Historicizing the Posthuman

Author(s): Alan W. France

Source: JAC, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 175-183
Published by: JAC
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866393
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Reader

Historicizing

175

Response

the Posthuman

Alan W. France

achievement

An amazing

of the cluster of essays on the possible

discur

siveworld of theposthuman?published inthelast issueofJAC?is that

itenablesus to imagine
what itmightbe like ifexperiencewere no longer

contained

in the biological

vessels we now

inhabit as selves, but were

shareware,permittedtospillout into
instead,throughcybertechnological
self-conscious

networks of identity. These

essays are about escaping

the

conditionwhereby theindividualhumanorganismis entirelydependent

on culturally mediated

signification?trapped,

that is, in the prison-house

of signifyingsystems,ina realmofhybridconsciousnessrepresented
by
thecyborg (or thejunkie). In thisstate,communicationcould create a

perfect community, a global post-McLuhanesque

village.

There isgreatpleasure incontemplatingthisescape fromthelimitsof

corporeality,andmuch profit in consideringhow technologiesmight
transform the integrated consciousness
of self-identity into an ensemble
as
John Muckelbauer
and Debra Hawhee
processes,"

of "distributed

suggest. In their illustrating example, drawn from David Cronenberg's

film and eponymous virtual reality game eXistenZ, virtual experiential
input is blended into each player's experience through a "game pod" that

is plugged intoa bioport at thebase of the spine, turningplayers into

It must be said that "eXistenZ,"

the
"biologic-machinic
complexes."
raises
for
anxieties
this
for
whom
Susan
game,
reader,
dystopian

Brownmiller'sdiscussion inAgainstOur Will of thefunctionof prison

rape came immediately tomind.
In varying ways, the cluster of essays on the posthuman

explore what

happenswhen the self is ruptured,transcended,dispersed;when it is

intheperformance
of hacking(Gunkel);when itisreinscribed
reconfigured
as a synthesisof cultureand nature (Brooke);when it ismonetized as
capital (Nealon); when it isuploaded intosiliconor at least flashfrozen
(Doyle); andwhen itis leachedaway inbodily fluids(Harold).One might
read these essays

futuristically: as extrapolations

or speculations,

sug

gestingwhat theposthumanexperienceof cybertechnology

mightbe like.
That is theway I firstread them.
One might also read these essays as discursive productions of the
present, as texts inhabiting a shared historical moment, and therefore as

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176

jac

texts capable of telling us more about thepresent, perhaps,

than the future.

This way of readingwould obey FredricJameson's critical imperative:

always historicize. Accordingly, one would always include in a reading
those contextual and material forces thatmake a text intelligible, but not
too obvious.
interests

One would

that express

always be on the lookout for those material

in a particular
themselves
characteristically

lexicon and tropological pattern and in a characteristic range of

images and symbols.

which
So, forexample,we mightbegin by askingwhy technology,

in these
in thepresent, is treated so unproblematically
we
on
are
we
"What
future.
here?"
the
essays
missing
might
posthuman
troubles us somuch

ask. And we might find an answer bymeditatingon Richard Doyle's

"Uploading Anticipation,
essays in the cluster.
For Doyle,
be anticipated.

Becoming-Silicon,"

the most Utopian of the

are genuinely to
of becoming-silicon
will produce
the new "external
Cybertechnologies

the technologies

Michel Foucault believes thatChristian

ized" self inthesameway that
was
the
produced discursively throughthepractice of
interiority, soul,

into
of being uploaded?"beamed
up"
Anticipation
mar
a
like
late
works
effect
that
rhetorical
capitalist
cyberspace?is
or
is the relation between what a commodity
kets in which value
as
was
Rotman
Brian
worth in themost recent past and,
says,
currency
confession.

"what themarket judges say itwill be worth at differentpoints in the

future"(qtd. inDoyle 850).
Markets, however, are only for people of means. Most would con
cede, I think, that technologies have historically been ways to enrich some
and, more frequently, to despoil, dispossess, and even destroy others (see

Braun in thisissueofJAC).While some technologieshave been applied

humanely, theyare always in the first instance instrumentalto the
aggregationand regulationof social power. Technology is alwaysfor
a technology unambiguously
is
something, and indeed to represent
really to present an argument for theway it situates those who control
it in their social and material environment.

Surprisingly,therelationshipof cybertechnologytogenderdoesn't

attention in these essays on the posthuman, even though

as well as in contem
is
strongly coded male,both historically
technology
too
far to suggest that
not
be going
culture. Itmight
porary American
receive much

This
masculinity isdefined in largepartby itsrelationshipto technology.
that being a man has always meant having one's
uted to some extent throughout social networks?armies,

means

identity distrib
teams, gangs,

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111

Reader Response
derive their power
corporations, and other hierarchies?that
or
material
of
domination,
symbolic.
nologies

from tech

Letme offerjusta briefexampleof thesymbolic.Thesewords appear

in the aftermath of theNFL

season, with

its embarrassingly masculinist

displays ofmale identity:rituallypaintedmen in cheeseheads and pig

snouts with

their torsos bared

to winter weather, flailing, ranting, and

are
men
who "belong to" theRedskins or the
jumping up and down. These
Raiders or some other professional
football team. They are already,

at least,cyborgswho have subordinatedtheirindividuality

to
figuratively
a systemofvirtualdominationinordertoshareinitsaggregatepower.We

men have always been "uploaded

be a problem to be investigated.

subj ects," inDoyle'

s term, and thatmay

In a largersense,cultureitselfis softwareplugged intothesubject's

centralnervous system like thebioportgameware of eXistenZ.And I

like us to pay more attention towhat happens to gender?and,

in
to
culture
goes
particular,
masculinity?when
posthuman. Doyle begins

would

more

with the film Blade Runner:"...

life, fucker," which is the fugitive

android's
demand of his "wetware"
father. It may be a
ambiguous
demand formore experience, more time; or, itmay be a demand to be

artificially (or at least non-organically)

replicated, as Doyle suggests. It
a
to
also
be
demand
may
change states, to reproduce, to be a fucker
politics has always been about men trying to control or
regulate reproduction. In the futuristicworld of Blade Runner, even when
DNA
is no longer destiny and replication can replace reproduction, new
himself. Sexual

life?more
life?is still conferred by men: Tyrell, who is the originary
fucker, the intellectual father of Nexus Six bodies; and Deckard, who
possesses the almost maternal instinct necessary to detect the now-blurred

difference that separates beings born ofman and those born ofwoman. In
the wake of the Ashcroft appointment, men will retain the power over
reproductive rights. Le plus changer. ...

CollinGiffordBrooke is lesssanguinethan
Doyle abouttheposthuman
us
to
liberate
from
western
traditional
promise
binary logic and the
dualism

thatunderwrites

it:body/mind; nature/culture; organic/machinic.

He is concerned that (post)modernism"threatensto disembody our

rhetorical practices,

leaving

the binary between

nature and culture

in

with thesophisticationof
place evenaswe renderitincreasinglyinvisible
our information
a
This
is
fairrepresentation
ofmy
technologies"(777).
concern

here,

and

cyberspace binary.
David Gunkel's

itmight

excellent

be

illustrated by turning to the hacker/

extended

analogy

between

hacking

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and

178

jac

deconstruction

can serve as a starting point. Gunkel

sets out to "question

thenetworkof preconditionsand assumptionsthatalready informand

delimitourmodes of inquiry[and thatinfiltrate]_existing systemsof

(797-98). He proposes hacking as a means of questioning

that are "too often taken for granted" (798). However,
assumptions
is a two-edged sword: once we agree to
hacking, like deconstruction,
rationality"

destabilize meanings, our own preconditions

to become decipherable.

and assumptions

are liable

Inwhat follows, then, Iwant to attend to the representation of hacking

inGunkel's essay,being on the lookoutforpatternsof significationthat

might uncover the culturalwork thathacking does in reproducinga
of theworld and, inparticular,that
would betray
genderedunderstanding
the social relationsenablingwhite men to perpetuateour privileged
tomorrow's cyber
profit, that is, from our social capital?in
am
aware
I
of inhabiting just
Of
course,
economy.
myself
uncomfortably
such a gendered position: a place where it's possible to use a theory?a

position?to

piece of cultural software?to

hack the "rationality" of these essays and,

in so doing, to reproducetheprivileged (andparasitic) roleof thecritic

who

tries towork his will on the passive,

if resistant, texts that have been

coerced, editorially,intothisblinddate.
That being said, itwould be hard to avoid the conclusion that

create something of a gendered relationship

as
between hackers and,
Andrew Ross puts it, the cyber-systems of
suggests an alternative mode of
rationality they "penetrate": "'hacking'

Gunkel's

rhetoric does

that learns, so to speak, how to enter, explore, and rework the

systems and programs that have informed and regulated investiga
tions of cyberspace." Hacking
"designates an activity that is simulta

examination
basic

neously applauded for its creativity and reviled for its criminal transgres
... is
sions, while cyberspace
pulled in every conceivable direction by
interest" (798). Hacking consists of "particular prac
every conceivable

ticesandmovements thatonlybecomemanifest throughspecificperfor

mances";

and itdesignates

"both creative innovation and a form of illicit

behavior" (799). Gunkel quotesDerrida inthiscontexton theparasitism

of deconstruction:theparasite "is by definitionnever simplyexternal
never simply something that can be excluded from or kept outside of the
body 'proper,' shut out from the 'familial' table or house" (800). Bad-boy
hackers, we learn, are "crackers," white
799). And so on.

boys kicking ass (see Gunkel

While itis truethatany exercise in thiskindof "unrestrainedlexical

will ultimatelyleadback to theprimal scene, the
drift,"asGunkel calls it,

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Reader

pervasiveness

Response

179

of this tropological pattern does confirm the commonplace

of the hacker as (post)adolescentmale, working alone perhaps but

nonethelessina looselyaffiliatedsubcultureofgettingoveron
imbricated
(transgressing)theestablishedrules (thedomesticities)of society?the
trickster
cuckoldingproprieties.
Adopting a point fromCollin Brooke, Iwould hope thattheconver
sation about posthuman

rhetoric would

carry into the next millennium

thatoldmodernisttrickofbeing suspiciousabout itself,

beingwary about
to
what
used
be called, fairly
of
and
hierarchies
the
inequities
reinscribing

patriarchy and about reproducing the "ludic quietism" of

Zavarzadeh has called "post-ality." Post-ality is a species of
argument maintaining thatheretofore unforeseen changes in thematerial
labor and capital?like
relations between
cybertechnologies?render

commonly,
what Mas'ud

cultural critique outmoded. Zavarzadeh

explains: "Post-ality is
of practices that, as a totality, obscure the production
is based on the extraction of surplus labor
practices of capitalism?which
announcing the arrival of a
(the source of accumulation of capital)?by

Marxist

the ensemble

new society which is post-production, post-labor, post-ideology,

post
white, and post-capitalist"
(1). We should be certain that posthumanism

is not a component of post-ality.

rhetoric that serves as a post-al
To guard against a posthuman
permits that shareware of culture to
apologetic for capitalism?which

ought to consider the

reproduce extant social and economic relations?we
extent to which hyper-reality and the distributed identities of cyborg
are products of the capitalist marketplace
consciousness
(the connection
keen insights).
the two is one of Doyle's
on
Nietzsche, Deleuze,
JeffreyNealon, drawing

between

and Foucault, an
swers emphatically
in the affirmative but decides that nothing can or
ought to be done about it.Nothing can be done about consumer capitalism
because there is no "outside" from which one might seriously resist the
Just Do It! And nothing should be done,
pronouncement"
anyway, even if itcould be done, because theprocess of commodification
must run its course: the bourgeois subjectivity that capitalism has pro
"axiomatic

duced

is the enemy, and the enemy is us.

I suppose thatthisisoneway tohistoricizethepostmodern,topoint

out the congruence of consumer culture and the deeper social logic of
multinational
I'm committed to
capitalism. As a teacher, however,
activism, intervention, and enough optimism to believe genuine critique

is liberating. Professing rhetoric commits me to the proposition

that
on
that
enables
how
knowledge
justice,
justice depends
knowing
things

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180

jac

work. Ifpeople understandhow "tomap theways inwhich misery is

mightwake up one day and
producedby capital,"asNealon puts it,they
say, "Wait! You mean all you'd have to do is democratize capital and a
thousand flowers would bloom? Let's give ita try!"However, Utopian this
sentiment may be, those of us who teach students to compose?to
themselves around discursive

organize

representations of theway

things

are and ought tobe?are obligated tomake informalcriticaljudgments

about the ethics of the system thatwe are paid

to reproduce.

we are obligated toask if

To historicizetheposthuman,then,I think
thehyper-worldrepresentedintheessays onwhich I'm now reflectingis

really the "superstructural" effect of the penetration of capital into new

areas of human experience. That makes a big difference to someone in the
of teaching students how to negotiate in "truthmarkets."
To suggest, therefore, the relationship between cyber-consciousness

business

we mightbrieflyconsidergreen futurologist
and hyper-capitalism,
(and
master of post-ality) JeremyRifkin's most recentwork, The Age of
Access: TheNew CultureofHypercapitalism,WhereAll ofLifeIs a Paid
what's reallygoingon todayisa shift
for Experience.Rifkinbelieves that
in theway people relate to commodities,making the very idea of
"market" obsolete

better metaphor,
sciousness

has

as a metaphor for doing commercial transactions. A

not surprisingly, is "network." Just as dispersed con
of
identity in the discourse
integrated
replaced

so "access"
has replaced ownership as the preferred
posthumanism,
to
the commodity under the regime of hyper-capitalism.
relationship

be replaced
Products(thosesolid thingscalled "goods")will increasingly
by services, while

at the same

time industrial production

based

on

physical capitalwill giveway to theculturalproductionof intellectual

property?what
consumption.

we might want
Rifkin explains:

to think of as "virtual" production

and

Imagine a world where virtually every activity outside the confines of

family relations is a paid-for experience, a world inwhich traditional
by feelings of faith,
reciprocal obligations and expectations?mediated
relations in the
contractual
and
solidarity?are replaced by
empathy,

form of paid memberships, subscriptions, admission charges, retainers,

and fees. (9)
This might almost be a paraphrase of The Communist Manifesto,
except
that the name Marx does not appear in The Age of Access.
Rifkin argues that the commodification of human relationships and
all aspects of personal

experience will have cognitive

effects that sound

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Reader
very much

like the "distributed

181

Response

identities"

of the posthuman:
"'mul
of consciousness,

frames

fragmented
tiple personas'?short-lived
each used to negotiate whatever virtual world or network they happen
to be in at any particular moment of time..." and resulting in a "freeing
to be more playful, flexible, and even
up of human consciousness
transient

. . ." and "a more

interdependent

and embedded

means

of

perceiving reality" (13).

Nike epitomizes this new cyber-economy. It is not really a manufac

turer of athletic shoes somuch as a virtual discourse, a "front" for dealing
in intellectual property: "a research and design studio with a sophisticated

built in large measure

marketing formula and a distribution mechanism"
on the posthuman?or
rather superhuman?advertising
campaigns of

Weiden andKennedy (47).Young men get a shoemanufacturedinAsian

sweatshopsfora tenthor lessof itssalesprice;plus, theyget itsexchange
as "uploaded
subjects" in the virtual experience of
black super-athletes. So Nike will stand for the process by which western

value:

participation

areproducedby inhumanconditionsof labor inthe

posthumanidentities
so-called developing world.

In this instance, then, the posthuman

is a ruse.

Instead of liberatingus, itmerely hides the process by which our

metropolitan "paid-for experience"

the unwired world.

is extracted from subaltern workers

in

we can't findexploitationrighthere inthe

Not that
West. The sunof
on
set
has
since
British
the
isles, having now
global capitalism
long
the consumption of the industrial working class that Engels
analyzed more that one hundred and fifty years ago. Christine Harold
completed

wants us to thinkof theposthumanbodies of heroinaddicts in the 1996

film Trainspotting "as unstable, fragmented, or even dispersed across a
field of discourses," and shewants us to approach those "bodies as bodies,
... as rhetorical sites" that have
ontological standing in their own right

and timelyargumentparticularlyaswe
(867, 866). This is an important
observe bodies, inplaces likeTexas andVirginia, routinelyreduced to
objects of moral judgment and instrumental rationality.
To historicize Harold's
reading of Trainspotting, however,

Iwould

like tounderstandthatthebodies of addicts aremeaningfulnot just as

leakycontainersofbodily fluids?although thattoo?but also as subjects

of social

class

in the post-industrial wasteland

of urban
a
not
addiction
is
of
the
suggests,
property
"abject

embedded

Scotland. As Harold

Other"; itbelongs just as surelytomy social psychology (althoughI get

at the delicatessen,
at the mall, or on a trip to Italy). This
is clearest in a scene inwhich Renton, preparing to detoxify
equivalence

my kicks

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182

jac

himself,

translates heroin

into substitute commodities:

"tomato

soup

(ten tinsof),mushroom soup (eight tinsof?for consumption cold),

bottle), vitamins, bottled water, mouthwash,

(milk of?one
. . . one bottle of Valium,
already procured from my
pornography.
own
in
who
her
domestic
and
is,
mother,
socially acceptable way, also
magnesia

a drug addict" (seeHarold 870-71).

When Harold writes about what might be called the "access economy"
of heroin addiction inTrainspotting?that
itrepresents not only the desire

forbodilypleasure but"also a desire toovercome thepain thatinevitably

attendsa lifelivedon heroin"?I feelcompelled toadd "yes, and just as
certainly,a life livedunder theregimeof latecapitalism,a life lived in
terms of the social

and economic

redundancy

present

in Edinburgh"

(877). This filmshould remindus of thedystopianpossibilities of the

posthuman,especially forthosewithoutcapital, thosewho, to allude to
of cryonics thatDoyle cites, are more worried about getting
their asses frozen before they die than afterwards.
From a cautionary perspective,
then, the cluster of essays on the
the discourse

posthumanmay suggesta post-al allegory thateffectivelyexpurgates

Marx's

historical materialism.

In this version, cyber- and bio-technolo

gies take theglobal penetrationof capital to thenext (thefinal?) stageof

history. Culture falls entirely under the instrumental control of "choice."

It's plugged into the base of the spine, embedded in the brain, orwherever.
The

self itself becomes

a paid-for experience.
consciousness,
from a range of software?intellectual

a market;

systems are chosen

together constitute
property?that

Meaning

culture. Every child can have the

to
be
president.
experience of growing up
I have argued for a "post-humanist" rhetorical pedagogy
Elsewhere,
thatwould focus on teaching students "to assemble and assimilate the
fragments of postmodern

experience

into a coherent,

self-conscious

itself?into the
identity... bymaking inquiryinto identity-formation

process

of acculturation?the

conscious

topic of writing assignments

..

." (149).While most of theessays inJACs clusteron theposthuman

would contestthisobjective?and all complicate itbeyondanythingIhad
inmindwhen Iwrote thosewords?I thinkthattheposthumancondition
a
they help us imagine underscores the need for post-humane^ pedagogy.
In a culture as saturated with technology as ours is, it is no longer possible
(if itever was) to determine whether a certain sequence of information is
"software" thatwe produced or "conditioning" thatproduced us. We who
teach have always been agents of a system that asks us to install certain
software, to condition certain responses. Yet,

the historical

longevity of

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Reader

Response

183

we have
theprofession(perhapsthethirdoldestprofession)suggeststhat

the power to change things for better or worse?and

difference between the two.

to know

the

West Chester University

West Chester, Pennsylvania

Works Cited
Brooke, Collin Gifford. "Forgetting tobe (Post)Human: Media
a Kairotic Age." JAC 20 (2000): 775-95.
Doyle, Richard. "Uploading Anticipation, Becoming-Silicon."
839-64.
France, Alan W.

"Dialectics

X4C20

in

(2000):

of Self: Structure and Agency as the Subject of

English." College English 63 (2000):

Gunkel, David

andMemory

145-65.

J. "Hacking Cyberspace." JAC 20 (2000): 797-823.

Harold, Christine L. "The Rhetorical Function of theAbject Body: Transgres

sive Corporeality in Trainspotting. JAC 20 (2000): 865-87.
Muckelbauer, John,and Debra Hawhee. "Posthuman Rhetorics:
Pikul.'" JAC 20 (2000): 761-74.
Nealon,

JeffreyT. "Nietzche's Money!"

'It's theFuture,

JAC 20 (2000): 825-37.

Rifkin, Jeremy.The Age ofAccess: TheNew Culture ofHypercapitalism, Where

All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience. New York: Putnam, 2000.
Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud.

"Post-ality: The (Dis)Simulations

1
Transformation
(1995): 1-75.

of Cyber-capitalism."

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions