Reproductive Anxiety: Reconfiguring the Human in Virtual Culture by John Shiga, B.A., M.A. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Journalism & Communication Carleton University Ottawa, Canada © 2009, John P. 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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. •+• Canada Abstract From Jean Baudrillard's bold critique of simulacra to the rapid expansion of intellectual property law and the subsequent proliferation of infringement lawsuits, virtual culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been characterized by a profound sense of anxiety about the implications of digital, genetic and other bio- informational technologies. In this project, I conceptualize virtuality as a cultural disposition towards people and things as mixtures of materiality and information. Understood in this way, virtuality constitutes today what John Durham Peters (1999) calls "extremities of communication" which generate concerns, anxieties and controversies about what counts as human. My approach to questions about the "content" of reproductive anxiety (i.e., what they are about) has been influenced by cultural and intellectual histories of reproductive technologies, which suggest that reproductive anxiety is a manifestation of a broader crisis of agency, authenticity, tradition and paternal order. There is thus much more at stake in controversies about plagiarism, copyright infringement, gene patenting and unauthorized reproduction than who owns what. Drawing from theories of virtuality, feminist technoscience, and actor-network theory, I argue that the virtualization of reproductivity puts legal, scientific and popular assumptions about subjectivity and collectivity in question. Using a variety of methodological techniques, from "litmus tests" of humanness to online ethnography, I examine how cultural forms and practices mediate anxiety about reproduction, agency and the shrinking sphere of the uniquely human in controversies about unconscious plagiarism, transgenic organisms and digital music remixing. By ii increasing the scale and pace of human-nonhuman entanglement, bio-informational reproductivity challenges the notion of society and subjectivity as purely human. Anxieties about the shrinking zone of irreproducibility do not necessarily lead to the recuperation of purely human subjects and societies. Indeed, this study emphasizes the role of reproductive anxiety in the production of new figurations of the human subject whose autonomy, like that of nonhumans, emerges from entanglement. in Acknowledgements My work would have remained a few scattered ideas without the support of many people. I am grateful to my student colleagues, especially Sara Bannerman, Jennifer Ellison, Jason Hannan, Faiza Hirji and Robert Rutland. Conversations and collaborations with you kept this project going. I am also extremely grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program and Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication. I would like to thank Michael Dorland and Paul Theberge, who sat on my committee and provided invaluable suggestions at each stage of this project. Jonathan Sterne and William Walters, my external examiners, kept an open mind and provided critical feedback in precisely the right ratio for me to refine my work. In the year before he passed away, the late Paul Attallah set aside time to exchange ideas with me. Paul has had an enduring impact on me and my work. I owe a significant debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Sheryl Hamilton. Thank you, Sheryl, for your invaluable advice on many aspects of scholarly life, for inviting me to collaborate with you on research projects and conference panels, for your incredibly creative and critical suggestions on my work, and for suggesting that I do a Ph.D. in the first place. I also thank my great friend, Gavin Reedman, who has kept me honest in my work on technology and culture. I thank my family whose unwavering support enables me to be where I am today. Finally, I thank my wife, Jenny Acton, for her love, insight and encouragement throughout this journey. Table of Contents ABSTRACT II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV LIST OF FIGURES VI 1. REPRODUCTIVITY, ANXIETY AND VIRTUALITY 1 2. LITERATURE REVIEW: A SURVEY OF REPRODUCTIVE ANXIETY IN SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE 19 COMMUNICATION STUDIES 23 AESTHETICS 38 LEGAL STUDIES 51 FEMINIST THEORY 59 PSYCHOLOGY 71 CONCLUSION 81 3. THEORY AND METHODOLOGY: MOBILIZING REPRODUCTIVE ANXIETY IN THE STUDY OF VHITUAL CULTURE 88 THEORIZING VIRTUAL CULTURE 90 Discourse, materiality and decentred subjects 90 Translation: Linking anxieties 102 Incorporation and inscription: Distinguishing anxieties Ill Anxieties in the bio-informational regime 121 A METHODOLOGY FOR ANALYZING REPRODUCTIVE ANXIETIES 134 Litmus tests of humanness 139 The organization of the substantive chapters 152 4. ENTANGLED MEMORDZS: CRYPTOMNESIA AND ANXIETY IN COPYRIGHT LAW 158 PLAGIARISM AND THE SIMULATION OF PRESENCE 158 COPYRIGHT, MUSIC AND MEMORY 171 THE PLAGIARISM CONTAGION , 180 RESTORING THE DAMAGED SUBJECT 189 5. GENETIC CHIMERA: CULTURE IN THE AGE OF ITS BIOLOGICAL REPRODUCTION .199 PROBLEMATIZING THE "WHO" AND "WHAT" OF SELF-REPLICATION 199 ENROLLING ANXIETIES 207 MUTABLE MOBILES 217 THE ROLE OF VIRTUAL "THINGNESS" IN REPRODUCTIVE CONTROVERSIES 227 CONCLUSION: THE IDENTIFICATION CRISIS 233 6. ENHANCING THE ORIGINAL: HUMAN AGENCY IN VHITUAL MUSIC-MAKING 235 EXTREME DEMATERIALIZATION 235 THE ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS OF MP3 240 AUDITIONING FOR THE ROLE OF HUMAN IN VIRTUAL CULTURE 250 SIMULATING PIRACY, PROVOKING ANXIETY 266 7. CONCLUSION: OPENNESS TO THE NONHUMAN 276 BD3LIOGRAPHY 288 V List of Figures Figure 1: Hybridization/purification model of reproductive anxiety 106 Figure 2: Phenomenology of flow 128 Figure 3: Reconfigurations of subject/object dualism in hybrid collectivities 152 VI 1. Reproductivity, anxiety and virtuality In virtual culture, human subjectivity is shaped by the tension between two conflicting notions of reproduction: first, reproduction as a sign of stability, certainty, control and continuity, and, second, reproduction as sign of flux, uncertainty, danger and even death. Two well-known scenes in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982) highlight this tension. The first scene takes place in the apartment of the replicant-hunting protagonist, Deckard (Harrison Ford), who scans a photograph into his computer, uttering commands to move and rotate the virtual camera "inside" the digital image. This technique allows Deckard to view things that were previously invisible. "Zooming," "cropping" or "sharpening" do not quite capture what the computer enables Deckard to do with the image; the face in the mirror, which Deckard prints out, wasn't in the original photograph. The computer reconstructs the three-dimensional space in which the photograph was taken based on a two-dimensional image, and then pivots and moves a virtual camera in that space to reveal objects that were not visible from the angle of the camera that originally reproduced the scene. In this instance, digital reproduction is envisioned as a way of enhancing human control over space and time, and, more specifically, reconstructing reality so that it can be manipulated and new knowledge can be gleaned from old reproductions. The second scene takes place at the headquarters of Tyrell Corporation, which designs and sells human-like replicants. In a darkened room, Deckard demonstrates that even the most sophisticated human-like replicants can be detected through an "empathy test."