Astronautic Subjects: Postmodern Identity and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction — Page 4:
16 It is no coincidence that the TV-show keeps underlining the connection between NASA and cybernetic engineering. The male astronaut here functions as a hinge between the relatively new discipline of aeronautics and the old vision of progress through technology. Interestingly enough, the actual site of bionic fiction is not space, but the surface of the earth. The act of "going into space" is translocated to a very earthly sphere, either being a research laboratory or a restricted area for tests. Susanna Paasonen observes that in bionic fiction it is the human body which becomes "the space to explore and modify" (par. 31). The body of the astronaut, in this reading, is the actual ground of contestation where different visions concerning gender, progress, and technology are blended. This type of body is a site of contradiction, given the fact that it is loaded with gender, yet also revealed as a scientific construct. As an imaginary body, the figure of the astronaut offers us the option to find new identities and transcend the dichotomies dictated by Western society. As a symbolic body, however, it reminds us of the restrictions that cultural representation always implies. In the figure of the astronaut in cyber discourse, gender is at once debunked as a superficial idea and reinstated as a cultural fact.
Postmodern Subjectivity and the Body without Organs
17 This dilemma corresponds to the situation of the postmodern subject who is also torn between the trajectories of boundary maintenance and deconstruction. The 'grand narratives' of an alleged truth and hermetic unity have become obsolete in postmodernity. Stable meaning has been replaced by the free play of the signifier. By detaching itself from the phallogocentric inscriptions into the body, the postmodern subject begins to incorporate a new model of liberty and emancipation. In the words of Susan Bordo, "Western science and technology have now arrived […] at a new, postmodern imagination of human freedom from bodily determination" (Unbearable Weight 245). Within the postmodern imagination, anatomy is thus no longer destiny. The individual him/herself decides which position within the symbolic order she or he wants to take. The most obvious example of this new form of individual self-fashioning is the transsexual body, which combines organic and technological features to a new and unique concept - "the romance of the knife," as Sue-Ellen Case has put it (115). The old slogan, "Become whatever you want to be," assumes a new meaning in the age of plastic surgery and body modification. Everyone can forge his or her own individual body. Referring to the transsexual body in cyberpunk fiction, Cathy Peppers thus speaks of a "utopian subjectivity founded on the pleasure of boundary confusions" (166). The act of transcending boundaries is no longer a sacrilege but a promise.
18 The poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have developed a theory that almost sounds like an instruction manual: "How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?" (149). The traditional image of the body as a stable unity is replaced here by the notions of malleability and human creativity. According to Deleuze and Guattari,
the body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organization. […] The full body without organs is a body populated by multiplicities. (30)
In this model, subject and object are no longer seen as homogenous unities separate from each other, but as loose interconnections of energy, movement, flow, strata, segments, and intensities (Grosz 167). Through a process of continual becoming, Deleuze and Guattari explain, diverse forms of identity constitution are facilitated. The postmodern body image encompasses a multitude of different identity options. It almost seems as if the feminist ideal articulated by Susan Suleiman has already become a reality: "[We must] get beyond the number two" (24). The moment we engage in this journey to search for new ways of identity constitution, we are confronted with a confusing, yet also liberating number of possible identities. Subjectivity here assumes a nomadic quality, far from normative inscriptions.
Man as Mother, or, Gender Trouble in Space
19 Feminist cyber fiction has paid special attention to issues of gender construction and subversion. Ursula Le Guin's dystopian novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), for example, deals with a hermaphroditic race living on the planet Gethen. Although all inscriptions based on gender identity have been abolished on this planet by decree, the battle over dominance still continues, and there is no real balance. According to Le Guin, the aim of the novel was to outline that symbolic field which is shared by men and women ("Necessary" 133). Her model is based upon Jung's concept of animus-anima, according to which every individual has both feminine and masculine traits. A similar attempt to examine and criticize the disastrous split of human subjectivity into masculine and feminine can be found in Joanna Russ's novel The Female Man (1975). The novel's anti-hero, Jael, is a hybrid creature. Her cyborg body is endowed with a number of deadly weapons, claws and teeth made of steel, and a technologically enhanced muscular apparatus.
20 American science fiction films have added some imaginative settings to the scenario of gender confusion. Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) offers a frightening image of dislocated biological patterns, especially patterns of reproduction. The queen of the malicious aliens is a gigantic breeding machine that even abuses the male members of the human crew as "mothers" for her ghastly offspring. One the most impressive scenes in the movie shows a male astronaut, played by John Hurt, from whose belly the monster bursts in the form of a bloody birth. The image of the mother is crucial in this context since the whole spaceship, on board of which the alien makes its nest, is called "mother." In this sense, it is not only the individual male astronaut who gives birth to a child but also science itself (in the form of the spacecraft), which becomes symbolically feminized.