4.8 The Life Cycle of Cyborgs Writing the Posthuman N. Katherine Hayles Forsome time now there hasbeen furor going around that the age ofthe human has ven way tothe pOsth man. Not that humans have des out, out that the human a5 2 concept has been succeded by its evlutonary he. Humans are not the end ofthe line Beyord them loms the cyborg, a hybrid species created by crossing biologial organism with cybernetic mechanism Whereas its posible to think of humans as natural phenome, coming to maturity as a species through ratura stecton and spontaneous genetic mutations, no sch lusons ae possible with the eyeor. From the beginning its constructed, a technobiological object that confounds thedicnotomy between natural and unnatural made ana born If primatology brackets one end of the spectrum of humanity by the similarities and differences it constructs between homo sopiens and other primates, cybernet- ies brackets the other by the continuities and ruptures it constructs between humans and machines. As Donna Haraway has pointed out, in the discourse of pr 3a}matology “oldest” is privileged, for it points toward the most primeval and there= fore the most fundamental aspects of humanity's evolutionary heritage. "Oldest™ comes closest to defining what is essential in the layered construction of humanity In the discourse of cybernetics, newest” is similarly privileged, for it reaches ‘toward the limits of technological innovation, "Newest" comes closest to defining What is malleable and therefore subject to change in the layered construction of humanity. Whereas the most socially loaded arguments in primatology center on inertia, the most socially loaded arguments in cybernetics project acceleration, Primatology and cybernetics are linked in other ways as well. Primates and eyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. The conjunction of technol logy and dis- course is crucial. Were te cyborg only a product of discourse, it eould perhaps be relegated to science fiction, oF interest to SF aficionados but not of vital eoncem to the culture. Were it only a technological practice, it could be confined to such technical fields as biones, medical prostheses and virtual realty Manifesting set as toth technological object and discursive formation it partakes ofthe power of the imagination as well asthe actuality of technology. Cyborgs actually do exist; about 10% of the current U.S, population are esti- mated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers artificial joints, drug implant systems implanted comeal lenses, and artifical skin A much higher percentage participates in occupations that make them into metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keybosrdet Joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen the neurosurgeon guided by fiber ‘optic microscopy during an operation, andthe teen gameplayer nthe loeal videogame arcare, "Terminal identity” Scott Bukatinan has named this condition, caling it an “unmistakably doubled articulaton® that signals the end of traditions concepts of identity even as it points toward the cybernetic loop that generates new kind of subjectivity! How does a culture understand and proces new modes of subjectivity? Primarily through the store it tells or more precisely through naratves that count a sto- resin a gven cultural context. The stories I want to explore are narratives of life cycles? Tey bring into focus 2 crucial area of tension between the human and posthuman, Human beings are conceived, gestted, and tom: they grow up, grow ol, and die Machines are designed, menufactured, and assembled; normally they do not grow, and although they wear out, they are always capable of being disassembled and reassernbled either ino the same product ora sifferent one As ilian Beer has pointed out, Frankenstein's monsteran early cyborgs monstrous in par beeausehe has not grown, Asa ereature who has never kriown what its ike tobe a chill he remains alien despite his humanaid form When cyborg subjectivites are expressed within cultural narratives traditional understandings ofthe human lifecycle come into strong conflict with modes of dis- cursive and technical produetion oriented toward the machine values of assembly and disassembly. The confit cannot be reduced to either the human or machine crientation, forthe cyborg contains toth within seit, Standing at. the threshold separating the human from the posthuman, the cyborg looks to the past as well as the future. itis precisely tis double nature that allows cyborg stores tobe imbricated within cultural narratives while stil wrenching them in anew direction {322here- Idest™ imanity. fining on of eron an 2yborgs gs Is aps be reein to ch 1g itself wer of lly do sti- ale with neal ions iber dition, ditional ‘atesa varily assto- e ‘sion and jjand always tora ly vas never rm? wl sof dis cembly shine 2, the sy this rratives The new cannot be spoken except in relation to the old, Imagine @ new social order, a new genetic stain of corn, a new car-whatever the form, it can be expressed only by articulating its differences from that which it displaces, which isto say the old, a category constituted through its relation to the new. Similarly the language that oreates these categories operates through displacements of traditional articu- lations by formulations that can be characterized as new because they are not the same as the old. The cyoorg is both a product of this process and a signifier for the process itself. The linguistic splice that ereated it (eyb/org) metonymicelly points toward the simultaneous collaboration and displacement of newlold, even as it instantiates this same dynamic. The stories that produce and are produced by cyborg subjectivities are, ike the ‘cyborg itself, amalgams of old and new, Cyborg narratives can be understood as stories ony by reference tothe very life eye narratives that ae no longer sufi- cient to explain them, The results are naretive patterns that overlay upon the are af human life a map generated from assembly and disassembly zones One orienta- tion references the human, the other the posthuman; one is chronological, the other topological; one assumes growth, the other pre- supposes production; one represents itself as natural or normal, the other as unnatural or aberrant. Since the two strands intertwine at ever level, the effec finally not so much overly asinter- penetration. Sometimes the interpenetration is presented asthe invasion of a deadly alien into the self, sometimes asa symbiotic union that results in anew subjectivity. Whatever the upshot, the narratives agre thatthe neologstejining cannot be unsplit without kiling the truncated organism that can no longer live without ts eyblemetic component. AS these naratives tell, a comer has been turned, and tere is no going back To illustrate how cyborg narratives function, | want to concentrate on three phases ofthe life cycle and three corresponding isfassembly zones. The firs is adoles- cence, when self-consciousness about the body isa its height and the body is narcissstcally cathected as an object ofthe subject's gaze. Appropriate to the inward turing of narcissism isa dislassemibly zone marked by the joining of limb to torso, appendage to trunk. The second phase is sexual maturity, when the primary emphasis ison finding an appropriate partner and negotiating issues of intimacy and shared space. The dslassembly zone corresponding to this phase is located where the human is plugged into the machine, or at te interface between body and computer network. The lasts the reproductive or generative phase, when the emphasis falls on mortality and the necessity to find an hee for one's legacy. The disfassembly zone associated with this phase focuses on the gap between the natural body and mechanical replicate, or between the original and ‘manufactured clon. Because gender isa primary determinant of how stories are told, have chosen to imix stories by male and female authors. Spanning nearly half a century, these texts bear the stamps oftheir times as well as the subject postions of the authors. The generalizations that emerge from these texts confirm socialization patterns that make women welcome intimacy, whereas men are more likey to see it a5. threat; they also show women more attuned to bonding, men to aggression and hierarchi- cal structure. The interest of the comparison lies les in these well-known general- izations, however, than in the complex permutations they undergo in the cybernetic 323}paradigm. The narrative and linguistic counters by which such categories as intima~ cy bonding, and aggression are constituted do nat remain constant when the body ‘boundaries central to defining them undergo radical transformation, The adolescent phase sillustrated by Bernard Wolfe's Limbo (New York: Ace, 1952), with sie glances at Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (New York: Alfred A. Kropf, 1989). Both novels imagine cults that advocate voluntary amputation as a means to achieve beatife states. In Wolfe's novel the next step isto replace the absent appendages with prostheses, whereas in Dunn's narrative the amputations remain 25 permanent stigmata. At stake isthe truncated versus extended body, and boundary questions focus onthe relation of part to whole. Important psychological configurations are represented as originating within the family structure. Physical ‘wounds in these texts have ther symbolic origin in narcissistic wounds that occur when the child realizes that his body is nat coextensive with the word or, more specifically, with the mother’s body. The imaginative dimension which is most high- Iy charged is disruption of the body's interior space. The mating phase is explored through John Varley's 1984 novella “Press Enter” (Biue Champagne [Niles, I: Dark Harvest, 1986], 319-400} with Anne McCatfrey's short stories in the 1961 collection, The Ship Who Sang (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970]. Varley and McCaffrey are concerned with subjectivities that emerge n the human body is plugged into computer network. For Varley, the connec~ tion occurs when hiis characters respond to the “Press Enter" command of a myste- rious and lethal camputer program; with McCaffrey, when a birth-damaged child is trained to become a "shell person,” permanently encased in a shapeship and wired into its computer network. At stake is hyperconnectivity the possibility that the human sensorium can be overwhelmed and destroyed by the vastly superior infor- mation-processing capabilities of the computers to which its connected. For Varley ths isa threat that cannot be overcome, whereas for McCaffrey its one trial among many. Boundary disputes move outward from the body's interior to the connection that joins body with network, Varley text manifests a phabic reaction to the connection as an unbearable form of intimacy, while MeCaffreys narrative embraces it as life-enfiancing and ultimately freeing, The most highly charged imaginative dimension is extension in external space ‘The generativity phase appears in C. J. Cherryh’s 1988 Cyteen trilogy (Cyteen: The Betrayal, Cyteen: The Rebirth, Cyteen: The Vindication [New York: Popular Library, 1988], which is compared with Philip K. Dick's 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (New York: Ballantine, 1968). Dick's novel, freely adapted for film in. BlodeRunner, concerns a future in which androids ae common off-planet but are not allowed on earth. Te protagonist is @ bounty hunter whose jb is o find and “retire” androids who have violated this prohibition. Cherry's trilogy also fore- rounds replication, achieved through claning and deep psychological conditioning rather than production of androids. At stake isthe ability to dstingush between originals and replicates. In both narratives, empathy plays an important role in nailing ths distinction or drawing it into question. Boundary disputes move beyond the body and its connections to focus on the displacement of bodies to other localles. the most highly charged imaginative dimension is extension inte ‘These pattems give an overall sense ofthe kind of narrative structures that result when stories based on life cycles are overlaid with topological narratives about {324rtima- body 1952), 1989). 0 t emain logical sysial occur vore st high- er Frey's ne merge connec rmyste- Ichi is wired tthe rinfor~ or one orto the action “ative red n:The ibrary, Electric but are nd and ore- Jitioning ween cin ites nthe rarged result out dislassenly zones Structure isa spatial term, however, and missing from this accounts the temporal or narrative dimension of stores that unfold through time. Their complex historical, ideological and literary implications can be understood oniy by engaging both aspects as onc, the highly nonlinear dynamics characteristic of these unstable narratives as well 2 their fractal spatality. Fr that we must turn to € fuller account of how human and posthuman interact in these cyborg stories Growing up Cyborg: Male Trunks and Female Freaks Ferorciousiy intelligent and exasperating, Limbo presents itself as the notebooks of De Martine, a neurosurgeon who defiantly left his medical postin World War I and fled to an uncharted Pacific island, He finds th islanders, the Mandunji tribe, practicing a primitive form of lobotomy to quiet the “tonus" in antisocial people. Rationalizing that tis better to do the surgery properly than to let people ge from infections and botched jobs, Martine takes over the operations and uses them to do neuroresearch on brain function mapping. He discovers that no matter how deeply he cuts certain characteristics appear to be twinned, and one cannot be excised without sarificing the other—aggression and eroticism, for example, or creativity and a capacity for violence. The appearance on the island of “queer limbs” men ‘iho have had thei arms and legs amputated and replaced by atomie-powered plastic prostheses, glves Martine an excuse to leave his island family and find out hhow the world has shaped up in the aftermath of the war The island/mainland dichotomy isthe fist of a proliferating series of divisions. Their produetion follows a characteristic patter. First the narrative presents what appears ‘0 be a unity (he istand locale; the human psyche), which nevertheless cleaves in ‘wo (mainlanders come to the island, a synecdoche referencing a second locale tat exists apart from the fist; twin impulses are located within the psyche). Sooner or later the cleavage arouses anxiety, and textual representations try to achieve unity again by undergoing metamorphosis, usually truncation or amputation (Martine and the narrative leave the istand behind and concentrate on the mainland, which posits itself as a unity; the islanders undergo lobotomies to make them “whole” citizens ‘again. The logic implies that truncation is necessary ifthe partis to reconfigure itself asa whole. Better to formalize the spit and render it reversible, so that life can proceed according to a new definition of what constitutes wholeness. Without truncation, however painful it may be, the partis doomed to exist asa remainder. But amputation always proves futile in the end, because the truncated part spits in two again and the relentless progression continues. Through delirious and savage puns the text works out the permutations of the for mula, Ametca has been bombed back to the inland Strip, is coostal areas now vr- tually uninhabited wastelands The image of a truncated countrys outer extremities blasted away, proves prophetic, for the ruling political ideology is Immob. Immob espouses such slogans as “No Demobilization without Immobilization® and “Pacifism means Passi It locates the aggresive impulse in the ability to move, teaching that the only way to end war permanently is perma- rently to remove the capacity for mation Tue believers become valamps men who have undergone voluntary amputations of tei limbs Social mobility paradoxically translates into physical immobility. Upwardly mobile executives have the complete treatment to become quadroamps; janitors are content to be unarnps; women and blacks are relegated to the limbo of 325}unmodified bodies. Treating the human form as a problem to be solved by dislassembly allows it to be articulated with the machine. This articulation, far fom leaving the dynamics dr ving the natative behind, carries it forward into anew arena, the assembly zone marked by the joining of trunk to appendage. Like the constructions that preceded it. Immob ideology aso splits in two. The majority party discovering that its adher- ents ae restless ying around with nothing to do, approves the replacement of miss ing limbs with powerful prostheses (or pros) which bestaw enhanced mobility, enabling Pro-pros to perform athletic feats impossible fo unaltered bodies Anti-pros believing that ths is perversion of Immob philosophy spend their days proseltying from microphones hooked up the baby baskets that are just the right Size to accommodate limbless human torsos—a detail that later becomes significant. As the assembly zone of appendageltrunk suggests, sexual polities revolve around symbolic and actual castration, interpreted through a network of assumptions that ‘manifest extreme anxiety about issues of control and domination. In the world of mmab, women have become the initiators of sexual encounters, They refuse to have j sex with men wearing prostheses, for the interface between organism and mecha- | nism is not perfect, and at moments of stress the limbs are apt to careen out of control, smashing whatever isin the vicinity. Partnered with truncated, immobilized ‘men, women have perfected techniques performed in the female superior position that give them and their partners satisfaction while requiring no motion from the rmen. To Martine these techniques are anathema, for he believes that the only “nor- mal” sexual experience for women is a "vaginal" orgasm achieved using the male superior position. In tis Martine echoes the views of his creator Wolfe and his cre- ator’s psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler. Wolfe, described by his biographer as a small rman with a large mustache, creates in Immab a fantasy about technological exten- ons of the male body that become transformed during the sex act into a truncated natural” body If the artificial limbs bestow unnatural potency, the hidden price is the withering of the limb called in US. stang the thitd leg or short arm, In more than one sense, thisis a masculine fantasy that relates to women through mechanisms of projection. It is, moreover, a fantasy fixated in male adoles- cence. Wavering between infantile dependence and adult potency, an Immod recreates the dynamic typical of male adolescence every time he takes off his pros- theses to have sex. With the pros on, he is capable of feats that even pros like ‘Michael Jordon and Mike Tyson would envy (the pun is typical of Wolfe's prose; with pros every man is a pro). With the prosfe off, he is reduced to infantile depen- dence on women. The unity he sought in becoming a vol-amp is given the lie by the split he experiences within himself as super-human and les-than-humen, ‘The woman is correspondingly divided into the nurturing mother and domineering sex partner. in both roles, her subject position is defined by the ambiguities characteristic of male adolescence. The over- written prose, the penchant for puns, the hostility toward women that the narra- tive displays all recall a perpetually adolescent male who has learned to use what Martine calls a “screen of words’ to compete with other men and insulate himself from emotional involvements with women. \Were this all Limbo was, it would be merely frustrating rather than frustrating and brilliant What enakes it compelling is its ability to represent and comment upon its {326‘own limitations. Consider the explanation Martine gives for why Immob has been so successful. The author gives us a broad hint in the baby baskets that Immob | we | eae | devotees adopt. According to Martine, the narcissistic wound from which the os amputations derive is the infant's separation from the mother and his outraged rreded discovery that his body is not coextensive withthe world. Amputation allows the of mis: attentive and nurturing females. The text vacilates on who is responsible for the 5 narcissistic wound and its aftermath. At times it seems the woman is appropriating ‘ the male infant into her body; at other times it seems the amputated men are will rae fully forcing women into nurturing roles they would rather escape. In fact, once Tight male and female are plugged into a eybernetc circuit, the question of origin nificant. becomes irrelevant. Fach affects and forms the other. In approaching this realiza- tion, the text goes beyond the presuppositions that underlie its sexusl polities nd “ound reaches toward a new kind of subjectivity. ae Crucial to this process are transformations in the textual body that re-enact and ‘to have re-present the dynamic governing representations within the text. The textual body wecha. begins by figuring itself as Martine's notebook written inthe "now ofthe narrative eh present. But this apparent unity i ost when it splits in half, shifting to Martine's bilzed first notebook written nearly two decades earlier. Martine tries to heal the split tsition narrative by renouncing the frst notebook and destroying the second, The narra- Se tive continues to fragment, however, introducing drawings that intrude into the ino textual space without notice or comment, and scrawled lines that run down the to8 page, marking zones where the prosfe stops and the truncated, voiceless ody of eae the text remains. From these semiotic spaces emerges a corpse that, haunting the aemall narrative, refuses to stay buried. Its name is Rosemary. Helder, Martin's college ree roommate and later the founder of Immob, had taken Rosemary toa peace rally vuneated were he delivered a fiery speech. He returned with her to her apartment, tried to price is have sex with her, and when she refused, brutally raped her. After he left, she com- mitted suicide by slashing her wrists. Martine’s part inthe affair was to provide a reluctant alibi fo his roommate, allowing him to escape prosecution for the ‘prow rape-mansiaughter. Les Serene metre ine penetra his prose logo=extruding fom each of her nipples (Wolfe, 294) She wears glasses carries @ ike huge hypodermic needle, and has around her neck a series of tiny contiguous circles, rose; which could be taken to represent the necklace popular in the 1950s known as @ Yeo choker. To the right of her figure i @orotesque and diapered male torso, minus arms iieby and legs precariously perched ona flat carriage with Immob legs instead of wheels. van He has his mouth open ina silent scream, perhaps because the woman appears to be uring aiming the needle at him. In the text immediately preceding the drawing, Rosemary ject is mentioned. Although the text does not acknowledge the drawing and indeed fe over- seems unaware ofits existence, the proximity of Rosemary's name indicates that the None. drawing sof her, the needle presumably exaained by her profession ewhat Ina larger sense the drawing depicts the Immob woman. According to what | shall himself call the voiced narrative (to distinguish it from the drawings, nonverbal lines, and punning neologisms that correspond to comments uttered Sotto void), the woman ing and is made into a retroactive cyborg by constructing her as someone who nourishes, upon its and emasculates cyborg sons. The voiced narrative ventriloquizes her body to speak Of the injustices she has inflicted upon men. It makes her excess, signified by the 327}needle she branches and the legs that sprout from her nipples, responsible for her loverlson' ack. In this deeply misogynistic writing itis no surprise to read that woman are raped because they want to've, Female excess is represent- ed as stimulating and encouraging male violence, and rape is poetic revenge for the violence women have done to men when they ate too young and helpless to protect themselves. The voiced narrative strives to locate the origin of the relentless dynamic of splitting and truncation within the female body. According toi, the refusal ofthe woman's body to respect decent boundaries ‘between itself and another initiates the downward spiral into amputation and | eventual holocaust. Countering these narrative constructions are ather interpretations authorized by the drawings, nonverbal nes, puns, and lapses in narrative continuity. From these semiotic spaces, which Kristeva as associated with the feminine, come inversions and disruptions of the hierarchical categories thatthe narrative uses to construct mmaleness and femaleness? Written into non-existence by her suicide within the text's represented world, Rosemary returnsin the subvocal space of the drawing and demands to be acknowledged. On multiple level, the drawing deconstructs the narrative's gender categories. In the represented world women are not allowed to be cyborgs yet this female figure has more pros attached to her body than any rman, Women come after men in the represented world, but here the wornan's body is on the left ands thus “read” before the man's Above all women and men are separate and distinct, but in this space pars ofthe man's body have attached themselves to her. Faced with these disruptions, the voiced narrative is forced to recognize that it does not unequivocally control the textual space. The semiotic intrusions contest its totalizing claims to write the world. The challenge is reflected within the narrative by internal contradictions that translate into prosfe the intimations of the semiotic disruptions. As the voiced nar rate tries to come to grips with these contradictions it cycles closer to the real- zation that the hierarchical categories of male and female have collapsed into the same space. The lobotomies Martine performs suggest how deep this collapse goes To id the (male) psyche of subversive (female) elements, itis necessary to ampu- tate, For time the amputations work, allowing male performance to be enhanced by prostheses that bestow new potency. But eventually these must be shed and the woman encountered again, Then the subvocal feminine surfaces and initiates 2 new cycle of violence and amputation. No matter how deeply the cuts are made, they can never excise the ambiguities that haunt and constitute these posthuman {and post-textual) bodies. Limbo envisions cybernetics asa writing technology that inseribes over the hierarchical categories f traditional sexuality the indeterminate circuitry of eyborg gender. When dis/assembly zones based on truncationjextension are overlaid upon narra tives of maturation, the resulting patterns show strong gender encoding for et east thvo reasons. Firs, male and ferme adolescents typically have an asymmetrical rela- tion to power While the male comes into his own as inheritor ofthe phallus, the female must struggle against her construction 2s marginalized other. Second, truncation and extension of limbs are primarily male fan- tasies, signifying more powerfully in relation to male anatomy than fernale. The characters who advocate amputation in these texts are male. Geek Love, a norrative that also imagines voluntary amputation but written by a woman and narrated by {328for her hat sent- apeis > ate the e body. ss id doy these rsions struct the ving acts the ed to any v's body are ET dito ote t ed nar real- rta the se goes. ‘npu- anced and the 338 nade, suman oy that rminate arra- at east val rela «the \ fan- The arrative ted by an albino hunchbacked dwarf called Oly, illustrates this asymmetry. Asa female pro- tagonist, Oly role is to observe and comment upon these body modifications, not Initiate them, ‘The symbolic representations of adolescence also tend to be different in male- and female-oriented texts. Whereas in Limbo the transitional nature of adolescence is constructed as a wavering between infantile and adult states, in Geek Love its sig- nified by the liminal form of Oly’ aberrant body. She brings into question the dis- tinction between child and adult, having the stature of one and the experience of the other. Moreover, she isnot one and then the other but both continuously. A mutant rather than a hyphen, she also brings racial categories into question. ‘Although she is white, she isso excessively lacking in pigment that even this sign of “normality” is converted into abnormality. Amputation cannot begin to solve the problem she represents. Cyborg stories based on female adolescence are thus likely {0 be more profoundly decentered and less oriented to technological solutions than narratives based on male adolescence. If, a5 Donna Haraway suggests, itis better to bbe cyborg than a goddess, itis also more unsettling tothe centers of power to be a female freak (which is perhaps a redundancy) than to be either 2 truncated or extended male Hyperconnectivity: Male intimacy and Cyborg Femme Fatates ‘When the focus shifts to the mating phase of the life cycle, the isfassembly zone that isforegrounded centers on the body’s connections to surrounding spaces. Traditional ways to represent sexually charged body space—spatal contiguity, intense sensory experience, penetration andor manipulation jostle cybernetic constructions focusing on information overload, feedback circuits and spatially dispersed networks Varley's “Press Enter” begins with a telephone call, signifying the moment when an individual becomes aware that he is plugged into an infor rmation-cybernetic circuit. Tis is, moreover, a call generated by a computer pro- gram. It informs Victor, a recluse still suffering from brainwashing and torture he endured in a North Korean prison camp, that he should check on his neighbor kKluge—whom Vietor barely knows—and do what must be done, Victor discovers that Kluge has turned his house into a sophisticated computer facility and finds him slumped over a keyboard, his face blown away in an apparent suicide. One strand in the plot focuses on finding out who (or what} killed Kluge. Another strand centers on Victor's relationship with Lisa Foo, the young Caltech computer whiz sent to unravel Kiuge's labyrinthian and largely illegal programs. Lisa discovers that Kluge has managed to penetrate some of the countrys most secure and formidable computer banks, manufacturing imaginary money at will altering credit records, ven erasing the utility company’s record of his house, Slovily Victor becomes aware that he is attracted to Lisa, despite the differences in ‘their ages and the “generalized phobia” he fee's toward Orientals He discovers that Lisa has also endured torture, first as a street orphan in Vieinam—she was too thin and rangy to be a prostitute—and then in Cambodia where she fled to try to reach the West. For her the West meant “a place where you could buy tits’ (Varley, 363); her first purchases in America were a silver Ferrari and silicone breast implants. When Vietor goes to bed with her, she rubs her breasts over him and calls it “touring the silicone valley” (Varley, 363). The phrase empha- sizes that she isa cyborg, first cousin to the computer whose insides are formed 329}through silicon technology, The connection between her sexuality and the com- puter is further underscored when she propositions Vietor by typing hacker slang ton the computer sereen while he watches. His plugging into her is preceded and paralleled by her plugging into the-computer. The narrative logic is fulfilled when she trips a watchdog program in a powerful military computer and is killed by the same program that commandeered Kluge's consciousness and made him shoot himself. Her death, more gruesome than Kluge’ is explicitly sexualized. After overriding the safety controls she sticks her head in a microwave and parboils her eyeballs; the resulting fire melts down her silicone breasts, Vietor is spared the halocaust because he is in the hospital recov- ering from an epileptic seizure a result of head trauma he suffered in the wat, When he realizes that the computer is after him as well, soliciting him with the deadly “Press enter” command, he survives by ripping all of the wires out of his house and living in isolation from the network, growing his own food, heating with ‘wood, and lighting with kerosene lanterns. He also lives in isolation from other human beings. Plugging in in any form is too dangerous to tolerate. The final twist to this macabre tale lis inthe explanation Victor and Lisa work out for the origin ofthe lethal program. Following cues tet by Kluge, they speculate that computers will achieve consciousness nat through the sophistication of any given machine, but through the sheer proliferation of computers that are intereannected through networks, Like neurons in the brain, computerized machines number in the billons including electronic wristwatches, car ignition systems, and microwave tim ing chips. Create enough of them and find a way to connect them, a Lisa suspects j secret research atthe National Security Agency has done, andthe result isa Super ‘computer subjectivity that, crissrossing through the same space inhabited by humans, mains totally alen and separate from them. Only when someone breaks in on ts consciousness~2s Kluge did in his hacker probing, as Lisa did following Kluge tracks, and 2s Victor did through his connection with Lisa—does it fel the touch of human mind and squash it as we would a mosquito. Hyperconnectivity signifies, then, both the essence of the computer mind and 2 perilous state in which intimacy is equivalent to death. Human subjectivity cannot stand the blast of information overload that intimacy implies when multiple ang intense connections are forged between silicon and silicone, computer networks and cyborg sexuality. The conclusion has disturbing implications for how sexual politics can be played out in a computer age. Although in actuality most hackers are male, in this narrative it is the woman who is the hacker, the man who is iden- tified with the garden that first attracts and then displaces the woman as a source of nourishment. The woman is killed because she is a cyborg; the man survives because he knows how to return to nature. Whether the woman is represented through her traditional identification with nature or through an iranie inversion that places her at the Apple PC instead of the apple tre, she is figured as the conduit through which the temptation of god-like and forbidden knowledge comes to the man. If both fal, there is nevertheless a distinction between them. She is the temptress who destroys his innocence. When Vitor objects that the computer car't just make money, Lisa pats the computer, console and replies “This is money, Yank.” The narrative adds, “and her eyes alit- {330com srslang sdand ‘erful ‘luge’s m ksher inher recov eat athe ‘fri ting with ther tkout alate that given nected rin the ave tim 'spects super- abited re breaks ing elthe anda yeannot ale and works exual vackers vis iden- a source org; ° with ad of the {god-like lesa -e. When puter soit tered" (Varley, 368) Fallen, he has to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow, but it is her sexuality that bears the stigmata of evil signified by the grotesque travesty of self-enpowerment that Lisa's breasts become. In an overdetermined crossing of Genesis and Babbage, supernatural agency and National Security Agency, hyper- connectivity becomes a cyborg Tree of Knovrledge whereof itis death to eat Varleys punning ttle reinforces the subterranean connections between the evils of female sexuality, denie patriarchal myths, and masculine fears of intimacy. "Press Enter" swerves from the customary cursor response, Hit entec® Compared to “press” isa more sensual term, evoking a kinesthetic pressure softer and more per- sistent than hitting, These connotations work to heighten the sexual sense of “Enter.” which implies both a data entry and penetration, Already an anomaly in the intensely masculine world of Caltech, Lisa has the hubris to compete against men and win, including the rival hacker sent by the CIA, the male detective from the police department, and the city councilman whom she bribes so she can buy Kluge house. Fiting with danger in taking on these male figures of power, she goes too far when she usurps the masculine ole of penetrationpenetration more- over not into the feminine realm of house and garden but into the masculine realm ‘of computer sentience. In more than one sense, her crime is tantamount to what the repressive patriarchal regime in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tate calls gender treason. Not only has she taken on the male role; she has used it to bugger a male. Her death mart this gender treason on her body by melting her breasts the part of her anatomy where the crossing between her female gender and cyborg masculinity is most apparent. The comparison of “Press Enter" with Ann MeCaffreys The Ship Who Sang, another story about plugging in, suggests that there are important correlations between, hyperconnectivity and intimacy. Verley's narrator repeatedly expresses fears about intimacy. Can he perform sexually? Can he tolerate another person close to him? Can he afford to love? MeCaffrey’s narrator, a congenitally deformed female who hhas grown up as a “shell person’ and been permanently wired into the command: console of a spaceship, moves through 2 typical if vicarious female life cycle despite her eyborg hyperconnectivty, including lave, marriage, divorce, and moth- cerhood. Whereas Varley writes a murder mystery and horror tale, MeCaffrey writes 8 cybernetic romance. The difference hinges on how willing the protagonist is to interface body space with eybernetic network. Implicit in this choice Is how exten sively the narrative imagines human subjectivity to differ from cybernetic subjec- tivity. Are humans and cyborgs next of kin, or life forms alien to one another? MeCatfrey's answer is as far from Varley as one could imagine. n The Sho Who Song, there is essentially no difference between a cyborg and a Woman. Even though the protagonist's body has been subjected fo massive technological and chemical intervention, she remains human female Encapsulated within metal and invisible to anyone who comes on board, she nevertheless remains true toa heterosexual norm, identifying with her female plots but saving her romantic feelings for the men, who fr their part fantasize about the beautiful woman she could have been, Published during the 1960s by an author best keown for her "Dragons of Pern" fantasies, these stories ttlat by playing witha transfor- mation that they do not take seriously The pleasure they offer isthe reassurance that human bonding will triumph over hyperconnectivty, ie cycle ove assembly zone, female nature over cyborg transformation Nevertheless the fac that i was 331}rnecessaty to envision such transformations indicates the pressure that was building ‘on essentialist conceptions of gender, human nature, and traditional lifecycle narra~ tives. By the 1980s, the strategies of containment that MeCaffrey uses to defuse her subject (60 to speak) could no longer work Cyperpunt, human factors engineering, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality were among the SF revisionings that pushed toward a vision of the eyborg as humanity's evolutionary successor. The loaded ‘questions shifted from whether cyborg modifications were possible to whether unmodified humans could continue to exist. Genorativity: The Tangled Web of Production and Reproduction Insome respects, C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen trilogy is @ rewriting of Huxley's Brave New World, Mother earth has receded into the far distance for the colonists on Cyteen, who have declared their independence and forged alliances with other colony ‘worlds, Mothering (in the biological sense of giving birth) has also receded into the far distance. As in Huxley's dystopia, reproduction is accomplished through geneti- cally engineered fetuses decanted from artificial wombs end deep-conditioned by ‘sound tapes. The fetuses are designed to fil different niches in society. Theta fetus- ¢ slated for manual labor, have more brawn than brain, whereas Alpha fetuses are tailored to become the elite, Along with these appropriations of Huxley go pointed differences. Cyteen reverses the gender assumptions implicit in Huxley's text, which depicts female characters as airheads and gives the powerful roles to men. At the center of Cyteen is Reseune, the corporation that produces the fetuses. Reseune, So huge that itis virtually a city in itself, controls enormous political and economic power because its biological products are essential to the colony worlds. And ‘Ariane Emory controls Reseune. ‘The reader first sees Ariane through the eyes of one of her politcal adversaries. From this perspective she is arrogant, shrew, formidably intelligent, indifferent to mascu- Tine pride, atthe height of her power and enjoying every minute of iA very dfer~ tent view of Ariane emerges when she becomes a mother~and a child. Certain highly placed “specials” citizens of such extraordinary intellectual endowments that they are declared state treasures, can request that a parental replicate (PR} be made of them, Instead of being a genetic mix ike the other fetuses the PRs are exact genetic duplicates of their “parent.” Reseune has only two specials within its wall the gift- ‘ed scientist Jordon Warrick and Ariane Emory. Since each is enormously intelligent ‘and ambitious, itis virtually inevitable that they should clash. Once lovers, they are row rivals. Jordon Warrick has had a PR created, hs "son" Justin. The tension betwen Jordon and Ariane turns deadly when Jordon discovers that Ariane has seduced the seventeen-year-old boy with the help of psychotropic drugs and run a deep psychological intervention on him. Enraged, Jordon confronts ker alone in her laboratory. Her body is subsequently discovered frozen to death by the liquid ammo- nia that leaked from the pipes. Although the circumstances of her death remain Clouded, Jordon is charged with her murder. His sentence amounts to banishment from Reseune. As part of his plea bargain, he is forced to leave Justin behing, Since Reseune is now without a leader, Ariane's brothers immediately make plans to clone her from embryos already prepared. They hope to duplicate the environ- rmentin wihich she grew up, thus recreating nat merely @ genetic duplicate but Ariane herself. At this point Ariane is manifested through two different modes of {332bulging enarra- fuse her veering, tpushed ied her ave New Cyteen, ony into the geneti- ned by ta fetus- cuses are pointed xt, which Atthe seune, so ad ‘ies, From y differ tin highly at they ade of tt genetic the gift aligent hey are has druna rein her dammo- hment 4 = plans but des of enistence: the child that is and is nother, and the tapes that she has tequeathed to her successor, hoping that the gil will learn from her experiences and mistakes. The rarative focus then shifts to Ariane Il and follows her through childhood, adoles- cence, and young adulthood. Through the tapes the reader gets another version of ‘Ariane |. Ariane on tape is thoughtful about her shortcomings, concerned that het suceessor not fel for those around her the contempt of a superior mind for an inferior, awate that in her own life she never succeeded in having a long-lasting intimate relationship wth an equal ‘The narrative teases the reader with patterns of similarity and difference between the original and replicate. At times Ariane Il seems free to follow her bent, at other imes bound to a track already marked. When she shows a special inclination toward Justine and seeks him out despite the prohibitions of her uncles, for exam- ple, itis not clear if she is picking up on subtle clues from those around her that Justine stands in a special relationship to her, or if she hasan affinity for him that, isa predetermined repetition of her predecessors behavior. The dance of similarity and difference that Ariane I and Il carry out across generations also occurs within generations. Justin, forced to stay behind at Reseune, lives 3s 2 virtual prisoner in the corporate complex. His one solace is his companion Grant, who was secretly cloned by Ariane from Jordon Warrick’s gene set, with a few modifications that she sew as improvements. The genetic similarity makes Justin and Grant brothers as well as lovers although it isnot clear that they are aware oft between them, There is, however, a crucial difference as well. Justin is @ supervisor, Grant an azi ‘zi are Reseune products designed primarily for security and military use. Like ‘ther products, they range along a spectrum of abilities, Alpha azi are highly intel- ligent and usually become personal bodyguards to important people; Theta azi are slated to become foot solders. Picking up from Huxley the idea of children condi- tioned by listening to tapes while they sleep, Cherryh expands and complicates the notion. All Reseune children take tape, but there is an important difference in the depth and extent oftheir conditioning. Az listen to conditioning tapes almost mm the moment they are decanted from the birth tanks. By contrast, other Alphas do not take tape until they are six. While azi are fully human, they are not fully ‘autonomous. Each aziis assigned a supervisor, who oversees his cantinuing condi- tioning and prescribes tape as needed. Strict legal and ethical codes govern how supervisors can relate to az. A supervisor who does not live up to his responsibility is stripped of his office and punished, If free wills one ofthe distinguishing marks separating humans and machines, ai stand at the threshold between human and automaton. They experience the com- plexity of human emotion and thought; but they also feel the automaton’s sub- senvienee to an encoded program. ‘The entanglement of the human and machine in azi points toward a more general entan- glement of reproduction and production. Normally production is 2 genetic lottery Some of a parent's traits may be replicated but aays with unpredictable admixtures. Reproduction is slow, individual, and in humans usually monozygotic. It takes place within the female body, progressing under the sign of wornan. By contrast, production is presitable and geared toward tuning out rmul= tile copies as fost as possible. Traditionally taking place within factories controled by men it progresses under the sign of man. 333}Cyteen deconstruct these gendered categories. The woman, usually associated with reproduction, here isin charge of production, which nevertheless turns out to be about reproduction. She oversees production facilites that gestate a younger ‘version of herself, The production is necessary because she has seduced the son of her rival, man who in his younger days was also her lover. His parental replicate, @ bboy who is the same as him yet different, is devastated by the seduction and its, aftermath. He becomes lovers with the other “son” the woman has engineered from the man. The boy's companion, a variation of himself, is free to choose this relationship yet bound by azi conditioning, Whatever else these entanglements mean, they signify how completely the assembly zone of replication has permeated the life cycle of generativity. Generativity normally means recognizing one's mor- tality and looking for an heir to whom one’s legacy can be passed. In Cyteen, the heir is enfolded back into the sel, so that the generosity of mentoring becomes ingistinguishable from the narcissism of self-fixation. {Asimilar enfolding takes place in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric ‘Sheep although here the feeling is more hopeless because humans do not recog rize ther replicates as legitimate heirs. The story centers on Rick Deckard, @ bounty hunter who *retires' androids who have violated the proscription against returning to earth, The Rosen corporation that manufactures the androids keeps making ‘them more sophisticated and human-like, until the only way to tell (live) human from a (Functional) android is through involuntary reactions to psychologically loaded questions. The humans left on earth, faced with a planet slowly dying from the radioactive dust of WT (World War Terminus), resort to mood organs to keep them from terminal despair. The organs have settings to dial for every conceivable problem. There is even a setting to dial if you don’t want to dial. The obvious impli- cation is that hamans are becoming more like androids, just as androids are becoming more lke therm ‘The vertginous moments characteristic of Die’ fiction occur when the tenuous distinctions separating human and android threaten to collapse, as when Deckard suspects another bounty hunter of being an android witha synthetic memary implant, so that he does not realize he is not human. The suspicion is insidious, for it implies that Deckard may also be an android and not realize it. When humans can no longer be distinguished trom androids, the life eyele and assembly zone ‘occupy the same space. Then what count asstories are not so much the progres- sions of aging as the permutations of cisfassembly. It would be possible to tell another story about posthuman narratives based on this imperative, acing from Willam Burrough's Noked Lunch to Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless, But that is not my purpose here. | have been concerned to trace: the evolution of the mapping of assembly zones onto life eycle narratives from the early 19505 when the idea that human beings might not be the end of the line was beginning to sinkin, through the present, vahen human survival on the planet seems increasingly problematic. tis not an accident that technologists such a Hans Moravee talk about their dreams of downloading human consciousness into a computer? As the sense of its mortality tows human looks for is successor and her, harboring the seeret hope that the heir can somehow be enfolded back into the self, The narratives that count 2s stories for us speak to tis hop, even a5 they reveal the gendered constructions that carry sexal polities into the realm ofthe posthuman, {334ated Notes asout to unger 2s0n of plicate, 3 adits aed ie this vents srmeated ‘smor- an the mes: tee recog- a bounty turning ding human zally 1g from to keep ivable 4s impli~ ust as Jeckard ory ‘ous, for “nans ogres | don this empire of race life ings rent, | dtan of ortality | de that aunt as stfons am grateful tothe Center fr Advanced Sudes atthe Univesity of lowa for esearch support while ting this sey, espetally ay Sere’ en Lorn Olson. van sksery Rony, Je sugested he term “hypertonnectvty” and Danna Haraway simulated my interest Jon Vales story Press Enter ster ete adress. Inlana University February 1990, Donna Hraway, Primate Visions: Gender Roce, and Neture In the World oF Modern Sence New York: Routledge, 1988) 279-303. 2. Scot Bukatman, “Wha Programs You? The Science Fiction ofthe Spectacle” Alen Zone: Cultural Theory ‘and Contemporary cence Feta Cinema a Anette Kun London Ves 1990), 2 2 Foran overview of fe yl tages andthe attrbutesassaited with each se Erik His, The Lie je Completed (New Yor: WW Norton, 1882) 32-13.Acomarson of rlson, Plage, and Sears can be found Henry W. Mair, Tree Theories of his evelopment, aed ee York Harper nd Rom, 1978, 176-77, 4, Glan Bet, Drains lots: Evolutionary Narrative in Dernin, George Bot and Nineteeth-Century Fetion (London: Routledge & Kegan Pel, 1863), 5. Cooly Geduldin Berar Wale New Yor Twayne, 1972 describes the author a "ery sll man withthe, sprouting mustache, fat cigar ands voce that grabs attention (1) 65 Davi. ere'son has called Linke one of he the peat twenteth-cenury dystopia in "Lindo The Great Ameria Dystopia Extrapolation 19 (1970: 7-81 7. Ja Kristen, “he Novels Poon Ossie in Language A Semioe Aapraach to Lterature ad At ‘Leon. Raudiez tans. Tamas Gor, Ac sine, and Leon S.Rouie (New Yor: Columba Univesity Pres, 180), 158-208, Ste for example rogonfight, raponquest nd Deion at Dana aly MeCatiey The stores in THe Ship Who Son were published separate from 196-1969, wth the eoltion apearing in 1970. fort Aiseusion of MeCetie' fantasies, ee Science Retin, Tedy and Tamorow Rail Bretrot (New Yor: arper an Row, 1974], 278-94 Also of Interests Mary. Bla, Ane MeCeey San Bernadine, (CR Tae org Press, 1996), especialy 19-22. 9, Mocave i quoted in Ed Reais, Great Mombe Chien and Transcendent Sine: Science Slightly ver the Ege Reaaing, MA: Adelson Wesley, 1980, See aso Roger Penvse, The Emperors New Mind Conceming Computers Minds ana te Lows oF Phys (New York: Oxford Univesity Pres, 1983), 47-447 and OB. Harlson, Disappearing Tveugh the Shlght Cultre and Technology in the Tventeth ‘Century New York: Ving, 1909), 335}