Posthuman Systems

Page 8 American Book Review gate two representative post-cyberpunk novels, Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991) and, in a brief separate chapter, Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996) to emphasize the critical importance of bodies and embodiment in these writings which deconstruct the denial or transcendence of embodiment that could sometimes be found in cyberpunk culture. In her examination of novels by Jack Womack and Neal Stephenson, which forms the sixth chapter of the study, Vint focuses on the importance of texts to the formation of identity. Less futuristic than the other fictions, Womack’s speculative novel Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1995) portrays a young female protagonist, Lulu, who, through the use of a diary and against the backdrop of acute economic and social decline, chronicles her difficult journey from a protected middle-class child into a street-smart gang member. Not only the substance but also the manner of her writing testifies, as Vint convincingly shows, to this change of identity which is once again read as the result of interactions between cultural forces and subjective agency. Centering on a primer that possesses artificial intelligence and is used as a handbook, the novel recounts the lives of a group of girls in a neo-Victorian society. Featuring a primer that adopts to each girl’s unique circumstances and encourages her in her transition to adulthood and social advancement, Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995) is another coming-of-age novel that narrates interactions between individual circumstances and cultural-ideological scripts. In the conclusion chapter, Vint observes that our particular ideological investments and value constructions require clear articulations rather than glosses and opaqueness. Likewise, practices of, and inquiries into, the posthuman need to acknowledge differences in embodied subjects based on class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, race, and access to resources, for with further technological advances differences will also continue to proliferate. The conclusion chapter provides further juxtapositions between fictional narratives and real-life practices. For example, Vint draws attention to the movement and the websites of transhumanists whose language exhibits a tendency toward a reinscription of liberal humanism into a contemporary cultural landscape. Under the guise of universality and liberty, they appear to promote certain kinds of body enhancement while denouncing others. Throughout the study, moreover, Vint cites Ellen Ullman who diagnoses the dangers involved in the abstract logic displayed by some computer programmers who have adopted an elitist stance vis-à-vis unsophisticated “end-users” as well as toward their own bodies. Even a book as broadly and comprehensively conceived as the present volume will by necessity be selective, leaving out some aspects whose inclusion would have been welcome. For example, the long tradition of disavowing Cartesian mind-body dualism which informs Vint’s argumentation and which goes back at least as far as Karl Marx’s early writings, would have merited some delineation. Furthermore, Vint’s examination of the human in relationship to the posthuman could have drawn some attention to Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), where in chapter 3 Freud sketches connections between the available technologies , which he characterizes as hyper-versions of human body parts, and a transition into a kind of posthuman condition. Overall, the present study is an extremely engaging, informative, and readable book which gives an admirably broad and detailed account of the kind of recent science-fiction writing that has brought into focus fundamental questions and ethical concerns about embodied subjectivity in an increasingly posthuman world. Arguing that genetically, physiologically, and technologically altered bodies will continue to be specific embodiments, Vint cautions that to imagine the posthuman condition as one of disembodiment is to neglect our continued encasement in however radically altered corporeality. Her readings of various depictions of the posthuman consistently demonstrate that agency, connectivity, responsibility, vulnerability, and mind-body interactions are concomitants of having bodies and being parts of the material world. Friederike von Schwerin-High is an assistant professor of German at Pomona College in Claremont, California. She received her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts with a dissertation on the reception of Shakespeare’s Tempest in Germany and Japan. Her research interests include the age of Goethe, Thomas Mann, translation, theories...