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. 

Reading The Children of Men by P.D. James

I saw Children of Men at the theater.  It was good.  As usual, I was disappointed when I noticed the item in the credits -- "based on the novel."  Bummer.  I was seeing the movie before reading the book.  Breaking one of my own cardinal rules.

Today, I'm fifty pages from finishing the book.  It took me a while to finally read it.  I recently learned that my course on apocalyptic narratives has been approved -- I will be the professor of "The Apocalypse in Literature and Film" in fall 2015.  I can't help feeling a little proud of myself.  I never wanted to teach writing, always wanted to be a literature professor, felt like I was settling for writing and now, look at me.  Designing and teaching my own "Topics in Literature" course.  There will be grad students in my class.  Grad Students.

Anyway, the book is awesome.  I love it.  What stands out now is the distinctiveness.  It's not the same story from the film.  The characters are different, the plot is different.  I read over a hundred pages, and still nothing had blown up.  The novel's plot is, interestingly, barren, like the human beings who populate its world.  Not much happens.  Theo wanders around a lot, is lonely much of the time.  Kind of how I imagine the apocalypse.

However, the most nuanced and 3-dimensional presence in the text is religion.  I wasn't expecting that because there really isn't much religion in the film.  At least, it's not discussed overtly.  If you think about it, any apocalyptic narrative is about religion in a sense, because of the eschatological nature of the premise.  There is inherent religion in all apocalypses, whether it's discussed or not.

In The Children of Men, James gives us post-apocalyptic religions, and more than one.  People are fed up with a god who has abandoned them.  New preachers and Holy Men come out of the woodwork, preaching that Man has offended God and must repent.  Other spiritual leaders preach the value of love and compassion in a more secular sense. The character Julian finds herself pregnant by a priest in a time where humans are no longer able to conceive.  It's interesting to consider the double meaning of the phrase "to conceive of life..."  I suppose it takes a priest.  Luke.  (Remind me to read The Book of Luke.)

I am excited to keep reading.  It's one of those stories that I don't want to end too quickly.  I mostly know how it ends, but the writing is very good, and I want to see how James gets us to the ending.

Journals and Organizations

I'm thinking some of these CFPs might help me narrow down my focus as I start to read more.  I'm worried I'm going to get too big...

Science Fiction Studies
Popular Culture Association
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

The Souls of Cylons

I watched an interesting episode of Caprica last night, in which Daniel Graystone, the inadvertent inventor of Cylon technology, works on the avatar of his wife, Amanda Graystone.  For those BSG fans who haven't seen the prequel, Daniel finds an avatar program created by his deceased daughter, Zoe.  He downloads it into a robot he's building for the military, and the robot seems to come to life.  In fact, it has "come to life;" it's the avatar of his daughter, Zoe, who lives on in V-World with all the memories and attributes of the original Zoe.  She is, for all intents and purposes, the first Cylon.

So, Daniel works away at replicating this program -- he's building an avatar of his wife, who has left him.  In V-World, he interacts with Amanda's avatar, and at first, the audience believes it's really his wife and he's really asking her for a reconciliation.  "Amanda" grants the reconciliation because she loves him -- why would she continue holding a grudge against someone she loves?  Daniel gets angry because, of course, the real Amanda would never behave in such a way.  Daniel thinks his avatar program is "not human enough."  However, it might be more human than he realizes -- if the souls (for lack of a better word) of humans are inherently good, then he might have created an enlightened version of Amanda, an improved Amanda.

Daniel's reaction is interesting to me because many religious philosophies indicate that the intrinsic nature of humans is good, kind, and compassionate.  In other words, perhaps Daniel thinks his program is "not human enough" because he doesn't know what it means to be human.  From a religious perspective, he has created life.  The avatar of Amanda feels sensations, she reacts to other beings, and she claims that she loves Daniel.  He retorts with a line that BSG fans will remember: "You're just a machine -- you can't love."  But who is he to say? 

One of the earliest religious beliefs, according to Karen Armstrong in The Case for God, was the interconnected essence of all things.  She says, "As life became more settled, people had the leisure to develop a more interior spirituality.  The Indian Aryans... pioneered this trend, achieving the groundbreaking discovery that Brahman, being itself, was also the ground of the human psyche.  The transcendent was neither external nor alien to humanity, the the two were inextricably connected" (19).  I believe that Love is an example of the transcendent, as do many religious people.  The Bible claims that God is Love.  Buddhists claim that once a being is enlightened, she or he behaves with compassion for all beings.  The real problem for Daniel seems to be that a soldier robot cannot have Love as it's fundamental, intrinsic quality.  He considers this a mistake.  He's creating Cylons in his own image.

New Books... New Ideas

I went to the library yesterday (finally!).  I went specifically to look for books from the bibliography of Karen Armstrong's The Case for God, which I've decided to re read.  At least the first half, anyway.  I'm very excited about one book in particular -- Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return.  It was published in 1950, which means it's one of the oldest books in our library.  The last section, titled "The Terror of History," seems like it will be most useful to my project. 

There is a point, for Armstrong, at which religion ceases to be useful.  It's the point when humans forget that their religion is mythos, that it needs to be interpreted and put into practice in order to be effective.  When they lose the transcendent aspect of their religion, it becomes "just" a belief system, as opposed to a practice.  Another way to react to the loss of transcendence seems to be literalism.  In BSG, some characters, especially President Laura Roslin, make a serious mistake when they begin taking their religion literally.  I may be wrong on this, though -- maybe she is just trying to interpret it and put it into practice.  I need to watch the series again (oh, darn!).  I can't wait till my grading is complete and I can jump into this project for real.

Finding Transcendence

I'm interested in the role of religion and the transcendent experience in Battlestar Gallactica (BSG).  The material I've read so far suggests that Cylons limit themselves by aspiring to be more like humans.  When "they evolved," as the opening credits of the show tell us, they evolved into more human beings.  In some ways, then, they might be devolving, or stuck in a cycle of eternal return, like samsara.  It makes sense that the creators of the original Cylon robots were not made to improve humanity or eliminate our flaws.  The final 5 Cylons in the BSG explain that they felt humans had something special that made life worth it -- life is not supposed to be easy or fun, according to them...  Learning to get over one's flaws and shortcoming is the meaning of it all.  (We find out in the prequel, Caprica, that the first Cylon was made by accident, in an effort to either 1) keep a deceased daughter alive, or 2) build a super-soldier that can't die.  Both of these reasons are terribly vain and express a certain amount of greed or egotism that is not healthy.)

Cavil, a particularity nihilistic Cylon, seems not to be "on board" with the Cylon project to "evolve" into more human beings; he'd prefer to evolve into the best machine he can be.  Being human-like, for Cavil, means being imperfect.  If they are machines, then why not be perfect machines?  Why build in flaws that impair a machine's functioning?  This, of course, calls the "intelligent design" premise into question in an important way.  It is not particularly "intelligent," in Cavil's opinion, to give a robot with the mental power of a Cylon all of the physical limitation of a human body -- skin, muscle, and bone are subject to decay, and are limited by the physical allowances of nature.  Moreover, the Cylons are subject to outbursts -- they have a hard-time keeping control of their emotions, and they have seemingly built in restrictions on individuality which suggests that the final 5 (if they, in fact, "made" the other Cylons) probably weren't interested in creating truly human-like robots, or maybe they were merely acting in blatant self-interest.  In either case, the Cylons' emotional outbursts end up causing all kinds of problems -- medical, political, etc -- and eventually create a Cylon civil war between those who want to embrace their "human-like" tendencies of individuality and emotionality, and those who want to deny those aspects of themselves.

The Cylons' desire to form an alliance with the humans underscores the limits imposed on them by their human-ness.  The Cylons feel limited by their inability to reproduce sexually, and throughout the series they try all  kinds of things to make this happen.  They "farm" human women; they plant Cylons who have been programmed to think they human (like Boomer) to see if humans will fall in love with them and the love, mixed with biology, will help to create new life.  They also search for "God," an unknown being in the show, whom the Cylons believe in as a creator and benevolent deity who guides them on a pre-ordained path.  However, the Cylons cannot have free will if the path is preordained.  They seem to have free will, and the final 5 seem to believe that they, the final 5, programmed the Cylons to have it, so where is the path? 

In all of this, I keep coming back to the idea of eternal return.  Nietzsche wrote about this in The Gay Science, I think, and I plan to read that soon.  My understanding of the phrase, "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again," first uttered by Leoben the Cylon in BSG, and repeated by many others, is that it's a kind of allegorical eternal return.  The stories we tell are meant to help us understand the cyclical nature of time, but because people (and some Cylons) are so focused on their own times and places, they have a hard time reading/understanding these stories in allegorical ways.  They search for meaning or understanding of their own times and places, their own situations, without seeing the universality of the Situation. Of Time. Of Space.  

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong suggests that seeking transcendental experiences, which has historically been one of the primary goals of religious practice and teaching, has died out as a common experience in the modern age.  My initial thought is that transcendence is the only way to "escape" the eternal return, the constant repetition of the same events, the same misunderstandings, the same trials, life after life.  As long as the Cylons are obsessed with humanity (becoming more or less human, finding "God," which for them means finding a reason for the way things are, as opposed to transcending the reason for the way things are), they will not achieve transcendence. 

The only character who may have achieved transcendence in the end is Starbuck, who disappears without explanation.  Also never explained was her mysterious "death" when she crashed into a planet during a fight.  Is she a Cylon?  If she is, then the other Cylons don't know about her.  Maybe she is the lost 13th model, like the lost 13th colony.  Or maybe she's an angel.  Or maybe she reaches a Nivanic acceptance of the way things are, and because she is no longer striving so hard to escape her situation, escape is finally granted to her at the end.  Granted by whom?  I don't know.  This is either another example of the limits of language, or a hole in my theory.