Reading the Human-Technological Interface in Thomas Pynchon’s fiction, David Cronenberg’s Films and Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s Art Installations

Abstract

One of the focal precepts of literary studies and post-humanism is to look at the crossing points between technologies and the human. This way of thinking additionally ascertains that disciplines as particular and removed from the technical specifically cultural studies, gender studies, cinema studies, visual studies and political studies, have started to interact with the engineering and technical disciplines. My motivation in this paper is to imagine how technological intersections re-imagine our comprehension of the human body and its fringes, by alluding to Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge, select movies of David Cronenberg and select artworks of Rafael Lozano Hemmer. In this paper, I proceed to use Rabinow and Stone’s coinages of ‘biosociality’ and ‘technosociality’ to carry out a content analysis of the previously mentioned works. Utilizing this as a structure, I keep up that, the human-innovation interface opens up a discussion for the penetrability and porosity of the fringes of the human body and also suggesting a variety of experimental production modes across different media. Every so often, by alluding to artificial intelligence, I will explain that these texts tend to decentre the human as the proportion of everything which was envisioned ever since the Enlightenment. There is a consistent force battle engaged with the procedure, by which people have become a set of information processes, as Katherine Hayles had contended. American writer Thomas Pynchon in his fictional works delineate his 'human' characters as mere pawns, mediators and methods of data circulation in a techonology-driven 'urban' universe of 9/11 New York. Likewise, Mexican-Canadian artiste- Rafael Lozano-Hemmer sets up a coherence with innovations in his exhibition-based establishments which can be comprehended as participatory and interactive with the receptors- to be specific, his audience. His art installations which resort to different innovation related systems, make a discourse with the human receptor. Additionally, the films of the Canadian director David Cronenberg dissolve the possibility of the human as the focal point of everything which comes out even more unmistakably in eXistenZ and Crash.

Keywords: posthuman, technology, cybernetics, image building, biosociality, technosociality