Cyborgs, Posthumanism and Short Fiction - Hayne Williams

8/14/2019 Cyborgs, Posthumanism and Short Fiction - Hayne Williams

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CYBORG S POSTHUMA NISM AND SHORT FICTIONWilliam S. Haney

A ttempts to theorize the short story as in the collections editedby Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (1989) and Charles E.May (1994)deal primarily with early, modern, or contempo-rary stories that feature ordinary human characters. Charles Maycites several theorists who describe the short story as an impres-sionistic representation of sacred experience. Unlike the novel, apub lic form that springs from encounters w ith the everyday, the s hortstory dep icts the imm aterial reality of the inner world of the self in itsrelation to eternal rather than tem po ral rea lity (May 133), But if theshort story depicts momentary mythic encounters with the sacred,then what happens when the protagonist is no longer human inthe traditional sense, or even postmodernthe two for all practicalpurposes being physiological ly identicalbut rather posthumanacyborg? A cy borg is any human w ith a techno phil ic body, defined asa huma n/machine symbiosis (Hayles 84-112). As the bod y becom estechnop hil ic, whether through the mo dif ication of functional o rganicstructures or through genetic engineering, the quality of subjectiveexperience mediated by this body is bound to undergo signif icantchange. As we move from the contemporary/postmodern to theposthum an as a cultural construct, stories d epicting posthum an ex-perience will no longer be confined to the sub gen re of science fictionbut will increasingly extend to all types of short fiction.

As Katherine Hayles notes in How We Became PosthumanAlthough in many ways the posthuman deconstructs the l iberalhumanist subject, i t . . . shares with its predecessor an emphasis oncognit ion rather than embodiment, Wil l iam Gibson makes the pointvividly inNeuromancer when the narrator characterizes the posthu-man bod y as 'data made fles h' (5). Generally spea king , while the


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em phasis on cog nit ion rather than emotional em bod imen t, I wi l largue, may result from the possibility that the artificial (e.g. genetic)modif ication of the human body wil l end up modifying, or rather di-minishing,the cap acity of the hum an species to sustain the qua lity ofconsciousnes s necessary for sacred experience. Francis Fukuyam ain Qur Posthuman Condition argues that the biotechnology revolu-tion may not only undermine human nature but also have terriblecon seq uen ces for our political order. As represe nted by short fiction ,the human capacity for mythic encounters with sacred experiencemay also suffer adverse consequences. Through the example ofselected short stories, including science fiction, as well as a briefconsidera tion of the nature of consciou sness, I wil l dem ons trate thatposthuman encounters may indeed preclude sacred experience aswe know it today.

In Simians Cyborgs and Women Donna Haraway signals threecrucial breakdowns in the boundary between m achine and organism :first, nothing enforces the human and animal separation, includingtool u se, social behavior, language , and reason; seco nd, the distinc-t ion between animal-human o rganism an d ma chine is leaky becauseof th e am biguo us difference between the natural and the artificial; andthird,as a subset to the sec ond , the boun dary between physical andnon -physical is very imp recise (149-181). In her feminist ap proachto cyberculture, Haraway claims that N o objects, spaces or bodiesare sacred in them selves; any com ponent can be interfaced with anyother i f the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructedfor processing signals in com m on lang uage (163). Her definition ofcyborg ,however, does not take into account consciousness a s-such ,but only the temp oral self: The cybo rg is a kind of dissem bled andreassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is theself feminists m ust co de (163). For cod ifying the self and red esign -ing the body, bio- and communication technologies become theessential tools. Haraway defines cyborg writing as not about the fallfrom an earlier pre-linguistic wh olene ss, but about survival by meansof tools as prosthetic devices. Cyborg writing also rejects perfectcom mu nication throu gh a master cod e, the central dog m a of phal-logocentrism (176).

T hroug hou t A C yborg M anifesto H araway problematizes thedistinction between unity and diversity. She argues that dualisms


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WILLIAM S. HANEY I 9the liminal trans form ation of a ma chine-orga nism sym biosis (177).From a feminist view point, a cy bo rg, wh ich is short for cybe rneticorganism, comprises not an impermeable organic wholeness,but symbiosis, prosthetic devices, hybrids, chimeras and mosaics:Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communicationsdevices like others. There is no fundam enta l, onto logical sepa rationin our formal kn owledge of machine an d organ ism, of technical andorganic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Biade Runnerstands as the image of a cyborg culture's fear, love and confusion(177-178). One difference between machine and organism noted bythe physicist Jean Burns, however, is that humans have volition orfreewill,which is associated with consciousness, while machines donot; indee d, the phys ical effects of volition are not explainable bypresently known physical laws because these laws encompass onlydeterminism and quantum random ness (32), which are not what areindicated by consciousness or volition.

The posthuman, however, is not a homogenous construct. Atleast two d istinct de finitions of the po sthum an exist, as sugg ested byAndy Clark inNaturai-Born Cyborgs. The cyborg can be understoodeither as a physical m erging of the hu man and machine throug h w ireimplants or genetic modification, or, as Clark proposes, a merging consummated without the intrusion of sil icon and wire into fleshand blood, as anyone who has felt himself thinking via the act ofwriting already kn ow s (5). In this friend ly version of posthum anism ,tools such as pen or com puter are not just external aids but integralaspects of the problem-solving systems that civil izations have de-veloped over the ages. Clark considers the notion of pos t-hum anto be a misnomer for a thorough ly hum an tendency to me rge ourmental activities with the operations of pen, paper, and electronics(6).We are already na tural-born cy bo rgs: creatures whose minds arespecial preciseiy because they are taiior-made for muitipie mergersand coaiitions (7, Clark's emphasis). In this definition, technologyhas always been geared toward self-transformation. The mind is notconfined to its biological skin bag but has the potential to extendinto and manipulate the physical environment.

The posthuman notion that the mind extends beyond the body,while hardly a novelty, is here understood primarily as a materialrather than the spiritual phenomenon of the world's contemplativetraditions. For Clark, self-transformation has becom e a sno wb all-


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rial brains, material bodies, and complex cultural and technologicalenvironments ( 1 1 , Clark's emphasis). What this friendlier definitionof the human-machine merger suggests is that the posthumanintensifies and extends the postmodern condition of materialism,relativism, and com putation, thereby aspiring not only to su percedebut also to repress the transcendental i ty, mythical oneness andconsciousness associated with traditional short fiction and perennialpsychology. In both versions oft he posthuman invasive an d nonin-vasivethe traditional notion of human nature comes under threat.In the posthuman condit ion, cognit ive machinery and technologicalskil ls in manipulating nature take precedence over the powers ofconsciousness that acco mp lish similar ends in a natural, spontane-ous,and environmentally friendly manner. The posthum an, therefore,emphasizes com putation and techno logical expertise in an outw ard,physical domination of the natural world. But as understood by thewo rld's c ontem plative traditions, as well as by artists and writers, thisoutward approach, conducted at the expense of innate quali t ies ofhuman nature, can be made redundant by m ethods of accom plishingthe same ends inwardly on the level of consciousness, as describedfor example in the Vedic tradit ion, notably the U panishads and Y ogaSutras, and exemplified by the mythic encounters of short fiction.

Some believe that human nature began to change in modern-ism and continued to change with a vengeance in postmodernism.A ccording to Virginia Woolf, In or about D ecember 1 910, humancharacter [read nature] chang ed ( Mr. B ennett and M rs. B rown ,qtd.P inker404).But S teven Pinker, who ques tions the notion that them ind is a blank slate subject to radical mod ification thro ug h externalinfluence, argues that modern science has no conclusive evidencethat hum an nature has changed in recorded history: The mode rn sci-ences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution are increasingly showingth a t. . . [the blank slate] is not true (421 ). T his, however, doe s notmean that human nature cannot be changed inadvertently throughhuman-computer interaction, as in tampering with the spinal cordthrough medical implants to enhance sensory experience. Indeed,as Katherine Hayles, Elaine Graham, and Robert Pepperell note,through the proliferation of bio-engineered prosthetics that integrateshumans and ma chines, the practical dist inction between machineand organism is receding (P epperell 7).


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l ike short fiction, may organize pleasurable stimuli and direct themto the em otions , pleasure itself can be said to have its source not inexternal objects but in witnessing consciousness. Borrowing fromA sian dramaturgy, A ntonin Artaud in heatreand Its Double calls thewitnessing or pure state of consciousness a void in thou gh t (71),that screen of qualityless awareness which is non-changing in itselfbut which mirrors all mental activity or qualia: thought, sensation,mem ory, emo tion, and m oo d. If we examine representative mo dernshort fiction by James Joyce, Raymond Carver, Kate Chopin, JorgeLuis Borges, and others, we find that epiphanic mom ents experiencedby characters or the preclosural points experienced by the readerderive from a level of consciousness associated with a transcen-dence oft ime,place, and culture. Posthuman techn ology attem pts tosimulate these experiences on a mechanical/electronic basis thro ug h telepresence, or virtual presence in cybe rspace . A rguably, thetranscendence of spatial/temporal boundaries constitutes the coreof human nature, as described for instance by Vedic l iterature andIndian literary theory.

Yohanan Grinshpon in risis and Know ledge describes the heartof storytell ing in terms of the healing potency of 'kno wledg e of thebetter se lf (viii). As op po se d to the lesser self, the better self is de -f ined as A tman or witnessing co nsciousness, which Grinshpon refersto as Vedic otherness (5). The experience of the better self doe s notinvolve thou gh t or com pu tation , the hallmark of the pos thum an lesserself with its emphasis on a heightened conceptua lity; rather it involvesa state of B eing, or a void in thoug ht. As M ay and L ohafer sugge st,short fiction leads to these ineffable trans-c onc eptual, trans-linguisticmoments of Beingthereby invoking a taste of the core of humannature. In contrast, the posthu m an by definition m ilitates aga inst thebetter self in its quest for the empirical advantages of kno wle dge-based electronics (Clark 34)extreme forms of cognitive activityenhanced by technological mergers. In short prose narratives, theknow ledge and skil l in action a ssociated w ith the lesser self serve asthe necessary context throu gh w hich awareness transcends conc ep-tuality in attaining the better self as a state of Being.

The computational responses of the mind also frustrate theattempt to overcome sol ipsism and experience a transcendentalintersubjectivitya move from the lesser to the better self. Patrick C.Hogan argues that a great deal of culture espec ially asp ects of


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Literature has a particularly prominent place in this 'management'(119).Hog an uses the term consciousnes s as if it were synon ym ouswith what in eastern thought is identified with the mind and its con-ceptual content, not with pure consciousness or consciousness be-ing aware of itself in the sense that I'm using it here. Because of themind's s ubject/object duality, Hogan claims that we cannot disprovesol ipsism,that we can never experience anything except our own ,utterly private self and that, no matter how much we would like toshare that self, we can no t (121). In other wo rds , we can never havea transpersona l, transcendental experience. Again, from an Advaitanperspective this is true only for the computational mind and not forconscious ness itself. Inde ed, as Hogan points out, In Ve dan tism,the ideal is not simply heaven, but moksa, release from the cycle ofbirth and de ath . This release is a realization that m aterial pa rticularityis maya or i llusion and that all individual sou ls are one with Brahm anor godhead. Suffering, in this view, is the result of attachment tomaya, to the illusion of particularity, prominently the particularity ofthe self [or m ind ] (136). As posthuman ism expand s, our tech nolog i-cal emphasis on the discriminating powers of the mind will reinforcesolipsism and make it increasingly difficult for cyborgs to escape theirunbearable sol i tude.

As Lohafer, May, Hogan and others have noted, l iterature, andespecially short fiction, helps us to manage solitude and even totranscend the mind into the better self. Fiction can achieve this be-cause of the close connection between the emotional effects of per-ception and imagination. While f ict ion consists only of words , thesewords stimulate the imagination, Neurobiological research tells usthat the sam e kind of brain activity oc curs in both the imagination andordinary p erception (see Kosslyn 295 ,30 1,3 25 ; and Rubin4 -46,57 -59).Because of this neurological l ink, we can experience a powerfulint imacy with others through the art of f ict ion. According to Hogan, consciousness is not an objectai part of a causal sequence involv-ing the brain. It is, rather, an existential experiencean existentialexperience that is, I susp ect, inseparable from particular b rain states,an existential experience that is correlated with ne urological patternsin every particular, bu t which stil l is not those neu rological patterns(140). Nevertheless, existential experience depends on the delicatebalance of our neurological patterns that show alarming signs ofbeing disrupted by posthuman interference. If the technologically


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WILLIAM S. HANEY II 163

as a resuit of a new sense of inferiority regarding his lesser self whenhe awakens from his conventional knowledge of marriage and thelimitations of his relationship to his wife , Gretta. After hearing Gretta'sstory of her dead love, Michael Furey, Gabriel realizes that what hetook for real is only a cognitive il lusion, and that a much wider real-i ty l ies beyond his conceptions of the world. In what Susan Lohaferwould call the final closure of the story (307), Gabriel's awakeningis suggested by fall ing snow that covers not only the known worldoutside their hotel window but also extends to encompass everythingelse in the m ind's eye: H is soul swoo ned slowly as he heard thesnow fall ing faintly through the universe and faintly fall ing, l ike thedescent of their last end upon all the living and the dea d ( The De ad59).The hom ogeneou s blanket of snow symbolizes the unity of Beingafter the d iscriminating activity of thoug ht has run its cou rse. At thispoint in the story, Gabriel and the reader experience a final momentof conte m plation , a suspension of all activity in a simp le identity withBeing,free of desire, thou ght, e go, self-contradiction and paradox.

In Lohafer's cognitive ap proa ch to shortfiction,the anterior, pen-ultima te, and final closural sentenc esas a sequence (308, Loha fer'semphasis) can like epiphanies be seen as a series of gaps in cogn itiveactivity through which character and reader experience an openingor clearing of awareness, a flash of truth, a subtle revelation. Unlikeknowledge about mental content involving the duality of knower andknown, this experience consists of a glimpse of being at one withpure awareness a un ity that has its basis in the void of thoug ht, notin thought itself. Through its structural sequence of closures, shortfiction is ideally suited to suspend the activity of thought, revert theeye from the lamented past and anticipated future, and focus atten-tion on the timeless present.

In tradit iona l, mo dernist and postm odernist short fict ion, epiph -anic moments and closural points open awareness to the core ofhuman nature. The content of the story combined with the aestheticstructure of its conceptual closures give the reader access to thebetter self. W e see this, for exam ple, in Kate Ch op in's early m od ern -ist wo rk The Story of an Hour, in wh ich M rs. M allard, des cribed bythe narrator as affl icted with heart trouble, dies of an apparent heartattack when her husband sudden ly reappe ars after reportedly havingbeen kil led in a train ac cident.


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The revelation here emerges in the implicit gap between the lesserand better selves. That is, our mythic e ncounter w ith the better self,imp lied in Mrs. Mallard's feeling "Free Bod y and sou l free " (262),eme rges from our com m on sense of innate unbo unde dnes s beyondspace, time, and causality. As construed today by the receptivereader, the double irony of Chopin's "Story of an Hour" is that Mrs.Ma llard's death has a twin cause: not only is she stricken by the returnof her hus ban d and the fetters of marriage; she has also failed to l ivefreely within social boundaries. The story sugges ts that the material-ism of the natural human conditionwhich unlike the materialism ofradical posthumanism is not inevitable or inescapableposes nophysical barrier to psychic freedom. Despite Hogan's emphasis, asnoted above, on the unbearable sol i tude of "consciousness," oursacred and profane selves go hand in hand. In a posthuman age,however, with natural-born cyborgs subjugated to technologicalmergers invading ever more abstract regions of inner space, to es-cape material ism in the form of conce ptual bounda ries will be com eincreasingly problema tic. Under these circumstance s, as discussedbelow, we may find it truly difficult to share existential experiencebey ond the purely physical sensations induced by simu lated stimu-lations, as disturbingly depicted by Will iam Gibson; or we may evenfind it impossible thanks to a constitutional prohibition against thebetter self, as described by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It is reasonab le to expect, therefore , that short fiction w ith cyb orgcharacters will exhibit a decline in mythic encounters w ith the sac red.Moreover, as readers in general undergo the transformation of selfthat Clark prescribes for natural-born cyborgs, they will also suffer agradua lly d iminished aptitude for aesthetic expe rience or the sublime .In "Harrison Bergeron," Vonnegut speculates on a future society inwhich conformity is enforced upon anyone with exceptional abil it iesby the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. In this society,"Nobo dy w as better looking than anybo dy else. Nobo dy was strongeror quicker than anybody else" (4)an equali ty decreed by Amend-ments to the Co nstitution. Geo rge and Hazel Berge ron's 14 -year-old-son,Ha rrison, is arrested by agents of the US Ha ndicap per Generalfor being exceptional. Also highly intell igent, George the father hasto wear a "handicap radio in his ear" which regularly emits a sharpnoise to preclude his brain's ever giving him an unfair advantage.Harrison finally escapes, discards his handicapper impediments and


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W I L L I M S. H N E Y II 5 5a society that frustrates any move toward the better self. The sameoften applies in the short fiction of W ill iam G ibson , whose charactersare often cyborgs of more invasive mergers. In Gibso n's story Bu rn-ing Chrom e, Bobb y Quine and Automatic Jack, two ace hackers,break through the Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) ofCh rom e's da ta base to steal a fortune . Jack then tries to help Tiger,their cyborg girlfriend, by giving her money so she can stop workingat the H ouse of Blue Lights. At the e nd of the story. Jack speculateson Tiger's posthuman condit ion:

working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, whileher body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business.The customers never got to com plain that she was faking it, becausethose orgasms were real.But she felt them , if she felt them at all, asfaint silver flares somew here on the edge of sleep. (191)Tiger's neuroelectronics enable the customers to have it both ways,n eeding som eone and wanting to be alone at the same time (191).But at what cost? Tiger and her customers have been reduced topseudo-sentient posthumans. Rather than wanting to escape theunbearable solitude of their posthuman condition, they relish in theparticularity of selfish des ires, unaware of what they 're m issing. Be-ing displace d from the sacredness of existential experience not onlyprecludes genuine fulfi l lment, but also reinforces solitude and thecraving for ever more sensational forms of physical indulgence tointensify the illusion of intimacy. As Gibson 's story suggests , they canhave physical sensations without con scious aw areness, or co nsciousawareness without emotional contact, but seldom the experience ofintersubjective em pathy thro ugh co ntact with their better selves. Thisdimension of human nature has lost its appeal and is in peril of beingphased out by electronic replacements.

As suggested by the short fiction d iscussed he re, the e xperienceof an inner space, commensurate with the emergence of the betterself, or the core of human nature, does not depend on biologicalenhancement through electronic mergers. In fact, it is reasonableto assume that any artificial inducement through what Mark Weisercalls ubiqu itous co m pu ting (94-110) wo uld probably result in atransformation of the self away from human nature's innate capacityfor transcen denc e or a void in though t. This assump tion is further cor-roborated by Clark's biased and patently false assertion that the ideaof 'm ind as spirit-stuff' is no longer scientifically respe ctab le (43) a


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and W e dom ains into the material ist, third-person It dom ain(Wilber 67)apparently the ult imate and p ossibly pos thumo us goalof the posthuman condit ion.William S . Haney IIProfessor of EnglishAmerican University of SharjahUnited Arab Emirates

Works itedArtaud, Anton in . The Theater and Its D oub le. Trans. Mary C .Richards.

New York : Grove , 1958 .Burns, J ean E. Vol i t ion and Physical Laws. The Journal o f Conscious-ness Studies: Controversies in Science and the Humanities 6 . 1 0( 1 9 9 9 ) : 27 -47 .Chalmers, David J .The C onscious Mind: In Search o f a Fundamental

Theory. Oxfo rd & New York : Oxford U P1 9 9 6.Chopin , K ate. The Story o fan H our. The N orton Antholog y o f Short Fic-tion. Sixth Edit ion. Ed. R.V Cassil l and Rich ard Ba usch . New York& London: Norton, 2000.Clark, Andy. N atural-B o rn C ybo rgs: M inds Technolog ies and the Futureo f Human Intelligence. Oxfo rd & New York : Oxford UP 2003.Forman, Robert K.C., ed. The Innate C apac ity: Mysticism Psychologyand Philosophy. New York &Ox ford : Oxford UP, 1 9 9 8 .Fukuyama, Francis. Ou r P osthuman C ondition: C onsequ ences o f theBiotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, 2 002 .Gibson, Wi l l iam. Burn ing Chro me. Burning Chrome. New York : Ace,

1 9 8 7 .Ginshpon, Yohanan.Crisis and Know ledge: The U panishadic E xp erienceand Storytelling. New Delhi : Ox ford UP, 2 003 .Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens

and Others inPopular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UR 2 002 .Haraway, Donna. Simians C ybo rgs and Women: the Reinvention o f


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Hogan, Patrick C, Literature, God, and the Unbearable So litude ofConsciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11,5 (2004)'116-142.Joyce, James, The Dead , James Joyce: TheDead. Ed, Daniel R,Schwarz, Boston & New York: Bedford, 1994,Kosslyn,Stephen,Image and B rain:The Reso lution of the Imagery De-bate.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994,Lohafer, Susan , and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds.Short Story TheoryataCross-roads.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UR 1989,Lohafer, Susan, A Cognitive Approach to Storyness, The New S hort

StoryTheories. Ed, Charles E, May, Athens , Ohio: OhioUP,1994,May, Charles E. The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction , The NewShort StoryTheories.Ed, Charles E. May, Athens, Ohio: Ohio UR1994,Pepperell,Robert,The PosthumanCondition:Consciousness eyond theBrain.Bristol, UK, Portland, OR: Intellect, 2003,Pinker, Steven,TheB lank Slate.London : Penguin, 2002,Rubin, David,Memory in OralTradition:The Cognitive Psychologyof EpicBallads and Counting-outRhymes.New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1995,Vonnegut Jr,, Kurt, Harrison Bergeron, The WorldTreasuryof ScienceFiction.Ed, By David G, Hartwell, Boston, Toronto, London: LittleBrown,1989,Weiser, Mark, The Computer for the21^'Century, Scientific Am erican.September, 1991:94-110,Wilber, Ken. Integral Psychology: Consciousness Spirit PsychologyTherapy. Boston & Lon don: Shambala, 2000,


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Cyborgs, Posthumanism and Short Fiction - Hayne Williams

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