The Posthuman Future of Man

Pordzik, Ralph. "The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction." Utopian Studies 23.1 (2012): 142-61.

From the opening abstract (italics removed/regularized): "This essay interrogates some of the embarrassingly quixotic proposals of posthumanism, taking H. G. Wells's Time Machine (1895), William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2004) as paradigmatic texts exploring patterns of mutation, virtuality, and bioengineering. In their concern for the apocalyptic and their sometime [or "some-time"?] depiction of the glorious moment of Herculean victory over classical 'human' man (or 'the liberal subject'), these novels articulate the Western self's undaunted desire for the perfect Other, implying critical and even ironic gestures that question of propagation of a 'new' human condition or the idea of absolute boundaries of the human" (142).

Quotes Donna Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991, p. 159) on "posthuman 'pleasure in the confusion of boundaries'" and asserts that SF and dystopian narratives are well suited to explore this pleasure (p. 143). The three works on which Pordzik focusses "seek to apprehend the ineffable other of technology and behind this the constituitive 'Other' as defined by […] Jacques Lacan: a dimension of radical alerity that resists identification or assimilation" (p. 144). "Fatally defined by lack and/or death, the human species wishes to […] become what its' 'best machines already are'" (p. 144, quoting and translating Gundolf S. Freyermuth, "Designermutanten unde Echzeitmigranten […]" (2004).

Note 9 (p. 159) brings in "Hollywood blockbusters like Iron Man, Transformers, and The Matrix clearly announce the end of man in their celebration of the body made perfect or left behind, their dream of the dissolution of self through computer technology, bioscience, or the intersection of consumerism and the new digital environment. These films are all 'posthumanist' in their abandoning of the established Western matrix of autonomy, consciousness, and self-direction." 

"In many respects, J. G. Wells's The Time Machine can be regarded as the apotheosis of the mechanical image of man as subscribed to by nineteenth-century technoscience: It represents and simultaneously seeks to overcome this image." The time machine itself is the "product of the traveler-narrator's technical inventiveness" that in turn has issued "from a productive symbiosis of science and craft in the nineteenth century, the foremost aim of which is to subject nature and to advance technological progress" (p. 145).

Summing up on Neuromancer, Pordzik has it (correctly) that Gibson "remains skeptical of the enthusiastic idea of humans transferring their minds into more durable — read immortal — hardware systems" and the matrix of Cyberspace "and thus leaving behind, in good Christian tradition, their mortal apparel as dispensable and unnecessary. The posthuman as a means of managing the human and the technological domains" is both used in Neuromancer and brought into question (p. 152). Changing Pordzik's terminology, we might say that Gibson in Neuromancer uses the motif of the Separable Soul in a narrative that works to deconstruct ideas of the posthuman. ¶¶ Atwood's Oryx and Crake concludes Pordzik's series of works, with a stress on human language, discourse, "Atwood thus courageously turns the tables on postmodern technoscience: Technology's claim to being the ultimate other of humanity is repudiated; in fact, discourse itself rises to become the new other of positivist science now […]. The novel bluntly discloses what current technoscience still has trouble dealing with: Technology's striving for instrumental power and unity […] implies its denial to acknowledge language as a site of difference' technology aspires after [156[ unity, standardization, and objectification and thus disavows its own origin in language games […]" (pp. 156-57). 

Note: Neuromancer is the first book of what has been called the "Sprawl Trilogy," followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988); related stories as of 2018 include "Johnny Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel," and "Burning Chrome."[1] Oryx and Crake is the first book of the MaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). As critics at least should have learned with sets from the Oedipus plays through Shakespeare's historical tetralogies into the STAR WARS series, the meanings of individual works can shift when put into larger contexts.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 24July18