Augmented intimacies: posthuman love stories in contemporary science fiction Amy Jane ...

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Augmented intimacies: posthuman love stories in contemporary science fiction

Amy Jane Christmas

Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD
The University of Leeds
York St John University,
Faculty of Arts.

September 2013
Intellectual Property and Publication

The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been
given where reference has been made to the work of others.

This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no
quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement.

The right of Amy Jane Christmas to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

© 2013 The University of Leeds and Amy Jane Christmas

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost I would like to take this opportunity to thank my research supervisors, to
whom I am indebted for their expertise, support and patience over the last four years. Professor
Gary Peters has guided my philosophical reading and education, and my introduction to and
subsequent love of Alain Badiou can be credited to his input. Dr Liesl King has repeatedly gone
above and beyond the call of duty, and I am very grateful to her for always finding the time and
energy for me. In addition, it is to Liesl and Andy Gordon of the Literature department at York
St John University to whom I owe my passion for science fiction as an academic subject, thanks
to their wonderful undergraduate module on Ursula K. Le Guin. I would like to thank York St
John and the University of Leeds for their support and resources, as well as the funding
opportunity I so gratefully received in 2009.

I also must thank Professor Lucie Armitt from the University of Lincoln and Dr Richard Brown
from the University of Leeds for dedicating their time to examining this thesis.

Thanks must also go to Dr John Rule and Jill Graham in the York St John Research Office for
their commitment to the graduate students and for their unerring support and reliability
throughout. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues in the Graduate Centre, whose
moral support and amazing community spirit have made the postgraduate journey one taken in
good company.

Particular thanks must go to Steve Nash, James Cragg and Suzanne Dickinson for their time
spent proofreading and for being sounding boards and patient friends on top of that.

I have to thank my family for their support both emotional and financial over these many
student years. Additionally, I have my husband’s family, particularly my mother-in-law, to
thank for taking care of me so well in France as I finished my write-up. Merci beaucoup.

Finally, I want to thank my husband, Bertrand Audebert, for his unwavering love and care, not
to mention patience, over the last four years.

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Abstract

Science fiction in the developed world has for centuries provided a fertile space for explorations
of human and cultural phenomena, on the one hand underpinning philosophical conceptions of
humans and human nature, and on the other acting as a fictive mirror in which the aspects and
impacts of our technoscientific cultures are reflected. Between nature and culture stands the
figure of the posthuman, whose ancestry can be traced as far back as the Talmudic golems, but
whose presence is most keenly felt in the genre since the mid-twentieth century, where the
science has caught up with the fiction. Resurfacing in post-industrial, secular society, alongside
technologies newly able to render it into being, the posthuman reminds us of our position in
relation to evolutionary laws, inviting speculation upon its future, and thus, by default, upon our
own. In 2002, Francis Fukuyama used two seminal works of science fiction – Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – to trace ‘a tale of
two dystopias’, or how two fields of technoscience are currently pushing us into a posthuman
stage of history.1 Biotechnology and communications are, as Donna Haraway has put it, ‘the
crucial tools recrafting our bodies’ – moreover, they provide the discursive spaces within which
we now so consciously write and rewrite our presents, pasts and futures.2 This thesis follows the
dovetailing trajectories of Fukuyama’s ‘two futures’ hypothesis by presenting, in two sections, a
range of posthuman figures in contemporary science fiction novels, short stories, comics and
films. Beginning with Philip K. Dick’s genre-defining Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968) and ending just over four decades later with Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s milestone
Internet documentary Catfish (2010), the four textual analysis chapters delineate an evolution of
the posthuman in fiction (and reality) from cyborg to cyberpunk, showing how the ground is
quickly closed up between the human and the posthuman. Much excellent scholarship,
following Haraway’s ground-breaking “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), has been produced on
the cyborgian/posthuman figure in science fiction and practice alike; the posthuman as the
ultimate Other for our technoscientific world. This thesis takes a new approach in refocusing
upon the posthuman in love, responding to the growing insistency in science fiction texts to
foreground romantic relationships between posthumans, between humans and posthumans, and
between humans enframed by the technoscientific. The close readings of these eleven primary
sources are underpinned by four chapters devoted to constructing a philosophical framework
which marries the cyborg theory of Haraway and the virtual posthumanism of N. Katherine
Hayles with the history of the philosophy of love in the continental tradition, specifically the

1 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London:
Profile Books 2002).
2 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century” (revised chapter version) in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (London: Free Association Books 1991).
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late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century writings of Alain Badiou. Working from Badiou’s
central tenets of love – difference, disjunction, and the encounter – and analysing the move to
posthuman selfhood alongside the seemingly anachronistic pursuit of love in late modernity,
this thesis seeks to explore and explain the presence and meaning of love in high-tech society. If
the posthuman is an emergent figure portending the end of history, as many postmodern
thinkers have argued, then how can we understand its relationship to the love paradigm, which
turns on the perpetuation of a conception of metanarrative that, in current modes of criticism,
has fallen out of fashion?

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Contents

Acknowledgements iii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1

Chapter One – Love Makes Us Human 26
1.1 There’s something very strange and touching about humans –
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) 30
1.2 More human than human – Blade Runner (1982) 37
1.3 I am a magician who seduced a machine – He, She and It (1991) 43

Chapter Two – Les preuves d’amour 56
2.1 Difference 63
2.2 Locating the self in technoculture 70
2.3 Towards a new subjectivity 74

Chapter Three – Love Makes Them Human 80
3.1 We’re all unnatural now. We’re all cyborgs – He, She and It (1991) 83
3.2 Don’t fall in love with her, she’ll only make you cry – Chobits (2001-2) 91
3.3 Poor creatures. What did we do to you? – Never Let Me Go (2005) 100

Chapter Four – We Are All Chimeras 112
4.1 Disjunction 118
4.2 The metamorphosis of freedom 120
4.3 The ritual of bodies 128

Chapter Five – Bodies Otherwise Imagined 138
5.1 I am not what thou lovest – ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ (1973) 147
5.2 Close but not touching – ‘The Wedding Album’ (1991) 155
5.3 Seeing beauty feels like love – ‘Liking What You See: A
Documentary’ (2001) 163

Chapter Six – The (Re)Birth of the World 172
6.1 The encounter 180
6.2 Life on the splice 185
6.3 Existing as inscription 197
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Chapter Seven – Are You Still There? 203
7.1 I’m not sixteen years old, I’m not from Arkansas, and I’m not a girl –
The Parlor (2010) 207
7.2 Have you ever met one of your internet girlfriends? – LOL (2006) 212
7.3 I keep changing your smile because you keep changing your smile –
Catfish (2010) 220

Chapter Eight – Nothing but Solitudes 230
8.1 A neo-Romantic media 234
8.2 The generation of selves 241
8.3 Adrift, ‘alone’, and dis/connected 256

Conclusion 263

Bibliography 268

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Introduction
I do know that for the sympathy of one
living being, I would make peace with all.
I have love in me the likes of which you
can scarcely imagine.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

The work so often cited as the first science fiction novel is not only a story about science – it is
also a story about love.1 In 1818, Mary Shelley set the tone for all subsequent treatment of the
liberal humanist subject in the genre, and it is Victor Frankenstein’s tragic monster who
initiates the double-helical interplay of two of the grand narrative arcs – science fiction and
romance – in our modern literary tradition. Theodore Roszak writes that ‘at the centre of her
classic tale […] Mary Shelley placed a love story, a tragic love story of a marriage – a union,
as she always called it – that failed to take place’.2 Though the novel performs a Gothic
inversion of the traditional love story – like Shakespeare through a scanner, darkly – it
nonetheless issues from the height of the Romantic period, and in using love to curtail Victor
and his creature, Shelley reframes both the monster and the mad scientist as driven and
demented by their pursuit of love. Writing about the potency of nesting narratives so
characteristic of this period, Beth Newman remarks that the novel’s mise en abyme encourages
us to ‘attend […] to the relations between the stories in the centre and those in the frame’,
continuing:

frame narratives suggest about storytelling […] that a story can be cut off from
its origin in a particular speaker and tell itself in other speakers, who to some
extent are shaped by it instead of shaping it. Such a conception of the narrative
act contradicts one of the central tenets of most approaches to narrative theory,
the idea that no story exists apart from a shaping human intelligence, and that
every story bears the mark of this shaping intelligence.3

In Frankenstein, not only are narratives held within narratives, but also texts within texts. The
concentric frames are further focused through the creature’s account of his time spent in exile,
and his attempts at self-education and socialisation. Here, the significance of narrative is
recursively pointed to, by Shelley through the mouthpiece of her creature, as he relates to Victor

1 Among others (Richard Kadrey, Larry McCaffery), Brian Aldiss calls Frankenstein ‘the first great myth
of the industrial age’ in Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday,
1973), p. 23.
2 Theodore Roszak, ‘Frankenstein, Feminism, and the Fate of the Earth: Virtual Reality and Nature’, The
Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, 14.3 (1997) <http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/
view/203/274> [accessed 23 July 2013] (para. 2 of 5)
3 Beth Newman, ‘Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of
Frankenstein’, ELH, 53.1 (1986), 141-163 (pp. 141-142).
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an episode in which he came across a collection of abandoned texts. With these, the creature
taught himself to read, and he explains to Victor how substantially they altered his emotional
and cognitive being:

I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an
infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but
more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. In the Sorrows of Werther,
besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many opinions are
canvassed and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me
obscure subjects that I found in it a never-ending source of speculation and
astonishment […] As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own
feelings and condition.4

Shelley’s choice of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) as a
conditioning influence on her monster is telling. Goethe’s novel is a staple text of high
Romanticism, as catalytic for the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) would prove to be for post-Revolutionary
France, and the Byronic archetypes of narrative poetry for English literature up to the late
Romantic novels of the Brontës (1847) and beyond. These core texts marked the greatest
paradigmatic shift in the history of romantic writing and its encompassing philosophy since
William Shakespeare, in whose sonnets and dramatic works (though issuing from the preceding
era of courtly love) can be read early indicators of the impending Romantic puritanism that took
hold of the continent so strongly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Romance in contemporary cultural production has, to an extent, fallen out of fashion.
No longer so dynamically linked to the heroic narratives of emerging modernism, and
problematizing an existential individualism, love stories in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries tend now to be treated superficially with light or absurd humour (exemplified by
countless films and television series produced each year in the romantic comedy genre),
relegated to the realm of women’s escapist fantasy, with the romance distended beyond
recognition (Harlequin and Mills and Boon) or else subsumed beneath more overtly erotic
themes (melodramatic ‘chick lit’ and ‘airport novels’). In The Transformation of Intimacy,
sociologist Anthony Giddens charts the twin development of modern subjectivity and the
romantic narrative, from the rise of the novel in the Western tradition through to the twentieth
century. He observes that, by the late Victorian period, the idealised love so fundamental to the
Romantics had become incompatible with a post-industrial (and predominantly masculine)
individualist conception of self. Love stories, by the Victorian era, were thus firmly consigned
to the domain of women’s literature:

4 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The modern Prometheus (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2005), pp. 152-
153.
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Avid consumption of romantic novels and stories was in one sense a testimony
to passivity. The individual sought in fantasy what was denied in the ordinary
world. The unreality of romantic stories from this angle was an expression of
weakness, an inability to come to terms with frustrated self-identity in actual
social life.5

This feminisation of romantic literature may have in some part contributed to our cultural
disdain regarding love stories (and perhaps love in general) today. Yet, we continue to produce
and consume these stories, however jaded by or suspicious of them we profess to have become.
Helen Fisher, who has spent over thirty years analysing how the intersecting of
anthropology and biochemistry sheds light on loving phenomena in human societies worldwide,
addresses this continuation of love as an underlying and directive social force by defining it as
‘a universal experience – deeply embedded in the human brain’.6 In a talk for the Technology,
Entertainment, Design (TED) conferences in 2008, in light of her experimental research in this
area, Fisher summarised:

Around the world people love. They sing for love, they dance for love, they
compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love.
They pine for love. They live for love. They kill for love, and they die for love
[…] Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies.
They’ve never found a society that did not have it.7

Love is embedded, both biologically and culturally, and in its universality it communicates an
engrained sense of metanarrative – one steered and perpetuated by the incessant production of
individual myths coalescing as one mythology. In situating her creature within the concentric
frames of scientific, loving, and modernising social discourses, as a monster made from stories
and led by stories, Mary Shelley created a prescient figure – a modern Prometheus – to trouble
the underlying structures of our human traditions. Giddens writes that modernity ‘is essentially
a post-traditional order’, characterised at its core by a reflexivity undetected in pre-modern
societies.8 In the industrial and increasingly secularising West that gave rise to the Romantic
period, it was initially expected that scientific reason would come to replace the traditional
metanarratives handed down by religious and cultural customs. However, as Giddens identifies,
modernity’s reflexivity ‘turn[ed] out to confound the expectations of Enlightenment thought –

5 Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
(California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 44.
6 Helen Fisher, ‘What is Love?’, On Air: BBC International Magazine, 98 (2004), 12-15 <http://www.
helenfisher.com/downloads/articles/08bbconair.pdf> [accessed 23 July 2013] (p. 13)
7 Helen Fisher, ‘The Brain in Love’, TED (2008) <http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_
brain_in_love.html> [accessed 20/07/13]
8 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2004), p. 20. Giddens’s ‘high/late modernity’ equates our postmodern or contemporary
period in literary criticism. Outside direct quotations from his scholarship, the latter terms will be
substituted.
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