In this chapter, I will examine a change which has occurred in cultural theory within these last twenty or so years; metaphors and concepts from the science fiction genre (sf) has to an increasing extent turned up in order to express occurrences in contemporary culture. Generally, these concepts are used to turn events into facts, in the division Linda Hutcheon uses in The Politics of Postmodernism, arguing that facts are narrativised, textualised versions of real events. Hutcheon states that there is a postmodern desire to denaturalize the historical process of turning events into facts, and that: “[p]ostmodern fiction often thematizes this process of turning events into facts through the filtering and interpreting of archival documents” (Hutcheon, 1989/2002:54). The main point of this chapter is to show how this process also takes place in critical theory, where sf concepts are employed specifically as a way of denaturalizing this ongoing historical process.
In a move parallel to slipstream and transrealism in fiction, these theoretical texts seem to find these metaphors and concepts necessary to point out the transformations of Western culture. Critics such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles develop the words ‘cyborg’ and ‘posthuman’ respectively in ways that follow from the genre tradition they are most usually employed in. This process of borrowing is an example of what I have earlier termed generic contamination; Haraway’s and Hayles’ texts are contaminated by the sf genre, in this case with the grafting on of specific words to their theoretical discourse. Note that while the words do not originate in the sf field it is the place where they are most often employed, but more importantly than that, both critics use them primarily in the generic sf terminology, while still referencing their origins.
Here, I will examine the cultural texts of the cyborg and the posthuman in relation to their origin within the sf genre and how the speculative strategy of sf is carried over into the critical practice of specifically Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. I will argue how such uses of generic contamination form a type of double-coding; a typical trait of these critics’ approach, which can be considered part of postmodernist discourse, or better yet postmodernism theory, in Jameson’s coinage (Jameson, 1991). It is significant to note how these two concepts, cyborg and posthuman, are used as what one might call a-representational abstractions. As Jameson points out
In the old days, abstraction was surely one of the strategic ways in which phenomena, particularly historical phenomena, could be estranged and defamiliarized. When one is immersed in the immediate [...] the abrupt distance afforded by an abstract concept [...] is a unique resource, particularly since the history of the preceding few years is always what is least accessible to us. [...] But one must acknowledge the representational problem, if only to separate it out from the other motives at work in the war on ‘totality.’(Jameson, 1991:400)
In other words, abstraction has been a useful tool for analysis of the present moment, but today, we no longer trust the totalizing move behind such abstractions. As we shall see, this is precisely the reason for choosing words and concepts outside the typical field of critical theory, since such words will not immediately be regarded as totalizing, but instead offer useful abstractions. The transcoding of these words thus brings a different stance to contemporary culture and so prove useful for the critics.
This strategy has not gone unnoticed by other critics, here I shall simply point to two instances. The first is Carl Freedman, who argues for the “certain structural affinities between the two terms [critical theory and sf].” (Freedman 2000:23). These structural affinities come because it is in both genres’ nature “to speculate about the future” (Freedman 2000:181) although of course in different ways. Freedman’s point is that sf in many ways already work as a form of critical stance towards contemporary culture. It is this tendency that many sf critics and theorists have pointed to when they argue that sf is not about the future, but rather the present the texts are produced in.
Such cultural readings of sf as symptomatic of a culture’s view of specific issues have grown more common, with examples such as David Seed’s American Science Fiction and the Cold War (1999) or Lisa Yaszek The Self Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative (2002). The most interesting example, however, is probably Steven Shaviro’s Connected: or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (2003). In this book Shaviro reads science fiction as cultural theory in order to properly express and investigate the changing reality of our present condition. What is so special about the book is how Shaviro regards it as not just a natural way of regarding Western culture, but also the most useful. He writes:
Science fiction is about strange metamorphoses and venturesome, unpredictable results. It is a practice of continual experimentation, just as science and technology themselves are. In this way, science fiction conjures the invisible forces - technological, social, economic, affective, and political - that surround us. It makes those forces visible and palpable, and brings us face to face with them, however frightening and untoward they may be. It is only by writing cultural theory as science fiction that I can hope for my work to be (in Lenin’s famous phrase) “as radical as reality itself.” (Shaviro, 2003:xi)
Such an approach is clearly representative of what is termed theoretical fictions, or critifictions, and both Haraway’s and Hayles’ writings bear evidence of this practice of writing. Similar to Shaviro, both Haraway and Hayles clearly express a certain speculative thrust in their radical theories.
To reiterate, the methodological frame for this chapter will be a cultural semiotic one, regarding both the cyborg and the posthuman as signs which have dislodged from scientific discourse, entered the sf architext where it has since been used as a narrative device. From this sf generic discourse these signs have disseminated into the cultural field alongside the original meaning of cyborg. To be sure, the concept of cyborg as most will understand it comes from sf and not scientific discourse; few would probably even know that cybernetics originated in informatics. Because of this dislodging and dissemination, we need to understand how such a process might occur, both in the sense of how one discourse may contaminate another, separate, discourse. Jacques Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” and work on dissemination explains quite well how we may regard the use of sf concepts in critical theory as a form of contamination, which grafts a new context onto the theoretical text. It is this textual structure of the graft and what the graft reads back into the critical text, which will be examined.
However, this affinity can be seen as the way that the graft of the sf genre inseminates a particular meaning into critical theory, and other fields, in order to provide conceptual frames for thinking about our world’s present condition. It is such a move which classifies Haraway’s and Hayles’ works as double-coded; both theoretical and fictional, science fiction and theory.
The word and concept ‘cyborg’ today has a rather long and checkered history, since the word was first coined in Manfred Clynes’ and Nathan S. Kline’s, article “Cyborgs in Space,” from Astronautics, September, 1960. The word is clearly derivative of a larger academic field on cybernetics and informatics. Cybernetics’s root is the Greek kubernetes which means “pilot,” “helmsman,” or “steersman.” This root would immediately suggest that cyborg would have something to do with freedom of movement, something which both Timothy Leary picks up on in his essay “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot” (1988/1991: 247) and N. Katherine Hayles notes in her How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999: 104). However, this understanding comes only after the cyborg has become a cultural icon, rather than the technological term it originated as. Clynes’ and Kline’s article uses the cyborg as a technological innovation, their definition of the cyborg reflects this:
For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated hemostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term “Cyborg.” The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments. If man is space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg…is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel. (Clynes & Kline, from The Cyborg Handbook, xx)
As we can see, there is little in common with this wording and that which we find either in Haraway or Hayles’ use of the cyborg. While both critics are aware of the origin of the cyborg within space research, they go on to show how it can be used as a critical tool within other areas. It is interesting to note that Clynes and Kline utilize the cyborg as a speculative device; they note that many of the propositions for space travel are just that, speculative, and even indicate that some of these propositions may indeed sound like science fiction. In this way, there is a certain overlap in the way that Clynes and Kline employ the term and how Haraway will employ it 25 years later. Both use the term as evocative of the not-yet, something which is in the verge of emerging.
Clynes and Kline of course use the term in a very different context from what Haraway will come to use it, even when we recognise Haraway’s focus on communication theory. Clynes and Kline imagine a cyborg as a system parallel to the human astronaut which will take care of many minor necessities, such as the control of oxygen, position relative to spaceship and so forth. Such a system would free the human for the tasks more relevant. Today, we recognise this notion as the computer systems which are indeed used in space travel, but also in more conventional forms of air travel. However, Clynes and Kline are somewhat more radical in their imagining of the cyborg, since they regard it as something not exactly external to the human, nor exactly internal. Already here we find that the cyborg disturbs the notion of inner/outer space and the notion of human as clearly defined individual. Clynes and Kline see not problem in human and machinery be coterminous. [THIS NEEDS SPECIFIC NOTES]
However, there is little question that the cyborg has become a cultural icon; here I will investigate one area where the cyborg developed as an icon. The sf genre rather quickly grafted this new concept into its discourse. This is hardly surprising, since the concept originated within a field of special interest to sf: space travel. The first appearance of the word cyborg in sf comes almost parallel in two instances. Robert Heinlein’s serial version of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) in December 1965 to March 1966 issues of Worlds of If and in Frank Herbert’s serial “Heisenberg’s Eyes” from 1966 June to August issues of Galaxy, later published as a novel under the title The Eyes of Heisenberg (1966). Due to the nature of publishing schedules and revision, it is difficult to determine exactly which story was the first to use the word. What is more interesting, however, is that the two authors actually use ‘cyborg’ in the same way: as fusions of machine and human, thus using it in the same way that Clynes and Kline employed it.
If we take Heinlein’s novel, we can trace the use of the term cyborg. First, the novel itself revolves around a political and ideological centre. The moon is a prison for those undesired on Earth, but many have grown up on the moon and are essentially free people, though they still live under the yoke of the Authority, the totalitarian government of the moon. As such, the novel deals with the concept of revolution and can be regarded as a comment on how much contemporary US culture has fallen away from the heights settled by the US Constitution and especially the Declaration of Independence. The novel is extreme in its Libertarian views, such as the answer to the question “under what circumstances may the State justly place its welfare above that of a citizen?” which is that there are “no circumstances under which State is justified in placing its welfare ahead mine.” (Heinlein, 1966: 61)
It is not this main discussion which is of interest here, though, but instead two other themes, less developed, dealing with the borders between what is human and artificial. One is the discussion of Mike, the computer which has perhaps awakened to being ‘alive’ in whatever sense that might mean, while the other is the mention of cyborgs. The word ‘cyborg’ is mentioned only a few times in the text, each time regarded as something less than human. Interestingly, a cyborg is usually connected to piloting spacecrafts, so here we find a connection between the etymological origin of the word cyborg as ‘pilot’ or ‘steersman’ but also a connection to Clynes and Kline in the sense of astronautics. If we take just two examples:
There was a solar storm warning but the pilot thought he could make it-or didn’t care; he was a Cyborg. (32)
But contracted to go in a ship, with at least a Cyborg pilot to help me get down safely. (160)
Here we learn that cyborgs make excellent pilots, yet are not particularly human. This view of the cyborg as less than human can be found several times, let us here simply take a few:
I felt like a Cyborg with pleasure center switched on. (20)
Women are scarce; not enough to go around - that makes them the most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don’t care whether they stay alive or not. Except a Cyborg, if you regard him as a man, which I don’t. (123-124)
Did I detect an increase in bland inscrutability? A Cyborg-computer - Pickled brains? Or live ones, aware? Horrible either way. (189)
As we can see, the existence of a cyborg is regarded as offensive and as something less than human. A cyborg is generally perceived to lose its humanity once he (inevitably, all cyborgs are referred to as male) is connected with machinery; the hybrid nature of the cyborg is what makes it unnatural. Above we have the reference to pickled brains and there is another reference to cyborgs as a “wired-up ex-human.” The novel thus paints a rather bleak image of the cyborg and any potential unity between man and machine. However, it may be that it is only when the brains of a person is interfered with that one becomes a cyborg; since our protagonist Mannie has a cybernetic arm and while this disturbs some people he is never referred to as a cyborg, nor as less than human.
If this were the only instance of human-machine hybridity, the novel would be of less interest but there is another entity which is not physically human; the massive computer Mike, or his proper name, a “‘High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L’ - a HOLMES FOUR” (Heinlein, 1966: 9). While the computer starts out at first as simply an immense computer, he gains a degree of self-awareness at one point which first manifests itself as a joke, paying an exorbitant wage to janitor. Mannie, or Man as the computer ironically refers to him as, learns that the it is able to respond. The concept of self-awareness is brushed aside by Mannie, as is the discussion of a soul, thereby removing any problematic religious questions.
What is more important is that Mike, as Mannie names him, is shown throughout the novel to have emotions, though often childish, and he is far more accepted as human by Mannie and his friends. It is interesting to note that while there are some arguments about Mike’s personality, his humanity is never really discussed; that Mike is wholly machine and not a hybrid seems to preclude any notion that he might be ‘unnatural’ or less than human. One significant thing, although it is never really developed in the novel, is the question of Mike’s gender. Mannie thinks of him as male, but when Wyoh talks to Mike she discovers that he is actually female:
I discussed it with Mike, what sex he was, I mean. He decided that he could be either one. So now she’s Michelle and that was her voice. Got it right the first time, too; her voice never cracked once. [...] It’s not just pitch; when she’s Michelle it’s an entire change in manner and attitude. Don’t worry about splitting her personality; she has plenty for any personality she needs. (Heinlein, 1966: 49)
It turns out that Mike can actually assume either gender and shift at will. However, this theme is never really explored any further and Mike seems to be the dominant personality, even referred to as the original. One wonders whether a gender-switching computer was too much suspension of disbelief for the time, and that we as readers are to be reassured when Mike admits that he prefers Mike to be his personality and that it was always the real one.
Artificiality, then, is not the key issue in the discussion of what it means to be human or human-like. Despite Mike’s artificiality he is regarded as so close to human that there is no point in arguing any difference. This is despite his shifts in gender and personality, all of which are regarded as a natural state for Mike rather than evidence of schizophrenia. It is precisely this naturalness with which Mike’s artificiality is accepted that makes it so peculiar that cyborgs are regarded as ex-humans. Here we find an example of the blasphemy of the union between human and machine which Haraway will emphasise later in her cyborg manifesto.
While machines may gain sentience close enough to human sentience, human and machine must remain separate entities and never mixed. While we thus find a certain anticipation of cyberpunk in this novel, including the focus on rebellion, Heinlein has not really created a radical text; first off, the so-called rebellion of the moon against the Authority and the Earth still smacks more of dictatorship where Mike makes most of the decisions, even sometimes imitating Mannie and others and giving orders on their behalf, following what Mike terms as the ‘prurient course.’ Also, the potential for any radical subversion of gender or identity in focussing more on Mike’s development and his status as a sentient being is never explored; instead Mike is simply a textual device used to explain how the ‘Loonies’ can succeed in overthrowing Earth control. The fact the he is a computer is simply a way of rationalising his abilities to control telephones, spaceships, facilities and so forth. In essence, Mike’s status as a computer is simply part of sf’s denial of the fantastic status of the text and hence providing ‘scientific’ explanations in order to attach a degree of verisimilitude to the textual device.
If we turn to Frank Herbert’s novel The Eyes of Heisenberg, the case is slightly different. It takes place far-flung into the future in a world where some humans can live for thousands of years. As such, one could argue that human existence revolves around the concept of the posthuman, but it is not an issue dealt with in any greater length; genetic alterations are performed to create superhuman beings, while others are kept at more normal human standards. There are no real births, instead embryos are grown in vats after they have been ‘cut,’ genetically modified either for superhuman excellence or almost eternal life; in which case they will be sterile. There is a clear law against creating immortal superhumans and so this is of course exactly what happens in the novel.
Here, however, there is a greater focus on cyborgs who also play a more significant role in the narrative. Again, cyborgs are used primarily as workers and quite often as pilots or chauffeurs. In a world where there can no longer be said to be any ‘real’ or non-artificial humans left, since all are genetically manipulated and do not experience actual childbirth, we still find that cyborgs are regarded as less than human, frightening and emotionless.
It is this emotionless quality which makes the cyborgs offensive and not to be trusted; they lack something which real humans have. Not even the thoughts of a cyborg are human, since “[i]t was said the Cyborgs composed most of their thoughts only in higher math, translating to common language as it suited them.” (Herbert, 1966: 69) This machine-like quality is a constant reference and we learn that “such bodies contained miniaturized computers linked directly to the brain, that the arms were not arms but prosthetic tools and weapons. And the voice - always such a clipped-off unemotional quality” (Herbert, 1966: 68)
Cyborgs, then, are inhuman because they have no real emotions but are instead machines which work only by logic. However, normal humans are often also referred to in terms of being machines, or at least having machine-like qualities: “[b]ut I must caution you that your present reaction is conditioned by your gene shaping. You’ve excess male protectiveness.[...] These are flaws in your gene shaping” (Herbert, 1966: 106) Such terminology shows how even the human body and human reactions are not the result of free will as much as it is determined by how they have been made during their ‘cutting,’ ie. when their biological destiny is determined.
Again, as with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, we find that there is no real discussion of this apparent contradiction. It seems that the very fact that cyborgs are a mix of human and machine; that their thoughts are mathematical equations and that they lack emotions make it sufficiently evident that these beings are not fully human. No matter how artificial humans may have become, no matter how unnatural their births, they are still fully biological and capable of emotions, even if these emotions are the result of biological processes akin to machines.
Herbert’s novel thus stays away from any conception of human as a system, humans can be defined through their emotions, something which machines do not have access to. Even when we learn that cyborgs have some form of emotions they are negative emotions. “So they do have emotions, Svenggard thought. Pride… anger…” (Herbert, 1966: 171) Here also the cyborg remains blasphemous, presenting the fear that if humans are combined with machinery they will lose some of their humanity. Just as in Heinlein’s novel there are no religious elements, but cyborgs lose emotions which become a symbol for humanity.
This excess of logic which cyborgs have is a shared element between the two novels; it seems as if the time was not yet ripe for any alternative views of technology combined with humans was a good thing. Any bodily invasion of machinery upon the human mind will render that person inhuman. The significant part here is the invasion of the mind rather than simply body. Mannie’s cybernetic arm in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress does not make him a cyborg, just as what is unnatural about Herbert’s cyborgs is the miniaturized computers linking to the brain. While religion and soul is effectively effaced and ignored by the two texts, they both seem to imply that there is more to the human mind than a mere information-processing device. If the human brain is somehow altered to receive computer signals, then the brain will by extension become a computer and a machine, effectively turning the human into a machine. Both writers here emphasise a humanism where the human mind cannot be reduced to a machine.
The concept of artificial humans or humans as machine are of course not new within sf. What is significant is that both authors have chosen a different word than the more typical robot thereby signifying a change the view of artificial humans. In their novels cyborg refers to a hybrid entity, not one which is wholly artificial. That the word originates within scientific discourse rather than being one of sf’s many neologisms can perhaps best be attributed to a degree of convergence and point of intersection with scientific discourse, as well as a desire to make their writings more believable. Such a strategy, as we know, is typical of sf’s extrapolation; a typical move to deny the fantastic nature of the text and instead make it appear naturalistic. Since then, the cyborg has proliferated within the sf genre and has become what Damien Broderick refers to as an ‘icon’ within sf’s architext. (Broderick, 1995: 59) ‘Cyborg’ as a concept and idea moves into the self-structuring web of signifiers with absent signifieds which makes up much of the sf genre. While a cyborg, as it was used in sf from the 60s onward did not exist in the real world, the concept had a glorious career in textual form.
This is a clear instance of generic dissemination; the word is taken in from a different discourse (in this case astronautics) and inseminates the sf genre. Suddenly, ‘cyborg’ becomes a powerful and pregnant metaphor which is used in many different texts, whereby a specific, generic understanding is achieved. No longer does the cyborg mean a technologically enhanced astronaut who no longer needs to personally check his equipment, but rather becomes the fusion of human and machine: a forceful image which has the advantage of being to some extent ‘empty,’ since there is no real-world reference; the original context has been effaced. Because of this emptiness of the sign, the individual author has some leeway in choosing different meanings, or referents, for cyborg in his or her text.
It is precisely this polysemous freedom which Donna Haraway employs in her trail-blazing essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985). As a word dislodged from its ‘natural’ (or at least original) discourse, cyborg is filled only with generic connotations and no specific denotations. Although there is a certain metaphorical dependency, or what we may call metaphorical residue, of the original discourse (something we shall return to later) embedded within the cyborg’s contamination of sf, it is possible to create a semantic space within the word and thereby create new meaning.
As one of the first investigations into the constructed nature of identity, it is evident that it is precisely this strategy which Haraway employs. This strategy needs to be able to defamiliarize the existing views of identity and the device which Haraway chooses is that of the cyborg. For Haraway, the use of the cyborg as metaphor is a perfect choice. The cyborg is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 1985/1991:149), which makes it the ideal choice for a revolutionary essay, since it is both ironic and blasphemous, serious and playful. The cyborg is about contradictions which do not dissolve into wholes, but instead reveal that incompatible things can be held together when they are all necessary and true. In this way, the image of the cyborg is a double-coded strategy which enables Haraway to point out a number of faults in contemporary culture.
Her basic premise for the use of the cyborg is the argument that “[t]he boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway, 1985/1991: 149) which is a clear indication of her defamiliarization strategy for how can reality and fiction be the same, or only separated by an optical illusion? As an optical illusion, we are invited to view the difference as belonging to perspective rather than any inherent qualities in social reality. This is the first clue that Haraway views identity as constructed through a discourse rather than a given, hence the comparison to fiction.
The metaphor of the cyborg is representative of a shift from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system. In other words, the concept of the human moves from the organic conception of humanism, to the information-processing machine of cybernetic communication theory. If we briefly return to Heinlein and Herbert, we can see how Haraway emphasises the alternate view on cyborgs and humans; the human can be viewed as an information-processing machine, but only by the rejection of humanism which Heinlein and Herbert are not willing to do.
As a way of emphasising this, Haraway’s cyborg myth focusses on transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities (Haraway, 1985/1991: 154) attempting to portray the way that previous conceptions of identity can be destroyed. She points to the fact that identity as conventionally conceived has brought numerous fractions and fragmentations; that there has been nothing which would unity feminists by focussing on sameness and similarity. Haraway points to the usefulness of affinity over identity, where a postmodern form of identity can be constructed “out of otherness, difference, and specificity.” (Haraway, 1985/1991: 155).
The cyborg is the Other to the humanist subject, which we saw clearly stated by Heinlein and Herbert, and may thus for Haraway work as a metaphor for a consciously constructed identity rather than an inherited one. In this way, Haraway performs a deconstruction of the traditional conception of identity as a continuous subject by insisting on the contiguous elements which make up that which is Other. As cyborgs are contiguous entities of incompatible flesh and machine, so do women (and by extension, all who are Other in Western culture) need to construct their own contiguous subjects from the incompatible materials given them. “The cyborg” as she points out “is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”(Haraway, 1985/1991: 163)
Such a self must be coded from fusions with animals and machines in order not to be Man (Haraway, 1985/1991: 173) which is regarded the epitome of Western logos and is thus precisely what must be resisted. What animals and machines have in common is the way they have both been regarded as lesser and subservient to Man; embracing a kinship with them is therefore a rebellious act by denying one’s continuity with Man. The very equation that we find with man, Man and Mankind points out exactly why this must be resisted; it inscribes a dominant position as a natural one.
That Haraway uses the image of the cyborg deliberately and knowledgeable of its place in the sf genre is clear when she states that she is “indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre. These are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs.” (Haraway, 1985/1991: 173) Haraway draws her inspiration from what is primarily American New Wave authors, especially female authors but also, significantly, Samuel R. Delany. This is significant in two ways; first because Delany was part of a group consisting of himself, Russ, Le Guin and others, and second because Delany is homosexual and thus also decentred in relation to male heterosexuality. These authors can generally be considered as gender-alterity writers; writing sf which explores gender and sexuality in high-tech worlds. Much of their fiction deals with topias in different guises, be it heterotopias, utopias, dystopias or other types of imagined communities.
It is precisely this emphasis on speculative places which is so significant about these authors, since they generate idealized spaces that are clearly constructs and not part of the informatics of domination. It is worth noting here the difference between the writers mentioned above and the writings of Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert. Certainly Haraway would have no use for either Heinlein or Herbert since their views of the cyborg is continuous with the Western logos that Haraway wishes to disrupt. However, that their use of the cyborg has already been disrupted and deconstructed by later sf writers shows how the sf genre may transform the empty signifiers that composes its architext.
It also points to the usefulness of these writers for Haraway’s purpose; they are all already subverting Western myth through radical discontinuities. We should note here also that Monique Wittig cannot be categorized as a sf writer and that she falls more in the line of utopian writers in the ‘original’ sense of Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler and William Morris, and perhaps especially following in the vein of such novels as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. In any case, Wittig’s work follows the same lines of resisting a male informatics of domination. Haraway sees the usefulness of these fictions in their retelling of Western origin myth, emphasizing how “cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture.” (Haraway, 1985/1991: 175)
These central myths of Western culture revolve around dualisms which have instated the informatics of domination over the Other. By contrast,
[t]he self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many. (Haraway, 1985/1991: 177)
With her focus on the One as opposed to the Other, we see how much Haraway is inspired by Luce Irigaray’s writings, such as “The Sex Which is not One,” which Haraway clearly acknowledges. However, the path that Haraway takes is different from Irigaray’s by focussing on what she terms high-tech culture. This high-tech culture is characterised by a paradigmatic shift in ontology, science or formal knowledge, does not separate between machine and organism, technical and organic. It is only the continuation of Western myth which persists this separation and holds it to be true, and so it must be destroyed in order for the Other to be free from domination.
In this way, Haraway uses the image of the cyborg as a cultural icon to argue for its emancipatory possibility in eradicating gender differences. The cyborg becomes a radical object which challenges typical patriarchal values and social mores. By questioning the stable identity of the human, it becomes evident that gender identities (or any identity at all) are just as constructed. The cyborg smashes all Western grand narratives and so stands as the ultimate postmodern subject.
In a certain way, Haraway’s cyborg is a critifiction, a critical fiction which through its hybrid, oppositional nature narrates a specific emancipatory tale of how human identity can be freed by turning into a subjectivity. The story which is invoked is one of Utopia where the development of a cyborg identity will create a better place for women in particular but in essence for all who are different; the cyborg is difference narrativised. Haraway is certainly well aware of this when she states that “I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.” (Haraway, 1985/1991:150).
What Haraway is doing is following Jean-Francois Lyotard’s argument that science has always narrativised its theories in order to be convincing. However, as Haraway is well aware and as we have already pointed out, the master narratives (grand recits) are no longer useful but rather suspect. Instead, she draws from a smaller narrative (petit recits); that of sf due to its estranging nature. If Haraway’s arguments at times appear ahistorical it seems to me that this is deliberate, another way of pointing out that earlier history is part of the informatics of discourse.
The sf is used as a postmodernist representational strategy to subvert and reveal the constructions inherent in so much humanist discourse by estranging the reader. As Haraway herself states no construction is whole (157) and the desire for this wholeness must be rejected.
Harway’s critical methodology reflects two stances: the first being textuality and the second sf as ‘myth-busting.’ In this way, her basic assumptions are those of a cultural Marxist of a certain postmodernist persuasion. Theories of the text help us, she argues, to resist the managers (Haraway, 1985/1991: 163) and it is precisely her blending of critical discourse and the sf genre which reveals her view of world and culture as part of textuality, in other words the cultural text. Haraway is well aware that one of the places where Western myths (which we can also term its master narratives) are most often dissected is precisely in sf which with its estranging poetics, in Carl Freedman’s words a certain dialectics (Freedman, 2000:XX), is placed in a unique position to reveal society’s constructions. Not that it always does, of course.
What the cyborg does is to transcode identity, clearly so precious to feminists, into something estranging in order to reveal the constructed nature of Western gender politics. What is used is the cultural sign of the cyborg because it stands as the antithesis to the natural, holistic, humanist human being, the Western subject. Sf is the only discourse which has seriously dealt with the ontological status of being in a technological world accelerating out of our, not control, but understanding.
A cyborg, in this sense, is a natural construct which reveals the origin of man to not be natural but a recent invention, as Foucault would say. It is also this which makes it relevant to point out that it is this state as natural construct which is relevant, not necessarily the machines imagined by sf writers.
However, we come upon an interesting convergence with regard to the cyborg in cyberpunk fiction, growing from the same period as Haraway’s. The cyborg, in cyberopunk sf, generally stands as a double-coded sign for the human being becoming a commodity, such as Gibson’s meat puppets; bodies for rent with no consciousness present, or the loss of personal control over one’s own body in Ratz’ prosthetic arm which moves according to its own volition. But at the same time it also stands for extending human possibility and identity in both directions of animal and human, represented in two different short stories, Tom Maddox’s “Snake Eyes” and John Shirley’s “Wolves of the Plateau”.
Maddox’s story shows how technology dehumanises humans, making them closer to animals than real humans. Shirley’s also employs a certain animalistic discourse in the wolves of the title, but generally, here the human-machine interface pushes beyond human capabilities into the transhuman or posthuman, depending on what you wish to term this. Of course, both Maddox’s and Shirley’s texts are later than Haraway’s and so cannot have influenced her text in any way, but none of the two texts are exceptional in their treatment of the cyborg concept, instead representing the two poles which the cyborg represents.
The cyberpunk connection remains vital for this discussion, however, since much of their work represents a convergence in relation to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, which is a concept they develop further in their fiction and which later feeds back into cultural theory in connection with Hayles’ posthuman, which is something we shall return to later.
Haraway’s use of the cyborg is thus parallel to the use of the cyborg in sf. As Scott Bukatman points out in his book Terminal Identity, in sf the body has become a machine which no longer opposes the natural. No longer an immortality of the soul, but a hard-wired subjectivity (Bukatman, 1993: 244). Indeed, “[t]he body must become a cyborg to retain its presence in the world, resituated in technological space and refigured in technological terms.” (Bukatman, 1993: 247)
If we accept that the discourse of science transforms subject to object, human to machine (Bukatman 246), we can see that the discourse of sf transforms objectified subject to subjectivity, to a resistant and resisting metaphor; the cyborg which is not human but also not machine. The image of the cyborg is one of cultural resistance, properly double-coded as any postmodernist discourse must be. This is the irony which Haraway notes in the beginning of her essay.
If we turn to Katherine Hayles’ book How We Became Posthuman she deals with the process of how we as humans have changed within contemporary society and the guiding metaphor she uses is that of the posthuman. In it, we find that the argument is similar to and informed by Haraway’s concepts, but Hayles takes the ideas even further. Once the human has been shown to be a non-physical construction; in the sense of being an information-processing machine, any form of difference becomes meaningless as such, and the posthuman points toward the emancipation of (hu)mankind once we transgress or overcome the borders of the body. At the same time, the body is relevant but open to change, it becomes prosthesis. While this is a double-edged sword for Hayles, it does contain the possibility of hope and freedom.For Hayles, the posthuman is based on four premises; information over matter, consciousness as epiphenomenon, the body as the original prosthesis, and that the human being can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (Hayles 1999:2-3). This identification is clearly connected to that of the cyborg which Hayles also admits and sees as a necessary step on the ladder to the posthuman (Hayles 1999: 291); moving through the cyborg as a cultural icon.As we can see, Hayles’ posthuman is very close to Haraway’s conception of the cyborg. Hayles states that “[t]he posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogenous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.” (Hayles, 1999: 3) The posthuman, for Hayles, is also a continuation and further development of the cyborg rather than a break from it. Hayles point is simply that the cyborg has developed into the posthuman for some, while it has not occurred so for others, since the human and the posthuman coexist in different historical configurations.That the image of the posthuman is meant a theoretical construction and not a literal, physical being is pointed out by Hayles with reference to the discourses which currently surrounds the scientific understanding of the human being. Posthuman identity is simply one possible construction of the new models of subjectivity which emerge from new fields of research. What fascinates Hayles and what is important according to her is that embodiment suddenly takes on a radically different meaning; separate from the construction of subjectivity. The posthuman is post because it emphasises cognition over embodiment, but as Hayles makes clear: “To the extent that the posthuman constructs embodiment as the instantiation of thought/information, it continues the liberal [humanist] tradition rather than disrupts it.” (Hayles, 1999: 5)One way in which Hayles tries to pick at the discontinuities of the posthuman subject is to reading literary texts alongside scientific theories, to articulate the connections that run through the two discursive realms in order to point out that these cannot be regarded as discrete entities:
In this regard, the literary texts do more than explore the cultural implications of scientific theories and technological artifacts. Embedding ideas and artifacts in the situated specificities of narrative, the literary texts give these ideas and artifacts a local habitation and a name through discursive formulations whose effects are specific to that textual body. (Hayles, 1999: 22)
Since the posthuman is also a textual body, in the sense that is representative of textuality and deliberate construction, Hayles points to how other textual instances may provide insights into these newer formations. We can view this strategy in two ways, the first being as a blending of what is supposed to be separate: fiction and social reality. Already prefigured by Haraway, this would simply make Hayles’ text an example of cyborg writing.
The second view has also already been prefigured above, and that is the instance of the generic contamination. Hayles allows her writing to be contaminated by sf precisely for the same reasons as Haraway before her; the sf texts may be regarded as speculative theories narratively investigating the very same concerns of Hayles. In a sense, these speculations have already read the new texts critically by investigating similar spaces and identities; they preempt Hayles’ argument.
This leads us into Hayles’ view of cyborgs’ relevance for her concern with the posthuman; cyborgs are relevant precisely because they are both narrative constructions of sf discourse and a living being of technological practice (Hayles, 1999: 114-115), which echoes Haraway’s argument that the cyborg is both “a creature of fiction as well as a creature of social reality.” (Haraway, 1985/1991: 149) Cyborgs are relevant because they exist; not only in the case of people with implants ranging from pacemakers to artificial hips and more, but also in a more general sense of technological interfacing.
It is important to remember that the posthuman does not mean the end of humanity, but rather only the end of one conception of the human (Hayles, 1999: 286). If Hayles is correct, the posthuman will complete the project which Haraway embarked on; the end of Western culture’s conception of Man as a unified, continuous subject. Since reflexivity is a major part of posthuman culture, no longer can the human being be defined without recourse to a meta-discourse. Hence there we see that the posthuman implies an acceptance that subjectivity is constructed from a variety of sources and that any subjectivity must be continually reconstructed. The posthuman subject is thus always redefining itself in the very process of defining itself; a metadiscourse is inherent in the posthuman subject.
I will now turn to focus on the term posthuman whose lineage Hayles places with Ihab Hassan who in a 1977 essay used the term ‘posthumanism’ (Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?”, in Michael Benamou & Charles Caramella (eds), Performance in Postmodern Culture). Hassan regards this posthumanism as following humanism, ie. last five hundred years of Western thought, although he also mentions the change of human form (Hayles 1999: 1, 320n). However, the word posthuman was used first in Robert Silverberg’s sf novel Son of Man from 1971:
Clay senses, as he has never before sensed, the full span of time through which he has passed; for now he is caught in a sea of shapes, prehuman and human and posthuman, coming and going, smothering him, demanding comfort from him, seeking redemption, chattering, laughing, weeping - (Silverberg, 1971: 189-190, italics mine)
Interestingly, there is more which connects Silverberg’s and Hayles’ text than just the word itself. Clay, a human from our time, travels billions of years into the future and encounters humans whose forms he has never seen before; they may alter their shape as it please them, even to the point of dissipating into a non-physical form. The four premises of the posthuman which Hayles put forth are all part of Silverberg’s text and investigated as Clay tries to understand human nature outside the physical parameters.
As we can see, Silverberg text anticipates and reads Hayles’ text critically, such as when the loss of human culture is at stake, since none of the new humans remember any part of Clay’s/our culture their humanity is lost as well: “By the continuity of our culture we signify that we are human” (Silverberg, 1971: 24). Clearly Silverberg’s text is a conservative reaction fearing change and the loss of tradition, and yet many would surely feel more liberated than lost if Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, and Jesus were forgotten. The point here, however, is the graft of the sf which Hayles employs and even admits to. Sf for Hayles, it seems, becomes the primary repository of metaphors and concepts when dealing critically with human culture.
There is another area in sf which has dealt with the posthuman and this is the cyberpunk subgenre of the 80s and 90s. While the term ‘posthuman’ does not appear in cyberpunk until Bruce Sterling’s 1985 novel Schismatrix and is further developed in his 1996 Holy Fire, it is evident that the entire genre is concerned with the existence of the human and the connection between body and mind. The crossing of the border between the animate and inanimate is a constant. The humanist concept of ‘man’ as the centre of creation is severely undermined.
Here the connection to Silverberg is evident enough in an architextual relationship, the borrowing of the problematics but with a different angle. Silverberg’s point is that man is defined through culture but a biological change will also affect the stability of our identity. Cyberpunk goes further and radically critiques the notion of a stable subject stabilised within a body. Unlike Silverberg’s dystopic vision, Sterling’s is far more positive in the view of what the posthuman can do and be, just as much cyberpunk denies the old humanist values.
In Schismatrix, the posthuman is regarded as something radically different from the human: “I’ve met many borderline posthumans in my day, but never one of you. Is it true that they enforced an entire second state of consciousness?” (Sterling, 1985/1996: 20) where not just the biological make of a posthuman is different but more importantly the psychological make is also different. Whether this alteration is connected to the physical changes is unclear; most of the time it seems that the changes take place simultaneously and inform each other. The different types of human entities which populate Sterling’s universe are all removed from humanity as we know it, and it is evident that identity has moved beyond the stable human body, the body often being viewed as amorphous.
This is what posthuman means in Sterling’s Holy Fire, where the protagonist Mia experiences the rapture of being posthuman, where the body is extended like any other prosthesis, altered at the whim of the person. Becoming posthuman is regarded as a move which alters one’s existence by breaking with normal boundaries: “I’m posthuman, I made a moral choice to go beyond the limits.” (Sterling, 1996: 148) Such a move beyond the limits of the human pushes even further with the fact that it is possible to share and devour another person’s identity. Mia is offered to truly know the mind of another, which is possible in the posthuman world of Holy Fire:
She felt the mind of another woman. Not her thoughts. Her life. The unearthly sweetness of human identity. Loneliness, and a lottle bitternes for strength, and a bright plateau of single-minded youthful self-possession. The ghostly glaze of another soul.
She closed her eyes. It was deep, it was deep posthuman rapture. Awareness stole across her mind like black light from another world. And then the grey meat slowly ate that other soul. Sucked it hungrily into a million little crevices. (Sterling, 1996: 245)
It is such a fluid conception of identity and self that prompts people like Haraway find the icon of the cyborg to be so liberating, it exists as a critique of stable, unitary, male identity and provides a metaphorical freedom for reinscribing a new identity. Hayles does the same when she argues for the posthuman as being a way to get out of “old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means.” (Hayles, 1999: 285).
Obviously, this whole field of the posthuman cannot be based on one textual instance. Clearly, the term posthuman must also be seen in relation to the whole ‘post-craze’ movement in theory of the 70s and onwards, instigated by those who saw postmodernism as a radical, liberating break with previous times and created a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity. However, it is evident that the anxiety about a deep shift in human nature was first given voice in sf and since ‘travelled outward’ in a dissemination into other fields. Not that sf is in any sense prophetic but we can see an increased desire and perhaps even necessity in using sf tropes, concepts, and metaphors in order to understand our present, presumably brought on because, as Bruce Sterling notes in his preface to Mirrorshades, we have grown up in a science fictional world. (Sterling ,1994) In a world where technology moves faster than human literary imagination, where even much sf seems dated by its release date, cultural theory must necessarily turn to sf to find the concepts for dealing with contemporary developments.
Hayles agrees when she says: “As we accelerate into the new millennium, questions about the posthuman become increasingly urgent. Nowhere are these questions explored more passionately than in contemporary science fiction.” (Hayles, 1999: 247). This exploration has been a valuable aid for both Haraway and Hayles and it is with this in mind that we may turn to the critical strategies which they both employ.
The most immediately obvious connection between Haraway and Hayles is that they both use sf as the fictional representation of their ideas. This choice of sf is made rather than the more traditionally expected choice of mainstream literary or experimental fiction. As is evident from this choice, and as they also argue, their ideas are most clearly developed in sf and so it must also be here that they turn for their metaphors and concepts.It seems obvious to point out that sf is a useful repository of signs for Haraway and Hayles, since both of them are speculating in different ways. We find a utopian impulse embedded in both writers’ work which is evident in the way they attempt to generate new spaces for alternately constructed identities, be they specifically feminist as in Haraway’s case, or more general for Hayles. Such spaces must necessarily be fictional before they can be reality; this is the nature of manifestos, pointing the way to a different view.Both writers also deal with the ideal (though certainly not naively) freedom of the human; they both believe that future changes to the embodiment of the human will eradicate the borders of identity between male/female and that identity will become much more a matter of specific and deliberate construction. This discussion of embodiment clearly enters into a Cartesian discussion of mind/body duality, but such a discussion while significant lies outside the scope of the present projectBoth use the concept of the not-quite-human or after-human, whether the cyborg or the posthuman as a utopian rhetoric, borrowing much from the cultural iconicity of the cyborg or posthuman. Many of these discussions have taken place earlier in sf texts and it is this discussion which both Haraway and Hayles implicitly employ when writing their critical texts. Such use does not mean that they necessarily agree with the various textual instances of either the cyborg or the posthuman, only that their critical texts enter a field which already exists and that Haraway’s and Hayles’ use must be seen in relation to this field. It is precisely in this instance that we may locate the metaphorical residue which is carried over from the sf field, just as the sf field took with it a certain residue from the scientific field where the word cyborg arose. This residue is what we may call the mark of genre which has contaminated the theoretical discourse of Haraway and Hayles. Note that this contamination should not be seen in the negative sense, but rather in the inseminating sense of Derrida’s dissemination; where “this play of insemination - or grafting - destroys their hegemonic center, subverts their authority and their uniqueness.” (Derrida, 1972a: 378), a move which Haraway and Hayles both actively seek in their texts.Like the cultural construct both critics work with, whether it is cyborg or posthuman, their own critical discourse is a hybrid, an amalgam of theory’s master narrative and sf’s small/local narrative. This strategy is perhaps best understood in terms of the reflexiveness which Hayles points to has been part of so much 20th century discourse. Both Haraway and Hayles self-reflexively, and quite explicitly, use sf terminology to break standard forms of thinking about identity and subjectivity. Such a strategy remains reflexive because it breaks the inside/outside border of theoretical discourse by contaminating it with inappropriate material from outside.
If science fiction is an ambivalent response to industrialization then the transcoding of sf motifs and themes in cultural theory represents an ambivalent response or attitude towards the technological and cultural acceleration and the possibility of discussing this in ‘realist’ terms. The effect of transcoding or grafting the sf discourse into a theoretical discourse helps reveal the unnatural/constructed nature of our contemporary culture and provides a critical stance within that same culture.
By contaminating their theoretical works with elements of sf they create a hybrid discourse which participates both in theory and in sf. This ambiguous relation to two different discursive realms is what gives their argument such force; it is precisely because they present a doubled articulation of theoretical discourse and speculative discourse that their theoretical works may be considered representative of slipstream theory, a theory which lies in the slipstream of our accelerating culture.
If abstraction is required in order to estrange and defamiliarize cultural phenomena in order to distance oneself in the ‘immersion of the immediate’ to be able to critically analyse and assess the contemporary moment, then sf provides just such an abstraction when inserted into theoretical discourse.
The interesting progression from Haraway’s cyborg to Hayles’ posthuman is the aim of their ‘poetics’ or theoretical thrust. Haraway’s argument and her conception of the cyborg is subversive, oppositional and in essence prescriptive (although it points out what we should do rather than not do). Not so for Hayles’ posthuman which rather represents a new conception of contemporary culture and is descriptive in nature more than a programmatic statement or manifesto.
Although Hayles does see the road of the posthuman as bifurcating, she spends less time arguing which road to take than proving that the road is there. What this indirectly reveals is how the image of the cyborg has been domesticated, naturalised is perhaps a better word, and no longer represents an estranging image; we are not just as cyborgs as Haraway argues, we have also come to accept it as our natural state. This is precisely Hayles’ point of our becoming posthuman, that we must accept our cyborg status and move on.
However, what cultural shift are we experiencing when sf begins to participate in the dominant practice of critically assessing contemporary culture? Are we undergoing a paradigm shift or why else is speculative fiction so relevant and useful right now? It seems clear that we are undergoing the process of cultural acceleration, what David Harvey refers to as time-space compression in his The Condition of Postmodernity. This notion of cultural acceleration shows not only how ideas and concepts are circulated quickly across the globe (or at least Western culture), but also how temporal ‘distance’ is decreased in the desire for a sense of immediacy.
Such a drive for immediacy has created the need for ways of mediating the very process of acceleration, not just technologically but also theoretically or culturally; ie. to understand and describe the process of cultural change. This may perhaps explain why speculative fiction is a necessary practice of critical and theoretical texts, since there is no longer any essential gap between present and future; instead we are moving towards a point which we may call the postfuture, in which the teleological move forward has been suspended because, as Baudrillard has pointed out, the future is already here. In order to assess our accelerated (and -ing) culture, sf becomes a useful, perhaps even necessary, tool to deal with it.
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