Visualizing the Posthuman

No longer a cloud on the distant horizon, the posthuman is rapidly becoming an everyday reality. Kevin Warwick communicates in binary code with computer devices in the environment via an implant in his arm; portions of a lamprey eel brain, transplanted into a mobile robot, direct the robot's motion; Cog, Rodney Brooks's humanoid robot, surveys the environment and plays catch with a human interlocutor. It is not a question of whether the posthuman will arrive but what forms it will take when it does. In this dizzying cascade of posthuman visitations, an area of contestation that remains vitally under-determined is embodiment. Should the body be seen as evolutionary baggage that we are about to toss out as we vault into the brave new world of the posthuman? Or does embodiment continue to be essential to human thought and being?

Complexly related to this issue is the role of the visual in posthuman cultural production, for vision both constructs an embodied world for us and signifies its meanings through representational practices. As text moves from the durable fixed inscriptions of print into the flickering signifiers of digital media, visual forms, like the body, seem to lose their weighty materiality. Yet the digital realm also has its embodied particularity; electrons flashing across a cathode ray tube are not less material than plant fibers impregnated with ink. On some deep level of correspondence, visual forms and ideas about embodiment evolve together. In my view, a crucial cultural project at this historical juncture is to find forms adequate to express and construct the posthuman without erasing embodiment as the essential enabling ground for human existence.

In digital environments, the old print relation between letter and phoneme, mark and sound, is being reconfigured as text becomes dynamic, dancing on the screen in ways impossible with durable inscriptions. As a consequence, text is reasserting itself not only as something to be read but something to be seen. Word and image join in new collaborations, delighting in their flickering mutability and instantaneous transformations into one another. In the light speed with which these transformations take place and the infinite possibilities of mutation, text-as-image testifies to the posthuman body as a site of nonessentialist and culturally inflected production. But it is also possible to create text-as-image that simultaneously insists on the continuing importance of embodiment to human perception and being. The trick is to do both at once, to work at the borderline between text and image, enduring material form and mutable cultural production, without sacrificing either to the other.

The Topographic Text: Reading as Gliding

"What does it mean to move through a maze of language?" Diana Slattery asks in her electronic hypertext "Glide: An Interactive Exploration with Visual Language" (academy.rpi.edu/glide/testbed). At the center of this question is Glide, imagined as a nonverbal language that can only be written, not spoken, although it can also be performed through gestures. The narrative at the site, "The Death Dancers," illustrates the different modes through which Glide can be apprehended. The narrative takes place four thousand years in the future, when humanity has been infected with the I-virus, bestowing on selected members the dubious privilege of immortality. The Lifers, as they are called, become so jaded that only one event can pique their interest-the Game, a contest based on negotiating a complex maze comprised of the glyphs of the Glide language. The twenty-seven glyphs making up Glide are all variations of semi-circles of a certain radius and its double. Their similar geometries make it possible for them to fit to gether into larger patterns, creating mazes that are also inscriptions conveying meaning.

Semantically the glyphs function somewhat like ideograms, with each mark conveying three root meanings along with successive layers of secondary, tertiary, and sometimes quaternary connotations. The Lexicon at the site illustrates this process of signification by displaying a moving circle of glyphs. When the user clicks on one of the marks, it breaks off from the circle and shoots out rays displaying the three root meanings. Additional clicks expand these into second and tertiary meanings until all of the overlapping terms have been revealed, creating a semantic network that functions more as an extended metaphor or a haze of signification rather than a clearly defined denotation.

To run a maze of glyphs, then, is both to enact a physical performance and apprehend the subtle metaphoric connections that comprise each glyph in itself and the larger meanings that flow from several glyphs joined together. "The Death Dancers" narrative describes the Millennium class of initiates, adolescents who are being rigorously trained by Dancemaster Wallenda, a Lifer whose job it is to instill a Zen-like discipline in his students so they can run mazes of increasing complexity. The four students embody distinct types which correspond to different approaches to solving the mazes. The Chrome type relies on rational calculation of angles, degrees, and radians; the Swash type sparks on creative ingenuity; the Bod draws on the body's proprioceptive and kinesthetic capabilities; and the Glide gains an intuitive understanding of the language so she can think in Glide, running the maze as if she were learning a poem. Put into syncopation with these different types are different modes of cognition described a s Island-Mind, the rational cogitation of the conscious mind; Sea-Mind, the cognition that emerges from dreams, omens, and metaphors; Gut-Mind, centered in bodily sensation and emotion; and Lily-Mind, a transpersonal awareness that melds into what Emerson called the Oversoul. To run a maze in a certain way amounts, then, to mobilizing a certain mode of cognition. Rational consciousness in this world is merely one mode of cognition among many, and not necessarily the most powerful. The Dancemaster, for example, can choose to make the maze mirrored, in which case the visual faculty becomes almost worthless and those relying on Island-Mind are easily outrun by Dancers calling instead on Gut-Mind. Reading practices for Glide thus involve whole-body processing and a variety of sensory modalities.