A Genealogy of the Cyborgothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism (review)

This book is itself rather like one of the Gothic texts through which Dongshin Yi traces his "Genealogy of the Cybergothic": it has much mystery about it. Recalling the architecture of a gothic mansion, with all its hidden passageways and dungeons, the book is structured around five baroque chapters, ornate with theoretical apparati, festooned with footnotes for further reading. These rooms house bedfellows that are not wholly unfamiliar to us: Kenneth Burke and Ann Radcliffe; Immanuel Kant and Mary Shelley; John Stuart Mill and Bram Stoker; William James and Sinclair Lewis; Luce Irigaray and Marge Piercy. And yet, the context and contrast of the pairings in this setting make them newly strange. Reading this book, I felt, at times, rather like a heroine lost in a labyrinthine castle. How would Yi show me, as promised in the introduction, the way to an ethical treatment of the cyborg via these discussions of nineteenth century aesthetics, judgment, sensibility, science and rationalism, with so many detours into selfishness, sacrifice, and the flawed logic of separate spheres? Like a Gothic text, too, the appearances of the most sensational apparitions—here, the cyborgs—are fleeting and few and far between: a chapter on servants begins with a tour of the uncanny valley; a chapter on modern monsters begins with Turing's test and thinking machines; a chapter on scientific rationalism begins with "the ghost of eugenics" (63). But of course, this is a "Genealogy of the Cyborgothic" and thus, it is appropriate that it profiles the cyborg's ancestors. If, in touring the pre-cyborgothic domain, the rooms that Yi builds for us don't always seem to connect one-to-the-next by means of the narrow channel provided, it is because there are other, more profitable, passageways to be found between them.

Chapter one argues for a leveling of the "uncanny valley into a meadow, where humans and robots, however different or alike they are, might co-exist" (14). In order to put forth a "posthuman answer to the question of the uncanny valley," Yi acknowledges that we need to change our "psychical geography," and demonstrates the means to achieve this end: "it is aesthetic sensibilities, leading and regulating political sensibilities, from which the current of change flows full and by which the uncanny valley can be leveled." To do this, we must first recuperate an aesthetics of the Gothic and find in its tangling with the sublime an aperture for delight. To this end, the first chapter addresses matters of taste, sensibility, and society, as they exist in Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolfo and in Burke's conception of the beautiful and the sublime. What has this to do with an ethics of the cyborg? Fittingly, for a mystery story, or a book offering to change one's "psychical geography," A Genealogy of the Cyborgothic is a carefully constructed adventure, and if one adheres to the path provided, everything will become clear in the end. The reader's disorientation is a part of the book's artistry, for it works to strip away our expectations of the gothic genre and the cyborg's role in literature, in order to see them anew as Yi forecasts an ethical posthuman future.

From the sublime and aesthetics, we move quickly to examine science in literature. The goal is "to imagine an alternative to the polarized view of posthuman society" wherein "human dignity is not used as an excuse for exploiting non-humans but as a reason for embracing them." Yi purports to chart the course by first investigating "the relationship between the 'humanistic intent' and 'the march of scientific progress,'" (94); to do this we look to Frankenstein, Dracula, and Arrowsmith, in chapters two, three, and four, respectively. Yi argues that in the nineteenth century "modern society raised the question of the human but was unable to solve it" and that it is "in response to this...