An Insistence on the Body

In “The Posthuman Body,” N. Katherine Hayles focuses our attention on the cybernetic construction of the posthuman, critiquing its tendency to erase embodiment and seeking another approach (still rooted in cybernetics) that would instead insist on the body itself.

Hayles writes, “Thus the contest to define the posthuman is deeply bound up in the debate over whether humans are more aptly viewed as inscriptions or incorporations…At stake in my reading of [Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash] is not so much a decision to side with either the human or the posthuman, as a search for versions of the posthuman that do not erase embodiment and do not consider human beings as inscriptions that can be frictionlessly transferred into another medium” (247-248).

This privileging of the body finds resonance in the chapter “Posthistoricism,” in which Walter Benn Michaels offers analyses of Snow Crash and American Psycho that are concerned with measuring the force of a text by the effects it has on the body. By pain or by sickness, the body reacts to a “text” that is either forcibly carved onto the skin or channeled directly through the brain stem.

Turning to Snow Crash, Michaels writes, “But when some people catch the virus and some people don’t, we don’t think of the sick people as disagreeing with the healthy ones. Indeed, this is precisely what it means to begin to conceive the text on the model of the virus; it means to understand differing responses to the text as different effects produced on different bodies by the same cause” (73).

Michaels later uses this argument as an analogy for text vs. interpretation, which I won’t delve into here. What draws Hayles’ and Michaels’ arguments together is an emphasis on the presence and relevance of the (post)human as body as opposed to code. Hayles resists a definition of the human as DNA, written and transferrable. Michaels similarly draws a distinction between the body and text by imagining the latter as something that attacks, infects, inspires, or otherwise exerts force on the body—but remains separate from it. The body is still something that reacts to, rather than becomes, code/text.

However, while Hayes powerfully argues for the materiality of the body as something to embrace in the face of lifeless automation, Michaels’ offers a much bleaker outlook by only emphasizing the body as something that is helplessly overcome by something else; whether injured or inspired, the body is not really the hero of subjectivity that we might hope it to be, but the mere site where feelings emerge (but from whom?) and where differences occur (i.e., you are not sick/inspired but I am, thus we are different).

What I find myself searching for in both of these readings is something more than yet another dichotomy—which is in this case a dichotomy between the human as body or the human as code. Where does such an analysis leave us? What about the soul? What about emotion, experience, heritage, and so forth, which so much of human art is founded on and in preservation of?

In defining/describing the human, any dichotomy is futile. And arguing for the body as opposed to text is to have already decided that the human is one or the other, and nothing in between.