Some thoughts on Posthuman Bodies

I fear that without saying “where we’ve been” and without defining specific political goals, even the best intentions to theorize embodiment as something other than “fixed location in a reified body” (Haraway 195) can obscure the historical and discursive production of subjectivities, and consequently hide some of the political opportunities and pitfalls available in understanding such productions. Defining or owning up to what those political opportunities are is what can prevent the posthuman project from becoming too much like Terminator 2, where the razzle-dazzle of single, plastic (not to mention white and male) bodies gets more airtime than the implied or direct, historical and discursive confrontations that supply the plasticity out of which culturally valid bodies and subjectivities arise. (236)

In this passage from her essay, “Terminating Bodies,” Carol Mason seems to want to foreground the “historical and discursive production of subjectivities” in relation to the theorization of posthuman embodiment. Mason puts her point another way when she writes, “It’s not really cyborgs, or any individual bodies, that we need to examine. It’s the examination of contingent and perpetual processes of historical and discursive re-production that can allow us to better locate, articulate, and specify the aims of this ‘political unity’ or ‘posthuman’ ‘we’” (237). In other words, Mason seems to worry that “the razzle-dazzle of single, plastic [posthuman] bodies” will become more important to posthuman theorization than the fluid cultural entanglements in which bodies and subjectivities take shape (236). Her reading of Terminator 2, for example, reveals that technology-centered analyses of the cyborg are only one way to approach the film; she makes a compelling argument that ideologies of race and gender, figured within the confrontation between Dyson and Connor, must be accounted for in attempts to theorize the cyborg. Mason suggests that the cyborg must be historically-situated.

Her claim that we need to define specific political goals in relation to posthuman theorization is also interesting me; I think this is to avoid the “razzle-dazzle” of looking at single, plastic bodies. One of the most powerful moments in her essay is when she reminds us that conservatives have used a certain posthuman discourse, a certain alternative conception of the body, to argue for the rights of unborn children – conservative arguments about fetal personhood reveal that “the embodied individual is only one of many possible interpretations of what counts as a legal person possessed of rights. This position therefore introduced the possibility that legal personhood might be assigned to some unit that is lesser or greater than the embodied individual” (251).

Posthumanist attempts to disaggregate and untangle bodies, embodiment, materiality, and subjectivity “swing both ways,” to use some of Mason’s language. I think this is why she suggests that this theorization must proceed with specific political goals in mind; the modes of analyses themselves don’t necessarily provide clear political goals. Haraway’s reminder that attempts to imagine the future are never innocent is particularly useful here; there isn’t necessarily any stable, utopian discourse to which we can appeal to argue for a coherent space of posthuman possibilities.