Biju M.A.
Assistant Professor, St. Thomas’ College, Thrissur. Email: bijuciefl@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
Genesis of a posthuman era at the eclipse of a human one in an age of exponential technologies and catastrophic climatic change problematizes the complexities of our relational existence. We worry about an uncertain future when machines overpower human beings and challenge human exceptionality. Reading Brenda Peynado’s The Touches makes us aware of such a dystopian world created as a result of crossing the limits of the dangerous precipice of our human existence in the Anthropocene. The characters in the fiction live in a Post-anthropocentric world and they spend their time shuttling between the real and the virtual worlds. Fear of infection and pandemics makes living in the world outside undesirable. This paper looks into the intricacies of physical intimacies in the way we make relation with humans and other non-human beings in the surrounding. The paper also explores the enforced dystopia where people lead a life in locked –in cubicle under total surveillance and in constant interactions with robots.
Keywords: Touch, the Precipice, Posthuman, Post Anthropocene, Electrocene
Humanity is passing through a critical trajectory of seemingly imminent posthuman and apocalyptic nature. Recent epidemics and pandemics foreshadow a cosmological collapse. An apocalypse is always in the collective unconscious of human beings from the time immemorial. Humanity recognizes that the human-induced, technologically driven climatic catastrophes in the Anthropocene risk human survival on this planet. Such is the scale of harm that human beings inflicted upon it. Toby Ord notes that “fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves—severing our entire future and everything we could become.” (13) Exponential growth of technologies, especially in AI and Robotics foresees a dehumanizing nature of Robo takeover in the near future. Production of posthuman beings in the form of artificial general intelligence is very likely to replace human beings from every domain of human activity. This impending danger of uncertainty to human existence is augured by the human act of ushering in an Electrocene: “a term that refers to the impact of electronic and computational activity upon anthropoi – ‘humans’, ‘human beings’. The electrocene emerges in tandem with the human propensity to adopt – indeed become addicted to – technical devices that open onto a machine future ”(Mellamphy). This foresees an era when human species is oblivious to its organic existence but is always engaged with inorganic machines of great variety. This is exemplified in the development and use of various immersive technologies including various affective haptic technologies recently (Eid and Osman 27). To maximize profit cognitive capitalism competes to provide a more alluring virtual world than the real-life experience of sensory perceptions. Human’s over-dependence on all these exosomatic technologies often generates a general sense of meaninglessness after a period of addictive usage.
The combined effect of anthropocene and alectrocene leads humanity to an uncertain future which can be referred to as the Precipice, as Ted Ord calls. Describing the Anthropocene as the time of profound human effects on the environment, he finds the Precipice the narrow space and time when and where humanity is at high risk of destroying itself (Ord 38). If human beings overlook this Precipice, this may engender two possible consequences:
They are either extinction or two kinds of existential catastrophe: extinction and the unrecoverable collapse of civilization. This could be a world without humans (extinction) or a world without civilization (unrecoverable collapse). But it could also take the form of an unrecoverable dystopia, a world with civilization intact, but locked into a terrible form, with little or no value. (133)
Unchangeable lock-in is the key feature of this unrecoverable dystopia which is literally an existential catastrophe for humans. Toby Ord writes that this dystopia can be enforced, undesired, or sometimes desired in nature (136). All these predict a vulnerable human condition even in posthuman and post-anthropocentric times.
Speculative fictions are always first to envision such an uncertain world. In narrativizing human fear of impending an unknown future, fiction plays a great role. O’Connell explains that “all stories begin in our endings: we invent them because we die. As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our bodies, to become something other than the animals we are”(1). The possibility of death and extinction is latent in such fiction. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fictions present dystopian worlds. Life in a post-apocalyptic and post-anthropocentric world unfolds quite weirdly in these fictions.
This paper addresses how Brenda Peynado through her short fiction TheTouches presents a new world of human and non-human which emerged out of the willful crossing of the Precipice, the dangerous zone of existential risks. This world of precarious existence conspicuously lacks the very human qualities of physical/organic intimacies. This results in a troublesome relationship between humans and machines. This paper also explores how touch, the primal human sense, becomes central in our world making process even in an unpredictable future and also how it becomes life-threatening too. Anthropogenic climate change causes an enforced dystopia in this fiction.
The Touches presents a world where human beings are a protected category and robots take care of their needs. The earth is highly contaminated perhaps due to posthuman warfare. Nuclear weapons and bioweapons might have unleashed their potential to bring human civilization to the edge of extinction. As the electrocene set in, due to the power of technology, humans might have forgotten the Precipice. To accentuate the harm, a potential robot takeover has taken place and Artificially Intelligent Robots begin to control every human activity. Affective Haptic Technologies enable these humans nearing extinction to breathe some relief from the drudgery of being locked-in tiny cubicles. Immersive technologies help them take up their real and virtual avatars. The remaining humans are afraid of a dirty world outside for fear of contamination and perpetual death. The story talks about a research undertaken to find out the feasibility of possible reentry of human beings into the world. Here the desired human touch becomes very catastrophic.
The sense of touch is fundamental for human existence. Touch is the basic and the first sense that human beings use. Tiffany Field talks about touch that “touch is the first sense to develop, and it functions even after seeing and hearing begin to fade” (8). It is also the first sensory input in life as it comes from the sense of touch while still in the womb, and it remains mostly our social sense used for interaction with others (10). She underlines the significance of touch that plays a crucial role in the growth and development of individuals. Being an important means of communication, haptics makes us to be always related with other human beings and the surrounding environments. “It is through haptic experience that we feel engaged in the world and through affect that the world and its objects touch us” (Paterson 101).
Salipa, a post-gender posthuman character in the story, narrates her experience of the sense of touch. She talks about four touches that have affected her life drastically. “I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad” (Peynad o4). The second was her father’s touch. But Nan, the robot in charge of her removes her from her unclean parents forever for fear of infection by the unclean surroundings. Nan with its plastic hands hugs and unplugs her from her virtual world. Later in her life, Salipa often tries to avoid being touched by others for fear of being infected and contaminated. This awareness of infection is part of a pandemic culture. “We live in a state of continual, low-level anxiety, constantly aware of our double identity as diseasable subjects –simultaneously vulnerable to infection from others, but now also vectors of its circulation to others” (Mitchell and Hamilton 2). This is reflected when Salipa says “I know how bugs spread and cross-contaminate, and even the breeze of my breath can push bugs further than the initial contact area” (Peynado12).
The third touch was that of Alicia’s (colleague at the lab for human reentry project) deliberate one which made her infected. There was an initial repulsion from Salipa. But later she enjoyed the physical human touch. “My hand burns the whole way back, and I keep telling myself it’s not flesh-eating bacteria, it’s not a mosquito bite, it’s just touch. My third touch. The only one I remember”. (12) But later she craves for the very human physical touch and enjoys them. “We touched. I touched her real skin, traded microbiomes, contaminated myself. Surely, I’m infected. I take deep breaths and try to calm down”. (13) The fourth one was the annihilating touch of love and deceit by Telo, Salipa’s partner.
The whole story revolves around Salipa’s movements to and fro from the real and the dirty world, world that is clean and that of contaminated one. The real and the virtual avatars stand for posthuman ways of being and becoming. The story reveals the consequence of anthropogenic climatic catastrophes. “Outside it’s gray and ruined earth, trying to heal itself. All the superbugs—microbes and viruses that evolved immunity to antibiotics, that melted out of the polar ice caps and were released into the oceans, bugs we hadn’t seen for a million years—they’re all still out there, proliferating”( 5 ). Salipa finds her sanitized cubicle protecting her from the dirty world. She takes every precaution for not to be infected. She is apprehensive of her sense of tactile intimacies.
When technological singularity happens, human beings become mere codes and part of big data. Human organism functions according to appropriate algorithms. Murray Shanahan in his book The Technological Singularity explains that
. . . the institutions we take for granted—the economy, the government, the law, the state—these would not survive in their present form. The most basic human values—the sanctity of life, the pursuit of happiness, the freedom to choose—these would be superseded. Our very understanding of what it means to be human—to be an individual, to be alive, to be conscious, to be part of the social order—all this would be thrown into question, not by detached philosophical reflection, but through force of circumstances, real and present. (xv)
He predicts that AI and neuro technology are the potent agents of this singularity. And so Salipa in the story says “I inherited the code for my parents’ clean house, so the ephemera of their stuff is still there in the rooms, although I turned my childhood bedroom into the master bedroom and recoded the algorithm for how much space I could take up with the house”(4).
In All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, Martin Burckhardt and Dirk Hofer show that “today, the digital code is eating up the linear, alphabetic code. If the alphabet once served to change the body of the world (soma) into a sign (sema), the digital code is now going still further and dissolving the world of signs (sema) into digits (bits)” (30). “Digitization disintegrates the body as a physical phenomenon and transfers it (big data) into a world of signs; there, it loses all definition. The body turns into pure information, a site of transition, where intentions, actions, and ideas manifest themselves only in passing” (31). Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a popular transhumanist philosopher opines in the Immortalists Magazine that the society flourishes only when it possesses big data with total surveillance and this big data is to be given to the algorithms not to the person (64, 66). Catherin Hayles thinks that “human being can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (3). She considers that erasure of embodiment is a feature of posthuman bodies.
To conclude, the short fiction The Touches by Brenda Peynado portrays a posthuman and post-anthropocentric world where humanity loses clear boundaries of its corporeal and virtual embodiments. Human beings are deprived of its primal sense of touch and other physical intimacies. They become a vulnerable species and victims of its own drive of self-destruction. Their diseasable bodies succumb to the innumerable pandemics of their unprecedented climatic interventions and activities. Moreover technological singularity dehumanizes the entire humanity as humans become subjects under its total surveillance.
Works Cited
Biswas Mellamphy,Nandita and Mellamphy, Dan. “Welcome to the Electrocene, An Algorithmic Agartha.” Culture Machine, Vol. 16, 2015.
Burckhardt, Martin and Hofer, Dirk.All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse.Translated byErik Butler,The MIT Press, 2017.
Dinorah, Delfin. “The Future of Digital Surveillance and Health Care: A Conversation with World leading Philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner” Immortalists Magazine, no. 4, April 2020, pp.65-66.
Eid, Mohamad A. and Osman, Hussein Al. “ Affective Haptics: Current Research and Future Directions.”IEEE Access, Vol.4, 2015, pp. 26-40.
Field, Tiffany. Touch. The MIT Press, 2001.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The University of Chicago Press,1999.
Mitchell, Scott and Hamilton, Sheryl N. “Playing at Apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. in Pandemic Culture.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol.24, no.6, 2018, pp.1-20.
O’Connell, Mark.To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. Granta Books, 2017.
Ord, Toby.The Precipice:Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Hachette Books, 2020.
Paterson, Mark, The Senses of Touch:Haptics, Affects and Technologies.Berg, 2007.
Peynado, Brenda, The Touches. Tor Books, 2019.
Shanahan, Murray. The Technological Singularity.The MIT Press, 2015.
Biju M.A. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, at St. Thomas’ College, Thrissur, Kerala. He has done his Post Graduation from Calicut University and has completed B.Ed. from CIEFL (EFLU), Hyderabad. He has spent a short period of research at the Department of English, Pondicherry Central University. His areas of interest are Dystopian Fiction, Posthumanism, and Anthropocene.