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A Posthumanist Reading of Lars and the Real Girl and Black Mirror's InVisible Culture Loss of Control, Control over Loss: A Posthumanist Reading of Lars and the Real Girl and Black Mirror’s "Be Right Back" Prerna Subramanian Published on: Dec 03, 2018 DOI: 10.47761/494a02f6.480ad07a License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) InVisible Culture Loss of Control, Control over Loss: A Posthumanist Reading of Lars and the Real Girl and Black Mirror’s "Be Right Back “To define what is real is to define what is human, if you care about humans. If you don’t you are schizoid…and the way I see it, an android: that is, not human and hence not real.”- Philip K Dick quoted by N Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman The idea that any discussion pertaining to what is human and what is not, matters only “if you care about humans” is an important connection this article probes further into.1 This particular prerequisite to defining what is human is significant to understanding how relationships, emotions, sentiments have often formed the field where arguments in favour of and against human exceptionalism have been played out. Human exceptionalism or the tendency to categorically put humans on a different pedestal than other beings has been a crucial tenet through which posthumanist scholars often ruminate over the idea of human, inhuman, non-human and investigate the boundaries between these categories. What posthumanist scholars tend to grapple with in their work is the idea of whether there is actually a post-human, something that either succeeds the human, supersedes it or continues to add to what already is seen as definitively human. Moreover, the pedestalizing and differentiation for making humans look exceptionally different than the beings that surround them is often through arguments of rational behaviour and social habits: both of which play a role in how humans form relationships. Posthumanist scholars thus find it particularly interesting to probe into the genealogy of human exceptionalism and the idea of affection, relationship or love simultaneously. Some authors of fiction like Philip Dick find the idea of caring and of being human inextricably linked, while others, such as posthumanist essayists Neil Badmington go a step further to state that “to be human is to desire, but to desire is to trouble the sacred distinction between the human and the inhuman.”2 This notion that it may be human to love, but that love may not always be directed towards another human, is where the crux of many posthumanist arguments about what it takes to be truly human lies. Thus, this article focuses on certain questions that get asked often: what is it like to be human and to form relationships? Is there a conventional kind of human bond or is it constantly redefined? Can “human” be a constant, unchanging entity with a watertight description that proceeds to define whom this human finds attractive, bonds with and pines for? Starting with Philip Dick is important to this piece not only because his writings questioned the definition of human and anticipated the posthumanist turn of thought, but also because his philosophical statements often germinated through his work of fiction. Fiction has always been an important part of posthumanism because of its inherent capability to portray what is yet to come and its ability to push and blur 2 InVisible Culture Loss of Control, Control over Loss: A Posthumanist Reading of Lars and the Real Girl and Black Mirror’s "Be Right Back boundaries. Myra Seaman in her essay Becoming more (than) Human differentiates between what she calls theoretical posthumanism and popular posthumanism wherein she focuses on popular culture’s interpretation and representation of what it deems as posthuman. She differentiates between theoretical posthumanism that talks of an incoherent human category whilst popular posthumanism goes a step further and engages in reconstruction and reconstitution of what could be human. According to Seaman, both theoretical and popular posthumanism reveal anxieties of a universal, all- encompassing category of the human but the latter seems to portray this anxiety and is often pressured to give a resolution, or at least indicate towards one. Popular posthumanism, according to Seaman, gives into this anxiety because these “modified” or “better” humans cannot ever become “machines”, cannot become just the “mind”. The field where this resistance takes place is, in fact, emotions, because the ultimate realization is how human behaviour is rooted in “feeling.”3 Theoretical and popular posthumanism thus both conceptualize multiple subjects against the single, universal, liberal humanist subject, but popular culture’s posthumanist turn tries to find a connective tissue that binds these multiple subjects together. Seaman notes that these representations reveal an impulse to find a unitary human identity even if the body is altered, modified, mutated, and exemplifies a posthuman body that is unconstrained. The posthuman body may become technically advanced but what counts is the experience rooted in emotion, and hence they portray the posthuman and the resistance to it as if this is a natural simultaneity of posthumanism. This notion of how popular posthumanism often pushes boundaries only to boomerang to what it may consider the original way of being human is why this article looks into through two media-texts: a film by Craig Gillespie named Lars and The Real Girl (2007) and “Be Right Back,” the first episode of the second season of Black Mirror (2011-), a British TV Series created by Charlie Brooker. These two texts are chosen to see how they deal with the centrality of the human through their plots about loss, relationships and desire and to see if they indeed push boundaries, or as Seaman posits- bounce back to initial, rudimentary notions of human. The first section will deal with debates regarding intimate relationships between humans and non-humans/machines and will introduce the concept of posthumanism. The second section entails the analysis of the texts by looking at them with respect to posthumanist ideas of human and non-human relationships. HUMAN LOVE, ROBOTS AND ITS DIS(CONTENTS) 3 InVisible Culture Loss of Control, Control over Loss: A Posthumanist Reading of Lars and the Real Girl and Black Mirror’s "Be Right Back Both of the media-texts this article concerns portray relationships that go beyond the mundane. If Lars and the Real Girl has Lars striving to connect with a doll, Be Right Back’s Martha is striving to re-connect with her dead husband through an app. In both texts, there is an underlying tension of authenticity of and the ability to attain fulfilment in such relationships; after-all, they do not involve a conventional two-human relationship and its fruition. Before delving into the intricacies of the plot itself, one needs to see these tensions in a context that is rich with these questions of human relationships with what are deemed as not-human: how do humans interact with robots, machines, and dolls and what are the implications of these interactions? The binaries between organic-flesh body and a machine-made body have become tenuous as robots have now evolved in appearance; they have become, “artificial constructs masquerading as human.”4 Ishuguro’s idea of “sonzai-kan” or “human presence” in robots may seem like a desire to retain the human even in artificial constructs, yet this move towards providing a machine with qualities and appearance that look like humans render the qualities as transferrable and adaptable.5 Haraway gives us the notion of a cyborg where each one of us is always already hybrid in nature, the nature/culture; human/machine binaries have dissolve and seeped into each other to render us “seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.”6 Humans can have artificial implants and artificial machines can take up qualities and appearance that were originally seen to be uniquely human. This notion when combined with Baudrillard’s idea of a hyperreal world, opens up an array of ideas that have germinated due to technological advancement. Baudrillard differentiates between feigning and simulation, asserting that the former assumes something as real and then imitates it, whilst simulation blurs the boundaries between the real and the copy, so much so that it is impossible to distinguish between the two. He is of the opinion that with the technological progress and the world we find ourselves in, the real is no longer possible and hence illusion isn’t either, because what we see is already a copy of a copy. We as humans are geared towards finding meanings in life and even in our search for the real, we compensate or use “artificial revitalisation” to reach what we consider as real. This is why human appearance of the robots, their anthropomorphic nature does not hark back to anything particularly authentic human. This notion has contributed to expand the definition of human itself, where there is a “gradual merging” of humans and their own constructs, where we exist in a circuit that looks like a “Mobius strip”, where the dichotomies have become “isomorphic and indifferent to each other, neither is the other to the other.”7 This concept of trying to obtain the real through artificial paradigms is seen in both the media-texts as well, where a 4 InVisible Culture Loss of Control, Control over Loss: A Posthumanist Reading of Lars and the Real Girl and Black Mirror’s "Be Right Back concept of “real” human companionship is introduced but is navigated through what is considered fake or virtual. This concept of trying to obtain the real through artificial paradigms is seen in both the media-texts as well, where a concept of “real” human companionship is introduced but is navigated through what is considered fake or virtual.
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