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AESTHETICS and ETHICS in the AGE of POSTHUMANISM a Dissertation by DONGSHIN YI Submitted to The CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Texas A&M University A GENEALOGY OF CYBORGOTHIC: AESTHETICS AND ETHICS IN THE AGE OF POSTHUMANISM A Dissertation by DONGSHIN YI Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2007 Major Subject: English A GENEALOGY OF CYBORGOTHIC: AESTHETICS AND ETHICS IN THE AGE OF POSTHUMANISM A Dissertation by DONGSHIN YI Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Dennis Berthold Melanie Hawthorne Mary Ann O’Farrell Head of Department, Paul A. Parrish May 2007 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT A Genealogy of Cyborgothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism. (May 2007) Dongshin Yi, B.A., Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; M.A., Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David McWhirter This dissertation considers the future convergence between gothic studies and humanism in the age of posthumanism and proposes “cyborgothic” as a new literary genre that heralds that future. The convergence under consideration is already in progress in that an encounter between human and non-human consistently inspires the two fields, questioning the nature of humans and the treatment of such non-human beings as cyborgs. Such questioning, often conducted within the boundary of humanities, persistently interprets non-human beings as either representing or helping human shortcomings. Accordingly, answers are human-orientated or even human-centered in many cases, and “cyborgothic,” generated out of retrospective investigation into gothic studies and prospective formulation of posthumanism, aims to present different, non- anthropocentric ways to view humans and non-humans on equal terms. The retrospective investigation into gothic studies focuses on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the iv Sublime and Beautiful to retrieve a gothic aesthetics of the beautiful, and in the second chapter, examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein against Kant’s aesthetics to demonstrate how this gothic aesthetics becomes obsolete in the tradition of the sublime. This dissertation then addresses Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with Bruno Latour’s Science in Action to reveal problems in fabricating scientific knowledge, especially focusing on sacrifices made in the process. In the forth chapter, I examine Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith with William James’s pragmatism, and consider the question of how moral complications inherent in science have been handled in American society. The last chapter proposes Marge Piercy’s He, She and It as a same cyborgothic text, which tries to develop a way to acknowledge the presence of the cyborg—one that is at once aesthetical and ethical—so as to enable humans and cyborgs to relate each other on equal terms. Thus, “cyborgothic” is being required as a literary attempt to present the age of posthumanism that is no longer anthropocentric. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................... v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: BEYOND “THE RUIN OF REPRESENTATION” ................................................................... 1 II A BEAUTIFUL ATTENDANT: THE RISE OF THE GOTHIC AESTHETICS OF THE BEAUTIFUL.......................................... 13 1. Annette and Emily: An Affectionate Relationship .............. 24 2. A Homogeneous Taste: Emily and the Sublime .................. 35 3. A Heterogeneous Taste: Annette and the Beautiful ............. 44 III A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER: THE FALL OF THE GOTHIC AESTHETICS OF THE BEAUTIFUL.......................................... 57 1. A Sublime Aesthetics: Kant Revisited ................................. 64 2. A Beautiful Monster............................................................. 75 3. Walton’s Way to “Reason and Virtue” ................................ 91 IV VAN HELSING’S DILEMMA: SCIENCE AND MILL’S UTILITARIANISM ....................................................................... 101 1. The Alliance between Science and Society: Revisiting the Controversy between Mill and Whewell.............................. 110 2. Skepticism: Van Helsing the Purifier................................... 116 3. Selfishness: The Human as Hybrid ...................................... 131 V A HUMANISTIC SCIENCE IN A PRAGMATIC SOCIETY: RE-READING SINCLAIR LEWIS’S ARROWSMITH................. 149 vi CHAPTER Page 1. William James’s Pragmatism............................................... 158 2. A Pragmatic Society: Science under the Ideology of Separate Spheres ................................................................................. 166 3. An Un-pragmatic Humanism in Pragmatism and Science... 179 VI CONCLUSION: THE BIRTH OF CYBORGOTHIC: MOTHERING THE CYBORG IN MARGE PIERCY’S HE, SHE AND IT.......... 195 1. His Story: The Cyborg Is a Metaphor .................................. 207 2. Her Story: The Cyborg Is Our Ontology.............................. 216 3. Its Story: Mothering Cyborgs............................................... 222 WORKS CITED..................................................................................................... 236 VITA ...................................................................................................................... 261 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: BEYOND “THE RUIN OF REPRESENTATION” In an interview concerning his unfinished work, On the Genealogy of Ethics, Michel Foucault, wondering if humans are “able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasure which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other” (346), contemplated, What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, not our life? (350) An affirmation of “the pleasure of the other” indeed takes both an aesthetical appreciation of pleasure and an ethical embrace of the other, and it could move us beyond a “Slave ethics [that] … begins by saying no to an ‘outside,’ an ‘other,’ a non- self” (Nietzsche 171). But it shouldn’t lead us to, as Nietzsche expected, an ethics of “triumphant self-affirmation” (170-71); nor return us to eighteenth century aesthetic moral philosophies, which, under the banner of “the beautiful soul,” appeared as “an alternative to the traditional ethical system of the Christian religion” and established “yet another abstract principle: Humanity itself” (Norton 211, 212)—a principle, I might add, that would haunt us in our every step toward the other. Instead, an aesthetical ethics that ____________ This dissertation follows the style of The Henry James Review. 2 Foucault—only too briefly—envisioned here would be one of pleasant reciprocity between the self and the other, and, perhaps, between ourselves representing “Humanity” and themselves presenting non-humans. Cyborgothic,1 which I propose in this dissertation as an infant genre eagerly anticipating the age of posthumanism, is ultimately my literary attempt to pursue what Foucault left unfinished: an aesthetical ethics that “is able to take into account the pleasure of the other.” The literary attempt to give birth to cyborgothic is first and foremost an effort to impregnate the gothic literature whose revival in the later twentieth century in literature and other cultural media epitomizes the century’s persistent and productive (or counterproductive) engagement with the others, with the cyborg that claims our attention with its versatile (shape-shifting) utility and subversive potentiality. A genealogical work is absolutely necessary in order to ascertain that this new-born genre doesn’t represent the highly specialized yet isolated aesthetics or the triumphantly humanistic yet selfish ethics that have been indiscriminately inherited, and that it is capable of presenting an aesthetical ethics. Traditional literary criticism appears unfit for such a work, since, conforming to the tradition of representation, it has often confined literature either to re- presenting—truthfully or critically—pre-existing problems or virtues or to vacating the prerogative of such problems or virtues by providing endless substitutions of them.2 1 The name of cyborgothic is a remote adaptation of “cybergothic,” which C. Jodey Castricano in “If a Building Is a Sentence” uses to describe “a mutant form, a hybrid born of traditional gothicism, science fiction, and cyberpunk” (204). I however insist on using “cyborgothic” in my dissertation, because I want to highlight the potential that the cyborg has for posthumanism. 2 These two approaches are based on the two basic meanings of representation, as Christopher Prendergast summarizes in his The Triangle of Representation. One is “the 3 Even in “this prison house of Representation” (Prendergast, ix), however, literature has managed to present imaginary/imaginative worlds, which inspired many to hope for a better future. Cyborgothic portrays one such world for posthumanism, and, in order to see it
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