TecnaMonsterFairyTaleHigh and the Future of the Female Body

In chapter 3 of Cyborg Selves I offer a detailed analysis of the way gender and human sexuality is envisioned in two distinct posthuman discourses. One, of course, is the feminist cyborg discourse begun by Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," and the other is the analysis of gender and human sexuality offered by James Hughes and George Dvorsky in their Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies white paper entitled, "Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary."

I won't recap everything here, but suffice to say, I find these two discourses on gender and sexuality to be in opposition to each other in important ways, and the contrasts between the two ultimately rest on their divergent views of the human body, and in this instance, the female body particularly. [If you want to know more, well hey, take that $100 you've got lying around just waiting to be spent and click the link on the sidebar and get yourself a copy of the book! :)]

One of the assumptions in Hughes and Dvorsky's analysis of transhumanism and gender is that technological interventions on the human body are the ultimate means of addressing the social injustices  surrounding gender. They anticipate a future where, by means of various technologies, people will be able to consciously select certain "gendered" traits, according to personal preference, thus dismantling the "gender binary" that we have (presumably) inherited from our unaltered biology. The vision is one of liberation from that restrictive binary by altering our bodies at will.

There are a lot of things here to take issue with, from my point of view, but again--read the book.

What I want to focus on here is a new wrinkle of worry about this approach to gender and biotechnology and the posthuman future, prompted by my latest brush with the rampant sexualization and body distortion and stereotyping and reduction and limitation in children's media and the toy industry.

This past week Clare asked me to please rethink my ban on Winx Club. The girls at her school play "Winx" at recess, and while she joins in, she always feels a bit lost because she doesn't watch the show and has to figure out who is who and what is happening. I get that. And she was super thoughtful about asking me to rethink, and suggested I watch an episode. And promised that if I did let her watch it she would ignore all the inappropriate stuff (oh how I wish it worked that way). Of course it also turns out that she had been illicitly bingewatching on the iPad after Netflix put temptation right in front of her face. Sigh. #parentfail.

So, I watched an episode. And it basically made my brain explode and dribble out my ears. It was beyond the horrible I had braced myself for.

Then I saw the newest toy to come down the corporate pike for my daughter: Fairy Tale High.

Great! They're like Bratz, only not Bratz because they're, like, fairy-tale-ish. They're like Monster High, only not, 'cuz they're fairy-tale-ish. They're like Winx and _____ and _____ and ______ only not, 'cuz they're fairy tale princesses in their secret life instead of fairies and _____ and ______. Wow! That's what we call OPTIONS!

Pigtail Pals member Bailey Shoemaker Richards says it:

I mean, just look at them. You literally cannot tell these things apart.

What does the above picture have to do with transhumanist aspirations to postgenderism, I bet you're wondering.

That's great, because I'm about to tell you.

First, there's the basic question that Melissa Atkins Wardy at Pigtail Pals puts to us, which is, what are our girls (and boys!) learning from these distorted representations of the female body, and limited, frivolous representations of girlhood?

Yes, that's rhetorical. We know what they're learning, and it is false, and it is harmful.

My question is, what happens when these internalized false and harmful notions of what girls and women's bodies are supposed to look like collide with the ever-more-inventive technologies we use on those bodies?

Will we get the transhumanist utopian vision of technologically mediated gender equity, and human bodies that, again via technological mediation, defy the presumed biological gender binary?

Or will we get women who seek to sculpt their bodies into the distorted representations we've been handing them as the ideal and norm ever since they were born, and men who expect that?

Liberating Barbie?

Recently Melissa Atkins Wardy, founder of Pigtail Pals & Ballcap Buddies and author of the forthcoming Redefining Girly, sent this tweet:

Asking for insights on how Barbie can be used in adventurous stories during play http://blog.pigtailpals.com/2013/07/barbie-world-is-it-what-i-thought-it-would-be/ … #parents #girls #Barbie

Melissa's blog post notes that a lot of people, a LOT, shrug off the criticisms of Barbie with a "I played with Barbies, and I turned out just fine" response. Well, I played with Barbies too. And I think I've turned out to be fantastic...but I'm not sure we need to give Barbie credit, or even a pass, on that basis. Not least because, as Melissa points out, Barbie back then is not Barbie now.

A Barbie science station with swiveling chair and gadgets: they don't make 'em like this nowadays. (Thanks to my friend Wendolyn for giving us this awesome piece of her childhood!)

On the other hand, during my research for Cyborg Selves, I came across Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls by Kim Toffoletti, which theorizes Barbie's plastic figure as plastic in a metaphorical sense, and describes the subversive ways that Barbie can function--for example, in transgender play. It was this book that, when Clare first started asking for a Barbie doll, inspired The Great Barbie Project of 2010: my attempt to reconstruct and subvert in various ways a bunch of Barbies from our local thrift store. I cut hair short, I dyed hair pink and blue and gray, I drew tattoos, I drew wrinkles, I drew punk rocker makeup, I tried to erase existing makeup, I sawed off legs at the knee and made artificial cheetah sprinting legs out of duct tape and popsicle sticks, I bought a tuxedo outfit a la' Maddow, I sewed a pair of jeans and a muumuu and knitted a maternity dress.

While I deemed that mostly a failure at the time, with the sole exception of the knitted preggie Barbie dress, I think the strategy itself has some merit--though also, some hard limits. Barbie can--indeed does--in some sense serve as a blank slate to be projected onto, a kind of "everywoman" template that can be filled in according to the notions of those engaging with her in play. This then has some potential for liberating, adventurous play--even when the ready-made options are limited and myopically princessy in focus. We can encourage our kids to disregard those artificial restrictions and act out their own interests. Barbie can be an astronaut mommy who lives on the moon and studies moon rocks with her kids, if that's what your kid is into. Have space suit, will travel.

I still feel, however, that my conclusion at the end of the Barbie Project, that the hard plastic body of a Barbie represents the limit of its potential for subversive play, is correct. Partly this has to do with the pragmatic difficulty of altering a Barbie's basic shape. Although there is, apparently, a thriving subculture of Barbie alteration, the skills and tools needed to alter the basic body shape went far beyond what I had at my disposal. I could cut and dye hair, change clothes--but anything beyond simple outfits or cosmetic changes was beyond me. A more serious consideration, though, is the same "universal" aspect of Barbie that allows her to function as an "everywoman" template--and the way this makes Western blond big blue eyed beauty the "universal." Fine, protest that there are brunettes and different skin shades, etc.--they're blond Barbie with cosmetic changes: same face, same body. Clones with darker pigmentation. (See here for a summary of discussion regarding the "new black Barbies"--who still basically fall within Eurocentric beauty ideals.)

So, while I'm glad that we have the old-school Barbie science station with the awesome 70's chic swiveling chair, I'm even more glad that Clare doesn't much play with the Barbies she has.

It feels like this is where the conclusion should go, but there's one more twist.

A couple years ago--also, as it happens, as part of researching Cyborg Selves--I came across a blog post from a transhumanist point of view on Toy Story opining that what we really need in the world is more kids like Sid (I can't track this link down now, unfortunately). I agreed and disagreed--Sid's lack of empathy was what made him the 'villain' in contrast to Andy, and we certainly don't need to valorize lack of empathy--but, his creativity and skill in constructing posthumany-wumany type toys was, totally, absolutely, cool. And yes, we ought to be encouraging our kids to think outside the prefabbed play options they're handed, and do cool imaginative stuff with their stuff!!!

And so, I'm even more glad that Clare's Barbies are currently a heap of disarticulated body parts, and that when she plays with them, she tends to mix and match pieces freely. At the moment, the most complete Barbie is a single leg with a head stuck on it. And many of the faces have, um, custom permanent makeup jobs and very special haircuts.

If there's a way to capitalize on the plasticity of Barbie with a minimum of damaging body-image internalization, I'm pretty sure my 7-year-old has found it.

haaaaaaaaappy anniversary, cy-boys and cyber-girls!

If you're into this sort of thing, you won't want to miss the celebratory 50 posts about cyborgs in honor of the cyborg's 50th anniversary (since its etymological debut in 1960, in the Clynes and Kline article on space exploration in the now defunct Astronautics journal).

fun with data visualization!

The best resource for getting acquainted with the complicated terrain of transhumanism and its permutations, and the various oppositions to transhumanism or the idea of human enhancement technologies generally, is Dr. James Hughes' "Overview of Biopolitics" chart, a version of which is in his book Citizen Cyborg and a version of which is published on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) website. It's so useful, in fact, that I wrote to get permission to include it as an illustration in my dissertation text, which he was gracious enough to grant.

I have some quibbles with certain categories, but any sort of typology will generate those sorts of questions--that's part of why typologies are useful, as they force you to think "why would I do this differently, here?" And for the last couple days, I've been experimenting with an increasingly adapted form of Dr. Hughes' original typology, through a very fun little website called Many Eyes, a data visualization site. Ya uploads yer data, and out comes a purty picture. Very very nice for someone like me who often feels visually challenged, but wants to incorporate visuals into her pedagogy as often as possible (as a text-based and auditory learner, I can respect that not everyone learns best just by reading and listening and scribing).

So here's an in-progress look at what I've been putting together: the JTB Matrix Chart version of the Hughes/IEET Overview of Biopolitics:

Overview of Biopolitics Matrix Chart (adapted)

If you go to the manyeyes site, you can interact with this chart--there are five variables represented by the color blocks (views on citizenship/personhood is shown here, but in the full chart you can click between views on personhood, humanism, accessibility, technological risk, and environment).

I'll be tinkering with this more in the weeks to come, and possibly constructing a separate biopolitics and religion typology (one of my quibbles with the Hughes/IEET typology is that all religious views are "religious right" type Christian literalism/conservatism, so that I don't quite fit the typology...but then again, I like floating between categories, existentially speaking...).

the cyborgs in the Garden

...Seeking a way to articulate an answer to this question, I dare to imitate Haraway’s use of provocative figures to shape an answer that flatly contradicts her assertion that the cyborg does not belong in the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve as cyborg.[1] The Genesis narrative of humanity’s first parents need not be read in the organic, originary, heteronormative, naturalized and universalizing mode that has given us both a problematic original innocence and an even more problematic original sin. As interpreters of this biblical narrative of our cyborg origins, in which Adam is not born of Woman but is manufactured of material elements not unlike those of the flesh of humanity’s monstrous cousin the golem, and in which Eve, too, is manufactured in a strange foreshadowing of our own emergent biotech capabilities, how can we read such a myth as one of Nature, Man, and Woman in perfectly ordered, natural existence? The elements of relationality as definitive for a posthuman ontology are also undeniably present: God marks this creature, the human, as unique in no way other than God’s own choice to relate to it; the human dwells, walks and talks with the nonhuman—God, but also the animals; the human is not left “alone in the world” but created with another human. In the Garden of Eden, all manner of human and nonhuman creatures exist. Embedded within a nexus of strange boundaries of human and nonhuman relationships—human and divine, human and animal, human and human—the cyborg pair in the Garden are what they are because of the construction and contestation of these boundaries. What does it mean to be made a cyborg in the imago dei? Simply to have been made a creature who is simultaneously kin and other: to God, to other humans, and to nonhumans. The boundaries do not disappear in our acknowledgment and negotiation of them—but they become conditions of relationship, and not obstacles preventing it.

            This cyborg reconstruction suggests further that the Fall represents, not a loss of original innocence (which does not exist) nor a loss or deformation of the imago dei (which, as relationship, continues), but a poignant renegotiation of the ontological boundary between the human and the divine. Van Huyssteen suggests that Genesis 3:22 provides a “rather dramatic new dimension to the image or likeness of God,” but a negative dimension, one which stands in tension with God’s intent of divine and human closeness. Yet, further, this new dimension is one which questions the presumed boundary between human and divine: “the ultimate focus on this thin line between the divine and human worlds finally culminates in the breaking down of the necessary boundaries between these two worlds, and results in the symbolic first sinful act that leads to divine punishment.”[2]

Van Huyssteen suggests that nothing in the biblical narrative reconciles the contradiction between the created likeness and the epistemological likeness; yet he himself, in defining the human, makes a postfoundational notion of rationality central. This pair of moves leads us to the question, must we assume that this renegotiation of ontological boundaries is wholly negative? In our cyborg parents’ bid for greater understanding and closeness to the divine, for greater incorporation of the divine into themselves (eating, after all, being a material act), what is there that seems strange, or even necessarily blameworthy? Transgression of categorical boundaries in the living out of material embodied reality is, after all, what cyborgs and (post)humans are all about. Van Huyssteen’s own work on human uniqueness suggests that the very element of our humanness lamented in this text is the means by which we come to know, and relate, to each other and our nonhuman kin, including God. This is not to suggest that this element of our humanness is unproblematic, an entirely “happy fault;” but the cyborg has always been an ambivalent figure, capable of good and evil, and is no less so here...

---

[1] Donna J. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151.

[2] J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, The Gifford Lectures (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 123.

Conclusion: Cyborgs for Earthly Survival

CONCLUSION

CYBORGS FOR EARTHLY SURVIVAL

The concluding scene of the SciFi Channel’s revival of the short-lived 70’s TV series Battlestar Galactica shows a line of defeated but indomitable human beings, shouldering packs and trudging slowly but determinedly into a wilderness, away from their spaceships, their computers, their technologies. The scene visually tropes an earlier one, in which these spacefaring refugees from a nuked planet observe a primitive hominid family group moving single file across the plain in much the same way, unknowingly the objects of a technologically mediated, curious vision of alien kindred.

What could prompt such a dramatic and counterintuitive conclusion to a narrative of remnant humanity’s exodus from ruin, led by a faithless Moses and a dying Miriam, whose existence had depended so intimately for so long on the technologies now being decisively repudiated? What message lies in this conclusion for us, as we ponder the various possibilities, both frightening and liberatory, of the posthuman future?

The complexity of the narrative universe of Battlestar Galactica belies such a simplistic ending. For these human beings, the posthuman future has already arrived, and with a vengeance—literally. The opening scene of the series gives us a question posed by a sexy blonde machine to a middle aged, befuddled soldier/diplomat: “are you alive?” she asks. Yes, is the stuttered answer, but the machine doesn’t care, or perhaps, does not believe this answer—after all, this must have been the very question put to it, in the years that sowed the seeds of the conflict that would shortly destroy not only this man, but his whole civilization as well, in a retributive genocidal impulse.

The problem goes far beyond the pragmatic difficulties caused by the fact that “the Cylons look like us now.” The problem, in short, is that the Cylons are us: down to our very blood. And not just “us” in biological facsimile, but in nature. Violent, retributive, obsessive, sinful, human nature.

This is where the story begins: with an ontological confusion, a question of humanness not simply in terms of status but fundamental nature, and a question of what constitutes the difference between person and machine, when machines can also think and feel. The only difference seems to be, frankly, that the machines are determined to kill the humans. One can only speculate why; but, after all, machines made in imago hominis are likely to be pretty dangerously untrustworthy.

Things get more complicated when it turns out you can have sex with those machines, and get them pregnant. Beyond begging the question of the definition of species, interbreeding produces a more obvious hybrid, a child who is simultaneously threat and promise. Named for a goddess and literally a savior, this miracle child becomes blood sisters with the dying Miriam and saves the prophet’s life; revived, the leader of the human remnant rescinds the savior’s imminent execution but fakes a death to remove her from her Cylon mother’s care—machines can’t be trusted.

Things get more complicated still when it turns out that the Cylons themselves are a stratified society: Cylon fighters are bred like animals, “toasters” take orders from “skin jobs,” and everyone alike is conveyed through space by sentient ships piloted by those whom the Cylons themselves refer to as hybrids—human brains hardwired into their ships, simultaneously pilot and vehicle.

But things only get really weird when it turns out that there really are angels walking among us.

How to make sense of this strange, unsystematic, non-taxonomy of unclassifiable creatures, none of them natural, and all of them, somehow, kin? There’s no certain path through this wilderness, no telos, no heaven, and no real Earth; the only thing certain, in this narrative, is that it has all happened before, and it will all happen again. The final, looming question is, simply, will it happen the same way? Or will we, somehow, construct a path through the wilderness that aims toward making that new world a liveable world, in which anthropoids, humans, Cylons, hybrids, and angels alike, dwell?

same and different

Clare's really into this now: same, and different. [I'm not; in the "game time" segments on Noggin, invariably the different object is always missing something. Not just different, but deficient: an implicit message that to deviate means to be lesser. To be different is to lack. "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong"...we've updated the words nowadays to be less harsh, but the message is still there.]

She really likes having two pink pacifiers, so that she can point out that they are the same, but the blue and the pink 'fiers are different. Yes, my daughter chose to abbreviate pacifier into "fire" instead of "passy." Hmmm.

She has been doing this for a long time with her stuffed animals, though without the categorical labels of "same and different." Awhile back she started intuitively grouping them into "families" by kind, and then defining their familial relationships by relative size. Daddy Tick and baby Tick were the first. (In case you're wondering, The Tick was--is--my favorite cartoon, dating back to college days and one of the few happy legacies of an ill-fated relationship. I have two Tick figurines, one large and one small.) Then the trend spread to other groups, like The Elmos, of which we have three: Mommy Elmo, who despite her diaper is still the largest, Brother Elmo and Baby Elmo. And her doggies. And her bears. And well, anything at all really. I'm always having to explain that the categories of "big" and "little" are expressed as "daddy" and "baby" in Clare-ish.

Recently, however, Clare has bucked the trend and announced cross-stuffed-species familial ties. Two frogs now have a baby duck. (She has also started using a gender-inclusive word for sibling relationship: brister, though Brent doesn't believe me.)

Donna Haraway would be proud. And so am I.

Maybe I'm overthinking it (oh, who would believe that? of course I'm overthinking it! why else would I have a blog?), but I find in this the same evidence for openness to relationship and capacity to identify with the other that I saw in Clare's unhesitating finger when she points to the little black boy holding his daddy's hand and says "that's Clare, that's Daddy." Does it matter that she's female, blond and blue-eyed and looks nothing like that little boy? Does it matter that two frogs will never beget a duck? Only if we make it matter. Only if someone comes along and tells Clare, "no, honey, that's not you. you're a white girl." Only if someone comes along and tells her that frogs could never love baby ducks. Because they're not the same, they're different.

I won't be. I won't be telling her anything, because on this matter I think she's telling me.

And now I'm telling you.

Frogs can love baby ducks.

this is only a test

I just sent my text on transhumanism off to an H+ blogger I struck up an email correspondence with pretty much out of the blue. He's been marvelous to chat with and seemed very willing to look over my stuff for accuracy. And although I initiated all that, I felt very reluctant to take action on it. I sent the chapter to vH over a week ago, but only now have I managed to hit the "send" button to email it to my virtual acquaintance. The reason for my reluctance is the same reason I thought it would be a good idea to ask for his opinion in the first place: I remain very critical of the H+ movement, but I want my description of the movement to be accurate and fair--beyond that, even, a good-faith effort to portray the movement sympathetically. I feel like this is putting into practice the basic principle of interdisciplinary engagement. I'm not interested in picking the easiest target to shoot at, because that doesn't produce a very helpful or a long-term dialogue. There are some real and substantive issues to be gotten at, and beating up straw men doesn't get you there. Sending the text to be vetted feel really risky, a personal test of scholarship and integrity. And like any test situation I am nervous. Will I pass? I did my best, was it good enough?

reviews

Re: First Art.

The Jell-O fingerpaint recipe: a little gritty and sticky, but worth a second try.

The cornstarch paint recipe: pretty easy, once you amend the recipe by reversing the amounts given for the cornstarch and the water. But requires a LOT of food coloring to make real color on the paper.

Freezer paper for fingerpainting: excellent.

Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv: interesting. The thesis is too simplistic to suit me, but even so I don't disagree with everything Louv is arguing. The main point seems to be (I hedge because I'm only half-done) that all this technology stuff defining our lives and environments nowadays has led to our children suffering from "nature-deficit disorder." No free play, no natural environments. A lot of reminiscing about his own past prowess at building tree houses. A lot of lamenting today's children's lack of tree house expertise. I find the appeal to "nature" problematic, but I can agree that divorcing self from physical locatedness, one's own body, and the connectedness of our physical world is detrimental. But this is an issue of embodiment, not an issue of "Nature."

the cyborg candidate

Disclaimers:

1. This is not a post about the governor of California.


2. I'm no conspiracy theorist. Calling Obama the cyborg candidate doesn't mean I think he's remote controlled through a chip in his brain by extremists. (Although I expect that rumor's already circulating somewhere; last week I received a forward that Obama is the Anti-Christ. Which, as Scott Freeman points out, doesn't really tell you whether the Left Behind-ists will vote for or against him...)

So, now that the crazy options are out of the way you may be wondering just what the heck I do mean. Well, while I sincerely try to avoid discussing my dissertation topic when in polite company, I do occasionally vent my enthusiasm for the posthuman here on the blog.

But this cyborg stuff isn't all academic. In the beginning, the cyborg was political, not academic. And while this aspect of the cyborg may indeed have gotten "lost" along the way, it's not been lost on me; and the bottom line, evident in Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, (or you may prefer the comic version), is that the cyborg is about dropping essentialisms and identity politics so we can get together and finally get some things done.

Now, does that sound familiar, anyone?

Before I go any further, let me unpack a bit. What is a cyborg? A cyborg is a creature that breaks down the ontological boundary between organism and machine: part organic, part mechanical. The word was coined in 1960 by a couple of scientists dreaming up ways to explore space; it seemed like a lot of trouble to engineer a mobile life-sustaining environment to meet all of the needs of the earth-bound human body...so they thought, why not engineer the body to dispense with those needs, or meet them some other way? Of course we haven't quite achieved this yet, although the cutting edge technology in things like prostheses and silicon chips that allow quadriplegics to manipulate computer cursors is pretty damn amazing. But that's not really the point. The point is, the cyborg represents a form of life that refuses to fit neatly into our conceptual categories: person/thing, alive/inanimate, human/machine, etc. The cyborg has a foot in both worlds, and to ignore that fact means pretending it doesn't exist, refusing to see it as it is.

Writers in postcolonial theology muse on cultural/social/racial hybridity in a parallel way: neither one category or the other, they forge identity out of between-ness, the both/and, the neither/nor. And this brings us to Obama, who is hybrid in a way similar to these postcolonial theorists: the son of a white mother and a black father.

The disappointing thing to me about the Rev. Wright stuff is not really in what the man said, or even how what he said was twisted around and used against, not him, but someone else...as if, should Joe Hays ever do/say something crazy prophetic, it would somehow reflect on me personally. (Joe, I know you're crazy prophetic all the time. Keep on.) No, what's disappointing to me is that this in effect reintroduces, with a vengeance, into the campaign discourse the very thing Obama has been seeking to transcend: identity politics. If he stands with Rev. Wright, then he's too black and scary for comfortable white folks, too revolutionary, too angry to be trusted...If he disowns Rev. Wright, then he's too white and scared for righteously angry black folks who understand the truth in the Reverend's prophetic utterances. It's all about trying to make Obama declare himself: are you white, or are you black? Are you or aren't you running as a black candidate, to become the first black President?

The fact that Obama's response to this provocation was a speech on race in America indicates to me that he gets it. It's not really enough to claim a hybrid pedigree personally, although I think it's evident that growing up with a sense of not knowing to which category you belong--and constantly being recategorized as the Other by everyone you come across--shapes your experience in a way that makes the limitations of those categories painfully obvious. Obama's not simply the cyborg candidate because he's the offspring of a black-white hybrid family. He's the cyborg candidate because, like Haraway, he realizes that it's not desirable or even possible to dream of uniting people on the basis of common identity anymore. That's not what we want. That's not the goal. It doesn't work. Haraway's point about the cyborg is that there's nothing basic, essential, on which we can unite. Haraway realized this in 1985, reflecting on the fragmentation of the feminist movement in the U.S. Even white women in America, who briefly came together and united on the basis of a fabricated common identity as Woman, found out the hard way that oops, we're actually a bunch of women who are all different...and that was before we learned the even harder lesson that we shouldn't have left out the black women, the Latina women, the Chinese- and Japanese- and Korean-American women (not Asian-American! Asia's a continent not an ethnicity!), all the women in other global contexts who have something to tell us about their own experiences and needs and hopes.

Obama articulates the same realization when he urges us to unite in order to work towards common goals despite differences in color, creed, and experience. What's so impressive about his candidacy is that he has somehow managed to do this--every CNN retrospective breakdown of every primary, you see votes busted up: the white vote, the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the women vote, the white male vote. And despite the fact that these categories are so taken for granted in America today that we receive this kind of categorical analysis as normal and coherent, what we see is that Obama's candidacy makes these taken-for-granted lines, drawn and redrawn in every political analysis, obsolete. Perhaps a better word than "unity," which seems to indicate a seamless whole, is Haraway's "coalition," a word Obama also employs; coalition doesn't imply melting into one another and merging into a whole that obliterates the differences between us that are real and important--those differences that make us, for better or worse, who we are. Instead it's through those differences, the recognition and communication and comprehension of them, that we come together; that is coalition. Haraway talks about it as chosen affinity, a matter of conscious alignment with one another; sometimes she talks about it as kinship--but not the kinship of blood relation, more like the kinship of adoption. A chosen affinity, a coalition of difference...but not, for that reason, any less real or potent.

In fact, for that very reason, all the more so. This is what I, very hopefully, see in Obama's candidacy. An option for coming together that skips the necessity of me being like you.

Now, if we could just learn this lesson theologically and ecclesially, maybe Jesus could come back already. Because Obama's right on something else, too: the most segregated hour in this nation happens on Sunday mornings. But if Jesus' speaking to adulterous women and traitorous tax collectors and dirty Samaritans hasn't somehow hammered the lesson that "me being like you" is not a prereq for unity, then the reiteration of that message from a political candidate, even a cyborg candidate, may fall on deaf ears; those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

How many of you caught the Barbara Walters' special on anti-aging technologies tonight? What do you think?

do androids dream of electric vodka?

Today I walked by one of these.

Perhaps you think that's bizarre. If so, you need to check this out.

Comments?

eschewing our gender, yet again

Now dissertating in earnest, it is time to read N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman again.

Hayles begins her story with a prologue on the Turing test. What everyone knows about this test is that it has become the litmus test for identifying the moment when machines become "intelligent" (intelligent=ability to fool human beings, which, all things considered, is a pretty poor benchmark but, zenme ban). What no one remembers is that there were two versions of the test in Turing's proposal, the first being that one would interact via computer terminal with two unseen entities, and depending solely on the electronically transmitted responses to your questions, you would determine--not which was human, and which machine--but which one was a woman, and which a man.

"If your failure to distinguish correctly between human and machine proves that machines can think," Hayles asks, "what does it prove if you fail to distinguish woman from man?"

Andrew Hodges, a biographer of Turing, argues that the intent for inclusion of gender test is to show that gender, unlike intelligence, is in fact dependent upon unalterable physical reality. Hayles disagrees; the cases as presented are parallel, and point to a willingness to define gender in terms of symbolic manipulation similar to intelligence.

All of this reminds me of the hermits' marvelous diversion, the “gender genie” test, a kind of variation of the Turing gender test. What does this say about gender and identity? I fooled it successfully, and rather grandly—now I am a man? No; but it does tell you something interesting about my identity, that is, I am a woman who can successfully represent myself through verbal/semiotic markers as a man. And perhaps that is interesting.

The crucial move, as Hayles points out, is “distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an electronic environment.” And this, BTW, is the advent of the cyborg... Why? Because technology is the bridge connecting the physical and represented body/ies. The test requires disjunction, therefore: “What the Turing test 'proves' is that the overlay between the enacted and represented bodies is no longer natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so intertwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject.”

And, of course, Gender Genie's verdict on the above:

Female Score: 428/Male Score: 701
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male! (and in any case, definitely cyborg)

posthuman's no joke

Brent and I are catching the re-run of last night's Daily Show...since 11:00pm is just way, way, way out of reach for us at this point, with a brutal CPE/Clare schedule dictating our summer hours...

So I'm just now learning that last night Jon Stewart made a posthuman joke.

See? It's really real, people, and it's coming. Someday we will all have gills. Jon said so.

on the nature of the gods

Has anyone else been suspecting all along that the Cylons are the human's gods?

An epoch will come when people disclaim kinship with us as we disclaim kinship with the monkeys. -Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

damn it.

Dear blog readers, please forgive the fact that the intended audience of this post is not (originally) you. I just don't have the strength to explain it all again.


The Metametaphor of Information,
or, You are What You E-Know,
or, How/Why I Forgot my Lecture and the Nam-Shub of Enki

Were it on purpose, it might be clever to offer virtuality in place of Real lecture. (Or perhaps some of you would like to comment on whether there is any substantial difference…)

The Story of How I Forgot to Lecture is a simple one: a narrative which involves the (mis)coding of information. Once upon a time there was a conversation: a dissemination of information via sound waves, which, when received and properly internalized, is encoded chemically in the brain for later data retrieval. This process is, of course, sometimes hit-or-miss; so once upon a time there was also a dayplanner, into which the same information could be coded into written symbols, a different code repeating the same information received by the sound waves and encoded chemically in the brain. But these symbols can be misunderstood, corrupted, lost or obliterated over time…Or dayplanners can simply go unopened, and like long-lost clay tablets with vital information on them, if they go unread, the information therein is ineffective.

The nam-shub of Enki turns out to translate from the cuneiform as, “isn’t Dr. Osmer still in Germany?”

Indeed.

The plot of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash hangs on the supposition that Information is All. Why can a human being get a virus from a computer? Answer: what is a computer?—a machine that codes information/ what is a virus?—a tiny bit of self-replicating information/ what is a human being?—a conglomeration of genetically coded information. As Hiro Protagonist, broke and recently unemployed resident of U-Stor-It, Greatest Swordsman in the World and Warrior Prince of the Metaverse, gradually realizes, not only is the Metaverse an instantiation of Information, a collection of coded protocols written in languages that manipulate the basic binary code of computer-existence, Reality itself is constituted by information, a collection of physical, biological, social and cultural patterns of information enacted and embodied by various artifacts: machines and people and ideas, animals and franchulates and religions. Information is the substratum of Life and Reality.

We as readers must, just as Hiro must, negotiate these intersecting media of information, tracing the virus across these intersecting levels of genetic/biological, linguistic, cultural and virtual instantiations. Snow Crash is first presented to us as a computer virus, encoded in binary form; then a neurolinguistic virus coded in glossalalic syllables; then a biological virus, genetically encoded in infected blood cells. The virus, variously instantiated, is the same Information, which, regardless of its medium, enacts the same disruptive result on those who contract it—through religion, through exchange of bodily fluids, or through the binarily coded information on a bitmap accessed through the optic nerve. The destination of the virus is to coil like a serpent around the human brainstem, and it may travel in whatever way is convenient to get there.

To say that Information is All is to say something basic about, well, everything. To say that human beings are genetically coded Information says…what? It is commonplace now to refer to genetic code as “blueprints,” to think of our human genes as an instruction kit for the various proteins to meticulously assemble themselves into a human being over a 9-month (give or take) period of construction. Human being=a certain pattern of information assembled out of a supplied medium. What anthropological assumptions are at work here? And what are the implications for humans as mobile biological information systems?

It is no coincidence that the posthuman appears again in Snow Crash. If we are embodied patterns of information, and Information is All, then we (like the Snow Crash virus) may be variously instantiated in media other than the strictly biological. Information is pattern; and pattern can be replicated using different materials.

But Stephenson gives us more than a vision of The Posthuman; he gives us a variety of posthumans, and a companion cyborg species. (Post-dog as post-man’s best friend.) Ng is perhaps the most grotesque of the posthuman figures Stephenson gives us: “a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines…At the top of the pouch, Y.T. can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it—the top of a balding man’s head…Below this, on either side, where you’d sort of expect to see arms, huge bundles of wires, fiber optics, and tubes run up out of the floor and are seemingly plugged into Ng’s shoulder sockets. There is a similar arrangement where his legs are supposed to be attached, and more stuff going into his groin and hooked up to various locations on his torso” (225-6). Bizarre though this physical manifestation is, as Ng coolly explains to Y.T., the van is nothing more than a really souped-up motorized wheelchair. The apparatus attached to him enables the informational pattern that constitutes Ng to resist disintegration; it is an alternative medium, but the Information is Ng.

Likewise, Ng’s creation of Rat Things allows for a certain psychological continuity in which the instantiation of Information in the purely biological medium is retained in the memory, and forms the informational pattern that makes the Rat Thing the same dog it always was: B-782 is Fido, and Rat Thing B-782 loves Y.T. because Fido loves Y.T. (443-4). Most telling is Ng’s explicit statement to Y.T. countering her disgust at both him and the Rat Things: “Your mistake is that you think all mechanically assisted organisms—like me—are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before” (248). [Here, the really interesting question of the overlap Ng achieves between Metaverse and Reality, symbolized for us in the virtual masseuse that gives a Real massage through the electrocontractive gel Ng's Real body is immersed in, prompts us to wonder, with the Velveteen Rabbit, what is Real? Which Ng is the real Ng? A question we will return to with regard to our Hiro.]

In contrast to Ng and the Rat Things, who are Information preserved in alternative media, are the wireheads of L. Bob Rife. The wireheads are still fully biological in terms of life-sustaining systems; their cyborg parts are in addition to, rather than substitution for, their biological ones. Yet despite their higher degree of biological integrity, the wireheads are the truly frightening posthuman figure, for they are corrupted Information, rather than preserved Information. L. Bob Rife has left the medium more or less unmolested, but the Information—that which carries identity—has been purposefully hijacked by the virus.

Occupying a gray area between Ng and his Rat Things, and L. Bob Rife’s wireheads, are the gargoyles, and Hiro himself. And the difference between Hiro as freelance hacker, sometime Warrior Prince of the Metaverse, and Hiro as gargoyle (265) is a matter of degree so slight as to disappear. Which brings us to the question: is the difference between Hiro’s access of technology and our own interface with it also a degree so slight as to disappear?

This indeed would be the question that Donna Haraway would put to us via her "Cyborg Manifesto." To be a cyborg is not only to have machine literally grafted into flesh. It is also simply to be so dependent on technology that one cannot function without it—and this, I dare say, describes every single one of us, members of the technological elite, who interface with our technology multiple times a day.

Haraway’s ultimate goal in the "Manifesto" is not to laud the imminent arrival of the cyborg as a technophile. Rather, she is deeply suspicious of the oppressive economic possibilities of technology in a way resonant with the landscape of Stephenson’s future America of Burbclaves and franchulates. Stephenson draws for us a caricatured but logical extension of tendencies already present and at work in American culture: to identify with people who are “like us,” and paradoxically at the same time, to manufacture identity as image. The nearly infinite fracturing of group identities is obvious in the ever-growing list of ethnic identities that includes “jeeks” and “Nips” but also “the Military” and “skateboarders” as distinct ethnic groups. The fracturing of the United States government into independent franchises mirrors the ethnic fracturing in a literal way: each Franchise is for “people like us” and some, such as the New South Africa Franchulate, are violently racist. Stephenson offers no anodyne for this disturbing social development. There seems to be no possibility for identity and solidarity other than that of natural identity and origin—those “like us.” Haraway, too, pegs this tendency in her "Manifesto," and prescribes as nam-shub, “affinity,” that is, “related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity.” When one is hybrid, identification by natural origin is precluded—and this, Haraway and Stephenson both tell us, is a good thing. It is not by accident that Hiro is racially hybrid, ethnically hybrid, and occupies an intersecting set of economic and class categories, in addition to becoming something very close to the cyborg of Haraway’s essay.

Which brings us to the question: who is Hiro Protagonist, Really? Is the real Hiro the penniless former-Deliverator freelance hacker in the U-Stor-It, or is Hiro indeed the Warrior Prince that he is in the Metaverse? Is the Warrior Prince a manufactured image, much as the facades of Uncle Enzo and the daffy Chenglish-speaking Mr. Lee are? Or is it that Hiro, unburdened by the limits of circumstance, becomes more fully himself in the Metaverse than anywhere else? If this is so—again, what does this say about what constitutes a human being? As Hiro’s identities converge, leading to a Metaverse triumph with very Real consequences, what might this say about the connection between image and identity in a world of malleable information? If Hiro is Information, can he be re-imaged/re-written/re-programmed?

Of course he can: for this is the threat of the Snow Crash/Asherah virus. And this brings us, finally, to the question of religion as virus, a metaphor Stephenson puts forward in several places. Religion, like any other cultural meme (or in Stephenson’s term, me), spreads like a virus: through contact, specifically, linguistic contact, for language is the medium of interpersonal informational connection. Consider "truthiness." Consider, if you will, Wikiality. Like truthiness, religious doctrine is more or less contagious, depending on the susceptibility of those exposed to it: a conceptual virus that enacts itself by re-patterning behavior of those who catch it. But in Stephenson’s conception, religion is a cultural meme like any other: praise God, bake bread. It is simply information that generates behavior. Is this what religion is—simply a set of more or less compelling ideas? Is religion is so thoroughly naturalized that the metaphysical disappears into the social?

Or does it? The mystical reappears under the same guise that quashes it: Information. For Information is All. And Information must come from somewhere—and for this, Stephenson reaches for the Metavirus from Outer Space. The Fount. The Source. The Logos. Hiro observes during the course of his researches with the Librarian that the Metaverse is a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiber-optic network (211). But the Metaverse is simply another version of Reality, a single vast nam-shub enacting itself variously on the biomass, spoken into existence by the Metavirus from Outer Space. Information acting itself out in various media.

But religion as virus is not unambiguously negative, for the Snow Crash/Asherah virus through which L. Bob Rife the paranoid egomaniacal Texas wants to control all Information (and therefore everything), is countered by the nam-shub of Enki, the Babel/Infocalypse, a counter-neurolinguistic virus which is Reality’s salvation from undifferentiated, centralized Informational Control. Religion, then, is a medium for information, rather than Information itself, a constant of human nature (as Juanita points out, 200-1) that may be exploited for either good or ill.

There is, perhaps, an underlying Good that may be identified in Stephenson’s narrative of the Babel incident, and that is, the value of diversity. In the fractured landscape of Burbclaves and franchulates, where every group has its label, (its mascot, and its company motto), diversity has become estrangement. But Stephenson also offers us the information that diversity is necessary, valuable, and in a certain sense, salvation. Monocultures, like fields of corn, are vulnerable. “Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us” (279).

…In conclusion, I would point out that you, fellow members of the elite techno-priesthood, are also en with powers over multiple nam-shubs. Every day you work your magic through simple speech: 'I love you' is as transformative an utterance as one might ever give or receive, in any language. And as I again beg your indulgence for my personal snowcrash this week, I would most humbly remind you, so is, as well, absolvo te.

JTB

an explanatory note

Since I've never bothered to define "posthuman"...

There is an ambiguity at play that is really very significant. When I use "posthuman," I mean something like this. But it seems that quite a few people critiquing the idea of the posthuman use the word to refer to this. I think this second definition is properly considered a specific, and deficient, vision of posthumanity.

posthuman Dawn

This past week for ED 325, "Science Fiction, Social Criticism and Eschatological Thinking," we read Octavia E. Butler's Dawn, the beginning of her Xenogenesis trilogy. This is a fascinating novel about the posthuman, not least because it recasts the possibility of the posthuman into a fate not necessarily chosen by humanity itself or wrought by human technological achievement.

This is such a departure from the typical portrayal of the posthuman as the monstrous result of out of control (human) technology that it demands scrutiny. Why does Butler reconceive the posthuman in this way, and what does it say about her anthropology?

Throughout the novel Dawn, human beings are portrayed as a species uniquely constituted and conflicted. Twice, human uniqueness is affirmed as the contradiction of being "so full of life and death" at the same time. The Oankali, a three-gendered (male, female and ooloi), non-hierarchical species driven by a need for genetic exchange with nearly all other species they encounter, seem to regard humanity with a mixture of horror and irresistible romantic attraction--a reaction inspired by the uneasy mix of bipolarities that describe human nature. As the plot unfolds, we are given no unambiguously admirable human character (nor, for that matter, any unambiguously admirable alien character); even the protagonist, Lilith, with whom I as a reader sympathized immensely, is not without the flaws that seem to be definitive for human nature for Butler. Violence erupts with a slow, inexorable, tragic inevitability that no amount of foresight on Lilith's part can avoid. Misunderstanding, self-loathing, shame and desire, the need for expiation and punishment--all are incomprehensible to the Oankali, who not only are unified within themselves and never experience such inner conflict, but achieve unity, through the ooloi, with each other that humanity cannot properly conceive and cannot experience except through the ecstasy made possible through union with the ooloi--are presented by Butler as both the human flaws that trigger violence and tragedy, and the defenses which preserve the essentially human, or even the strongholds which enshrine the essentially human, and as that which is endangered by the posthuman future offered by the Oankali through the genetic blending of the two species. To be essentially human, and remain so, is to remain flawed. The dualism of humanity is both its uniqueness and its doom.

This view of humanity is one in which technology can never become a means of salvation, but only a means of destruction. Technology in the hands of fatally flawed humanity can only mean bigger, better, faster and more total means of self-destruction. And indeed, the book begins there: in post-nuclear-war devestation, from which humans must be rescued if they are to survive at all.

It seems logical to expect, then, that the Oankali are god-like beings--and such indeed they are. Personally, I am convinced that the Oankali are not simply god-like, but are Butler's image and theological critique of God--the Christian God--specifically, the Baptist God. The Oankali are a unified three-in-one, a trinity, in which the ooloi (the third gender) act much like the Holy Spirit in Augustine's description of the Trinity, as the "bond of love" between the other two. They are, in comparison to humans, omniscient (or close enough), and they are (or believe themselves to be) benevolent; they are powerful and in control of individual human lives as well as the collective fate of humanity; they make of Lilith a kind of prophetic leader; they intend the transformation of flawed human nature into something better.

And yet the Oankali are not, in contrast to humanity, completely harmonious and unconflicted moral beings. There are disagreements among them as to how to best handle their contact and interaction with humans. They seem to desire, above all, a mutual and reciprocal relationship with humans; but at the same time, they are distant, controlling, manipulative, ostensibly beneficent but unbearably patronizing. And they propose to transform humanity in ways that they refuse to describe, and proceed to do so without anything resembling consent. Lilith, whose relationship with the Oankali is the only one which comes at all close to one of equality and respect, resents the "need-to-know" justification for her ignorance, the callous disregard for her feelings, the deaf ear which the Oankali turn to her well-founded misgivings, and most disturbingly, the physical changes they effect in her without her knowledge. If relationship is indeed their goal, the means by which they try to achieve are incredibly counterproductive. The Oankali, too, are flawed. And this is what I think Butler wants to say about God: that if this is how God deals with humanity, an ostensibly beneficent but unbearably patronizing deity, then God too is flawed.

Who's posthuman

I grew up on that most marvelous of BBC creations, "Doctor Who." I still love it. Partly of course it's the nostalgic affection one inevitably has for any childhood love, but as an adult one can appreciate the deliberate comedic aspects so much more clearly. One of the many joys of going home to visit Mom and Dad is re-watching favourite episodes from their vast VHS collection of Doctor Who, all recorded sans commercials from the PBS station, although the occasional fund-raising blip does rear its ugly head every once in a while. Though Brent holds this element of Thweatt family culture in utter disdain, we don't care. It's fun to tease him with quoted lines of obscure dialogue and bits of family history like Emily's childhood fear of "tappers" and fondness for the "molopoligans."

Sometime in the 90's, there was an American made-for-TV movie attempt at resurrecting Doctor Who. It sucked. I don't remember much else about it, other than that it sucked and that a major reason for its suckiness was that they--clueless American They!--introduced a romantic angle into the Doctor's relationship with whatever chick was a part of that movie. So not the Doctor. We didn't have high hopes for it, really, and it still managed to disappoint us.

So I was suspicious of the new Doctor Who I heard about, even though it was BBC and being carried by the SciFi channel. But in due course my local Battlestar Galactica suppliers threw in the 2005 season of Doctor Who, and then then 2006. It took a few episodes but I ended up hooked. I'm still uncomfortable with all the hugging--the Doctor I grew up with only ever offered people jelly babies if he wanted to be friendly. But I can (just) overlook it.

So, not that Doctor Who is on the more philosophical end of the SF spectrum or anything, but the posthuman theme crops up every now and again. There's the universe's "Last Human"--a piece of flesh stretched out on a framework with a face in the middle, female of course, who keeps demanding "moisturize me, moisturize me!" in a riff on the perils of too much plastic surgery. But, more seriously, there is also the return of some classic Doctor Who villains: Daleks, and Cybermen.

It's the Cybermen that seem the more significant posthuman figure, despite the long history of Time Lord warfare with the Daleks, because we are offered a story of Cybermen origins in the double episode "The Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel." Here, in a human world closely parallel to Rose and Mickey's own, Cybus Industries has established a monopolizing hold on information technology, and introduced the innovation of earpieces that allow users to access the Cybus internet wherever they are. There's a great scene on the street, where, inexplicably, everyone around the Doctor, Rose and Mickey stop moving, wait for their daily download to complete, laugh in unison at the downloaded daily joke, and then resume walking. Of course, the earpieces become invasive technology in the hands of their insane inventor, the head of Cybus, John Lumic. Terminally ill and desperate to stave off physical weakness and imminent mortality, Lumic has invented the Cybermen: transplanted human brains in robotic metal bodies, bodies which, unlike their fleshly counterparts, do not wear out. As the plot unfolds, the earpieces become devices which override personal agency and people begin to march zombie-like into the factory for "uploading" (or alternatively, "deletion").

What is interesting to me, however, is not how the plot unfolds, which is of course predictable. The commentary on the posthuman along the way are the intriguing bits, as well as some of the specific features of Cybermen as posthuman figures.

1. Cybermen are transplanted brains in metal bodies. Perhaps I notice this particularly, having just finished Robert Sawyer's Mindscan, another narrative of a posthuman vision based on the desire to rid oneself of pesky mortal fleshly bodies. In Mindscan, however, the brain is not transplanted; instead, Sawyer offers a scenario in which one's mind is scanned and then recreated in another medium, so that Sawyer's posthuman is, physically, wholly artificial, with no organic component. The human element of Sawyer's posthuman is the mind, and it is the mind unattached to the organic brain. Doctor Who, on the other hand, presumes that the mind/brain is a single entity which must be physically transferred. There is still a dualism that must be presumed, but it is nowhere near as hardcore as Sawyer's, due to the slippage between the material/immateriality aspect.
   
2. Lumic himself resists being uploaded, and it is his Cybermen who force the issue by removing life support and making it a necessity; so that we, as audience, are presented with the fact that the creator of the Cybermen himself in the end holds an ambivalent attitude toward the "Good" of this posthuman destiny that he is forcing others to embrace. This is less about the ambivalence of the posthuman (after all, the posthuman in this scenario is unambiguously horrible) than it is about the hypocrisy of power: what is mandated for humanity's own good is so often something power exempts itself from.
   
3. Cybermen, like Daleks, are inhuman posthumans not because of the material of their bodies or the fact of cyborg hybridity, but because of a chosen/enforced inability for human emotion. The Daleks deliberately purged themselves of emotion; Lumic builds an "emotion inhibitor circuit" into the Cybermen. It is this that is the effective cause of the monstrous disregard for the other that is the common failing of both Daleks and Cybermen. When Mrs. Moore asks the Doctor why there is an emotion inhibitor chip, the Doctor replies, "because it hurts": that is, the fall (Fall?) from human into monstrous posthuman is emotionally unbearable, and so emotions, "the one thing that makes them human," must be eliminated. Cybermen are all rigorous logic and thorough application. The human brain is transplanted, but not the human heart (metaphorically speaking, of course). Cybermen are no longer human because the underlying anthropology at work here is one in which cognition as simple rationality is not, by itself, definitive of humanity. Rationality and emotion cannot be separated without doing violence to the meaning of being human. (In addition, empathy is predicated on emotional capacity, and morality on empathy, supposing a Humean view of morality.)


4. Alongside this, the elimination of all individuality is characteristic of the Cybermen. Reduced to mere logic, all individuals are merely parts of a technologically interconnected whole, with no volition or desires of their own. This seems to be an inescapable corollary to the elimination of emotion, and together, these lacks constitute a weakness exploitable for the Cybermen's defeat.


5. The restoration of emotion to these pitiable posthumans is the means by which they are defeated. The moment of realization of their posthuman state gives rise to a self-annihilating anguish expressed by wordless mechanically vocalized screams. Quite eerie, really. In the conversation leading up to the Cyber defeat, the Doctor cites imagination, emtion and personal agency as distinctives of humanity that make humans far superior to their posthuman Cyber-counterparts. But the final comment here is the most intriguing: when Lumic (the only Cyberman to retain an individual personality) demands, "what have you done?" The Doctor replies, not with a literally descriptive, 'I destroyed their emotions inhibitors' but with the statement, "I've given them back their souls." Souls!
6. But interestingly, in confronting Lumic, the Doctor also comments that everything Lumic has done is to fight sickness, and that this is brilliant and "so human." The problem the Doctor identifies is that the negativities of human life serve as the motivation for the struggle to overcome; without them, human striving for the good will cease. Cybermen are static; humanity is progressive. The implication is that there must be a human hope of utopia, but never a human-achieved consummation of that hope; humanity must exist within this eschatological paradox. When Lumic very logically counters with an exposition of the negativity of emotion and the offer of a "life without pain" the Doctor, like John the Savage of Brave New World, opts to embrace pain as the better (the human) choice.