Posthuman Love Stories in Contemporary Science Fiction
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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 ii 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. iii 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). iv 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? v 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 vi 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 vii 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.