This is preliminary work for an article. If you have any comments, please send them to kaisa.kortekallio@gmail.com. "ALL MASSIVE FLESH" - POSTHUMANIST EMBODIMENT IN SIMON INGS' HOTWIRE FM Kaisa Kortekallio University of Oulu kaisa.kortekallio@gmail.com As you all might have noticed by now, the humanist human has seen better days. The humanist model of a subject – as unitary, individual and governed by rational consciousness – appears inadequate in the age of Twitter revolutions and microbial medicine: blind and deaf to the multitude of noisy life forms around and inside it. In order to function sustainably in this complex world, the human subject needs to be modeled in ways that support awareness of inter-species dependencies without reverting to simplistic re-naturalization of nature or losing sight of the political and technological complexities involved in subject formation. Critical posthumanist thought has returned this need with multiple theories, most of which treat the subject as a material and collective process. 20th century science fiction, inspired by ecology, genetic biology and systems theory, has also been working with similar models. The visions of hiveminds, viral ecosystems and trans-species evolution in the works of such writers as Greg Bear and Octavia E. Butler are built on similar notions of collective and connective processes as the philosophical work of say, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour. Of course, these scientific, cultural and philosophical discourses have all evolved folding and twisting around each other. I can only zoom in on a small node in this vast network of interconnections, and present you with one fertile collision between science fiction and posthumanist theory. In order to do so, I apply Rosi Braidotti's Deleuze-inspired theory of posthuman subjectivity to literary analysis. I pay special attention to Braidotti's concept of figuration and its potential as an analytical tool. The source text for my analysis is Simon Ings' science fiction novel Hotwire, published in 1995. Braidotti stresses the importance of experimenting with figurations for posthuman subjectivities. She describes figuration as "the dramatization of processes of becoming" (Braidotti 2013, 164). For her, the experience of any unitary subjectivity, of a grammatical 'I', is a "fictional choreography". These wordings bring into focus the creative artificiality of the process called "self". In her own words: The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between different levels of power and desire, that is to say wilful choice and unconscious drives. Whatever semblance of unity there may be, is no God-given essence, but rather the fictional choreography of many levels into one socially operational self. (Braidotti 2002, 22.) In this line of thought, every subject is fictional – constructed and operated according to some internal model or schema. One way to work towards alternative models is to use figurations, such as the nomad, the cyborg, the mutant, the queer – or even such transgressive forms as Dolly, the cloned sheep or oncomouse, the first patented animal (Braidotti 2002, 13; 2013, 164). It is with these figurations we can adequately describe and This is preliminary work for an article. If you have any comments, please send them to kaisa.kortekallio@gmail.com. develop the multi-layered and internally contradictory subjectivities of postmodern times. If I wish to use the concept of figuration as an analytical tool, I must ask how are the 'processes of becoming' expressed in the text at hand? What are the actions and relations the character goes through, and in what ways does it transform? What forces define and shape subjectivity? And what are the defining processes that constitute the level of 'figuration' in a character – where is the drama, the dance, the relational logic in it? What results from these questions is not a static image, but a multidimensional, dynamic model of a subject in motion. In Simon Ings' science fiction novel Hotwire (1995), the forces forming the posthuman subject are explicitly in focus and defined mostly in material or social terms. Hotwire's protagonist, Rosa, is an artificial girl produced inside a massive artificial intelligence that is referred to as her Mother. From this womb-like state she is transferred to Earth, where she grows to understand and operate the abilities of her posthuman body. Rosa's character exemplifies subjectivity as a crossing and relay point between multiple material levels of power – social, institutional, sexual and technological. For the purposes of this presentation, I concentrate on mapping the continuities between her embodied subjectivity and the material and maternal systems surrounding her. In the speculative historical situation of Hotwire, humanity is experiencing a major shift in global structures of power. In states and cities all over the world, analytical and administrative tasks have been relegated to highly advanced artificial intelligences called "massives". The complex operations of these hubs of non-human agency are beyond human-scale reasoning, and as the massives gain more power and coherence of will, the humans are rapidly reduced to the state of "fleas trying to second-guess their dogs" (HW 96). "- - Massives in Berlin and Prague and Haag had caught up Europe in their sparkling net and now ran all, inhuman nannies to a once-proud state." (HW 30.) So, this is the situation on Earth, the complexity that the human-scale subjects of Hotwire have to deal with. Their subjectivities are always affected by the massives' violently indifferent politics and ever-changing technology. What marks Rosa different from normal humans is her close affiliation to the massives: while all of their subjectivities are being shaped by their power, Rosa is literally born inside one of them. Rosa's Mother, a rogue orbital space station called Dayus Ram, is at once a womb, a mind and an ecosystem: a bio-technological laboratory, constantly producing and re-producing novel forms of enfleshed posthumans. Only a small fraction of these creations are made in Dayus Ram's conscious parts, others are of unconscious origin. They take on all the surreal, grotesque, sublime and abject forms of speculative posthumanity: talking animals, angels, balls of cancerous tissue inhabited by collective minds. In deleuzian terms, these beings can be thought as actualizations arising from a zone of virtuality or 'chaosmos' (see Braidotti 2013, 86): Rosa herself is but one actualization, temporal and contingent as the rest of these odd creatures. Roaming the dusty rooms of her mothers unconscious parts, she too is reduced to the scale of fleas and even microbes: >> "A fish cannot imagine 'sea'. A tree snake cannot picture 'forest'. A foetus does not know its mother's shape. Rosa, living here, lived still in her mother's womb. She had, as a consequence, no image of her mother. She could no more understand her ma than a bacterium in her gut could know her." (HW 47.) The material from which Rosa and other Ma's creations are fashioned is called 'datafat'. As This is preliminary work for an article. If you have any comments, please send them to kaisa.kortekallio@gmail.com. the name suggests, datafat is programmable yet organic matter. Originally (in Ings' first novel Hothead) it was developed as an interface between a human brain and a computer. However, during a few decades of experimenting by mad scientists (not all of them human) it is now used for other applications. In short, it is intelligent flesh, flesh capable of connecting and communicating with one's technological environment. As Rosa finds out in communication with a Massive that is literally a sea, every cell of her body "has mind": Figure 1: "All Massive flesh." (HW 269-270.) The Massive defines mind as a 'side-effect of being' – an effect, not a thing. "The more you are, the more you think. Of course the earth thinks, on one scale. And so do you. Xu's boat thinks too; just not a lot, is all." (HW 269.) This view also leads to a cybernetics-flavoured monism: all things, born or manufactured, are considered as 'natural' in the sense that they are all 'shaped by a mind'. >> It also resonates with the 'vital materialism' of Braidotti's posthuman theory that sees all matter as affective and self-organizing. 'Life' is not codified as the exclusive property of human species but as a dynamic force that "cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains". (Braidotti 2013, 60.) In this sense, there is no categorical difference between a Massive-made datafat-body and an earthmade flesh-body. Both are considered as thoroughly intelligent and potentially conscious. However, it is crucial that Rosa is narratively constructed as different, as nonhuman – without this defamiliarization it would be hard for a reader to accept the awareness and connectivity enabled by her intelligent flesh. As a narrative device, datafat enables a detachment from the traditional dualist model of mind and body. It cunningly reroutes the reader's attitude towards embodiment by utilizing the well-established science fiction trope 'brain is a computer'. At first, datafat is a cognitive enhancement, an interface, supposedly operating analogically to cells in a human nervous system. Once this is established in Hot head, it becomes possible to spread out this analogy to encompass all cells of a body, resulting in a model where every cell is a computer – or matter with mind. A question set repeatedly by Braidotti is "what can posthuman bodies do". Well, to put it shortly, Rosa's body can sense and induce electromagnetism. The ionizing radiation of her This is preliminary work for an article. If you have any comments, please send them to kaisa.kortekallio@gmail.com. mother's operations and the casual background hum of FM radio are constant phenomena in her sensorium. She operates everyday appliances by ”minding” them on, sometimes without consciously willing to. Her abilities are compared to sexual desire, more corporeal than cognitive, and enhanced by affects. "I don't really know how I do it. I do it is all." (HW 303.) The rhizomatic organization of Rosa's embodied subjectivity is given a physical form when she gets pregnant. The progress of her pregnancy is simultaneous with her empowerment and increasing interconnectedness with the environment. Her morning nausea wore off at last, and in its place came a sensation of power she'd not experienced before. Something inside her, solid and powerful, was giving her energy. Like a battery, she thought. A battery in her belly. (HW 251.) As Rosa's pregnancy advances, her abilities get stronger. She begins to notice patterns in her surroundings: the tapping-rhythms of seaside food vendors as they advertise their goods, the harmonies in the rippling water of the sea that is actually a mind. Or when she realizes what the 'battery in her belly' actually is: ”She felt it flutter under her hands. It was so small, so delicate still, but there was no doubt: she could feel the pattern of its vessels, filled with motherblood, her blood, her baby –” (HW 281.) The idea of vessels and flows connects Rosa's pregnancy to the development of a semiconscious city. San Fransisco Bay is slowly awakening to massive-like consciousness, helped by the loyal city-dwellers who activate its optical network by making random phone calls. These random signals are equated to the firing of synapses in a developing brain. The city is described as a living organism with its flows of matter and information: roads and sewage systems, phones and power lines. Its complexity is what makes it intelligent and potentially conscious. Rosa, along with every other human-scale organism, is posited as a subsystem of the living city. Maybe we are encouraged by Ings to conceive of a living city as a "child of Earth" – growing from the body of its mother, connecting to it with veins that carry nourishment and information. In this view, nature and culture are set not in opposition but in a continuum. This figuration of a pregnant woman inside an evolving city, a transgressive collective creature, is what, for me, constitutes the greatest conceptual gift of Ings' novel. Hotwire can be read as a partly ironic coming-of-age -narrative of a posthumanist subject: the 'independence' Rosa achieves from her mother does not translate to individuality or full autonomy but rather an awareness of her specific location in a larger living system. Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Braidotti, Rosi 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Ings, Simon 1995. Hotwire. London: HarperCollins Publishers.