In seeking online resources to answer the guiding question, I endeavoured to find sources that explored readings of the body, using analyses of Catherine Waldby’s explanations of the Visible Human Project (VHP) and thoughts about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a starting point. Through my research I realised that the question was more complicated than it first appeared, as with recent technological and biomedical inventions, it can be difficult to conceive of where the body begins and ends. The figure of the cyborg, the merging of the human body with prostheses and parts from other bodies, and human identity mediated through CMC are all important to this topic. These issues highlight how although the body is constantly figured as the limit to what it means to be human, the body itself must be constantly reinterpreted, as lines between biological and technological blur.
The Visible Human Project
The VHP used two human cadavers to create a “virtual” male and female; arguably it uses ‘human’, and ‘human body’ to represent one in the same. Stuart Murray’s critical analysis of Catherine Waldby’s book on the project is useful here. Murray praises Waldby for questioning how new technologies potentially reconstruct what is human – as she reasons that the corpses have been recreated, “reanimated” and brought back to life virtually. Murray links the virtual bodies created by the project to Frankenstein’s man-like monster, arguing both are “caught between life and death.” Murray reasons that “bodily integrity” may be something that we consider so fundamental to being human that in merging the body with the “technological” and replacing the former by the latter, then the humanness is lost. Murray explores Waldby’s notion that the VHP is complicating the distinction between technology and the body. This is useful here because in problematising what is meant by the body, that which is often considered the limit of being human, is challenged.
Eugene Thacker traces the study of anatomy from the Enlightenment and asserts that for anatomists in this period, an understanding one’s self was achieved through knowledge of the body, which could be understood as part of a “universal, humanist, corporeal condition.” Thacker re-interprets the data set of the VHP as a “hyper-texted body” – using Alex Kroeker and Michael Weinstein’s theory of a combination of the living body and the “wired body of sci-fi.” Thacker also investigates other representations and re-productions of bodies on the internet, noting that we have departed from the sci-fi representation of the “transfixed hacker’s body” and can view the transmission of live bodies by video conferencing software. He argues that although these bodies may be constructed as “real,” they are reconfigured through the technology representing them. Thacker has some interesting ideas that are useful in a discussion of the body in relation to the VHP, but theorising on more recent developments in this area would also be helpful.
Cyborgs and Embodiment
In considering the body as the constantly reinstated limit to being human, particularly when related to Frankenstein, it is interesting to consider, as Slivia Vegetti Finzi does, what happens when there is a fusion of parts from one human body with that of another. Finzi explores how organ transplant complicates identity, and ponders why we would unquestioningly regard a transplant patient to be the same person as before, after receiving an organ, or even a hand, from someone else. Finzi references Donna Haraway’s cyborg; in her analysis of the cyborg she imagines a “chimera” that seems comparable to Frankenstein’s monster. She alludes to the threat of a cyborgian future, where separations between animals, humans, and machines become blurred, yet she does not fully explore these consequences. Although the body is reinstated as important to what it means to be human, the human body becomes less coherent as a cyborg, complicating a division between what it means to be human, and what is not human.
In her prologue, N. Katherine Hayle’s examines Alan Turing’s 1950 test, in which a subject must decode two computer mediated interactions and decide which respondent is human and which is a machine. Hayles argues that the human/machine test aimed to prove that machines could be designed to “think” like humans, which she called “the erasure of embodiment”. Her analysis of Hans Moravec’s more recent theory is useful in challenging a representation of the body as the limit to being human. Moravec proposed that being human could be understood as “an informational pattern” as opposed to “an embodied enaction,” essentially opening up the notion of human thought being downloaded to and undertaken within a computer. Moravec’s argument is that essentially what is human could be something apart from the body: “that machines can, for all practical purposes, become human beings.” Hayles prologue is invaluable for the way the ideas about embodiment explored in Turing and Moravec’s theories. More of Hayles own ideas and critiques of the theorists would have been helpful to include in the prologue.
Biomedicine
Biomedical breakthroughs can challenge the interpretation of the body as the limit of what it is to be human as seen in an article from Nature. This article discusses the development of “neuroprostheses” which are able to read thought commands and translate them into actions by robotic arms and computer cursors, potentially for use by paralysed people. Although the source lacks depth, it is interesting for its discussion of the technology. The attempt to differentiate between “science fiction” and science in the “real world” is also worth noting, as the editorial suggests that they are separate, rather than interacting with and informing each other as other writers would suggest. The notion of a machine, fused to the brain and body, that is able to read and interpret thoughts, challenges notions of bodily integrity, and potentially extends the limit of what it is to be human to the cyborg-esque “bionic man.”
Through my analysis of the above sources, I would conclude that although what it means to be human may be constantly reinterpreted as limited by the body, the meaning of the body is contested as we fuse with technology and essentially become cyborgs. The potential for humans to exist outside of the body is examined through the fantasies of some theorists, including Moravec as Hayles explores, but at the moment, it is the cyborgian body, the merging of biology and technology, that is largely figured as the limit to what it means to be human.
Bibliography
(2000). http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number10-11/vegetti.htm (accessed 26/08/08).
Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Became Posthuman, prologue,” The Univ. Chicago Press (1999). http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/321460.html (accessed 27/08/08).
Murray, Stuart J. “Catherine Waldby's The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine,” Reconstruction (2000). http://reconstruction.eserver.org/021/revVisibleHP.htm (accessed 25/08/08).
Nature Publishing Group, “Is this the bionic man?” Nature 442.7099 (July 2006). http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7099/full/442109a.html (accessed 24/08/08).
Thacker, Eugene. “.../visible_human.html/digital anatomy and the hyper-texted body,” ctheory (June 1998). http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=103 (accessed 26/08/08).
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