포스트휴먼의 위가: 깁슨, 핀천, 애커를 중심으로

Abstract

The Status of the Posthuman in the Novels of Gibson, Pynchon, an d AckerCho, Il-Je·Jeong, Hae-Ook In postmodern era, information technology modifies the concept of human beings and their relationships with machines. Most of postmodern theorists refuse to take humanism for granted from their philosophical viewpoints. This is the very ground of considering the subjectivites of posthuman. We try to think over the status of posthuman reading the fictions of William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker. William Gibson is mapping the ways that new technologies are impacting on human life creating posthumanistic individuals and environments through the imagined future. Thomas Pynchon, who tried to show the fear of technological civilization in his early works, considers the possibility of oppositional subjectivity in virtual space in Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland. And Kathy Acker introduces the possible female subjectivities in the age when technology encroaches even human body itself. Searching these kind of possibility they imagine a collective or individual agency who secedes the modern binary oppositional system. Donna Haraway says that she wants to be a cyborg rather than a goddess. Her concept of cyborg can be related with the postmodern collective subjectivities in Pynchon's Vineland and the kind of self to be newly encoded in Acker's The Empire of the Senseless. This is not to say that cyborg imagery suggests some utopian landscape of the coming future, but it is involved with the dream of heteroglossia. But the term, "posthuman" is not completely defined yet. Not all of the writers use this term to mean the same thing. As Hayles recognizes, the face and the future of posthuman is not clear. The problem, however, is that we are moving into the shadow of unknown. Accordingly, posthuman is less a term suggesting utopian or distopian view in itself than an open space which has the possibility of both.