Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Naked Singularities
- Part II How We Became Post-Posthuman: Postcyberpunk Bodies and the New Materiality
- 3 Mind, Matter, Markets
- 4 Self and Skin: Virtuality and its Discontents
- 5 The Other Side of the Screen: The Materiality of the Hyperreal
- Part III Economics 2.0
- Part IV The Last Question
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Self and Skin: Virtuality and its Discontents
from Part II - How We Became Post-Posthuman: Postcyberpunk Bodies and the New Materiality
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Naked Singularities
- Part II How We Became Post-Posthuman: Postcyberpunk Bodies and the New Materiality
- 3 Mind, Matter, Markets
- 4 Self and Skin: Virtuality and its Discontents
- 5 The Other Side of the Screen: The Materiality of the Hyperreal
- Part III Economics 2.0
- Part IV The Last Question
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The lightning rod for Hayles's critique of transhumanist disembodiment, and indeed the original impetus for her entire project, is Moravec's speculation on how a mind-upload procedure might work, ‘a roboticist's dream that struck me as a nightmare.’ With equal parts revulsion and fascination, Hayles recounts Moravec's ‘fantasy scenario in which a robot surgeon purees the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction […] the patient, now inhabiting the metallic body of the computer, wakens to find his consciousness exactly the same as it was before.’ It is difficult to say which aspect of the passage troubles Hayles most – the nightmarish staging of the scene itself, or the intellectual wrong-headedness of the premise it purports to illustrate. In either case, Moravec's graphic depiction of the annihilative scanning of a human mind serves Hayles as a vivid metaphor for the casual and often violent excision of bodies in posthumanist discourse on subjectivity.
Like Hayles, Greg Egan finds Moravec's scenario irresistibly compelling, if not unproblematic – so much so that he deploys it as the foundational premise for his novels Permutation City (1994) and Diaspora (1998). The latter relates a strikingly similar, and similarly horrific, scene of a human body being disintegrated while the mind it hosts is imported to a computer. In place of Moravec's ‘robot surgeon,’ Egan substitutes a swarm of hungry nanobots that tunnel into a man's flesh as they scan – which only intensifies the graphic horror of the Moravec operation as conceived by Hayles.
Waves of nanoware were sweeping through Orlando's body, shutting down nerves and sealing off blood vessels to minimize the shock of invasion, leaving a moist pink residue on the rubble as flesh was read and then cannibalized for energy. Within seconds, all the waves converged to form a gray mask over his face, which bored down to the skull and then ate through it. The shrinking core of nanoware spat fluid and steam, reading and encoding crucial synaptic properties, discarding redundancies as waste. Inoshiro stooped down and picked up the end product: a crystal sphere, a molecular memory containing a snapshot of everything Orlando had been.
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- SingularitiesTechnoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century, pp. 57 - 73Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013