Assignment One

Question Two: “From Frankenstein to the Visible Human Project, the body is continually reinterpreted as a limit to what it means to be human” Discuss Critically.

My first reaction to this question was to take an in depth look at speculative fiction, not just Frankenstein but also stories such as, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The reason for this is a large portion of this genre consists of hypothetical investigations into how future technology, both external uses in the world around us, such extrapolations of computers and their use, and also invasive technology/techniques to the human such as the extension from pacemakers and artificial hearts to entire replacements of the human body. These books offer a unique insight into the future possibilities for the interpretations of what makes us human. After that I tried to research the meanings of current ‘real life’ phenomena that are changing our conception of what it means to be human, and how that relates to our perception of the human body and its interpretation in the current day. All of my research was done using Google scholar, through the UWA intranet (meaning some sites may only be gained with free access when using university computers, you however should not have to log in at any stage).

The first interesting article I discovered was Mark Mossman’s “Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein and the Postmodern Body”. The relevance comes as Mossman begins each of the first four paragraphs with “[m]y body is a postmodern text” The young English professor starts his writing about his disability, the sixteen operations he has undergone and how he is at the end stage of renal failure, and the issues of self-awareness in writing about himself as a text. More importantly as he goes, he discusses the attitudes of those around him, as his disability is not immediately obvious, and the change as their awareness grows about how he differs from the norm and how the students have to attempt to “account for the difference”, reconsidering their assumptions about the human body. Mossman goes on to tie this experience to his idea of a postmodern text by discussing it in conjunction with Frankenstein’s monster, and how when teaching, “[his students] claimed that the creature was not a ‘monster’; calling it one, was the whole problem”.

The second paper I found focused purely on Shelly’s work. Horror of a Split Conscience by Vrankova was a fascinating read, following Mossman’s article into the ideas of humanity and appearance, within the examples shown by Frankenstein’s monster. This monster, she says, is an outsider not dissimilar to Grendel in Beowulf; destined not to be part of society, due to his monstrous beginnings (through unnatural life in the former case, unholy lineage in the latter) causing a wretched appearance of the body, and thus being shunned by humanity. While Vrankova states that the creature “desires for friendship and envy”, its “horrid” appearance makes that an “inaccessible Paradise”, for society could not interpret the creature as human due to its body. She argues that Shelley treated the monster as very much human, using tactics such as symbolism as well as the eloquent speech of the monster to render his mind human, perhaps in an attempt to make the reader reconsider what exactly is human.

A preview of the book Retrofitting Blade Runner by Judith Kerman was also available online. This book consists of a collection of essays exploring both the movie and the original Philip K Dick novel, and investigates our perceptions of humanity, our treatment of “other people when they define them as not-human” and especially “humanity of the enemy”. These are important in Dick’s world creation, where all living things are treated with almost religious import, yet the artificial humans created are hunted down and killed without a second thought. Kerman, in her introduction, suggests that the story begs the question, “if human culture creates artificial life, does such life deserve to be embedded in the same ethical discourse which we apply to naturally evolved life, and especially human life?” This is a question worthy of analysis when considering the limitations of humanity.

A paper by K. Michael and M.G. Michael titled Micro chipping people: the rise of the electrophorus was the next text I thought would be suitable for analysis in this context. It discusses the implications of automatic identification (auto-ID), “the process of identifying a living or nonliving thing without direct human intervention… allowing automatic capture of data”. While currently we have separate devices such as ATM and identity cards, there is an increasing idea of making these more invasive, especially on the emerging idea of human implants to carry this information. While the article appears to have the aim of allaying privacy concerns and legal implications, it does state that “technology is increasingly becoming an extension of the human body”, raising the question: once these technologies are universally enforced, would the body no longer be interpreted as fully human, by society, should you be without them?

As my last reference, I found the text Lacerations: The Visible Human Project, Impossible Anatomies, and the Loss of Corporeal Comprehension by Eugene Thacker. This article, while initially focusing on the “revolution in medicine” that this project led to, goes onto explore how it changed our perceptions of the human body, not just by increasing our understanding of it. The text goes on to analyse the idea of “digital anatomy” and questions “is the body a cadaver?” and “in what sense can a ‘virtual’ body be said to exist?” An in depth analysis of this article brings us back to the idea of the postmodern body and, I think importantly for my essay, to critically consider whether we are currently reinterpreting the definition of the human body so that one can exist without physical form and still be human.

These would be five major online sources I would use in my critical analysis to write an essay about reinterpretations of the human body. These in no way cover the entire breadth of my argument, and I would like to have used more articles about speculative fiction’s interpretations; after all, there are millions of other ideas such as Neuromancer , not to mention other ideas that can be seen throughout our history, as our perception of body has changed.

This is posted without a bibliography in order to save space and prevent duplication of information. The full bibliography is on the hardcopy submitted.