Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film Alex

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Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film Alex View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Surfing the Interzones: Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film Alex McAulay A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Pamela Cooper María DeGuzmán Kimball King Julius Raper Linda Wagner-Martin © 2008 Alex McAulay ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ALEX MCAULAY: Surfing the Interzones: Posthuman Geographies in Twentieth Century Literature and Film (Under the direction of Pamela Cooper) This dissertation presents an analysis of posthuman texts through a discussion of posthuman landscapes, bodies, and communities in literature and film. In the introduction, I explore and situate the relatively recent term "posthuman" in relation to definitions proposed by other theorists, including N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Hans Moravec, Max More, and Francis Fukuyama. I position the posthuman as being primarily celebratory about the collapse of restrictive human boundaries such as gender and race, yet also containing within it more disturbing elements of the uncanny and apocalyptic. My project deals primarily with hybrid texts, in which the posthuman intersects and overlaps with other posts, including postmodernism and postcolonialism. In the first chapter, I examine the novels comprising J.G. Ballard's disaster series, and apply Bakhtin's theories of hybridization, and Deleuze and Guattari's notions of voyagings, becomings, and bodies without organs to delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman landscape. In the second chapter, I address Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, and Werner Herzog in terms of issues of identity, mechanization, and replication with regards to the posthuman. In chapter three, I turn to posthuman cinema, and apply the notion of the cyborg to the work of David Lynch, as well as delineate the elements that constitute a posthuman film through a discussion of iii the Danish Dogme 95 film movement. In chapter four, I extend my discussion of modified bodies to address texts by Iain Banks and Angela Carter in terms of gender disruptions and new myths for the posthuman age. The final chapter, "Second Life vs. The Mole People ," examines both the optimism that the posthuman provides and also the tangible, social cost of the posthuman, through a juxtaposition of the elite metaverse of Second Life with the homeless subway tunnel dwellers in New York City, termed the "mole people." iv For Lisa v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Much thanks to my advisor, Pamela Cooper, for all her support and guidance along the way, as well as to Kimball King and the other members of my committee: María DeGuzmán, Julius Raper, and Linda Wagner-Martin. In addition, thanks to my mom, Carol-Julia, and my dad, Alastair, and my parents in law, for all their support as well. Eternal thanks to my wife Elizabeth McAulay for her love, research assistance, and editorial acumen. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................1 PART ONE: POSTHUMAN LANDSCAPES..................................................................24 CHAPTER ONE: Myths for the Posthuman Age: The Drowned World, The Crystal World and The Atrocity Exhibition ....................................................25 Reclamation: Holey Space and The Drowned World................................31 Armor of Diamonds: Bodies Without Organs in The Crystal World........40 "Make Rhizome Everywhere": The Atrocity Exhibition and Ballard's Posthuman Language Machine..........................56 CHAPTER TWO: Ecstatic Untruths: Posthuman Landscapes in the Works of Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas, and Werner Herzog......................72 Constructing Posthuman Reality: Technology and Hybrid Voices in Andy Warhol's Novel a..........................................79 "Complete Automation": Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto .......97 The Apocalyptic-Posthuman: Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, Lessons of Darkness, and Of Walking in Ice ...........................118 PART TWO: POSTHUMAN BODIES & COMMUNITIES.........................................156 CHAPTER THREE: Projecting the Future: David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Harmony Korine and a Manifesto for Posthuman Cinema.........157 Magic & Loss: Michael Jackson's Face and Posthuman Anxiety...........159 Henry's Dream: Redefining Humanity in David Lynch's Eraserhead ....163 Posthuman Filmmaking II: Digital Cinemas and A Manifesto for Posthuman Films...........................................................179 American Dogma: julien donkey-boy ......................................................183 vii A Pseudo-Manifesto of Posthuman Cinema............................................190 CHAPTER FOUR: Posthuman Bodies, Gender Disruptions, and Fascistic Tendencies in The Wasp Factory and The Passion of New Eve ....195 Sacred Monsters: The Passion of New Eve ..............................................214 FUTURE SPECULATIONS: Our Proto-Posthuman Communities: The Mole People vs. Second Life....................................................................................233 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................250 viii INTRODUCTION The term "posthuman" is one that, in its relatively recent history, has already acquired a multitude of contradictory definitions. The word holds within it both a great sense of power as well as unease. To call something "posthuman" can often suggest liberation from the restrictive boundaries of the human condition, such as race and gender. Yet it can also conjure apocalyptic images of a world in which humans have ceased to matter and no longer possess any agency. The term's ambiguity therefore complicates notions of what it means to be posthuman, or to live in a posthuman culture. While the idea of the posthuman has implicitly been an integral part of romantic, realist, modernist and postmodern literature, in texts ranging from Frankenstein to Orlando to A Scanner Darkly , the term itself was first introduced and employed as a tool for critical analysis in Ihab Hassan's 1977 article "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?" Here Hassan states: "the human form—including human desire and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re- visioned… five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something we must helplessly call posthumanism" (qtd. in Hayles 247). Yet from Hassan's somewhat bleak conjecturing about the death of humanism has come the outgrowth of modern posthuman theory. As I will demonstrate, an array of theorists have attempted to grapple with the term "posthuman" in the years since Hassan's article, and many have found great promise and optimism in notions of reenvisioning the human form.1 In fact, any attempt to define the "posthuman" calls for an adjustment of what it means to be human. The term "posthuman" is already in dispute, as evidenced from the varying interpretations of what constitutes a posthuman text. A survey of the existing literature and major posthuman theorists, from Hassan to N. Katherine Hayles, is useful in illustrating the disparity of meaning and usages. For Hayles in How We Became Posthuman , the word "posthuman" implies a mindset of "post humanism" that runs counter to humanist philosophy, although not in a negative way. Hayles considers the posthuman a "dynamic partnership" between humans and intelligent machines, rather than the end of humanity itself. She also focuses on the posthuman as a post-World War II development, rather than emphasizing the vibrant current of what might be called "pre- posthuman" thought emergent before that time. While Hayles admits that the word "posthuman" conjures up both feelings of terror and pleasure, she primarily views the merging of the natural and the artificial as a positive social development. For Hayles, the posthuman is a means by which the elitist desires of the liberal humanist subject to dominate and control the natural world can be subverted and destroyed. She writes that "the posthuman evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means" (285). 1 Although technically Hassan introduces the term "posthumanism," indicating a movement away from humanist values and philosophy, rather than the term "posthuman," a term which lacks any sense of moral judgment (i.e. it does not suggest that works of this nature will be anti-humanist, or inhumane), Hassan is the starting point for modern posthuman theory. I believe that the term "posthuman" is a more useful and applicable term than "posthumanism," in addition to sounding nonpejorative, and it will be the term that I engage with in this dissertation. 2 In "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," published in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature , Donna Haraway pursues a line of thinking similar to Hayles in exploring a literal representation of a posthuman figure: the cyborg. She defines a posthuman entity, or cyborg, as one that has overcome biological, neurological and psychological constraints to be free of such boundaries as gender and race, and she defines a posthuman text as one that clearly
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