Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism

Abstract

In ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Donna Haraway signals three boundary breakdowns causing considerable stress in late twentieth-century life, in which the meaning of life — that is, of the word ‘life’ — is part of the stress.² These boundary breakdowns are between the human and animal, the human/animal and machine, and, a subset of the second, the physical and non-physical. Biology and evolutionary theory have claimed that human and non-human animals share language, tool use, social behaviour, and mental events, and that nothing really convincingly settles their separation; and advocates of animal rights have repudiated the need for such a separation. The distinction between organism and machine has disappeared with organicism in post-modern life: pre-cybernetic machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous, says Haraway, they were not selves at all, but only a caricature, like Frankenstein’s monster, of the masculinist reproductive dream. Today, machines challenge the difference between natural and artificial, self-developing and externally-designed; moreover, machines are near the hearts of many of us, prolonging our lives mechanically. The distinction between physical and non-physical is further eroded by modern machines, which are quintessentially microelectronic devices, nothing but signals, but are nonetheless, as Haraway says, ‘a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore’ (p. 70). Sherry Turkle, the anthropologist whose fieldwork is among Hightech Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that in the nineteenth century when machinery was transparent, when as