Charivari of Things

So, for PCA this past spring, I wrote a paper about shadow, empurata and identity in robots.  And it was one of those conference papers that are like 'hey, it's a thing! look at this thing! it sure is a thing!' where you know there's something interesting under there, but you can't quite figure out what it is. Especially not in a 15 minute paper. 
Well, so I was thinking more about it.  I realize it could so very easily work to explain post-humanism. Our idea of the fractured self, the non-centered subject, is actually pretty clearly exploded in the test.  Because it goes like this, very basically: posthuman theory indicates that we are, in a sense, not 'us'. There is no coherent you or me, there is no 'inner self'.  This kind of goes against all the Western society's vision of a coherent self, and a coherent self that creates a coherent narrative, a 'life story'. I've often sort of joked that when you're ready to die, you'll look back and see how dots lined up and What It All Meant, that you'll then, and only then, know the 'whole story', the narrative arc, the main plot/theme/conflict of your life.

That kind of structure has kept Western literature alive for two thousand years. The idea that IT ALL MAKES SENSE.  Every novel has its denouement, where all the pieces finally rattle into place. Everything happens for a reason.  I could pile on the cliches, but you get the idea. The notion of narrative coherence controls Western literature. (If you've ever read any World Lit, especially Asian, you might notice it's...different

Post Humanism chucks all that out the window. There's no coherent self.

In a very basic form, we get this. You have a facebook page, a tumblr, a twitter, maybe a pinterest, etc etc.  And you know, you've seen it at least at one point, where someone knows you only from one site, where you're only available in small bits, that the you they know isn't the whole picture.  Or you've had something you've wanted to post, an article you found, a joke and  you have to stop and say, OKAY, which one do I post it to? Is this something I tweet, or do I save it for my livejournal or on tumblr or, or, or.... That's a tiny internal recognition that the persona you develop for each site is slightly different. It is nearly impossible to be the same throughout all sites--if nothing else because you'd spend half your day crossposting across every site. 

Well, there you go, right?  There is no coherent you, only a bunch of micro-yous, each of them IS you, but none of them is the totality, each is a fragment, like a hologram, of you.  And each of these holograms, curiously, exists in pixels.  Each of these yous: twitter you, tumblr you, blog you, facebook you--they exist simply in cyberspace. 

Haraway spent pages squeeing that the internet, the computer, the dawning digital age, the age of information would allow us free rein over information, over ourselves, and like the heroes in cyberpunk novels, the self, the 'meat' is the thing left behind.  She envisioned that the internet would set us free of the meat (her ideas really cling to that mind/body dichotomy in ways that discomfit me more and more), so that racism, sexism, any sort of prejudice that relates to the body would either simply fall away, or we'd be free to open other doors, try on other identities, embrace this new freedom.

Maybe that is happening, but it's sure NOT happening on Reddit or fandom.

Anyway, back to center: the whole idea of changing out parts of the body, or removing parts of the personality or identity, really say some interesting things about post human identity. What I'd struggled with in the paper was that I was trying to make it all *mean* something, connect it to the Western tradition where it all makes narrative sense.  Taking the three--torture (which plants one solidly in the body and turns it into an enemy); empurata, which makes the body alien, othered; and shadowplay, which disrupts/assaults the integrity of the mind--they all call into question the very notion of the coherent, stable self.