Posthuman Gothic

By Anya Heise-von der Lippe

Posthuman Gothic is an edited collection of thirteen chapters, and offers a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic. Contributors explore the various ways in which posthuman thought intersects with Gothic textuality and mediality. The texts and media under discussion – from I am Legend to In the Flesh, and from Star Trek to The Truman Show, transgress the boundaries of genre, moving beyond the traditional scope of the Gothic. These texts, the contributors argue, destabilise ideas of the human in a number of ways. By confronting humanity and its Others, they introduce new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as human. Drawing on key texts of both Gothic and posthumanist theory, the contributors explore such varied themes as posthuman vampire and zombie narratives, genetically modified posthumans, the posthuman in video games, film and TV, the posthuman as a return to nature, the posthuman’s relation to classic monster narratives, and posthuman biohorror and theories of prometheanism and accelerationism. In its entirety, the volume offers a first attempt at addressing the various intersections of the posthuman and the Gothic in contemporary literature and media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786831088

Book preview

Introduction

Post/human/Gothic

Anya Heise-von der Lippe

‘I was not even of the same nature as man … Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?’¹ Abandoned by his creator and outcast from human society, Mary Shelley’s ‘hideous progeny’² expresses the terror of finding oneself outside of the human(ist) paradigm, on the margins usually reserved for the monstrous Other – ‘difference made flesh’.³ Frankenstein, both Gothic meta-text and emerging science fiction narrative, offers a unique starting point for a discussion on the posthuman Gothic. With its complex system of embedded narratives it accentuates the perspective of the man-made, posthuman ‘creature’ which the text both (re)creates and revolves around: ‘a monstrous conjunction of otherness linking’, as Fred Botting argues, ‘mob, woman, nature and writing itself’.⁴ Such a productive ‘integration of the various subjects in the novel with the machinery of the texts’⁵ is a defining element of the posthuman Gothic, which often combines a foregrounding of the aesthetic/technological aspects of textual production with a thematic focus on human-technology interfaces. Moreover, by juxtaposing the creature’s tale with that of his creator, the novel draws attention to the monstrous Other as an eloquent, rational individual, an ‘I’ which offers a foil for identification and the contemplation of otherness. The creature is not only a productive narrative instance in itself, but also foregrounds the conflicting representations of the human and its Other(s) in the text, thus undermining its creator’s anthropocentric stance.

By distributing the task of representation and interpretation to various narrators and readers inside and outside of the text, Frankenstein also draws attention to the discursive construction of monstrosity. The creature is not monstrous in itself; it becomes so in the eyes of a society which defines it as an Other to its position of ‘humanity’: ‘Indeed, it is only in terms of a masterful position that otherness is linked in the form of monstrosity.’⁶ As Stefan Herbrechter points out, ‘[t]he posthuman monster à la Frankenstein thus poses the question to us, as representatives of an imaginary humanity: Why have you created me like this? And in doing so it vents its scorn: "So you think you are human?"’⁷ The monster at the centre of the text is a ‘harbinger of category crisis’⁸ – that is, of a state of epistemological and ontological unease,⁹ which challenges the basic paradigms we¹⁰ associate with being human, and as such is a representative of the posthuman Gothic.

Frankenstein’s monstrous aesthetic, however, raises just as many questions as it provides answers. Most prominently, it draws attention to the conceptual difficulties of adopting a posthumanist perspective. As Herbrechter and Ivan Callus argue, we can not simply step out of an ingrained humanist perspective to adopt a posthuman point of view. Rather,

for a ‘posthumanist reading’ these moments in which humanism is threatened and the posthumanist other is unleashed need to be taken seriously (maybe even ‘literally’) and forced back onto the texts. In fact it is a kind of ethical demand that confronts texts with their own liberal humanist conservatism. The aim is not in any way to ‘overcome’ the human but to challenge its fundamental humanism, including its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and allies (e.g., anthropocentrism, speciesism, universalism).¹¹

It is this humanist baggage which ties Western thought to an anthropocentric perspective often perceived as universal, even if, as Rosi Braidotti points out, ‘[n]ot all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history.’¹² In this ‘rhetorical crisis for the humanist’, Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston argue, ‘[t]he privilege of blindness to these contradictions is part of the arrogance of entrenched power’.¹³ This is a kind of human(ist) privilege which allows us to maintain a belief system whose pillars have long been challenged. In fact, the posthuman does not exist outside of and unrelated to humanism and the human – as Herbrechter and Callus point out with Neil Badmington, ‘posthumanism inhabits humanism: … it is always a repressed possibility of and inside humanism’.¹⁴ The ‘post’ in ‘posthumanism’ does, consequently, not refer to an entirely temporal relation but rather suggests a close engagement with and a challenging of the critical paradigms of humanism. Cary Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism as ‘a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore’¹⁵ also suggests that this is an alternative critical framework which ‘points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms … a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon’.¹⁶ There is something distinctly disturbing about this necessary paradigm shift, as our posthuman predicament confronts us with the instability and ultimate unsustainability of our most basic ontological category – the human – and challenges the tenets of Enlightenment humanism in the process. The involvement of the Gothic in these matters, consequently, goes beyond a mere aesthetics of representation: born out of the immediate reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, the Gothic is no stranger to the exploration of ontological states before, beyond and alongside the humanist subject and has always been aware that both the sleep and the dream of reason create monsters.¹⁷

In a context that is frequently described as post-theoretical¹⁸ – not least because posthuman exigencies have destabilized the rationalist basis of traditional Western scientific and philosophical thought – popular narratives of the posthuman offer an opportunity to explore such paradigm shifts and possible cultural scenarios. David Roden refers to this as ‘speculative posthumanism’ – the ‘philosophical claim that [posthuman] successors are possible’.¹⁹ It would certainly be problematic to rely on theoretical explorations alone in a context in which the very foundation of the humanities – the concept of Enlightenment humanism – is at stake along with our understanding of what it means to be human. As such, the fictional contemplation of posthuman possibilities does not arise out of a need for entertainment alone, but also out of the necessity to come to terms with the ubiquity of a posthuman Other which is also a part of ourselves.

The obvious site for narrative explorations of the posthuman is, of course, the science-fiction genre, and the intersections between critical posthumanism and science fiction are numerous. Herbrechter, for instance, argues that ‘[c]ontemporary cultural criticism is … well advised to take science fiction seriously, not in the sense of its factual realizability but rather on the basis of its cultural influence’.²⁰ The ties between posthumanism and the Gothic may seem much more tenuous on the surface, but, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, they are far from that.

While Gothic criticism frequently incorporates readings of the dark aspects of the posthuman, the Gothic has made only sporadic appearances in posthumanist critical discussion since the 1990s,²¹ and seems curiously absent from recent posthumanist theory (most prominently Wolfe, Herbrechter and Braidotti). When room is given to the discussion of Gothic fiction within posthumanist discourse – as in Pramod K. Nayar’s Posthumanism (2014) – the focus is often on the analysis of individual narratives, viewing these texts through the lens of posthumanist theory rather than as instances of the posthuman Gothic. Nayar’s characterization of Doris Lessing’s ‘posthuman vision’ in The Fifth Child (1988) as ‘species Gothic’²² suggests a useful broadening of the posthuman as a concept, which often focuses on human–technology interaction rather than fusions of the human with other species, but its explicit discussion of the posthuman Gothic seems curiously isolated within critical posthumanist discourse.

It is conceivable that the lack of recognition of the Gothic’s involvement with the posthuman stems from a general reluctance in contemporary criticism (outside the immediate context of the Gothic) to see ‘Gothic’ as anything other than ‘an anachronistic term’, referring to a historical literary genre or ‘a buzz-word in literature and culture’.²³ This disconnection between posthuman and Gothic criticism may also be based on the genre’s recalcitrant playfulness – Gothic texts are, in fact, often purposefully camp and over-the-top, to the point of alienating more ‘serious’ readers – and to acknowledge this underlying facetiousness may be crucial to an understanding of the genre in the broader context of cultural theory. Botting’s revision of his definition of Gothic as a form of writing signifying ‘excess and transgression’,²⁴ to ‘a negative aesthetics’²⁵ in the second edition of his highly influential introduction in the New Critical Idiom series reflects this crucial difference in common critical conceptions. Gothic texts often seem to be considered lacking in theoretical substance, seeking the cheap titillation of horror by exposing their reader to ‘excess and transgression’, rather than a genre reflecting cultural issues and anxieties through a frequently metatextual ‘negative aesthetics’. Herbrechter, for instance, while drawing on the essentially Gothic figures of the ‘monstrous’, ‘the nightmarish, the haunting’ to discuss the posthuman, does so under the caveat that these ‘need to be taken more seriously than some purely aesthetic, dark romanticism’.²⁶ Braidotti, while eloquent on the subject of the anxieties provoked by the posthuman as well as its ‘gloomy connotations’,²⁷ does not interrogate the sources of the Gothic imagery she is borrowing from in these instances.

The tendency to use Gothic terminology and metaphors to describe the anxieties surrounding posthuman developments is, however, an essential part of the Gothic’s ‘negative aesthetics’, which is based on a profound ‘association between Gothic fictions and technical innovations’²⁸ as well as the cultural theories framing such developments. As Botting argues, ‘[n]ot only is the genre repeatedly described as being mechanical in form and effect, its various manifestations in different media – fiction, drama, photography, film – suffuse those media with ghostly associations’.²⁹ Steeped in human fears and desires, the Gothic is always already there, recording and engaging with the horrors of new technologies at the very forefront of their becoming reality, or imagining them before they have been developed, and serving as an aesthetic framework to explore these posthuman tendencies. In this capacity it is not only closely linked to but also engages with the same ontological and epistemological questions as the posthuman, which as Wolfe argues, comes ‘both before and after humanism’: it comes before the human,

in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms (such as language and culture) …³⁰

This is why ‘Gothic fictions cannot be put down as merely mechanistic, formulaic and low cultural aberrations, despite the critical reiteration of mechanical metaphors to describe the effects of romances on undiscriminating readers whose minds work mechanically’.³¹ Rather, in spite of its frequently formulaic genre conventions, the Gothic also comes with a metalevel of theoretical paradigms and a deep involvement in contemporary culture and various subcultures. Coupled with postmodern concerns over identity constructions, it has become an important mode of cultural production to reflect these concerns.³²

The use of Gothic imagery in critical posthumanist texts is, thus, no coincidence but a direct consequence of the genre’s position in culture and theory. The posthuman Gothic makes us aware that the monstrous Other is not only lodged within, but an essential part of our (human) identity construction. Posthuman monstrosity is an inherent feature of how we establish and discursively construct our humanity in a world that no longer allows us to perceive ourselves as whole and wholly untouched by the effects of our own (bio)technological involvements. As Micheal Sean Bolton points out, in the posthuman Gothic ‘a sense of horror emerges from the internal dread that the technological other already inhabits the human subject, that the subject is betrayed from within. The monstrosity of these interfaces has as much to do with the human component as with the technological’.³³ The posthuman’s decidedly uncanny connotations are rooted in the subject’s incapability to abject its monstrous/posthuman features in the process of trying to establish a coherent identity narrative – a discursive feat that is, moreover, highly problematic after postmodernism.

It is possible that this Gothic part of the posthuman is not easily visible from a normative perspective because it is the most truly Other aspect of the posthuman – the part signalling intersections of the heteronormatively male, white, ‘model human’ with all its possible Others – the female, the subaltern, the sexually different, the sick/disabled/prosthetically altered or enhanced, etc. The posthuman is scary: as Kim Toffoletti points out, ‘the posthuman inhabits a space beyond the real where time and history defy linear progression’; it disrupts ‘origin stories, contest[s] understandings of being, and create[s] the potential to configure the subject outside of temporal narratives of evolution and progress’.³⁴ By disrupting the human’s ties to its/our own history, the posthuman draws attention to the meaning of these ties in our identity construction. As Herbrechter and Callus argue, drawing on the uncanny, ‘posthumanism is a discourse which in envisaging the beyond of the human opens onto openness itself. It is the unknowable itself, the unthinkable itself.’³⁵ The posthuman, thus, makes us face our closets full of skeletons and madwomen in the attic in a rather Gothic manner – not as a literal ‘return of the repressed’ but by undermining and challenging familiar origin stories and drawing attention to how this ‘anxiety over the loss of humanity as human memory is externalized and interfaced with technology’.³⁶ As Halberstam and Livingston argue in one of the earliest attempts to conceptualize posthuman bodies in the 1990s, ‘the rough beast that now slouches towards the next century is not monstrous simply by virtue of its status as a non-species’³⁷ in the sense of Jacques Derrida’s definition of monstrosity as ‘that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized’.³⁸ Beyond this concept of monstrosity as the unknown, Halberstam and Livingston see ‘posthuman monstrosity and its bodily forms [as] recognizable because they occupy the overlap between the now and the then, the here and the always’.³⁹ This is one of the intersections between the Gothic and critical posthumanism, as the former has always been aware that the past was treacherous, a monster lurking in the shadows. So, as ‘[w]e struggle … to articulate a present laden with the debris of inert pasts’,⁴⁰ the Gothic is not just a fictional reflection, but rather at the forefront of the struggle to come to terms with the emerging horror of faltering ‘masternarratives about humanity’.⁴¹ Instead, Halberstam and Livingston offer ‘someness’: ‘The search for origins stops here because we are the origins at which imagined reality, virtual reality, Gothic reality are all up for grabs. You’re not human until you’re posthuman. You were never human.’⁴² Beyond their period-specific celebration of the multiple/diverse posthuman this is remarkably similar to Braidotti’s more recent approach, which raises an important set of questions about the future of humanity and the planet:

posthuman theory is a generative tool to help us re-think the basic unit of reference for the human in the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthropocene’, the historical moment when the Human has become a geological force capable of affecting all life on this planet. By extension, it can also help us re-think the basic tenets of our interaction with both human and non-human agents on a planetary scale.⁴³

Recent work on the posthuman generally approaches it as a set of discourses and theoretical frameworks rather than an ontological category. The central arguments posthumanist critics like Wolfe, Herbrechter and Braidotti explore draw on conceptions of biopolitics, monstrosity, liminality and the contested boundaries between the human and its Others. What is at stake in the recent theoretical reflection on the posthuman, monstrous Other, ‘is the transgression of boundaries with its associated risks and pleasures’⁴⁴ – among others, the one between life and death:

posthuman vital politics shifts the boundaries between life and death and consequently deals not only with the government of the living, but also with practices of dying … Bodily politics has shifted, with the simultaneous emergence of cyborgs on the one hand and renewed forms of vulnerability on the other.⁴⁵

Gothic criticism, frequently concerned with ways of dying and liminal, undead creatures dwelling on the boundaries between life and death, can make useful contributions to this debate: ghosts, vampires, zombies and reanimated/technological monsters are expressions of cultural anxieties similar or frequently identical to those evoked by the posthuman. In the first comprehensive attempt at defining the posthuman Gothic to date, Bolton, who also contributed to this volume, argues that the posthuman Gothic ‘finds instances of terror and horror arising from the interfaces and integrations of humans and technologies’.⁴⁶ In an attempt to come to terms with ‘the continued existence of the human subject reconstituted as posthuman’⁴⁷ the posthuman Gothic’s main source of dread, ‘lies not in the fear of our demise but in the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change’.⁴⁸ The contributions in this volume explore a number of ways in which these (post)human anxieties of an internalization of the Other permeate posthuman Gothic texts, also extending their discussion to textual examples in which human–technology interfaces remain below the surface or are merely hinted at – without making the text any less posthuman or Gothic. As Herbrechter and Callus have pointed out, it is not only a possible, but a necessary critical endeavour ‘to envisage a posthumanism without technology’. Such a critical reconsideration, they argue, would force ‘what has been attached to an ism to be formulated anew … renegotiated in the very open modes of the unthought and the unbroached, the untried and the forgotten’⁴⁹ – effectively taking posthumanism back to its origins in monstrous becomings.

Frankenstein perfectly illustrates these human anxieties of becoming posthuman. As various adaptations of Shelley’s novel – from Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to Kenneth Branagh’s film version – highlight, the fear of becoming Other and retaining a residual memory of one’s previous humanity is already latent in the Frankenstein myth. The monster itself, a (technologically) reanimated being constructed from human and animal body parts, can be read as the prototype of later posthuman creations. Moreover, Victor Frankenstein’s use of ‘materials’ from graveyard ‘vaults and charnel houses’⁵⁰ references common resurrectionist practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which turned dead bodies into a commodity for anatomists and physicians studying the human form. While these practices may seem crude to the contemporary reader, their use of the human body as a commodity finds its repetition in the global ‘necro-political’⁵¹ exploitation of bodies and organs in the twentieth century, which has a definite component of body horror. As Braidotti argues with Achille Mbembe, ‘[c]ontemporary necro-politics has taken the politics of death on a global regional scale’⁵² and ‘the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify difference (woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable bodies of the global economy’.⁵³ Posthuman paradigms offer new ways of framing these global necro-political connections as well as contemporary culture’s distinctly forensic interest in these matters, and, in doing so, often inadvertently rely on Gothic aesthetics and imagery. The posthuman Gothic as a frequently subversive, metanarratively aware form of textuality seems to offer a unique starting point for the exploration of these issues across various contexts and media platforms from narrative fiction, to film, television and video games.

This collection aims to offer a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic in different media, forms and critical contexts. Each of the volume’s four parts provides a different thematic angle, which connects the chapters and aims to provide an opportunity for the contributors to engage with key Gothic and posthumanist theoretical positions (most prominently those discussed in this introduction),⁵⁴ as well as explore new avenues of discussion.

Part I – ‘Organic’ – focuses on recent destabilizations of the human by means of posthuman Others (the vampire, zombie and the genetically modified posthuman). The contributors map the territory of representations of the posthuman Gothic in literature and film and offer a dialogical introduction to the posthuman Gothic in the process.

In Chapter 1, Micheal Sean Bolton draws on his own definition of the posthuman Gothic by bringing the Ship of Theseus problem to the discussion of posthuman destabilizations of human identity constructions in David Wong’s novels. He argues that the texts – framed as zombie narratives – generate dread from processes of transformation that occur as human subjects interface with the monstrous Other and have to negotiate what remains beyond these processes of transformation.

Combining posthuman theory and Gothic criticism in her reading of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Antonia Peroikou shows in Chapter 2 how the liminal presence of the genetically modified posthumans in the novels draws attention to the discursive construction of categories like the ‘human’. She reads the posthumans in the text as representatives of a future that is both utopian and dystopian, as it reverses the stakes on humanity, turning ‘us’ into the Other, to a more sustainable group of posthumans.

Lars Schmeink’s Chapter 3 uses critical posthumanism as a framework to interrogate medical and genetic discourses in recent vampire films (Blade II, I am Legend and Daybreakers), arguing that the vampire’s liminal status makes it an ideal metaphorical figure to explore posthuman transformations and the necessary renegotiations of categories in posthuman contexts.

Part II – ‘Undead’ – continues this discussion of the undead as posthuman in vampire and zombie narratives, tracing the (attempted) domestication, necro-political exploitation and frequent reinventions of the undead in different media and genre contexts.

Chris Koenig-Woodyard’s Chapter 4 reads Richard Matheson’s I am Legend as a seminal text in the history of (posthuman) vampire fiction. Highlighting discursive and narratological strategies, which support the confrontation, he argues that the genetic, aesthetic and cultural friction between human and posthuman in the text offers a foundational treatment of a posthuman vampire that informs later representations.

In Chapter 5, Erica McCrystal continues this discussion of the vampire as posthuman by drawing on theories of hospitality to read the US television series True Blood as a posthuman utopia. The treatment of different posthuman and human characters in the series, she argues, can be read as an attempt to soften the boundaries between human and monster in a liminal, essentially Gothic world.

Maria Alberto’s Chapter 6 focuses on ambiguous posthuman identity constructions in the British zombie television series In the Flesh. She argues that the show draws on critical concerns regarding agency, mutation, individualism, rationality, and monstrosity to show how the undead characters in the series shake the boundaries of human identity and identification.

In Chapter 7, Maria Marino-Faza concludes this part with a critical reading of female monstrosity in the US television series The Vampire Diaries. She argues that the representation of the posthuman as monstrous Other and female body in the series not only reflects contemporary posthuman anxieties and concerns, but offers new insights into twenty-first-century gender constructions and the paramount importance of the medium of television in the transmission and reiteration of these discourses.

Part III – ‘Evolving’ – brings together three chapters which read the posthuman Gothic as a structuring principle in multilayered filmic, ludic and literary narratives.

In Chapter 8, Amalya Ashman and Amy Taylor bring a feminist approach to a reading of visual narrative means in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Reading cultural anxieties over becoming posthuman as a regression to the animalistic, they argue that the human subject is divided in this text between the fragmented mental and the bodily experiences of sexual trauma. The narrative’s ‘return to nature’, they argue, can be read as an example of the Antipodean Gothic’s location of the Other in the landscape which mirrors the protagonists’ psychological struggles.

Dawn Stobbart’s Chapter 9 focuses on Gothic themes permeating the setting and characters of the video game Portal, which interrogates the genre’s tropes of femininity through its embedded narrative of death, imprisonment, escape and reconciliation. The game itself, she argues, is haunted by and is inhabiting the Gothic and the posthuman through gaming technology, which allows a practical realization of posthumanism while simulataneously drawing attention to the fact that the identities assumed within the game are reiterations of a posthuman construct.

In Chapter 10, Donna Mitchell offers a reading of the genetically constructed ‘eves’ in Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours as posthuman Gothic entities. By reading the novel in the context of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl – a metacritical hypertext adaptation of Frankenstein – she highlights the text’s critical potential concerning issues like simulation and monstrous fragmentation, arguing that their representation interrogates concepts of ‘natural’ female identity and the artificial construction of the female according to a techno-patriarchal gaze.

The three chapters in Part IV – ‘Reimagined’ – move further beyond the traditional scope of Gothic narratives to open up new avenues of discussion of the posthuman Gothic.

Dennis Yeo’s Chapter 11 offers a reading of The Truman Show (1998) as a posthuman Gothic text. As Yeo argues, the next step in the ongoing evolution of humankind is the technologically mediated human – the panoptical subject of The Truman Show. By using various metalevels of representation, he argues, the film aptly reflects today’s televisual cyberworld – a global panopticon of representation, control and paranoia as well as a culture of spectacle, narcissism and voyeurism that is indicative of the posthuman Gothic in contemporary media.

In Chapter 12, Evan Hayles Gledhill addresses the concept of the monster and the human as cross-referential categories of subjectivity in the Alien films and Star Trek. They read Star Trek’s Borgs and the aliens through the lens of theories of monstrosity in the work of Canguilhem and Foucault, arguing that the multiple constructions of the human, posthuman and monstrous in these narratives are interconnected by the concept of transgressive embodiment – the promise of monsters, which signals the end of the humanist paradigm and its continuation in the posthuman.

Aspasia Stephanou’s Chapter 13 concludes this volume with a discussion of a number of contamination-centred biohorror texts in the light of theories of prometheanism and accelerationism. She introduces the term ‘Gothic Inhumanism’ to theoretically frame narratives like Frankenstein – and its contemporary descendants – which focus on anxieties surrounding the