Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Chapter Four Posthuman Selves, Assembled Textualities

chapter four Posthuman Selves, Assembled Textualities Remediated Print in the Digital Age k ie ne br il le nb ur g w ur th There is no subject, only collective assemblages of enunciation. Subjectification is only one such assemblage. —giles deleuze and felix guattari , A Thousand Plateaus All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. —william burroughs, ‘‘The Cut-Up Method’’ In recent years, media theorists and historians have extensively researched the transformative impact of modern communication and recording technologies on the human body and human embodiment: the body as it is normatively projected from the outside in a specific culture and the body as it is lived from the inside. Especially under the influence of Friedrich Kittler, but also due to the growing dominance of information technologies in Western culture, many scholars in the humanities are rethinking what it is to be human. Such scholars no longer conceive of a human essence or soul tucked away inside the body; rather, they explore provisional modes of embodiment framed, prepared, and configured by media technologies. In the work of Bernard Stiegler and others, these provisional modes of embodiment have come to be associated with the idea of an artificially extended humanity typically called posthuman. This critical notion of the posthuman differs from a scientific posthumanism devoted to prolonging life in the pursuit of immortality. Although the concept ‘‘posthuman’’ may refer to certain fairly recent fantasies and developments in science and science fiction concerning the human and its mental as well as bodily extension over time, it also involves rethinking the basis of subjectivity as radically heterogeneous. That is, the posthuman both fulfils scientific visions of the endless extension of a liberal or autonomous humanist self subjecting the world to 75 76 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth its free will and, as a critical concept, presents a means to dismantle that liberal self by exposing the very fluidity, multiplicity, and difference on which it is based.1 In this latter sense, and as Katherine Hayles has proposed in How We Became Human, posthumanism signals not a technologically mediated afterstage of the human, but rather the end of a dominant conception of the human that privileges sameness, identity, and mastery. This does not mean, however, that critical posthumanism has no concern with (cyber)technology. While it has primarily focused on animality in/and humanity, critical posthumanism has also typically tried to redefine ideas of the human by reflecting on the space in between humans and machines. Such reflections have led to the idea that the self is not given, is not contained, and has no exclusive interiority from which to start: Rather, the self is an exteriority (what Stiegler calls ‘‘technics’’) that acts as an original incursion of that selfhood. It is this critical posthumanism that I will be concerned with here. Recent analyses of posthuman subjectivities in film and literature have usually focused on cyberpunk and science fiction, where such subjectivities are configured digitally or in another high-tech fashion. In this chapter I examine how in some contemporary fiction the ‘‘old’’ medium of paper has come to function as the matter of ‘‘new’’ posthuman subjectivities that are the product of an ‘‘external’’ inscription: enactors operating on the basis of codes—not digital codes, but handwritten , printed, paper-based instructions. This is an especially interesting development, since paper has long been implicated in the construction of humanness and subjectivity in Western culture. Indeed, as Allison Muri has shown in her article ‘‘Virtually Human,’’ the book has functioned as the locus of human consciousness in our culture since the Renaissance, while the human body has been familiarly framed as a book of nature. Accordingly, literature—and the novel in particular—has been a mediator of human identity and consciousness, and the construction of an individual, humanistic subjectivity in Western culture has often been associated with the reading of books. Thus, for those critics warning against the growing dominance of the electronic page, the codex book captures the spiritual values of humanism and is the privileged locus of a secular consciousness: ‘‘in our secular world, the ‘cathedral’ of human consciousness or identity has for centuries been represented by the . . . codex or paper page.’’2 For example, Sven Birkerts apocalyptically connects the waning of the private self, together with the erosion of language and the loss of historical perception, to the rise of the electronic [18.220.140.5...