To help me make sense of what ‘posthuman’ means I pondered the question, “What’s it like to be human?” I could not stop thinking about this, it has been churning away in the back of my head, popping up at the most inappropriate times, such as when I’m trying to sleep. It really is a difficult question to answer and I feel the need to write down my thoughts. (Is this proof I’m human?)
Considering that there is so much diversity in the human race, the first thing to do was search for was commonality. For starters, we are all born and we all die. To survive we need sleep, we must eat and we must drink. We age and become frail as we grow older; we are prone to diseases and we feel pain. But these statements are also true of animals. So what makes us ‘human’?
Humans are sociable and help work towards the common good (well some of the time). And there is a strong tendency towards a sense of belonging, be it to a group, tribe or community, as our ethnographies proved. I can’t posit this as a reason for being human though as research shows animals too have these attributes. Ah, but where we differ is that we have the ability to laugh, cry, be compassionate, give gratitude and empathise. This must surely distinguish us. I wonder, are we inherently sceptical of those who lack emotion and could this be why we mistrust, even fear, cyborgs and posthumans? Wasn’t there just the teeniest bit of doubt about the emotion of the cyborgs in Blade Runner?
Hayles states that “the human has ..been associated with rationality, free will, autonomy and a celebration of consciousness”. So being human is more than just attributes, it’s also about our capacity to use our brain; our ability to reason; our belief that life has meaning; our need to improve ourselves and shape our world. This took me back to the film festival at the beginning of this unit: Bendito Machine (Episode 3 Obey His Commands) and eXistenZ: the restaurant sequence. These films showed how humans react and interact with technologies.
An experience I had earlier in the week made me realise my own interaction with technologies. My Mac stopped charging and I only noticed when there was 30 minutes of battery time left. The nearest Apple Store was a couple of hours drive away and anyhow it wouldn’t have been possible for me to go there until the weekend. What a disaster! I hadn’t backed-up my files and all my personal stuff, such as music, photos, phone numbers and coursework is stored on my Mac. I was beside myself trying to think of how I was going to remedy this. I was so relived when the problem turned out to be a dodgy outlet. Once I saw that the battery was recharging, I reflected on my initial reaction. I knew this wasn’t a life or death situation but that didn’t stop me from feeling quite devastated when it happened. Is this an example of me being posthuman? Hayles states, “the world we understand is also the world we make, in both literal and figurative senses.”
“I think that questioning humanism-posthumanism itself – begins to build ways for being different in the future. “We” have nothing to lose but “our”selves.” (Badminton, 2003, p23) Now this makes sense to me so may be I’m closer to understanding the difference between human and posthuman than I thought.
References
Badmington, Neil, “Theorizing Posthumanism” Source: Cultural Critique, No. 53, Posthumanism (Winter, 2003), pp. 10-27 Published by: University of Minnesota PressBibliography
Hayles, N. Katherine, (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” from Hayles, N. Katherine, we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics pp.1-25,293-297, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press
Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201101/can-animals-work-the-common-good
Why do we always seem to go into a panic when tech fails… or simply doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do? We know that its not a life or death situation, as you say, but it is no less devastating or disheartening when it happens.
In the summer of 2010 my wife, daughter and I spent 2 weeks touring in Scotland. It was a wonderful trip and just having received a new camera I took hundreds of photos. When we returned, I took the memory card to the store to develop some pictures, but somewhere between the house and the store the memory card was lost. I was devastated… photos of the entire trip; video of my daughter crawling for the first time… gone. While it still pains me at the loss, I can console myself with the memories I have of the fun trip we took as a family. I have since taken many more pictures of my daughter, and no doubt we will return to Scotland for another visit some time in the future, but the physical record of that particular trip no longer exists.
What occurred to me after reading your post and being reminded of my own loss, is how would a cyborg react? I have a fond recollection of my trip. I have an emotional connection to the memories of the events. Does a cyborg feel an emotional connection to data? If the data is lost or removed, would they even be aware of the loss? Can they feel emotional attachment to something which no longer exists in their memory banks? Would it be as if it never existed, or would some aspect of the experience linger?
As you said, emotions could be the difference between humans and animals but is that also the potential difference between the post-human and the cyborg? Do our emotional connections separate us from the non-human? Is recognizing the connections we have and the attachments we form to the physical world part of the process of becoming post-human?
Thanks for your comments Kevin. Sorry to hear that you lost your photos. I would have been devastated at that too. I so love looking through my albums. Glad you enjoyed your time in Scotland and have such fond memories. It’s amazing how emotional attachment and memories can be very strong no matter how many years have elapsed. I really like your question, “how would a cyborg react”. You’ve got me thinking again.