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?
