ÚVAHA: Center and periphery of the body designed by science fiction 3/3

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Asimov obeys strict hierarchy of the enlightment’s world order; in the very beginning of the Foundation saga country boy Gaal Dornick comes to Trantor, imperial centre of the twenty-five million inhabited planets. ⁶

With Neuromancer, Alien, Terminator etc. begins the postmodern science fiction’s destruction of the binary constructcenter – periphery. In Neuromancer, Case’s brain is a center for peripheral jack-ins but Case and all other personages of the novel are instruments of the artificial intelligence external not only to persons of the story but to all humankind. ⁷ The center has shifted from people to computer, from Earth into Universe, where artificial intelligence Wintermute has found its equal partner.

Rippley, Terminators and other SF personages are permeating the border between human and unhuman.  Most boundaries between center and periphery got vague. On the one hand, the deconstruction process brings novelties in sense of Darko Suvins novum ⁸, on the other hand it brings chaos into the rational thinking, disrupts and destroys nicely ordered picture of the world with the best designed being, the Homo sapiens, placed on the top of the evolution scheme. Nevertheless, Ordo ab Chao – new thought paradigm may arise.

In modern science fiction human body used to be a vehicle of human conquest ideology; the Earth is center, the rest of the universe is periphery to be colonized. The same applies for the species; humankind is champion, the Others are victims or bounty of the predator Man (in numerous stories the Galaxy is a private property of Homo sapiens). Designers shaping the human body into the posthuman are only following the path determined by nature, the path of the most successful animal design. Some of the designers might be silly, but such suspicion is erroneous; the adequate question is if they are crazy enough to be ready for a second creation, capable to re-design human body suitably for survival during next thousand years. Stanisław Lem is one of few authors capable of deeper insight into one of the most intriguing issues the authors of the fantastic fiction are able to offer. Science fiction has already been invented, now we are inventing reality.

What kind of existence of Homo sapiens (if it will survive) can be expected after populations of posthuman and non-human beings will appear? We have peripheral utilities to computer; why not the peripheral utilities for brain? The name suggests that the brain is center, but there is a possibility for shifting the central position of brain to the central role of a computer, or for a fluent interaction in which is anymore not possible to identify the center and the periphery.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, prosthesis. A cyborg design, cyborg aesthetics? Cyborging ourselves is costuming ourselves from the inside out, a techno-carnival, delightful, disturbing imaginings of beautifuland grotesque. Zoë Sofia ⁹ explained linkage in Western culture through a technoscientific aesthetic that privileges epistemophilia, half-lives (from cyborgs to nuclear decay), origin stories (from the Big Bang to the human and the posthuman), immortality, and extraterrestriality. Monstrous chimeras, old haunt redesigned around metal and death, both bizarre and frightening erotic of the machine design, of the alien design, of un-human design. Giger’s morbid technoflesh, mixture of human design with insectoid machine, is only one exemplar in the science fiction atrocities exhibition. The existing technoproducts are well ahead of the grotesque pandemonium designed by our ancestors, time and again leaving backwards also the technohorrors fantasized in the near past. Few former visions sprang off the imagination wild or sick enough (or both) to be comparable with our present-day and near future technoreality. The designers train their students to mold possible futures.

Transformation is a game which human species plays with itself. Increasingly interactive electronic environment facilitates people to shape the game. Nevertheless, the game is limiting human freedom by shaping the player more than the player shapes the game. The escape paradox is that the player feels liberated by the game which continues to be the centre of player’s peripheral modifications; the game structure/architecture underlying only to peripheral changes made by the player is defined by the designer. The game rules, design style, sound design, story design obey the designer – the game is autonomous while player obeys the basic game rules or stops playing. Player has little choice once being infected by the addiction. A new category of the game-related social structures emerged, the owners of the game, investors, producers, designers etc. – they are the genuine social center controlling the game business.In collective and interactive games like MUDs and MMORPGs the player’s collective partially takes over the role of the almighty designer. Still, the whole virtual game world mediated by the internet is not a subject to the minuscule will of the individual player. If the life is a game, we have created a reality show in which we are peripheral phenomena.

Dreaming of possible constructions of the impossible implies real transformations, new types of life, changes in the very way we think of space, time, life, erotic, art, and of us. Technoscience is deconstructing impossibilities at high speed, faster than contemporary science fiction. The past is gone. We can’t go back to the future, except in the movies. We ride out future shock. In the long run it may not be a good survival strategy but we are committed.

New designs are often grotesque, illicit and disordered amalgamations that transgress both good taste and common sense. They are dangerous, exciting, perhaps liberating. They dwell on the border between cultures, between organic and inorganic, between natural and artificial, between the present and the future, and doing so they obscure, and reify, these very boundaries. As individuals we can love and hate, we can pretend something isn’t happening. As a species, we explore the borders we inhabit and transgress. We can’t stop the posthuman carnival, it is well underway. We are designing the costumes we wear not always being aware that by our technologies tailored design is in turn designing us. We may hope that at least a part of future will be designed by, and for us.

References and notes

6. Asimov, Isaac 1951: Foundation. Del Rey, New York
7. Gibson, William F. 1984: Neuromancer. Ace, New York
8. Suvin, Darko 1979: Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale UP, New Haven Conn.
9. Zoë Sofia 1984: "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extra-Terrestrialism". Diacritics 14, pp. 47-59. http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en#hl=en&complete=1&site=webhp&&sa=X&ei=gG3ETIz0HMafOtfq_dcL&ved=0CBEQBSgA&q=Zoe+Safia%3A+"Exterminating+Fetuses%3A+Abortion,+Disarmament,+and+the+Sexo-Semiotics+of+Extra-Terrestrialism&spell=1&fp=499faa430ac3503f accessed Oct. 16^th 2010

Filmography

• Cameron, James 1984: The Terminator
• Cameron, James 1991: Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• Mostow, Jonathan 2003: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
• Scott, Riddley 1979: Alien
• Cameron, James 1986:Aliens
• Fincher, David 1992: Alien³
• Jeunet, Jean-Pierre Alien 1997: Alien: Resurrection

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