The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television

Michael Hauskeller, Curtis D. Carbonell, Thomas D. Philbeck, Michael Hauskeller, Curtis D. Carbonell, Thomas D. Philbeck

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137430328
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Performing Arts

What does popular culture's relationship with cyborgs, robots, vampires and zombies tell us about being human? Insightful scholarly perspectives shine a light on how film and television evince and portray the philosophical roots, the social ramifications and the future visions of a posthumanist world.

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Posthumanism in Film and Television

Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck and Curtis D. Carbonell

Cary Wolfe begins his widely known book What Is Posthumanism? (2010) by announcing the results of a Google search. He reports that at the time of his writing (summer 2008) the search word ‘humanism’ yielded 3,840,000 hits, while the word ‘posthumanism’ gave him only 60,200. Wolfe concludes from these data that, apparently, ‘humanism is alive and well’ (2010, xi). When we repeated the experiment six years later, in December 2014, ‘humanism’ came up with 9,030,000 results and ‘posthumanism’ with 294,000, which is still considerably less, but almost five times as many as six years ago. You do, however, get many more results if you search for ‘posthuman’ (3,250,000), ‘transhumanism’ (2,310,000) or even (a term that is, outside academia, little known or used) ‘transhuman’ (484,000). So even though humanism may still be alive and well today, the idea of the posthuman and what it signifies, namely the surpassing of the human condition, is rapidly catching up and has now secured a well-established place in our cultural imagination. Clearly, an evolving posthumanist narrative has taken shape in popular culture, providing a new context for what it means to be human and challenging long-held assumptions about the human condition. Yet this narrative did not arrive fully formed. It was first prophesied and then dissected in academic spheres for many years before reaching a level of diffusion large enough to impact popular consciousness.

In 1977, the literary theorist Ihab Hassan published a paper in which he envisaged the arrival of a posthumanist culture that would heal the ‘inner divisions of consciousness and the external divisions of humankind’ (1977, 833). What we need to understand, claimed Hassan, is:

That the human form – including human desire and all its external representations – may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism.

(Hassan 1977, 843)

While we ourselves change in the wake of new technological developments and possibilities, traditional boundaries between the human and the non-human, the natural and the artificial, the organic and the machinic, as well as the spiritual and the material, become increasingly brittle and unconvincing. Moreover, the way we think about our place in the world also must adapt to the changing human form. ‘Humanism’ is here understood as an outlook that stands and falls with a particular ontological condition, a particular way of being in the world that has long defined what it means to be human. However, it may no longer define us in future, or may indeed have already ceased to do so. Thus, our current human nature informs how we understand and position ourselves, that is, the humanist framework that guides our thinking and actions, so if the former changes (to something that is no longer human as we used to understand it, and thus to something posthuman), the latter must too (to a posthumanism). For Hassan, the change manifesting itself in a merging of the sciences and the arts will eventually lead to a ‘dematerialization of life and the conceptualization of existence’ (835) through the ‘expansion of human consciousness’ to the whole cosmos. Such an expansion of human consciousness is obviously an idea that is rooted in a particular kind of humanism (i.e., the conviction that our human destiny is to transform the world in our image, which is ultimately the image of God) and is echoed in current transhumanist ambitions and visions of our imminent posthuman future, popularized by Ray Kurzweil (2005, 21) and others.

There is an ambiguity here that would eventually lead to a diversification of the posthumanist discourse into incommensurable, but equally posthumanist standpoints. On the one hand, Hassan is well aware that common predictions of the impending ‘end’ of humanity, like the notorious final paragraph of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, in which Foucault contemplates the possibility that ‘man’ might ‘be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (1970, 387), are not to be taken literally. They instead invoke ‘the end of a particular image of us’, which casts us as a ‘hard Cartesian Ego’ (Hassan 1977, 845) radically distinct from the world. On the other, Hassan envisages a real change in the human condition beyond just a change of a particular image. The human species is transforming in a continuing process of becoming that Hassan aptly calls the ‘transhumanisation of the human’, as we increasingly become aware of new ‘staggering’ possibilities of evolution (1977, 849). Hassan associates those possibilities with the development of artificial intelligence (AI), prompting him to recall the supercomputer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, whom he finds ‘so strangely human, that is, at once so sinister and pathetic in every circuit and bit’ (1977, 845). Yet whatever this development will bring, whether it leads to a transformation or a replacement of the human, it is sure to alter ‘the image of man, the concept of the human’ (1977, 845).

We might not be quite there yet, but we have certainly moved considerably further towards the posthumanist culture that Hassan described. Although the early 21st century has much in common with the 1970s in terms of technological proliferation and its effects on society, our relationship with technology is quite different in important ways. Forty years ago the dominant narrative still saw technology mainly as a deterministic force working alongside humanity for good or ill. In contrast, the early 21st century has adopted the view that we are, deep down, inseparable from our technologies. We have lost our fear, or if not exactly lost it, found a way to accept the beneficial sides of this merger and its hopeful prospects. For example, we promote challenging the limits of our bodies through prosthetic and biological enhancement. We also seek to transcend our mental limitations through new arrangements and ensembles of technological devices, chemicals and knowledge resources, resulting in a distributed form of conscious engagement with the world. In the process of this transformation, we have acknowledged the challenges to the long-held foundation of Enlightenment humanism that has undergirded our views and given shape to what it means to be human.

And rightly so: the limitations of Enlightenment humanist categories are visible everywhere posthumanism spreads, from the philosophical problematic of self and agency in which technology exerts its own influence on our corporeal identities, to the political concern that affects a variety of categories, such as gender and sexuality, in both the scientific and cultural spheres. This last aspect of political posthumanism is of key importance, since modern technology has been problematizing the humanist framework for nearly two hundred years. Long-standing technological challenges to selfhood and agency, combined with the political evolution of the social sphere, have helped people accept the challenges to selfhood that technology has posed since our Pleistocene past. These two areas, technology and politics, have reciprocally buoyed each other, revealing fissures in humanism’s rigid foundations.

While critical theory and cultural studies have focused on posthumanism and its political application, the key factor in the appearance and development of posthumanism as an interdisciplinary discourse is the underlying claim that technology is the missing ingredient in Enlightenment humanism’s recipe for what constitutes being human. Modern ‘technology’ and its artefacts have exposed the ontological problems with Enlightenment humanism’s metaphysical assumptions about the human condition. Technology, or rather technoscience, provides a material means to challenge social categories. It also forces the philosophical discussion towards an inherently existential stance wherein technology plays a critical role in our constitution. Thus, posthumanism’s foundation combines the philosophy of technology with the sociological critique of science, especially how artefacts and objects influence the network of relations that define the human world. By investigating the outcomes of science and technology via the discourse of critical and philosophical posthumanism, the ontological frameworks for the constitution of technology and human beings have been foregrounded through a dissection of the natural versus cultural (artefactual) world.

Luckily, one need not be a scholar to observe how this paradigm shift is affecting humanity, since much of the narrative is reflected in Western popular culture, and perhaps, more than anywhere else, in film and television. Indeed, this collection reinforces the idea that the shift in popular consciousness is due to arts that mirror and disseminate visions of our possible futures. Such a process is, indeed, a matter of art mimicking life and life mimicking art. And technology is transforming both life and art into a new set of opportunities. The medium of moving pictures is particularly well suited to reflect this transformation, not only by providing thought experiments for possible transformations of the human, but also by creating concrete, visual representations. Screened representations translate concepts into moving images, living pictures, and thus make them immediate in a way that an abstract and thus dead (or more precisely not-yet-living) concept could never be. Here, more than anywhere else, and especially in films that belong to the science fiction (SF) genre, we find literally the image of the human transformed into images of the posthuman. As a result, we learn to see ourselves differently. We can debate endlessly about the meaning of proposed changes in the human condition, but it is the visual images and the stories that are being told with them that bring the point home. Moreover, the predictive element involved in the representations or the creative licenses taken in SF film and television series is not what is most important. Much has been made of the influence of Star Trek on the public consciousness and on technological advancement (e.g., flip phones and hypodermic injections, tricorders), but SF does much more. As leading SF studies theorist Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr writes in The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, the ludic aspect of SF film separates it from written forms as a unique and valuable mode that emphasizes ‘perception at the expense of reflection’ (2008, 11). These cinematic spectacles ask us to play with the world, with reality, to see what it can be. Through trial and error and serendipitous cross-pollination of thoughts and influences, play fuses lateral thinking and quirky recombinations, working like selection pressures in evolution to produce much debris and a few true insights into our human condition. Screened SF allows us to play with our possible selves. At the same time, however, it also demands a serious response, because what it plays with, what it enacts, is what our own lives might one day turn out to be, and it does so at a time when we are all fully aware that things are changing quickly, and that more drastic changes are likely to occur during our own lifetime, affecting what we are, how we think of ourselves and how we look at each other.

A trajectory can be charted in SF’s representation of posthumanist concepts through film and television over the last century. In SF films, early ‘posthumans’ were monsters in horror films – Frankenstein for example. Later, posthumans and transhumans were villains that challenged human society in one way or another. Even later, posthumans became ambiguous in terms of their status as moral creatures, like the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day or the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. The most recent incarnations are fantasy figures and heroes such as the X-Men’s Wolverine, Tony Stark as Ironman and Will Caster in Transcendence, who sacrifices himself for the world as a technological Christ. This trajectory from monsters to heroes is evidence of a change in social consciousness concerning what we consider acceptable posthuman attributes. Clearly, the discourse surrounding the transformation of technology’s place in our world has been with us for some time. However, the discourse on the transformation of our place in a technological world began in earnest in an atmosphere of technological determinism in the 20th century. Despite an initial optimism regarding technology’s ability to help us remodel the world (Th. Hughes 2004), we started to feel, at a pervasive social level, galvanized by the warning voices of Martin Heidegger (‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 1954/1977), Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954/1967), Günther Anders (The Obsolescence of Man, 1956) and others, that technology might get the upper hand to autonomously undermine, overpower or destroy us. Since the 1980s, with nuclear power, robotic manufacturing and the introduction of computers at the household level, many SF films of this era, such as War Games, The Terminator, RoboCop and so on, played with these difficult scenarios, framing technology as a false friend, something of which to be wary.

And some of us still are anxious, while a growing number of others see only the wonderful opportunities that a thoroughly technologized world might bring. The fear and wonder of the posthumanist turn continues in a trajectory that was once only hypothetical, being explored through the magnifying lens of SF. Yet as SF increasingly becomes reality, an amorphous future looms over our fragmented but reified identities. We clutch them as we do notions of a nation state, sovereign and inviolable, even though we know that, like a nation state, our identities are a composition of abstract concepts and/or components. In essence, they are a tradition that we participate in (Hauskeller 2009). In regard to individual identity, we use our history to contextualize ourselves. We might even say that we actually are traditions, each and every one of us reified beings that stabilize ourselves (or have learned to do so) through the retelling of our stories and the construction of behaviours. These traditions make our individual notions of self and collective notions of society function by handling the practical question of agency. Such juggling demands attention at every turn of social intercourse involving interaction with technology.

We, the protagonists of our own historical drama, have been slowly demoted from the leading role of creators and masters of technology to that of technological co-dependents and co-agents. This recasting is ongoing. Indeed, the role of slave-to-technology (or perhaps even worse, of ‘obsolete bystander’¹) is intimated as waiting just over the horizon, and technology’s role cannot be separated from the drama. Whether the objective is to transform people into cyborgs, create new biological or disembodied beings, dissolve humanist categories that reinforce biased values of gender or race, or critique our assumptions about human ‘nature’, technology is the key ingredient in the long running discourse on being human. Technology has evolved far past the Aristotelian notion of a poietic eruption, dependent on human origin, and is becoming independent, intellectually superior, self-replicating and possibly sentient. More importantly, while we are being recast as dependents, technology is being recast as a saviour that transforms us into something else entirely.

We may have never been modern, as Latour professes (1993), or we may have, as Hayles describes (1999), become posthuman decades before we realized it, but we are now, a decade and a half into the 21st century, beginning to understand our place beyond the old humanist categories. The popular narrative of the relationship between human beings and technologies has been filled with cognitive biases, blind spots and wishful thinking. We have long considered ourselves masters of technology, makers of tools and givers of purpose to inanimate material. Egocentrism, metaphysical beliefs and the resulting ontological categories distorted any other form of consideration. We have now come to accept that we are no longer the centre of the universe and (for most of us) that we are no longer the centre of the natural kingdom. Now, we are on the cusp of realizing that we are no longer the ontological rational intentional centre of the world either. We have learned to look at ourselves as one object among others, even if we can’t quite escape our subjectivity (and thus humanism). We must ask, as Bruce Mazlish does in The Fourth Discontinuity (1995), if the intersection of humans and machines is also forcing us to rethink who we are in the world. Advancing technology recontextualizes us to discover, comprehend and investigate more about the world and our own attributes. As we engage ourselves in a techno-social narrative, whereby technology and humans are increasingly integrated, the resulting ontological consequences are rewriting and recasting what being human entails. We are no longer the beings we thought we were. Maybe, as some scholars have been saying, we never were.

This handbook is intended to provide an essential resource for those interested in film and television, posthumanism and how the latter is reflected (and possibly also practised) in the former. It acknowledges that posthumanism has developed into a major intellectual force influencing our culture. It affects research agendas, economic developments, social policies, philosophical theories, and ultimately the way we look at ourselves and our world. This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the various aspects of posthumanism and how they are represented, discussed and exemplified in the cultural medium of film and television. We have not tried to impose a particular view of posthumanism on the contributors, as a wide spectrum of ideas and worldviews are all called posthumanist in academic and popular discourse.

For the purpose of this handbook, posthumanism should be understood broadly as any critical engagement with the possibility that what we have always considered to be the human condition (which is both a particular way of being in the world and a particular way of positioning ourselves in this world) is no longer a given, that it is more fluid than we once thought, and that we are free (or will soon be free, or are becoming increasingly freer) to remould our identities. Thus, the posthumanism represented in this handbook is a reflection on the malleability of the human condition. Naturally, this reflection emerges in different forms, ranging from: (a) an enthusiastic embrace of new ‘anthropo-technologies’ (Sloterdijk 2014) and the many new freedoms that they may bring us (known as popular or liberal posthumanism, or simply transhumanism), over (b) the embrace of those technologies’ potential to dissolve ossified humanist pretensions of the human and the non-human (known as critical, cultural or radical posthumanism), (c) the insistence on the ubiquity of other, non-human forms of agency, which reframes the human as just one among many players in the game that is our life, and thus strips us of the exceptionalism that once set us apart from the rest of the world (methodological posthumanism), to, finally, (d) a deep scepticism regarding the desirability of all the changes in our condition that are already taking place or are being envisaged for the near future (dystopian posthumanism, or, rather disparagingly, bioconservatism). A very useful, convincing mapping of those different strands of posthumanism on several axes has recently been proposed by Tamar Sharon (2014). There are still others, of course, for instance Jaime de Val and Stefan Sorgner’s metahumanism (2011) (which intends to bridge the gap between transhumanism and critical posthumanism), David Roden’s (2014) speculative posthumanism or Sharon’s (2014) very own mediated posthumanism. All these versions of posthumanism provide alternative takes on the same issue, which is the ongoing transformation of the human image.

Note

1.  Pieter Bonte’s term, used in a personal communication.

Part I

Paving the Way to Posthumanism: The Precursors

2

From DelGuat to ScarJo

William Brown

In this chapter, I want to offer an overview of how/why Gilles Deleuze and...