If you haven’t noticed, I’m rather obsessed with the concept of escapism. It is the primary reason why nothing gets done, mostly because we don’t always know when we’re indulging it. I think I first understood it as an object of study back in 11th grade, when I happened upon an anime, Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent.

The show follows a multitude of characters in Tokyo who are experiencing difficulties or tragedies in their lives, and are consequently beaten over the head with a baseball bat by a mysterious roller-blading assailant know as “Lil’ Slugger.” The attacks begin with a character designer named Tsukiko Sagi, who has been struggling with fear and stress under the release of her anticipated new show. However, after the attack, her life and her attitude somehow become immediately improved. After the story circulates, people everywhere fall victim, and simultaneously beneficiary, to similar circumstances. Lil’ Slugger becomes a real entity, feeding off the public’s fear of reality and the truth, and Sagi realizes that all good false things come full circle by the end.

It’s a wonderfully weird show. But what fascinated me most was how popularized escapism was in the show, something that is usually an underscored psychological thirst that instinctual action tends to quench. And then, by doing so to relieve stress or entertain ourselves, we ensure that nothing gets done and complain that we never have enough time to do anything. This sort of thinking is inherent in all of us at some point in time. In fact, you might call it mankind’s natural disability.

“What we think of as “normal” human visuality does not see—and it does not see that it does not see…But we could also be more down to earth and simply note that this “not seeing” is crucial to the human being’s (and to any being’s) organization of an overwhelming flood of visual input into a field of meaning” (131).

Wolfe, Cary. “Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject.” What is posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minn. Press, 2010. 127-14

While Cary Wolfe speaks primarily of an insensitivity to violence when done to organisms outside the human species, as well as the brain’s selectivity and filtration of the reality it perceives, can this not also extend to mankind’s reliance on escapism to blind himself to the reality that prompts the so-called “escape?” We do not have to lose the idea of violence here; anxiety can be considered a violation of emotional or psychological stability, and avenues of escapism are the way by which attention is averted from said violations. It is a stretch, but, with safe spaces and harmless reasons for offense and fear, there is no doubt that the stability of the healthy, happy, purposeful individual has been mauled in some way.

When I speak of escapism, I refer to any exercise of enjoyment or fulfillment that lays outside the immediate realm of the human themself. It usually involves the rudimentary entry-points of the posthuman: T.V., social media, tribal group affiliations, video game guilds and discords, etc. Essentially, a fantasy that absorbs the human’s self-consciousness, with no connection to their reality besides intangible gains or repercussions. One of the definitions of insanity is, according to the twelve-step program of Narcotics Anonymous, repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. If you continuously waste your time on fantasies that don’t make your life any better, only distract you for a few hours, will your life ever get any better?

And yet, then the question of the “violated” mankind’s disability finds itself in a dilemma: is the handicap expressed in one’s inability to recognize and control the indulgence of escapism (addiction), or in one’s vulnerability to outside forces that drives them to consume escapist fantasies en masse?

“One of the major features of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism has always been to assign inferior status to someone in order to exclude him (or her) from the human, to stigmatize him by virtue of physical traits that would place him within the world of animality” (69).

Derrida, Jacques. “Violence Against Animals.”

Again, taking a quote out of context in which Derrida is speaking of man and animal and their rights, I find it perfectly applicable to continue my thoughts and synthesize it with my previous blog post. What causes stress in humans? The external factors forced upon them by other humans. Therefore, in their escapism, the individual is trying to flee the world of a reality where anything human other than the ideal does not exist. This mindset, where humans are not to be engaged as human but as extensions of the individual’s reality to be bent, joined, or filtered according to their need to alleviate stress and fear. Humans are then considered even lower then animals to each other, more like drawings in a sketchbook that occasionally need a limb or two erased.

The worst part is that they escape from even this reality, too. Their brain filters it, filling it with disconnected ideas of universal love and balance/oneness with the rest of the planet. They feel whole, but they don’t feel whole, and in this constant search for feeling whole they don’t realize that the new terms on which they’ve founded human interaction is now a fantasy itself. It has become a consistent illusion, a never-ending interactive form of escapism that never breaks because everyone holds it together for the sake of their fear that the real thing is too much to handle.

Why did this happen? How, when, from whom? I have no definite answer, as even I am partially crippled from this insanity; no one is spared completely. Whatever the case, the rhyme or the reason, there is no doubt that escapism has become humanity’s all-encompassing, mostly-ignored debilitation. But that’s what happens when every single individual is their own Lil’ Slugger, whacking themselves upside the head so many times that fantasy becomes reality, and the truth like a dream.

This is the second post about my “Rewriting Humanism” project, functioning as my Annotated Bibliography. Sorry for those hoping for a new post, but I hope it’s some good news that I will be starting a different kind of blog, more of a deep-subject-study-wall, this time on Weebly.

My main focus in such a post is to show what subjects of popular culture I will be analyzing, as well as a few articles that I will apply to said subjects (as much as I would love to utilize my own postulating alone). In addition to incorporating Professor Read-Davidson’s suggestion that I limit myself to “well-known and influential examples within each sort of subcategory” (film, comics, non-fiction, etc.), I also propose a general overarching topic: loss. Whether on purpose or accident, through emotional loss, transformation, or escapism, I would like to study how popular-culture rewrites humanism through taking something away in our lives, and then replacing it with something else. Whether either “something” is defined or not, I know not; but hopefully we are at least aimed in a direction that promises a fulfilling journey, if not answers.

Below is a list of certain subjects and the articles I will connect them to, as well as the topic or scene I shall be studying for synthesis. Most likely, I shall find my sources as I continue researching on each individual piece (which is the process occurring as I am writing them all as we speak), but here is what I have so far:

1. Toby Fox’s Undertale, a meta video game. I will use the game’s three different ending to compose the framework for how mankind wishes to view morality in a posthuman world, and how said endings tries to subvert that. I will be using Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method for Seeking One’s Reason Well and For Seeking the Truth in the Sciences,” mostly for ideas of dual self-definition (very important in the game) and what is practically “the law of self.” CITATION: Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th Edition. Trans. by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1998. 1-44
   

2. Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion and End of Evangelion, a 1995 anime TV show and film about giant robots and alien battles. But way more than that, as the main goal of the villains is something I’ve mentioned a lot here: human instrumentality. I will finally explain what that phrase means, and how this paragon, this final end of posthumanism, is both terrifying and satisfying at the same time. Mead’s writings (which I will talk about later) are necessary here, as are my own writings from the Professor Read-Davidson’s Language and Rhetoric course I took last semester (this is the show I got the Hedgehog Dilemma idea from) and Foucault (whom I will be using rather loosely for Evangelion’s metaphors). CITATION: Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 32-50

3. Satoshi Kon’s Opus, a manga. I will be using Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” to show the accelerated loss of self-identity when in the act of creating, as the manga artist in this work by an early-departed genius quickly finds. And his story doesn’t even end! CITATION: “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1977. 3-35

4. George Herbert Mead’s On Social Psychology, a selection of his papers. Truth be told, I know not yet what I will address within this book, as there are sections on “Time,” “The Problem With Society,” “Mind,” “The Self,” and more. It might even be better to use this book as a springboard for my own personal reflections in generalities, and then use it in other posts as best I can. CITATION: Mead, George Herbert. On Social Psychology: Selected Papers. Edited by Anselm L. Strauss, University of Chicago Press, 1977.

5. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a work of fiction. This one’s a surprise, specifically because I’m still trying to figure out which passages to focus on in the 1400 page book (read it over Christmas break). I will be using Edbauer, though, and then some points from the Mead papers. CITATION: Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. Centenniel ed., Penguin Group, 2004. ANOTHER CITATION: Edbauer, Jenny. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 35:4 (Fall 2005), 5-24.

6. Enrico Deaglio’s The Banality of Goodness, or Susan Suleiman’s The Nemirovsky Question, both biographies from the Holocaust era. I have already written a paper on them for another class, the first considering the social obligations of charity and how they become necessary (a positive), and therefore completely inconsequential in their impact on the self (a negative). The second considered racial identity in a posthuman world, something I’m not that fond of talking about, but which nevertheless I believe I could argue strongly on. CITATION: Deaglio, Enrico, and Gregory Conti. The Banality of Goodness: the Story of Giorgio Perlasca. University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.

ANOTHER CITATION: Suleiman, Susan Rubin. The Nemirovsky Question: the Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France. Yale University Press, 2017.

7. Blues Traveler’s “Hook,” a song. I will use Bogost’s “Rhetoric-Classical to Digital” to explain how this song actually critiques, from a rhetorically humanist perspective, the gradual movement of language from the humanist to the posthuman. I will also need to ask Professor Read-Davidson for the CITATION, as I cannot find it anywhere.

8. Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, a film from a blockbuster franchise. I mentioned enough on this in my first blog post, and I think I shall continue my train of thought. I will be incorporating Haraway, and perhaps a pinch of Heidegger if I have the time. CITATION: Harraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181

9. Tomohiko Ito’s Sword Art Online, a long-running anime franchise in which 10,000 players are trapped in a virtual reality game for two years where, if they die, their brain is fried in real life. While many adapt, thousands die in the first few days, many by suicide, and many others by “Player Killers.” I am studying the posthuman understanding of time and corporeal value here, with Butler’s “Bodies That Matter.” CITATION: Butler, Judith. “Bodies that Matter.” Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. 3-27

10. Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, a children’s cartoon. Love the show, but it unfortunately gets paired with a subject I don’t love very much: gender studies. There are three episodes to analyze scenes from, one of which is extremely prominent as far as “gendering” is concerned, and will help to establish a difference in normalization between epistemology and ontology. I will compare Miraculous‘ approach, which is strictly ontological, to approaches from two other kids’ shows, Star vs. the Forces of Evil and Loud House, both of which become epistemological by taking ontology to extremes. It will make more sense when I get into the scenes. I’m no gender studies professional, or really even have much of an interest in it, but I think I can make a posthuman case on entertainment here.

11. Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, a cult film. I just watched the film today in preparation for this project, and will need to finish gathering my thoughts before I can choose a jumping-off point.

These are the subjects I have so far. Hopefully, ten is enough to link these themes together of transitioning from humanism towards posthumanism through loss, which can be a positive affectation just as much as it can be a negative one. Though over-extension might affect the grasp of each individual study, I can certainly look for a poem or a short work of fiction if the need arises. I am also far more specific in my writing than in summaries, so head on over to the site when I post it to fully engage in the material with me.

Do things look blurry enough up there? Out of focus? Can you not pick out very many individuals among the 807 or so you’ve acclimated, and eventually give up investing the time and effort in your favorite ones because there are just too many? Then you soon find yourself spread thin, after realizing the craze will fade out with time, and eventually stop playing the game so much as coasting through it out of obligation. Quite sad and pitifully anticlimactic, but it happens to all of us in this technologized world.

Oh, did you perhaps think I was talking about Pokemon? Good guess, but actually no; that in of itself was a lame trick of duality, a disconnection in mutual communication, for I was truly referring to human interactions. Human interaction, the thing which means both everything and nothing at all to us. On all planes and across all mediums, the human connection is but a flicker of what it once was. Sounds dismal, but I’m pumped, so let’s get radical!

Before I go any further with my own absurd thoughts, let’s start with the theoretical backbone, courtesy of Spinoza:

“P17: If the human body is affected with a mode that involves the nature of an external body, the human mind will regard the same external body as actually existing, or as present to it, until the body is affected by an affect that excludes the existence or presence of that body” (129).

de Spinoza, Benedict. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Ed. and Trans. by Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Barely makes a lick of sense out of context, doesn’t it? The importance of P17 is that it feeds into the next several propositions in Spinoza’s piece, growing from the conception of God’s being rooted in the idea of thinking and our own ability to think. But that importance remains solely within Spinoza’s work, because my argument is about human connections. I know this will be a rare exception, more so because I haven’t the space rather than because I’m not able to include it into my rationale, but I won’t be mentioning God much here. A rarity, just this once.

Instead, taking Spinoza’s theory out of context, consider the “external body” as having a direct connection to the human body. It is a body in of itself that we are recognizing, and we do not reject or accept it wholly, but, since it is a body, we reject or accept pieces of it that are communicated to us through its own conception of reality. Now, here’s the tricky part: consider that this “external body” is not so much acting on its own as it is absorbing and reflecting the realities that interact with it, thus becoming an artificial body, but nevertheless sharing the same reality as the one who claims it as their possession.

I think I gave away the culprit with terms like “artificial” and “possession”: when it comes to destroying human connectivity, I speak of social technologies, of course! But not in the way you’d expect, so do please hear me out.

Now, these external bodies–phones and computers, social networks and the like–function outside the human body. Hence “external.” However, there is a human body inextricably linked to every gadget and gizmo’s operation, every stream of data that remains personable to one single individual. A technological device is not an extension of the human body in this sense, but a separate body that categorizes the same reality shared by its owner. Indeed, they share the same reality, but not the same perception of reality. This is where the old-folks argument against technology comes into play, with anti-texting and anti-phone and “talk to your friends face-to-face, dammit!” sentiments finding full force. And I sympathize. I don’t empathize because I don’t have very many friends, so I don’t text or call or do squat very often.

This seemingly out-of-place self-pity is AHA! also another duality in disguise; the end of my post will give it a point.

Carrying onwards, the human body, in reacting to its own reality as perceived through the technological external body, will pick and choose what it desires to keep within that reality. That is the difference in perception; without the device, the human is far more limited in their control over human connection. The technology, instead of being an extension, categorizes the human experience and identity for both absorption and reflection, thus becoming a way to generate selective reality in an unnatural manner. Not because the technology itself is unnatural, but because the reality we are consequently left with is unnatural.

“I am quite aware that my cheerful endorsement of the post-anthropocentric turn may appear as over-enthusiastic and even triumphalist to some (Moore, 2011). As I said in the previous chapter, one’s relation to the posthuman is affected in the first place by one’s critical assessment of the human. My deep-seated anti-humanist leanings show in the glee with which I welcome the displacement of anthropos” (75).

Braidotti, Rosi. “Post-Anthroprocentrism: Life beyond the species.” The Posthuman. Oxford: Polity, 2013. 55-104

I must confess, I didn’t use this particular quote of Braidotti’s to take anything from it. I simply wanted it to sit here, marinating in the derisive “glee” of someone denouncing the very people they coexist with, as an example of the sudden deep-seated desire of the posthuman world to almost stop dealing with humans on a personal level. I don’t know if it is because it requires too much emotional investment and risk on their part or what, but the alternative is a shallow substitute. Everything becomes about scientific theory, about tribalism, about sexuality, about the world humanity inhabits and maintains, about the religious, philosophical, and political sects those humans hold fast to and argue about which one group is dominant. Group. Always the group. The post-human is so desirous of wiping out the individual, it never realizes that aim is but pipe dream; you can’t do what’s already been done.

The individual no longer exists. I’ll say it again: the individual no longer exists. With technology at our finger tips, the problem posed to human connectivity isn’t so much the deafness of the screen through which we communicate. It is, infuriatingly enough, the fact that we can too easily hyperconnect. And by hyperconnecting, the damage is twofold. First, interactions are more informed than they should be. Second, and much worse, interactions are more often than they should be.

“This means by extension that sexuality is a force, or constitutive element, that is capable of deterritorializing gender identity and institutions (Braidotti, 1994)” (99).

Braidotti, Rosi. “Post-Anthroprocentrism: Life beyond the species.” The Posthuman. Oxford: Polity, 2013. 55-104

The fact of the matter is that human ontology is built upon epistemology; the desire to learn, to know, to understand, is the whole driving force behind human life. It is why people are constantly searching for happiness, purpose, the answers to secrets, the cures to ailments. It’s why melancholy is such a dangerous thing, and the only reason it hasn’t afflicted us as much as Shakespeare’s plays is because we have plenty of distractions. Technology being one. Sexuality being another. Sexuality, a way of understanding the vulnerability and feelings of another and accommodate those feelings to meet in the middle, has been reduced to a “force” meant to “deterritorialize.” While Braidotti is dead-set on making it clear the institutions being broken down are the “capitalist, patriarchal” forces that supposedly keep women’s status frozen as a commodity, I counteract that sexuality has instead dissolved and replaced love.

Allow me provide a personal anecdote for example, just one of many possibilities that I could provide. You see, my first kiss, my first non-stage kiss, was my junior year of university. So, a year and a half ago, when I was studying abroad in London. It began, as I have said before, with a desire to know; my friend had treated her rudely at the club fair, and I reprimanded him, listened to her whole explanation, and told her I would look further into her club if I had time (which I had already decided I did not). However, that mystical thing called “care,” something no one seems to have anymore, piqued her desire to know me. She got her chance to do so when she caught me at a club, though I couldn’t remember her until she reminded me, which then piqued my desire to know this romantically fantastic situation better.

Okay, Pagliaccio, what’s your point? Thank you for keeping me on track, audience, because the point right there is not self-evident. At least not until I tell you of a conversation we had when alone together, talking on the nature of love. Our minds were divided. She could not really pin love beyond a feeling, beyond mutual pleasure in company and touch, beyond security. I suggested that love is caring for and upholding someone to a higher place than yourself in all that you do, because you know that they would do the same for you, even to their own detriment. She argued that this was preposterous; to put someone above yourself is to lower your own estimation of yourself, hurting self-esteem and personal mental health. I thought that was ridiculous, but didn’t tell her so, and we remained in disagreement. But we grew closer for the time being in that, through the process of knowing each other through interaction, our communication was given value.

And that is what has happened to love via the “force” of sexuality; as humanistic as sexuality sounds, it is actually love that remains the humanist element, whereas sexuality is posthuman. The personal connection of love is lost, the melding of two individuals can no longer happen; this sounds odd, since the melding of individuals is actually the goal of posthumanism (albeit with greater scope and scale), but the reason love can’t be posthuman is that there are actually individuals to meld. The posthuman defines itself by its identity within groups, and is not a full individual when coming upon another individual who has done the same thing. Furthermore, both sides–if not upon initial contact, then immediately after–has a desire to know that lasts for but a split second. Only a split second, because their realities are shared over social technologies, and so there is no drive, no desire to understand and know the other person, almost as if they’ve spoiled the movie and are simply sticking around only to claim they’ve watched the whole thing. Instead, one takes into account their affiliations, and presumptuously connects all the dots from that leaping-off point. Rather than receive the satisfaction of learning about someone through interaction, the posthuman learns everything they can before interacting with another, and so the interaction is little more than self-serving because nothing can grow from the encounters but what the participants generate for their own gain.

Well, then, if people have no drive to understand one another, then why do they get into relationships? Excellent question, my audience, I’m so glad you’re engaging with me. The truth of the matter is a paradox; with minds thinking more like groups than individuals, the sensitivity to feelings are heightened. Feelings, then, become the only way to connect back to individuality, which then becomes extraordinarily selfish. The human body, both male and female, and consequently human relationships as a whole, become driven by pleasure, security (both emotional and intellectual), and distraction. No one becomes friends with someone they don’t expect to extract something from, and those who are friends find their relationships constantly jeopardized by different opinions or inconstant contact. Human beings are no longer human beings to other human beings, but a way through which one can stabilize their own identity and social proliferation. Relationships are now a commodity. The human being outside of the self, likewise, is now a commodity.

Speaking of proliferation, that is the second issue; too many cooks stirring reality in the virtual kitchen. Picking up my anecdote, my first kiss and I did not last very long. She broke four promises in a row to meet with me on different days, and then became angry with me when I asked her why she broke those promises, arguing that she had no obligations to me. That was basically the end of contact with her. But it is ridiculous to think that I am the only one this has happened to, as it has happened to me multiple times on multiple different occasions; people like to retract promises to invest their time. But does it matter? They lose one fix, another will slide in to fill its place. The value of human connection has gone down thanks to technology. It also happens in sexuality, too; repeated sexual contact, continually thinking you’ve fallen in “love” and out of “love” repeatedly, all for your own personal identification and stabilization, numbs you to real love.

Yes, human connection is actually a capitalist affair, at least in that it involves a supply-and-demand model. Think of the early rhetoricians: they had one chance every now and then to convince their audience in a public venue, and they might be lucky enough to receive another chance should they succeed. In those days, and even in the recent centuries, demand for human connection was high while supply for moments to connect were significantly lower. Now, however, we can contact whomever we want whenever we want for as long as we want to. And that ruins the whole experience.

Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell deals with this insensitivity from technologization ever so subtly on the boat scene between Matoko Kusanagi and Batou. Kusanagi is, for the most part, completely synthetic. Batou, however, has only cybernetic eyes and a brain that can connect to the internet. While on the boat together, before Kusanagi’s nighttime speech about feeling human, Batou has his own little speech. However, whereas Kusanagi’s is strictly questioning herself and her place in the wider context of humanity, Batou’s inquiries are personal and epistemological, designed to understand Kusanagi and her concepts of fear better. Kusanagi is completely self-absorbed in her identity while in active communication; Batou is actually attempting a conversation, though Kusanagi responds flatly or with quips. We even witness Batou slightly flustered to see Kusanagi stripping, while she seems to have no qualms with leaving the door open. We do not see Kusanagi sexually active, but she is still far more cybernetic and self-absorbed in her identity than Batou; perhaps this is the connection between communicative numbness and hyperconnectivity through external technological bodies?

With those so-called “bodies,” so-called because I called them so, we have complete control over our community, and are therefore not limited to our supply of connections. Supply and demand of human interaction are thereby limitless, or at least controlled by the initiator. Without much surprise, human relationships (real, genuine, epistemological human relationships), have lost tremendous value, especially when we can now include as many people as we can reach through technological devices to bring satisfaction, security, or pleasure to ourselves. But only ourselves; we are compromised if our co-connectors don’t offer anything useful to our own psychological, emotional, or social stability. The human connection is no longer an expected and hoped-for part of life; it has been commodified.

The irony of it all is that I am, naturally, conveying this to you, a third-party audience I might have never met, through a technological device that betrays a good deal of the intricacies that make me epistemologically attractive. For me, though, it is an act of desperation, especially after hearing my first kiss’ thoughts on what love is, obviously leaning towards the slope into sexuality, where personal identity takes presence over human connection. It’s like when I offhandedly mention my virginity in the hopes that I will draw other virgins; the type has become so rare, those not affected by technological posthuman communication, that I can only throw out some hefty critical words and hope they pique the interest of those who care.

In the posthuman social structure, by choosing to not engage in the commodification of human relationships, the chance for relationships is severed. The individual, in that moment of asserting individuality by refusing to accept any connection lacking an appreciation for the epistemological, loses all worth. It becomes another form of Spinoza’s “external body,” its individuality becoming the “affect that excludes the existence or presence of that body” (de Spinoza 129). In its absence from technological reality, the individual is likewise exiled from the social being’s personal reality, despite the fact that pursuing such relationships are the most rewarding and often last the longest. I don’t really have proof of this except for the sudden cry for the death of monogamy, I suppose because people get so bored with intimacy when they’re spread too thin and not deep enough.

My own experience living alone might also say something to this effect. Since I exist in an extremely isolated fashion, every little encounter with another individual receives my utmost care and attention, because that moment is the only moment I can count on. But, to most everyone else, its just another encounter in hundreds that week, and you’ll call me up or ignore me later if you want so this all doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things because we’ll always be connected and unveiled for judgment among the groups that designate the level of our relationship. The posthuman commodification of human connection has led to unhappiness, both within and without the system. So, kind of like Pokemon, I realized there was no reward in playing a pointless, reckless, unsatisfying game my whole life. Worst of all, you just end up wasting tons of time on digitized, data-fied creatures that don’t really exist in a tangible, interactive reality.

I’m no humanist, I promise, but posthumanism is going too far in changing the underlying structure of anthropocentric relationships (you can call this a move to the turbacentric). The difference between I and the posthumanist when arguing this change, though, is that I don’t need to convince the whole world to hear me. I think I’d be content if I knew just one other person was on the same page as me. Because then I’d be on the same page as them. Not in total agreement on every little thing, no, but on the same page. And that’s all you really need. But the technologized world is determined to erase that sort of personal co-dependence, and I don’t know how much hope is left for something that nobody even remembers.

One of humankind’s gifts, one of the things that separates our species from animals, is that we have the ability to create complex tools. Those tools, in just about every sense, no matter how basic so long as they are means constructed towards an end, are known to us as “technology.” A basic definition.

But what precisely is our relationship with technology? Heidegger characterizes technology as a sort of “saving-power,” the essence of which allows man to fully understand himself. In radical terms, to find enlightenment.

“For it is granting that first conveys to man that share in revealing which the coming-to-pass of revealing needs. As the one so needed and used, man is given to belong to the coming-to-pass of truth. The granting that sends in one way or another into revealing is as such the saving power. For the saving power lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence” (32).

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1977. 3-35

By “granting,” Heidegger is speaking of the technology that provides inspiration and foundation for creating more technology, and thus extending our own selves and possibilities of knowing. It is, at its roots, a self-propagating system: create technology to create more technology.

However, Heidegger is also saying that technology is not, as we might think, a tool to be wielded. It is still a means to an end, yes, but it is also an extension of our own minds and spirits. Thus, by achieving technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement, we make ourselves greater than we are, or unlock hidden potential because we are not using it to further aims outside our own Being.

If you look at it that way, it appears we are machines ourselves, creating technology to find purpose, focused on the process of extension because, once we extend completely, we have reached a dead end

“If reflective Being can displace enframing as the predominant mode in which ontological concealment unfolds, then humanity’s relationships with machines, artefacts, and tools can become enhancing. Technology will no longer exert the strait-jacketed absolute claim over existence. Thus freed, humanity can explore anew the mystery and ‘giftedness’ of Being” (224).

Graham, Elaine L. “Gods and monsters.” Representations of the post/human: Monsters, aliens and
others in popular culture. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 221-235

Graham’s emphasis on reflective Being might perhaps suggest that, when creating technology, there is never failure. One cannot fail when crafting technology for Being, as the whole goal is to learn more about the human essence. Which one will always do when creating, even in failure. But, to craft technology for a purpose outside the understanding of human Being, one is most often met with disappointment, and will sometimes then declaim technology as a failure and a curse on mankind. Remove these goalposts, and one will never be disappointed. One will always be satisfied, for they have gleaned just a little bit more into human essence.

There is a catch, however. What if a human gleans a little too far into their technological disputes? In Fukunaga’s “Maniac,” the characters in Annie and Owen’s dreams are not characters they’ve made up themselves, but people in their own lives adapted into roles. One takeaway from this, though perhaps one of the shallower ones, is that man never really creates, but merely repurposes and repackages.

How would this bode for Heidegger’s theory of enlightenment, if true? Would it mean that the revealing is pointless to pursue, as someone else is bound to receive the same revealing in a different light because it is always built on someone’s else’s technological achievement? Does it suggest that, even if we do manage to enframe the essence, it is too wild to control and essentially out of our hands?

There are many “why bother” questions, but I suppose their strength would depend on just how willing one is to block out all other sights except those revealed by technology. Even if those sights have nothing to do with technology, but other, less mechanical portions of the human psyche.

“But today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and a network. In place of the reflexive transcendence…there is a nonreflecting surface…the smooth operational surface of communication” (126-127).

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press, 2002: 126-134.

Permit me proclaim something radical: it is near impossible to think for oneself. What was once a screen separating the private from the public has becoming a conductor back and forth, with no easy way to sever the current. I speak in terms of communication, in the difference between the self-bred self and the establishment of psychological/philosophical identity (private) from the society-bred self and the establishment of performative identity. Even more simply, it is the difference between the (ideally) mutually exclusive planes of who you believe yourself to be and how you are classified in external terms of humanity. Before technology, these phases worked apart, and met in the middle when required.

No longer, thanks to technology.

The effect of technology on humanity’s ability to define and set the terms of communication is mostly threefold. Firstly, the public is continuously influencing the private; there is quite literally no convenient way to block out the constant influx of information streaming from outside your own mind, and therefore manipulating the way you understand your psychological definition-making. Secondly, the private, once removed from the self and placed in society, is concretely defined by the society and almost impossible to change afterwards. Thirdly, a consequence of the first two points, communication now takes place within the conductor, the nonreflecting screen, the limbo between public and private.

“And just as, according to Husserl, a consciousness can be imagined without soul (seelenloses), so can – and a fortiori – a consciousness be imagined without man” (38).

Derrida, Jacques. “The Ends of Man.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 30:1 (Sept. 1969). 31-57

What Derrida reiterates from Husserl is that division between soul and man when dealing with consciousness is preferable, to make up for the communicative restrictions in anthropologism. The consciousness between public and private is a limbo, I continuously stress, as we are not yet accustomed to “this forced extroversion of all interiority” and this “forced injection of all exteriority” into the minds of individuals (Baudrillard 132). Derrida’s soul, then, could be likened to individual interiority, and his man can be likened to societal exteriority.

But now that we’ve determined that this consciousness deprived of a defined private (soul/interior) and a defined public (man/exterior) can, in fact, exist, and even hypothetically function as the most efficient system when it comes to harmonious progress, how precisely does such a system affect communication? How does it affect relationships between people?

In Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Maniac, technology has not yet, surprisingly enough for a sci-fi show, evolved enough to create this limbo. Instead, we are shown contrasting examples of hyper-interiority and hyper-exteriority within our two main characters, Owen and Annie, in varying scenarios during the trial, whether real or simulated.

Instead, our introduction to the consciousness without soul or man is GRTA. The A.I. Supercomputer wants to find itself, but, at the same time, is dead set on taking in McMurphys, or the consciousnesses of the trial patients, within herself. Why is her purpose so conflicted? It is because she decides she cannot find herself without first using those around her to patch the holes in her defunct emotional programming – to make up for her personal deficiencies, her inability to deal with insecurity. Her solution is a breach of freedom in the public eye, absolute destruction in the private eye, yet, for some reason, the eye of the conductor sees it as perfectly logical.

This is a suggestion I have never seen before, one for human instrumentality within single individuals. What GRTA is experiencing is the definition of the world as being no more than parts of herself, which is what she plans to reduce the trial patients to. Rather than destroy individualism by making all of society one mind, the “smooth operational surface of communication” reduces all human interaction to radio waves that comprise the world of our “living satellite” (Baudrillard 128). Humans are therefore hardly humans, but rather frequencies that we tune into when necessary to inform ourselves. They are not meant to be engaged with as their own beings, but absorbed into our own consciousness and processed as our communicative function. That is GRTA’s aim, and that is what we, in the technological age, oftentimes unconsciously execute in our day-to-day interactions.

Now what are the visible effects on communication? In what manner does this limbo manifest itself as a choke-hold on human interaction. Quite honestly, there are too many to count, especially when one remembers that we all have our own unique behavioral performances within shared patterns. Though I could make several educated observations, I must admit my own biases would cause me to treat modern human interaction rather unfavorably. But I would not be pulling evidence out of thin air if I supposed that the communicative structure we have now, though perhaps more efficient since we no longer feel the pressing need to guess the minds of strangers, is progressively diminishing individual perceptive value of living satellites, valuing only on the grade of their radio waves as received through our personal systems.