Corporeal Ontology: Merleau-Ponty, Flesh, and Posthumanism Angus Alexander James McBlane September 2013 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory Summary As posthumanism has developed in the last twenty-five years there has been hesitation in elucidating a robust posthumanist engagement with the body. My thesis redresses this gap in the literature in three intertwined ways. First, it is a critical assessment of posthumanism broadly, focusing on how the body is read in its discourse and how there is a continuation of a humanist telos in terms which revolve around the body. Second, it is a philosophical interrogation, adaptation, and transformation of aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, focusing its reading on Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, with additional material drawn from his works on language, aesthetics, and ontology. Third, it is a critical analysis of four films drawn from that seemingly most posthumanist of genres, science fiction: Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor, and Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. Science fiction is the meeting place of popular and critical posthumanist imaginaries as the vast majority of texts on posthumanism (in whatever form) ground their analyses in a science fiction of some kind. By reading posthumanism through the work of Merleau-Ponty I outline a posthumanist ontology of corporeality which both demonstrates the limitations of how posthumanism has done its analyses of the body and elucidates an opening and levelling not adequately considered in posthumanist analyses of the body. Following Merleau-Ponty I argue that there is a ‘belongingness of the body to being and the corporeal relevance of every being’, yet, the body is not the singular purview of the human. There are alternative embodiments and bodies which have been previously overlooked and that all bodies (be they embodied organically, technologically, virtually or otherwise) are corporeal. Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank my family for their unwavering emotional support throughout and for their financial support. I'd like to thank all those in CCCT, ENCAP, other Cardiff University departments and schools (particularly IO), and other Universities for moral support, innumerable discussions, evenings down the pub and the inevitable adventures had, and for putting up with me during certain periods in the process. I'd especially like to thank Adam Coward, Phillip Roberts, and David Vella. Moreover I'd like to thank those who embarked on reading a draft or portions of the thesis for their editorial comments: Phillip Roberts, Pat and Rorri McBlane, and Dr. James Miller. I’d also like to thank the administrative staff in CCCT and ENCAP, without whom nothing would ever get done. Finally I'd like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Neil Badmington, for his patience, particularly his patience, and guidance throughout. Table of Contents Summary Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Posthuman Gestures p. 1 Situating Posthumanism p. 4 Posthumanism, Merleau-Ponty, and Corporeality p. 16 Chapter 1: The Texture of Bodies: Embodiment and Expression p. 27 Embodiment p. 31 Expression p. 53 Chapter 2: Technology and Artificiality in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence p. 65 ‘This Strange Little Creature’: Cronenberg's eXistenZ p. 73 ‘But I want to be a real bo(d)y’: Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence p. 84 Chapter 3: The Flesh of Bodies: Style and Flesh p. 105 Experience, Expression, and Style p. 112 Flesh, Style, Corporeality p. 126 Chapter 4: Information and Virtuality in Josef Rusnak’s The Thirteenth Floor and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell p. 138 ‘Hey, What'd you do to the world? I turned it off’: Rusnak's The Thirteenth Floor p. 145 ‘I am a lifeform that was born in a sea of information’: Oshii's Ghost in the Shell p. 152 Conclusion Corporeal Ontology p. 175 Corporeal Gestures p. 180 Corporeal Ontology p. 183 Bibliography p. 191 List of Abbreviations Texts by Merleau-Ponty Only the most frequently cited works are abbreviated ‘CD’ ‘Cézanne's Doubt’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 9-23 ‘EM’ ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. by Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology and the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. by James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 159-190 ‘ILVS’ ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, in Signs, trans. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 39-83 PHP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) PRI The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology and the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. by multiple, ed. by James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) PW The Prose of the World, trans. by John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) SNS Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) S Signs, trans. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) VI The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) Introduction Posthuman Gestures 2 The posthumanist challenge that this thesis is situated around is the corporeal status of artificiality, technology, information and virtuality. The site of this challenge is the body itself. This is not to say that posthumanists should ignore questions concerning biology, other animals, and the organic. At the current moment questions concerning the status of animals in philosophy, theory, and cultural studies have become much more prominent,1 including the rise of critical animal studies, and, within posthumanism, in particular, the work of Cary Wolfe has helped shaped this discourse.2 Rather, the scope of this thesis is situated within a different register of posthumanism. In order to elucidate this posthumanist challenge the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is crucial in disclosing, on the one hand, a form of posthumanist cultural practice which develops from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of expression in order to interrogate particular styles of being in the world that have already been expressed and acquired ‘institutional limitation within the conventions of a culture’,3 and, on the other, a posthumanist corporeal ontology which interrogates the depths of corporeality through the reversibility and divergence of styles of being in the world, or what Merleau-Ponty develops as the ontology of flesh. While Merleau-Ponty is primarily known outside of scholars who examine his work as a phenomenologist, or more particularly an existential phenomenologist, Diana H. Coole notes that ‘phenomenology became for Merleau-Ponty not a subjectivist, humanist and idealist philosophy, but a dialectical, posthumanist, yet existentialist critical theory’.4 This thesis, however, is not situated within phenomenology. It is situated within the discourse of posthumanism broadly, critical posthumanism specifically. I seek to transform the debates and discourse on the body by philosophically basing my work through the elucidation and 1 By no means exhaustive, see the following for an indication: Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I am, trans. by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and readers such as Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. by Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal: At the limits of Experience, ed. by Corrinne Painter and Christian Lotz (Berlin: Springer, 2007); Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader, ed. by Jodey Castricano (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2008). 2 See: Wolfe, Animal Rites; Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 3 M.C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, 2nd edn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 188. 4 Diana H. Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), p. 107. 3 transformation of aspects of the work of Merleau-Ponty. Following Neil Badmington this is a kind of posthumanism which allows 'us' to feel how ‘meanings move without the human [and that] culture does not begin and end with “us”’.5 Methodologically this thesis contains three intertwined components. First, it is a critical assessment of posthumanism broadly focusing on how the body is read in its discourse and how there is a continuation of a humanist telos in terms which revolve around the body. Second, it is a philosophical interrogation, adaptation, and transformation of aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty which focuses its reading on the Phenomenology of Perception6 and The Visible and the Invisible, with