Sarah's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Silvana has left a comment in response to my previous blog entry Defining posthumans where she states that:

“I think the key is the rejection of individualism which I think is central to a humanist view”

This tied in neatly with some additional thoughts that I have been mulling over today, so I thought I would blog about them.

I think that Tracy is correct in her determination of Hayles view on the posthuman. However, I have just completed reading the article by Muri ‘Of shit and the soul’ which seems to dismantle this view. She draws upon the work of Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein who stated that:

“the body has become a passive archive to be processed, entertained, and stockpiled” (1994)

They also considered that:

Networked communications speak the ‘digital language of the world’s first post-flesh body”

However Muri points that that during the period when we can expect this ‘disembodiment’ to occur;

“the human body has never before been so present” pg 75

She states this in terms of a huge population explosion, as well as the increasing pollution that we create from our own bodies. I may be inclined to take this one step further and talk about our obsession with the physical body and the culture of celebrity. Our culture is saturated with reference to beautiful bodies, in song lyrics:

“Bodies in the Bodhi tree,
Bodies making chemistry
Bodies on my family,
Bodies in the way of me
Bodies in the cemetery,
And that’s the way it’s gonna be

All we’ve ever wanted
Is to look good naked
Hope that someone can take it
God save me rejection
From my reflection,
I want perfection” Robbie Williams “Bodies“

As Robbie says, all we want is to look good naked.

These ideas are fed to us in imagery and advertising:

It is even possible to book a holiday and come back with a better ’surgically enhanced’ and more beautiful body. What these images sell us is perfection, and that we too can attain perfection, but we must not look like we are trying too hard. That is why celebrities are often none too keen to admit to having ‘work done’ – they want to be seen as natural.

If we take this a step further and move into a virtual world where everyone appears exactly how they wish to, wouldn’t this diminish the concept of beauty? As Beautiful South inform us:

“And everyone is blonde
And everyone is beautiful
and when blonde and beautiful are multiple
they become so dull and dutiful” Rotterdam

In a world where we care so deeply about the physical ‘wrappings’ that our conciousness arrives in, how could we possibly take steps that result in what Muri calls:

“the loss of selfhood and elimination of the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ body”

Surely the ‘perfect’ ‘natural’ body is the ultimate prize, so where does that leave Hayles posthuman?

Tags: Hayles, Muri, posthuman

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Week 9. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.