clearly raising questions which lie in the field of post-humanism.

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__________________________________________________________________ Post-humanism, however, is not as concerned with artificial creations replacing humans as it is with humanity's behaviour in a world which is increasingly technological. In her seminal text ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, Donna Haraway states the following: ‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs’.2 In this statement Haraway is representative of a widespread concern among theorists of the post-human – the issue is not humanized machines, but rather mechanical humans. Although Haraway treats the idea that we are all cyborgs as a truism, post-human studies still struggle with the question of humanity's nature, and no consensus on the issue exists. As stated, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? deals mainly with the human attitude towards Replicants and those Replicants’ ontological status. Television series Battlestar Galactica (BSG), which is the main concern of this paper, might be seen to thematically continue the debate, however with a meaningful difference. BSG focuses on the human part of the equation; on the way humanity deals with itself when facing a reality in which the line between human and machine is indistinguishable. 2004's BSG is a very loose remake of a series with the same name from 1978, and it takes place in the wake of an almost complete annihilation of the human race by the Cylons – man-created robots who rebelled against their creators. Whatever is left of humanity is gathered in a small space fleet, defended by the last standing battleship, the Battlestar Galactica. Cylons are first thought to be large metallic robots, this being the way man created them, but it is soon revealed that they have evolved – Cylons can now assume human appearance, in any one of eight humanoid models, which are duplicated many times over. Essentially, Cylons are not very different from the Replicants presented in Blade Runner – they look, talk and behave like humans. Thus, the question is asked again: what separates an artificial synthetic organism from a human? The way Cylons are portrayed in BSG challenges any distinction that could be made to differentiate man from machine. The term ‘machine’, for one, is problematic - Cylons are synthetic creations, not made in a factory, they have no bolts or wires, but are rather bred in tanks filled with organic substance, and are ultimately made of the same matter humans are. They too bleed, sweat, and have sexual urges in the same ways humans do. They are also rational beings; rationality and free-choice being a common argument in favour of man's uniqueness. Throughout the show, Cylons display reason, moral integrity, and free will, negating rationality as the distinguishing element. Finally, the Cylons have deep and complex emotions, and BSG almost overflows with Cylons acting upon a wide range of feelings and sensations. A prime example of their emotional complexity can be seen in their development of a monotheistic belief system, establishing the Cylons' emotional need for faith. In short, any attempt to empirically distinguish the artificially created Cylons from the ‘naturally’ created humans fails. The final stroke in this is the Cylons'

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__________________________________________________________________ choice, in the series' final season, to embrace the possibility of death. Before this point in the series, whenever a Cylon's body is destroyed, its consciousness is downloaded into a new body, a process called ‘resurrection’. Natalie, a representative of the group of Cylons who make this choice, explains her race's decision to destroy the resurrection hub and accept death: We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value, it must end. To live meaningful lives, we must die and not return. The one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over, mortality, is the one thing... Well, it's the one thing that makes you whole.3 Facing an artificial creation that is capable of reason, emotion, and even death, surely the very notion of ‘human’ becomes questionable, unsustainable, even obsolete. And yet, the human characters of BSG insist on separating themselves from the Cylons. In fact, the overall narrative arch of the series can be read in two different, complementary, ways: in one sense, Galactica tells the story of humanity's struggle of survival against a physical threat, namely the Cylons. In a second sense, it tells the story of humanity's struggle of survival as a discursive formation in light of a post-human threat, which the Cylons represent. The human crew of the Galactica, then, is not only literally fighting for its life, but is also desperately defending the discursive difference between itself and the Cylons. From the very beginning of the series, this defence is sustained through language: the Cylons are collectively and derogatorily nicknamed ‘Toasters’, lowering them to the level of simple machines; Cylon humanoid models are called ‘Skin-Jobs’, emphasizing their artificial nature, being nothing more than ‘a job’. Later in the series, as the humans are increasingly exposed to Cylons and encounter Cylon behaviour and characteristics they would otherwise deem ‘human’, the crew still maintain the difference. When faced with a starving Leoben, a number two Cylon humanoid model, Captain Kara Thrace says: ‘Kinda bad programming, isn't it? I mean, why bother with hunger?’4 When Sharon, a number eight model, confronts Lieutenant Carl Agathon in an emotional outburst, he denies the possibility of feelings in a Cylon, claiming instead ‘You have software’.5 Both example reveal just how important it is for the humans to think of the Cylons as something different than themselves. This fierce classification, and the insistence of expressing it, is not limited to the humans' attitude towards Cylons; its most clear manifestations are in fact aimed inwardly, in the human crew's constant fear of discovering they themselves are Cylons. In the first season of BSG, the identities of the eight Cylon models are not yet known to the fleet, and as the Cylons are identical to humans, anyone might be one of them. And so, not only do members of the fleet suspect each other, but they

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__________________________________________________________________ are also driven to suspect themselves. However, we might ask what is the exact nature of this fear? If one discovers he or she is a Cylon, one does not stop being oneself; it is only one’s self-definition as ‘human’ that is emptied of all meaning. The fear, then, is not of losing one’s human ‘essence’, but rather of losing the possibility of being defined as human. Put differently, humanity’s greatest fear is discovering that the term ‘human’ is no longer relevant. This fear is constantly played upon in the series, and is brought to its most extreme expression when, at the end of the third season, five central characters thought to be human are revealed to be the ‘Final Five’ Cylon models. The characters themselves did not know their true nature and are, like the viewers, caught by surprise. However, in the moment of discovery, when they are ‘technically’ no longer human, they still choose to be: My name is Saul Tigh. I am an officer of the colonial fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else that means, that’s the man I want to be, and if I die today, that’s the man I’ll be.6 Humanity’s conceptualization as a discursive formation could not be clearer than this – being human has nothing to do with one's biological structure or origin, one's reason, or anything else; it is simply a matter of choice, a question of definition. While it is quite clear why humanity would insist on maintaining itself as a unique and favoured category, not to be contaminated by artificial creations such as the Cylons, what is much less clear are the Cylons’ reasons for doing the same. Cylon society, as it is shaped in BSG, aspires to resemble humanity as much as possible. This is apparent from the evolutionary process the Cylons go through in the series – from mechanical models to humanoid ones. In other words, the narrative presupposes the mechanical models would like to ‘improve’ themselves by resembling humans. The same can be said about the aforementioned Cylon choice to embrace death – only when accepting the major human ‘flaw’, as they define it, can the Cylons see themselves as leading meaningful lives. Finally, the idea is most explicitly presented, to the point it seems almost romantic, in the issue of Cylon procreation. Cylons are artificially created, and while they hold reproductive organs, all attempts to give birth to a Cylon baby are said to have been a failure. The Cylons have a difficulty explaining this, as they are supposed to be biologically capable of reproduction, just like humans. A simple explanation to this is provided after a human-Cylon baby is first conceived and born (eventually a pure Cylon baby is born): Cylons were not able to conceive because they lacked the capacity to love. Only when a conception is made out of this most human emotion, can the process be successful. How, then, can this Cylon need to be human be explained? Or, to paraphrase Phillip K. Dick, why would androids want to dream of sheep? Why, given

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__________________________________________________________________ practically infinite options, do the Cylons wish to be part of the ‘human’ discourse? The answer, perhaps, lies not in them, but rather in their creators. Neil Badmington, building upon Derrida’s criticism of Foucault, questions the possibility of a post-human discourse that is completely separate from humanism. Analysing Foucault’s History of Madness, Jacques Derrida asserts the impossibility of discussing a concept that lies outside rationality with rationality’s language and framework.7 In the same way, Badmington suggests, post-humanists discourse cannot be articulated outside humanism’s conceptual framework – ‘one foot forever drags in the past’.8 Badmington uses this notion to criticize Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, but we might as easily apply it to BSG. The question is, then, whether a text that is created within a humanist tradition and framework can conceive a post-human entity that isn’t tinged with human ideology. More simply put, can we imagine a robot that does not have human values and aspirations? With this question in mind, we can identify any number of texts in which a supposedly post-human entity aspires to be human – A.I, Bicentennial Man, the Alien series, even Star-Trek – all these texts feature androids of different kinds and different origins, but they all have in common a desire to possess human characteristics, as if the only possible model for android mentality is Pinocchio. This is also overwhelmingly true in BSG. In a very revealing episode at the end of the second season, ‘Downloaded’, we get a first glimpse into Cylon society. Until this moment in the series all narratives revolved around the human fleet. Suddenly, the series dedicates an entire episode exclusively to Cylons. The episode takes place in the Cylon-occupied Caprica City, the former capital of the human colonies. As the episode exposes different parts of Caprica City, the Cylon’s concept of an ideal society is revealed: coffee shops decorated with plants, leisurely strolls in the sun, a cosy two bedroom apartment with a nice view. Nothing of the ‘steel and wires’ cities we have come to expect in science fiction – apparently Cylons want nothing more than to be middle-class humans. Humanity, then, suggests the narrative, is the ultimate goal for humans and Cylons alike. Furthermore, it creates a distinction between, for lack of a better term, ‘good’ Cylons and ‘bad’ ones based on their attitude towards humanity. In the fourth and final season of the series, Cavil, a number one humanoid model and a dominant force among Cylon leadership, proclaims the following: I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? […] I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body!9

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__________________________________________________________________ In the series’ final narrative movements, it is this Cavil which assumes the role of the series’ protagonists and the final obstacle in creating an ideal human-Cylon future. He is portrayed as sadistic, vindictive, and violent. Once outside the sphere of human discourse, the narrative proposes, the alternative is decisively negative – post-human aspirations are linked here to violence, cruelty and even totalitarianism. In contrast, the rebel Cylons who embrace the alliance with humanity are portrayed as compassionate, kind, and ultimately worthy of trust and love. Do no other alternatives exist? Must android mentality mimic human mentality? Can we not conceive of machines which will choose for themselves goals other than the ones we as humans chose for ourselves? As Derrida’s observations imply, perhaps it really is impossible for us to even phantom such goals. What would they consist of, and based on what values would we imagine them? Similar to the way that rationality cannot be criticised except by use of that same rationality, it is possible the ‘human’ cannot be criticised using art, which is essentially and fundamentally a human instrument. And yet, perhaps BSG actually portrays a very reasonable development of events. Taking Derrida’s logic a step further, we will arrive at the conclusion that as post-human discourse has one leg dragged behind it in human discourse, a posthuman creation will inevitably have in it a grain of humanity. In the same way that we create art that corresponds and reflects our human mentality and values, we will have no alternative but to create machines which reflect the same. As Phillip K. Dick first wrote his androids, or as a man who is set upon programming a humanoid life form, what could they insert into their creation except human ideals? How could they give them anything but death, morality, and love? To conclude, it is evident that BSG creates an immensely rich fictional world, one which invites analysis and study. This paper briefly touched on some of the post-human concerns the series raises, trying to illuminate first the construction of humanity as nothing more, and nothing less, than a constituting discursive formation; and second, the implication of this formation on our understanding of humanity and the problematic portrayal of the artificial life forms in the text. The final moments of the series condense these ideas perfectly. As the humans and Cylons head towards a communal and supposedly peaceful future, we jump to New York City, 150,000 years later. This is New York of our time, the time in which the series was created. Humanity has forgotten all about the Cylons, and is now again about to create artificial life. ‘All of this has happen before...’ says Caprica Six, suggesting it might happen yet again. BSG, then, proposes a never ending cycle of humanity perpetuating itself, creating itself anew over and over again. We might call this naïve, we might call it circular logic, or we might call it, simply, human.

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Notes 1

Neil Badmington, ‘Blade Runner's Blade Runners,’ Semiotica 173 (2009): 471489. 2 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ in Posthumanism (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 69-85. 3 Battlestar Galactica, ‘The Road Less Traveled’, written by Mark Verheiden, SciFi Channel, May 2, 2008. 4 Battlestar Galactica, ‘Flesh and Bone’, written by Toni Graphia, Sci-Fi Channel, December 6, 2004. 5 Battlestar Galactica, ‘Kobol's Last Gleaming (Part 2)’, written by David Eick and Ronald D. Moore, Sci-Fi Channel, January 17, 2005. 6 Battlestar Galactica, ‘Crossroads (Part 2)’, written by Mark Verheiden, Sci-Fi Channel, March 25, 2007. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness.’ in Writing and Difference. (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 36-76. 8 Neil Badmington, ‘Posthumanist (Com)Promises: Diffracting Donna Haraway’s Cyborg through Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass,’ in Posthumanism, (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 85-98. 9 Battlestar Galactica, ‘No Exit’, written by Ryan Mottesheard, Sci-Fi Channel, February 13, 2009.

Bibliography Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. Film Artificial Intelligence. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Los Angeles: Warner Home Video, 2002. Film. Badmington, Neil. ‘Blade Runner's Blade Runners.’ Semiotica 173 (2009): 471489. –––. ‘Posthumanist (Com)Promises: Diffracting Donna Haraway’s Cyborg through Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass.’ In Posthumanism, edited by Neil Badmington, 8598. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Battlestar Galactica. Produced by Ronald D. Moore. Universal Studio, 2004. Television. Bicentennial Man. Directed by Chris Columbus. Los Angeles: Touchstone Home Video, 2000. Film

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__________________________________________________________________ Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Warner Bros., 1982. Film Derrida, Jacques, and Alan Bass. ‘Cogito and the History of Madness.’ In Writing and Difference. London: Routledge Classics, 2001. 36-76. Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books, 1996 (1968). Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’ In Posthumanism, edited by Neil Badmington, 69-85. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Star Trek. Roddenberry, Gene. NBC., 1966. Television. Yonatan Englender is an English M.A student in the University of Tel Aviv. Among his interests are contemporary American immigrant fiction, science fiction, and classic American fiction.

In the Absence of Flesh, Bodies Made Anew: Transparency, Avatars and the Holographic Body in Hollywood Cinema (1980-2010) Pia Pandelakis Abstract Hollywood action films of the last four decades relish in displaying the body and the flesh of the American male hero. The action genre relies on an extended scrutiny process (including torture scenes, equipment scenes, depictions of prowess. . .) which underlines the organic nature of the body. In this framework the hologram, a body without flesh, constitutes an interesting case of debased materiality on screen, a counter-example to the heavy, sculptural body of the action hero. Focusing on movies that keep the body at the centre of the narrative while debasing its materiality, I intend to explore in this article the problematic representation of the ‘fleshless’ body. To do so, I will consider emblematic cases of the rewriting of the body as a digital, aerial or transparent object, from Total Recall (1990) to Resident Evil (2002). The status of the holographic technology, between the realm of the digital and the realm of the photographic, is also ambiguous. This ambiguity adds to the unseizable quality of the holographic body. As a body of light, the hologram carries divine connotations and bespeaks of a potential disappearance of our cumbersome bodies (as recently evocated by Spike Jonze’s Her). The fleshless body paradigm outlined by the hologram rests paradoxically on the disappearance of the body and the assertion of the self as a real, powerful entity, based not on the flesh but rather on willpower. Stating the obsolescence of the body, American movies simultaneously reaffirm the utter necessity of incarnation - even when the flesh is only digital. Key Words: Films studies, cultural studies, hero, action film, body, digital, flesh. ***** ‘It is you… your movements… your technique.’1 It is in these words that a recent commercial recently invited the Xbox users to experience the Kinect Sports Rivals game to be released in 2014. The public was thus offered to embrace the age-long promise of total control over an avatar that would no longer exist in a separate reality, but form a continuous extension of the self. Hollywood movies, from Tron (1982) to Surrogates, Gamer or Avatar (2009) have repeatedly explored this fantasy of the augmented body mediated by an avatar (which can be digital, or made of flesh; the examples are numerous and deserve an extended analysis in their own right). This concept of the bettered self should be understood in the wider context of the overall fragmentation of the post-modern subject. Torn between several identities, movie characters mirror the dislocation of our own

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__________________________________________________________________ identities. Personalities can be split; fake identities are endorsed; bodies are shared, when they are not morphed or merged. Action heroes incarnate this duality in their flesh: Superman conceals his true identity behind the guise of Clark Kent, but he also goes under the name of Kal-El. In the original franchise (spanning from 1978 to 1987), these various identities are questioned, played with, until the figure of the body double becomes itself doubled, revealing a character who seems open to infinite self-fragmentation. 1. Motion Capture and the Twenty-First Century Avatar The extended use of CGI in twenty-first century cinema reinforces these problematics and somehow complicates them. Academia has given a lot of attention to the matter of the digital body (for instance Barbara Flueckiger,2 Lori Landay3 and Lisa Purse4), especially with the advent of breakthrough technologies such as motion capture, used in Avatar or The Adventures of Tintin (2011). The core issue brought forth by these authors concerns the empathy (or lack thereof) felt by the audience for digital characters. The process of identification becomes a challenge when digital avatars are involved, mainly because of the difficulty to effectively capture human features, despite the promise brought by new technologies. Akin to the ‘uncanny valley’5 dilemma, the matter of the subject’s ontological nature comes forth. What happens to the subject, when it is duplicated or re-written through a complex mediation such as motion capture? In an era where the actor’s body can entirely be reconfigured to become a mass of pixels on screen, the case of the hologram might seem a little bit distant, if not altogether outdated. Holographic projections are, after all, based on a photographic technique using the projection of light rather than code or algorithms. Holograms appear in Star Wars (1977), but also in Total Recall (1990) or more recently in Resident Evil (2002). When considering these movies, we might get the sense that the holographic figure is either a form of the past, or a singularity best suited for B movies. On the other hand, holograms appear as a new form of live entertainment. In 2012, the transparent body of the hologram met its counterpart, the ghost, when deceased hip-hop singer Tupac Shakur appeared on stage at the Coachella Music Festival to perform two songs with Snoop Dogg.6 The hologram can also find applications in the movie industry: while promoting his motion capture feature Hugo, Martin Scorsese expressed interest for the technology and stated it could become a new way to engage with a narrative.7 Following Sean F. Johnston’s in-depth account of the history of the technology,8 I would like to stress that the hologram possesses two existences: as an actual technology, holograms hold an increasing potential for future applications in the entertainment industry (in movies, but also in video games, amusement parks, etc.); as a fantasised technology, contextualised in science fiction narratives, they seem to have lost their capacity to fascinate. It is the reality of holograms in fiction that I wish to turn to in this article since it is my intuition

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__________________________________________________________________ that this particular form, understood as a body of light, represents an interesting formulation of the cinematic body. The hologram engages issues that can in turn inform our understanding of the twenty-first century avatar, but also give a wider background to the theorization of the cinematic body at large. To fulfil this project, I intend to use an interpretive approach, looking closely at a selected body of cinematic texts, including Star Wars, Total Recall, and a selection of Star Trek episodes. Using Lisa Purse’s analysis of the digital body,9 I will attempt to seize the specificity of the holographic body. Jean Baudrillard’s essay, Simulacra and Simulation,10 will help me coin the underlying meaning of the transparent body; however I will distance myself from his approach to outline the potential reality of the hologram, and the ways in which it questions our own identity as a subject. 2. Illusion and the Transparent Body In most cases, the cinematic representation of the hologram rests on a threeterm equation. At first, there is a body: made of flesh, it is the original which provides a foundation for the holographic copy to be made. Secondly, the hologram must be generated from a source (The Holodeck in Star Trek, a watch in Total Recall, R2-D2 in Star Wars), since the hologram is theoretically supposed to emerge from the projection of several light beams and thus from a set of coordinates located in space. Finally, the holographic projection itself is a part of this apparatus: its materiality ranging from a poor copy (Star Wars) to a perfect illusion touching on the characteristics of a solid (the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager). The original body, the mediating object and the projection are assigned different functions depending on the narrative (body, image, illusion, projection, etc.) or depending on the situation within a single narrative, as it is the case with the Doctor in Star Trek: starting as a program, the character becomes a person through a long lengthy revendication process of claiming his own identity. The hologram must also be understood in the wider context of the transparent body trope. In early cinematic representations, such as Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), superimposition of film respectively participates in the construction of a ghostly ectoplasm (Mabuse) or compensates for the absence of a functional morphing technique (when Jekyll turns into Hyde). However, transparency is in both cases a function of an overall transformation. Holography engages with the radically different process of copy: a holographic display produces a second body, whose nature remains to be explored. Jean Baudrillard rejects the hologram because of this process of copy. Furthermore, it is the ideal of an exact copy that the French author criticises: The real, the real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror - and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of the real - and any attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will

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__________________________________________________________________ inevitably miss its object, because it does not take its shadow into account [. . .] The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there.11 To Baudrillard, the hologram resembles cloning in that it exposes the fruitless, narcissistic desire to contemplate oneself. In this framework, the hologram is not a medium because mediation itself has become impossible; in its stead, aimless fascination prevails. However, Baudrillard addresses the hologram as a technology and does not comment on the holographic form represented in fiction. The following analysis intends to broaden our conception of the hologram, whose ontology might not be entirely determined by this illusory quality. 3. The Hologram’s Uses and Functions Bluish, crystalline, trembling and shaken by an unknown disturbance: this is generally how the hologram is depicted in Hollywood cinema. Like most visual effects, however, the hologram is not solely meant for our contemplation and stands out as a central narrative device. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker first encounters Princess Leia while watching the holographic message she left recorded in R2-D2’s memory. The hologram is small, blurry, and the message, obviously deteriorated, loops through the same sentence. The hologram is here depicted as a communication device. In cinematic terms, the Star Wars hologram plays a major role in the narrative: instead of waiting for the two characters to physically meet, Lucas allows Luke and Leia to experience a form of co-presence in the very beginning of the film, although the narrative arc rests on the very distance that separates the two characters. The hologram of the Red Queen in Resident Evil or the holo-mitter in I, Robot (2004) retain the same function: they deliver messages, even if their narrative pertinence is less manifest than in Star Wars. The second type of hologram emerges in the context of warfare or in combat. Total Recall is exemplary in this regard, showing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rachel Ticotin engaging in a chase with a team of soldiers. To compensate for the fact that they are outnumbered, the couple uses a holographic device in the shape of a watch. By using the watch in turns, Schwarzenegger and Ticotin project a mirrored image of their bodies, which in this case become decoys for the enemy. When the holographic image shivers, it is already too late; the soldiers realize they are aiming at the wrong target, only to be shot in the back by the actual heroes. In this case, the hologram is an agent of deceit; a similar use can be observed in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (although not technically a hologram, the projection of the empty room conceals the presence of the two spies). Lastly, the hologram can be shown operating in the context of entertainment, revealing uses that could be realized in a near future, as hinted by recent endeavours (The Tupac ‘hologram’) or predictions (Scorsese’s interview). In The

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__________________________________________________________________ Island (2005), Scarlet Johansson and Ewan McGregor use their holographic avatars to engage in a combat game;12 naked dancers appear in Outland (1981); the Holodeck in Star Trek enables its users to enter a virtual reality game and Total Recall, in a frequently overlooked scene, shows Sharon Stone perfecting her tennis moves with a holographic instructor. Understood as objects within the diegesis or as narrative devices, holograms retain various functions but mainly operate in at least three distinct ways. The hologram, in its most anecdotal form, will convey the sense that the narrative takes place in a future where the technology is advanced (mostly when the hologram is used for leisure). The hologram also functions as an augmented reality in the most literal sense, by building a second body and extending the hero’s capacities (Total Recall being the seminal example in this case). In some instances, the hologram is not just a body but a re-created space (The Island, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol). Body or environment, the cinematic hologram engages a process of illusion, deceit but also outlines the possibility of a different physicality. 4. The Matter of Mediation: Between Presence and Absence Holograms come in various forms but they all share a common determination: as projected images, they operate a mediation process; as luminous projections, they force us to wonder and search for a point of origin. When an object is qualified as the source (a watch, a robot), this question seems easily answered. In such occurrences, the hologram would incarnate a type of projection apparatus - in the absence of a screen. Drawing from Barthes, Manovich asserts the importance of the screen as a model of viewing, determining our relationship to the act of seeing. He goes on to ask: what is the price the subject pays for the mastery of the world, focused and unified by the screen?13 Holographic landscapes seem to mimic the effect of the screen, thanks to their all-encompassing fictitious view (The Island). On the other hand, the holographic character challenges our representations when it engages its audience to see in the absence of a projecting surface, the screen - which, following Manovich’s cue, could mean a loss of control. An entire episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is dedicated to this matter, and explores the corollary anxiety surrounding the concept of an image that could exist without a located source. In ‘Ship in the Bottle’ the self-aware hologram James Moriarty encountered in season 2 makes a comeback, reasserting his consciousness and his will to live as a regular human being. The hologram, originally part of a game generated by the Holodeck, wishes to experience the real world. At first, he seems to achieve his goal and successfully steps out of the Holodeck perimeter. Later, this incredible performance of gained materiality will be revealed to Captain Picard and his crew to be deceitful. Picard realizes that this impossible event was in fact part of an illusion far greater than the holographic projection of Moriarty, since the entire Enterprise ship has been copied into a holographic projection, making every impossible event possible. Such narratives

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__________________________________________________________________ act as a cautionary Braudillardian tale: not only could holograms break the charm of vision,14 but they could very well turn our realities into a full-scale illusion. I will go back to the specificity of Star Trek holograms when concluding this essay. For a mediation to take effect, there must be a tangible image or representation to which we have access. Here holograms challenge us because of their undecided quality. As the projection of an original (all cases cited above except Star Trek), the cinematic hologram is simultaneously a body and the absence of that very body. This motif of absence can be observed in most cinematic processes involving computer generated imagery (CGI), which aims at making visible a nonexisting object, as Lisa Purse emphasises when noting that the ‘presence of the digital intervention is also potentially an absence’.15 This observation echoes Edward Lucie-Smith’s observation when he posits that the hologram is ‘disturbingly there but not there’.16 The hologram appears as a figure of ambiguity, because of its non-materiality: its transparency points at its virtuality, thus suggesting the absence of a body. On the other hand, the reality of the hologram in fiction is repeatedly made obvious: the Red Queen provides guidance (Resident Evil), as does the hologram of Jor-El (Marlon Brando) in Superman (1978); while Princess Leia’s hologram guides Luke Skywalker towards his destined journey. The hologram might be an illusion, but it still possesses a great suggestive power: Luke knows very well that the hologram is not the princess, but her image immediately sparks his interest (‘Who is she? She's beautiful. . .’).17 The hologram does not only merge the presence and the absence of a body but also signals this absence with a set of aesthetic choices. The almost perfect Star Trek Holodeck projections put aside, most cinematic holograms are disturbed by a glitch. The glitch separates the hologram from the reality it attempts to inhabit. Holograms can be coloured with an artificial shade (holograms in Zardoz are blue; the Total Recall tennis coach blinks in red when his owner comes home; the Red Queen in Resident Evil is, quite expectedly, red), but they also are blurred, affected by dithering, blinking, opacity variations and so on. According to David Kirby, this use of the glitch is typical of the display of technology in the science-fiction genre; by showing its capacity to malfunction, the narrative anchors a device’s reality within the boundaries of the narrative.18 The motif of the glitch does more than provide realism to the hologram. It participates in outlining a potential new physicality, a body that would not be made of flesh, but of light. Star Trek holograms contributed to the elaboration of this fantasy, although they do so through the characters’ discourse rather than in visual terms. When the glitch appears in Star Trek: Voyager (‘Phage’), it is on the Doctor’s own terms: willing to demonstrate the versatility of the holographic materiality, the Doctor asks Tom Paris to hit him in the face, after having adjusted the magnetic field of his projection. Paris’s hand goes through the doctor, disturbing his image as if it was a mere liquid - the ambiguity might be erased for a time, but it seems bound to

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__________________________________________________________________ return, even in the case of apparently flesh-and-blood characters such as Moriarty and the Doctor. 5. Light vs. Flesh: The Other Duality of the Avatar Holograms mimic real bodies, by copying the appearance of an existing being, or by adopting anthropomorphic features. In both cases, they can be deceitful, by outlining the presence of a person or an object that is not really present in the space and time of the projection. Transparent, made of light, holograms are not the primary form of the avatar in contemporary cinema. Movies such as Avatar, Gamer or Surrogates bespeak the common fantasy of the body double - but in each case, the second body is made of flesh. At the turn of the century, Matrix (1999) gathered those two body archetypes; while Neo stepped out of the realm of the Matrix to reclaim his material body, he was chased by the virtual yet lethal Smith. In one of the final scenes, Neo defeats Smith, whose body is shattered by inner forces to finally explode under the pressure of a light beam. This temporary failure (Smith will return) signals a radical shift in the representation of bodies of light, including holograms. Instead of being projected on the outer world, the hologram folds back to its interior, as if returning to his point of origin. As such, the hologram seems to incarnate a response to the morphed self, another troubling body type visible in Hollywood cinema. Morphed characters offer a vision of continuity, the constant possibility of reinventing oneself; holograms, on the other hand, seem to leave us with the vision of a worrisome physicality. If not worrisome, this body of light can also be tied to godlike connotations. The association of light to a divine power is timeless, but finds a new incarnation in Hollywood cinema, as Richard Dyer went on analysing in his study of the white race, White. White race is frequently associated with the ideal, pure status of light in film, often reinforced by the use of a light source beaming on the white characters from above. Interestingly, pure light does not only refer to God(s), but also to artificial intelligences and programs. In movies such as Tron and the later sequel Tron: Legacy, a large light beam gives shape to the Operating System in which the characters strive. Connected to divine underpinnings, but also to a divine understanding and shaping of computer technologies, holograms further engage with this fantasy of mastering light, and sometimes make one with that being: in Tron: Legacy, Jeff Bridges seems to mimic Smith’s destiny in Matrix when the character blends with the program in a magnificent blast of light. Lacking materiality, the cinematic hologram seems to compensate this flaw by asserting its identity with extreme rudeness: the Red Queen (Resident Evil) is mean, the Doctor (Star Trek: Voyager) is rude and the game character in Her, despite its cute appearance, has terrible manners. Holograms are hollow in physical terms; with the absence of an interior, they construct an identity without a body, mainly by mastering language and repartee. Looking at recent Hollywood movies (from Surrogates to Her), one is faced with the idea that our bodies have

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__________________________________________________________________ somehow become cumbersome and must be replaced, recycled or erased. However, while we seem ready to achieve this post-human transition, we also need the hologram, a vintage remnant of the twentieth century cyberculture, to remind us of the importance and the necessity to have a body. Craving a body of protons, we are also keen on reaffirming the centrality of the body - using the voice of our own technologies.

Notes 1

‘C’est vous...vos mouvements...votre technique’ in the French Kinect Sports Rivals commercial, aired in April 2014. 2 Barbara Flueckiger, Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer, trans. Mark Kyburz (Marburg: Schueren, 2010). 3 Lori Landay, ‘The Mirror of Performance: Kinaesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Body in Film, Television, and Virtual Worlds’, Cinema Journal 51.3 (2012). 4 Lisa Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 5 Or in French: ‘vallée de l’étrange’; Masahiro Mori, ‘La vallée de l’étrange’, Gradhiva 15 (2012): 27-33, Viewed on 2 May 2014, http://gradhiva.revues.org/2311. 6 This apparatus was technically not using a hologram, but a 2D-video projection. A similar performance involved the projection of an Elvis Presley hologram at Celine Dion’s Caesar Palace show. Hayley Tsukayama, ‘How the Tupac “Hologram” Works’, Washington Post, 18 April 2012, Viewed on 2 May 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/how-the-tupac-hologramworks/2012/04/18/gIQA1ZVyQT_story.html. 7 Steven Zeitchick, ‘Scorsese Rousingly Endorses 3-D, Says Holograms Next’, LA Times, 6 November 2011, Viewed on 2 May 2014, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/11/martin-scorsese-hugo-3d-hugorelease-reviews-butterfield-moretz-movie.html. 8 Sean F. Johnston, ‘A Cultural History of the Hologram’, Leonardo 41.3 (2008): 223-229. 9 Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, 38-50. 10 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (The University of Michigan, 1994), 105-111. 11 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 109. 12 The hologram in The Island is also an instrument of deceit in this movie, where the entire landscape is revealed to be an illusion to fool the colony of clones. 13 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001), 104.

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__________________________________________________________________ 14

‘the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost.’ Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 105. 15 Purse, Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema, 23. 16 Edward Lucie-Smith, ‘A 3D Triumph for the Future’, The Spectator, 277.8777 (1996), 57-58. Quoted in Johnston, ‘A Cultural History of the Hologram’, 225. 17 Luke is talking to himself in this instance found in Star Wars (1977), praising the beauty of the princess. 18 David Kirby, ‘The Future Is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-World Technological Development’, Social Studies of Science 40.1 (Feb., 2010), 52.

Bibliography Abbott, Stacy. ‘Final Frontiers: Computer-Generated Imagery and the Science Fiction Film.’ Science Fiction Studies 33.1 (Mar., 2006): 89-108. Avatar. Directed by James Cameron. Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. The University of Michigan, 1994. Chion, Michel. Les films de science-fiction. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2008. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. MGM, 1931. Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler - Ein Bild der Ziet. Directed by Fritz Lang. GmbH, 1922. Dyer, Richard. White. London, New York: Routledge, 1997. Flueckiger, Barbara. Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer. Translated by Mark Kyburz. Marburg: Schueren, 2010. Gamer. Directed by Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor. Lionsgate, 2009. Her. Directed by Spike Jonze. Annapurna Pictures, 2013. Hugo. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Paramount Pictures, 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ I, Robot. Directed by Alex Proyas. Twentieth Century Fox, 2004. Johnston, Sean F. ‘A Cultural History of the Hologram.’ Leonardo 41.3 (2008): 223-29. Kirby, David. ‘The Future Is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-World Technological Development.’ Social Studies of Science 40.1 (Feb., 2010): 41-70. Landay, Lori. ‘The Mirror of Performance: Kinaesthetics, Subjectivity, and the Body in Film, Television, and Virtual Worlds.’ Cinema Journal 51.3 (2012): 12936. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. Viewed on 2 May 2014. http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Directed by Brad Bird. Paramount Pictures, 2011. Mori, Masahiro. ‘La vallée de l’étrange’. Gradhiva 15 (2012): 27-33. Viewed on 2 May 2014, http://gradhiva.revues.org/2311. Outland. Peter Hyams. 1981. Purse, Lisa. Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Google Books edition. Resident Evil. Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. Constantin Film Produktion, 2002. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Columbia Pictures and Paramount Pictures, 2011. DVD The Island. Directed by Michael Bay. Dreamworks and Warner Bros., 2005. The Matrix. Directed by Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski. Warner Bros., 1999.

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__________________________________________________________________ Tsukayama, Hayley. ‘How the Tupac “Hologram” Works.’ Washington Post, April 18, 2012. Viewed on 2 May 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/how-the-tupac-hologramworks/2012/04/18/gIQA1ZVyQT_story.html. Star Trek: Voyager. Created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor. UPN, 1995-2001. Star Trek: Voyager. ‘Phage’, Season 1, episode 5. Directed by Winrich Kolbe. UPN, February 6, 1995. Star Trek : The Next Generation. ‘Ship in the Bottle’, Season 6, episode 12. Directed by Alexander Singer. CBS, January 24, 1993. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope . Directed by George Lucas. Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. Surrogates. Directed by Jonathan Mostow. Touchstone Pictures, 2009. Total Recall. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Tristar Pictures, 1990. Tron. Directed by Steven Lisberger. Walt Disney Productions, 1982. Zardoz. Directed by John Boorman. Twentieth Century Fox, 1974. Zeitchick, Steven. ‘Scorsese Rousingly Endorses 3-D, Says Holograms Next.’ LA Times, November 6, 2011. Viewed on 2 May 2014. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/11/martin-scorsese-hugo-3d-hugorelease-reviews-butterfield-moretz-movie.html. Pia Pandelakis received her doctorate in Film Studies at the University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her dissertation, The Hero Who Came Undone, focuses on the hero’s corporeity in Hollywood Cinema. Her current research focuses on the physicality of the character on screen. She holds a teaching degree (Agrégation) in Applied Arts and currently teaches Graphic Design at the Lycée Jeanne d’Arc, Rouen (Normandy).

Part III Posthuman Scepticism and Hopes

The Technological Utopia in Hollywood: The Surrogate as Contemporary Paradigm for Posthumanity in Surrogates (2009) and Gamer (2009) Mehdi Achouche Abstract The figure of the cyborg has experienced an interesting new development in recent Hollywood films. While not departing from their traditional interest in depicting future critical dystopias and false technological utopias, these texts have indeed taken a keener interest in the future of body and mind enhancements through a figure which could be termed the ‘surrogate’. In the eponymous film (Surrogates, 2009), humans are able to remotely pilot enhanced, ‘augmented’ cybernetic bodies enabling their user a transmogrification of sorts. Yet the future technological utopia that is presented quickly harkens back to the archetypical technological false utopia, Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, with humans as volunteer prisoners in their apartments/cells, refusing any real and meaningful interaction with the outside world, especially each other, and slowly withering away. The longing for perfection proves delusional until, in the very end, the machines literally stop and abandon humans to their fate. In Gamer (2009), humans can again transfer their minds into the bodies of other people, who are less economically advantaged. The humans, who have fallen prey to the promise of immortality and of an easy life, literally pull the strings of the bodies they control. By materialising the virtual avatar, these films both address the rapid advances in cognitive science and technologies and aim their criticism at virtual social worlds and Internet-mediated interactions. Whereas productions from the 1990s used virtual reality as the prevailing metaphor for the hyper-real present, new productions thus tend to bring the avatar into a new augmented reality to renew their critique of the increasing synergy between humans and their machines and our continued desire to escape ‘the prison of the flesh’. Along with other recent films, they all depict the technological utopia as the tomb of a posthumanity ironically rendered less human by posthumanist perfectionism. Key Words: Posthuman, transhumanism, cinema, Hollywood, science fiction, utopia, dystopia, technological utopia, cyborg, avatar, enhancement, mind uploading, luddite, technology, social networks. ***** 1. The Cyborg and the Avatar The merging of human and machinery has been a recurring theme in Hollywood science fiction (SF) since the 1980s, with Robocop (1987) the first great cinematic iteration of the figure of the cyborg, the ‘cybernetic organism’ first

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__________________________________________________________________ described by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960.1 Yet the specific interest of the figure of the cyborg as a representation of posthumanity, as opposed to more traditional robots or even androids (human-like robots) lies in the fact that the cyborg, true to Clynes and Kline’s original vision, is indeed a human being transformed through machinery, rather than a machine transformed to look and behave like a human being (an android). Both figures, the cyborg and the android, offer fascinating reflections on the definition and meaning to being human, and both express what J.P. Telotte calls our ‘fantasy of robotism’, ‘to fantasize about being artificial, being a robot, or being like one’, which he rightly sees as a central theme of modern science fiction cinema.2 Yet the cyborg more specifically allows for imagining the consequences of the literal and metaphorical merging of human beings with their artefacts. As the 1980s witnessed the start of profound changes in the relationship of people to their technologies because of the introduction of new devices and new technologised mediations into their daily lives (desktop computers, video games, walkmans, the advent of digital technologies), the cyborg simultaneously appeared in Hollywood cinema. People started imagining themselves literally plunging into a computer or a video game (T.R.O.N., 1982) or being programmed like a computer, as happens to Alex Murphy/Robocop. Manipulated like a puppet by his programming, the roboticized, automated posthuman was in fact degraded by so-called human enhancement or augmentation, even though he eventually was able to use his new condition for good, proving that technology could potentially become an ally. The 1990s continued to expand on this figure, with the Internet and technological mediation now at the forefront. Virtual reality and the postmodern nightmare of the simulated world transformed the cyborg into an avatar, what they call in the paradigmatic film of the period, The Matrix (1999), the ‘digital self’.3 Now humans were prisoners of simulated reality and the slaves of the machines, being turned into human batteries, but mostly through their own fault: ‘most of these people are not ready to be unplugged’4 and go back to a more challenging reality, as Morpheus explains to Neo in the film. Using their leather-clad, mirrorshaded, super-human avatars into the video game-like environment of the matrix, the protagonists’ avatars try to free a humanity which is not even aware it has been enslaved and which needs to ‘wake up’ to its real servitude. Films of the present era in a large measure continue in the same vein, with the Internet and video games still making the avatar an important figure in today’s cinema (as the eponymous 2009 film underlines). Yet, the idea of the simulation had largely been left behind by then, or had rather undergone an interesting development, as exemplified by two other 2009 productions: Surrogates and Gamer, which propose a more contemporary vision of the posthuman figure.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. The Technological Utopia Both films base their stories on current advances in cognitive research and telepresence, as the opening title sequence of Surrogates makes clear.5 Using stock shots of a monkey operating a robotic arm ‘with nothing but his thoughts’,6 then of a man in a wheelchair moving the latter again only through his cerebral waves, on to military applications of this technology (android extrapolation of current drone warfare, as a later scene will make abundantly clear) and then its widespread use in society, the news report-like sequence shows the gradual progress from repairing to augmenting human beings that today’s ethicists often warn about: ‘[…] investigations that begin with an intent to treat often lay the groundwork for an enhancement’,7 the ‘slippery slope’ that Jürgen Habermas among others has warned about.8 Soon features and behaviour that are considered normal today could come to be viewed as negative and dangerous, the treatment of paraplegia giving way to cybernetic replacement of functioning and healthy limbs, or even of the whole body, making people ‘better than well’, as is the case in Surroagtes.9 Gamer mentions the same phenomenon, with nanobots introduced into the human body to replace human cells and help improve human health or even to reach immortality, but later used for shallow entertainment activities and, ultimately, nefarious purposes. By having images of Middle Eastern drone warfare immediately following the man in the wheelchair, Surrogates emphasises not how fast a new technology can get out of hand, as traditional films would have it, but be applied to new, unforeseen (or kept quiet originally) and more troubling areas of life. This represents the posthuman as the unintended but the inevitable and dangerous consequence of present therapeutic research. The opening montage of Surrogates then leads the viewer towards the present of the film: a society where people can remotely control ‘fully synthetic bodies’,10 androids. Without ever going out of their homes, the humans of the future can thus interact with each other, go to work, do their shopping, etc. through those surrogate robots. The point for them is that they can use androids that are supposedly better, that is, stronger, taller, more attractive than their real bodies, while avoiding the risks daily life poses: crime, pollution, accidents, diseases, etc. As a commercial for surrogates intones, ‘get ready to live your life without any risk or danger’.11 And as a news anchor declares, ‘anything you dream, you can achieve, and become anyone you want to be, from the comfort and safety of your own home’.12 Men can even use female androids, or women male ones, or use a surrogate of any skin colour they wish. Humans are thus finally able to transcend their biological limitations, the cyberpunk ‘prison of the flesh’,13 and upload their consciousness into the body of their dreams – the utopian, liberating vision of the posthuman. By the end of the opening credits, we learn that utopia has indeed been created: with humans able to free themselves from the shackles of physical imperfection and ugliness, race, gender or physical harm have lost any meaning and virtually .

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__________________________________________________________________ disappeared, with racism and sexism now things of the past. As the news report voiceover explains, since the global embrace of surrogacy, crime rates have dropped to record lows. We have witnessed an incredible reduction in violent crime, communicable disease and discrimination. Problems that have plagued societies for centuries, solved almost overnight.14 A technological utopia is thus heralded, with technology solving millennia-old issues ‘almost overnight’ being the best definition for such a techno-utopian world. Tellingly, liberation (or, as viewers will later discover, enslavement) is accomplished through and on the body. According to these films, the body, through its transformations or preservation, is the crux on which tomorrow’s society’s fate will be decided. The utopian or dystopian aspects of these two films (as well as many other contemporary dystopian texts) mainly revolve around the situation and status of the bodies of the protagonists, their control or lack thereof, access to therapeutic and improving technologies, biopolitical and ethical issues which are raised or broached, the commodification of the human body, etc. At stake here is Telotte’s fantasy of robotism, that seductive view of the self as fantasy, able to be shaped and reshaped, defined and redefined at our will. Within that fantasy the utilitarian, represented by the technological, is yoked to the pleasurable, to our desires, and it attempts to reconcile the two.15 This posthumanist dream of a malleable self is both the core element of the utopian promise technology holds, and the reason so many texts simultaneously fear the posthuman fantasy. 3. The Mechanical Monads The dark side of utopia soon reveals itself. With most of the population now living cloistered in their apartments, in their pyjamas or bathrobes all day long, busy piloting their surrogates outside and ‘experiencing the world through a machine’,16 as one character reprovingly stresses, it quickly becomes clear that people no longer have any meaningful and authentic interaction with each other. Staying home all the time has become a mark of good behaviour, a robotic landlady remarking: ‘Cam’s a good tenant you know. Pays the rent on time, never leaves the apartment.’17 People hide what the film implies is their true self behind the cybernetic mask of their surrogate, unwilling to face up to the harsh realities of daily life as an imperfect human being: in a world where technology can seemingly achieve anything, imperfect is not satisfactory anymore.

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__________________________________________________________________ Surrogates’ faces, eerily beautiful and flawless (the actors’ faces have all been digitally retouched, the core special effect of the film),18 are wax-like and wholly expressionless as well (they mostly look like satirical versions of Barbie and Ken), while surrogates can often remain rigid and impassive for a long period of time, their users presumably busy multitasking or having gone to the bathroom for all anyone can know. These lifeless dolls often give the impression of carapaces in which human beings can crawl and protect themselves from the outside world, from the challenge that is life. In the two instances when the mask literally peels off, only a sneering skull appears, revealing the true nature of these surrogate robots – travesties of life and vehicles of (physical, moral, spiritual) decay and death. Technology is thus corrupting people by legitimating their own narcissistic desire to frivolously improve their bodies (one character works in a beauty salon offering a very literal interpretation of facelifts). The irony is of course that people have not really improved their bodies, but only their idealised replications and simulations. The film thus satirises, among other things, the contemporary flight into virtual worlds and avatars, as the director, Jonathan Mostow, makes clear: [Surrogates] are sort of a physical manifestation of ourselves on the Internet. Right now on the Internet you can go and you can shop, talk with your friends, get the news. You can express your opinion. You can pretty much live a full human life without ever leaving your home.19 Communication technologies are ironically hindering meaningful communication: as one anti-surrogates, neo-Luddite character remarks at one point in Surrogates, ‘we sacrifice many modern pleasures and conveniences to feel truly connected, not with machines, but with ourselves’.20 True connection has been ridiculed by the shallow simulation that is surrogacy, or, indeed, social networks. These technologies, real or extrapolated, make us, in the words of Sherry Turkle, ‘alone together’: ‘[…] when technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections’.21 Because we are ‘lonely but fearful of intimacy’, because ‘digital connections and the sociable robot […] offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship’, ‘allow[ing] us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other’, then ‘the idea of sociable robots suggests that we might navigate intimacy by skirting it’.22 To the question of whether ‘virtual intimacy degrade[s] our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind’,23 Surrogates clearly answers positively. Mostow adds:

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__________________________________________________________________ In a world where we are seemingly more connected with each other than ever before, you could argue that we are actually more disconnected from each other than ever before – because we're actually, really not interacting with each other on a personal basis.24 As for Gamer, it imagines a somewhat analogous future where human beings can transfer their consciousness, this time into the bodies of other, less privileged human beings, and control their every move for a certain period of time. Here the traditional dystopian trope of the haves and the have-nots resurfaces, with humans becoming not so much robots as puppets, slaves for their masters to experience their every fantasy and perversion vicariously. Even more so than in Surrogates, this new technology indeed opens the floodgates to all sorts of vices and excesses: the protagonist’s wife, Angie, is thus forced by her operator to prostitute herself to various kinds of sadomasochistic men who alternatively enjoy watching violent sex or vicious murder, their ‘puppet’ being either the perpetrator or the victim. In both films, these operators are described as obese white men who apparently never leave their couch or ‘sim chair’ and who can only use this reified cyberspace to fulfil their fantasies. Gamer also describes its own diegetic game, Society, the ‘ultimate sim environment’,25 as a real-life equivalent of the popular game/social network Second Life (while another real life popular game, Slayers, allows operators to shoot and slaughter each other’s human puppet). Rather than transcending their biological limitations, these men live out their fantasies and perversions, and pretend to be who they are not by impersonating and manipulating (in all senses of the word) seductive young women. Again, then, the Internet and social networks are satirised by means of bringing the avatar, online games and the virtual world into reality, rather than the other way around. Such a strategy exposes how reality is infected by ‘virtuality’, where allegedly augmented bodies are operated in an augmented reality, rather than a purely simulated one. This new, augmented reality, where ‘an AR system supplements the real world with virtual (computer-generated) objects that appear to coexist in the same space as the real world’,26 has in turn been weakened by an augmentation which only leads to the fading of human contact. These films depict the demise of humanity through the rise of materialism and nihilism due to technological progress, the media and corporations, by showing reality becoming one giant video game and social network. The world of Gamer has been contaminated by a mentality that sees everything as one giant game (the presence of reality TV, where viewers can apparently watch everything that goes on, only adds to this impression). These films thus focus not so much on the blurring of the distinction between real and virtual than on the impact virtual lives can have on individuals and society as a whole. It is not reality

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__________________________________________________________________ which is being simulated here, but rather humanity, human bodies and especially feelings and relationships, by humans themselves – humans pretending to still be human. These films emphasise how these technologies, as Turkle points out, play on our vulnerabilities, representing easy fixes to problems (solitude, loss, rejection, imperfection) that should not be ‘fixed’ but confronted. Or, as Gilles Paquet puts it, they present traditional human dilemmas as ‘puzzles to which there is a solution, rather than problems to which there may be a response’.27 4. The Machines Stop What Surrogates and, to a lesser extent, Gamer show is that, contrary to their 1980s and 1990s predecessors, the future, or indeed the present, is not likely to be a confrontation between humans and sentient machines, a la Terminator or Matrix, but rather humans trying to assuage their own longings and weaknesses and falling for a quick technological fix. Not humans being wiped out by machines, but becoming soulless machines, because of their own vanity and self-indulgence – humans not up to the challenge their tools have created for them. Far from transcending their current condition and becoming super-humans or even gods, science fiction cinema’s posthumans almost invariably turn into something less, not more, human. Contemporary SF films more often use the extrapolative narrative genre to try to show the impact of cybernetic or virtual technologies on society as a whole, rather than just one isolated individual, who otherwise might typically turn into some kind of monster or superhero. Indeed, what Gamer and especially Surrogates show is not one individual being transformed because of a freak accident or out of his own volition but humanity voluntarily choosing to have technology literally stepping in for them, while their posthumans also stand metaphorically (human beings as puppets, literalised avatars) for today’s web users. Even the omnipresent multinationals and what we could call their ‘mad CEOs’, present in both films as in so many others, are not the ultimate guilty party. This in turn is the very essence of an ‘anti techno-utopia’: humans not enslaved by other humans through the use of technology, nor humans literally enslaved by their machines, but humans falling victim to the very triumph of their technological yearnings. Not technological progress running amok, but technological progress leading exactly where it was supposed to, with unforeseen consequences that the inhabitants of Utopia are usually unable to even realise because of their own materialistic, nihilistic and highly individualistic definition of happiness. This is the pattern that Brave New World follows, or ‘The Machine Stops’, a short story by E.M. Forster (1909) and one of the first real anti techno-utopias, which bears a telling resemblance to Surrogates. In Forster’s future, people never leave their tiny subterranean apartments, passing their time conversing with friends on our equivalent of the Internet, not walking anymore but moving on mechanical

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__________________________________________________________________ chairs, and slowly withering away (the 2008 film Wall-e also imagines a technological anti-utopia where obese humans, forever served by their robots, have even forgotten how to walk, thus ironically regressing because of progress). They finally die when the Machine, which cares for their every need, eventually breaks down and stops. Surrogates imagines an analogous ending, though a less bleak one, when all the surrogates stop functioning and collapse, all at the same time, all over the planet. People, now on their own, start then streaming out of their homes, seeing the light of day for the first time in years. The final news report voiceover then wonders how long will the breakdown last, and whether human beings will be able to cope without their technological crutches – leaving audiences to answer that question. The ‘anti techno-utopia’ thus allows the filmmakers to comment on and ultimately to reject, not necessarily technology itself, but rather technological utopianism, or what Evgeny Morozov calls ‘solutionism’: the idea that every problem has its technological solution, even aspects of human life, like human relationships, that were not seen as problems until now.28 Certainly, as Tom Moylan underlines, the idea of perfection itself may very well be rejected by anti-utopias, as the promotional posters for the film already implied through their tagline: ‘Human perfection. What could go wrong?’ The oxymoron that the phrase ‘human perfection’ seems to imply is traditionally stigmatise in science fiction cinema, with cinematic technological utopias systematically, since the 1970s, revealing themselves to be anti-utopias, that is, nightmarish future worlds often designed to counter the very idea of perfection, if not of perfectibility itself.29 A film like Surrogates is an anti-utopia in so far as it imagines a future utopia meant to counter the arguments and imagery of technoutopians like the transhumanists. Ultimately the surrogate version of the posthuman is thus, in those films, a representation of the threats which people pose to themselves through their technologically-mediated longings. According to these films, then, technology itself might not be the real problem, but rather technoutopianism or ‘solutionism’.

Notes 1

Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space,’ Astronautics (September 1960): 26-27 and 74-75. 2 J. P. Telotte, Replications. A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 9, 32-33. 3 The Matrix, dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Los Angeles: Warners Bros., 1999, DVD, 40:08. 4 Ibid., 57:00. 5 For an example of current research in the area, and the relevance of present movies to that research, see Katie Drummond, Pentagon’s Project ‘Avatar’: Same

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__________________________________________________________________ as the Movie, but with Robots Instead of Aliens, February 16, 2012, Viewed on 14 May 2014, http://www.wired.com/2012/02/darpa-sci-fi/. 6 Surrogates, dir. Jonathan Mostow. Los Angeles: Mandeville Films, 2009, DVD, 01:00. 7 David and Sheila Rothman, The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement (New York: Vintage Books), 2003, Kindle edition. 8 Jürgen Habermas, L’avenir de la nature humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 35. 9 Rothman, Pursuit of Perfection, np. 10 Surrogates, 01:19. 11 Ibid., 20:00. 12 Ibid., 01:45. 13 William Gibson, Neuromancer (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 12. 14 Surrogates, 02:35. 15 Telotte, Replications, 51. 16 Surrogates, 00:45. 17 Ibid., 08:42. 18 Surrogates, audio commentary by Jonathan Mostow, 03:30, DVD. 19 Alan Boyle, The Science of Surrogates, interview with Jonathan Mostow, September 23, 2009, Viewed on 25 June 2014, http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2009/09/23/4350037-the-science-ofsurrogates. 20 Surrogates, 45:05. 21 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 1-16. 22 Ibid., 1-10. 23 Ibid., 12. 24 Boyle, The Science of Surrogates. 25 Gamer, dir. Neveldine and Taylor. Los Angeles: Lakeshore Entertainment and Lionsgate, 2008, DVD, 06:55. 26 Ronald Azuma et al., ‘Recent Advances in Augmented Reality,’ IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 21:6 (Nov/Dec 2001): 34. 27 Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 1. 28 Morozov, To Save Everything, vii-xiii. 29 Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westwood Press, 2000), 121-145.

Bibliography Azuma, Ronald, Yohan Baillot, Reinhold Behringer, Steven Feiner, Simon Julier and Blair MacIntyre. ‘Recent Advances in Augmented Reality.’ IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 21:6 (Nov/Dec 2001): 34-47.

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__________________________________________________________________ Boyle, Alan. The Science of ‘Surrogates’. Interview with Jonathan Mostow. September 23, 2009. Viewed on 25 June 2014. http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2009/09/23/4350037-the-science-ofsurrogates. Clynes, Manfred E. and Kline. Nathan S. ‘Cyborgs and Space.’ Astronautics (September 1960): 26-76. Drummond, Katie. Pentagon’s Project ‘Avatar’: Same as the Movie, but with Robots Instead of Aliens. February 16, 2012. Viewed on 14 May 2014. http://www.wired.com/2012/02/darpa-sci-fi/. Forster, E.M. The Machine Stops. London: Penguin Classics, 2011 Gamer. Directed by Neveldine and Taylor. Los Angeles: Lakeshore Entertainment and Lionsgate, 2009. DVD. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Habermas, Jürgen. L’avenir de la nature humaine. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Vintage Classics, 2004 The Matrix. Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1999. DVD. Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here. New York: Public Affairs, 2013. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westwood Press, 2000. Robocop. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Los Angeles: Orion Pictures, 1987. DVD. Rothman, David and Sheila. The Pursuit of Perfection. The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Kindle edition. Surrogates. Directed by Jonathan Mostow. Los Angeles: Mandeville Films, 2009. DVD.

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__________________________________________________________________ Telotte, J.P. Replications. A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. T.R.O.N. Directed by Steven Lisberger. Los Angeles: Walt Disney, 1982. DVD. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Wall-e. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Los Angeles: Pixar Animation Studios, 2008. DVD. Mehdi Achouche is an associate professor at Jean Moulin University in Lyon, France. His research focuses on technological utopianism and its representations in popular culture, in particular science fiction, cinema and television.

Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass and the Cyborg-Human Relationship: Fear or Hope for the Twenty-First Century Miguel Nenevé and Nayra Gomes Abstract ‘Yod was a mistake. You´re the right path, Nili. It is better to make people into partial machines than to create machines that feel and yet are still controlled like cleanings robots’: this sets the mood of our chapter. Piercy´s novel seems to invite the reader to think on issues of (a) discursive standpoints as a means of knowledge production, and (b) the body as a cultural entwining that involves both the expression of social identity and the means to define and objectify subjectivities and the universe we inhabit. Our reading might highlight the importance of the subjective sphere involved in the process of knowledge production and might offer new understandings of the concepts of science and cognition, as well as of the relationship that individuals have with technological artefacts. Based on traditional literary theory approaches to the study of science fiction (SF), which are usually restricted to positivist notions of science and cognition, our reading suggests a transgression of the latter, which prove to be limited before the fictional universe forged by Piercy. Our aim is thus to analyse the representations of scientific and technology advances as well as their relationship with the discursive standpoints of knowledge production in the novel. We finally argue that the images Piercy’s novel construct might allow for speculations on cultural demarcations, and pose fluid representations beyond our boundaries, once they may lead to new realities and alternatives to the official space-time dimension. Key Words: Marge Piercy, Technology, Body, Gender, Cyborg. ***** Originally published in 1991, under the title of He, She and It in the United States, the novel Body of Glass was released in the UK a year later and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1993. A scene of court battle unfolds a ‘bewildering new world.’1 We argue that Margie Piercy´s novel suggests several thoughts on gender, identity and other cultural constructs of traditional cultural categories. The organization of narratives in which the stories are told in analogies and in different historical times offers alternative visions of two historical periods: the Jewish ghetto of Prague during the Middle Ages and a possible future of our planet in the year 2059, after an ecological catastrophe. The novel purports a destabilisation of concepts naturalized by culture, which can be evidenced through the contrasts provoked

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__________________________________________________________________ by the permanence in the human experience manifested itself in two focalisations of the narrative bound by Malkah´s speech.As it is wrong to give birth to a child believing that child will fulfil your inner aspirations, will have a particular talent or career, so it is equally wrong to create a being subject to your will and control. In the myth of Pygmalion, we assume that she would love her sculptor, but Shaw knew better. Each one of us wants to possess yourself; only fools willingly give themselves away. Slavery produces the slave. Avram and Yod killed each other. Yod loved me, or whatever simulacrum of attachment he felt, because I had let go.2 The parallel stories present similar historical moments regarding the insecurity of living space as well as the creation and manufacturing of life. The shared experiences seem to point to the artificial factor of the constitution of the realities that would not be predetermined for alleged linearity and uniqueness of historical ‘progress’ as Lucy Sargisson advocates.3 1. Future Alternatives Realities These narratives, such as Piercy´s Body of Glass, promote the construction of alternatives to the actual reality of the characters. Considering the strangeness of gender categories, the fiction suggests the production of other spaces that challenge the naturalized epistemological categories and cultural practices, which have determined how to produce and understand new social and scientific ontologies. It is on these models that the novel Body of Glass (He, She, It) can provide the reader with new material for other possible meanings. The titles themselves evoke the existence of other identity categories, as express by ‘It’ in the title He, She and It, and speculation about the concept and role of the body (Body of Glass) in a posthuman world. Although science can provide pathways for the de-familiarisation of representations of bodies and identities in essentialist conceptions, the simple application of technologies in the spatiality of the novel Body of Glass is not presented as the solution to elude immutable categories. It may be limited by the resources and human knowledge, when based on universalistic assumptions and [the] commitment to objective, pure and neutral knowledge, which investigates the involvement of religion and magic in the production of knowledge. Linda Wight argues that this novel destabilises the usual hierarchies of knowledge and definitions of the mode and settings of Science Fiction (SF), based on the value of different sources of knowledge, suggesting a much more fluid definition both of this literary mode and the concept of reality.4 We argue that Piercy´s novel suggests that the body is a place of knowledge production as it establishes relationships and interaction with space, whose representation seems to imply transgressions of the limits of conceptual

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__________________________________________________________________ compartments of mind and body. This would function as a metaphor for undermining the logic grounded on oppositional poles: body versus mind. To highlight the erosion of the boundaries between emotion and reason, respectively connected with the body and mind, Sargisson (1996) cites Alison Jagger (1983), who proposes an epistemological model underpinned by the non-hierarchical combination of emotion and knowledge.5 Based on articulations which are also suggested through the destabilisation of rigid demarcations mainly related to biological classification of characters, we suggest that the novel seems to offer opportunities for discussion on the concepts of humanity and identity. This justifies the clippings for analysis that focus on the body and a forging of identity. Representations of science in Body of Glass may allow for speculation on the cultural borders, posing constructed fluid images (susceptible to transformation) beyond these boundaries, which may lead to new realities and alternatives to official space-time dimension. This may be evidenced from the conceptual transgression one can observe throughout the novel. 2. Some Concepts of Science: Visions and Revisions Scholars such as Scholes6 and Suvin7 have produced materials that illuminate the importance of the SF mode for literary criticism. However, most studies they developed so far reduce science fiction to the cognitive aspects and thematic linked to technology, excluding other modes of knowledge production and the implications of how such knowledge is shared. Such a reduction, however, seems to be due to the time period elapsed between the original publication of these studies and more recent publications, such as the object of our study here. The context of production on which Scholes and Suvin remarked on probably referred to the duality of representations of science and technology that alternated between optimism and relations of power and aggression. What sustains the thesis of the two theorists, therefore, seems to be the positivist concept of cognition that would be evaluated in fictions with this subject, which certifies a view of science that seeks to achieve a pre-cultural fact, prior to any human judgment. However, both of their work proved to be important because of the displaced images and representations of the space-time elements that both authors explore in relation to science fiction. In response to this traditional view of science as an objective inquiry, feminist scientists and science fiction writers have produced alternative approaches to science, considering the differences, multiplicity, complexity, bias and location of discursive knowledge. The choice to analyse the representations of knowledge production, therefore, is justified by the fact that the novel offers a fictional world in which various forms of experimentation around the world seem to be accepted as a means of knowledge, which can thus be perceived as a perceptible, on-going process of discovery. The very structure of the novel seems to suggest this process by switching the focus of the narrative between two characters and by displaying spaces that initially appear to simulate an almost

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__________________________________________________________________ evolutionary gradation of social forms, in which knowledge and applications of technology resources support the superiority of objectivity and rationality as a prerequisite for development and progress, which can be perceived from the first descriptions that characterize the Glop (short for megalopolis) only as an extremely polluted area, where people live off of the waste produced by the domes, the free cities as places located in unstable regions and the Black Zone as a major radioactive territory. Although rationally organized spaces, which represent, in the novel, the production centre of the whole knowledge basis upon which the concepts of truth and reality are constructed, corporate enclaves have their position gradually deconstructed throughout the novel. The reader realizes that Piercy´s work increasingly emphasises the existence of multiple types of knowledge to destabilise the hierarchical systems of knowledge and oppression that they engender, as pointed out by Wight.8 The introductory scene of Body of Glass presents a scene of legal battle, the disclosures allow for the perception of predictable forms and types usually associated with the mode of science fiction: Josh, Shira’s ex-husband, sat immediately in front of her in the Hall of Domestic Justice as they faced the view screen, awaiting the verdict on the custody of Ari, their son. […] The YakamuraStichen dome in the Nebraska desert was conditioned, of course, or they would all be dead, but it was winter now and the temperature was allowed to rise naturally to thirty Celsius in the afternoon as the sun heated the immense dome enclosing the corporate enclave. […] Every time she called up time on her internal clock and read it in the corner of her cornea, it was at most a minute later than when last she had evoked it.9 As one can see, this is a space typically related to the expected in stories of science fiction: an environment affected by natural disaster that is controlled with applications of science and technology. The initial settings of the narrative presents inhospitable places due to the occurrence of a nuclear holocaust, with several enclaves within which life is made possible by controlling the weather. These places are subjected to multinational companies, which have replaced our current forms of government. Outside corporate domes, survival is almost impossible because the ozone layer was destroyed, the fertile lands were covered by oceans and became deserts or places without security, people were under constant threat of being attacked by organ traffickers. Yod affirms: I’m conscious of my existence. I think, I plan, I feel, I react. I consume nutrients and extract energy from them. I grow mentally, if not physically, but does the inability to become

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__________________________________________________________________ obese make me less alive? I feel the desire for companionship. If I can’t reproduce, neither can many humans.10 Being designed to look like a real human being, Yod is very close to what is perceived to have a real human appearance and it/he establishes emotional ties with Shira, Malkah, who produced its/his operating system, and with Ari when the child is kidnapped by his mother to live in Tikva. The personality of Yod is thus forged between the ‘program’ and what it/he learns during his socialisation process. The family that they imply and the small achievements of the cyborg, as the payment it/he receives for its/his work and his days off service, revise the possibilities of relationships between men and women and of the integration between humanity and its environment, as suggests Elaine Graham.11 The socialisation of Yod, however, is not the only instrument of the character’s ‘subjectification’ or perhaps you could say ‘humanisation’. The second level of narrative in Body of Glass, the story of the Golem of Prague, seems to allow for the creation of social ties to the free city after recognition of their condition. Joseph is also a being created to protect a community, through magical religious rites. Both are products of human artifice, created to defend people from external threats. He, She and It may suggest that the condition of these beings is manufactured from two systems of gender and knowledge traditionally arranged in opposing pairs whose combination can configure a third discourse, alternative space to those naturalized cultural practices, in which the concepts of gender identity and categories of knowledge can be redefined. The title suggests that the contrast between these two systems of gender condemns a limited male definition of science fiction and knowledge. It also celebrates a broader feminist approach that embraces multiple sources of meaning. These distinctions seem to be also denied by Malkah, which is recognized by the creation and development of defence information bases (called chimeras) and circulating knowledge in virtual environment programs. Products developed by character based on the transgressions of traditional frames seem to operate and be used in the production of Yod. The mutability of Malkah, for example, allowed it to penetrate the basis of YS to steal information. Although the program used by them is not a chimera, the scientist soon realizes that entering the enemy base requires adaptation to established frameworks: ‘We have to accept his metaphors and incorporate them.’12 3. Final Remarks Trying to explain the concept of metaphor to Yod, Shira asks it/ him if it/he has ever seen a rose. The cyborg answers that it/he has information in his program. Then Shira takes it/him to the garden of her grandmother where the cyborg recognizes the rose from the information that it is stored in the program:

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__________________________________________________________________ It [Yod] took hold of one rose and deftly plucked it, bringing it towards its face. “It has colour, fragrance and form, just as my memory instructed me. But it also has a curiously pleasant tactile quality. I think you might describe it as... like velvet, perhaps? Am I using a simile correctly?”13 The rose that Yod finds in Malka’s garden, for example, only starts to offer it/him new signification after the re-positioning of the subject: the contact with the rose, beyond the information implanted, offers a new objective organization which allows the cyborg to compare the velvet texture of the flower with the sensation of the petals. The experience, therefore, may be understood as a common construct of all forms of life, which is mediated by the interpretation and modelled by other constructors, such as language and culture. When objectified and contextualised in a wider web of relations, the experiences integrate our cultural consciousness, from where fictions take material for their constitution. According to Julio Jeha this process projects ‘several alternatives which encourage multiple interpretations’14 and at the same time, orient the senses which relate to the text. The personal experiences and those experiences shared by the reader allow the text to construct meanings in a fictional work and, based on internal references which transmit the expressive value of the text, it presents new references as well as textual emptiness. The fictional space of science fiction in this case, presents new ontologies through other ways and methods which go beyond our experience and culture. In this sense, Jeha proposes that it is impossible to classify a text into a single genre. Science fiction can manifest itself in several literary forms broadening our possibilities of shared experiences which make part of our cultural universe. The analogy between the woven construction and development of Yod and Joseph also shows what motivated the fabrication of both. The narratives involve the attempts to acquire social and emotional acceptance, as well as identity construction and the position of the other they occupy. During the socialisation process and the search for freedom, Yod and Joseph bump on the almost indelible categorisation of nonhumanity thrust upon them. The way Joseph is presented also ratifies the awkwardness between the frontiers of knowledge, offering intriguing possibilities of ‘exploration of aspects of religion, culture and gender.’15 Even part of the religious mythic narratives, the golem of Body of Glass also embeds scientific perspectives in its construction process. Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass suggests a very important discussion on the relationship between cyber culture, cyberspace, science fiction as well as utopia and dystopias. Can technologies save humanity or just do the opposite? The same meanness and egocentrism one faces today seem to be the biggest problem in the future era, as the novel suggests, through Avram: ‘I made him and I can unmake him….Yod was created to protect and to defend us.’16 It reminds us of Defoe´s

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__________________________________________________________________ Robinson speaking about Friday: Crusoe taught the language to the savage, Friday, because he saw the possibility of Friday being useful to him. Therefore it seems to be possible to conclude that Marge Piercy suggests that advances in cybernetics and technology may bring fear or hope, depending on our human attitude towards them.

Notes 2

Anders Nordgren, ‘Moral Imagination in Tissue Engineering Research on Animal Models,’ Biomaterials 25 (2004): 1723-1734. 2 Marge Piercy, He, She It. (New York: Fawcet, 1992), 418. 3 Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York: Psychology Press. 1996). 4 Linda Wight, ‘Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science Fiction in Marge Piercy’s Cyborgian Narrative,’ in When Genres Collide: Selected Essays from the 37th Annual Meeting on the Science Fiction Research Association, ed. Thomas J. Morrissey and Oscar De Los Santos (White Plains NY/ Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press, 2007), 133-40. 5 Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, 136-142. 6 I refer to Robert Scholes´s based mainly on Robert Scholes ed., Bridges to Fantasy: Essays from the Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (Alternatives.) (Riverside: University of California, 1990) and Robert Scholes, ‘Structural Fabulation’: An Essay on Fiction of the Future (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1975). 7 Darko Suvin, ‘The State of the Art in Science Fiction Theory: Determining and Delimiting the Genre’, Science Fiction Studies 17.6 (March 1979). 8 Linda Wight, ‘Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science Fiction in Marge Piercy’s Cyborgian Narrative’, 137. 9 Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Fawcet, 1992). 10 Ibid., 93 . 11 Elaine Graham, Representations of the Posthuman: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 84-90. 12 Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Fawcet, 1992), 367. 13 Ibid., 76. 14 Julio Jeha, ‘Mimese e Mundos Possíveis,’ (2007) Accessed 30 September 2014, http://www.revistas.ufg.br/index.php/sig/article/viewFile/7354/5219, 79-90. 15 Elaine Graham, Representations of the Posthuman: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 85. 16 Marge Piercy, Body of Glass, 386.

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Bibliography Amaral, Adriana. A Visão Cyberpunkt do Mundo Através de Lentes Escuras de Matrix (2003b). Accessed 30 September 2014. www.boc.ubi.pt/pag/amaraladriana/cyberpunk-posmodernismo. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. S Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1999. De Laroche, Lucia, A. Teixeira. ‘Frankenstein de Mary Shelley e Dracula de Stoker: Gênero e Ciência na Literatura’. História, Ciências e Saúde. VIII (Mar-Jun 2001): 10-34. Jagger, Alison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Brighton : Harvester, 1983. Jeha, Julio. Da Fabricação de Monstros. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2009. Jeha, Julio. ‘Mimese e Mundos Possíveis.’ (2010), Accessed 30 September 2014 http://www.revistas.ufg.br/index.php/sig/article/viewFile/7354/5219. Nordgren, A. ‘Moral Imagination in Tissue Engineering Research on Animal Models.’ Biomaterials 25 (2004): 1723-1734. ______. For Our Children: The Ethics of Experimentation in the Age of Genetic Engineering. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Piercy, Marge. Body of Glass. London: Michael Joseph 1992. ______. He, She It. New York: Fawcet, 1992. Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. New York: Psychology Press. 1996. Scholes, Robert ed. Bridges to Fantasy: Essays from the Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (Alternatives.) Riverside CA: 1990. Suvin, Darko. ‘The State of the Art in Science Fiction Theory: Determining and Delimiting the Genre.’ Science Fiction Studies. 17.6 (March 1979): 1973-1975. Versnack, Hugo. Science Wonder Stories. Paul Cover. Indianapolis, 1929.

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__________________________________________________________________ Wight, Linda. ‘Magic Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science Fiction in Marge Piercy’s Cyborgian Narrative.’ In When Genres Collide: Selected Essays from the 37th Annual Meeting on the Science Fiction Research Association, edited by Thomas J. Morrissey and Oscar De Los Santos, 133-140. White Plains, NY and Waterbury: Fine Tooth Press, 2007. Miguel Nenevé. Professor of Department of Foreign Language at the University of Rondonia, Brazilian Amazon. His publications are in the field of Canadian Literature, postcolonial translation, Travel-writing on the Amazon and Amazonian Literature. . He has one book of poetry and three books of short stories. Nayara Gomes Macena. Lecturer of English and Literature at the University of Alagoas – Brazil. She has been developing a study on Marge Piercy´s Body of Glass. Her publications include articles on women´s fiction, feminist studies and utopia.

Digressions in Progress: Posthuman Loneliness and the Will to Play in the Work of the Strugatsky Brothers Julia Vaingurt Abstract Never overtly political, Soviet science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky nevertheless found it increasingly difficult to publish in Soviet Russia, and the critical consensus today regards their work especially in terms of sociopolitical critique. It is, indeed, hard not to read their oeuvre as engaged with the political discourses of technologically driven competition and colonization that characterized the Cold War era, whether in the capitalist West or the socialist East. Philosophical explorations in the Strugatskys’ works, moreover, often appear to put rationalism and dialectical materialism – key Marxist-Leninist conceptualisations of history – to the test. And yet, a central Strugatsky leitmotif, the technological enhancement of the human, evinces the influence of, and dialogues with, another philosophical system crucial to Soviet science fiction since its inception, namely, that of Russian Cosmism. The progenitor of this attempt to reconcile evolutionary history, scientific determinism, and Christian thought was Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903). The Strugatskys never explicitly mention Fedorov, but their writing is so clearly indebted to the philosophical tradition he initiated that, as S. Nekrasov puts it, ‘outside of his semantic field, their work cannot be properly understood.’ Here I will analyse the Strugatskys’ exploration of technology’s role in fostering, qualifying, and transforming life via the prism of Fedorov’s quest for immortality and the radical physical transformation of humanity it would entail. Key Words: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Cosmism, posthumanism, bioengineering, immortality, technology, inhumanity, rationalism, body. ***** Never overtly political, Soviet science-fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky nevertheless found it increasingly difficult to publish in Soviet Russia, and the critical consensus today regards their work especially in terms of sociopolitical critique. It is, indeed, hard not to read their oeuvre as engaged with the political discourses of technologically driven competition and colonization that characterized the Cold War era, whether in the capitalist West or the socialist East.1 Philosophical explorations in the Strugatskys’ works, moreover, often appear to put rationalism and dialectical materialism – key Marxist-Leninist conceptualisations of history – to the test.

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__________________________________________________________________ And yet, a central Strugatsky leitmotif, the technological enhancement of the human, evinces the influence of, and dialogues with, another philosophical system crucial to Soviet science fiction since its inception, namely, that of Russian Cosmism. 2 The progenitor of this attempt to reconcile evolutionary history, scientific determinism, and Christian thought was Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903). The Strugatskys never explicitly mention Fedorov, but their writing is so clearly indebted to the philosophical tradition he initiated that, as S. Nekrasov puts it, ‘outside of his semantic field, their work cannot be properly understood.’ 3 Here I will analyse the Strugatskys’ exploration of technology’s role in fostering, qualifying, and transforming life via the prism of Fedorov’s quest for immortality and the radical physical transformation of humanity it would entail. With the techno-enhancement of humanity as their point of departure, the Strugatskys address, explicitly or otherwise, the following interrelated questions: what does the concept of human life include (or exclude)? What in humanity is worth salvaging, and how can technology be reconceptualised such that it preserves rather than destroys this essence? Fedorov’s mentees titled the posthumous compilation of his essays (1906) The Philosophy of the Common Task. In a nutshell, this philosophy rests on the daring assertion that the only conceivable purpose of scientific-technological progress (and for that matter, of all human activity) is to be found in the Christian doctrine of resurrection. Ethics and reason demand that technology serve the abolishment of death, and the resurrection of life (specifically, of ancestors); such other uses as the temporary advancement of material progress and plenitude are rendered superfluous by the unfortunate fact of dying. The restructuring of the body is thus of prime moral importance to Fedorov, who deprecates procreation in favour of artificial reassemblage on the molecular or nano-level; implicit in this injunction is that natural reproduction represents a mere compulsive replacement of old with new, rendering us little more than contingent links in the chain of motion toward death. Reproducing sexually, we – unethically, egotistically – duplicate what is, rather than striving to create what should be. Instead of simply birthing other mortal beings, we could dedicate ourselves to the artificial resurrection of our forefathers, thereby learning to govern our own biology, becoming agents of a qualified life. Self-regulation of the human organism, according to Fedorov, would ensure functional immortality; the ability to resurrect life artificially renders sexual and digestive organs obsolete. Liberated from reliance on such physiological exigencies, we will become self-sufficient and self-renewing. Human interconnectedness will no longer be a matter of dependency, but of brotherhood (bratstvo). Moreover, as self-regulated organisms, people will be untethered from the planet Earth, able to travel cosmically. (Which will, indeed, be necessary, when the resurrection of all ancestors results in overpopulation.) The technological overcoming of death proposed by Fedorov may, of course, be interpreted variously. The sheer remoteness of such an achievement might seem

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__________________________________________________________________ to render it little more than an object for contemplation; but on the other hand, seen from a less indulgent point of view, Fedorov’s quasi-ethical goal of transfiguration via technology might appear as the ultimate manifestation of what Giorgio Agamben pinpoints as the essence of modernity, the establishment of the state of exception as the norm.4 To Agamben, this condition results from the interpolation of the simple state of living, or zoē, into the political (a particular, qualified way of living, bios), from the creation of a zone of indistinction between biological and political life. Biological life, due to its unqualified nature, its bareness, is banned from bios immediately upon its inclusion therein.5 Fedorov undertakes a similar synthesis of life as a whole with the body: Being born, a human being departs from totality and rejects life with all and for all; out of a lack of knowledge, this blind creature rejects what it should be doing with all the living and for all the dead.6 The spirit/body dualism prompting other Christian philosophers to talk of the former’s overcoming of the latter does not exist for Fedorov; sobornost’ [spiritual community] is hindered by the problematic materiality of the human body, which must be transformed if life is to be worth living. If we think of the ‘common task’ as a kind of law, it follows that such legislation depends on what it bans; what it excludes, after all, is us as presently extant. If humanity unites in pursuit of the goal envisioned, total subordination of all aspects of life to the law of the common task will ensue, and what is not commensurate with Fedorov’s conception of humanity transformed, with ‘the brotherhood of sons who serve their fathers,’ will be eliminated as belonging to ‘blind, fallen nature.’7 It is precisely through the demarcation of what constitutes proper from improper life that humanity’s sovereign power over self, nature, life and death is asserted. Reading Fedorov through Agamben helps explain the ready amenability of the former’s ethical ideals to totalitarian affiliation, especially to political discourse grounded in radical materialism. (Such a reading, for instance, amplifies the echoes between Fedorov’s would-be transformation of unqualified biological life into worthwhile life, on the one hand, and Leninist enlightenment’s trajectory of spontaneity-into-consciousness, on the other.) For Agamben, just as for Fedorov, biology is complicit in its own destruction: desirous of protection against death, it gives itself over to power – inevitably associated with technological reconditioning – thereby sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Ostensibly a tool for the mastering of life, technology devastates it in the process. Reared on the ideals of Russian Cosmism, the Strugatskys inherit its task of discerning, in the enormous power of technology, some ethical ends. They are preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with the question of technology’s role in the spiritual rather than material enhancement of humanity, and in the moral

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__________________________________________________________________ imperative of conquering death; but on the other hand, the authors inhabit a postHolocaust, Cold War world, and are thus poignantly mindful of the potential ominousness of attempts at mandating radical biopolitical restructuring. Time and again their texts seek out ways to disassociate technology from instrumentation, from the idea of mastery; to imagine alternate conceptions of technology, especially such as to associate it with experimentation, play, and openness. For example, in their novel The Kid (Malysh, 1971), Fedorov’s biopolitical project becomes the political aspiration of a utopian communist state. Technology has rendered citizens of an idealised Earth futurity practically immortal. These new people aspire, moreover, to function as spreaders of enlightenment (in subsequent novels, called Progressors), aiding underdeveloped species still mired in the constraints of biology and languishing on dying worlds; specifically, the advanced humans seek out previously uninhabited planets and organize them as new homes for those less fortunate. On one such ostensibly barren candidate-world, the Earthlings find a human child (the sole survivor, it turns out, of an earlier shipwreck). Reared by this alien planet itself, and adapted to the conditions thereof, the boy has undergone radical physiological change. He is capable of almost metamorphosis-like mimicry, possesses extraordinary memory, and needs no food or other sustenance. He appears to be a self-sufficient organism, content with his life on the planet, where he believes himself to be completely alone. The boy’s sovereignty is problematized, however, by the fact that the planet apparently controls him without his knowledge. Under the illusion of his at-homeness in this world, the boy is quite content until the arrival of the newcomers from Earth. The planet had created for the boy surrogates of himself to play with, but such virtual replicas cannot compare with actual humans, who introduce elements of unpredictability and newness. The boy’s thirst for knowledge, seemingly his most human trait, induces him to seek out contact with humans. Play and curiosity thus outweighing his posthuman contentment, the boy becomes lonely, and torn between the pull of others of his kind – humanity – and his loyalty to the alien planet. The planet, meanwhile, is slowly killing the boy for his betrayal, his association with humans, and it falls to the Progressors to decide: continue the project of enlightenment at the expense of the child’s life, or abandon it in order to save him? This dilemma represents one of the numerous ethical obstacles the Strugatskys put before the Progressors in their novels, complicating the righteous mission to spread the ideal of a life organized along rational parameters. Paradoxically, to insist in this case on the transformation of the planet along humanist ideals is to behave inhumanely toward the boy, to do right by whom, the Progressors must recognise the limitations of their techno-humanist project. The ‘kid’ is the first to hint at this paradox in one his conversations with the crew, when he is asked: “And why did you feel bad?”

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__________________________________________________________________ “Because there were people.” “But people never harm anyone. They want everyone everywhere to feel good.” “I know,” said the kid. “Just like I said: people will leave, and it will be good.”8 Furthermore, the Progressors must reconfigure their relationship with the boy, from seeing him as an instrument of their plans to recognise his autonomy and difference. For his part, the boy does not need humans; on the contrary, they cause him discontent, show him he is not infinite and therefore not completely independent. And yet a part of him desires their company. The Progressors must make a similar shift in attitude. Recognising the imperative of coexistence with the Other, they must cease imposing themselves upon this alien world, and reconceptualise technology from facilitator of homogeneity to mediator and enabler of difference. Unlike the will to power, which leads to the mastery and exploitation of the environment, the will to play drives exploration and curiosity. The Progressors need to abandon the dream of complete control, and reconfigure their communication with the boy along the parameters of play and exploration. When the Progressors decide in favour of ‘laissez-faire,’ they leave one of their robots with the boy, so that he can use it as a transmission device to keep in touch with them. The machine originally conceived as an instrument of the transformation of the planet, of one-sided control, thus becomes a means of mutuality and communication. Instead of being seized and shaped, the alien/ unknown is now to be reached out to. Published in 1971, The Kid foregrounds the quest to use technology for purposes other than mastery of the Other; but by the 1980s, the Strugatskys would revise such optimistic views. In Waves Extinguish the Wind (Volny gasiat veter), written in 1984, the concept of play has lost its association with humanness; now superhuman, it acquires a sinister tint. In the distant future, part of humanity has evolved to become immortals known as liudeny (an anagram of ne liudi [not people], as well as an allusion to homo ludens, ‘human the player’), perhaps because these ‘players’ play with humans for the purposes of unnatural selection. The capacity to transcend biological limitations and ascend to the status of liuden is inherent in particular individuals, but a medical procedure is needed to activate it. Those who have the potential must be identified, entailing a complicated process of selection; technology is thus co-opted into this ‘game’ of exclusion. Here the Strugatskys question the very concept of the qualified life and its identification with goodness. On the one hand, liudeny seem qualitatively better than rank-and-file humans: the latter are xenophobic, afraid of the unknown, limited, whereas liudeny are open-minded and impeccably moral. Despite or because of this generous endowment, however, liudeny grow indifferent to humans. Ethically and physically superior, they lose all sense of affiliation with

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__________________________________________________________________ their apparently superseded kind. They sever ties with loved ones; after their transformation, human life appears to them as not worth living, as less than life. While they are Fedorovian in their ability to overcome indifferent nature, their feeling of brotherhood, of unity with all for all, does not extend to their forebears. Evolving beyond humanity renders them utterly inhuman. Since the novella is told from the perspective of one who is left behind, the state of mind enabling liudeny to abandon humanity remains alien. A former Progressor, Toivo Glumov, views his impending ascension to this higher state of being as an unavoidable tragedy, terrifying in its implications: Turning into a liuden means my death. It’s much worse than death, because to those who love me, I will remain alive, but be repugnant beyond recognition. Arrogant, self-satisfied, selfassured. And what’s more, probably eternal.9 He perceives the inhumanity creeping into him as the cessation of his life with others, as abandonment and aloneness. In its sheer divorcement from any trace of origin, the state of being a liuden suggests indeterminacy, a fearsome play of possibilities. Afforded by technology, this play is not joyfully Derridean, but constitutes the eradication of humanity, a state of absence rather than presence. In the Strugatskys’ later works, former Progressors, disenchanted with the idea of unbounded progress toward perfection, attempt to forestall its deleterious effect on human life. They have failed to be agents of progress, they realize, all along having served as little more than this ideal’s blunt instruments. Now that superior beings lay claim to the future of the qualified life, it must be asked whether anything in humanity is salvageable, or worth salvaging. The Strugatskys seem to think so, nostalgically turning away from reason and toward finitude as the fundamental human trait, the one characteristic ensuring the existence of both disequilibrium and desire. In connection with this viewpoint, we might cite an essay in Jean-François Lyotard’s collection The Inhuman devoted to the highly Fedorovian question ‘Can Thought Go On without a Body?’ Two possible responses are provided. Much as does Fedorov himself, the first speaker, a certain He, adduces the ultimate limitation on earthly endeavours – the death of the sun and with it the death of thought – as necessitating the direction of all human technologies toward finding ways for thought to exist beyond the hardware of the human body. Immortality in this view is reimagined as the perpetuation, not of the human species, but of disembodied thought, energies invested by human mind. The second speaker, called She, agrees in principle, but registers two objections. Firstly, thinking and suffering overlap, because thinking does not merely involve a selection of data, but an effortful suspension of ordinary intentions of the mind: the ‘soliciting of emptiness, this evacuation – very much the opposite of the overweening, selective,

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__________________________________________________________________ identificatory activity – does not take place without some suffering.’10 Secondly, the human body is gendered, hence incomplete, this incompleteness inducing the individual to desire another as a half complementary to the self. Lyotard’s objection to the prospect of disembodiment, then, is that thinking machines will be too effortless, and too complete, to achieve the incredible complexity of human thought. Similarly, in an interview Boris Strugatsky expresses his worry that eventually human beings, having solved a multitude of social and scientific problems, will turn into carefree specimens of the homo ludens: too self-satisfied, too untroubled and freed from responsibility, to be properly human. 11 Moral choices are linked with human finitude, conditioned by the existence of the Other, by one’s own limitations and lacks, and ultimately, by mortality. This doubting as to the viability or worthwhileness of the homo ludens stands as a double indictment of the Fedorovian project’s conception of immortality as humanity’s ultimate goal and of techno-reason as the route thereto. The Strugatskys wind up discrediting both the means and the end of this process, now read as inhuman, thus undesirable. The Strugatskys are often read in terms of their political nonconformity. For example, Yvonne Howell, who was the first to trace the imprint of Fedorovian ideas on their writing, sees the Strugatskys as travestying Fedorov’s style and thought, the more starkly to reveal humanist scientific dreams as ineffectual under conditions of modernity; as inevitably neutralized by the epoch’s regnant powers of technology and the totalitarian state.12 As compelling as this interpretation is, it suggests that the problem lies in the sociopolitical circumstances hindering the philosophy’s flourishing, rather than in the failure of the philosophy itself. My contention, by contrast, is that political reality has exposed not the ineffectuality of Fedorovian bioengineering, but rather its inherent inhumanity and the ominousness of its potential realization. In the end, the authors’ political pessimism and disappointment with socialism might stem from their disillusionment with the possibility of finding an exit from the circle of entrapment into which our technological aspirations have led us.

Notes 1

Their works frequently feature ‘Progressors’ from an advanced communist planet who journey through space to rescue, resettle, and ‘progress’ underdeveloped alien populations. Ethical dilemmas arising in the course of such operations echo the similarly problematic nature of the mission featured on NBC’s Star Trek (196669). Here the Federation Starfleet, frequently inclined to render aid to the distressed and (per Federation mores) benighted, is at the same time enjoined by its own ‘prime directive’ not to ‘interfere’ with alien civilizations; which injunction is routinely agonized over and violated. This aspect of Star Trek and the Strugatskys’ Progressor-ism would seem to allegorise competing US and Soviet aspirations to

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__________________________________________________________________ self-portray as benefactors to the developing world, and the complicated nature of such aims. 2 See Leonid Geller, Vselennaia za predelom dogmy (London: Overseas Publications, 1985), 63. 3 S. Nekrasov, ‘Kosmism N. F. Fedorova i tvorchestvo Strugatskikh,’ in Filosofiia bessmertiia i voskresheniia, ed. A. G. Gacheva, S. G. Semenova, M. V. Skorokhodov (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996), 2: 167; this and all other translations from the Russian in this article are mine – JV. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 170. 5 Ibid., 3-6. 6 N. F. Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Progress, 2000), 2: 171. 7 N. F. Fedorov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Mysl’, 1982), 181, 479. 8 Arkadii Strugatskii and Boris Strugatskii, Obitaemyi ostrov. Malysh (Moscow: Tekst, 1993), 378. 9 Arkadii Strugatskii and Boris Strugatskii, Zhuk v muraveinike. Volny gasiat veter. Otiagoshchennye zlom (Moscow: Tekst, 1994), 313. 10 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 18. 11 L. Ashkinazi and V. Efremov, ‘Avtorskaia refleksiia,’ in Ulitka na sklone: opyt akademicheskogo izdaniia, ed. Arkadii Strugatskii and Boris Strugatskii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 529. 12 Yvonne Howell, Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 122.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Fedorov, N. F. Sobraniie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moscow: Progress, 19952000. –––. Sochineniia. Moscow: Mysl’, 1982. Geller, Leonid. Vselennaia za predelom dogmy. London: Overseas Publications, 1985. Howell, Yvonne. Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Nekrasov, S. ‘Kosmism N. F. Fedorova i tvorchestvo Strugatskikh.’ In Filosofiia bessmertiia i voskreshenia, edited by A. G. Gacheva, S. G. Semenova, and M. V. Skorokhodov, 2: 162-67. Moscow: Nasledie, 1996. Strugatskii, A. and B. Strugatskii. Obitaemyi ostrov. Malysh. Moscow: Tekst, 1993. –––. Ulitka na sklone: opyt akademicheskogo izdaniia. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. –––. Zhuk v muraveinike. Volny gasiat veter. Otiagoshchennye zlom. Moscow: Tekst, 1994. Julia Vaingurt is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her book Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s was published by Northwestern University Press in 2013.

Part IV Codifying Body and Mind

Bodily Imagination from Suprematism to Cyberpunk Colleen McQuillen Abstract Changing the shape of the human body helps us to imagine new possibilities for existence. By altering our physical form we open our imaginations to new possibilities: our physical and mental capabilities, social organizations, and our relationship to material objects and the natural environment may be radically transformed. In reimagining the corpus, philosophers and artists reimagine the society it inhabits: new physical forms permit new functions and interactions, and foreclose others. Postmodern philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari elaborated the concept of a Body without Organs (BwO) in A Thousand Plateaus as a metaphor for liberating social structures, thought processes, beliefs, and habits from regimented and ossified ways of life. While their intent was not to articulate a theory for creating new visions of humanity, the BwO is a conceptual model for thinking about the relationship between our bodies and our societies. In this chapter, I use the conceptual model of the BwO to illuminate the enduring relationship between the human body and human imagination, and specifically, how fantasies of disembodiment are situated in imagined societies. Examining Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings and Andrei Tiurin’s cyberpunk fiction through the lens of the BwO, I show how altering representations of the body is an integral step in reimagining reality. Key Words: Abstraction, cyberpunk, avant-garde, body without organs, dematerialization, disembodiment, Suprematism, Futurism, Malevich, Khlebnikov, Tiurin, Deleuze, Guattari. ***** 1. The Metaphor of a Body without Organs Changing the shape of the human body helps us to imagine new possibilities for existence. By altering our physical form we open our imaginations to new possibilities: our physical and mental capabilities, social organizations, and our relationship to material objects and the natural environment may be radically transformed. In reimagining the corpus, philosophers and artists reimagine the society it inhabits: new physical forms permit new functions and interactions, and foreclose others. Postmodern philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari elaborated the concept of a Body without Organs (BwO) in A Thousand Plateaus as a metaphor for liberating social structures, thought processes, beliefs, and habits from regimented and ossified ways of life. While their intent was not to articulate a theory for creating new visions of humanity, the BwO is a conceptual model for thinking about the relationship between our bodies and our societies. In this

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__________________________________________________________________ chapter, I use the conceptual model of the BwO to illuminate the enduring relationship between the human body and human imagination, and specifically, how fantasies of disembodiment are situated in imagined societies. Examining Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings and Andrei Tiurin’s cyberpunk fiction through the lens of the BwO, I show how altering representations of the body is an integral step in reimagining the space in which it operates. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s chapter on the Body without Organs in A Thousand Plateaus reads as a manifesto of liberation, in which the form of the human body as we know it symbolizes the restrictive beliefs and social structures that limit humanity. Organs, they maintain, determine the shape and function of the body; without the predetermined and unchanging structure provided by the organs, the body is open to all potentialities. Organs are the building blocks of organisms and organizations, complex and highly regimented systems. By removing the building blocks, de-organ-izing the body, the body is transformed from being a defined and therefore limited entity to one that is open to novel possibilities. The BwO is (to the extent to which it can be defined, since it is always a state of becoming) full of creative potential and it liberates consciousness from the world of illusory constructs. It is a pregnant zero, encompassing everything yet to be born. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, the BwO is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity=0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. […] That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs […].1 The multiplicities inherent in the BwO mean that there is no singular version of the BwO; rather, it is manifested variously, depending on the ‘organs’ removed. 2. BwO and Russian Modernism As science fiction gained popularity in early twentieth-century Russia, it proved itself a critical laboratory for experiments in imagining alternative bodies and the societies in which they operate.2 Such openness to exploration was not, however, limited to this genre: alternate visions of humanity and its environment emanated from artistic movements unconnected to literary treatments of real and hypothetical scientific and technological innovation. Certain Russian Futurists, for example, explored possibilities of visiting other spatio-temporal dimensions, unencumbered by the weight of chronological time and cultural patrimony. True to their name, the Futurists strove to create through their art an avant-garde reality divorced from history, tradition, and language. Among the Futurists, Velimir Khlebnikov distinguished himself with his radical theorizations and artistic experiments. Most famous for developing a trans-rational language called ‘zaum’ (literally, ‘beyond-

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__________________________________________________________________ reason’) divested of responsibility for signification, Khlebnikov also imagined new dimensions of time and space. His fantasies of humans overcoming the physically determined mechanism of time (i.e., rotations of the earth around the sun) and the three-dimensional understanding of space undergird the trans-rational opera Victory over the Sun (1913), on which he collaborated with artist Kazimir Malevich and music composer Mikhail Matiushin. In the opera the sun represents the traditional measurement of time; vanquishing it will result in an escape from the diurnal cycle, allowing a new concept of time to emerge. The opera’s futuredwellers live in the Land of the Tenth Dimension, far removed in time and space from contemporary humans. As the costume and set designer for Victory over the Sun, Malevich sought a visual idiom to treat the theme of humanity overcoming its traditional measures and environment. To convey this reconceptualised realm of existence, he deformed his representations of the human body. Malevich sketched his costume designs using mostly straight lines and geometric shapes, such as triangles, squares, and rectangles. The relative scarcity of curvilinear shapes betokens the victory of the square over the circle (the opera’s titular victory over the sun), which symbolizes conventions of chronology, such as orbital mechanics, the sundial, and the clock face. Malevich sketched these costumes on heavily stylized human figures. The simplified two-dimensional figures bear recognizable outlines, but he altered the physiognomy of each actor in costume to reflect the alien nature of their existence: Malevich used a trapezoid for a head (the Coward),3 inverted triangles comprising legs (the Enemy),4 and a diagonal semicircle for a torso (Nero),5 for example. Malevich adorned the costumes of the Pallbearers in Victory over the Sun with a black square, a shape the artist invested with philosophical meaning. In a letter to his musical collaborator, the composer Matiushin, Malevich wrote that the black square ‘is the embryo of all possibilities.’6 The full creative potential he assigned to the black square in the opera also inspired his painting of 1915, Black Square.7 While his critics perceived Black Square to be a blasphemous anti-icon or a nihilistic black abyss, Malevich viewed it as a primordial depth out of which everything could emerge. Like a Body without Organs, the Black Square is a plane of immanence: it represents openness to all possibilities, and liberation from material and socially constructed constraints. Malevich considered his Black Square to be a ‘zero of form,’ the essence of creativity from which all else could emerge. Along with the Futurist Khlebnikov, Malevich used zero to signify the limit of the object world. Their goal was to get to the other side of zero, an imagined dimension of pure thought. In 1915 Malevich announced, ‘Through zero I have reached creativity.’8 Malevich abandoned figurative art, its false appearances, and its banal, mimetic representation in his Suprematist paintings such as Black Square.9 He considered his style to be a ‘new painterly realism,’ a depiction of reality liberated from the dullness of the object world. Malevich attested that, ‘The keys of Suprematism lead

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__________________________________________________________________ me to discover that which is still unperceived.’10 His non-objective realism, a visual regime of geometric shapes into which he invested the potency of imagination unbound, is in its essence an artistic program akin to the BwO. Deleuze and Guattari shared with the modernist painter Malevich the impulse to reconfigure the body in order to imagine a new reality. The process of attaining a BwO involves the de-organ-izing of complex social structures and collective constructs. The Body without Organs, a metaphor for the liberated social corpus, is no longer recognisable as a human body: without its organs, the social corpus can adopt new shapes. Malevich likewise removed the organs, as it were, from the corpus of the material world, which resulted in abstract paintings. He simplified the object world, including the body, into geometric forms. The shapes used to express his artistic program, such as the Black Square, were pregnant with possibility; like the BwO, the Black Square was a full zero. Malevich’s vision of an eviscerated object world also found expression in the staging of the opera Victory over the Sun, which involved light projectors casting shadows against the stage set.11 As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the shadows stand for the illusion of reality that the spectators have been watching. In 1926, Malevich took this idea about the illusory nature of reality even further, writing that, ‘form is a condition. In reality form does not exist.’12 His negation of the material world’s reality symbolized his desire to overcome the limited nature of human experience. Rebelling against the four-dimensional world we occupy, Malevich envisioned the kind of liberation that Deleuze and Guattari promise in the BwO. Simplifying the body and the object world it inhabits was his way of removing the vital organs, which allowed him to conceive of a realm of pure thought. Black Square was first exhibited at a show called 0,10 (also known as The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting), which was carefully laid out according to calculated angles and ratios.13 The name of the exhibit may stem from the fact that there were 10 artists participating in the show, or it might allude to the Land of the Tenth Dimension where the future-dwellers live in Victory over the Sun. Examined in the context of quests to overcome the illusory nature of the object world and to discover a new reality, the numeric palindrome 0,10 evokes the computer programming language comprising strings of zeros and ones, called ‘binary code’, and the generative act of computing. In the early days of computing, binary code was also represented as the presence or absence of holes in thick paper cards. Such punch cards were the primary mechanism for encoding computer programs. The patterns that emerged from the rectangular holes punched in the cards delivered the computer program’s instructions; they comprised a rectilinear language that, when decoded, triggered computations and produced digital images. Inhering in such punch cards was creative potential, a key to unlocking an as-yet-unrealized action or image.

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__________________________________________________________________ Malevich’s words about Suprematism being for him the keys to open an as-yetunperceived dimension of reality resonate with the aesthetics and mechanism of the computer program encoded in rectangular holes. Malevich’s non-objective canvases register his fantasies of going beyond zero and leaving the object world for a new dimension of creative potential, and of entering a zone of dematerialised experience. His search for creative liberation from the material world parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s call for liberation from social constructions and institutions. Malevich’s Suprematist costume designs were his modernist equivalent to striving for a postmodern Body without Organs. In the early twenty-first century, computation has advanced to where coded programs create a realm of virtual experiences. Although cyberspace comprises visual replications of the material world, physical constraints have disappeared: the acting human body is no longer necessary for subjective experience. Dematerialised virtual reality, a ‘consensual hallucination’14 as William Gibson termed it in Neuromancer (1984), allows us endless opportunities to transcend our bodily limits and those of the material world, to dismantle social constructions, and to enable new interactions. Virtual reality facilitates liberation and creativity because it is divested of the organisms and organizations that constrain the physical world. Cyberspace, a zone of dynamic flow and potential, is the BwO that Deleuze and Guattari imagined. As I discuss below, their utopian vision of virtual reality has a dark flip side, which I illustrate with the cyberpunk novella of Andrei Tiurin, Patriotic War of 2012.15 3. BwO and Russian Cyberpunk The genre of cyberpunk science fiction, which reached peak popularity in the west in the 1980s and in Russia in the first decade of the twenty-first century, thematises the fantasies of technologically enhanced bodies and dematerialised human existence in cyberspace. Characters in Patriotic War of 2012, for example, seek to transcend the limitations of their carnal bodies, derisively known as ‘meat’ or ‘wetware.’ The main character, Grammatikov, is a computer programmer and painter who authors a computer code for ‘technolife,’ or what might also be called virtual reality, and is terrorized by sinister group of hackers who want to steal his code. The plot is set in a dystopian future, in an era after the so-called Cyberian War, a moniker that puns on the sonic similarity between the prefix cyber- and the eastern Russian territory of Siberia. Tiurin simultaneously evokes virtual space and geographic space, coyly alluding to an essential battle of posthumanism: the struggle between disembodied (virtual, cybernetic) and embodied (geographic, Siberian) realities. The novella’s titular war is waged between the technologically reformatted body and the organic, natural body; between corporations and individuals; and between blind sensual gratification and ethical behaviour. After the Cyberian War in post-Russia Petersburg, the biological corpus is subservient to incorporated

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__________________________________________________________________ commercial interests: parasitic capitalist conglomerates feed on the flesh of the human body, plying technological enhancements that transform humans into cyborgs. The residents are perpetually haunted by advertisements for technological means to enhance their bodies, the primary aim of which is to amplify sexual gratification. Tiurin’s novella indicts capitalist consumer culture as the engine of sensual overindulgence. The crassness of omnipresent advertisements hawking bodily transformation is outdone only by the lewd hologram ads that promise ‘long-lasting orgiastic madness,’ which are broadcast onto sidewalks covered in photonic plastic and onto hovering, temporary displays formed of aerosol spray. No longer in the business of protecting its citizens, the corporatized government has joined the ranks of those profiteering from fleshy bodies by licensing carnal freedoms such as rape. In the language of Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘organs’ of this dystopia are a corporatized government, technological prostheses, and commodified sexual gratification. The abusive capitalist structures and the beliefs they instil have brainwashed people and ensnared them in a state of perpetuate enslavement. Such a dystopia is a social body with organs. Tiurin registers the grimness of the dystopia by focusing on the technologically enhanced (or, rather, deformed) bodies, illustrating once again how altering the body correlates to a new reality. In Patriotic War, the technolife created by Grammatikov at first promises to be an antidote to corporate enslavement. Emerging from computations, the dynamic realm of cyberspace heralds a reality free from the ossified organs of corporate governance and its manufactured carnal desires. Virtual reality is supposed to be a Body without Organs: a dimension where disembodiment and dematerialisation of the object world free the post-Russian Petersburgers from enslaving capitalist organs. However, as the novella shows, technolife is also a lawless dystopia in which Grammatikov finds himself in mortal danger. Computer-generated reality may be a BwO, but it is one that illustrates the dark side of Deleuze and Guattari’s manifesto of liberation. Their call to dismantle vertical power structures and foster in their place dynamic flows and temporary formations is romantic and utopian, and ignores the dangers of destabilisation. The absence of organs that order and structure a space of interaction may produce a dystopia where creative potential breeds new and unfathomed perils. Like Malevich’s Black Square, idealised virtual reality may be a utopian BwO; however, virtual reality generates high-fidelity replicas of the material world, including the human body, which stand in the way of eradicating cancerous social organs. 4. Conclusion In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari sound a decidedly postmodern note, criticising fixity, structure, and limit, in what amounts to a utopian fantasy of life without restrictions. Their model of a Body without Organs illuminates the creative potential inhering in liberation from complex institutions, but fails to

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__________________________________________________________________ address the flip side – the dangers of lawlessness and ungovernability. Nonetheless, the BwO model profitably illuminates the correlation between bodily modification and social change. Artists and writers, such as Malevich and Tiurin, have reimagined the corpus in order to reimagine the reality that it inhabits. The human form gains new abilities as it is altered, and this enables new possibilities and exclude others, thereby altering lived experience. Fantasies of bodily liberation have evolved in lockstep with the technologies available for conceiving and representing them. In the early twentieth century, Russian avant-garde painter Malevich abstracted bodies and material objects into geometric shapes. One hundred years later, science fiction writer Tiurin described a virtual reality in which people and objects are generated digitally by computer code. For both, mathematical abstraction served as a starting point for reimagining the body and its environment: the images are made from geometric shapes on the painter’s canvas and from binary code in cyberspace. Uniting abstract art and computing is the main character of Tiurin’s novella: Grammatikov, whose name derives from the Russian word for grammar, grammatika, and betokens his fluency in the language of computer programming. He is a coder and painter, but one ‘not like Van Gogh, rather Malevich.’ An artist and coder, Grammatikov seeks the idealised Body without Organs but learns that it is not always a utopia.

Notes 1

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 153. 2 See Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012). 3 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Coward,’ costume sketch for Victory over the Sun, Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://www.20art.ru/gallery/p17_sectionid/7/p17_imageid/364. 4 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Enemy,’ costume sketch for Victory over the Sun, Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://www.20art.ru/gallery/p17_sectionid/7/p17_imageid/365 5 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Nero,’ costume sketch for Victory over the Sun, Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://www.20art.ru/gallery/p17_sectionid/7/p17_imageid/369. 6 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Kazimir Malevich, ‘Pis’mo M.V. Matiushinu (1916),’ Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://kazimirmalevich.ru/bsp41/#s1. 7 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://www.20art.ru/gallery/p17_sectionid/7/p17_imageid/408, 8 Quoted in John Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 99.

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Thomas Aiello, ‘Head-First through the Hole in the Zero: Malevich’s Suprematism, Khlebnikov’s Futurism, and the Development of a Deconstructive Aesthetic, 1908-1919,’ Melbourne Art Journal 1 (July/Dec 2005): 7. 10 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Pis’mo M.V. Matiushinu (1916),’ Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://kazimirmalevich.ru/bsp41/#s1. 11 V.S. Turchin, ‘Metamorfozy form u Malevicha,’ Accessed on 22 August 2014, http://www.k-malevich.ru/library/metamorfozy-form-u-malevicha.html. 12 Aiello, ‘Head-First through the Hole in the Zero: Malevich’s Suprematism, Khlebnikov’s Futurism, and the Development of a Deconstructive Aesthetic, 19081919,’ 5. 13 Milner, Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry, 126. 14 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 69. 15 Andrei Tiurin, Otechestvennaia voina 2012-go goda, Accessed on 22 August 2014. http://fan.lib.ru/t/tjurin_a_w/patriotic-war2012.shtml.

Bibliography Aiello, Thomas. ‘Head-First through the Hole in the Zero: Malevich’s Suprematism, Khlebnikov’s Futurism, and the Development of a Deconstructive Aesthetic, 1908-1919.’ Melbourne Art Journal 1 (July/Dec 2005): 3.1-3.16. Banerjee, Anindita. We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity. CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Featherstone, Mike and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Hollinger, Veronica. ‘Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 23:2 (1990): 29-44. Malevich, Kazimir. ‘Pis’mo M.V. Matiushinu (1916).’ Accessed on 22 August 2014. http://kazimirmalevich.ru/bsp41/#s1.

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__________________________________________________________________ Milner, John. Kazimir Malevich and the Art of Geometry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Tiurin, Andrei. Otechestvennaia voina 2012-go goda. Accessed on 22 August 2014. http://fan.lib.ru/t/tjurin_a_w/patriotic-war2012.shtml. Turchin, V.S. ‘Metamorfozy form u Malevicha.’ Accessed on 22 August 2014. http://www.k-malevich.ru/library/metamorfozy-form-u-malevicha.html. Vint, Sherryl, ed. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Colleen McQuillen is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research examines the bodily imagination across art and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book The Modernist Masquerade looks at strategies of self-stylising and bodily representation in the context of Russian modernism.

The Colonized Pastoral: Africa, Myth, Alienation and Blackness in Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels Selena Middleton Abstract This chapter explores the ways in which Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels presents a traumatised pastoral – a landscape that is compromised by colonialism. The key to understanding the nightmarish internal world of the book’s main character, Emmanuel Goldsmith, is through an exploration of the variations in the pastoral genre. Firstly, Goldsmith’s psychological landscape, or his ‘Country of the Mind,’ is built upon a simultaneously physical and idealised African landscape. This idealised landscape, which never existed and can never exist in the ecologically devastated ruin of Bear’s future-Africa, is internalised as the mythological Guinée, a landscape that even Goldsmith acknowledges does not exist despite the fact that his identity relies on the intact state of the myth. Lastly, the corrupt nature of Goldsmith’s mythology, despite the tenacity with which he holds to the idea of Guinée, is revealed when two psychiatrists perform a nano-link with Goldsmith’s mind. Through the works of Pratt, Mudimbe, Thiong’o, Butler, and others, this essay explores the ways in which Goldsmith’s colonized pastoral – and the extent to which Goldsmith’s internal mythology has been breached by the weapons of colonialism – points to fundamental ideas of what it means to be dispossessed of one’s own mythology and thus deposited into the dystopia of fragmentation and how potently the violences of the past can infect the peace of the future. Key Words: Utopia, dystopia, pastoral, nanotechnology, mental health, colonialism, race, environment. ***** In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels, it is the year 2048 in a futuristic Los Angeles which M.F. Blatchford calls ‘utopian’.1 Nanotechnology allows people to arbitrarily change their appearance and vast swathes of the population are rendered psychologically safe and sterile through a techno-psychiatric process through which people are ‘therapied’. Bear’s utopian Los Angeles is a technological marvel, a place where advancements in science and technology offers solutions for complex social and economic problems; Bear, however, also presents a crack in the façade. Emmanuel Goldsmith, a poet and a man of mixed race in a world where people (of a certain wealth and status) can choose their skin colour, has murdered eight of his young acolytes, cutting their throats and dismembering the bodies with his father’s bowie knife. Goldsmith is a part of a seemingly small segment of the population who are ‘untherapied’ – a chosen status either as a sacrifice for art or a protest against governmental intrusion into personal matters. Through investigation

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__________________________________________________________________ of Goldsmith’s crime, however, it soon becomes clear that government mandated therapy, while offering a present utopia, not only does not begin to heal the brutal histories of the economic and social formation of the West, but creates a stark contrast between the present 2048 and Goldsmith’s psychological dystopia, sprung directly from a complex creation mythology attached to Goldsmith’s concept of home. Therapy, then, has not healed but buried the prevailing problem of slavery and colonialism – a problem that has persisted, manifesting in the African continent transformed ‘into a charnel house [of] [p]lague and war and famine’.2 In Goldsmith, this history coincides with the death of his personal creation mythology; Goldsmith’s idea of origin and the origin of his ancestors was destroyed along with the African continent. The death of this mythology and the pastoral ideal through Goldsmith’s internalisation of colonial history culminates in a loss of identity that stimulates a drive toward death. Goldsmith’s murders, then, are the physical manifestation of the psychological impact of a long and unresolved history of genocide, slavery and dehumanization that persists both in Bear’s socalled utopia and our own modern world. As a writer, Emanuel Goldsmith relies on the established set of images and narratives – mythologies – that express truths about human history and our present and persisting human condition. One such mythology is the creation myth, a story in the pastoral mode that suggests a divine human origin, or a perfect state from which humanity came and to which it will someday return. Inside and outside the realm of creation myth, the pastoral mode has been used to draw attention to imperfections in society by removing the reader from that society. Terry Gifford writes about the three kinds of pastoral, the first being what we might consider the more traditional variety that sprung from the poetry of Theocritus and Virgil and continued with poets and playwrights throughout the Renaissance. Gifford emphasises that retreat or return is the ‘fundamental pastoral movement, either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral retreat “returned” some insights relevant to the urban audience.’ The third form of pastoral, however, is a sceptical use of the term – ‘pastoral’ as pejorative, implying that the pastoral vision is too simplified and thus an idealisation of the reality of life in the country. Here, what is ‘returned’ by retreat is judged to be too comfortably complacent to qualify as ‘insight’ in the view of the user of the term ‘pastoral’ as a pejorative’.3 Queen of Angels functions within both the second general but idealistic form of pastoral and the third more cynical use of the genre in the suggestion that the natural elements of pastoral speak to us on a fundamental level. In this way, the pastoral can appear not only in literature concerned with simple rural life, but also in highly speculative technological narratives. Additionally, the impetus for the

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__________________________________________________________________ movement of the ‘pastoral return’ invariably involves a traumatic act. Such trauma – or the suggestion of trauma – is not unknown in pastoral literature. Indeed, after the widespread trauma of World War I, the pastoral mode became a way for Georgian poets to resist return, to stay out there in the safely comforting location of retreat, in their case in the countryside of a mythic Old England where stability and traditional values were located.4 While the trauma of war forced poets into Arcadia, the grim reality – and the inevitable movement in the pastoral mode – is to return to urban life where one is forced to confront demolished cities, death and a fundamentally changed humanity. It is this ‘traumatized pastoral’ that is at work in Queen of Angels. Greg Bear invokes a ravaged pastoral through a mixture of Vodoun religious iconography and colonial history in order to hint at the injury done to an entire people through the loss of Africa both as an actual landscape and as a symbol. For Emanuel Goldsmith, Africa stands in the place of the pastoral Arcadia. The landscape that Goldsmith calls Guinée stands in for the real continent that has been lost. Africa has been plundered and destroyed. The continent no longer exists as a homeland, a fecund place of creation. In order to maintain a sense of identity through place, Goldsmith idealises Africa through Guinée, an imaginary place that he and other blacks claim as a mythological homeland in place of a real ancestral landscape. In the tradition of travel writing literature, mythologising Africa creates an Arcadia of an entire continent and displaces the people who actually live there.5 This is one of many colonial strategies, to usurp not just a land or a people but also the creation stories the colonized people once held as their own. In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o quotes from Cheikh Hamidou on the chief means of colonial education: the school that, after the initial violence, ‘fascinates the soul[s]’6 of the colonized. It is through the colonial school that the language and internal cultural narratives are usurped. Through the colonial school, a new language and culture is assigned. In his book The Idea of Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe describes the way in which the colonial power consumes the individual narratives of various regions throughout the continent and erects a monolith in its own honour. Mudimbe states that colonization cohesively binds the diverse, often antagonistic, collective memories of many African cultures. [...] This newly circumscribed social “body” was composed of Africans who were supposed to incarnate an absolute beginning of history.7

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__________________________________________________________________ Returning to Queen of Angels, Goldsmith, being a descendent of both the colonized and the colonizer, experiences his own history within this colonized context: as something alien. His constructed African Arcadia – Guinée – is a place that ‘looked something like [...] Africa, where no white man has ever set foot and blacks live free and innocent’.8 His identity is rooted in this non-existent place, a place he considers home, but to which he can never retreat or return because of the traumatic histories not only of his ancestors but also of the land. In Queen of Angels, Africa is alternately depicted as a dead continent – emptied through plague, famine and slavery – and as a kind of terra nullius which colonist Sir John Yardley has set in the cross-hairs of his colonial-era elephant gun. Even in the far-future of Queen of Angels, this idea of Africa persists. This shifting, unstable Africa remains a home to no one (but ‘savages’) and a land rich with resources for Europeans to plunder. Goldsmith’s mind fractures on the point of intersecting incompatible identities made ‘real’ by the acceptance of myth; through interviews and poetry readings it becomes apparent that for Goldsmith, Guinée has become a mythological home. He simultaneously acknowledges, however, that Guinée does not exist and yet it figures largely into his personal origin and return mythology. He acknowledges that Africa is dead, but ultimately a part of him still lives there. In his interview with a team of psychologists in preparation for the more invasive psychiatric nanotherapy he undergoes later, the following exchange reveals Goldsmith’s struggle with myth, reality and identity: ‘Where is Guinée, Emanuel?’ [The psychologist asks.] ‘Lost. We lost it centuries ago.’ ‘I mean where is your Guinée?’ ‘That’s a name the Haitians, the Africans on Hispaniola use for their homeland. They’ve never been there. It isn’t real. They think some people go there when they die.’ ‘You don’t believe in a homeland?’ […] ‘Home is when you die. There are no homes. Everybody steals our homes. Nobody can steal what’s left to you when you die.’ ‘You don’t believe in Guinée?’ ‘It’s a myth.’ 9 This exchange between Goldsmith and the psychologist illustrates Goldsmith’s poignant struggle with an identity fractured by Goldsmith’s lack of an identifiable homeland. For Goldsmith, home is not real, but mythological. Queen of Angels as a social critique of colonialism and its persistent and echoing effects throughout even a near-utopian future society would not function quite as well without the potent horror that is Goldsmith’s ‘Country of the Mind’. Through a nanotechnology link between Goldsmith and two psychiatrists, Martin

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__________________________________________________________________ and Carol, the reader is exposed to the images and symbols that populate Goldsmith’s personal mythology. Entering into Goldsmith’s ‘Country’, Martin and Carol initially find nothing but desolation and destruction. Eventually, however, they discover a collection of rich and highly disturbing symbols – a troubling conglomeration of Vodoun religion, slave trade history and Goldsmith’s personal traumas. Quickly discovering that Goldsmith’s latent personality has been completely overrun by a dominating figure called ‘Sir’ – who alternately stands in for a mythological ‘King of Africa,’ the colonizer Sir John Yardley, and Goldsmith’s own abusive father – Martin and Carol experience a myth sequence in first person as they are placed into the story of the twin sons of Sir and the Vodoun Goddess Erzulie. It is during this sequence that one of the most insidious weapons of colonization is used against the team. In an expression of the state of Africa in 2048, the history of a people and Goldsmith’s own personal childhood trauma, Carol – standing in for the ‘pale’ and ‘feminine’ son of Sir – is raped. The rape effectively consumes her, erases her body though her mind remains in Country. When she appears again, she is a naked ‘pale pink fog’10 who has lost the ability to control the environment. She begs Martin to get them out of the Country, claiming that Sir will kill and eat them.11 The multiple images used in the expression of this nightmarish sequence all point to a distinct and poignant loss of power. Carol, whose body has been used and then consumed, reappears only tentatively. Not only does she not have a concrete and definable form, but she is denied the dignity of clothing, reappearing in a vulnerable state of nakedness. Carol’s lack of control is made even more tangible by the fact that her control cube that enables her to navigate the space inside the Country is blank, the emergency ripcord useless. Furthermore, Bear makes a point of noting the fluctuating skin colour of the characters in Goldsmith’s country. While the child’s bodies that Martin and Carol inhabit begin with dark skin (and red fur), at the time of the rape Carol’s twin is white. For Goldsmith, a white identity is associated with weakness as he sees his own whiteness as an undesirable acquiescence to dominant American culture. The white twin, therefore, is Goldsmith’s ‘weak’ and ‘feminine’ identity that allows not only an insipid existence among a population of oblivious colonizers, but also – on a more personal level – the childhood abuse that drove him to patricide and the severing of the link between himself and his ancestral land. The link between colonial violence and domestic violence is complex but explicit in Queen of Angels. The violent figure of destruction and death in Goldsmith’s Country is named ‘Sir’, a figure that is obviously analogous to the father who demanded his children address him by that name, but also to the other ‘Sir’ in the novel, Sir John Yardley, the colonizing tyrant of Hispaniola. The sexualisation of the relationship between Goldsmith and his father links Goldsmith’s dysfunction to the idea of the ‘abject’ and ‘docile bodies’12 of the oppressed and further complicates Goldsmith as simultaneously a victim and perpetrator of violence. Even the figure of Sir both commits and is subject to

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__________________________________________________________________ violence through the myth sequence that stands in for colonial history. The seemingly endless cycles of violence present in Goldsmith’s psychology hints at yet another effect of colonialism on the colonized – the desperate scrabbling for power that the oppressed perform, often against themselves rather than those that truly hold power. According to Jane Freedman, the disruption of precolonial societies and the resulting struggle for power has been especially difficult for women and children as they find that not only are their traditional roles largely without worth, but that men who feel disenfranchised find it easier to take what little power has been left to women than fight a monolithic and impenetrable system – and even easier still to award themselves the privileges of the new masculinity of a misrepresented African culture.13 The violence Goldsmith experiences himself and perpetrates on others, represented by both the rape Carol experiences in the Country and the potent death imagery that pervades Goldsmith’s mental landscape is destabilising violence. The violence of colonialism upsets the structures it encounters in an effort to seize power. Confronted with a powerful system, further acts of violence become the means through which the oppressed believe – as they have observed – that they may destabilise the stratifications of society and reclaim some of their lost power. The imagery of struggle in Goldsmith’s Country of the Mind – an endless cycle of violence against violence – reveals the utter corruption of his Arcadia. Instead of a place of creation, Goldsmith’s mythology is a narrative of destruction, absence and death. Goldsmith is unable to retreat from what he considers his inauthentic life because the pastoral microcosm offered by Guinée has been breached by a reality tainted by colonialism. Goldsmith’s struggle to reconcile a life in which the pastoral ideal of ‘home’ has been extinguished, in which the land of his creation has been exploited and destroyed, with his identity as a black man is sharply contrasted in the character of Mary Choy. Mary is a police detective and so-called ‘transform’ – a person who has undergone voluntary nanotherapy to change her appearance. Mary has chosen to change her skin colour to a deep, uniform black. Mary’s voluntary ‘blackness’ is contrasted with Goldsmith’s diluted coffee-coloured blackness. While Goldsmith’s colour – which he perceives as impure – comes with a history that, for Goldsmith, gives his identity meaning, Mary’s uniform blackness comes without conditions or responsibilities. Mary is very open about the lack of meaning behind her choice of blackness. Mary is asked about her colour three times; the first time that Mary’s colour is questioned is by a fat black man connected to the Goldsmith murders. This first interview at once connects Mary to Goldsmith’s struggle with race and pointedly places her very much outside of it. Bear writes, The fat man again made his lip curl appraisal. ‘This woman is not black,’ he said matter of factly to Ernest and the large woman. ‘Why does she want to look black? She fools nobody.’

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__________________________________________________________________ Ernest grinned at Mary. He was enjoying this. ‘She likes the color.’14 The connection between Mary’s chosen blackness, the destruction of the African ‘homeland’, and the legitimacy of Yardley’s colonial rule over Hispaniola all work to underscore both the semantic emptiness of Mary’s colour and the intricacies of race politics that persist in Bear’s future world. M.F. Blatchford writes that in Queen of Angels ‘[w]e see nothing of black American society in 2048, but Mary Choy has had her skin turned black, which seems to hint that in 2048 black is at least cosmetically beautiful’.15 The suggestion that Blatchford seems to be making is that the complex socio-political dynamics resultant of colonization can be reduced to a question of aesthetics. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, on the other hand, writes that Imperialism is the rule of consolidated finance capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has affected and continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the remotest corners of our [African] countries.16 It seems unlikely, then, that even in Bear’s utopian 2048 that a system which had, for the benefit of an elite few, mortgaged an entire continent would have been overturned in such a way as to allow a dominant social group to permit a freedom that results in the reduced privilege of that group. Mary’s experience of race is completely devoid of this history – a fact which is recognized by both the fat man in her first interview and Yardley’s wife later in the novel – and thus her experience of blackness is not equivalent to Goldsmith’s, but instead contrasts the disturbing potency of Goldsmith’s internal world. In Queen of Angels, the boundaries between history, mythology and psychology become blurred into an encompassing, but corrupt, pastoral myth that is meant to sustain exiled identities. The ways in which this mythology fails those it should uphold are explored in Goldsmith’s story, his struggles with an absent idea of home and his increasing alienation in a society that is experienced as utopia by some and not by others. In this way, Queen of Angels is a critique of both the damaging idealisation of Africa by the Western power that colonized it and also the appropriation of myth through the colonial infiltration of language and story. Thiong’o uses an image of dismemberment to express the effects of alienation through the imposition of a foreign language and culture. It is no coincidence, then, that these images of formlessness appear when one’s concept of origin or home is rife with violence. The imagery that populates Goldsmith’s Country of the Mind confirms colonization as a dismemberment of body, mind and soul through the appropriation of not only wealth and resources, but language and myth, and potently illustrates how violences of the past can infect the peace of the future.

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Notes 1

M. F. Blatchford, ‘Cyber against Punk: Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels as Metamorphosed Cyberpunk,’ Literator 15.3 (1994): 61. 2 Greg Bear, Queen of Angels (New York: E-Reads, 1990), ch. 43. 3 Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2. 4 Ibid., 81. 5 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,’ Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 126-7. 6 Ngũgĩ Wa Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: J. Currey, 1986), 9. 7 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 129-130 8 Bear, Queen of Angels, ch. 39. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., ch. 56 11 Ibid. 12 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 111. 13 Jane Freedman, Engaging Men in the Fight against Gender Violence: Case Studies from Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 28. 14 Bear, Queen of Angels, ch. 22. 15 Blatchford, ‘Cyber against Punk’, 61. 16 Wa Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind, 2.

Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970. Bear, Greg. Queen of Angels. New York: E-Reads, 1990. Epub. Blatchford, M. F. ‘Cyber against Punk: Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels as Metamorphosed Cyberpunk.’ Literator 15.3 (1994): 55–70 doi:10.4102/lit.v15i3.677. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ Freedman, Jane. Engaging Men in the Fight against Gender Violence: Case Studies from Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999. Langer, Jessica. Postcolonialism and Science Fiction. Houndmills, Basingstoke Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Meger, Sara. ‘Rape in Contemporary Warfare: The Role of Globalization in Wartime Sexual Violence.’ African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review 1.1 (April 2011): 100–132. doi:10.2979/africonfpeacrevi.1.1.100. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: University Press, 1994. Pratt, Mary Louise. ‘Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.’ Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 119–43. Accessed 30 September 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343465. Wa Thiongʼo, Ngũgĩ. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey, 1986. Selena Middleton is a doctoral student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Her dissertation explores the interrelation between pastoral, wilderness and apocalyptic modes in environmental science fiction.

Imprisonment in the Fiction of Christopher Priest Elsa Bouet Abstract Paul Kinkaid, in What is It We Do When We Read Science Fiction, argues that the fiction of Christopher Priest presents detached islands, tearing the characters ‘away from the world, into islands of invisibility or virtual reality or alternate worlds’.1 These alternate worlds are also places of alienation and madness where the characters are oppressed and tortured. In Indoctrinaire and Inverted World, this sense of isolation is heightened by the fact that characters are unable to leave these insular, virtual environments, turning them into prisons. In Inverted World, the inhabitants of the closed city of Earth are forbidden to leave the city and visit the planet – Earth – across which the city travels. In Indoctrinaire, Elias Wentik is held captive in the mysterious Planalto District, a deforested circle in the Brazilian forest set in a future time. This chapter will investigate how, in these two novels, the theme of alternate insularity is used to create carceral conditions. Unable to rationalise their being tortured within the islands, the characters attempt to find some answers to the reasons behind their detention by looking at the real world from which they have been detached. By looking at Foucault’s concept of punishment in Discipline and Punish, the chapter will demonstrate how this alternate insular reality only provides irrational answers: the tightly controlled space, the tortuous carceral conditions and the maddening isolation are all created by an authoritarian force whose only rational is power, subduing the characters into submission in barbarous settings. This chapter will therefore argue that, in these two novels, the abusive enforcement of power is an ideological dehumanising, normalising constructed force threatening the individual and the human potential for compassion and rationalisation. Key Words: Christopher Priest; Michel Foucault; Discipline; Punishment; Ideology; Alternate Reality; Insularity. ***** Paul Kincaid, in What is It We Do When We Read Science Fiction, argues that the fiction of Christopher Priest depicts worlds that tear the characters ‘away from the world, into islands of invisibility or virtual reality or alternate worlds’2 and face up to ‘isolation’.3 The islands have an ‘inward turning reality [which] is dislodged by an intrusion from a greater outside world, by the forced acceptance of a new consensus reality’.4 For Kincaid, these insular spaces, from the ever moving closed city in Inverted World (1974), an alternate plane and space in Indoctrinaire (1970), or the virtual jail of ‘Sentence in a Binary Code’ (1971), create crises of identity as the internal ideology finds itself threatened from the outside. However, these

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__________________________________________________________________ narratives provide such harsh, enclosed environments that they become akin to prisons, rejecting the consensus reality of the outside world. The characters are seen as disruptive outsiders and become prisoners to be reformed and made to adopt the oppressive, irrational internal reality. These ideas echo concepts of discipline and punishment later exposed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). 1. Foucault’s Binaries and Priest’s ‘Sentence in a Binary Code’ Foucault argues that the apparatus of discipline ‘compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes’, specifically, it ‘normalizes’ by ‘bringing into play the binary opposition of the permitted and the forbidden; not by homogenizing, but by operating the division, acquired once and for all, of condemnation’.5 Although disciplinary power homogenises, it does so by imparting its own sense of normality, morality and ideology, excluding those of the prisoner. It uses a binary mode of division and branding, creating a separation between the mad and the sane, the dangerous and the harmless, the normal and the abnormal.6 This division is further implemented by creating a spatial division by excluding, rejecting and isolating the abnormal individual, creating an alternate space to control the offender, viewed as an ‘anomaly’.7 Several dichotomies are created: that of the differentiation and segregation of individuals and that of their spatial distributions. Christopher Priest’s ‘Sentence in a Binary Code’ uses this binary nature of the disciplinary power in a literal way. The main protagonist, Joseph Turatsky, is sentenced to imprisonment in a virtual jail for being ‘politically undesirable’ and ‘seditious,’8 highlighting his anomalous nature and his non-compliance with the powers in charge. Turatsky is to be disembodied and his soul is to spend its jail term as part of a ferrite core inside a computer. Turasky has no ears and no organs; he symbolically has ‘no voice’.9 As part of his punishment, Turasky is forced to do ‘twelve hour’ shifts,10 tediously sorting out dull data for the Defence Computer. Patterns in the data Turasky filters for the Defence Computer emerge: they consist of the summaries of ‘human psychology under physical strain’, of ‘the justification of total defence preparedness as a basis for government’ and other forms of propaganda.11 Turasky decides to store these literal computing bits of propaganda and to reverse the flow of information, outputting the stream to display them to the invisible powers monitoring the prisoners. After doing so, Turasky awakes, reembodied, ready for rehabilitation within society. As he walks towards the rehabilitation centre, he ponders ‘how long he could successfully play his new role of patriot,’12 suggesting that the attempt to reform the dissident has failed and is only superficial. ‘Sentence in a Binary Code’ exploits the image of binary code of zeroes and ones marking the difference between off and on. This also serves to represent the opposition, as formulated by Foucault, between normal and abnormal, accepted

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__________________________________________________________________ and rejected, and most importantly between being and not being, since the prisoners are left disembodied within the virtual carceral world. It depicts what Foucault calls the normalising function of the disciplinary apparatus: the convict has to be silenced, reformed, retrained, re-coded so that he complies with the ruling ideology.13 Priest’s short story suggests that this reformation is superficial: Turasky performs the role of a rehabilitated, indoctrinated individual, displaying a spectacle to satisfy the invisible authorities that he has been transformed and complies with the rules of the power apparatus. His last thought suggests his future noncompliance: he will offend again, a return to his former self that he has only temporarily surrendered. Again, this recalls Foucault’s argument that ‘prison cannot fail to produce delinquents’14 because of the isolation inmates face, the useless work that they are given, the unnatural conditions that the prison creates and the imposition of violent constraints on them.15 These elements are part of Turasky’s imprisonment, creating a rebellious individual instead of a rehabilitated citizen. 2. Panopticism and Indoctrinaire Priest’s novel Indoctrinaire opens with the main character, Elias Wentik, working in a military facility called the ‘Advanced Technique Concentration,’16 reminiscent of concentration camps, where those deemed undesirable are persecuted, tortured or killed. There, Wentik conducts research on a mind altering and conditioning drug which causes hallucinations, insanity, violence and schizophrenia. Wentik is approached by an agent called Astourde and his assistant, Musgrove, who inexplicably need Wentik’s help to identify a UFO that was spotted in the Planalto District in Brazil. Wentik does not understand why the two men approached him or what links him to this investigation: he nonetheless travels to Brazil with them as instructed by Washington. When Wentik arrives in Brazil, he requests from Musgrove to be told the nature of the mysterious location he is taken to. Musgrove replies that it is a ‘part of the world where you can see in one direction but not in the other. A place you can walk into, but not out of,’17 inferring that the Planalto District is a prison even before having explored it. Wentik also learns that the Planalto District he is to enter is a dual space, existing at ‘two different times,’18 1979, the time of the start of the narrative, and 2189. It is surrounded by a distortion field which enables the different time zones to be crossed: this field is perfectly circular.19 Wentik and Musgrove enter the Planalto District, find themselves in 2189 and reach a deserted jail located at the centre of the circular field. The centrality of the jail within a circular field mirrors the layout of Bentham’s Panopticon: ‘at the periphery an annular building; at the centre, a tower.’20 The outer building is made up of cells, whilst the tower is the centre of supervision backlighting the cells for easy observation of the isolated inmates. As Foucault argues, the architecture of the Panopticon ensures the constant visibility of its inmates, while, through the effect

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__________________________________________________________________ of lighting and blinding the prisoners, power remains in the dark, invisible.21 This allows for the removal of an identifiable power: it is automatized and deindividualised,22 ‘unverifiable’.23 Consequently, anyone can exercise power; it no longer matters who or what motivates the individual exercising it and the detainee cannot assert for sure when or by whom he is watched.24 The oppressive constitution of the Panopticon suggests that the ideal form of assertion of disciplinary power would allow for ‘an interrogation without end’,25 used to constantly intimidate the convict. These images of control are present in Indoctrinaire. As opposed to being a free consultant helping Astourde to investigate the appearance of the UFO, it becomes increasingly clear that Wentik becomes a prisoner, for reasons unknown to him or the reader. Upon his entering the jail, Wentik is inconspicuously offered a cell as his personal quarters, unaware of the conditions he is about to face. In the jail, Wentik’s freedom is reduced: doors become locked, his meals are served further and further apart and his contact with others is limited to the occasional interaction with the guards and Astourde. His situation is expressed in a carceral terminology: ‘by degrees, his tiny privileges were restricted’.26 He faces inhumane conditions: he is kept in his cell for twelve hours a day with minimal access to the corridors of the jail.27 He is awoken by a beam of light targeted to his eyes, blinding him, illuminating his cell, following his movements.28 This is done to prevent him from sleeping, which is also achieved by playing loud, discordant music.29 Wentik’s life in the jail becomes a ‘deathful routine’, ‘breaking him out of his old pattern of behaviour’ and ‘He was becoming lethargic in his movements, sluggish in his thinking’, being disoriented by the jail.30 Wentik is subjected to violent conditions and constant observation: his body is weakened and monitored to ensure his docility. Wentik is also under constant interrogation from Astourde, an ideal fostered by the panoptic disciplinary apparatus. Astourde interrogates Wentik aggressively and coldly, although, on rare occasions, he interacts with him in a respectful manner, as he would to a consultant. Astourde attempts to extricate from Wentik a confession, who is unaware of his trespass: ‘You’ve committed a crime. What is it?’;31 ‘Your guilt is beyond doubt’; ‘All I require is an admission from you’.32 Wentik is left baffled, thinking that ‘there is no crime. [He] is innocent’.33 Astourde also asks of the nature of Wentik’s work at the Concentration: Wentik does not see the relation between his work on the mind altering drugs and his being imprisoned, nor does he understand his interrogator’s mood swings. He thus puzzles over the illogical nature of his interrogation: Wentik has never seen Astourde ‘perform a single rational or logical act,’34 highlighting the irrational nature of his interrogation, incarceration and of the power exercised over him. Looking for a rational explanation, Wentik wants to know who Astourde works for: as he wears a uniform, Wentik believes he works for the government. Astourde replies that he does not, although he follows orders, but only wears the official

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__________________________________________________________________ outfit to impress and instil fear in Wentik, reflecting Foucault’s idea that anyone can uphold the mask of disciplinary power. Astourde works administratively for the Pentagon as part of a Committee in conjunction with some generals from the Army and the Air Forces, and with Washington. The panoply of agencies makes it unverifiable to assert who the power commanding the investigation really is, therefore keeping it in the dark, highlighting the unknowability, and thus the ungraspable nature of power. Wentik, in his subsequent incarcertion in a Brazilian hospital, learns that he is somewhat responsible for the events occurring on the Planalto District: Astourde’s irrational behaviour was induced by the mood and mind controlling drug that Wentik was working on in 1979 that he tested on himself, making him immune to its effects. Upon his arrival to the hospital, he is told that he has been admitted for Disturbance rehabilitation. He is told by a doctor to read books as ‘part of the course’35 for his treatment. One of the volumes is entitled Brazil—A Concise History: he learns that shortly after his departure to the future, a nuclear war broke out between the communist bloc and America, and that other weapons were used, including the Disturbance gas, the gaseous form of the drug Wentik was working on, still effective in 2189. The gas never dissipated in the atmosphere but did ‘more permanent damage to the world than bombing,’36 causing widespread violence, accompanied by rapes, murders, wars, causing ‘whole ideologies [to] crumble.’37 Wentik is approached by Jexon, a sociologist, who tells him that the historical volume he is reading is Brazil’s ‘doctrinaire history,’38 that is the historical and ideological beliefs on the Disturbance that Wentik has to adopt to ensure his release. In Indoctrinaire, as in the short story ‘Sentence in a Binary Code’, rehabilitation is granted if the character accepts the doctrine of the powers in charge. Wentik is the criminal responsible for the Disturbance, the widespread dissidence which causes whole ideologies to topple. Wentik is taken to a remote place and time, and after his rehabilitation, is re-instated in a society in which he has no ties, since his family, his friends, his job no longer exist, severing him from his dissident past. The use of the panoptic prison and hospital, as mechanisms of total observation, control and dedention of the criminal, where power is unidentifiable, enables the removal and isolation of the dissident from society to another, alternate space, preventing him to ‘disturb’ the set order any further. Later on in the novel, we learn that Wentik was brought to the future by Jexon to fix the Disturbances, so that he could create a society ‘neat and symmetrical, each part cohesive in its place’ but ‘while the disturbance gas was allowed to remain in the atmosphere, nothing could make his society perfect.’39 Wentik’s ultimate rehabilitation lies in his dismantling the dissidence he started which prevents the creation of an orderly, totalitarian society.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Inverted World and the Disciplinary Apparatus Inverted World depicts a successfully trained and disciplined character. The closed city of Earth needs to move towards the centre of normal gravity known as the optimum which pushes the land further away from itself, towards a greater outer gravity force which could crush the city. The city exists on an inverted plane, as it coexists on planet Earth, devastated by past nuclear warfare. A strict level of security and secrecy is maintained in the city: only the guild members commanded by the Navigators, the committee leading the city on its path towards the unreachable optimum, know of its existence and of the need for the city to move forward. The movements of the city are ‘so slow as to be almost undetectable’40 to keep these facts secret. Here again, power is invisible, shrouded in secrecy, darkness and supervisory titles. The only people allowed out of the city are the guild members. Helward Mann is one of the disciples of the many guilds enabling the city to move. During his initiation ritual, he is asked to swear an oath even before knowing its content. The oath ensures Helward’s total compliance: he is not to talk about the oath, the outside world, the world of the guild to any citizen. He realises that the ‘betrayal of any one of these conditions shall lead to [his] summary death at the hands of [his] fellow guildsmen.’41 Helward thus surrenders his self and his past to his jailers: now in total control of his body and his soul, they allow him to leave the city to start his training. Helward is taught about the world external to the city, and learns that the further away from the optimum, the greater the gravity, which can crush him. This gravitational difference is reminiscent of the binary opposition exposed by Foucault: as well as the differentiation between normal and abnormal, Inverted World delineates the binary of inside and outside. Away from the centre of power, the individual is crushed. This binary difference explains the disciplinary forces at play within the city, as Foucault argues: the rule is made to be ‘respected or as an optimum towards which one must move.’42 Helward always has to aim towards complying with the views and beliefs of the authorities. Helward becomes indoctrinated by his jailers. As he travels further away from the optimum on a mission, he feels crushed by the outer gravitational force, a test to his loyalty. Helward, fearing the gravity, wants to return towards the optimum: those away from the centre of power, from standard rules will be made to bow down to and to accept the ruling authority. So far out of the city, he is made to adopt the Navigator’s distorted view of the world, the sun and the moon as hyperboloid, hourglass-shaped, although he was taught at school that they are spherical.43 This indicates the coercive nature of power: training in isolation, within the confines of the disciplinary apparatus, power can inculcate in its disciples any ideas it wishes. Foucault argues that power can teach falsities such as two and two not adding up to four, or that the moon is some kind of cheese,44 or even hyperboloid if we are to take the example of Inverted World. At the end of the novel, we learn that a generator creates a distortion field which generates the

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__________________________________________________________________ illusory inversion in gravitational force that the city experiences. It is switched off and the normal nature of the world is revealed to the population. However, Helward is unable to cope with its real nature. He tries to comfort himself: ‘I just have to keep looking at the sun and telling myself that it’s a sphere, whatever else it might look like’45 as he still sees a hourglass shaped sun. So imbued in the reality of the distorted, inverted reality of the city of Earth, he is unable to cope with the real, seemingly transgressive world of the planet Earth and to habilitate himself in this new society. These three stories all use the alternate, insular, virtual world to isolate their characters and to subject them to the effects of a virtual, rather ideological, distortion field in view to transform, rehabilitate and normalise them. They deploy the alternate environment to create images of carceral islands which highlight the binary oppositions created by the disciplinary apparatus in order to enforce control over the prisoner, to monitor him and pressurise him into yielding to forces of power. Interestingly, a distortion field, which changes the perception of the characters, is created in these three stories: Turasky adopts the propaganda line, Wentik accepts his past world and his past life have been destroyed and adopts a new history, a new ideology, and Helward is left unable to cope with the real world. The three narratives create images in which the carceral becomes an oppressive force which crushes the dissident, which normalises him, to use Foucault’s terminology, and attempts to make him forget his past. Instead of rehabilitating the individual, the disciplinary apparatus trains him, reshapes him into a docile element complying with its ideology: his humanity and individuality are stripped, all that remains is the docile body which is under total control.

Notes 1

Paul Kincaid, What It Is We Do when We Read Science Fiction (Harold Wood: Beccon, 2008), 105. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 95. 4 Ibid. 5 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 183. 6 Ibid., 199. 7 Ibid., 254. 8 Christopher Priest, ‘Sentence in a Binary Code,’ in Real-Time World (London: New English Library, 1974), 91. 9 Christopher Priest, ‘Sentence in a Binary Code,’ 92. 10 Ibid., 93. 11 Ibid., 95. 12 Ibid., 96.

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Foucault, Discipline, 183-4. Ibid., 266. 15 Ibid. 16 Christopher Priest, Indoctrinaire (London: New English Library, 1971), 5. 17 Ibid., 16. 18 Ibid., 19. 19 Ibid., 57. 20 Foucault, Discipline, 200. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 202. 23 Ibid., 201. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 227. 26 Priest, Indoctrinaire, 25. 27 Ibid., 23. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 23. 31 Ibid., 30. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 Ibid., 30. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Ibid., 95. 36 Ibid., 97. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 110. 39 Ibid., 137 40 Christopher Priest, Inverted World (London: Gollancz, 2010), 275. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 Foucault, Discipline, 184. 43 Priest, Inverted World, 31. 44 Foucault, Discipline, 204. 45 Priest, Inverted World, 302. 14

Bibliography Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Kincaid, Paul. What It Is We Do when We Read Science Fiction. Harold Wood: Beccon. 2008.

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__________________________________________________________________ Priest. Christopher. Indoctrinaire. London: New English Library, 1971. –––. ‘Sentence in a Binary Code.’ In Real-Time World. New English Library, 1974. –––. Inverted World. London: Gollancz, 2010. Elsa Bouet has recently completed her PhD on utopian and dystopian literature. She is currently working on dystopian geographies and broadening her research interest to monsters and the monstrous in relation to ideology and utopia.

Totalitarian Literature: Realism and Reality Luana Signorelli Faria da Costa Abstract This work will offer a comparative reading of three works: Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) and 1984 (George Orwell), identifying the problem of realism as a literary mode of representation, especially when it contemplates the aesthetic dimensions of these works, and compare them with reality itself. Also, this chapter will aim to represent a socio-cultural panorama of the time and the political influences, still present, of these works, to unravel the role of art in a consumer society (would it be in decline?), specifying how the totalitarian regimes were built and how art has established the subversive power of revolt. In each work, dialectical relations happen (especially between the collective and individual), the characters are in crisis and collapse in society. Concepts such barbarity, reification, dystopia and consumer society may be exposed. Key Words: Realism, dialectical, art, aesthetic, criticism. ***** This work was intended to criticise three books about totalitarianism, but then this study had to be more focused. So, this work now really intends to analyse more specially only one book, Brave New World, written by the British author Aldous Huxley, but it will also draw on the other books. The main purpose of this article is to recognise the realism of these works as a mode of literary representation – not restricting itself only to the literary period of realism. Would it be possible to consider Brave New World as a realistic book, given it departs from the actual conception of the world? For what reasons? For instance, it is necessary to counter the literary period of realism to modernism, in which this book was conceived. It will be explained here that Brave New World’s historical and political context of totalitarianism is crucial to explore the centrality of art and literature as means to subvert the conditioning of this kind of systems. It is important to emphasise that the construction of this narrative answers somehow the crisis of the characters. The proposal here is to observe how the development which leads the characters to what Aristotle called catharsis, purging or even purification, is represented.1 At first, it is important to represent an overview of the socio-cultural and political influences that Brave New World raises, even today, since it was a postwar experience and the author faced hopelessly – or not – an uncertain future; the practice of the writer reflected the feeling of terror against barbarism. In this hostile world in which Huxley lived, the limit of cyberculture, a new conception of being

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__________________________________________________________________ alive, arises. Then, art is essential, because it shows what ideology hides. Moreover, art is able to determine the self-development of the human when all the rest seems lost. Art, to account for reality, sometimes needs to transform it, even to deform it. Fidelity to reality in the artwork sometimes needs to depart from its own reality. The realism of post-war points to that. At the time, realism was very difficult to achieve. It is common in this kind of art to find elements of disfigurement, escape from reality, ideological, imagined and futuristic communities, real dystopias. Huxley, in this work of literature, was able to create a science fiction narrative, to represent society exactly reflected, which ensures the aesthetic efficiency of his text and thus impacts his readers to the present day. The reality was aesthetically captured by Huxley, as his own experiences. It was a realistic way to see the future capacity of community. The characters in the dystopian novels are true representatives of an ideology: they wear their ideologies as if they wear their clothes. Above all, the ideology demonstrates the relationship of the individual to forms of power. The Brazilian journalist Marcondes Filho explains: ‘it appears that ideology meant only one type of thought concerned with the political question: who dominates society? And for the one that dominates it, is it dominated by anyone?’2 To literary criticism, the fact is that resistance is another face of power. For example, John the Savage in Brave New World, by the time he reads, becomes himself a real leader, even greater than Ford himself. The society of Brave New World is based on a regime of urgency, the hyperorganization. The world is uncertain and separatist, where one cannot face more concepts as univocal. The truths are filtered through ideology: the individual does not like or dislike something, but feels exactly what they – the authorities – want him or her to feel. This society was the imperative of psychological torture: emotions were induced and controlled in order to maintain a status quo. Personally, I came from a country (Brazil) that lived in fear of military dictatorship in the 60s. I was not born then, but I carry the memories of those who experienced it. After trying to outline the problem of the dictatorship, a Truth Committee was created by the state. It sounds like fiction, but it was history: official truths were and still are easily manufactured, according to the interests of those in charge. In light of this knowledge, Marcondes Filho also mentions that: The very statement “one possesses the truth” can also be a form of domination. It can mean the desire to impose this truth to others. Nevertheless, the truth cannot impose itself to anyone. It appears by itself.3

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__________________________________________________________________ In other words, in dystopias there is a kind of power that is in charge of thinking for the individual, who is charged with the only task to work. And where does literature stand in the middle of all this? Art (subjective, made by and for individuals)4 in such a society is transformed into an object (a final product of consumption; a piece without there being a master). Also, art is ideological because it holds techniques, worldviews, messages and interpretations. The ideology which degraded art is the one of the dominant social class. The consciousness is owned by a ruling class, and their interest maintains this situation, it does not matter how harsh it is. The character that embodies this ideology in Brave New World is Henry Foster himself, a distorted and degraded acronym for Henry Ford who, as a historical figure, was responsible for the creation of the production model that best fits capitalism. When the real-life Ford’s ideology arose, the United States had a short history, it was newly founded, and this created a sound, healthy environment for industry to emerge. Then, the whole society revolved around manufacturing and producing. This allowed for higher wages and lower selling prices, which is still the case in our world today, actually. This also represents a huge means of persuasion and propaganda, because the social environment was conducive – and still is – to the growth of production. Propaganda happens when language marries speech. Stalin, for example, led a true propaganda machine to immortalise his name.5 The internal contradictions of modern society as exposed in Brave New World reach their limit. Individualism became a programmatic economy. Politics and ideology are vehicles for its implementation. Manufacturing in series allows only for reproduction, and eliminates the creation: this is a decisive shift in the occidental thought. Differences are erased, and individuals are uniformed. In our world nowadays, there is a critical inversion: there are so many differences, but what is required of them is that they be standardised, uniformed. Since so many cultures exist, would it be possible to create only one social structure? In all the totalitarian societies, such as those depicted in Brave New World or 1984, despite this uniformity, the social division of work still exists, meaning the individuals have different jobs and occupations, but yet, they all look like the same, since they all are so consumed by their own work that they are not capable of thinking anymore. In the totalitarian regime’s decaying social structure, the individual tries to adapt, to adjust. At this point, the regime needs a new human type adapting to this new environment. Darwin’s evolution theory echoes this idea here, more than ever. A Brave New World creates a new human type, and that is the vision of humanity in cyberculture. Gramsci calls this new human type improved puppets.6 In this society, even the sexual function – the most intimate human relation – is changed: there is a common interest to reduce birth rates and to spend less on learning and on human formation. It means that sexual instinct is radically regulated,

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__________________________________________________________________ rationalised. It is extremely perverse, violent, and it is a real violation of human rights. To a certain extent, it is accepted that society is built on coercion. In Brave New World, there is a character named Darwin as well, a paparazzi who, yet in the book’s end, is impressed by John the Savage. John looks so primitive, so strange to Darwin that he does not recognise himself in the figure of otherness: it is exactly what Marx – Karl Marx, the real and historical one, not the Huxley’s fictional one– called alienation. Thus, it is possible to think of literature in the world nowadays becoming a difficult challenge. Those who appreciate literature can even be called mystics: it is the case with Professor Helmholtz Watson in Brave New World. It is important to emphasise that Helm in German means ‘helmet’, and ‘holtz’ is the participle of the verb ‘holen’, meaning ‘to hold’. It represents the maximum protection for the brain against any external idea that might influence or change that mentality preestablished by the dictatorship. Or the opposite: the maximum brain protection from the main degrading ideology. Bauman reflects the dual aspect of the capitalist ideology: ‘The modern arrangement – capitalist – of human society had a shape of Jano: an emancipatory face and another coercive.’7 However, in the heart of that society, the teacher is the one who can think better. Then a possibility arises: thought, when it is very directive, ultimately creates rebellion, revolution, and every individual has a great subversive scheme in himself. As The Beatles have sung: ‘You say you want a revolution, well, we all want to change the world.’8 And the question is: what stops us nowadays? Everything changes when we turn ourselves into realistic thinkers, and thinkers realize they are not favoured by the system and, therefore, they can more easily revolt against it. Brave New World is a whole fiction about intellectual and existential conflicts, once it is known that consciousness generates thought. In a determined moment and in a determined condition, John knows the importance of himself and he is frightened to realize his potential, and at the same time he could not understand why it is forbidden to read Shakespeare. As I have my personal, national, memory of dictatorship, the English culture has Shakespeare and Milton, whom A. E. Housman reincarnates in his poem: Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think.9 This is a poem which appears in Brave New World. It is possible to interpret this section from the context of the book, it represents the urgency in totalitarian

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__________________________________________________________________ societies of the need to escape, principally of thinking, through alcohol for example or through drugs as well. Although the Muse is the Greek mythological creature responsible for the arts, in the modern and totalitarian societies, it has a trend to fade and to be ironized. Nevertheless, the main purpose here is to emphasise that Huxley utilises Housman’s message (and other authors’ too) to argue his point – knowing art and our own culture is important. Then, Literature means the ability to think, and more importantly memory itself. John in Brave New World is moved by art, which was enough to alter his inner experience. He realizes that he had received an invitation to further enter the system. It is necessary to try to understand his perspective: he leaves his original homeland, that is a colony, as Brazil was once, and now he is not only in a civilised society, but also within its limits: there is a crisis. The individual freaks out, societies collapse. In a totalitarian society, there will always be a type of individuals that reproduces the dominant ideology, unconsciously. If society is observed carefully, people nowadays can be noticed to be practically purely empty. People do not express ideas, but merely reproduce them. Their memory is controlled or corrupted, because they have been conditioned to think and ignoring the truth is comfortable, easier. Is the virtual community walking forward or backward then? Caution and attention are required as playing accordingly to a speech does not mean to be an adept of it. Worse than not being aware of one’s condition is to have a false consciousness. Ideology is in people's minds and in their imaginative capabilities. The role of the media today, especially social networks, can be seen to reflect this conditioning: The cultural industry is the most subtle form of totalitarianism; it was made to meet the needs and tastes of a medium public that has no time to question what they consume.10 Being invisible: that’s the triumph of totalitarianism, because no one realizes anymore that one is actually living in a totalitarian regime. Achieving a totality (totalitarianism) is to get the reduction that things are being right in themselves and that they are enough – there’s no curiosity, no research into other paths. The aesthetic reflection is lost: the individual who produces something does not recognize himself in what he produced. The systems avoid any kind of subversion. Then, why read Shakespeare still? Adapting books is also a form of people assuming that they need to survive. The human kind itself is an evidence of a past history, art and literature, especially since so many of Shakespeare plays deal with power, and the possibilities of subverting that power. Another very interesting dystopia dealing with this theme is Fahrenheit 451: ‘Books were only one type of receptacle where we store, fearing to forget many

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__________________________________________________________________ things’.11 Books were destroyed, but the knowledge they contained was learnt by memory by some people to preserve the culture they held. These people became more than human; they became receptacles of information and culture. No longer wearing the ideological clothes, they also incorporate, carry and wear the essence and the core of the books that they have memorised. They would adopt the identity of a book as one would adopt one's own child. Turning people into books is admitting passages of media, semiotics. The human element should not be transformed into reduced machines, which would be the maximum process of reification (transformation of man into a thing), because thus the system would win again. Therefore, there is a change in the technique of artistic representation, which is no longer written, but memorised now, and it is still a way to save the artwork. Men and women become the memories of themselves. On the other hand, this chapter also analyses very briefly a little of George Orwell's 1984. He was a British author and, also in the post-war era, imagined a futuristic community similar to Huxley’s. The similarities are many, such as the idea of Big Brother: behind an immeasurable, invaluable control, there is a great emptiness – in fact, no one is actually watching it – this is a true phantasmagoria. The world itself is a big phantasmagoria. The important thing is to maintain the illusion, to represent power, so that it can be feared. Perhaps, would this not be the function of art in the consumer society? To keep the audience interested only during the necessary time to briefly entertain it without its essence ever being captured? Once the vacuum is realized, possibilities arise. In 1984, Winston is feeling unworthy, miserable, and begins to question his life, his routine and his work. Then, he meets his romantic partner, Julia, and he lastly put himself in a dangerous situation. The walls grow around Winston, and he is forever entombed. Finally, Huxley, an Englishman who witnessed the war and survived it, made use of licit and illicit substances in his real life, and also created his dystopia. The world in his book is not so admirable – it is created to function purely in a manufactured laboratory, in which the same woman was the biological mother of sixteen thousand people, and a child was already a mother. This book shows a society that reached an extreme state of barbarism. The emotions are replaced with pure engineering. Is genetic engineering a dream or nightmare? – as Mae-Wan Ho asks. In the real world, the German economy has quickly risen in the post-war era because the Jews were tested on: an example of progress used to justify the use of immoral means, as exactly thought of by Machiavelli in the sixteenth century. The greatest evil in Brave New World may be the ritual of hypnopaedia: unconscious brainwashing in which people were submitted, in the passage from childhood to adulthood, to have their behaviour conditioned, to hate reading, flowers, nature. In this society, the ultimate symbol of power is Ford (symbol of pure and mere reproduction, typical of consumer society), compared to a God. The fact was that in this totalitarian society, the existence of art becomes impracticable.

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__________________________________________________________________ How then can we resist? Huxley’s book is important among others because it represents a raw truth, in the face of critical characters, who are no longer aware of the reality around them. This book is also dangerous, since the artist becomes so self-conscious, his cathartic process becomes so successful that he becomes a kind of psychic. Books themselves make people different – the characters of this book really became what they read. The word changes the world, so the importance of reading is emphasised. There will always be subversive minds in the world, and this is the true historical contribution to humanity; literary people are the most subversive, and without them human history would be stopped. It is curiosity that moves humanity, a beautiful aphorism that could be Oscar Wilde’s. The goal of this work was to analyse how Huxley found a way to transpose literarily a distorted reality that he experienced. Faced with so many issues, it is a central proposal here that stipulates whether or not his work can be considered realistic, and it is proved that Brave New World is so realistic that is spooky, actually. The problem of realism in these literary works of dystopia is central, because it is only through the realism that they are so current and yet so present in our contemporary society.

Notes 1

Aristotle, Poetics, 1453a28. Ciro Marcondes Filho, Ideology, vol. 1 (São Paulo: Global, 1997), 19. 3 Ibid., 54. Author’s translation. 4 Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1992). 5 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism (São Paulo: Companhia de Bolso, 2012). 6 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, vol. 4 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001), 266. Author’s translation. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Search for Safety in the Current World. (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2003), 29. Author’s translation. 8 McCartney, Paul, John Lennon. ‘Revolution’. Hey Jude/Revolution. London: Apple Records, 1968. LP. 9 Alfred Edward Housman, LXII. Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff, Accessed 17 May 2014, http://www.bartleby.com/123/62.html, 20-24. 10 Teixeira Coelho, What Is Cultural Industry? (São Paulo: Editora Brasilense, 1980), 11. Author’s translation. 11 Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451. (São Paulo: Globo, 2012), 109. Author’s translation. 2

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Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. São Paulo: Companhia de Bolso, 2012. Aristotle, Poetics. England: Oxford, 1965. Bauman, Zygmunt. Community: Search for Safety in the Current World. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editora, 2003. Bradbury, Ray. Farenheit 451. São Paulo: Globo, 2012. Beatles, The, McCartney, Paul, John Lennon. ‘Revolution’. Hey Jude/Revolution. London: Apple Records, 1968. LP. Coelho, Teixeira. What Is Cultural Industry? São Paulo: Editora Brasilense, 1980. Filho, Ciro Marcondes. Ideology. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Global, 1997. Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks. Vol. 4. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001. Hegel, Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1992. Ho, Mae-Wan. Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? – Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1998. Housman, A. E. LXII. Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff. Accessed 17 May 2014. http://www.bartleby.com/123/62.html. Huxley, Aldous. Admirável Mundo Novo. São Paulo: Globo, 2009. ———. Brave New World. New York: Bantam Book, 1958. McCartney, Paul, John Lennon. ‘Revolution’. Hey Jude/Revolution. London: Apple Records, 1968. LP. Orwell, George. 1984. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009.

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__________________________________________________________________ Luana Signorelli Faria da Costa recently graduated in Portuguese Letters at the University of Brasilia (Brazil). Currently, she is studying toward the Master Degree in Literature. She also works as a teacher, monitor and text reviewer.