The Human Inside Of You": Avatars and Posthumanism
Jenna Ng HUMlab

"Hold fast to the human inside of you, and you'll survive." ~ Dialogue line from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Fjärilen i glaskupan) This seminar is about balancing hope and despair. Hope because posthumanism, rendering bodies as steel and cod our bodies are now made of machines, images and information" . unleashes the construction of the human towards boundless possibilities, potential and promises. Because human beings can now be, and are, "upgraded" with bionic eyes, hearing aids and artificial hearts, to see and hear further than they have before, to beat out pulses when there should have been none. Because the highest grossing film of all time at the moment is a spectacularly photorealistic vision in which a human body with wasted legs but possessive of a strong spirit is successfully left behind in favour of an earthly (or unearthly) harmony one can only dream of on this currently wrecked and depleted planet. And despair because of the refusal to believe those promises, of how their falsities instead beckon a dystopia in which machines become indistinguishable from people, of the fear of losing values which keep us quirky, imperfect and alive. Using the trope of the digital avatar a graphical stand-in for the human body within virtual worlds"%E2%80%94I discuss this balance in the current discourse of posthumanism and the stakes of that tightrope walk. I argue for a derivation of the body, not conceptually fused as but elementally enmeshed with information and data%E2%80%94a digital self that remains organic and sensual. To that extent, the call in the opening quotation to hold onto the human inside of you" is anachronistic, reaching out to a time when the concept of the human is contested through a dialectic between body and information. Instead, I suggest a deliberate misreading of the quotation so that "inside" becomes the object noun the human inside of you"and in so doing infuse a new currency in the balance: faith of the human inside, of our humanness the sum of our fears, the certainty of our uncertainties, the conviction of our doubts.