At the Crossroads of Monsters and Machines: a posthumanist digression

or
A Posthumanist Digression at the Crossroads of Monsters and Machines
A monster is not a ghost, and it does not so much haunt, that is to say, animate the machine in
questionable ways, as it renders explicit the limits to man-machinic omnipotence, that desire
to mimic and surpass Gods creative powers, where the products of mans creativity are
viewed as inevitably wont to go awry. The monster in the machine is our own image
anamorphically transmuted by the exacting cleverness of our perspectival instrumentation, the
pleasure and the terror of the directed gaze when precisely positioned at that intersection
between subject and object that grants visibility to hidden wonders: the saint appearing
magically in the frescoed landscape on the monastery wall; the Harpy-Hippogryph-Fury
generated by an innocent insect when captured under the microscopes lense; our own bodies
transmigrated into chimeras as we peer into catoptric devices. Or shall we contemplate the
spectacle of matter-moving-of-its-own-accord in the garden grotto, water-bearing,
hydraulically-powered automaton of Cartesian nightmares? This is the sort of specter that is
enough to make one wonder if the performance of lifelikeness is just a ruse for seeing
things as they really are: impossible hybrid creature (man) creates more and more exacting
three-dimensional images of itself, enhancing and enlarging, until the resulting model (created
object) merges with the method (instrumental objectification), producing a simulacrum of
itself (machinic alterity) that is indistinguishable from the original (now transmogrified
subject). Or to put it otherwise: We never were the masters of matter, we only thought we
were, and with this trick of the mind, thinking like a monster (pleased or terrified at the
random chaos you may generate) as opposed to thinking like a machine (unintentionally but
productively generating ordered systems) the boundaries between dualisms (any binary
opposition you chose to contemplate at all) come tumbling down. This is precisely what
happens at the crossroads of monsters and machines, and what this paper describes in a
posthumanist mode.
Zakiya Hanafi
Universita Ca Foscari Venezia