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.