Posthumanism in the 1980s

This week, I had the pleasure of re-watching both Robocop (1987) and The Terminator (1984).  In the back of my mind, I was interested in how (or whether) these films portray ideas associated with "posthumanism," which essentially calls into question or drastically complicates all that we take for granted in discussions of "human essence," according to N. Katherine Hayles.  In How We Became Posthuman, she says:

The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.  Consider the six-million-dollar man, a paradigmatic of the posthuman regime.  As his name implies, the parts of the self are indeed owned, but they are owned precisely because they were purchased, not because ownership is a natural condition preexisting market relations.  Similarly, the presumption that there is agency, desire, or will belonging to the self and clearly distinguished from the "will of others" is undercut in the posthuman, for the posthuman's collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another.  We only have to recall Robocop's memory flashes that interfere with his programmed directives to understand how the distributed cognition of the posthuman complicates individual agency.  If "human essence is freedom from the will of others," the posthuman is "post" not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be distinguished from an other-will. (3-4)

Watching Robocop again helped me understand what Hayles means by "distributed cognition."  In a nut shell, she means that a posthuman subject (who is not necessarily a cyborg) contains multiple, competing wills.  Robocop retains many of his human memories, particularly memories of his son and wife, which are juxtaposed against the memories of being murdered by the villain Clarence Boddicker against whom he seeks revenge.  A program in Robocop's mechanical body prevents him from doing harm to anyone who works for the company that built him, so he remains incapable of satisfying his human desires.  The human part of him has a separate and competing will from the mechanical part of him.  And both exist in the same body.

I can also understand this concept from the perspective of a gamer.  In an MMORPG, such as World of Warcraft, for instance, a player must contend with multiple competing wills.  The will of my avatar, a level 90 fury warrior who is required to keep up her dps rating or lose her spot in guild raids, has to contend with the competing will of my human body.  Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in an MMORPG can attest to the fact that the boundaries between the player and avatar are slippery and often invisible.  Often, the will of the avatar overtakes the human will.  It's easy, for example, to play for several hours without realizing that I haven't eaten any food for most of the day, and players in South Korea have even died at their consoles.  Ernest Cline's Ready Player One takes this slippery boundary a step further by constructing a fully immersive simulated world, the OASIS, which players access using a set of high-tech goggles and a "haptic" suit, which allows players to feel sensations that their avatars might be feeling.  Most people in the universe of the novel conduct all of their business and pleasure inside the OASIS and rarely leave.  With few exceptions, the characters do not seem to distinguish between themselves and their avatars; the avatar is an extension of the human self.

It's worth noting that I used the phrase above -- "my human body."  My avatar is a disembodied version of myself.  Because she is disembodied, she can do things like fly, fight a dragon, or fall from a cliff, and she can always resurrect herself if things go awry. It's easy to see the appeal of "erasing the flesh" (Hayles 5).  However, Hayles contends that posthumanism does not necessarily need to emphasize disembodied immortality.  On the contrary, she says, "my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of the human being" (5).  Cline seems to take this approach in Ready Player One, as Wade and Samantha fall in love and decide they prefer being together in the real world.  However, Cline's narrative can also be read as an overly simplified dismissal of the the promise of the posthuman, overlooking any potential middle ground between a completely virtual existence and a completely embodied one.

While The Terminator holds up remarkably well for a 1984 film (and it's worth noting that James Cameron does a LOT with some masks, a red laser light, and some modest pyrotechnics), it is more of a post-apocalyptic humanist narrative than a posthuman one.  Reese's life in post-apocalyptic America is bleak and hard, and the machines are ruthless.  The goal of the survivors remains decidedly humanist -- to preserve humanity's individual freedom.  The T-800 model 101 terminator unit might be read as posthuman, since he is technically a cyborg, but in the film, he never deviates from his programming for a moment, until Sarah Connor crushes him in an automated machine that might be one of his early ancestors.  Importantly, the T-800 only resembles a human being, while there is a part of Robocop that is decidedly still human. The T-800 has no heterogeneous competing wills.

So, what did I learn?  I suppose I would say that posthumanism in the 1980s shows up in a couple of really different ways.  First, there is the posthumanism of human-cyborgs like Robocop and the competing wills that Hayles describes.  Second, there is the post-humanism of the impending apocalypse, which is decidedly still humanist in that its goal is to prevent human beings from becoming extinct, and to preserve them in their fundamentally human state.  It's interesting to think about apocalyptic narratives in this way -- do they prefer to conserve humans as they are?  or do they prefer to see humans evolve into something different and potentially better?  and what is at stake in each?

The Age of Perpetual Transition

Frank Kermode says, "The age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics" (Sense of an Ending, p 28).

This makes me think about the proliferation of apocalyptic narrative in contemporary television and fiction, and whether we might not be enmeshed in an age of perpetual transition right now.  Since my previous post, I've finished volumes 22 and 23 of The Walking Dead comic, watched season 5 of the TV show, watched seasons 1 and 2 of The 100 (a series that combines the best of BSG with elements of The Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies), and read Zombie Apocalypse! by Stephen Jones.  And that's just popular culture.  It's worth noting that David Mitchell's last two novels have had apocalyptic themes, along with Howard Jacobsen's J, a wonderful novel about what I'm tentatively calling a "silent apocalypse" (more on that in another post).

So what's the deal, pop culture?  Why are you so obsessed with the apocalyptic?  And what does it mean that your obsession is spilling over into "legit" fiction?  Is our age one of perpetual transition?  And if so, what does that mean?

There are certainly plenty of crises in the world that many of us would like to see come to an end.  However, as John Berger notes in After the End, "The end is never the End.  The apocalyptic text announces and describes the end of the world, but then the text does not end, nor the does the world represented in the text, and neither does the world itself" (5-6).  The crisis of each and every literal and figurative apocalypse is more aptly described as  a transition, not an ending.  The characters in The Walking Dead transition from one way of life to another.  Western civilization crumbles in the wake of the virus that causes the dead to walk; and by volume 22, the survivors have triumphed over the evil Neegan and started a kind of reconstruction.  They aren't rebuilding the same civilization, at least not necessarily, and they are trying to avoid the problems and pitfalls that humans succumbed to the first time around.  Likewise, in The 100, there are several important transitions:  the transition from life on Earth to life on the space station, and then the transition back to Earth again.  Both were "endings," in a sense.  The way of life enjoyed by the people who left Earth could not continue in the enclosed environment of the space station (or The Ark, as it comes to be called).  And once the children are sent back to the surface, the laws that made sense aboard the Ark are no longer useful. The adults in the group are painfully slow to come around to this reality, which could be just the nature of YA entertainment, but I suspect it has something to do with the nature of apocalyptic transformation.

Apocalypses are really just transitions, all of them.  The question is ... transitions into what?  This turns out to be a fundamental question that depends on our recognition of the postmodern idea of the Grand Narrative.  It strikes me that all apocalyptic tales have this in common: the narrative that has guided a civilization's way of life for long proves no longer to useful, and the people must transition into a newer, more meaningful narrative.

As we see in The 100, however, people get really attached to their Grand Narratives, and they don't want to let them go down without putting up a fight.  The Mountain People can't survive outside their bunker, but they refuse to accept the reality of their situation and greedily hoard the fruits of human culture while enslaving and murdering the Tree People to stay alive.  Likewise, the adults from the Ark struggle to accept the implications of their transition to the surface, and most importantly, of their decision to send their young people ahead of them.  Clarke and her "Sky People" have inadvertently become the new leaders, and in no small part, that's because they are less attached to the ways things were done on the Ark.

We might look at our situation today as an age of perpetual transition because technology changes things so quickly that we don't have time to adjust to a new idea or narrative before it evaporates or loses its usefulness.  Or because the environment is the thing that's transitioning, and each change causes repeating devastations for human life.  

Everything I'm saying here relies on the assumptions that there will still be humans around after the apocalypse to facilitate the transition into a new narrative or set of narratives.  In another post, I'll explore ideas of the posthuman, including the implications of an environmental apocalypse that puts an end to human habitability on Earth.