Biopleasures: Posthumanism and the Technological Imaginary in Utopian and Dystopian Film

Abstract

The key term in the title of this chapter may be misleading in prematurely raising the claim to surpass the constraints of humanist and anthropocentric thought. However, I do not wish to suggest that the arrival of the posthuman enforces the ‘obsolescence of the human’ (Halberstam & Livingstone 1995, 10), as enthusiasts in the field try to make us believe. There is very probably a (e)utopian subtext in many dystopian and science fiction (SF) films, seducing viewers to put their faith in the blessings of a post- or transhuman alternative or future.¹ Yet their emancipatory stance does not perforce imply an evolution or devolution of the human; the posthuman emerges not as the end of man but as a varying pattern of connectivity between the dichotomies of self and non-self, man and machine, embodiment and consciousness, as a dispersed and discontinuous relation between bodies, ideas and objects. Utopian and SF films produced in the wake of the eruption of modern visual media and employing discourses of technology and ‘techno-culture’ (Beard 1998, 114) have contributed to foster the idea of the ‘posthuman condition’ in the West to such a degree that some critics already feel entitled to announce the Age of the Posthuman: ‘All that was solid has melted into air. Posthumanism has finally arrived, and […] “Man” “himself”, no longer has a place’ (Badmington 2003, 10). In this chapter, I do not want to carry the matter to such extremes. In fact, I wish to interrogate some of the embarrassingly quixotic or utopian proposals of posthumanism with regard to their basis in changing conceptions of the Western mind. My aim is to show that their performative matrix of difference implies critical and even ironic gestures questioning the necessity of a ‘new’ human condition or the proclamation of definite boundaries of the human.²