The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television the Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television
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The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television Edited by Michael Hauskeller University of Exeter, UK Thomas D. Philbeck World Economic Forum, Switzerland Curtis D. Carbonell Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, UAE Selection and editorial matter © Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck and Curtis D. Carbonell 2015 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-43031-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57701-9 ISBN 978-1-137-43032-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137430328 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents Preface ix Notes on Contributors xv 1 Posthumanism in Film and Television 1 Michael Hauskeller, Thomas D. Philbeck and Curtis D. Carbonell Part I Paving the Way to Posthumanism: The Precursors 2 From DelGuat to ScarJo 11 William Brown 3 ‘Self-Immolation by Technology’: Jean Baudrillard and the Posthuman in Film and Television 19 Jon Baldwin 4 Derrida on Screen 28 Stefan Herbrechter 5 Bruno Latour: From the Non-Modern to the Posthuman 37 T. Hugh Crawford 6 Friedrich Nietzsche and the Posthuman/Transhuman in Film and Television 45 Babette Babich Part II Varieties of People-to-Come: Posthuman Becomings 7 Terminated: The Life and Death of the Cyborg in Film and Television 57 Rhys Owain Thomas 8 Of Iron Men and Green Monsters: Superheroes and Posthumanism 66 Dan Hassler-Forest 9 Growing Your Own: Monsters from the Lab and Molecular Ethics in Posthumanist Film 77 Anna Powell 10 Post-Singularity Entities in Film and TV 88 David Roden 11 Chimeras and Hybrids: The Digital Swarms of the Posthuman Image 99 Drew Ayers v vi Contents Part III Rise of the Machines: Posthuman Intellects 12 Androids and the Posthuman in Television and Film 111 Kevin LaGrandeur 13 ‘Change for the Machines’? Posthumanism as Digital Sentience 120 Sherryl Vint 14 Alive in the Net 130 Jeff Menne and Jay Clayton 15 Autonomous Fighting Machines: Narratives and Ethics 141 Dónal P. O’Mathúna Part IV Body and Soul: Posthuman Subjectivities 16 A Contest of Tropes: Screened Posthuman Subjectivities 153 Curtis D. Carbonell 17 Desire and Uncertainty: Representations of Cybersex in Film and Television 163 Hilary Wheaton 18 At Home In and Beyond Our Skin: Posthuman Embodiment in Film and Television 172 Joel Krueger 19 Constructed Worlds: Posthumanism in Film, Television and Other Cosmopoietic Media 182 Ivan Callus 20 Games, Gamers and Posthumanism 192 Tanya Krzywinska and Douglas Brown Part V Better Humans: Posthuman Capacities 21 ‘Life’s a bitch, and then you don’t die’: Postmortality in Film and Television 205 Michael Hauskeller 22 A New Lease on Life: A Lacanian Analysis of Cognitive Enhancement Cinema 214 Hub Zwart 23 Limitless? There’s a Pill for That: Filmic Representation as Equipment for Living 225 Kyle McNease 24 Posthumans and Democracy in Popular Culture 235 James J. Hughes Contents vii 25 Negative Feelings as Emotional Enhancement in Cinema: The Case of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy 246 Tarja Laine Part VI Creating Difference and Identity: Posthuman Communities 26 Biopleasures: Posthumanism and the Technological Imaginary in Utopian and Dystopian Film 259 Ralph Pordzik 27 Of Posthuman Born: Gender, Utopia and the Posthuman in Films and TV 269 Francesca Ferrando 28 Sharing Social Context: Is Community with the Posthuman Possible? 279 David Meeler and Eric Hill 29 Our Posthuman Skin Condition 289 Teodora Manea 30 Muddy Worlds: Re-Viewing Environmental Narratives 299 John Bruni Part VII Us and Them: Posthuman Relationships 31 Executing Species: Animal Attractions in Thomas Edison and Douglas Gordon 311 Anat Pick 32 The Sun Never Set on the Human Empire: Haunts of Humanism in the Planet of the Apes Films 321 Phil Henderson 33 Uncanny Intimacies: Humans and Machines in Film 330 Alexander Darius Ornella 34 Posthumanous Subjects 339 Steen Christiansen 35 Identity: Difficulties, Discontinuities and Pluralities of Personhood 349 James DiGiovanna Part VIII More Human than Human: Posthuman Ontologies 36 The Final Frontier? Religion and Posthumanism in Film and Television 361 Elaine Graham viii Contents 37 The Ghost in the Machine: Humanity and the Problem of Self-Aware Information 371 Brett Lunceford 38 ‘Trust a Few, Fear the Rest’: The Anxiety and Fantasy of Human Evolution 380 Pramod K. Nayar 39 Onscreen Ontology: Stages in the Posthumanist Paradigm Shift 391 Thomas D. Philbeck 40 Object-Oriented Ontology 401 Graham Harman Bibliography 410 Index of Films and TV Shows 436 General Index 443 Preface This handbook is structured in eight parts. Part I – Paving the Way to Posthumanism: The Precursors This section focuses on some of the intellectual influences that have paved the way for the posthumanist discourse. William Brown begins with posthumanism’s most referenced theorists, Deleuze and Guattari. Brown highlights the often-cited idea of ‘bodies without organs’ and ‘desiring machines’ as critical to understanding Deleuzian posthumanism. These decentring concepts of the human, leading away from a grounded, circumscribed, individuated entity, challenge simplistic transhumanist notions of the self, allow- ing Brown a critique of cinema from a posthuman/Deleuzian perspective, in which he argues that cinema has always represented a world ‘teeming with life’ to the point where humans have little or no control. Jon Baldwin follows with a look into media theorist Baudrillard and his think- ing that the digital world reduces us to the inhuman. Baldwin focuses on how alterity may be lost in our posthuman moment, in particular how virtual reality is represented as a space in science fiction (SF) for the eradication of difference. The copy and the clone become the hyperreal, or the new real, and the posthuman experience divorces us from ourselves. Stefan Herbrechter wades into the difficult work of deconstruction theorist Derrida, arguing that ‘Derrida is both a “proto-posthumanist” and a “media philosopher” ’, and that posthumanism and contemporary media would not even exist without Derridean deconstruction. Herbrechter teases apart Derrida as both someone screened and someone who comments on moving pictures such as film and television, and on visual media in general. T. Hugh Crawford provides an examination of Latour’s critique of modernity and how it relates to posthumanism. Crawford notes that Latour’s critical approach undermines the notion of the posthuman because, as with being modern, we have never been human in the naïve Enlightenment sense. Latour’s focus on the non-human provides a ‘theatre of proof’, whereby scientists like Pasteur were able to foreground certain dramatic elements in their experiments, thus making an impact in much the same mode as cinema. Babette Babich ends this section with an overview of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra 2.0, detailing how the philosopher’s notion of the Übermensch relates to Singularitarian ideas of posthumanity, and how the popular imagination skews Nietzsche’s idea towards posthuman supermen. ix x Preface Part II – Varieties of People-to-Come: Posthuman Becomings This second part deals with the various different ways we imagine the posthuman and the transhuman to be; that is, what we may one day be and what we are already in the process of becoming. Rhys Owain Thomas starts the section off with a look at the cyborg in film and television. Thomas locates the postmodern cyborg within the discourse of critical theory so that its posthuman inflections are noted, namely, those of sub- ject creation and identity. The screened versions reflect shared anxieties of the technologized human. Dan Hassler-Forest applies ideas from critical theory to screened superheroes, according to which posthuman bodies are discursive processes being written today by technology. He sees the posthuman as providing a necessary tension for the superhero paradigm in its quest to overcome the body’s limitations. Anna Powell provides a Deleuzian reading of how the posthuman monstrous is comprised of processes of ‘becoming, assemblages, anomalies’. She moves through examples of screened cloning texts, slowing down with a detailed reading of Casshern, a film with multiplicities of narrative, style and content that imagine posthumans as Deleuzian neo-sapiens. David Roden tackles posthumanism within the context of the technological sin- gularity as seen in film and television, attempting to understand how we will know that we have entered a truly post-singularity world.