Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace PDF
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Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace LEXINGTOBNO OKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanhnrn Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http:/lwww.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright O 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miccoli, Anthony, 1972- Posthuman suffering and the technological embrace / Anthony Miccoli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2633-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-739 1-4402-2 (electronic) 1. Technology-Philosophy. 2. Human body-Technological innovations. 3. Cyborgs. 4. Humanism. 5. Suffering. 6. Artificial intelligence-Social aspects. 7. Philosophical anthropology. I. Title. T14.5.MS2 2009 128--dc22 2009038848 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSVNISO 239.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America For Alina- "the voice ofyour eyes is deeper than all roses" And in loving memory of Joseph & Rina D 'Angieri and Carolyn Miccoli Contents Preface ix ... Acknowledgments Xlll Introduction Posthuman Assumptions and the Technological Embrace 1 Inside Out and Prayers for Recognition 2 The Crying ofLot 49 and Posthuman Subjectivity 3 Humanism Through Technology 4 White Noise: Jack Gladney and the Evasion of Responsibility Conclusion A.I. ArtlJicial Intelligence: Accepting Obsolescence Epilogue Selected Bibliography Index About the Author Preface Technic Excavations One of the greatest difficulties in writing any theoretical treatment of technology is the fact that time is against you. The place one chooses to plant one's "post" is almost immediately subsumed by the tide of those who come after, rendering even the most prescient insights moot or obsolete in the time it takes for a manu- script to go to press. Revisions become a dual process: excavating the texts that were lost in the debris of composition, while simultaneously erecting statements on the very ground being excavated. As this text evolved from its earliest stages as a doctoral dissertation to its present form, I found myself guilty of the same shortcoming of which I had been so quick to accuse Hayles and Haraway: using discourse in an attempt to shore up the constantly shifting ontological ground. Mark B. N. Hansen, one of the authors I "excavated" late in the process, so accurately points to this very occurrence, calling out the technesis of technology theorists who are so tempted to cling to a poststructuralist movement of decon- struction, that they lose sight of their own logocentric maneuvers.' We can hard- ly blame them. We investigate the implications of technology using the technol- ogy at hand: discourse. In order to "embrace" we must first define and instantiate the concept at the edges, and define "technology" in such a way that the act of definition becomes invisible. Hayles, Haraway, Freud, Heidegger, and Lyotard all struggle in their own ways to either directly or indirectly "work through" their own technological definitions, attempting to erect solid discursive structures on constantly shifting ground. In that way, this text is no different. "Technology" becomes a placeholder, conceptually taking the shape of the discourse that attempts to define it (thus, I can even justify the previous deflection: technology = discour~eH.~o wever, it is in that very act of placeholding that we can, perhaps, make inroads. My subse- quent treatments of Hayles and Haraway have proven accurate, especially in light of each author's more recent texts. In Hayles' My Mother Was a Computer, she references her earlier work and states that "the interplay between the liberal humanist subject and the posthuman that I used to launch my analysis . . . has already begun to fade into the history of the twentieth century7'; that "new and more sophisticated versions of the posthuman have ev~lved."I~nd eed it has, but "the Posthuman version 2.x" still represents the same lack that its predecessor did. Furthermore, by abandoning her earlier investigation of the "interplay be- tween The liberal humanist subject and the posthuman," and instead shifting her
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