Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System

The subject ‘is [the] body and [the] body is the potentiality of a certain world’, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty (p. 106). At the intersection of cybernetics and phenomenology, the body already operates as an interface between mind and experience, but in contemporary SF and horror, the body is also narrated as a site of exploration and transfiguration, through which an interface with an electronically-based postmodern experience is inscribed. The body is no longer simply the repository of the soul; it has become a cyborg body, one element in an endless interface of bio-technologies. The SF text stages the superimposition of technology upon the human in all its effects: the computer alone has been figured as a prosthetic extension of the human, as an addictive substance, as a space to enter, as a technological intrusion into human genetic structures, and, finally, as a replacement for the human in a posthuman world. The obsessive restaging of the refiguration of the body posits a constant redefinition of the subject through the multiple superimposition of bio-technological apparatuses. In this epoch of human obsolescence, however, a remarkably consistent imaging/imagining of both body and subject ultimately emerges.