Katherine Hayles’s “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics” focuses on the complicated relationship between consciousness and embodiment in an age speeding towards virtuality. Hayles maintains that the two are not mutually exclusive and acknowledges that the posthuman narrative so popular across modern texts implies a distinct lack of the physical self’s role or of individual agency. Instead, Hayles’s “… dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of of unlimited power and disembodied immortality…” (5).
This is an incredibly interesting article, and all the more terrifying to think about today as we drift towards our digital image at the cost of our actual selves. Our presence on social media is not anything but a curated version of our “self,” and was not even something to consider in 1999, when the posthuman was expanding within the dawn of new technology. We grow closer to our personal devices by the day, rarely parting from our Smartphones and growing more and more anxious when we are separated from them.
In part because of these modern themes, there is a huge variety of recent texts that Hayles’s article brings to mind. I immediately thought of the popular show Black Mirror and a popular, recent episode aptly titled, “The Black Museum.” Black Mirror often deals with the ethics, horror, and wide variety of other implications that our current and future technology plays within our roles as humans, individuals, and societies. (All seasons are available on Netflix.) The anthology series has several episodes that focus on or include the idea of human consciousness, agency, and how these things interact with our physical bodies.
The premise of this particular episode is simple, for those who have not watched it. A young woman is driving on some kind of ambiguous road trip backdropped with scenery reminiscent of a sunny, middle America. She stops to charge her car, low on battery, with solar power and finds herself outside of a roadside attraction–the Black Museum.
The man in charge of the museum eagerly shows her around the dimply lit exhibits, mostly artifacts of horrible, technological horror stories. (A handful of the artifacts in the background are Easter Eggs from earlier episodes of the show.) He tells our protagonist three extensive stories, and it is the last two that pull from Hayles’s worst fears.
Story two is centered around a stuffed monkey (pictured above). Enter: a family falling apart. Mom is in a coma. Her physical body is dying, and it is her husband’s desire to keep her alive for their child, first by sharing his body with her. Her consciousness is removed from her body and transplanted into her husband’s body, their new shared space.
Suffice it to say that things do not work out well for them over time–and his next option is moving her consciousness once more, into a stuffed monkey for their child. Mom can no longer speak once placed into the object, can only see her child grow and her husband find new romance. Her voice is limited to two soft phrases that the toy is programmed to say. She is eventually abandoned as her family moves on.
(Horrifying is the fact that the museum curator claims her consciousness still remains in the toy, encased in glass at the museum.)
The final story is the culmination of the episode. I will not give too much detail, as it would spoil quite a bit, but the museum curator, becoming increasingly sweaty in the summer heat, proudly shows our protagonist his most impressive exhibit: a hologram of a convicted murderer’s execution that allows museum goers to flip the switch. The murderer signed over the rights to his own consciousness for this hologram to exist, and sadistic patrons of the exhibit are able to get little, animated keychains of the convict’s pained face after they fry him.
Outside of the terror most viewers might feel when considering themselves in the position of the stories’ victims, the episode poses many ethical conflicts that remain somewhat unresolved. In the case of the toy monkey, a husband attempts to preserve his wife’s life (perhaps an attempt at the “immortality” Hayles condemns) by moving her consciousness into his body, which keeps her in a biological body while still removing her agency. Would Hayles consider this evidence that our natural selves are completely linked to our consciousnesses? Even the husband in the story loses some of his agency by sharing his physical body with his wife, leading to the transfer of his wife’s consciousness to an object. He has complete physical control of his body, but the consciousness of his wife speaks to and influences him as he makes decisions about their child and his own life. Outside of the physical possibilities, would this type of procedure be even remotely possible in a world where embodiment and consciousness are a part of each other?
“Similarly, the presumption that there is an agency, desire, or will belonging to the self and clearly distinguished from the ‘wills of others’ is undercut in the posthuman, for the posthuman’s collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another” (4).
In the case of the wife in the toy monkey, and even of the convict being killed again and again, other individuals completely de-humanize them due to their lack of physical, biological bodies. A toy and a hologram are easier to neglect or abuse. A loss of humanity as soon as a body is not what it should be, even if it resembles a body (like the hologram) or contains the consciousness of a loved one (like the toy monkey), again implies the actual lack of disconnect between the concrete body and the conscious.