‘The Posthuman It ANDY MOUSLEY The Posthuman Seontemporary capitalism, with its subordination of all putatively human [ teeds and wants to the impersonal and largely mysterious operations of ‘the F markee’, the priority of which is reinforced by the ubiquity of the language of marketing and corporate management-speak. Where once there were human ings with rich and complex interiorities ~ or s0 we might like to think ~ there are now ciphers whose principal way of conceiving of themselves is © cither as brands or loci of consumption. Explorations of the posthuman and posthumanism have become growth areas across a wide range of academic disciplines since the 19905. Although the terms may be new, like many concepts they have a pre-history. In the versions of literary and critical theory that presided in the x970s and whose Influence can still be felt, the presumed integrity of the human subject was _ icratinized from different directions: by poststructuralises who emphasized >the role of language in the construction of subjectivitys by psychoanalytic sritics who displaced the notion of entirely rational human agents; and by = Marxists influenced by Louis Althusser for whom human subjectivity was tn ideological illusion. These anti-humanists, as they were often termed, -thomselves had antecedents, not least in some aspects of the work of their primary sources (Saussure, Freud and Marx). However, it would be mis- leading to write the genealogy of posthumanist ideas solely through these thinkers or other challenges to anthropocentric thinking as posed by such _ figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin or Galilei Galileo. That is bocause the posthuman is not exclusively the invention of philosophers and scientists. Nor is it solely the result of techno-scientific changes. Rather, to adopt N. Katherine Hayles’ insight that ‘we have always been posthuman’, the posthuman names a tendency internal to the human condition itself." © he posthuman and its near conceptual neighbours ~ the inhuman, subhu- man, superhuman, anti-human, trans-human and non-human ~ have from = this perspective arguably always shadowed the human, with the idea of the Intactness of the human and human subjectivity being more the stuff of myth "than reality. Given its capacity to explore all comers of human existence, often prior to their formalization as named theories or philosophies literature is one of the places to which we might turn to witness the human condition in allies postthuman variety. Depictions of hollowed-out subjectivities (conspicuous examples being T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and “The Hollow Men’ ‘when answering e cold callin differentiating straight away between a huma 1925), and the plays of Samuel Beckett) might offer one point of entry into voice and a digitized version of one. the posthuman. The horror provoked by co-opted or radically transformed A fourth contributor to a posthuman condition, not always observed iit human subjects ~a staple ingredient of the Gothic - might be another. If ehe discussions of posthumanism, are the various de-humanizations effected by term posthuman, as I suggested at the outset, verges on the sensationalistic, The term ‘posthuman’ names several striking, even sensationalizing, p pects for humanity. Apocalyptically, the term suggests the demise of hhuman species due to such real or imagined dangers as environmental cat trophe, global warfare or diminishing resources. Less drastically, though by much, the posthuman signifies the passing of the human as we know i or think we know it. There are a number of conttibutors to the kind'9f pposthuman condition in which we might one day find ourselves or whig right already exist. The first is that increasingly sophisticated machines mi render human beings and whatever special characteristics they (think they] possess superfluous, with computers, for example, composing music, adjudl cating on legal matters and predictively writing our emails and texts for ‘A second scenario is that instead of being left behind by (new) technologies humans or a privileged few of them will be enhanced by them (as they been by past technologies), living longer, improved lives liberated from thi limitations of being ‘merely’ human. In some of its more wildly egocentel ‘human into its often-presumed ‘others’: the machine, the animal, the digital the automated. Such morphing may occur either through the importatid fications, or through increased exportation of mechanized processes into human world. Such multiple, two-way hybridizations may make it dificil to distinguish the natural from the artificial, or the simulation of the hu bya machine, especially given that humans, always good mimics, may cot to actin increasingly mechanistic ways; already, I sometimes have difficult 158 159then its natural literary ally may indeed be the Gothic, a genre dealing extremes, and one which, like the foreboding term posthuman, incites us ( ask or ask again: what is human? what do we mean by the human? Posthuman Humans in Frankenstein Frankenstein's artificially made creation may cause us to ponder the 0 ditions for accepting, him or “it” as human, The claims that the monste himself makes upon Frankenstein, and us, to be accepted as human (it positive sense of that term) are especially compelling in that part of thas creature's autobiographical narrative where he demands that Frankenstel create a mate for him: ‘I am alone, and miserable; man will not associa ‘with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself tome... This being you must create.”* At various moments in Frankenstely creature has ‘natural’ human feelings and affections, it seems, and ironically even appears more human than the human who created him. In his utopiatt human compassion extends to the natural world itself, chus making him more ecologically part of nature than an aberration from it My food is not that of man; Ido not destroy the lamb and the ki, to glue my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human,» and you must fel that you could deny i only inthe wantonness of power and crucky. Pitiless a5 you have been towards me, | now see compassion in your eyes. (p. 120) “{ohuman’ might easily substitute here for ‘pitiless’, the creature's word for his human creator. The world of Frankenstein is at this point a topsy-turvy ‘one in which the human seems more monstrous than the monster, and the monster outstrips the human in its humanity. The unsettling of boundaries between human and inhuman, natural and unnatural, does not resolve itself into this simple inversion, however, for if the creature acts as a touchstone for human values (such as compassion, peaceful co-existence with nature, living within boundaries rather than in excess of ther), then its immediately necessary to say that it may be ‘all too human’ to betray these and all other ‘human touchstones. We can forget ourselves. We can become ‘denatured’, 160 The Posthuman We can behave inhumanly. Indeed, so routinely may we forget the ‘milk of human kindness’ that ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ looks to be the more iweurate proverbial encapsulation of a condition which in reality is rarely telbidentical, rarely a matter ofthe simple recognitions that the narrators in runkenstein sometimes invite. Tirankenstein himself is a prime example of a human whose bumanity paradoxically consists inthe simultaneous recognition and denial of human limits. As one of literature’s most notorious Promethean over-reachers, he ‘exemplifies the posthuman in the human, or at least one kind of posthu innity, bent on surpassing himself, Shelley takes pains, though, to ground Frankenstein in recognizably ordinary human feelings of which he then takes -ave, as if to imply that the condition of being ordinarily human and want- ing to exceed that condition are thoroughly intertwined. When he departs {or the University of Ingolstadt his ‘melancholy reflections’ naturally tura twwards the ‘amiable companions’ (p. 28) he will miss, but equally natural, we ate encouraged to think, is his youthful desire for adventure (intellec- tual adventure, in his ease): ‘Thad often, when at home, thought it hard to remain during my youth cooped up in one place, and had longed to enter the world, and take my station among other human beings’ (p. 28). So far, so ‘normal’, we are led to believe, until the solitary pursuit of forbidden knowl- alge becomes obsessive, leading him to ‘spend days and nights in vaults and chacnel houses (p. 34) in search of body parts for his creation. Frankenstein tnarks the antichuman monstrosity of his activity - ‘often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation’ — but he continues anyway, ‘urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased’ (p. 37). Natural human revulsion can be overcome by a variety of countervailing compul- sions: insatiable curiosity; an urge to defeat human mortality ~‘I thought... night in process of time... renew life where death had apparently devored the body to corruption’ (p. 36); and the ultimate ego gratification of secur- ing the unalloyed devotion of the ‘new species” he will bring into existence {p- 36). Yet these overriding compulsions also stem from feelings ~ curiosity, fear of death, a need to be loved ~ that are equally identifiable as ‘human’ Tey also derive from a recognition on Frankenstein's part of the limiting conditions of human existence. His curiosity, for example, can be seen as an attempt to mitigate the wondrous as well as frightening mystery of what he calls ‘our dark world’ (p. 36). Death, fresh in Frankenstein’s consciousness as a result of his mother’s recent demise, is another obvious constraining, fact of existence, as is the uncertain conditionality of love. Its against these givens of existence chat Frankenstein rebels. Unlike his creature who later imagines a life modestly accepting of the limits which his extraordinary 161ANDY MoUSLEY ‘The Posthuman ‘posthuman human’, a human who refuses to live within the boundat the human. There have been times when faith in the capacity of human beings change themselves and their environment, ostensibly for the better, ha ‘more conspicuously evident than at other times. In a theocentrie uni governed by ideas of original sin and humanity's fixed place in a God scheme of things, the potential for transformation is limited. The worl Frankenstein is otherwise, and not just because Frankenstein as a spectad] lar Promethean figure co-opts the role of a creator-god in a capricious of individualistic hubris, but because as a modern Prometheus he inbal a world which propels him in several different ways towards notions twansformability. Ideas of self- and world-transformation form part of fabric of Frankenstein's day-to-day world and way of thinking, and 1 some aberration from them. ‘The view that selves and worlds can be Fi cally transformed is in other words so embedded in Frankenstein’s as to make it almost second nature to think beyond nature. The assum tion, tempered to different degrees, of the radical transformability of hum: nature, nature and society is advanced in Frankenstein across a numb of different discourses. As a student of modern chemistry, for example ceulogized by one of his early teachers M. Waldman, Frankenstein heats how the “modern masters” (p. 30) of chemistry have “penetrate(d] int the recesses of nature” and “have acquired new and almost unlimited xs” (p. 30). From his father and his father’s secular materialism, he learn to be afraid of ‘no supernatural horrors’ and to view a churchyard as ‘mere the receptacle of bodies deprived of life’ (p. 34), an attitude which facilitate his profane treatment of corpses as manipulable objects available to him fof vivisection. Asa Romantic, susceptible to the power ofthe imagination, and in awed the sublime majesty of nature from which he at the same time draws insp tion, Frankenstein also privileges world-making imaginative consciousnest above mere imitation of what already exists (this despite the more dialectical attitude of a Romantic poet like Wordsworth). Traumatized by the thor William, Frankenstein travels with his family to the iconically Romani destination of Mont Blanc. There he experiences a degree of relief from hi 16 tie’, writes Walton in an early description he gives of Frankenstein, ‘can a more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea ‘and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the E power of elevating his soul from earth’ (p. 16). Sublime nature itself appears ‘posthuman’ because its vastness and grandeur are beyond human scale and © comprehension, Elevation above the ‘merely human’ is what Frankenstein himself craves. He achieves an elevated, sublime state, equal to nature's, by E the immensity of his own transformative vision and imagination, Nature “has @ humbling effect upon Frankenstein, and increasingly s0, but it is © nlso the site of projection, a vehicle for the expression of a desire for extra-ordinary powers, realized in the creature’s ‘superhuman speed” and stature (p. 76). Scientific and Romantic discourses propel this modern Prometheus towards ideas and feats which refuse or radically modify the ordinary limits of human existence. So, too, do some of the libertarian principles which lspired, or were ignited by, the French Revolution. Brought up unconven- | tionally by parents who ‘never forced’ particular ‘studies’ upon their children 6 ‘disciplined? them ‘according to the ordinary methods’ (p. 21), Franken- stcin’s resulting free spirit of enquiry echoes the libertarian beliefs of Mary | ‘Shelley’s father William Godwin. In his An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of +793, published in the year after the establishment of the French E Republic, Godwin proposes that no government ought ‘to set up a standard upon the various topics of human speculation, to restrain the excursions of Fan inventive mind’. ‘It is only by giving a free scope to these excursions’, he continues, ‘that science, philosophy and morals have arrived at their present degree of perfection, in comparison of which all that has already done {sic} will perhaps appear childish’.? Godwin is also in the tradition of thinkers, = stretching at least as far back as John Locke, to argue for the priority of nurture over nature in the formation of human consciousness and morality. ‘There being ‘no innate principles’, argues Godwin after Locke, we are ‘nei- ther virtuous nor vicious as we first come into existence’ In Frankenstein, = the monster advances a similar understanding in his insistence that “misery made mea fiend”? (p. 78) and that happiness can return him to the virtue he = learned from the cottagers in whose house he secretly resided in one forma- tive part of his life. Monsters are made not born. Likewise, the benevolent humanity of humans is a matter of cultivation, and not some inalienable fact ‘of human nature. 163