Stephen L. Hood & Glenn Wm. Shuck, Rice University Cybernetic Laughter: An Exploration of the Ethical in the Construction of Post (Humanity)

Heterological Bodies and The Challenges of Post (humanity)

New technologies, especially those involving computers and experiments with artificial life, have challenged how one constructs identity, and, by default, the embodied aspect of the modernist subject.² While some contemporary commentators have extolled these developments, suggesting a transcendence of the human condition, others have condemned them in a nostalgic, reactionary sense, clinging to a version of subjectivity that never existed.³ Less common though more auspicious, however, has been a move to problematize these trends as offering a myriad of possibilities for the re-formation of the human and inviting a hope of overcoming traditionally patriarchal forms of dualism-the separation between the immaterial mind and the material body that has resulted in a pattern of human domination over nature and other humans.

In this essay we take on an implicit challenge raised by Kathryn Hayles in her text, How We Became Posthuman, that we have arrived at a discursive moment in which humanism succumbs to a new form of transcendence, cybernetics; we are supposedly moving beyond the human birthed by the Cartesian matrix to a kind of pseudo-subjectivity whose agency and freedom are as virtual as the technologies that implicate them. Hayles preserves the complexity of this problem in an historical analysis that covers the development of cybernetic technologies and their reflections in recent cyberpunk fiction. She writes, "The best possible time to contest for what the posthuman means is now, before the trains of thought that it embodies have been laid down so firmly that it would take dynamite to change them."⁴ Although Hayles elsewhere suggests that "pattern tends to overwhelm presence, leading to a construction of immateriality that depends not on spirituality or even consciousness but only on information,"⁵ she recognizes that the phenomenological body cannot be replaced or replicated by the virtual, whether it encodes all of the proper information or not:

Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being in the world [...] Embodiment can be destroyed, but it cannot be replicated [...] As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced.⁶

We interpret Hayles' challenge as an ethical one, a call to evaluate the deployments of the so-called post (human) utilizing, ironically, those elements of subjectivity called into question by many commentators of the phenomenon-moral agency and the phenomenological body. Ethics, in this sense, becomes much more than a prescription for proper action. It becomes a call, reflecting the work of the twentieth century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for a construction of subjectivity that retains the radical difference of the "other," while still fostering what Edith Wyschogrod terms heterological communities, or pluralistic spaces in which the care of the "other" includes a respect for his or her uniqueness and particularity.⁷ Levinas writes:

A calling into question of the same-which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same-is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics.⁸

Within these heterological spaces, one responds to the needs of the other because of his or her difference, rather than filiation or sameness. Finally, we seek to retain the contingency, anxiety, and risk of being human.

The Gibson Continuum: Negotiating The Cyber-Subject

One finds these ethical dilemmas in William Gibson's Neuromancer, a novel in which Gibson constructs a technological utopia/dystopia in a not-so-distant future. Gibson narrates the action through the exploits of a down-and-out "cyber-cowboy" named Case. Case, a hacker by trade, could once "jack-in" to the disembodied realm of cyberspace at will, but lost this ability when he double-crossed a former employer. The novel opens with him languishing in the seemingly hyperreal environs of Chiba City, a dark realm of constant danger and rapidly changing appearances. But despite his destitute condition he still has value, at least to a powerful, renegade artificial intelligence known simply as Wintermute. Wintermute, with the assistance of his two hirelings Armitage and Molly, has Case surgically repaired, allowing the latter to once again gain employ as a cyber-hacker. Case's task for Wintermute involves a risky assault on a multinational enterprise housing another powerful artificial intelligence, the Tessier-Ashpool Corporation.

Dixie Flatliner, so named because of an accident suffered in cyberspace, assists Case as a construct. A construct is nothing more than a pattern of data, the disembodied remains of the hacker's personality. The Flatline, as the protagonists call him, remembers something about humanity, what humans do, but he cannot himself emulate their affectivity. When he attempts humor, his uncanny laughter unsettles Case, who, as we read in the opening quote, begs him to stop. In the end, all The Flatline seeks is death.

Case and The Flatline break into the Tessier-Ashpool headquarters, and there, within the cyber-realm, Case meets the artificial intelligence, Neuromancer, who is a sibling of the renegade Wintermute. Neuromancer, attempting to stop the intrusions of Wintermute, offers Case a tempting choice, a vision of technological immortality that includes a reunion with a lost lover:

'I call up the dead. But no, my friend,' and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land.' He laughed. A gull cried. 'Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you.'⁹

Case resists the offer, although the reader intuits that it is by no means an easy choice. His work on behalf of Wintermute continues, until the latter merges with Neuromancer forming a new, even more powerful cyber-entity simply known as Matrix. As the novel concludes, Case "jacks-in" to cyberspace, looks across the expanse, and sees his old lover, Linda, but he also hears "the laugh that wasn't laughter." They are somewhere and nowhere, the constructs of Linda and The Flatline, a non-place that is not quite heaven, and not quite human.

Gibson's stance is thus more nuanced than many critics argue. Although his depiction of the future outside cyberspace appears quite dark, he does not simply propose a technological utopia superior to embodied space, nor does he valorize the body at the expense of the hyperreal. Rather, Gibson problematizes these concepts, demonstrating that our world is already a blending of the two, neither inherently superior to the other, but each able to do something the other cannot.¹⁰ Significantly, the seeming paradise of Neuromancer's hyperreality is not Edenic. Further, as Hayles points out, when the body dies, it cannot be replaced. The negotiations that characterize the post (human) involve an inevitable trade-off.¹¹

Scott Bukatman, in his Terminal Identity, despite recognizing that Gibson's text "remains a consequential bricolage that moves us further from Edenic fantasies of essentialism,"¹² reads Neuromancer less generously. He writes:

Clearly it is the patriarchal ideology that is simplistic here-even within Gibson's finely wrought labyrinth there still remains some notion of an essential humanity untainted by the electronic condition of being. In the writing of more politically sophisticated writers, on the other hand, the body is always already in crisis.¹³

Bukatman levies the charge that Gibson's protagonists, often dubbed "cyber-cowboys," evidence a kind of castration anxiety and misogynistic fear of the feminine.¹⁴ Ultimately, Bukatman charges Gibson with many of post-modernity's most potent bugaboos: patriarchal tendencies, misogyny, essentialism, romanticism for a lost form of subjectivity, and political naïveté. In contrast to Gibson, Bukatman prefers writers he considers more politically sophisticated who eschew violence and dominance in favor of a kind of negotiated solution with the technological. Bukatman overlooks critical elements, however: Neuromancer is not simply a glorification of the Arnold Schwarzeneggar-style cyber-cowboy, but a problematization of the ethical conumdrum located at the intersection joining the cyberrealm to the human body. Gibson does not privilege the hyperreal over the so-called "meat space." The Flatliner begs Case for termination; and, for his part, Case recognizes, despite his enthusiasm for the possibilities of the virtual, that "meat space" has certain advantages. When shown a vision of technological immortality, Case rejects it, just as he winces at the phony laughter of the construct. In spite of its obvious flaws-pain, illness, and ultimately decay and death-the body of "meat space" enables certain activities and affections that do not translate into the virtual. The affectivity of laughter, the exhilaration of risk, and the joy of accomplishment are all embodied sensations for Case.

The textual constructions of William Gibson, despite the doubts of critics like Bukatman, indeed problematize the body. Gibson's characters, at least those who exist in "meat space," augment themselves through a series of modifications. These alterations may involve the surgical implantation of prostheses, weapons, computer chips, or even the interface required to "jack-in" to cyberspace. The Gibsonian body thus presents itself as an active site for the negotiation and emergence of a hybrid, technologized body. This construction of hybridity, however, retains a sense of agency, allowing the human elements to act in concert with the technological ones. Bukatman appears correct, however, in his assessment that Gibson portrays these developments in a somewhat negative light. But it seems Gibson's difficulty lies less with the human/technological interface than his implicit concern that contemporary patterns of inequality will accelerate, not improve, in the cyber-age. Tiger, a character in Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome," evokes pity from the other protagonists because his optical prosthetic is the defective Sendais, not the pricier and safer Carl Zeiss model.¹⁵ Indeed, given sufficient funds, one can make all sorts of valuable modifications, enabling the subject to function within the powerful realm of cyberspace.

This latter issue, which calls into question the role of global capital in information technologies, is an interesting one vis-à-vis Bukatman's interpretation, given his critique of Gibson's "political naïveté." Bukatman prefers instead an analysis of the aesthetic and sensual aspects of virtuality. He writes:

A standing joke about cyberspace is that in an era of ATMs and global banking, cyberspace is where your money is. So cyberspace is a financial space, a space of capital.¹⁶

But he quickly adds:

It is a social space; it is responsive; it can be modified; it is a place of testing and the arena for new technological rites of passage.¹⁷

Bukatman, however, does not tell us to whom it responds, who can modify it, and who tests the "new technological rites." In short, Bukatman seemingly minimizes the role of global capital in the construction and transmission of knowledge and information in contemporary culture.

'O Donna: The Post (Human) in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Bukatman's politically charged reading of Gibson suggests the influence of Donna Haraway, whose oft-cited "Cyborg Manifesto" describes the predominant cultural Geist of late capitalism as an "informatics of domination," an ethos emerging alongside, and perhaps exacerbated by, the rise of multinational corporate power in the post-industrial world. Haraway's primary agenda is feminist, specifically an effort to create a language for feminism that "weaves" the various strands of feminist discourse together without totalizing, and thereby implicates the more general issue of the possible emergence of the post (human).

While we generally agree with Haraway's enterprise of problematizing the body and drawing attention to the ethical concerns presented by the cyberrealm, we disagree that her valorizing cyborg myth or poetics overcomes the mind/body dualism that tries to stifle the noise of the body. Haraway contends, "A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end,"¹⁸ arguing, falsely in our view, that the human-as-cyborg is an intersection of social processes that do not function in a binary either/or, mind/body manner. Haraway writes:

Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.¹⁹

Seduced by the new science, Haraway fails to notice that, in the words of Stephen A. Tyler:

Cyborg consciousness is not new. It is merely the working out of themes and ideas already available, not just in the textual tradition, as Gadamer might say, but of what is already possible within the form of consciousness facilitated by the Cartesian matrix, which is, after all, the source and means of the computer itself. Just as the network is the idea of the matrix projected outward onto the social body, the computer is the idea of the matrix introjected into the mind as the body of thought.²⁰

Further, Haraway opens herself to the charge of materialism, defined here as the belief that all that we consider human, including consciousness and the affective sensibilities in their particular instantiations, can be replicated if not codified in terms of scientific quantification and extension, a kind of reductionism that intensifies during the post-Renaissance boom of scientism but emerges in ancient Greece.

Haraway seems to anticipate this criticism when she suggests the cyborg is implicated by writing; the transition from orality to literacy is, after all, the pivotal moment in Greek civilization, the transition that engenders the constitution of the abstraction known as language but also allows for the recording of speech acts and the subsequent codification and quantification of differences. She writes:

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.²¹

Haraway's discussion of Cyborg writing appears to differ from what French theorist Michel de Certeau refers to as the tactic, a means of operation, necessarily limited, available to the marginalized. He writes:

It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of "opportunities" and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep.²²

Practitioners of the tactic must continuously struggle to write their environs, a process that remains under constant erasure as the strategies of the politically powerful override and quickly re-code marginal scribblings. But these acts of resistance, or poaching, are possible because the tactician operates within the space of the other, disrupting the transmissions. The tactician does not possess sufficient power to permanently re-write or etch codes, but can nevertheless open alternative, mobile spaces in which one can resist commodification and consumer fetishism, even if this process remains precarious and fragile. These limited practices of resistance, however, are made possible because critical aspects of the human condition resist coding and the machine logic of replicability; that is, they remain heterological, always other, albeit slightly, vis-à-vis their environments. The tactician resides in the space of the other, but its uniqueness sets it apart. It cannot, in other words, become absorbed by the dominant material codes. Haraway's Cyborg, by contrast, itself a product in toto of material-mechanical codes, would seem unable to execute de Certeau's tactics of resistance, much less construct the kind of ironic utopia of technological deliverance Haraway describes.

Haraway thus proves exceedingly optimistic concerning the Cyborg's potential efficacy within the dynamics of global capital exchange:

The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.²³

She dismisses the problem of continued inequality in the cyberrealm with a narrative that suggests the technological age will present an opportunity to re-organ-ize the power structures of the piston-driven social machinations. Her optimism here is little more than a recapitulation of the Platonic utopia wherein all citizens are, as far as social relations are concerned, parentless, the hope being that obscured origins will engender generic equality and ubiquitous altruism. But it seems unlikely the human-technological interface will, by virtue of its existence, undermine received forms of domination, and especially the domination structured by the Cartesian matrix. If all reality were reducible to information, then one would have to concede that even information, like any commodity, would be divided among the information elite, the peon networkers, and the disenfranchised cyber-drones who would live parasitic lives hacking into networks, harassing the elite. There is an inevitable Hegelian seduction to all this: The facade of the information elite would be the server, suggesting slave, and the supposed democratization of knowledge via the network would seem to render the populous a master of the game. But as with Oedipus, what was thought to be willed is the illusion, and the mastery of cybernetic illusions becomes the illusion of informatic mastery.

Coitus Interruptus: Challenging The Ethics of The Post (human)

So where does this leave us? Clearly, we resist notions of irrational, utopian schemes, a kind of updated Neo-Platonism rendered hip. We also recognize, like Scott Bukatman, the perils of instrumental reason run amok. Our disagreements with Bukatman, Haraway, and Hayles do not center on how they present the problem, but in the tentative answers they offer. All call into question an ethically active subject capable of resisting the advances of global capital. Moreover, Kathryn Hayles views the active subject as bent on mastery and domination. Hayles posits valorization of conscious agency as a desire to be free of the "contamination" of machines and the technological.²⁴ This need not be the case, however. One must draw a distinction between an ethical subject capable of responsibility and volition, and one that insists on the alleged sanctity of the biologically human. Hayles writes:

In the posthuman view, by contrast, conscious agency has never been "in control." In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted. Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures.²⁵

Conscious agency may not "be in control," but it plays a vital role in what it means to be human, or even post (human). For example, although our attendance at this conference was made possible by a number of factors outside our control, including a travel grant from the university, safe passage provided by Lufthansa, and, most importantly, the time and energy of the organizers, we still chose to come. We could have chosen otherwise, but we did not. This may not seem like much, but it is at the heart of our interactions with the technological.

We are not simply, in other words, "chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism," as Donna Haraway puts it, we are already much more.²⁶ Our relationship to the technological is not one of mastery, but neither is the reverse true. For although the technological occasionally resembles a kind of Kantian sublime, untamed and mysterious, we are not exactly predictable, either. As the artificial intelligence Wintermute laments in Neuromancer, human behavior is somewhat mercurial and unreliable, making it difficult if not impossible to quantify, digitize, or otherwise encode. Moreover, the Dixie Flatliner, despite benefiting from powerful computations, cannot emulate the simplest of human affects: laughter. In sum, as Hayles suggests, what is required is an evaluation, an ethical examination of our relationships to emerging technologies. The negotiations, however, never cease. Humans have always had "others," whether biological, environmental, or technological. We never remain the same for long. Thus, the post (human)-if we can call it such-is not a quantum leap forward, but rather another in a series of adaptations, perhaps differentiated only by its speed and intensity. How this unfolds in each moment we can never completely know. More importantly, we cannot suggest that the human is simply subsumed within the technological, for to do so surrenders an ethical sensibility, and moves us back into a computerized aesthetic, an immediacy in which things simply happen to us-a pre-modern escape into a hyper-modern utopia of irresponsibility masked as a technological dream of deliverance, wherein agency dissolves in the space between "the Devil made me do it" and "God only knows."

Scott Bukatman, despite his erudition and obvious knowledge of cyperpunk and its postmodern interlocutors, could be read as accepting the predetermined ethic that the cyberrealm prescribes. He recognizes that the cyperrealm is an aesthetic space (in the Kierkegaardian sense), an eroticized domain of capital and its machinations.²⁷ The space of capital becomes the productive center of a new consumer fetish, a postmodern, electronic God. Gibson's closest approximation of the transcendent cyber-deity comes when the artificial intelligences of two powerful multinational corporations merge to form the Matrix-the womb of cyberspace itself. The result, for Gibson, is a highly eroticized zone that tempts its human partner, but nevertheless one which can be resisted. Bukatman appears to deny this possibility. He concludes his text with this pronouncement:

The texts promise and even produce a transcendence which is also always a surrender.²⁸

But is this surrender not a capitulation to contemporary conditions, a deferral of ethical responsibility in order to take pleasure in the erotic space of the virtual? We are given this, after all, as a substitute for that which we are no longer permitted to enjoy. As novelist Greg Bear suggests in Blood Music, the human, ethical space may be destroyed, but we receive the cybernetic as a consolation prize for the lost satisfaction of embodiment, a resurrection granted within the spaces of the virtual elite, producing a passive consumer subject violated by the masculine thrusts of global capital.²⁹ The only possibility still extent within Bukatman's framework is surrender. But even this surrender retains an ethical component, a temptation, a choice, a Wahl, to move back within the safe, passive, yet passionate embrace of the aesthetic. Although we cannot extricate ourselves from the technological, or "pull the plug" as media theorist Mark C. Taylor puts it,³⁰ we have an ability and responsibility to negotiate the nature of the relationship.

Notes

¹ William Gibson, Neuromancer, (Ace Books, New York, 1984), p. 169.

² By "modernist subject" we are referring to the subject of the Cartesian tradition (with Kantian modifications), which stresses an agency of pretentious totality, especially in terms of activity. While the modernist subject emphasizes consciousness and control as primary traits, our notion of subjectivity refigures these terms as symptomatic and potentially troublesome, respectively. Thus, when one speaks of the death of the subject, it is the Cartesian-Kantian subject that is moribund rather than still extant possibilities, including as purely symptomatic traces of a fleeting sense of agency, a conscious awareness of multiplicity and possibility and a recognition that this subjectivity is ceaselessly constituted by conversations with multiple others. This view positions subjectivity as an aspect of embodied humanity that cannot be known in a positive sense, but only through its affects/effects in the world.

³ Tom Valovic, Digital Mythologies: The Hidden Complexities of the Internet, (Rutgers University Press, 2000). Valovic provides a solid account of the various parties to the debate concerning virtual technologies and the effects they may have on the human dimension, although he does devote more effort to debunking exaggerated claims for the technological. Valovic, for his part, does not seem to fit neatly into either category, nor does he yet seem willing to entertain the vision of the post (human).

⁴ Kathryn Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyberspace, Literature, and Infomatics, (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 291.

⁵ Ibid., p. 35.

⁶ Ibid., p. 49.

⁷ Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others, (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

⁸ Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1961), p. 43.

⁹ Gibson, pp. 243-244.

¹⁰ Wolfgang Welsch, "Eine Doppelfigur der Gegenwart: Virtualisierung und Revalidierung," in Medien Welten Wirklichkeiten, Gianni Vattimo und Wolfgang Welsch, hrsg. (William Fink Verlag: München, 1998). Our discussion here benefits from the work of German theoretician Wolfgang Welsch. The "virtual," according to Welsch, does not undermine the "real" as much as it re-validates it by expressing its own limitations.

¹¹ See William Gibson, "The Gernsback Continuum," in Mirrorshades, Bruce Sterling, ed. (New York: Arbor House, 1986), pp. 1-11. Gibson, in his earliest of short stories, takes issue with the notion of technophilia and the exaggerated possibilities embedded in dreams of technological progress. The protagonist, besides seeing a UFO, also has a "what if" hallucination of a futuristic yet oddly Art Deco version of Tuscon, Arizona. His vision incorporates the 1930's technophilia embodied in such films as "Metropolis," and the architecture of the Empire State Building. Gibson throws into sharp relief the problems of a certain kind of hyper-rational nostalgia, a vision of the future without an ethical dimension.

¹² Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, (Duke University Press, 1993), p. 328-329.

¹³ Ibid., p. 324.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 315-316.

¹⁵ William Gibson, "Burning Chrome," in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace Books, 1986), pp. 183-184.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 156.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 156.

¹⁸ Haraway, 1991, p. 180.

¹⁹ Haraway, 1991, p 163.

²⁰ Stephen Tyler, "Vile Bodies - A Mental Machination," on-line essay (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~anth/bodies.html, 1993), p. 8.

²¹ Haraway, p. 176.

²² Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 37.

²³ Haraway, 1991, p. 151.

²⁴ It is ironic, of course, that one could argue that the category of the technological arrives in the wake of the Cartesian-Kantian subject. The contemporary subject to which Hayles appears to allude, however, is created perhaps as a result of the technological or even as product of the technological. Our explicit approach seeks to valorize neither the embodied aspect of humanity nor the reifying realm of the technological; rather, one finds that subjectivity results from on-going conversations between these and other dimensions which, contrary to the musings of many science-fiction authors such as Greg Bear in his Blood Music, cannot finally fuse.

²⁵ Hayles, p. 288.

²⁶ Haraway quoted in Bukatman, pp. 322-323.

²⁷ Bukatman writes: "The human remains reduced by this interface with a complex other space in which the world's most significant activities occur" (166). The interesting phrase "the world's most significant activities" leaves little doubt that Bukatman is alluding to global capitalism and the ubiquity of this meaningless catch phrase even at the 'village level.'

²⁸ Bukatman, p. 329.

²⁹ It would nevertheless be naïve to assume that even the compensatory ersatz of the cybernetic playspace would be available to anyone other than those already sufficiently endowed. The virtual economy it seems is not in itself a leveling space, but a space which seeks to transform all cultural activities into the language of capital.

³⁰ Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies, (Routledge: London, 1994).