which do you think is most compatible?
Answer the BOLD question(s). Answer does not need to exceed a couple of paragraphs.
It’s got kind of a long lead-up, but bear with me.
This reading unit takes us into one of the more avant-garde areas of contemporary literary theory — the theory of the posthuman. One of the many ways to get a handle on this concept is to ponder a couple of the more profound changes in the way we think about “the human” as a distinct category:
(1) Animals vs. Machines. Think of the Garden of Eden story as a mythic definition of the human. The newly created Adam doesn’t have any conception that he’s human. According to the story, in an effort to create a companion that is “meet for him,” that is, suitable for him, God creates and presents Adam with various animals. Adam, however, does not find any of these (nonhuman) animals to be suitable as his companion. God then creates Eve, out of the same human stuff of which Adam is made (the famous “Adam’s rib”), and Adam does find Eve a “meet” companion (as he puts it, she is “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh”). Among other things, Adam (who in the story represents humankind as a whole) is finding out who he is — becoming aware of himself as a human — by way of one of the most basic means of learning: comparison and contrast. He is unlike the other animals; he is like Eve.
For our purposes here, the point is that the comparison is between the human animal, Adam, and the nonhuman animals God presents to him. “The human” as a category is understood in terms of our similarities to and differences from other animals.
Nowadays there is another method afoot for understanding “the human,” that of defining ourselves in terms of our similarities to and differences from machines (or rather, from othermachines, because in some ways organisms like ourselves can be thought of as biochemical machines). This conceptual shift makes sense, given the prominence of animals in the ancient world and of machines in the modern world. It’s no mystery that the ancient world imagined human-nonhuman animal creatures (like the centaur), while the modern world imagines human-machine creatures (like Star Trek‘s Data and the many other robots and cyborgs of science fiction). On Star Trek, “the human” as a category is understood in terms of our similarities to and differences from other machines.
(2) Complex networks. This is basically Donna Haraway’s hugely influential idea of the cyborg. In place of the “Cartesian subject” (or the similar “liberal subject”*) which conceives of the human as a distinct, isolated, rational, independently thinking entity, Haraway’s “cyborg” is what she calls “a node in a network.” In this view, we are defined by our relationships with everything to which we are connected — by the ways in which we create our world and are created by our world. If we want to understand why we are as we are, we have to think of this whole, complicated network of relationships. We are genetically connected to preceding generations (going all the way back to the dawn of evolution). Within our families, we are unique individuals but we also occupy set positions within the preexisting structure of the family: we are sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, aunts, etc., and we are partly defined by the corresponding role expectations.
We are also connected to — and partly created or “constituted” by — the modern global economy, in all sorts of ways, not least among them by the food we eat, which might well be grown on a Swedish-investor-owned corporate farm in Chile, using seeds created by an agricultural-research school in South Dakota, and laced with chemicals discovered in California and produced in a factory in New Jersey. That technology-infused food is inside of us and helping to shape us, and this, according to Haraway, makes us every bit as much a cyborg — a mix of the natural and the technological — as the grotesque villain in a Star Trek movie.
Anyway, stories about animals and machines are important “figures of thought” (aka tropes) in the literary tradition — that’s what all this has to do with literature and literary theory. For decades now, that tradition has focused on the ways in which the human/animal and human/machine boundaries are blurring. Cyborg characters have populated many of our culture’s most influential new texts. So we might want to pay more attention to older texts we have slighted in the past but might prove interesting today, where the machine seems just as important as the animal in defining who we are. And we also have opportunities to re-interpret pretty much any text, old or new, by thinking of its characters as Haraway-esque nodes in a network rather than independent self-created individuals (that is, not Cartesian subjects or liberal subjects, but cyborgs). Finally, as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, “the human” might have to reckon with a kind of dethronement from its current position atop the creation. (After all, another way of defining ourselves as human has been by claiming ourselves the most intelligent of all beings.) As some of the assigned readings already suggest, machines might soon be doing two things traditionally considered the sole realm of the human: reading and writing.
Now for your prompt. Which of the literary theories you’ve studied in this course do you see as most compatible with the developing ideas of the posthuman? Or maybe I can put it this way: think of someone with advanced training in feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, Marxist criticism, etc. Which of them is best prepared to develop a literary criticism appropriate to the “cyborg” realities of our age?
* The liberal subject can be thought of as the idea of the human being that was assumed by the 18th-century political theorists of liberal democracy. Think of the attributes that the human individual should have in order for liberal democracy to work as we’d like it to work: in this view of the human, we are individuals morivated by rational self-interest (tempered by a basic sense of fairness to all), we are impervious to appeals to irrational instincts, etc. The fact that we’re not really like this is the reason that “Theory,” beginning with Marx and Freud, has been “contesting” the idea of the liberal subject.
