Source: JAC, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 2000), pp. 767-774 Published by: JAC Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866364 Accessed: 28-01-2016 12:51 UTC
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Posthurnan
Rhetorics:
JohnMuckelbauer
"It's
the Future,
Pikul"
and Debra Hawhee
David Cronenberg'sfilmeXistenZbears the titleof thefilm's central meta-fleshgame focus:a virtual-reality gameplayed through"prototype pods."
These
pods?an
DNA?are synthetic
amalgam
of amphibian
neural webbing
and
connecteddirectlyto theplayers' bodies through
what are called "bioports," which are jacks installed at the base of players' spines. As the game's creator explains, the apparatus was designed to fully
integrate the human nervous system and the game architecture. Inside the game itself, players are thrust into an entirely realistic world that, in classic metafictional style, perfectly mirrors the reality outside the game: game players become
characters who are testing out a new virtual-reality
gamenamed "eXistenZ" thatinvolvesthesame fleshygame pods and the
same spinal cord bioports. As
the game proceeds,
these layers of virtual
realityproliferateso thatitquicklybecomes impossibleto tellwhere the
game ends and realitybegins.Thus, bydesign,eXistenZ(thefilmand the
so intimately that itmakes
game) links humans, animals, and machines sense to to little very attempt distinguish among these three categories. Instead, these biologic-machinic complexes become webs of neurons and
software engaged in specific exchanges of information and energy.
Of course, this boundary confusion is by no means simply a pleasant experience for the players precisely because the very distinctiveness of the player
minglings,
there is clearly an erotic edge to the game's
the players also frequently panic or experience "penetration
is at stake. While
phobia" (aswell as theconstantfearofbiological and softwareinfection)
when
their bodies
are transformed from self-contained
entities
into
distributed processes.
We beginwith eXistenZbecause it is a ratherexplicit attemptto
engage a series of problems we would like to address through the figure
of the "posthurnan." The most obvious concern of the film is the the effects of convergence of virtuality/actuality and human/machine, are to produce an entirely different manner of existence?hence, the film's title.Because of its conjunction of human and machine, the film
which
jac
20.4(2000)
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768
jac
seems to call for a discussion
of the figure of the cyborg, a figure that is
not new to rhetorical studies. In eXistenZ, however, the characters are not
wherein thecategoryof thehumanmust firstbe
all cyborg-style hybrids, as imagined relativelydiscrete in order for it to be connected to (and potentiallytroubledby) itsOthers (humanplusmachine). Many of the human
characters
change?material
in this film exist simply as sites of information ex
entities produced by and teeming with swarms of
others (codes, identities,technologies,knowledges, and so forth).In
short, eXistenZ does not render the human as an object that connects to other objects, but as an effect ormoment ofmultiple "inhuman" connec that are always on theirway elsewhere. that emerge from these couplings thus demon The machine-beings
tions?connections
one thatnot only complicates our
stratea differentformof identity, kind of response. In notionsof identity but also may requirea different contemporary culture, one need only listen toweekly news reports on computer viruses to see that the justice system?the most humanistic of on causality, guilt, and motive?is ill enterprises given its emphasis
machine equipped to deal with such fast-moving,highlydistributed
we mean both the viruses themselves and the hackers
beings (and here who, as part of the techno-scientific system, help produce them). Thus, we as an attempt to engage humans as begin by considering posthumanism
rather than as discrete entities. In doing so, we
processes follow JudithHalberstam and IraLivingston, who write thatposthumanism "emerge[s] at nodes where bodies, bodies of discourse, and discourses of
distributed
intersect to foreclose any easy distinction between actor and stage,
context" (2). between sender/receiver, channel, code, message,
bodies
As
a result of challenging
the distinctiveness
of some of these key
tomany
longstanding, concepts, posthumanism poses intriguing questions "self-evident" assumptions about rhetoric and communication, broadly conceived. Indeed, one need not have a fictional computer game plugged into one's spine to recognize that, for example, a human body is already
highlydistributed(biologically,ecologically, and socially). If even our
are so intimately involved with nonhuman realms, itmay be the
case that theway we think about some very common scholarly categories as we once thought. Is it really so easy, for might not be as rigorous a speaker, an audience, a message, and example, to distinguish between that these con a context? Most readers will undoubtedly acknowledge bodies
one can cepts are quite slippery inpractice, but thatone tries to do the best of course, that a "situation" can be circum in each situation?assuming, scribed. Instead of attempting to reduce the complexity of actual events,
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Muckelbauer
769
and Hawhee
rhetoricthatwould encourageus to might therebe a way of rethinking to Wouldn't thisengagement engage thiscomplexityand respondto it? if, as is often claimed,
be necessary
rhetoric trulywants
to become
practical art? In short,itmay verywell be thecase thatthe rhetorical
triangle is about as useful as a joy stick in eXistenZ?in
other words,
itmay
we are incontrolof thegame,butwe will miss out
offerus thesense that on all the action as a result.
The categoryof theposthuman,however,bringswith ita host of
the least of which
problems?not
is its very engagement
with
the
"human."None of thisemphasison distributed
bodies should indicatethat
humanism
is somehow
defunct. While
posthuman
reinscriptions
of the
us to thecategoryof thehuman, they
do not return body and subjectivity do not function as a refusal of that category either. That is to say, is not an ideological chimera thatwe have somehow intellec
humanism
tually surpassed; to tell such a storywould be a key strategy of humanism.
There is an enormous difference, for example, between the postmodern
claim thatwe have moved fromtheregimeof the real intothatof the
simulacrum simulacra.
and
The
the posthuman claim that the real is structured by
first claim is the story of a fundamental epochal or
tend responses change, and even the most sophisticated conceptual toward a bittersweet nostalgia over what has been lost (a la Fredric Jameson) or simply the insistent demonstration of this change (a la Jean
The second claim, however, offers no such progressive
Baudrillard). the real does not disappear or become more readily malleable story: (or it is structured by simulacra. As Halberstam hyperreal) simply because
and Livingston write, "The posthuman does not necessitate the obsoles cence of the human; itdoes not represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather
itparticipates in re-distributions of difference and iden
a result, there is no cause for either celebration or sadness, tity" (10). As just a sense of the exigency to develop tools that can respond in a different fashion. In Gilles Deleuze's
words,
"It's not a question of worrying or of
hoping for thebest, but of findingnew weapons" (178). Each of the
articles in this special cluster on posthuman rhetorics thus seeks to invent such weapons and to do so from the perspective of rhetorical studies. But, as you will find, the rhetorical perspective is also in the process of connecting
elsewhere.
Some of the toolswill likely sound familiar to an audience of
rhetorical theorists: the concepts ofmemory, moral judgment, and inven
tion figure prominently in the articles that follow. But given the distrib cannot be uted character of the posthuman, a rhetorical perspective
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770
jac
confinedto a singledisciplinaryemphasis,and thuseven familiartools
might sound strangewhen theyare hooked up to other technologies. Indeed, through posthumanism, rhetoric becomes an art of connectivity and thereby asks for new considerations frommultiple angles?those that critical cultural engage literature, science, studies, theory, argumentation, et cetera (with emphasis on the "et cetera"). The posthuman
thus offers a
orweapon inventioninwhich disciplinaryboundaries
styleof theorizing
become
sites of connection
rather than enclosures
of autonomous
interiorities.
Still, inventing weapons isa seriousbusiness and thusinaddition to the conceptual
implications we have mentioned,
posthumanism
also has
an important political tenor.The conceptof theposthumanpoints to the
dangers of a humanist, Enlightenment-style politics, one that strives for
increased recognition through various collective formations (for ex In order to function at all, these ample, more rights for more people). representative
collectives must enforce some kind of coherence
among
theirconstituents. And, asMichel Foucault pointsout inTheHistory of
Sexuality, the founding movement of such "liberating" politics is effec
tively to eliminate the possibility of some versions of freedom. Instead, a posthuman politics finds its strategies in transient, emergent coalitions
like the computer hackers
and indiagramming networks of power?much In short, just as is thatDavid Gunkel discusses in "Hacking Cyberspace." the case on the conceptual front, a posthuman politics can neither accept
nor refuse humanism,
a humanist dialectic. humanism,
for a refusal would
effectively be a continuation of it attempts to redirect the trajectory of
Instead, to work within this tradition in order to transform it into
something different. In thewords of the trout-farm cum game-pod worker
in eXistenZ, "It seems like everything used to be something else, yes?"
But what specific implicationsdoes this"somethingelse" hold for
rhetorical studies and for pedagogy? With the emergence of
challenges distinctions between subjectivities
posthumanism?which and consequently renders the notion of persuasion rather unclear?what becomes of rhetoric? Or, better, how might rhetorical scholars, teachers,
andmorphingontologiesas and studentsencounterdistributedidentities as portable consciousness? The articles in this cluster follow similar lines of questioning by working at the seemingly disparate nodes of capital, bodies, life,memory, and time. Each article therefore offers and
well
deploys a series of tools for encountering
rhetorics.
and producing
posthuman
To thisend,Collin GiffordBrooke beginswith thebroad double
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Muckelbauer
771
and Hawhee
that spawned this cluster of articles: how does posthumanism
reconfigure the concepts and practices of discourse production, and what
question
does rhetorichave to contributeto thearticulationof theposthuman?
the typical Burkean question, "Where are we now?"?a considers the question that often sets Burke on a new path?Brooke context in the of academic world, specifi today's "post-ist" posthuman
Deploying
cally distinguishingposthumanismfrompostmodernism.Drawing on
work by Katherine Hayles and Bruno Latour, Brooke suggests thatwhat
is at stake in posthumanism is a refiguring of relations between nature, culture, and subjectivity. Brooke suggests that from a rhetorical perspec
tive posthumanism means the contemporary outsourcing ofmemory, one
of the five canons of ancient rhetoric. This movement ofmemory from the
brain to giant servers and microchips forces a consideration of "the body
loss of the body occasioned by the age of information problem"?the return to embodied information," a technologies. Brooke suggests "a
with itsattentiontokairos (or timing)begins toelaboratea
solutionthat, posthumanrhetoric,thefeaturesofwhichmight be tracedthrougheach of the articles in this special cluster?specifically, through the distribu tions of identity and subjectivity that occur in various economies of
exchange. One such economy belongs to the computer hacker, who, as defined editor of 2600: The Hacker Emmanuel Goldstein, by Quarterly, "is a lot of questions, refuses to accept simplistic dead-end anyone who asks answers, iswilling to bend rules to attain knowledge, and has a real sense of adventure" (qtd. inHale 71). David Gunkel's "Hacking Cyberspace" offers amode of analysis based on strategies gleaned from this conception
of the computer hacker and from Jacques Derrida. According
toGunkel, the parasitic hacker functions as a kind of training through following: the hacker moves through in order to both do and undo. Hackers model deconstructive
strategies for responsive intervention. Gunkel delineates
"hacking logic" and theway it inhabits and disrupts the site of "consen sual hallucination" known as cyberspace. As a parasitic inhabitation of
deconstructive
discourse, his article performs themode
of intervention it
details by hacking humanism and offeringtools for reprogramming
rhetoric. As such, Gunkel's version of hacking also offers useful ways to approach teaching. As both a familiar activity and a responsive hermeneu tic, hacking will
resonate with our students as a mode
of inhabiting a system
producing discourse, transform it. In other words, close allies.
composition
of engaging in order to respond
and hacking
and and
are already
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One problemof contemporaryacademic theories(especially leftist
theories) is a resentment toward and anxiety about capital. In "Nietzsche's
takes on what he calls "consumption anxiety," Money!" JeffreyNealon the undeniable yetmuch-loathed capitalist urge to consume. Nealon turns
to the seeminglyunlikelyfigureofNietzsche in order to articulatea
posthuman ethic for encountering third-wave capital. Such an ethic is
critical for rhetoricians and teachers in the "dot com" era inwhich money
might be dubbed theforemostrhetoricalproof. In regard to capital's
and movement,Nietzsche enables a shiftaway fromthequestionof truth is to and what does it mean?) representation(What money questions of forceandpower (Whatcan itdo?). Capital thusprovidesa usefulexample of a nonsignifyingsymboliceconomy thatsimultaneouslyturnson and logics of desire. In short,money doesn't mean;
more productively. sketchsome tools that mightenableus torespondto it
The
result
is his five "Most Will-to-Powerful
Laws
of Nietzschean
Personal and Financial Growth," a ride throughthe conjunction of
and capital that demonstrates how capital trumps conscious ness and demands response on the spot?just in time. resentment toward As Nealon suggests, capital won't get us very far,
Nietzsche
but experimentand improvisation
might. Such a speculativestudyholds for rhetorical practice and pedagogy. As we've capital offers a model of persuasion as movement or
important implications
already suggested, force that troubles theAristotelian model
that emphasizes human reason.
a in culture of Furthermore, increasingly "sponsored" universities, the five "Laws" offer a posthuman ethic that can enable more productive encounters with the capital surge and helps us analyze capital' smovement thus offers key to discourse in our classrooms. Nealon
and relationship
works productionanddistribution insightsintohow onemode of identity
occurs through capital's movement)
and, more as of its how inexorable we, components workings, might importantly, or celebration. in than other ways simple rejection respond Richard Doyle ex In "Uploading Anticipation, Becoming-Silicon," (namely,
that which
plores emergingtechnologiesof theself in thetangleof contemporary
article examines the
and science fiction. Specifically, Doyle's the intersection with which we began: between organism and machine, a rhetorical map of what an ways thatmachines have helped produce a organism "is," and thereby have become the loci for "redistribution of science
invokes the notion of "up
vitality." To mark this redistribution, Doyle now term for file distribution?that is, commonplace loading," the
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Muckelbauer
and Hawhee
transferring information from a personal
773
computer to a server or onto the
Internet. File distributionis thepointof conjuncturebetween organism andmachine andmarks a technologyof theselfthatdoes notbeginwith withwhatDoyle calls "inhuman theindividualinterior subjectbut rather movementoutsideof a singularbiological exteriority"?a (quite literal) entity. In other words,
the logic of the self in science and science fiction
offersa useful example of the posthuman insofaras it depends on
networkedidentitiesthataredistributedin timeand space and thatshare an expectant attitude toward the future.
Doyle's analysisof posthumanidentityisvital to a considerationof
delineates ever-emerging "Uploading" posthuman rhetorics. Because modes of identity formation, itenables an engagement with memory and
but emerge at a conjunction ofmachine parses out a posthuman subjectivity
and organism. As such, uploading
and simultaneously articulates a
posthumanrhetoricimbuedwith anticipationandmobility. Thus, both
with a discourseof hacking Nealon andDoyle, likeGunkel, experiment and attemptto interveneinand redirectan existingsystem(capital and lack, respectively).
All thisconsiderationof capitaland cyberspacebringsus back to the
problem of the body thatwe mentioned
earlier. Christine Harold's
"The
RhetoricalFunctionof theAbject Body: TransgressiveCorporeality in
Trainspotting" shows how theposthuman and all its corporeal materiality can be narrated through and in a cinematic text. Specifically, Harold
theway inwhich Trainspotting?through
its in-your-face of notions of and portrayal bodily abjection?hacks identity normativity by narrating, over and over again, the capacity for bodies to transform demonstrates
connected to particular cultures, practices, and chemicals. Along
theway, Harold's reading demonstrates how feminist notions of corpo reality and abjection can effectively hack rhetorical studies. That is,
when
Harold defersthetypical moralizingmove ofjudgingthefilmor theissues itportrays and instead uses the film to diagram what forces such as drugs and abjection do. In this regard, the articles in this special cluster offer an occasion
in"?to computers, to to to we As chemicals. reminds have likely us, culture, capital, Hayles
We
been posthumanall along. It is our hope thatthesearticleswill help to
develop explicit strategies for teaching and doing posthuman rhetorics. But lest readers look for a "how-to" manual for doing rhetoric in a
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774
jac age, we
should be very clear: themovements of uploading,
consuming, hacking (all movements of becoming) are designed to fore stall the production of such programs?that is, of course, unless the as a "user's manual" is program listing only one order: "Use!" figured posthuman
Cronenberg's
eXistenZ
such a posthuman
approximates
logic. Ted
who has never played
Pikul is a skepticalmarketing representative he poses the quivering telos he finally acquiesces, enters he the game-world, "What, precisely, is the driven question when the we're that of game playing now?" In response, the game's goal "eXistenZ."
When
designerwhips her head around and,with eyes gleaming, supplies the
only directive, "You have toplay the game to find out why you're playing the game. It's the future, Pikul." game's
Pennsylvania
State University
University Park, Pennsylvania
UniversityofIllinois Urbana-Champaign,
Illinois
Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on Control Societies." Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-82. eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, and Willem Dafoe. Videocassette. Dimension Films, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random, 1978. Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston. Introduction. Posthuman Bodies. Ed. JudithHalberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 1 19.
Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in theLate Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention ofNature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies inCybernet ics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Hale, Constance, ed. Wired Style: Principles Age. San Francisco: Hardwired, 1996.
of English Usage
in theDigital
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