Posthuman suffering: The expression of the technological embrace (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo)

At the heart of posthumanism is a desire for compatibility with technology in its most literal sense: as a "suffering together" where the technological other acknowledges human suffering and acts to ease that suffering. Posthumanism treats technology as a superior model to which humans should aspire. It asks us to be aware of the boundaries between the human and technological other without taking responsibility for those boundaries, creating the illusion that technology has the ability to embrace us.; In its attempts to engage the human in terms of the technological, posthumanist discourse characterizes technology as a distinct other that can only be rendered indistinct one it has been properly (and knowingly) embraced. This "repression" of the initial reaching out to technology makes possible an "outsourcing" of human subjectivity to the technological and cultural artifacts around us.; In my dissertation, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World serves as a parallel path through which the foundations of posthumanist discourse are examined. Beginning with Donna Haraway's "Cyborg" (a very anthropomorphic precursor to the posthuman) and its desire for a human embrace, the text then moves through Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" and Lyotard's Inhuman, resituating technology not as an other to be embraced, but as an epistemology: we enframe the world technologically. With those layers cleared, the submerged connection between posthumanism and Freudian psychoanalytic theory is exposed. Each is haunted by their own technological aspirations, and find difficulty rectifying technological completion with narrative conclusion.; The literary texts I have included provide viable examples of the implications of attempting to achieve posthuman subjectivity. For Oedipa Maas in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Jack Gladney in DeLillo's White Noise , and Monica Swinton in the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence , the empowering of the technological other erases the moment of initial interface. Each essentially "gives over" aspects of their subjectivity to the technological other, making possible the technological embrace which ultimately defines them.