Falling in Love with Machine: Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2

Abstract

Falling in Love with Machine: Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 Unlike other dumb machines, Helen in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 is designed to pass an M.A. comprehensive exam in Department of English. Helen looks like an ideal machine at first by passing the exam but soon shows a larger factual world which is proved later not objective at all. Evoking complementary pattern of society and science in Latour's Aramis, Powers' Helen becomes a super computer that memorizes and thinks like intellectual human beings. Gradually, Helen replaces human relationships in Lentz's case, his mentally ill wife Audrey, and in Ricks's case, a former lover C. Functioning as Rick's second-consciousness, Helen reminds Rick of a painful memory of his past with C. Contrary to the role of dummy lover, as the becoming-subject Helen enriches Rick's consensual hallucination of reality. Although Helen satisfies Rick's need to keep a suppressed self alive for a moment, Helen finally reveals the dark second self of Rick. Namely, a cerebrally expanded but emotionally diminished neural net Helen becomes a significant Other and hopeful monster to Rick by providing possibilities of the alternative future through dark lucidity. Depicting a machine more human than a human being, Powers tries to decode the intimate language of mind through Helen's baby girl-like experiences of pure wonder and dark maturity. Helen is the part of our selves which was constructed by significant Others in interaction with cyberspace. The encounter with Helen as memory is already reconstructing or deconstructing Rick's subjectivity. In this regard, being a constructed sensitive consciousness coming into being cyborg Helen makes Powers's Galatea 2.2 a Buildungsroman for the postmoderns who must live with and by machine.