Seite 2: The Posthuman Body

In the postmodern world the idea of the body as a natural inheritance now seems as quaint as the idea that it is GodŽs gift. For the first time the option of post-humanism is opening up: a move beyond the idea of the body as a natural inheritance, something you live with to something you live in, something you might want to redesign, re-engineer, possibly even leave behind. The Australian performance artist Stelarc has observed that at some point in the future we will need to redesign our bodies completely.

I see this age as the final period of human beings...You could hollow out the body, make it a better host for the new technology.

Stelarc

Examples of such possibilities have been explored in novels and have been graphically portrayed in film. Cyberpunk narrates a new human subject who can interface with cybernetic technology. Super Nintendo advertisements emphasisc the computer as an extension of the body through images of man-machine transmutation as the avid player squares up to the challenges of the latest software.

Films such as Tetsuo, Terminator, Robocop, and Videodrome combine human and machine in prosthetic extensions of the body and the new flesh. The almost perfect simulation of the body (ReplicantsŽ in Blade Runner, the Terminator films) implies that the original too may be a simulacrum. Computer technology can also transform and distort the body. We see an arm, part flesh, part machine; or Meryl StreepŽs head turned through 180 degrees (in ZemeckisŽ Death Becomes Her).

The body is....a plasticine entity that can be painted, moulded an padded out with prosthetics or twisted back to front.

L. Francke

These films are often set in a decaying world of great brutality and unremitting violence, the postmodern antithesis to modernityŽs hope in progress.