Animal Bodies and Artificial Bodies

Abstract

The preceding chapters presented three different forms of the posthuman body in roughly chronological order, suggesting that the posthuman body is best conceptualised as a rhizomatic assemblage whose functions are determined only by what other assemblages it can be plugged into. So it was that the Perfect Body was able to impact on bodies by way of eugenics-based sterilisation programmes and, more recently, the search for real-world super-soldier technologies has drawn upon the comic book Superhuman as a source of inspiration. Rather than a fixed and stable category, the posthuman body is a fluid, patchwork figure, emerging from the interplay of a variety of forces and intensities—social, scientific, political, artistic, and so on, and composed of heterogeneous elements that also play roles in other configurations. The relations between these parts are contingent, not necessary, so that parts can be extracted from one assemblage and plugged into another. These heterogeneous elements are not all the same; assemblages can be comprised of bodies, physical objects and events as well as semiotic elements. Within the rhizome there can be no hierarchical privileging of the “real” over the “symbolic” or macro sociological structures over micro sociological interactions. Hence, this book has argued that the three most easily identifiable realms of the posthuman body incorporate philosophy (in the form of Post/Humanism), fictional representations (in the form of Superhumanism) and actual material, technical practices (referred to here, broadly, as Transhumanism).