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  • 标题:Enter the [begin strikethrough]Post[end strikethrough]human.
  • 作者:Wilson, D. Harlan
  • 期刊名称:Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
  • 印刷版ISSN:0897-0521
  • 出版年度:2011
  • 期号:January
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts
  • 摘要:In this rigorous and sophisticated analysis, Anthony Miccoli explores the relationship between humanity and technology, providing an informed history of posthuman studies and charting new territory. As a starting point, he calls upon a range of twentieth-century theoretical bigwigs--e.g., Hayles, Haraway, Freud, Lyotard, Heidegger--all of whom, to varying degrees, have investigated technological implications and affect. Miccoli uses the critical momentum of these figures to develop his own ideas, sometimes dishing out scathing critiques (especially of Hayles). In addition to theory, he scrutinizes literature and cinema; primary texts include Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), DeLillo's White Noise (1985), and Spielberg's A.I. (2001). Given the subject matter, I expected more analyses of hard science fiction and postcyberpunk. As Miccoli asserts in his preface, however, he is not as interested in extrapolated, futuristic visions/versions of technology but in how technology manifests in contemporary reality. It is from this angle of incidence that he establishes a theory of posthuman suffering, which "is not only a theoretical issue, it happens on a daily basis, to 'regular' people" (x). Miccoli wants readers to become more acutely familiar with their relationship to technology. Deploying Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987) as a centerpiece for his argument, he writes:
        I am asking my readers to become critically aware of their own uses    of technology, and how those technological artifacts simultaneously    augment and diminish our agency ... in the "real world." ...    Scarry's contention that technological artifacts are "expressions"    of pain provide the rhetorical backbone of the text, and make    possible my own contention that we create technological artifacts    so that the "lifeworld".... can suffer with us. (xi) 
  • 关键词:Books

Enter the [begin strikethrough]Post[end strikethrough]human.


Wilson, D. Harlan


Miccoli, Anthony. Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010. xi + 142 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-07391-2633-2. $60.00.

In this rigorous and sophisticated analysis, Anthony Miccoli explores the relationship between humanity and technology, providing an informed history of posthuman studies and charting new territory. As a starting point, he calls upon a range of twentieth-century theoretical bigwigs--e.g., Hayles, Haraway, Freud, Lyotard, Heidegger--all of whom, to varying degrees, have investigated technological implications and affect. Miccoli uses the critical momentum of these figures to develop his own ideas, sometimes dishing out scathing critiques (especially of Hayles). In addition to theory, he scrutinizes literature and cinema; primary texts include Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), DeLillo's White Noise (1985), and Spielberg's A.I. (2001). Given the subject matter, I expected more analyses of hard science fiction and postcyberpunk. As Miccoli asserts in his preface, however, he is not as interested in extrapolated, futuristic visions/versions of technology but in how technology manifests in contemporary reality. It is from this angle of incidence that he establishes a theory of posthuman suffering, which "is not only a theoretical issue, it happens on a daily basis, to 'regular' people" (x). Miccoli wants readers to become more acutely familiar with their relationship to technology. Deploying Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987) as a centerpiece for his argument, he writes:
   I am asking my readers to become critically aware of their own uses
   of technology, and how those technological artifacts simultaneously
   augment and diminish our agency ... in the "real world." ...
   Scarry's contention that technological artifacts are "expressions"
   of pain provide the rhetorical backbone of the text, and make
   possible my own contention that we create technological artifacts
   so that the "lifeworld".... can suffer with us. (xi)


With this in mind, Miccoli contends that posthuman studies has fallen short by not paying more attention to the actual, visceral experience of technological subjectivity and mediatized bodies. Ironically, perhaps, Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace will not resonate with all "regular" people: the book speaks to veteran scholars of posthumanism and postmodernity.

The introduction, "Posthuman Assumptions and the Technological Embrace," builds upon the ideas developed in the short preface. Under exclusive inspection are the ideas of Hayles and Scarry. Miccoli rightly targets Hayles as a nuclear point of reference, itemizing her posthuman views as described in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), and then destabilizing those views, claiming that "Hayles' 'informed posthuman' sets up a model for human beings which is, at best, problematic" (7). Miccoli critiques her on many counts, but mainly he sees a fundamental disconnect with her understanding of the role of technology. Hayles perceives the technological not so much as an extension (and inscriber) of the body and selfhood, but as a bona fide other that we must both embrace and temper so as not to lose our identity in the maelstrom of blip culture and machinic desire. The problem is both ontological and epistemological. "The fully posthuman individual," Miccoli writes, "would not dream of an awareness of his/her connection--his/her interface--to the machine, the posthuman would not dream of a connection at all; because the direct connection to a technological system would be so intrinsic that the most basic self/other relationship would be non-existent" (8). Hayles's variety of posthumanism deemphasizes the visceral human subject. Miccoli turns to The Body in Pain, published over a decade earlier than How We Became Posthuman, in an attempt to correct this defect, foregrounding Scarry's thesis that physical pain, above all, is the dominant human characteristic.

Before proceeding, I want to address a point Miccoli makes regarding the human subject, visceral or otherwise. He states: "When we strip away all layers of technology, all objects that came to be through human artifice, we are left only with the human. Thus we must return to the human, and the human's most basic wants and needs, in order to understand the posthuman" (8). This statement appears to be at odds with a key assertion Miccoli makes later in the book because it suggests that the human and the technological can be detached. As I hypothesize in Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction (2009), the human is only human by way of technology, particularly if we consider technology as any cultural extension of the body, whether it be lo-tech (e.g., speech and writing) or hi-tech (e.g., computers and AK-47s), in which case the technological other is essentially the self. Consequently, posthumanism is just a fancy term for the electronically technologized human (as opposed to the mere technological/human). Technology has always been a central and "natural" component of humanity. This is precisely what Miccoli says in chapter 3:
   The connection I am speaking of here requires us to begin where the
   assumptions of critical posthumanism end. If we begin with the
   assumption that technology is an intrinsic aspect of human
   ontology--that an integral part of our humanity is to take in the
   world (and itself) technologically, regardless of the time period
   or level of technological advancement we have reached--we can
   better address some of the deeper issues that posthumanism raises.
   If we look at technology as the process by which [we] negotiate the
   boundary between self and other, we will be better able to
   understand our humanity in a world where the objects of technology
   seem to be eroding our human efficacy. (62)


Prior to this passage, Miccoli seems to waver on the subject, reticent about its feasibility. Perhaps it took him half of Posthuman Suffering to come to the realization. Whatever the case, while I disagree with the notion that technology should be perceived/theorized as a kind of liminal machination and mediator between self and other, this theory does in fact work, and Miccoli effectively applies it in the wake of its articulation.

Chapter 1 evaluates Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985), a crucial posthuman text that Miccoli favors considerably over How We Became Posthuman. "Haraway, in a more politically aware mode, anticipates many of the posthuman aspects which Hayles puts forth twenty years later" (18). The chapter's title, however, "Inside Out and Prayers for Recognition: Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto' and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49," contains a rather glaring typo: Pynchon's novel is not discussed until the subsequent chapter. At any rate, whereas Haraway anticipates Hayles (in terms of the fluidity and permeability of information vis-a-vis the mind/body apparatus), Miccoli still finds her cyborg theory problematic insofar as it advocates a certain technological compulsion:
   Haraway reclaims the technological systems which might otherwise be
   used further to marginalize already-oppressed voices. In so doing,
   however, she has implied a need for technology both to overcome the
   already-present power structure inherent in the western subject,
   and to reach what amounts to the true potential of the re-coded,
   cyborg (posthuman) self. This need becomes more pronounced as
   Haraway claims that the cyborg is capable of re-envisioning
   fundamental epistemological boundaries. (23)


The inherent message is that the self has expired and the technological other is the only means of salvaging the residue of "humanity," which has become supplemental to technology in the age of information, mediablitz, hyperreality, futureshock, etc. In other words, humanity, "when held to technological standards, is ... already the technological other" and hence "already obsolete" (24). This is according to both Haraway and Hayles. Miccoli invokes Scarry, then, to show that the technological does not condemn the human to obsolescence. Rather, it functions as an extension of the human that retroactively (re)defines selfhood. And the act of extension, for Scarry, is violent. Through the medium of technologically induced pain, we do not lose ourselves; we become more whole and more in touch with the other. After all, Miccoli admits, selfhood has always been intimately connected to technology, "a part of our collective experience since the first homo sapiens fashioned tools" (24), and arguably before that: the faintest communicative squeak or grunt designates a (lo-tech) act of extension.

Miccoli scaffolds his argument by pitting Hayles against Haraway, championing the latter, and then trumping both of them with Scarry. In chapter 2, "The Crying of Lot 49 and Posthuman Subjectivity: Conditional Humanity," he demonstrates how "it is through narrative that our 'posthuman condition' will be most effectively illustrated" (30). Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is a kind of proto-posthuman figure. Set in the fictional San Narciso, California, a name that reflects both psychological and physical terrain, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is a postmodern quest narrative in which Oedipa, charged as the executor of an ex-lover's will, attempts to unearth truths about her own identity in tandem with an elusive technological world. In simplest terms, the novel is a wild postmodern goose chase at Oedipa's expense pointing to the idea that truth is an intricate, multilayered illusion. Important for Miccoli is how the novel denotes
   a key gap in early posthumanist discourse by presenting a character
   who remains in a constant state of reserve until she can find the
   right apparatus to begin her "quest." The story of Oedipa Maas is
   literally the story of the human in early posthuman discourse--the
   human who is aware that the opportunity for an expanded "embodied
   awareness" exists, but cannot find the right means to achieve it.
   (34)


Hence, Oedipa's humanity is dependent upon technology (i.e., an "apparatus") in order for her to embrace an epistemology of selfhood, even if that epistemology is chronically flawed, or at least deferred and redirected.

Miccoli uses The Crying of Lot 49 to enumerate what he believes are posthumanism's chief components: feelings of (mediational) inadequacy, "viewing the body as a prosthesis" (37), and "viewing consciousness itself as an epiphenomenon" (39). The novel also points to the "ultimate goal of the posthuman--to be compatible with the world. To know that the external world can know our pain as humans. To know that the external world can suffer with us" (47). This goal must be achieved by interacting with the technology of information (namely electronic media) that we have extended into the world around us. Information "informs" our selfhoods, but it also threatens to erode and erase the self, at least as conceived in this fashion. The self and the world both suffer, and according to Miccoli's posthumanism, that's the way it should be, because that's what we want.

As with the human (i.e., the "pre-posthuman"), desire thus functions as the posthuman engine. Unlike Hayles and Haraway, however, Miccoli posits that we are not yet posthuman, and what we desire is transcendence into that (impossible?) lifescape.
   While we have been told that the posthuman is already among us, it
   is more accurate to say that the desire to be posthuman is already
   among us. Although literal posthuman subjectivity implies a
   complete transcendence of humanity itself, what posthuman discourse
   is actually seeking is a perfectly technified "other" who can
   perfectly articulate the pain of the human condition. (49)



This is among the most revealing passages in Posthuman Suffering, albeit any consideration of a literal posthuman is incidental--after the inception of postmodernism, anything plugged into the prefix "post" is by default an aggressively theoretical machine. And in literal posthumanism, of course, we wouldn't be around to deliberate our condition, past, present, or future--that would be up to the technologies we leave in our dust, as is the case in A.I., which Miccoli appropriately contemplates in his conclusion (more on that in a moment).

Chapter 3, "Humanism through Technology: Situating the Subject in Hayles and Haraway," moves away from fiction to raw theory and philosophy. In contradistinction to the suggestion of the title, the chapter is less concerned with Hayles and Haraway as it is with Heidegger, Lyotard, and Freud. Invoking the Cartesian subject, Neil Badmington's article "Theorizing Posthumanism" frames this critical terrain, the most rigorous in the book. Miccoli writes:
   Badmington picks up where Hayles and Haraway leave off by directly
   engaging the humanist subject, maintaining that posthumanism is not
   a "replacement" for humanism, nor is it an opportunity to forget or
   cast off humanism all together. Instead, it is a means by which to
   re-think humanism from within. Borrowing heavily from Lyotard and
   Freud, Badminton sees posthumanism as a "working through" or
   "anamnesis" of humanism. In this manner, critical posthumanism
   becomes a method by which we can deconstruct the humanist subject
   by using the "language" that liberal humanism uses to define
   itself. (53)


Miccoli doesn't wield posthumanism as a tool for deconstruction. He explores how it might be engaged as such. Additionally, even though he seems to prefer Badmington to Hayles and Haraway, Miccoli refutes Badmington on the grounds that he "conclude[s] with the general sense that technology has become--or is becoming--a human ontology" (61). As with Hayles and Haraway, he neglects the concept that the human and the technological "other" have always-already been intimately connected.

This connection is capitalized on in the next section. Following a discussion of how Cartesian humanism anticipates some posthuman concerns and technological advances, Miccoli leaps forward to Heidegger and his essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (1954), among the most important twentieth-century philosophical investigations on the subject. In Heidegger, Miccoli finds what he's looking for: the technologically defined human, i.e., a claim that the human is contingent upon the technological "other." In this way, he is beyond posthumanism:
   Heidegger ... begins where posthumanism ends--articulating the idea
   that technology is the defining aspect of literally being human.
   Heidegger sees the essence of technology not as a separate entity
   that will enable us to understand the world better, but as an
   epistemology: technology is (and has always been) the manner in
   which we, as humans, apprehend--or "enframe"--the world. (62)


Heidegger classifies the technological as a "natural" part of the human, offering a "missed opportunity for posthumanism" (67). Half a century before Hayles, he conceives of a more realistic vision of posthumanity.

Subsequently, Miccoli measures Lyotard's The Inhuman (1992), a collection of essays presented during the 1980s that modernizes Heidegger's stance from a wider, more cosmological purview. In a sense, he departs from Heidegger, but only insofar as to reify a kind of technological absolutism: "Lyotard not only places technology as an inescapable aspect of humanity, but goes even further by stating that technology (defined as the ability to process and manipulate information) is a characteristic of biological life itself and is not uniquely human. Lyotard's 'relocation' of the human begins" (71). After Lyotard, Miccoli backtracks to Freud, "among the first to perform a posthuman maneuver of holding the human up to a technological metaphor" (83). He explains how the systems of psychoanalysis and posthumanism both desire their own disappearance and do not want to be needed. The difference is that posthumanism suffers from a willful repression, the traumatic kernel of which is increasingly unspeakable the further into the future we plunge, whereas psychoanalysis encourages interpellated subjects to locate and recognize that traumatic kernel, suffering with the external world that produced it and the internal world that harbors it.

Critical fogeys beware: as I have briefly mapped out, chronologically Miccoli jumps around a lot in chapter 3, mostly in the twentieth century. His methodology could be reviled as arbitrary and programmatic. It is certainly the latter: he selects texts that serve the needs of his argument. For me, this demonstrates an extremely well-researched and thoughtful line of flight, one that will prove invaluable to posthuman theoreticians and the future of posthuman--or rather, posthuman--studies.

In the fourth and final chapter, "White Noise: Jack Gladney and the Evasion of Responsibility," Miccoli shows how the "posthuman embrace becomes a submission to the technological other, rather than an assertion of the human" (107). By submitting/subjectifying our bodies and psyches to technology, technology (re)defines us. This is an empowering floodgate for the posthuman becoming-animal, if only in theory. We empower the technological to overpower the human in an act of externalization, projecting subjectivity onto the torrential sphere of mediatized cultural artifacts that surround us. In so doing, we "evade responsibility for being human" (119), a means of controlling oppressive economies of power. To represent this process, Miccoli reads DeLillo's seminal novel, whose protagonist "provides us with the most contemporary example of posthuman subjectivity thus far" (107).

This claim might seem surprising. White Noise (1985), after all, is not sf. On a good day we might call it very, very, very soft sf (likewise with The Crying of Lot 49). And posthuman studies has historically located itself squarely in the genre. By moving outside the genre, or to its outer limits, Miccoli exposes posthumanity as a present-day, real-world phenomenon, not something limited to futuristic diegeses, bodies and minds--precisely the goal he set for himself in his introduction. But he is not altogether inattentive to hard sf. A short conclusion reaffirms what Miccoli asserts in chapter 4 via the film A.I., a particularly apt text because, while set in the future and premised on the hard technology of the android, at its core, the film is about human emotion and family dynamics (as is virtually all of Spielberg cinema). Most important here is the function of android-protagonist David, who "represents the very human desire to see our own suffering reflected in the technological other" (127). A.I. tells the story of David's ever-increasing suffering, prompted by the desire to reclaim his family (especially the love relationship with his mother) and status as a "human" after being abandoned. In the end, he serves as a link between the human (now extinct) and the technological (evolved A.I.s for whom David signifies the last vestige of their makers). Containing elements of human self and technological other, David emerges as the embodiment of the Miccolian posthuman.

Posthuman Suffering comes to a close with an epilogue, "Concluding Humanity," that asks readers to take responsibility for technological empowerment. Moreover, it underscores the rethinking of posthuman studies that Miccoli calls for throughout the book:
   Posthumanism has the potential to be a discourse that can more
   fully address the power structure inherent in humanity's
   relationship with technology, but only if it acknowledges the
   ontological and epistemological connection between humanity and
   technology that has always been present. Failure to do so renders
   us blind to the reasons why we empower technology in the first
   place, and makes us vulnerable to our own fear that technology is
   already superior to us.... It is not simply a question of taking
   responsibility for the boundary between ourselves and technology;
   we must take responsibility for its creation. (132-33)


Such politically charged rhetoric doesn't work for me, but the point is clear, and it will no doubt resonate with others. Likewise with Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace itself. I suspect (and hope) it will meet with a wide berth of critical acclaim and skepticism. That's exactly what a successful work of theory should do. Miccoli has written a book worthy of close attention and capable of leading posthuman studies down new pathways.
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