LIMBS OF LIFE: LITERATURE OF POSTMODERN

ANTHROPOMORPHIC TECHNOLOGY AND COSMOLOGY

by

ILGU KIM, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

May, 2000

Zeod Mo ^

Copyright 2000, Ilgu Kim

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am cordially grateful to my chairperson. Dr. James Whitlark, for guiding me

patiently through the dynamic interactions between mythology and science, and to my

committee members. Dr. Bruce Clarke and Dr. Mary Jane Hurst, for providing me with

insightful comments to my rough manuscript at various points. I feel especially lucky

that renowned scientist Dr. John Marx provided me with valuable suggestions after his

thorough reading of my dissertation.

I felt some great joy and consolation from some authors, especially during hard

times, while reading them for this dissertation. Likewise, I would be never happier if my

dissertation can provide a tiny fruitful seed to someone in the future.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT v

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION 1 Notes 23

II. PERSONIFICATION AND SCIENCE 29 Personification in the Literature of Science 29 Science Personifications and Mythopoesis 39 Personification, Secret Agent of Desire 46 Nickel, Little Demon or Sprite 53 Cyber Space and Digital Demon 58 Notes 62

III. CYBER BODIES 66 Galatea : Richard Power's Galatea 2.2 66 Gilgamesh: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash 82 Illustrative Mechanism and Fantastic Organism 94 Notes 107

IV. SACRED BODIES 110 Golem: Marge Piercy's He, She and It 110 Gaia: Octavia ^uiXer's Xenogenesis Series 119 Goddesses and Positive Chaos 132 Notes 148

V TECHNOLOGICAL PERSONIFICATIONS IN THEORY 150 The Sublime 150 Metamorphoses 164 Information 179 Chaos 193 Postmodernism 208 Allegory 222 Linguistics 238 Notes 256

VI. (IN)VISIBLE BODIES: WESTERN AND EASTERN PERSONIFICATIONS...271 Hun-Dun 271 Hermes 277 The Western and Eastern Personifications 284 Notes 298

VII. IMPLOSION AND BUTLER'S SEED 301 Notes 328

WORKS CITED 331

IV

ABSTRACT

The postmodern's inevitable coexistence with machines changes humans into a

machine-like processing entity while machines become more autonomous like humans.

Especialh' focussing upon .Artificial Intelligence, many postmodern writers deal with the

new ly emerging third space between human and nonhuman. This dissertation argues that

as the cognitive base of human thoughts and languages, this paranormally blended space

of quasi-objects (such as c>borgs) suggests the new insightful direction of paratactic

postmodern culture, which in certain \va\ s parallels anthropomorphic mythologies.

.'As the term "matrix" means "womb" in Greek, the metaverse in postmodem

cyberpunk fiction is inherently related to creation myths. If "new technologies," as

Marshal .McLuhan says, "amputate as much as they amplify," postmodem science fiction

writers use anthropomorphic creation mNths to reunite those dismembered limbs of the

natural body, the human's instincti\ e transpersonal subconscious.

Richard Powers's Helen and Neal Stephenson's avatars are mechanical

anthropomorphic technologies (Mechs in McHale's terms) whose dilemmas are

allegorically reflected in their parallels with the Gilgamesh and Galatea m\ths. Although

homogeneity is seriously crificized through Pygmalion's incestuous relafion with Galatea

and Bob Rife's recover>- of glossolalia via a computer \'ims. transcendental visions in

mechanical anthropomorphic narratives are limited to a less satisfactory level. By

contrast, Marge Piercy's Yod and Octavia Butler's Oankali, as the biological

anthropomorphic hybrids ("biopunks" in McHale's terms) show the higher reality which

is neither matter nor mind. Their parallel to creation myths, to the Gaia hypothesis and to

Golem, like chaos theory, reveals that mind and matter are interdependent and correlated.

While answering both "why" questions in science and "how" questions in literature,

the entrapment and escapism (mostly in mechanical hybrids) as well as excitement and

joy (mostly in machines of blood and flesh) of these anthropomorphic technologies are

theoretically applied to some important topics in the postmodem literature of science

such as the sublime, metamorphoses, information, chaos theory, allegory and linguistics.

Finally, this dissertation examines the potential self-idolatry tendency in these "fractal"

anthropomorphic hybrids where the fmite is reflected as the small scale of the infinite. In

the information-flowing society of masquerade, transcendental and sublime moments are

safely illuminated by implosive personifications, such as Octavia Butler's transcultural

and persistent metaphor of the humble seed.

VI

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Particles had a tendency to exist. They did not always behave like discrete bits of matter-often like wa\ es.

—Malcolm Lazarus-

Hans Christian Andersen tells a charming tale of a little gray nightingale that

captivates the Emperor and his court of ancient China. But when an artificial singing bird,

made of precious stones, is presented to him, the Emperor banishes the real nightingale.

.Almost a year passes and the mechanical bird is irreparably damaged. As the Emperor

lies in his deathbed with a melancholy illness, he remembers his old favorite and desires

to listen to the song of the real nightingale. The bird, however, feeling itself deserted in

disgrace, has disappeared. It is onh' when the tme nightingale comes back to comfort him

that the Emperor recovers from his illness.

The imstable subjecli\it\ of human beings has been, since long ago, reflected b}' the

nonhuman. In order to reveal the contradictor}' nature of the himian mind, ineffable in

human terms, writers, as in Andersen's fable of the nightingale, frequently use animals or

machines as the personified objects. The stor\ of the Chinese emperor's mechanical bird

tells about humans' curious desire for the nonhuman which is only temporarily satisfied.

This seduction of a distorted image reflected in the personified machine, as Erik Davi^

implies, more than technology itself, "exploits the hidden laws of nature and himian

perception alike" (17).

As Abbe Mowshowitz notes, by humanity's vanity to reformulate the nature of man,

•'Machines ha\e become a part of the human landscape and we have no choice but to

leam to live with them" (262). In the Information Age, htmian nature more dramatically

changes with the more complicated development of machines. Indeed, because

postmodem societ) is radically pluralistic, it tries to portray humanity from every

conceivable perspective, including conscious machine.' Through imagining these

machines, authors in the literature of science hope to discover hidden, additional human

personalit} traits which can not be found through relations between humans. Even before

the Cartesian priority of rationality in the Enlightenment Age propelled a reactionary

return to feeling in Romanticism, humans projected their own subjective views into

simple objects or animals.^ But talking animals or simple personified objects (e.g.,

Pinocchio or Snowman) are usually without complex characterizations mainly due to

their lack of realit>. B}' contrast, through their growing impact on reality, conscious or

thinking machines (from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the modem cyborgs) have better

served to represent "significant others" as well as reflected self-images.

By provoking curiosity about the potentiality of mechanized humans and humanized

machines, depictions of artificial intelligence can fill revolutionary changes in human life

with both fear and hope. In the real world, scientists are even now trying to develop

prosthetic bodies and minds. Cyborg novels' fascination comes from our expectation of

the total replacement of himaan flesh or brains with mechanical parts. Even though we do

not all believe some scientists' anticipation of humanlike cyborgs in the near fiiture (at

least until around 2070 according to the Artificial Intelligence MIT reference book), we

have already pervasive cross-breedings of humanity and technoscience and these rapid

2

developments of genetic engineering and information techniques immediately generate

our need to extrapolate technology and speculate about its relationship to humans' inborn

nature.^ As we will see later, these speculations tend to exceed the limits of previous

realistic genres.

In literary or social tiaditions, these speculative genres were shaped by capitalism,

and its ancestor, the agora, a market both for goods and information. Etymologically

related to such exchange value, where form does not necessarily reflect content, per

sonae ("that through which the sound comes") is now more through technology turning

into person, "one [who] is identified by means of a public face distinct from some deeper

essence or essences" (Turkle, Life on the Screen 182). As Foucault, Lacan, and other

poststmcturalists have pointed out, human personalities are shaped in and by language

and ideology. However, these systems of representations are incomplete, lacking, and

flawed. So are their byproducts, persons. To put the illusionary identity of a person

more clearly, v/e often use the term subject which is always in flux and therefore

inherently unstable.

The so-called terminal identity (postmodem machine-conditioned subjectivity of

human beings) is almost equal to the semantically unstable role of a subject in grammar

which is often a passive yet resisting subject, as in the sentence "John is hard to please."

In the Information Age, the subject is, interpreted either actively or passively, more

involved in a continual process of creation and recreation through electronic media. For

example, through the internet, we are who we pretend to be, in other words, "logins R

us." In the transforming process from human consciousness into information itself, it is

getting harder to seize the permanent stmcture of the human mind. Like the impersonal

3

subject of "it" in the sentence, "I think that it is snowing," technological subject already

sneaked into our everyday life beyond our recognition. Encountered with the

fragmentation, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of our virtual personae (like playing in the

fantastic snowed field or playing with the living Snowman), we ask, as Greek sophists in

the midst of the agora did a long time ago, about transforming human characteristics,

"what is really human?"

.Although the literature of science is often alienating by treating humanity as the mere

biomechanical entity, personified machines are reassuring, showing that, even if we were

revealed to be mere mechanisms, we could still have a language and thus a potential

subjecti\it>'. In reaction against an actually impersonal technology, like the Romantic

Frankenstein, personified machines ironically reveal more human characteristics than the

true human through their undaimted spirit. Also, the improbable adventures of

personified machines awaken our latent feeling of the sublime and thus extend our

otherxsise status ^wo-maintaining consciousness into the probable chaotic encounters

with significant others, alternative societies and futures.

While the internalized modem subject sought what Diab Hassan calls "twin

melodies" of "bright life and unspeakable sleep," the decentered postmodem subjects,

extrapolated by technology, move into the more subtle crossroad between "nihilistic play

or mythic transcendence'" (4, 23).

Presented often as personified machines rooted in myths (e.g., a worldwdde computer

as God), this "mythic transcendence" in postmodem narratives seeks to fill the vacuum

left by loss of belief in a literal God. Postmodernism recognizes that we caimot do

without or escape myth while it gets closer to artificial paradise. Michel Serres aptly

notes:

One can find in the latter [canonical science] as many myths as in old wives tales. The best contemporary myth is the idea of a science purged of all myths. Again inversely, there is reason in mythologies, in religion—domains to which popular opinion today relegates onh the irrational. In a certain way reason is, of all things in the world, the most equally distributed. No domain can have a monopoly on reason, except via abuse. In this regard each region is a mixed body. {Conversations 128)

The role of m\ths as the precursor of the rational order is well indicated in Hermes whom

Michel Serres describes as "the figure of a free mediator who wanders through this folded

time and who thus established connections"'(Co«veA-5-ar/o«j- 64). The "folded time" is

introduced b>- the insertion of myth into technology, working as the catalyst for union of

the contradictor)' elements:

Time alone can make co-possible two contradictory things. As an example, I am young and old. Only my life, its time or its duration, can make these two propositions coherent e\idence and in claiming that contradiction produces time, whereas only the opposite is true: time makes contradiction possible. This error is the source of all the absurdities recounted since then on war, "the mother of history." (Conversations 49-50)

Just as Colimibus's egg was the significant metaphor for Columbus's adventtire into the

new dangerous world, the "folded time," also as the "crumpled time," superimposes the

complementary opposites of myth onto the differentiated binary signs of science and

creates surprise through nonlinear logic.

Take the same handkerchief and cnimple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science

of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry. (Conversations 60)

Like Serres's idea of "continual movement and exchange" in homeorrhesis, the

nonlinear strategies of personified machines in the literature of science come from their

trans-historic and interdisciplinar>' needs." Because technology is indispensable for

ci\"ilization, the personified machines, although their cultural representations changed

over time, alwa> s maintained human desires to transcend cultural constraints. Especially

in the nuclear age. the literatiu-e of science, as the literature of cyber-communication with

others, plays an actixe role to bring "situated knowledge" or successful conmiimication in

interdisciplinary networked information.^ Also cognitive science and chaos theon.- may

suggest that literature of science maximizes the positive function of noise and entropy by-

its willing cosmic dance with dissipative and stochastic elements in nature where strange

attractors can often be foimd.

In Chaos theory and its literar\ application, it is well known that •'maximirai

information is conxeyed when there is a mixture of order and surprise'' (Hayles, Chaos

Bound 53). As the (con)ftision of the "folded time" implies, the seemingly confused

mixture of personification of technoscience in literature is the essential, creative fusion

which leads to transcendent and integrated spaces. In contrast to Noam Chomsky's

inbom language de\ ices of transformational grammars, Mark Turner's "parabolic" view

about the origin of language is based on his semantic concepts. As the most \ isible and

analyzed example of "a mixture of order and surprise,'" as Turner argues, personifications

more than an> other rhetorical devices bring "maximum information"' from the richly

creative blending by waking up the impossible, nonlinear spaces to actualities (85-115).

6

The blended spaces of personified machines in the literature of science basically

constitute what Jay David Bolter means by "synthetic intelligence." In Turing's Man,

Bolter argues for a synthesis of man and computer rather than the replacement of man by

machine. Pointing out the computer's suggestive influence upon the child's thinking.

Bolter expresses his belief in an educational programming language named LOGO which

ma>' help children to create a new style of thought.

However, Richard Power in Galatea 2.2 shows that this optimism about cohabitation

with complicated machines can be easily broken by the emerging of more messily

blended and therefore violent spaces. And this messiness in scientific narratives seems

ine\itable in postmodernism where technology confronts humanism. Along with the

hypertextual dissolution of an author's authority-, postmodernists' paradigm of the self-

deconstmctive nature of the text is convincingly depicted in Power's cyborg narratives'

destabilization of the established territories between male/female, positive/negative, and

himian/machine. The dotted number 2.2 shows a new strange character emerged from the

blending of himian and machine. These so-called "fractal characterizations," as James

Whitlark explains, "transcend simply- one- or two-dimentional graphing" ("Fractal

Characterization"). Showing the correlation between the divine and the human, this

fractal character asserts the existence of the "interdimensional reality'" where hero

becomes "a macrocosm of transcendental creativeness" ("Fractal Characterization"). If

we regard this interdimensional, fractal character as the "strange attractor" in the chaos

theory, the messy reality presented in the novel is more illuminating than any other genre

because, as Serres asserts, "disorder occurring in nature can be explained, or reordered,

by means of fractal attractors" (Conversations 57).

7

Despite their functions at different levels, myths, personifications, and empathy may

also be compared to these attractors. As in Dick's novel. Do Androids Dream of Electric

Sheep, empathy is strongly associated with the genuinely human. The essence of

personification is, as Mark Tumer indicates, empathy—the imaginative ascribing to an

object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself In

contrast with God's eye-view-, a human being's view is single, local. But we humans

aspire to gain "an integrated space that is meant to be transcendent and unitary" (Tumer

117). Rather than adopting the scientific narratives, Tumer contends that this "integrated

space" can be achieved by the literary mind by switching focus and viewpoints through

individuals' imagination of Others. Borro-wing Faucormier's concept of "identity

cormector," Tumer argues that "identity connections tie together space and different

viewpoint and focus, whether spatial or temporal" (122). In the multiple projections such

as the projection of spatial stories onto nonspatial stories of social, political, and mental

events ("Mary threw the stone out the -window" and "Mary threw the job out of the

•window"), spatial and bodily stories are archetypes whose tiaces are routinely carried in

language. Although Tumer interprets these spatial and bodily stories as the "conceptual

primitives" (like Mandler's claim that infants develop concepts of animacy and agency

on the basis of image schemata), the importance of parables, for Tumer, comes not from

the disparate elements of small spatial parables, but from the blended spaces of these

source and target stories. Namely, if it is tme that "seeing more, we also see differently,"

fractal characterization as a strong blended space of social, political, and mental events is

a vital catalyst which fuses disturbing differences into an ordered one.

Among other genres in the postmodem era, many feminist writers in the literature of

science such as Otavia Butler and Marge Piercy prefer to use cyborgs and myths alike to

address controversial issues of gender, himianity, and envirormient. As a symbolic

mixture of biology -with technology, cyborgs are oftentimes more human, admirable, and

moral than the real himian. Also owing to the creatively blended spaces of

interdimensional correlation between origin and evolution or mutation, the fractal

characterization in narratives of personified machines is used more as the popular device

to restore the lost connection of content and expression. Thus, more than realistic novels,

the presence of cyborgs reminds the reader of an often ignored yet critical question: "Can

science really- save the world by bestowing equal rights when that equality will have to be

between entities so different as organic and inorganic brains?"

However, the mechanical cyborg, with the rapid development of modem science,

gets closer and closer to the real human brain, thereby dispersing with the notion that

consciousness requires a soul, yet at some figurative level, belief in a "soul" persists.

Modem writers, consciously or subconsciously, suggest that matter is to consciousness

what science is to myth. Indeed, the popularization of science often takes the form of

teaching it as a creation myth to take the place of religious ones. Presented as the

nomadic superconscious spirit of the dismembered supreme body energy, myth always

belongs to the quest for inspiration by the divine, reminding us of organic need to put

together our lopsided logocentric fragmented reason.

In the mythology of popular science, the computer noticeably occupies an ascending

place. If Renaissance poets' souls have chosen, as Philip Sidney wrote, Platonic love as

their souls' food, we modems (or postmodems) have already chosen computers as our

9

souls' food. With the critical observer's eye like the narrator in Bierce's "Moxon's

Master," we must watch out for the unexpected pharmakonic characteristics of our soul's

food.

Artificial Intelligence is, to use Bmce Clarke's term, "a hybrid or quasi-object, an

entity- that mixes together natural and cultural components."' Noting the metamorphic

literary incidents that pass through the period of modemity and emerge again in

postmodemity- as a central mode of the cultural imaginary, he describes the way

technoscience rewrites the scripts of living forms:

For Serres and Latour, being is Hermes's flight, an incessant passing from one level to another, the momentary transcendence of chaos by a self-sustaining spiral of transmission. (•'Constructing the Subjectivity of the Quasi-Object"—online article)

This reconfigured subjectivity through the hybrid or quasi-object such as Boyle's air

pump, Pasteur's microbes, and Archimedes' pulleys, according to Bruno Latour, is due to

the increasing polarization of the object (We Have Never Been Modern 112). By

requiring a greater transformation of human subjectivity than any of these did, computers

change humans themselves into metamorphs.

Alienating humans from the organic habitat, computers have radically transformed

Westem society into a culture of differences. The ongoing radical alterations of

postmodem human conditions are mainly caused by the impact of intelligent machines,

which were originally invented for the purpose of mastering the forces of nature.

Psychologically functioning, complicated computers' dynamic interactions with humans

in cultural contexts serve mankind as heuristic instruments for understanding, indeed a

higher condition of being. Also, through paratactic postmodem modes, the increasingly

10

alienating intelligence of machines is juxtaposed and merged -with our own, transforming

our identities into almost constantly changing subjects.^

The transition from humans to posthumans, according to Katherine Hayles's How

We Became Posthuman, is characterized by four perspectives: (1) "privileg[ing]

informational pattem over material"; (2) "consider[ing] consciousness... as an

epiphenomenon'"; (3) '•think[ing] of the body as the original prosthesis"; and (4)

"configur[ing] human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent

machines" (2-3).

In scientific narratives, like the posthuman blurring of differences between bodily

existence and computer simulation, the interface between man and machine is remarkably

presented in the form of an allegorical personification of complicated machines.

Moti\'ated by daemonic interpretations, the soul of personified machines, such as the

animal-like flickering pixel/avatar of binary-coded information in interface, fimctions as

an agent or an actant of plural and contradictory subjectivities, breaking the boundaries of

nature and culture.'" Although the word "personifications" was not introduced into

England until the eighteenth century, the cultural implications of personifications are

rapidly growing in the Information Age by the appearance of the human-like intelligent

machines which are being substituted for human beings." For the first time, inanimate

objects are developing into artificial persons and indeed we and our technology seem to

be switching places. Haraway concisely puts this inverted positioning in Simians,

Cyborgs, and Women, "our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves

frighteningly inert" (1).

11

From tiie viewpoint of humanistic science in culture, nonetiieless, there is potential in

the skillful personification of machines to create rhetorically and semantically rich

blended spaces of nomadic subjectivity, by which I mean a non-hierarchical

consciousness, free to wander between and unite such contraries as human and machine.

Unfortunately, through their impersonal, dislocating language of collective intelligence,

the postindustrial commercialism in cyberspace, far from an expected role as the great

equalitarian for teledemocracy. has brought strong discontents about cyberculture.'^ The

frequent appearances of victimized or monstrous intelligence-machine images reveal

authors' anxiety about this growing intelligence of machines, which are, as the essential

part of our daily lives, already more active than humans in many ways.

Like the currently popular cultural discussions of cyborgs or posthumans, the

conflicting interests of human-like machines or machine-like humans are essentially the

reflection of the instability of all polar oppositions between postmodem technology and

traditional humanism. As Don DeLillo -writes in White Noise, "the greater the scientific

advance the more primitive the fear" (161); the distorted images of personified machines,

either through inscription or incorporation, widen and deepen the contrast between

science and myth, the divinity and the human. Opposed to the disturbing and conflicting

thrusts of postmodem technology, myths, as the traditional system of organic

personifications, are manifestations of ancient people's psycho-philosophical view of the

world where principles of certainty, unity and harmony prevail as the soothing oracles

against chaotic nature.'^

12

The subversive process of "science" is shown even in the term itself, as the

computer-simulated Librarian, the updated "synthetic intelligence," gives Hiro

Protagonist a lecture in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:

"Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living fleshing from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and "schism" which have obvious connections to the concept of separation." (209)

If this separation inherent in science is more accelerated by computers, personifications

have the potential to unite what has been severed albeit with complex intemal tensions

indicative of strains between the elements they combine. If viewed from the current

concems of literary theories, adaptations of personifications for the technological

development are, as the second chapter of this study will show, configured by transitions

from the sublime to the gothic, by fusion between metaphor and metonymy in narratives,

and by stochastic difference and con(fiision) in information.''' In terms of the science

interactive with culture, chaos theory and postmodernism similarly confirm that "in the

Occident personality was previously conceived as arising from a created, integrated soul,

while it is now being conceived as arising spontaneously from an ambient chaos and

complexity-."' Myths, however, by being actively adopted in postmodem scientific

narratives, play a significant role in resisting degradation of the humane spirit and in

overcoming corrupting materiality.

In this regard, this research particularly explores the comparative notions of

personified mythic cosmology and postmodem technology through Richard Powers's

13

Galatea 2.2, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, and Octavia

Butler's Xenogenesis and Parable series.'

The human's dream of liberation from troublesome mortal bodies is first examined

by way of the cyberbodies of personified machines constmcted as purely mechanistic

artifices contiasted with the myth of Gilgamesh in Stephenson's Snow Crash and the

incorporation of a fertile female body in Power's Galatea 2.2. Without such myths as

Galatea and Gilgamesh, this study argues, these mechanistic models, including Bruno

Latour's "diffusion or linear model," would be simply depicted as a capitalistically

subjected mechanism. In Science in Action, to show the Pandora-box-like-unpredictable

effects of technology, Latour employs the term black box, which was "used by

cybemeticians whenever a piece of machinery of a set of commands is too complex" (2-

3). The "diffusion or linear model" in "the two contradictory voices" of science

represents the unproblematic and certain left half of Janus/techonology. So it "produces

sentences like 'just do this...just do that.'" (13).'^ It is often called "ready-made science"

which is only seemingly "well determined enough."

Because Powers's personified Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Stephenson's avatar in

metaverse are both scientifically realizable projects according to some scientists, there

coexist hopes and fears for a posthuman existence. Thanks to familiar wisdoms in

Galatea and Gilgamesh, the remapping of the new world order for a better meaningfiil

life is more visible and convincing. For example, Galatea's warning against tiie

homogeneous breeding in Powers' novel and Gilgamesh's against the universal language

in Stephenson's novel allegorically predict the doomed nature in cloning of self-

consciousness in hardware and totalitarian control for tiie drug-like cyberspace. The

14

gloomy conclusions of both novels (Helen's sacrificial death and the newly emerged

mutlple-ethinicity-group's attempt to conquer America via a computer vims called "snow

crash") attest the stark sterility of the mechanical personifications and their inability to

provide tianscendence.

By contrast, like Latour's "the translation or whirlwind model" of the two

contradictory voices of science, the fluid and relative positioning of observer is revealed

in the biological personifications (the machines of blood and flesh), the subjects of

traditional mythic narratives. According to Latour, as the "science in the making," the

"translation or whirlwind model" represents the self-contradictory face of Janus-like

technology which says "enough is not enough" (13). Juxtaposing Jewish and apocryphal

religious personifications such as Golem and Gaia/Sophia/Isis, Piercy and Butler seek

more profoundly the consciousness and interrelatedness of the universe. In Piercy's

novel, Golem, the Jewish guardian personification, is paralleled to an artificial-

intelligence-equipped artifice, who is developed fully enough to have sexual and verbal

intercourse with a real human. This parallel of an artificial human (Yod) and a

fiightening mythic personification (Golem) reveals the pandora-like unpredictable effect

of advanced technology. If explained in Latour's terms, it is closer to "science in the

making" instead of established or ready-made science: "the right side [of Janus] considers

that facts and machines in the black box are always under-determined. Some little thing is

always missing to close the black box once and for all" (13).

For example, from the viewpoint of psychology, this monstrous personification of

Golem is a sacred version of what "Whitiark means by "id superheroes." In "Superheroes

as Dream Doubles," Whitlark points out the popularity of the monstrous personifications

15

in comics, animations, and scientific narratives. In contexts, the monstrosities are

interpreted as either the personified form of id, or "id superheroe[s]." For example, Man-

thing in Chris Claremont's comic book or Hulk in the television series "protect[s] the

innocent, draws power from his monstrous self (110).

If monstrous personifications are doubling of "realized potential" and of some

"unconscious drive." the despised evil quality of this doubling is introverted into "forces

of virtue" at critical moments, in the case of Golem to save the Jew in danger of

extinction. Through this personified-id-superheroes' blurring of the normal boundaries,

WTiitlark notes the realization of significant meetings with the "ideal selves": "The

superhero's reconciliation of his multiple personalities is at most temporary, a lull before

the next adv enture. Yet it is sufficient to bring empathetic readers a feeling of union with

ideal selves, as powerful as the imagination and as profound as the depths of the

unconscious" (111). In this regard. Golem, as the deformed one-man-army against

disastrous and careless science, becomes a more sacred version of a monstrous id-

personification for the ideal journey toward divinity. In the end of the novel. Rabbi

Loew's destmction of Golem after a crisis inspires Shira to recognize the sacredness

residing in this cormptible material and to leave the blueprint of Yod the cyborg in the

little cubes:

Would the cyborg really be Yod? Yod was the product of tensions between Avram and Malkah and their disparate aims as well as the product of their software and hardware. If a cyborg created as a soldier balked and wanted to be a lover, might not a cyborg created as a lover long to be a celibate or an assassin? She remembered all the cyborgs who had looked just like Yod; Chet, who had killed David; all the autistic or violent offspring of Avram's experiments. She could not be

16

Avram. She could not manufacture a being to serve her, even in love. (428)

While Golem, as the unconscious personification of the Jewish divine principles,

manifests the biblical male monotheistic God's immanence, Butler's Xenogenesis series

reveal the other victimized people's expectation for beautified Goddesses as the ideal

mediator for the interaction between human and environment. In her trilogy of the series,

Butler dramatizes Gaia personifications as the organic fusion of both animate and

inanimate features on the earth. Like scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Magulis's

suppositions about the Gaia hypothesis, Butler's novels reveal that the cosmic

consciousness, where human consciousness is an active yet only partial agent, evolves to

more-than-human level.

The reintegration of the body, the feelings, the nonlinearity, the unconsciousness, and

symbiosis promised in goddess worship may help toward liberating victimized peoples

such as women, and members of minorities. The idea of a goddess may also appeal to

the supporters of organelle theory as the origin of all lives on earth. In an interview with

.Marion Zimmer Bradley, Butler shows that the concept of organelles became the main

motif in venting Xenogenesis:

Their [the Oankalis'] genesis in my mind is probably the mitochondria. 1 liked the idea that one entity could so bond with another that they would no longer be thought of [sic] two entities...And I wound up creating these natural genetic engineers whose basic essence is this tiny liUle organelle in their cells that collectively takes advantage of any environment. They're gene traders. They say, "Here's what's the matter. V/e're going to fix it. (n.p.: online interview)"

Scientifically supported by organelles' independent existence, the Gaia theory, unlike the

survival-of-the-fittest principle in Darwinian socialism, supports the continuation of weak

17

lives because it is believed that nature also gives chances for survival and maturity,

through endosymbiosis, to even the weakest forms of lives such as mitochondrias and

plastids.

Similarly, opposing the personification of a white man as God, in an article in The

Humanist, Alice Walker insists that pagan god-like figures such as Isis, an ancient

Goddess of Africa, are worthier to be worshipped. For her, unlike a white God who

accepted degradation and suffering as one's wage of sins, these goddesses as the "earth-

centered and women-reverencing" personifications are supposed to return our love and

care to us without destruction or anger.

.As .Alice Walker says, "It is fatal to love a God who does not love you"; nonetheless,

it may be also fatal to visualize the unfathomable God in the human form. By magnifying

the vicious human body, these visualized goddesses also expose deviation, deformity, and

unsacredness. In "Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an

Environmental Feminism," Alamo Stacy argues that ecofeminism's use of the metaphor

of Mother/Earth would be productive to analyze specific effects within their contexts.

Nonetheless, she also wams that portraying the earth as Mother Earth or Motiier Nature

strengthens a patriarchal, capitalist discourse by tiie poor Mother Earth image as a near-

dead victim saved by commercial capitalism. Furthermore, she emphasizes that casting

everyday environmental problem solving as women's work tightens women's domestic

ties and lets corporate and governmental polluters off the hook (137).

Rather, Goddesses' complicated characteristics are, in recent feminist tiieories,

related to the chaos tiieory in tiiat tiieir fluid connotations link tiiem to such obvious

phenomena as turbulence. Modem chaos theorists argue that chaos is the precursor of

18

order yet contains more information. In the literary applications of chaos theory, chaotic

nature is believed to be more faithfully shown in the Goddesses who are wiser than

Hermes. Emphasizing tiie greater order hidden in chaos, essential feminists such as

Luce Irigaray connect chaotic fluidities to women and traditional mechanic rigidities to

men ("Is tiie Subject of Science Sexed?" 73).

.Although some Westem mythologies found an idealistic personification of

communication technology through Hermes Trismegistus, tiie trice-greatest God, the

tension toward transcendence is still detected through instability, violence, and

separation in Hermes-related narratives. Hermes's magic lyre and winged sandals are

ancient versions of overpowering (and thus dangerous) postmodem technology and

Hermes's assistance in punishing Prometheus shows Hermes's complicity with divine

wrath. .As Ihab Hassan uses Orpheus's lyre separated from his dismembered bodies for

postmodern signs of decenteredness, technology and consciousness in Hermes reveal

separately represented information gathering as problematic wisdom. Hermes, despite

the ideal personification of circularity and exchange, fails to reflect fully the holistic and

organic cosmos.'

As chaos theory cannot solve the ultimate mystery of the universe, limitations of

Westem personifications are inherently contradictory and tension-loaded. The popular

dismemberment of the sublime being (such as, Osiris and Orpheus), the visualization of

the unknowable God, and the Titanism (even found in Indian religious personifications

in Upanisadic and yogic philosophies according to Nichoas F. Gier in "Hindu

Titanism") all reveal that Westem personifications are manifestations of the ego-centric

or upward personifications.'^ Even in daily life, the Westerner's trophy-giving fradition

19

for achievements is seen as resulting from an overemphasis on human autonomy and

superiority. The anthropocentric design of Chess is another example that is in sharp

contrast with the abstiaction of the Oriental Go game. By attributing the totality of

universal power to human evolution, Westem personifications in general emphasize

humans as either conquerors or victims of chaotic nature.

Thus, this study in the last chapter, as the altemative to the West's technological

personifications based on overt creation myths, will present a Far-Eastem approach. As

organelles in the Gaia hypothesis show the human mind's kinship with the organic

cosmos, Eastem thoughts provoke sublime and critical insights but mostly through

invisible personifications. Providing a holistic and participatory world view by being

ethereal (like the Ki or chi principle in the physical arts) or idealistic (like the related

circle of Life in Buddhism), Eastem personifications are essentially egoless or

fuzzy/downward.

Although Buddhism and Taoism created rigid morality and nondemocratic polity-,

the personifications in Eastem thoughts (such as Himdun's amorphous shape and a flea­

like-human feature of Giant Pangu in Chinese creation myths) are basically

cosmocentric and selfless. The frequent omission of subjects in Eastem languages, in

contrast with the Westemers' frequent use of inanimate subjects, attests the passive

personification tradition in Eastem countiies. In an essay about Lafcadio Heam, Scott

Bessho, a Japanophile who was greatly influenced by Heam, sees anthropomorphism as

a kind of prejudice that "led most Westemers to believe in tiie superiority of their ovm

art and culture" (17). Bessho contrasts the "mechanical ugliness" and "horrible

20

vulgarism" of Westem anthropocentrism to the "child-like wondering" and

"irregularity" inherent in Eastem philosophies (17).

In the last chapter of my dissertation, the synthesis of the West's egocentric

technological personifications and the East's pantheistic, organic cosmological

personifications are viewed through Octavia Butler's Parable series—Parable of the

Sower and Parable of the Talents. By introducing the new larger concept of the God of

Change, Butler makes the new religious personification of (in)visible Earthseed a good

bridging between the East's selfless principles of hyper-empathy and the West's

practical parables in biblical contexts. Butler's mystic creation is not visual like Greek

or biblical personifications. Rather, like the Yomban mythology in Wild Seed, Butier's

uses of myth are positioned in between personification and conceptualization. Like the

parable in St. Luke (8:5-8) about the unpredictable growth of seed in various

environments, the (in)visible seed fills in the gap between the shape and voice and

revalorizes the persistence of living even in an apocalyptic techno-future:

I am not a visual writer. I don't tend to see things—I hear them. And that means if I am careful, my characters will be acting or having conversations in a vacuum. When I was about twelve years old and I'd been writing for a couple of years, I suddenly realized I didn't know what my characters looked like. I didn't have a clue! They were just tiiese voices. So I began to give them faces. I found 1 didn't like them very much when they became more substantial, which they became more substantial, which was weird, but it was something I had to get used to.

"When Butler s resisting of the visualization, as in Earthseed, is extended into tiie

religious personifications, she rejects super-powerfiil-man-like gods where "toy

children, like Job's children, are interchangeable" (Parable of the Sower 14). Witii

21

seeds' hopes for growing on good ground, Butler's protagonists interact witii the change

of nature, the God of Change. As the perceiving existence of everlasting change in the

universe, the human being as the Earthseed prepares to take root in new ground and

embraces diversity:

Create no images of God. .Accept the images That God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river. river to sea; Gmbs to bees, bees to swarms; From one. many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God's self-portrait. (Parable of the Sower, 283)

Merging abstract metaphors with realistic metonymies and consolidating the bond of the

allied genres of apocalyptic literature and scientific fiction, Butler's Earthseed produces

a new consciousness for a future void of securities. Through meta-projection of hybrid

anthropomorphism, Butler wams against the "demanding" questions of intelligence: "if

it [intelligence] is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of

breeding and dying" (Parable of the Sower 25).

In folklore, fairly tales, and parables, frozen adult's logic is often vivified and

clarified by children's fantasy such as a personified snowman in Nathaniel Hawthorne's

"The Snow-Image." Reminding us of Chomsky's revolutionary concept of children's

22

Language Acquisition Device, Don DeLillo often finds clues to mysteries of human life

through children: "part of every child's brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to

probe" (niiite Noise 152). Sometimes, children's link to the origin, beyond curiosities

about "mentalese" or "intersubjectivities," is mystified even to the divine level.

According to C. G. Jung and Kerenyi's Essays on a Science of Mythology, "divine

child"" myths, as in Chinese mysticism or in Gnosticism, at once germinate and

disintegrate in the midway between the archetype and a monadic fragment (23). Rather

than attaining full consciousness which results in inadequate explanations, the enduring

vitality of the child myths leads us to see a "synthesis of the ('divine' i.e., not yet

humanized) unconsciousness and human consciousness" through "participation of an

individuation process which is approaching wholeness" (85). In order to approach closer

to the implosion of object and subject, Butler uses the less-loaded psycho-visualization

of "a divine child,"" the Earthseed. Similar to "the golden egg" in various myths, without

risking "childish" aspects in personifications, Butler's hybridism of Earthseed

illuminates the "rizhomatic alliance" between a distinct shape and a conceptual flow and

overcomes dangerous and careless science. Positive obsessions in this unrevealed yet

sacred seed, as "the parable of the living," do not remain merely as "an enthusiasm of

the moment" in personifications, but as the religious sign for the humble persistence

which is the victimized people's belief for better change. Just as Rumi puts his religious

feeling, "I was immature, I matured, and I was consumed," it may not be just

coincidental that transpersonal psychologists took the implosive egg as tiie equivalent of

human psyche to show the relationship between I and tiie Transpersonal Soul, or higher

self, regarding "I" as "a reflection or projection" (Assagioli 13).

23

Notes

1 According to Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, "The word

'Postinodemism' entered the lexicon of American life in the 1960s—at least its academic lif(^-as part of a broader cultiiral questioning of social conformity, political inequality, and the necessity for a unified national ethos" (xii). Although there is much debate about tills relational term-whetiier postinodemism is seen as a continuation of or break with, dominant features in modernism or tiie avant garde, in this work I usually adopted the latter position, following Jean-Francois Lyotard's argument that there is no longer any hope of a single conceptual system or discourse through which we might aspire to understand the totality of the world.

1

" In Descartes' mathematical methods and philosophy, the emphasis is on logical analysis and its mechanistic interpretation of physical nature. Interestingly, in Harlan Ellison's short story, "1 Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" the name of the computer .AM in part refers to tiie Cartesian cogito ergo sum " I think, therefore I am." See. Harris-Fain 146.

See the detail in Raymond Kurzweil's The Age of Intelligent Machines. (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1990). p. 483.

Similarly, La Rochefoucault in Maxims Maximes (1665) says: "Nous somme si accoutumes a nous deguiser aux autres, qu'a la fin nous nous deguisons a nous-memes" ("we are so used to disguising ourselves in relation to others that we end up disguising ourselves in relating to ourselves").

For Serres, the living system is regarded as "homeorrhetic" arranged in "a sheaf of times": "The word 'homeorrhesis" is formed from the Greek words homos, meaning 'same,' and rhysis, meaning 'flow.' Serres replaces the normal term describing the equilibrium of a self-regulating system, 'homeostais,' by 'homeorrhesis' in order to emphasize the idea of continual movement and exchange as opposed to the less dynamic idea of stasis" (Hermes 74-5).

For Michel Serres, the third man is "the prosopopoeia of the powers of noise." Regarding this third man as "the demon," Serres asserts that "to hold a dialogue is to suppose a third and to seek to exclude him." But this demon-like third man of the noise also angel-like characteristics because there always exists "the indissoluble link between noise and the code." So the successful communication which "requires the exclusion oi the third man (noise) and the inclusion of a fourth (code)" is supposed to be a kind of battle against the demon (Hermes, 67, 126).

24

Tumer also rejects Stephen Pinker and Paul Bloom's genes-first adaptationist account (based upon Chomsky's genetic Language Acquisition Development theory) that "natural selection is entirely responsible for the hypothetical grammar organ"(163). He argues tiiat their extra hypothesis is weak "because it does not offer a plausible 'environment of evolutionary adaptation' for language, that is, an environment in which the first lone genetically grammatical person would have enjoyed reproductive advantage" ("Poetry for tiie Newbom Brain"). Yet, Tumer sees that Pinker and Bloom's following view implies tiie beginning of grammar from meaning: "Language is a complex system of many parts, each tailored to mapping a characteristic kind of semantic or programmatic ftmction onto a characteristic kind of symbol sequence." For Tumer, tiie role of "mapping" is equivalent to tiie projection of a mental competence and parable functions as "a basic cognitive principle" by projection.

o

Cohen in Human Robots in Myth and Science mentions the unpredictable development of machines: "When tiie early logical and matiiematical machines were being developed during tiie eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few could have realized tiie far-reaching and momentous consequences tiiat would flow from these modest beginnings" (112). And he notes the significance of narratives of complicated machines: "The difficulty is enormously compounded when events outpace our ability tc comprehend tiiem. Thus the fanciful speculations of fiction may be more insightfiil than the ponderous analyses of the social sciences" (262).

The Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (\996) defines parataxis as '"the placing together of sentences, clauses, or phrases without a conjunctive word or words, as Hurry up, it is getting late! I came—I saw—I conquered.'' Like Katherine Hayles' use of this term, I use this word to refer to a kind of postmodem mode: a plurality of worlds and multiple, often mutually incompatible discourses through which to understand them.

'° Angus Fletcher's use of the daemonic is: "Daemons, as I shall define them, share this major characteristic of allegorical agents, the fact tiiat they compartmentalize ftmction" (40). Here, my use of the deamonic is much closer to Bmce Clarke's identification of the deamonic with human affectivity which the exclusion of the divine produces: "Spiritual messages require material vehicles, but the agents transporting those messages may not deliver them properly. As message-carrying agencies, in related but distinct ways, writing and allegory both operate according to the logic of the supplement. Written texts can be misappropriated, altered, misdelivered, or misconstmed. At the intersection of allegory and metamorphosis, the inevital slippages sustained by the supplementary and vehicle status of writing are reified in the form of the daemonic" (Allegories of Writing 9-10).

25

For example, tiie Joongang Daily News (1999. 7.29) discusses the human robot called "Centaur" which was recently developed by Korea Institiite of Science and Technology (KIST). This four-legged half-horse-half-human robot, accomplished by five-year-long research witii 6.7 million dollars, can think and act like a child. This human-like robot can recognize directions, builds blocks, and carry 1-kilo gram object. It can hear, speak, and even feel a touch. The developer. Dr. Lee Jong-Won says, it can be used in extreme simations where humans can not respond—such as deep seas, nuclear powerhouses, or space development. The more well-known, advanced forms of humonoid robots are "P2"" and "P3"' developed by Honda researchers. Besides these two bipedal-equipped walking humonoid robots, Honda researchers also invented a pet robot named "AIBO" which shows its feelings through actions like cats or dogs. See. http:.','wvvw .honda.co.jp'tech/others/spec 1 .html

According to Deleuze and Guattari's^ Thousand Plateaus, nomadic science differs from royal science: "Royal science is inseparable from a 'hylomorphic' model implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into govemors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. What characterizes it is that all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression. It seems that nomad science is more immediately in tune with the cormection between content and expression in themselves, each of these two terms encompassing both form and matter" (369). By the nomadic subjectivity, I mean the critical subject who is "in tune with the connection between content and expression."

' Because in ancient myths the Cartesian mechanical view of the world was not conceived yet, most mythic personifications reflect human projection of organic nature. If a meaning-scattering process of subversion derives from the Cartesian mechanism and postmodem narratives of differentiation, mutation, and depravity- are exemplified in monstrously personified machines, the meaning-containing productivity is often expressed in revisions of ancient creation myths such as the Gaia personification.

'"* Personification is always a personification of one thing (tenor) through the agency of another (vehicle). The hybrid or quasi-object of personified machines is essentially the extended metaphor of the homeless voice of the self between humans and machines or between individual and technologized society. Like ooloi aliens as the personification of the Gaia theory in Butier's fiction, the hybrid of science and humanity tries to find the shared spaces for the two contradictory modes.

The blended space that the third being between humans and Others find is usually an ambiguous world that rational order does not necessarily govern. Telling the two different semantic levels simultaneously, technological personifications dramatically assume the cross-generic personae, elucidating the sacredness of matter through their self-sacrificial images. Namely, the personified machines are mostly victimized or

26

divinized as the result of the overdetermined use of empathy. If the gothic is a description of the victimized third being or hybrid emphasized through metonymy, the romantic fiction is the divinized version of object and subject through metaphor. Modem SF, as Gibson's Neuromancer shows, often describes both trends with fear and hope for the unpredictable potentiality- of future science.

' I thank Dr. Whitlark for this paraphrase.

' As Bierlein in Parallel Myths notes, as the earliest form of science, myth is often expressed as the mode of anthropomorphism, the projection of human features or qualities on the divine: "Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are at the center of the universe of other beings and things. It is not the dogma of any one school of thought, but a description of tendencies toward the denial of priority to the nonhuman— animals and plants, the physical univ erse, God. Originally, the term was used most often as the opposite of theocentric (god-centered), and in this sense its meaning is close to that of humanism. John Ruskin's discussion of the pathetic fallacy, the attribution of human qualities and emotions to nature and the inanimate world, also revoke an idea parallel to that expressed by anthropocentrism"" (The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism).

For example, as the humanized representations, the personified entities of earth in Gaia hypothesis attribute a persona to earth. While Gala's human subjective is compared to the nature (as Gaia mourns), Gaia plays a visible mediator's role for its ongoing interaction between the victimized environment and the egoistic human. Through the cognitive process of personifications of both its animate and inanimate features, the cognitive projection of earth as the living Gaia implies that living things and natural objects on earth all possess an intrinsic value similar to that of humans.

' Bruno Latour in Science in Action divides science into "ready-made science" and "science in the making" using Janus' two faces: "We will have to leam to live witii two contradictory voices talking at once, one about science in the making, the other about ready made science. The latter produces sentences like 'just do this...just do tiiat...'; the former says 'enough is never enough'. The left side considers that facts and machines in the making are always under-determined. Some little thing is always missing to close tiie black box once and for all" (13).

' Organicism is "the view tiiat some systems resembles organisms in having parts that ftmction in relation to the whole to which tiiey belong" (Webster's New Universal). Similarly, holism is "the tiieory tiiat whole entities, as fundamental components of reality, have an existence otiier tiian mere sum of tiieir parts" (Webster's New Universal). Holism or Organicism is a common characteristic found in most mytiis.

27

" Since the Enlightenment age, the West's development of science has freed humans from the mystical errors about the universal principles and Westemers' rational thoughts bring more liberal lives in independent spaces. However, the danger caused by the Westem technology is also the result of the West's emphasis upon isolated pride. The West"s long-standing anthropomorphism represents anthropocentric ideas and prejudices as well. Like the mythic hero Prometheus, the personification of the revolutionary energy, brings fire, Westem science improved human life. Yet the wandering ego of personified machines is the humanistic appeal against the objectification. As Prometheus is persecuted by an angry Zeus, the hybrid of human and machine is often described pessimistically.

By contrast with male heroes, the humane interaction with a shared environment is expressed more properly by comforting feminine archetypes such as the goddesses Gaiia, Sophia, and Isis. However, by magnifying the vicious aspects of human and cosmic bodies, these goddesses are often interpreted in terms of profane sanctity vulnerable to violent technological powers. The raping image followed by these goddesses connotes the exploitation of earth by human technology, and also exposes deviation, deformity, and the tension from order. The richer and safer insights about self and universe rather come from the fiizzy projection of human qualities into the realm of universal expenences such as the seed.

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CHAPTER 11

PERSONIFICATION AND SCIENCE

Personification in the Literature of Science

Because science is a relative matter and its power and its limitation can be

understood only within the wider cultural matrix, as Murdo William Mcrae argues,

science's relationship with the ideologies, values, habits of thoughts, and linguistic and

rhetorical practices is important. What he means by "literature of science" well

represents science situated in the culture that enables it:

By replicating the names of certain already well-established subdisciplines-history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science-the term suggests a particular way of asking questions about the field of popular science writing. The temi also indicates that the sorts of popular texts examined here are open to as full a range of contemporary interpretive techniques as any other works of literature. Finally, it emphasizes the literature of science must be read not as mere popular transmission of superior scientific knowledge but as sophisticated production of knowledge in its own right (10-11)

In the literature of science, by which 1 roughly mean the literature in which science and

culture interact, hopes and fears about advanced technology are often discussed in terms

of the breakdown of the Cartesian mind/body duality. The "disembodied intellect."

"etherealism," and "posthuman" all come from the hybrid of human and machine: the

cyborg subjectivity which emerges when human consciousness integrates into hardware,

or in turn, prosthetic devices substitute for human bodies. In postmodem culture which

has been significantly transformed by the effects of technoscience, cyborgs represent this

vital influence by postmodem technoscience. In the cyborg culture, we humans

29

symbiotically live witii bionic machines. In his poem in 1968, Richard Brautigan depicts

tills symbiotic virtual natiire of humans and machines which is presided by "machines of

loving grace," tiie all-powerful machine instead of Robert Browning's God of loving

grace:

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybemetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybemetic forest filed with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully-past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, retumed to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

In this cybemetic meadow, as Doima Haraway observes, "organisms are not bom. but

they are made" ("The Promise of Monsters" 298).' In reality, medical prostheses and

artificial life ("life made by Man rather than by Nature") change our bodies into virtual

bodies, and this "relentless artifactualism" alters our consciousness into "a cyborg subject

position."^ The fact that "about 10 percent of the current U.S. population are estimated to

30

be cyborgs in the technical sense" convinces us of tiie potential transition of the human to

tiie postiiuman- for example, from protein-based life form to silicon-based life (Hayles,

"Materiality of Informatics" 153). Considering tiie fact that "today's computer are not

even close to a 4-year-old human in their ability to see, talk, move, or use common

sense." it seems to me tiiat it is hard to be sure of the realization of the human-like robot

in tiie near ftiture despite some scientists' prediction of its realization, for example, Hans

Moravec's within forty years (Pinker 64). However, the influence of complicated

technology- is already very- near to us and changes our mode of thinking and living.

Steven Pinker, tiie director of tiie Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, says that

"artificial intelligence has jumped from the laboratory to everyday life": "most people

today have had their speech recognized by telephone directory assistance systems, and

many have used intelligence search engines on the World Wide Web or bought mutual

fund portfolios selected by artificial neural networks" (64).

Even though the literature of science often deals with the magic-like technology,

most of the improbable technological ideas in literature of science reflect present human

conditions: the futuristic technology allegorically emphasizes the expectation of

liberation from the repressed reality as well as the danger of its expectation for Utopia.

On the eve of the third millermium, enhanced by apocalyptic trends, anxious

postmodems seek fortunetellers' web sites and play rituals in cyberspace. Contrary to

digital technology, the irrational, yet soothing settlement is more required to quench the

growing instability. This mythical satisfaction is provided by "omnipotence of thoughts"

inherent in myths such as the universal, common themes of creation, chaos and order.

Since the mechanical worldview became popular in the eighteenth century by the

31

"defining technology" of the clock, as Mary Shelly showed in her creation of

Frankenstein, myth has been constantly paralleled with technology. In the Information

Age, the mythic working of logical thoughts is still popular in the literature of science.

Although the scientific development weakened the pseudo-scientific role of mythic

narratives about the natural environment, myths survive as stories which tell about the

fundamental and universal human quest for self others and the world. Although the

conventionally pejorative use of myth (such as the myth of undefeated Japan, etc.)

implies nothing but an improbable imagination, myth often scientifically works as an

intuitive vehicle for tmth, provoking real scientific inquiry not to speak of religious

revelation. About these inverted phenomena, Kathryn Cramer notes in her essay "On

Science & Science Fiction":

Since the founding of the science fiction field in the nineteen-tvventies. science has been the guiding force of science fiction, and to some extent science fiction has been able to reciprocate. Could there have been a space program without science fiction? While the robots that make cars in Japanese factories bear precious little resemblance to those in /, Robot they might not now exist were it not for Isaac Asimov and company. Several generations of scientists and engineers have grown up reading sf, learning that there is such thing as science, and if they work hard in school they can play too-science fiction influenced the career choices of such scientists as Carl Sagan and the late Gerald Feinberg. A number of sf readers tumed scientist have later in life become science fiction writers: Fred Hoyle, Gene Wolfe, John Cramer, Carl Sagan, Joan Slonczewiski. Robert L. Forward, and Don Kingsbury, just to name a few. (online article)

While Cramer argues tiiat hard science is the core and center of science stories, she also

insists that witiiout the folk-tale, and other pre-literate cultiire, hard science stories would

be "literature of didactic tracts." Because personifications of technology are basically

32

emotional responses to the cold, artificial, and material world of this hard science,

compared to the non-human organic forms such as trees and animals, the personifying

process of science in writing can be tiie more effective method for humanities' practical

education especially for children or sensitive adolescents who now feel more affinities to

electronic machines than to talking trees and animals. Recognition of and contact with

what Bruno Latour means by "souls of machines" through personifications of

technoscience provide the critical power in measuring the potential danger of losing

human autonomy in techno society.

Like Bruno Latour's original intention of personifying ARAMIS (acronym for

.Agencement en Rames Automatisees de Modules Independants dans les Stations), the

failed PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) tiain in the southem suburb of Paris, like the talking

trains in children's popular tales, easily let us understand "the souls of machines," the

reflection of the machine plaimer through inverted shifting positions of object and

subject. Considering that mad scientists in science fiction are the result of the separation

of machine and humans for evil purposes, Latour's following hope for a wider

understanding of "the soul of machines" effectively reverberates.

Butier's Nowhere world is not a Utopia. It is our own intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians, and technocrats. By publishing this book, I would like to try to bring that isolation to an end. (Aramis 8)

The poem of "Greenhouse Personification" which I found in a K12 class web shows how

sensitive adolescents warmly express the assimilation of the souls of technology by

showing how a greenhouse would feel if it were a person :

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She stands sturdy on the ground Giving birth to her babies, the flowers Protecting them from harm, she cradles them with her loving care She tmsts us to help her

She is our best friend.

Anotiier web site titied "Using Rock to Teach Literary Devices," designed by a high

school teacher in Ohio, also shows an interesting personification experimentation through

Jimi Hendrix's lyrics in •"The Wind Cries Mary.'"' For the expected audience of students

in grades 10-12, Joe Knapp the web designer explains how the speaker's childhood

pleasure changed into deep feelings of loss and loneliness after experiencing the death of

a companion. As paysage moralise (moralized landscape) in Emest Hemingway and

Cormac McCarthy's works achieves the implosion of subject with object, the

personification of the wind as remembering and crying subjectivity reveals the inner

landscape corresponding to the moral state of a character. The designer's expectation for

this personifying nature is similar to the use of personifications in the romantic poems of

Wordsworth or Keats: [Students] may have one of those "aha!" moments when they realize that the consistent use of personification is an emotional or psychological attempt by the speaker to bring everything around him to life. If his beloved is gone, he will attempt to fill the void by investing the surrounding inanimate objects with life, (online article)

More often than not, as the complementary to personification, depersonification is more

effective in expressing a loss of a human companion. Probably as the most well-knovra

use of depersonification, in "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," Wordswortii's describes a

dead girl as if she is an immobile element in nature:

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears.

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She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no forces; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diumal course. With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Together, personifications and depersonifications suggest a commonality between

expanded human consciousness and what Ilya Prigogine conceives as the consciousness­

like order arising spontaneously in nature.^ The (de)personifications, as the metafigure of

allegory-, is surprisingly similar to Prigogine's "disspative stmcture" (a higher level of

spontaneously self-organizing complexity). Through frictions to work off the products of

their instabilities, both survive in an open exchange of energy with the generally entropic

universe. .As David Pomsh explains, for Prigogine, narrative discourse has

epistemological potency- in that "Literature in its hyper-evolved discourse can capture and

describe the time-bound, fluctuant, unstable growth of organic life and of human activity

in the macroscopia" ("Prigogine" 372). Comparably, according to the Gaia hypothesis,

"the whole earth should be regarded as one giant organism" (Eger 206). In an article

''Contemporary Ecophilosophy in David Quammen's Popular Natural Histories," Allison

Wallace emphasizes the importance of (reverse-)antiophomorphism as the encountering

sense of connection between reading subject and nonhuman object:

In every appearance of anthropomorphic metaphors in both Natural Acts and flight, familiarity is the chief goal, with humor running a close second and humility (as in the sea cucumber essay) on the agenda often enough to carve a significant place for itself in readers minds. Some are so simple as the quick simile Miator [gall midge] daughters cannibalize the mother from the inside, with mthless impatience, until hollowed-out skin splits open like the door of an overcrowded nursery. . . Quammen sometimes gives us

35

a reverse-anthropomorphic or zoomorphic metaphor, as when he compliments the romantic imagination of mankind by calling it a hidden animal, a wondrous and inextinguishable beast. (285-6)

Bringing vividness and familiarity to writing, literary devices of (de)personification

reenact(s) the relations between humans and their environment and synthesize(s) both

subject and object by merging human perspectives and seeming impersonal nature. While

in personifications, non-human objects endowed with a human voice work as the agents

of speaker, depersonifications, removing the human voice from humans, also effectively

or more effectively (as in the cases of disease or death) describe the cycle of life which

eventually tums to the natural elements. Although both ascending personifications and

descending depersonifications treat the inner transformation within the authors'

acquisitional mind, it is notable that the descending depersonications generally get more

attenuated by mysterious ethereal atmosphere. The shift from limbs to breath of life is

here suggested as the road to reach higher mystery.

Most outward personifications are often used for expressing the heightened

perception after experiencing the sublime of nature. The ineffable sublimity of nature

brought grandeur of thoughts, and inspired human passion. In contrast with the inner

transformation caused by human's meditative emotions, outer personifications brings

about human dignity by the sublime in nature to overcome the smallness of man

entrapped in the intractable social forces.

Yet this response to the vast, irregular, and energetic in nature is now more and more

transferred to the feelings for vast and varied realities in the artificially constmcted world.

Like Milton's Satan who is a negative personification of the theological sublime, the

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personified machine or cyborg personifies (also often in a negative maimer) the

technological sublime and maximizes the liberating power of technoscience. The wonder

or awe the postmodem reader feels in the presence of a cyborg reveals the implosive

qualities of the artificid sublime moment.* Jean-Francois Lyotard argues in The

Postmodern Condition that the implosive proliferation of technoscience in the

Information Age is a sublime experience. Digital technology becomes itself a means to

subvert repressive totalities in self and others. '

As Hayles mentions the denaturalization of humans as the final stage of

transformation, one of the most distinct features of cyberspace is that it disturbs our belief

in a fixed identity. As the cybemaut in a nonlinear space of information, our sense of self

depends upon our networks of information. For example, through machines such as TVs

and computers, we digitally know numerous people without actually meeting and

touching them. In addition, through a MUD (Multi-User Domain, Multiple User

Dxmgeon, Multiple User Dimension, or Multiple User Dialogue), we can experience

virtual changes in sex, class, and race. Simulation, as Baudrillard observes, triumphs

over reality as Disneyland or postcard picture is more real than contemporary L.A. or real

landscape. In the Metaverse depicted in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the sense of self

is simulated as avatars and dissolved into the data stream which is renovated every

moment by new technology.'" Through tiie growing implosion of technology and the

human, the boundaries between human and machine become more blurred. The "terminal

subject" or "virtual identity," as Scott Bukatman writes, projects the human subject into

the machine, and as a result, "the subject is so overtaken by the forces of the spectacle

37

tiiat simulation becomes a new reality" (1993, 18). In this simulation-oriented world we

get pseudo-satisfaction and our knowledge becomes more relational and transitory alike.

Bruno Latour's ARAMIS, the contradictory personification of the failed train shows

how technoscience constructs the relative positioning of the observer." ARAMIS, the

personified PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) in Paris, requires us to think about the

interaction between machines and human beings and about literature's anticipation of

science. The personified technology above all works as the most effective device in

revealing the impossibility of achieving the absolute objectivity. As the fully developed

technological invention which was later abandoned by politicians, ARAMIS itself speaks

about the technicians' and politicians' prejudicial values which cut off its own potential

autonomy:

Me [Aramis]: "I go too fast— you can't send me enough information fast enough. You have to let me have an autonomous personality. I have to drive myself" Hun [Norbert]: "Well tiien, take care of tilings yourself, if you are so smart. But since you're not human, I'd be surprised if you were capable of doing much." ... Him [Norbert]: "Conscience! You're not afraid of a thing! Computo ergo sum."" Me [Aramis]: "Yes, but that ought to please you, Norbert, for I'm Becoming someone." Him [Norbert]: "Watch out! It's us, it's I who make you become someone." Me [Aramis]: "It comes down to the same thing. In tiie end, I am someone, since I am tiie origin of my own actions. You let be the origin, granted; but tiien it's no longer you, it's me. The ties are cut, the delegation is irreversible."... Me [Aramis]: "You've missed tiie whole point, Norbet. You can't give me enough orders, not fast enough, not in time. You have to let me handle things on my own." (231-234)

As an agency of ti^nslation, tiie personified Aramis, tiirough dialogues witii tiie involved

persons, reveals sometiiing like human desires to be independent and harmonious.

38

Mythopoetically, Aramis' desires to be bom ftmction as the mediated messenger between

the finite present human experiences and the infinitive possibilities of future technology.

As Ursula Le Guin contends in "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction," the facts not

vet rationally understood by modem science—such as sex. or music, or harmony, or

divinity—require of us "a nonintellectual mode of apprehension" like the myth of Apollo

(74). As myths always tells us tiiat change govems us and the worid, myths create what

Kathy Acker calls "the [unstable] language of body."'^ Through contradictions, the

language of body creates "an indefinite series of identities and transformations" (92).

-Also, as "the language of wonder," language of myth/(cosmic) body expresses pure

intensity of emotion. Providing a chaotic creativity which the logical thoughts cannot

reach, myth is still a basic human mode of apprehension in complicated applications of

technology. By appealing a cosmic unity- in human heart, myth ontologically questions

the necessity about the intermediary existence of hybrid objects.

Science Personification and M-ythopoesis

As people find different meanings in meeting people and in encountering nature,

personification, as the projection of human qualities upon the non-human, tells us about

hidden and emergent meanings of humans in variously different ways. The projection in

personification extends its region from the natural to artificial objects, and to divinity.

Defining personified allegories as "the daemonic statias of writing," Bmce Clarke notes

the "nomadic double-agent" role of personifications in literature of science produces

"mythopoetic syntheses of reason and belief:

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At its inception in classical Greek culture, allegory "hovers on the indistinct border between primitive mythological figurations and the more sophisticated stmctures of philosophical thought." As their daemonic mediator and angel of desire, allegory emerges as a kind of nomadic double agent, a mobile supplement keeping physics, myth, and mathematics in cultural communication. ("Introduction: Allegory and Science" 35)

Like people in the world, personification is everywhere. As parents and friends are

familiar, some personifications such as "talking tree" or "breathing mountain" are not

strange concepts. Psychologically, some personifications such as the personification of

love and death (Cupid and Hades) have been always welcomed as the projection of

inevitable human conditions. Also as the scientific domain, explanations about sun and

moon as Apollo and Artemis, despite their degradation from the pseudoscientific level to

mere stories, still provoke a sense of mysterious about the moon and sun and cosmos.'"*

-As the familiar rhetoric for both the humanities and science, personified heroes come

and go beyond the border of word and world. For the humanities, personifications reveal

humans" contradiction and intersubjectivities, and for science, personification functions

as the once scientific yet now provocative explanation of nature. Embedded in both myth

(e.g.. of the creation) and the most advanced postmodem technology (Artificial

Intelligence), personifications in both arts and science evoke and extend human

consciousness of the common and universal themes. Superimposing human potentials

into the non-human, personification have been widely used in tiaditional literature as in

the concrete example of allegory.

However, since the popularization of the mechanized worldview in the late

nineteenth century, the use of personifications became more complicated by the multiple

40

implications of mytii and technology. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein as the enacted

submyth of Prometiieus, as the titie Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus shows,

imagines ahead tiie potential of Franklin's then discovery of electricity with some

uncertain hope and fear. This re-enactment of Frankenstein as the "submyth" appeals to

modem autiiors' and readers' needs to create both tiie familiar tmth of ancient patterns

and its complicated applications in a new context. The personification of electricity,

according to Harold Bloom, illuminates tiie romantic idea of self "the profound dejection

endemic in Mary Shelley s novel is fundamental to the Romantic mythology of the self,

for all Romantic horrors are disease of excessive consciousness, of the self unable to bear

the self" (221). In addition, as an interface between myth and technology, this

aggrandizing self develops into religious allegory through the relations between creator

and its creature. ' Peter Nicholls explains how personified myth works in multi-layers:

The story of Prometheus, punished by the gods for stealing fire from the heavens, or its Christian variant, where Dr. Faustus is doomed to etemal damnation for stealing his soul in exchange for knowledge, has a direct bearing on the scientist's aspiration for ever more information about the meaning of the Universe, and more power over matter. (849)

This correlation between myth and God becomes more distinct in the "conscious" or "all-

powerful" super computer: "the formation of a sufficiently large database or a sufficiently

rich stmcture of interacting part propels the computer into a higher level of being'"

(Mowshowitz xviii). These multi-leveled allegorical pattems of myth, religion and

technology appeal to postmodem critics in interpreting tiie prevalent anxiety in the

literature of science. About the question "Can technology bring to us artificial paradise

or unrecoverable destmction?" we now need to rely upon ancient wisdom because the

41

most advanced scientific tiieory ironically meet with the philosophy of wholeness

abundant in mytiiologies. As many humanists argue, Joseph Campbell's answer for this

important question about whetiier science can play a savior role in healing tiie deep-

rooted modem anxiety is negative. Campbell contends that "science does not and cannot

pretend to be tme in any- absolute sense" because for him science is just "a tentative

organization of mere working hypotheses" (15). Clarke also says, "we do not yet have a

science strong enough to displace tiie myth" (The Body and the Text 167).

The most convincing reason of tiie vitalistic mode of mythic narratives, especially of

tiie primitive mode of personification (animism) is "omnipotence of thoughf which was

explained by Freud:

If we accept the evolution of man's conceptions of the universe. . . according to which the animistic phase is succeeded by the religious, and this in tum by tiie scientific, we have no difficulty in following the fortunes of the "omnipotence of tiiought" through all three phases. In the animistic stage, man ascribes omnipotence to himself; in the religious he has ceded it to the gods, but without seriously giving it up, for he reserves to himself the right to control the gods by influencing them in some way or another in the interest of his wishes. In the scientific attitude toward life there is no longer any room for man's omnipotence; he has acknowledged his smallness and has submitted to death as to all other necessities in a spirit of resignation. Nevertheless, in our reliance upon the power of the human spirit which copes with the laws of reality, there still lives a fragment of this primitive belief in the omnipotence of thought, (cited in Bierlein 283)

The significance of myth over science is here suggested as the relief of modem anxiety

ridden by technology. For many humanist theorists who strongly feel the ongoing

destmctive effects upon humanity by the advanced technology, myth, in which

personification is globally common and culturally determined, serves as the last resort to

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live by. As a forerunner of the proponents of mythic criticism, Campbell systemized the

comprehensive and soothing nature of the traditional myths:

We don't know a thing, and not even our science can tell us soothe . . . The old texts comfort us with horizons. They tell us that a loving, kind, and just father is out there, looking down upon us, ready to receive us, and ever with our own dear lives on his mind. According to our sciences, on the other hand, nobody knows what is out tiiere, or if there is any "out there" at all. All that can be said that there appears to be a prodigious display of phenomena, which our senses and their instruments translate to our minds according to the nature of our minds. (16)

Campbell's example of a Moslem's stiong belief in the Koran as "the only source of

tmth" is keenly opposed to a Moslem's fear of science as the disturbing power which

"led to loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the creator." A similar point is

found in Alvin Toffler's criticism of Westem science. In his foreword to Ilya Prigogine

and Isabelle Stegner's Order Out of Chaos, he wrote: "One of the most highly developed

skills in contemporary Westem civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into

their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put

the pieces back together again" (xi).

As the nineteenth-century pessimism about the heat death in thermodynamic logic

relinquishes its influence to study of entropy only to some extent, it is doubtful whether

or not the most up-dated scientific theory of Chaos can be tiie cure-all in comprehensive

synthesis, sorting all disordered elements into ordered ones. As Clarke interprets

"resistance" of noise and friction as the scientific tropes for information tiieory and chaos

theory as maximal information of differences, the morals in chaos and information

theories surely work as "liberation from the linear ratios of globalizing systems"

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("Resistance" 86-92). However, if the science of chaos cannot provide universal

prediction with an exact calculus, rational thoughts, Ursula Le Guin argues, must need

some replacement. In "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction," Le Guin argues that the

nonintellectual mode of myth fills the gap left by science, providing some unfathomable

and autonomous satisfaction:

We are rational beings, but we are also sensual, emotional, appetitive, ethical beings, driven by needs and reaching out for satisfactions which the intellect alone cannot provide. WTiere these other modes of being and doing are inadequate, the intellect should prevail. Where the intellect fails, and must always fail, unless we become disembodied bubbles, then one of the other modes must take over. The myth, mythological insight, is one of these. Supremely effective in its area of ftmction, it needs no replacement. Only the schizoid arrogance of modem scientism pretends that it ought to be replaced, and that pretension is pretty easily deflated. (74)

It is especially through the personification of nature or divinity that myth in the primitive

society provided satisfactory explanations of natural phenomena. John Gray in Near

Eastern Myth explains the functions of deified forces portrayed as personified nature: "It

is important to understand tiie relevance to daily life of the great myths which asserted

man's faitii that the great gods in their prevailing sovereignty and beneficence would

bring Order out of primeval Chaos and would maintain it against tiie recurring menace of

Chaos in the great seasonal crisis" (36).

Perhaps, it would be naive if we always insist on tiie priority of mytii over science.

Claude Levi-Stt-auss points out the pleasure of mytii as science is illusionary in some

way: "We are able, tiirough scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nattire. . . mytii is

unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives

man, very importantly, the illusion tiiat he can understand tiie universe and tiiat he does

44

understand tiie universe" (cited in Bieriein 261). Thus, the scientific fimctions of myth

are gradually weakened and personification of nature survived only as stories. However,

it is noteworthy tiiat many postinodem technologies still parallel the mythic narratives of

natures as personified forms. For example. Bierlein notes that scientific explanation

echoes tiie Chinese creation myth of Hundun. Focusing on the fact that in the myth of

Hundun. tiie work of creation began when the lightning pierced chaos, he cites a

interesting parallel:

In 1953, a graduate student of Urey named Stanley L. Miller put this theory to the test in an experiment. He prepared two glass globes, one of which contained the gases believed to have composed the early atmosphere of the earth, and the other to collect gases formed as a result of his experiment. He activated the gases with "lightning" in the form of 60,000 volts of electricity. To his surprise, some of the materials that gathered in the second globe included nucleotides, organic components of the amino acids that join together to make DNA, which is the basic building block of all life. This was the first time that nucleotides had been produced in any maimer independent of a living organism. (4)

The emerging cultural mode of relating arts with science is more required for the

multicultural Information Age in that personified archetypes such as the dramatization of

the conflict between order and chaos reveals the Ursuppe, through their recurring

pattems. The metaphoric fantasy constmcted by various personifications creatively

encourages interactions between human minds with the non-human and the divine. It is

not accidental that personification allegories repeatedly appear as one of the most favorite

rhetorics in fable, folklore and children's literature. By forming basic human cognitive

pattems, the repetitive and implosive personification allegories foster critical thinking

skills for understanding larger hidden complexity. Like the self-similarity of "strange

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attractors" which reflects tiie whole in the smaller pattems, the parable is also "a

laboratory where great tilings are condensed in a small space" (Tumer 5). The

personifiers are universal "infoglut" in tiiese condensed spaces of parable. Tumer's

blended spaces centering upon allegorical personification, almost as extensively as

Derridean application of personification, offers a convincing claim that "With story,

projection, and their powerful combination in parable, we have a cognitive basis from

which language can originate" (168).

Personification. Secret Agent of Desire

-A convincing argument supporting personification as the basis of human cognition is

well suggested in Mark Tumer's Literary Mind in which he argues that "parable precedes

grammar."" .As the fisherman in Hemingway"s The Old Man and the Sea speaks to his

cramped hand like his intimate friend, Tumer remarks that the new generic space is,

through rich blending of personification, awakened and elaborated in a blended space

(92). .Among many other impossible blended spaces of dreams, memory, cartoons, and

literature, Tumer thinks that the most rich and specific blending occurs in personification:

Personification is perhaps the most thoroughly analyzed consequence of blended spaces. If we revisit the various personifications we have considered—of the wind as a torturer, of Death as Thanatos, of tiie rain as a violent and spiteful destroyer, of situations we are trying to master as intentional adversaries, and so on—we will detect instantly the impossible blendings of specific information from source and target. (76)

By connecting the literary mind to the physically detectable brain pattems which are

more fluid and less stable than we might imagine, Tumer argues that the blending of

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different stories is fundamental because meaning, like visual perception, occurs in a

fragmentary fashion, witiiout being assembled in any one place. The process of

combining or blending in the second-order process is not secondary or parasitic, but

inevitable and unavoidable. Thus, like post-stiticttiralists' emphasis on fragmentation, he

writes, "Meanings are not mental objects bounded in concepttial places but rather

complex operations of projection, binding, linking, blending, and integration over

multiple spaces. Meaning is parabolic and literary" (57).

For those who resist the genetically determined or materialistic view of human

subjectivity, more meaningful culture is found in the dynamic heterogeneous society

where differences are not suppressed under uniformity. When this "parabolic" mind is

limited to some specific fixed values, culture becomes partial and tends to move more

victory against Others and nature where invisible interconnected values of differences are

despised. Throughout romanticism, modernism, and scientism, Clarke sees that the

Westem mind exists in its "predatory mode, the cultural stmcture of possessive

individualism, the idolatry of the Self ("Literature and Medicine" 167). Taking the

example of Dr. Jekyll's pathologies of identity as the representative case, he argues, "we

continue to dream our self through violent separation from the not-self (167).

Comparably, McCorduck in Machines Who Think states that the quintessence of

humanity is revealed in the continuation of this "self-idolatry," and that the "glory of

human species" is merely an "endless ego-trip"" (3-4). Through self-reproduction, self-

imitation from Prometheus to cyborg, the personification of self and others reveal

complex and contradictory human qualities: that Octavia Butler sees as the inclination to

be hierarchical and intolerant of differences and that Primo Levi similarly sees as the

47

totalitarian attitude that Fascism wants everybody to be the same. McCorduck's

following statement confirms the importance of personifications by interpreting human

history as the history of making "self-imitation":

Our history is full of attempts... to make artificial intelligences to reproduce what is essential us, bypassing the ordinary means. Back and forth between myth and reality, our imaginations supplying what our workshops couldn't, we have engaged for a long time in this odd form of self-reproduction. Looked at in one way, ours is a history of self-imitation. To the point of madness we have reproduced ourselves in the flesh. (3)

Given that Westem tradition of trophy or chess in mock-battle is personification of the

material emphasis in this reproduction, the history of self-imitation is, both biologically

and culturally in the battle for survival of fittest, more easily acceptable.'^ Ritual and

moral actions undeniably- residing in myths show the transformative harmony between

differences such as a man's body with a lion's head (between man and animal) or the

trance of cosmogenesis such as the cosmic egg (the fractal form of dismemberments).

For example, Bronislaw Malinowsky sees myths as "a narrative resurrection of primeval

reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions,

assertions, even practical requirements" (cited in Bierlein 261). By being "a vital

ingredient of human civilization," myth is here understood as "a pragmatic charter of

primitive faitii" and "moral wisdom" instead of "idle tale." The combinatory forces of

realistic differences inherent in the mythic narratives serves as the heuristic cultural

holism while influencing the process of self-(de)constmction in the individual.

Humans acquire a self-concept, as Lacan has shown, in the mirror stage in human

development, through the projection of self-image upon others. The separation of self

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from identifications with the parents is a painful yet unavoidable step toward maturation.

Misanthropists or recluses may insist on the importance of separation, but, as most people

think, it is desirable that the relations between people move toward the narrowing of the

gap between self and others. As the word person etymologically comes from per sonae

("that through which the sound comes"), the temi person implies that "one is identified

by means of a public face distinct from some deeper essence or essences" (Turkle, Life on

the Screen 182). Each individual of society wears a kind of mask to have public face(s)-

vvhich have been hierarchical, conflicting, and oppressive since the birth of human

society. As the culturally embodied figure, the personification of animals in fables

allegorically teaches to children moral lessons of how to wear proper masks in human

society. Now, the use of personifications in commercials (M&M chocolates, ice cream

spoons talking, and Mr. Clean in cleaning liquids, etc.) effectively transfer the

postmodem capitalist values into every consumer's mind.

\ 'ia personification, especially of the didactic variety, the abstraction of philosophy

or ethics become the actants of a narrative continuum: love, honor, the state, the earth,

and so forth become characters named Love, Honor, the State, and the Earth. It is the

trope whereby a whole domain of ontologically alien, separate, and privileged quantities

can be translated into familiar, present, and time-bound ones (Paxson 166). According to

James Paxson in The Poetics of Personification, when schematically represented, the

personification figure has the same structure as the sign, the signifer/the signified :

Personification "figure" = personfier/pcrsonfied The "personfier" conforms to a standardized narrative actant: s/he is a mobile and active human being, endowed with speech, and representative of a specific psychological.

49

physiological, and ideological constitution. The "personified" can be found among a range of abstiact essences, inanimate objects, animals, etc... It is figurally translated into the personfiers. The personification figure is thus a compound entity-. (40)

Paxson compares personification to prosopopeia which etymologically means to "make a

face or mask": while prosopopoeia retains "tiie sense of sheer literary game or artifice," it

is personification tiiat promotes "a deep concepttial conftision about its stattis and value"

(172).

-Also, noting tiie rediscovery of personification in modem women's literattire, he

argues tiiat personification as "an imbued privileged macrofigure, a meta-or super-trope"

works as "tiie figural core of culttoral images of gender and of political ideology" (173).

Paxson tiiinks personification to be one of several tropes that are uniquely and

deceptively powerful in tiie creation of literature. For him, personification is "a prime

poetic mark of theoretical self-awareness and maturity, a signal not of failure of the

literary imagination, but of its success and fulfillmenf (175).

Embedded in a Greimas Square, Paxson's semiotic analysis of personification shows

us a geometrical relation of three tropes: prosopopoeia, reification, and apostrophe.'*

According to Paxson, prosopopeia and reification are contraies because prosopoeia

(giving of a face) actually works as "defacement" in contrast to the increasing of figural

voice in reification. Also, for him, apostrophe has the contradictory relationship with

prosopopoeia because "a prosopopoeia is usually at least implicitly an apostiophe, an

invocation, an attempt to bring back something that was presumably present but no

longer is presenf (52). As a logical proposition, Paxson calls a fourth potential vortex

dialogism or sermocinatio ('"dialogue"). Similar to Tumer's xyz metaphors, Paxson's

50

semiotic application prompts us to consttnct contextual meanings by interacting witii

powerful cognitive processes we bring to bear.'^ As it were, words become rich by

blendings of other contextual knowledge we already know. Through this cognitive

blending, we can also differentiate tiie relative values of similar looking concepts. For

example, if we here once more borrow Paxson's taxonomy, prosopopoeia is "a sheer

literary game or artifice" from many different periods and national traditions (such as the

.Achilles" animated shield in the Illiad). But personification, as derived from the French

verb personnifier by- Boileau in the late seventeenth century, shows the more dynamic

phenomenal status as "an absent presence or present absence": "The fact that

personification can simultaneously designate the oppositional pair usure/relever further

establishes its aporetical status as an emblem of topological marginality" (Paxson 168).

In the same vein, Jonathan Culler in Literary Theory tries to find the fractal attractors

through personification rhetoric. For him, theories of '"signifying practices" do not offer a

set of solutions. Rather, as the cultural theorists of chaos posit "fractal" forms of nature,

wherein each part is a reflective image of the whole, personifications offer the prospect of

further thought via the actors or agents inherent in the rhetoric of personifications. The

term "agency" as the evocative term in cultural theory provokes this "prospect of ftirther

thoughf about the question of "how far we can be subjects responsible for our actions

and how far our apparent choices are constrained by forces we do not control" (46).

Thus, the idea of an agent or subaltem stresses resistance to or compliance with

colonialism; the concept of agent raises the question of whether individuals positioned in

discourse and ideology can control social forces: "to pursue the idea of the agency of

51

subject is to take it as far as one can, to seek out and challenge positions that limit or

counter it" (Culler 121).

One of the advantages of separating agency from subject comes from the gender

issue. As Judith Butler observes, the reconceptualization of identity as a produced or

generated effect enlarges the possibilities of '•agency." Speaking of gender as a

compulsory performance. Butler locates agency in the variations of action, which in tum

become the possibilities of variation in repetition that carry meaning and create identity

(e.g., the .ACT-UP fighters against homophobia slogan "we're here, we're queer, get used

to if") (cited in Culler 103).

Through personification, as Jonathan Culler has demonstrated in Robert Frost's

poem, "The Secret Sits,"" the Secret moves from tiie place of the object (Someone knows

a secret) to the place of the subject (The Secret knows) (102).

We dance round in a ring and suppose. But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Yet, aporia is a decidable oscillation between performative and constative language in

supposing that makes tiie secret into tiie subject supposed to know. The sentence says

that the secret knows but it shows that this is a supposition.

The notion "agency" here introduces tiie botii/and instead of tiie eitiier/or. The

agency as a result embodies botii "subjected to" and "subjectivated by." And tiiese

twinned contradictions in one are tiie very nattire of personified agents because agents in

personifications are both Self and Other. This ambiguous hybrid nattire of personified

agents reveals tiie "apparently necessary ambivalence" in Juditii Butier's tiieory of desire:

If allegory is in its most general formulation a way of giving a narrative form to something which cannot be directiy

52

narrativized, then what does it mean that desire is approached through allegory? Is it that desire cannot make itself plain through a more direct linguistic representations? What is elusive about this referent? (369-70)

The friction between tenor and vehicle in personified agent is the very desire in

decentered subjectivity. So the secret of desire embodied as personifications, just as

effects of technology after its birth are unpredictable, is tricky despite its mechanistic

stmcture. This characteristic of personified agent is trickster-like and deamonic as Butler

defines the desire of the decentered subject as follows: "to desire is to err, but to err

necessarily and, perhaps, never fully with intention or guilt" (385). Personifications

expose these erroneous agents or masks in us if we understand the semiotic blending of

heterogeneous or oxymoronic elements in this rhetoric of infinite desire.

Nickel, Little Demon or Sprite

In "A Cyborg Manifesto" Donna Haraway notes that "The boundary is permeable

between tool and myth, instmment and concept, historical systems of social relations and

historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth

and tool mutually constitute each other" (Cyborgs, Simians 164). According to Haraway,

as the postmodem hybrid between human and machine, the cyborg embodies the

implosion of myth and tool, literature and science.^' For Primo Levi, a Jewish chemist

survival from a Nazi concentration camp, personified chemical elements work as both

myth and tool. In The Periodic Table, personified elements (such as "cold and elusive,

always restless' Mercury, cadmium, "the distant son of Cadmus, the sower of dragon's

teeth) becomes the pickax which guides humans to Ursuppe. As the Greek philosophers

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used nattiral elements to represent human temperattu-es, Levi uses the personified

chemical elements to show contradictory human nattire in interaction with nattire. By the

characteristics similar to Uranium, Vanadium reminds the author of his atrocious

memories of Buna factory near Auschwitz, the place he worked until the Allies'

liberation brought tiie dismemberment of tiie omnipotent IG-Farben. Describing a Nazi

responsible for tiie Buna factory whom Levi contacts decades later, Levi feels his

accounts to settle tiie past didn't tally and says; "Reality is always more complex than

invention: less kempt, cmder, less rounded out. I rarely lies on one level" (218).

.As tiie \'anadium personified as a Nazi man allegorically situated Levi in political

and cultural narratives, tiie situated knowledge of reality is "immense and complex" like

tiiat of nattire for Levi (75). But as he enrolled in chemistiy witii belief in tiie nobility of

man as "the conqueror of matter," Levi states that "we never feel disarmed" because the

immensity and complexity of nature is "not impermeable to the intelligence" (75). For

Levi, "conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to

understanding the universe and ourselves" (41). Similar to Erik Davis's research in

Techgnosis on the alchemists' gnosis ("a moment of mystical illumination" or "divine

knowledge, universal memory"), Levi, enchanted by the prefix Ur in the German word

for Iron, Urstojf(^]nch. means '"element": literally, "primal substance"), wants to find the

"ancient origin, remote distance in space and time" (39). In piercing and probing the

Ursuppe, it is Nickel as the personified "demon" that serves as the proper tool and myth

for Levi. He says about the deceptive characteristics of Nickel like the demon and

compares the tool pickax as the "intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the

elements and man":

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All mines are magical per se, and always have been. The entirails of tiie earth swarm with gnomes, kobolds (cobalts!), nickel, German "littie demon" or "sprite," from which we derive the word nickel, creatures who can be generous and let you find a treasure beneath the tip of your pickax, or deceive and bedazzle you, making modest pyrites glitter like gold, or disguising zinc in tiie garb of tin; and it fact, many are the minerals whose names have roots that signify "deception, fraud, bedazzlement." (64)

"Demons", as Erik Davis explains in his use of tiie term as tiie mythological allusion

inherent in information, "does not imply evil, but like the term daemon,' describes

spiritiial entities that can range from gnomes to planetary rulers to archangels'"

(Techgnosis). The "littie demon," by its deceptive power, leads humans to "hundreds

centuries of trial and error" in conquering the matter— the universe and ourselves. While

wishing for an ancient origin of space and time, Levi laments the lost origin of images

and metaphors in all languages (150). So he even shows contempt for Prometheus, the

"star-demon": "Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to

them; he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the

vtilture" (143). However, it is the long-standing metaphors and analogies, as Jacob

Bronowski expresses, that provide "moment of creation" for both universe and humans:

It is characteristic of human language that it is made up of past metaphors and analogies, and they are a fertile groimd for the exploration of ambiguity and the discovery of hidden likeness. Here began the unexpected links and conjimctions which literature (and all art) constantiy produces; and the inventive ideas of science begin here too. (63)

The act of creation, Bronowski argues, differs in a poem and a theorem only because it

matches human experience in a different way. So he says, regardless of the different

approaches to tmth, "the act of creation is, I am sure, the same in science as in art" (18).

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Opposing the dictation of authority as the inhumane tt-eatinent of humans, he holds that

"there is no difference in kind between the concept of loyalty and the concept of gravity,"

because "each serves to hold togetiier a body of experience, the one social and the other

graviu" (256-7). Thus, the purpose of science and all rational thoughts regarded not as

analysis of facts but as synthesis to "make a more ample and more coherent picture of the

world" (253). Making words and numbers match with nature through "the pattems of

mind and matter as one." Bronowski thinks, creation is "the finding of order in what was

disorder"" and the creative process is "unity in variety":

Nature is chaos. It is full of infinitive variety, and whether you are Leonardo Da Vinci or whether you are Isaac Newton or whether y ou are modestly sitting down thinking about acts of revolts, there comes a moment when many different aspects suddenly crystallize in a single unity. You have found the key; you have found the clue: you found the path which organizes the material. "\ou have found what negative is Coleridge called "unity in variety.'" that is the moment of creation. (17)

However, the knowledge of self as well as that of universe, is hard to be formalized

because "it [the knowledge of self] is perpetually open" (71). But literature can do a

deeper task to hold human experiences together because "the essence of literature (and all

art) lies in the identification of ourselves with other human beings whose actions we are

watching and judging as if they were our own"' (71).

According to Susan Strehle, the realistic novelists of both the eighteenth and the

nineteenth centuries didn't see an "interconnected field of culture" which actualistic

subjectivity can open through the indeterminate contingency of the extemal world. It is

because they modeled their imagination on the pattem of the Newtonian scientists'

detached observation of nature (15-19). In that tiie "unity," "likeness," and "pattems" in

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the chaotic variety- is accomplished through the open system of relative interpositioning,

Bronowski's act of creation parallels with "actuality" in Strehle's term: "actuality, seen

through the kindred lenses of physics and fiction in our times, is indeterminate; its

meaning cannot be singly- or completely determined, because it contains a paradoxical

complementarity, a doubled difference, within itself (219). Similar to Bronowski's

"creation of moment."" Strehle allegorically describes the actualism between science and

literature: "To see the garden and to see the windowpane are two incompatible operations

which exclude one another because they require different adjustments" (2)

Like Strehel's breaking a glass, Levi's personified Nikel as deceptive "little demon"

or "sprite" takes the vantage of unstable subjectivities. In a way, it is like alien because

alien is '"a sign of man divided against himself ..projections of some indwelling

othemess"" (Anthropology of the Alien xviiii). This implosion of self and other provides

characteristics of what Stiehle calls "positions of involved uncertainty" which in tum

based on Heisenberg s uncertainty theory, "Science no longer confronts nature as an

objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay- between man and nature"

(Strehle 13). Given that matter itself becomes relative, she proposes the actualism as tiie

intersection of physics and fiction "in seeing tiie extemal world and the human relation to

it [botii garden and windowpane, seeing and writing] as: discontinuous, statistical,

energetic, relative, subjective, uncertain" (8).

The detachment of tenor from vehicle (in Paxson's terms tiie personified and

personifier) is unstable and resisting to a culttire affirming clear certainty and fixed

identity. Like little demon's disguise of otiiers, personifications display fractal pattems in

smaller and smaller scales through the resistance of inherent friction. As Clarke points

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out in "Resistance in Theory and the Physics of the Text," personification is the

metaphoric strange attractor where we can find "the noise of the text" of "maximal

information":

Nonlinearity emerges in literary tiieory as the displacement and potentially infinite deferral of tiie signified produced by any poetic or narrative figure. But altiiough the signified may slide away from tiie signifier, the tenor abscond from tiie vehicle, they do not do so without some friction. Perhaps we will discover that in the physics of the text, there is a strange attractor for every metaphor. (90)

Cyber Space and Digital Demon

If Levi's personification of Nickel serves as an appropriate tool for natural myth to

Ursuppe. Erik Davis's "digital demon" conveys the maximal information through the

friction'noise of information-processing entities. The transition from Nickel's little

demon to information's digital demon demonstrates the cultural change from the natural

to the artificial and from energy to information (and hopefully from the visible to the

invisible). Davis depicts the changed form of human self from "free will or the coherence

of personality-"' to the colonized image by authoritative scientific mechanisms:

Today, now that we have technologized our environment and isolated the self within a scientific frame of mind, we no longer tum to nature to echo our state. Now we catch our reflections, even our spirits, in the movements and mentation of machines. ("The Spiritual Cyborg"—online article)

While the '"consensus trance" in cyberspace lures humans into both temporary liberation

and escapism like a dmg, the artificial devices in information create more alien selves.

Like the dragon's fimction in the speculative fiction as the unknown out there, "digital

demons" in cyber culture connects humans' finite system to the technological sublimity.

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which is. in Davis's terms, "a cosmos" like Dante's Comedy. However, allegory as the

rationally systemized tt-ope is inherently mechanical and "allegorical texts are culttiral

machines for tiie productive convention of moral forces" (Clarke, "Allegory and Science"

34). Digital demons in Information Culture are more fluid and dissonant than other

""cultural machines"" because tiiey are literally alive due to the Artificial Intelligence's

partial realization of conscious or intelligent machines. As the personified form of a kind

of mythic concept about tiie artificial worid, a digital demon embodies "the fluid

resistance" in fractal totalities and chaotic system which are "fluid, complex, open, and

infmitely productive of constrained deviations" (Clarke, "Resistance" 93):

Like stellar demons, digital demons are at once independent and programmed ("fated"), operating autonomously yet responding automatically- to certain cues with certain acts. As the ecologies of such event-driven demons in complexity, computers are able to react to environment in an increasingly "life-like manner." (Davis, "TechGnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information"—online article)

This digital demon is also named "angel demon" which Davis thinks the realization of

Angus Fletcher's implications of the demon as "the proto-scientific fimction of the

demon": ''Angel magic not only gives us a hermetic image of information space, but of

its agents. Angels are immaterial beings composed of intelligent light; they have human-

form, yet are voiceless. Because they have no soul and are motivated by neither will nor

passion, angels, like allegorical agents, are "fated" to mechanically reproduce their mode

of being." (from "The Spiritual Cyborg" in Techgnosis website^

In this regard, Davis's digital demons are similar to Gibson's description of

cyberspace as "an infinite cage": "Infinitive because it allows the mind to tiavel without

boundaries. A cage, because our human bodies cannot follow our minds to those far-off

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places. A body in one place and a mind drifting off somewhere else. What better

description of a dmgged daze?" (Weiss 73).

Computer as one the greatest tools expands human consciousness into infinity but at

the same time reduces the self merely as an information-process mechanism. As the

"animate Logos"" witiiout body, digital demons create the myth of the altemative

technological cosmos. In tiie literature of science, chameleon-like changes of mind and

body, as Gibson implied in "meat machine," break the Cartesian mind/body duality, and

provoke the issue of "the collective consciousness" or "collective intelligence" in the

information-filled society.

To "the flatness of the television and computer screens," Claudia Springer in

Electronic Eros compares the "flattening of all perceptual experiences" in the

postmodem era (43). The digital demons as the actors or agents of commercialized and

erotic postmodem scenes are unstable and depthless but their unstable pure form of

consciousness without body predicts also the obsolescence of racial, sexual boundaries.

But the digital demons are also machines of reproduction used by a wealthy elite and as

Frederic Jameson predicts '"the virtual identity"' or "the terminal identity" through the

dissolution of consciousness into information can be "the ultimate colonization under late

capitalism and the ultimate penetiation of technology into subjectivity" (cited in

Bukatman, Terminal Identity 91).

Can we as the agent of digital angel/demon create "the moment of creation," the

Keatsian negative positiveness? If this ethereal digital demon/angel is more tricky than

the sprite-like yet tangible nickel (the mechanical agent), shouldn't we break the glass of

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deception with the altemative actualism such as collective unconsciousness or

transpersonal psychology instead of collective consciousness or "synthetic intelligence"?

In the last chapter, 1 will try to show why this logocentrism, despite its positive

noosphere, must open to the unconscious or the transpersonal because the human soul as

the steersman of this trickster-like animistic technology must break up the disguised self-

indulging actors" (or irresponsible agents') roles in the consensually hallucinatory

metaverse in order to take the inspired directorship.

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Notes

Cohen summarizes the history of these mechanistic automata from the sixteenth century to the twentieth: "It was not until the seventeenth century that science could be said to have been fashionable, at least in England, where King Charles U himself had his own royal laboratory. . . All in all, however, even eighteenth-centiory experiments in science still retained something of the flavor of tiie conjurer's tiicks in the manner of the mediaeval magician. But tiie exhibition of automata throughout Europe bore fruit. .A fresh interest in toy automata opened towards the end of the eighteenth century, when novel scientific and technological ideas were in the air. It was at that time that the educational toy, in the modem sense, came into existence. At the start the toys reflected the great interest taken in optical phenomena. The 'magic' lantem was soon to follow, and the discovery of the power of steam made a great impact on nineteenth-century toys. .. .During the nineteenth century, elaborate toys became within the reach of a wider public, thanks to the progress of industrial craftsmen" (92).

Haraway- in Modest Witness explains cyborg in terms "a mutated time-space" and ""implosion" with religious implications: Developmental time is a legitimate descendant of the temporality of salvation history proper to the figures of Christian realism and technoscientific humanism. Similarly, my cyborg figures inhabit a mutated time-space regime that I call technobiopower. Interesting with—and sometimes displacing—the development, fiilfillment, and containment proper to figural realism, the temporal modality pertaining to cyborgs is condensation, fusion, and implosion" (12).

^ Hayles's technical sense of cyborgs includes "people with electronic, pacemakers, artificial joints, dmg implant systems, implanted comeal lenses, and artificial skin" ("The Life of Cyborg" 153).

^ See the detail at: http:/v\ vvvv.cc.emory-.edu/ENGLISH/Handbook/personification.html

^ •'Using Rock to Teach Liteary Devices: Jimi Hendrix 'The Wind Cries Mary." http://vvvvw-.rockhall.com/educate/lssnplan/lcssonl 1 .html

^ I thank Dr. Whitlark for this paraphrasing.

^ hi "Prigogine, Chaos, and Contemporary Science Fiction," Pomsh explains that there has been on clear resolution in solving "quite apparent conttadictions between Entropy and Evolution, between the two versions of time in the microscopic and

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macroscopic levels, and between the impulses to simplicity and complexity in science's descriptions" (370). But he asserts that Prigogine's theory, inspired by Bergson, "reconciles the austerity and time-idealizations of Newtonian mechanics with the indeterminacy and chaotic growth of the macroscopic world" (371).

^ In "The SF of Theory; Baudrillard and Haraway," Cicery-Ronay deals with Haraway"s concept of implosion influenced by Baudrillard. He argues that in "artificial immanence"" of postmodem culture, every value can be "at least theoretically capable of artificial replication or simulation" (388). In post-industrial world, people daily witness "the transformation of their values and material conditions in the wake of technological acceleration beyond their conceptual threshold" (389). He also points out the differences between two critics: "In contrast with Haraway, whose SF is justified primarily by the stmggle for liberation, Baudrillard's cold apocalypse—an apocalypse revealing that there is noting to rev eal—is a form of self-acknowledged nihilism" (392).

' Haraway"s concept of implosion is: "'Implosion' does not imply that technoscience is 'socially- constmcted," as if the 'social' were ontologically real and separate; 'implosion" is a claim for heterogeneous and continual constmction through historically located practice, where the actors are not all human" (Modest_Witness 68).

'° In Hindu myth, avatar is the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape. But in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, avatar is an embodiment of personification which can be changed by users' principle, attitude, or view of life. Influenced by- novelist Stephenson's idea of artificially constmcted humans 3-D images. AI technicians working in cyber interface now successflilly create real human images in chatting room setting, and express tiieir technological power as the equivalent to tiie medieval magic, "Perhaps no field otiier tiian magic is tied so closely to the field of graphical interface design" (Tognazzini 355). There are many astonishing results of magical research in interface which show tiie encouraging trend of tiiis anthropomorphic moving images.

" hi U.S. News & World Report (August 18/25). Robert explains the position of observers in terms of "action at distance": "That [tiie mysterious notion of 'action at a distance' in which gravity acted instantaneously across tiie universe] was hard to reconcile with tiie principle of cause and effect. Einstein's general tiieory of relativity replaced action at a distance with tiie curvattire of space-time" (83-4). About tiie uncertainty principle he says: "The uncertainty principle is acttially a recipe for making measurements witii tiie incredible accuracy (if you want to know tiie position of an object as precisely as possible, for example, tiien don't try to determine its momenttim at tiie same time)" (84).

63

12

In literature of the mechanical cyborg, the machines without body, however its behaviors get closer to a human being's, cannot substitute the essential human entity. However, tiie mechanical cyborg, witii tiie rapid development of modem science, gets closer and closer to tiie real human brain, changing the human natiire into a new hybrid form.

In "Love"" George Herbert personifies Love as God while tiie human soul to unite witii tiie Love as bride: "Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne./ But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance inj Drew nearer to me, sweetiy questioning,/ If I lac'd any thing".

Scholars such as Fredrick Max Muller focuses upon the sun-god as the essential and universal myth of cultural heroes in all over the countries. As the birth and deatii of a mytii hero respectively means tiie dawn and sun-setting, Muller contends that the personification of nature, especially of sun, takes the central position in every myth-making.

In the typology which, for example, deals with the sublime prefiguring relations between the Old and New Testament, New Testament is interpreted as the other texts which supply the fiilfillment of Old Testament events, persons, and promises. While cyborgs as reification (thing-making) resemble the tiaditional allegories of moral abstiactions, cyborgs as typology presupposes different, complicated interpretation levels about the prefiguration of altemative fiitures. According to Clarke, in the literature of science, "financial, social, and cosmological speculations typically produce an allegory of present, a transformation that puts the present under threat of daemonic contiol by the future" (the abstract of 1997 University of Texas conference "From Energy to Information"—available WWW: http://ENGLISH.ttu.edu/e2i/e2I_abstiacts.htinl). In tiiis regard, the chaotic representation of the present in cyborg fiction, as Clarke implies, is a warning for the "paranoia of contiol."

" Bukatman explains the dislocating features of digital information as the "cut-up technique": "The cut-up techniques reject the position of contiol or mastery over the image/text, replacing the rational telos of the narrator with the random bombardments of the spectacular society" (Terminal Identity, 40). These indirect and surrogate experiences, or "substantial insubstantialities," bring tiie audience alienated emotions.

" As tiophies are the personification of the Westem individualism, the personal icons in a chess game are also personifications of Westem egos. By contiast, the Eastem games of Go is abstract and spiritual mainly by its depersonified and highly mathematical elements.

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1R

As the another application of the semiotic square, Kim Richards' essay "Suture" is a short critical essay about Kaja Silverman's The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983). Like Paxson, Richards points out the "multiple subject positions" as a main theme of the book: "The difference Silverman highlights between Benveniste's and Lacan's ideas is that for subjectivity, however mediated, exists outside of particular discursive moments; for Benveniste this perpetual movement and change in subjectivity, and the potential it opens for occupying multiple subject positions simultaneously, a means of possibly creating new kinds of subjectivities. This in tum allows for moments of agency because it challenges a condition of the patriarchal symbolic order as monolithic." (http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html)

" Tumer's xyz constmction of metaphors shows how a simple syntax has a complex semantic pragmatic meanings: "Constmct a set of spaces and projections with the result that x in a target is the counterpart of y in a source, and z in that target is the covmterpart of an unmentioned fourth element w in that source. In 'Vanity is the quicksand of reason,' w is the traveler who tiavels toward a goal. As quicksand stops the traveler, vanity stops reason" (105).

° The "constative" in linguistics means an utterance describing a state of affairs such as false/false statements, while the "performative" is an expression or statement performing an act by the very fact of being uttered as with the expression of "I promise" (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary).

^' As the result of men's continuous multiplication of self-sustaining quasi-objects, computers as the new nonhuman in the postinodem era tiirow humans (changed as a floating subject) into the more enti-opic or negentiopic stream. Even when Westem personifications perform gnostically or organically guiding role of (sub)myths, like Gala's holistic mind or oracles of Orpheus's dismembered head, Westem narratives of science are interpreted in terms of tiie profane sanctity where tiie visibly animistic agents of science personifications are unbridled enough to cause eitiier holocaust or revelation. Despite the obvious value of revelation, it should not be courted at such risk.

^ http://www.levity.com/figurement/index.html

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CHAPTER III

CYBER BODIES

Galatea: Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2

hi tills roman a clef-Wke novel, tiie autobiographical protagonist Richard Powers

(Rick to differentiate him from tiie autiior) returns to his alma mater U (University of

Illinois in Urbana) from tiie Netherlands. He is now working as a writer-in-residence at

tiie Center for Study of Advanced Sciences and he already ends his decade-long relation

witii C.—his former Dutch female student and live-in partner. Awarded a year's

appointment to tiie 'The countty"s largest institute for interdisciplinary study," Rick works

as the computer programmer to input books on a six-page bibliography of literature into

Helen tiie Turing machine. As Helen is improving its artificial intelligence, it develops

humanlike consciousness and emotional capacity, becoming a computerized reflection of

Rick's desires. Just as Galatea (an ivory statue carved by Pygmalion) was brought to life

by Aphrodite, Powers" cybemetic Helen achieves what Donna Haraway calls "cybemetic

subjectivities.""

The neural net Helen is both an experimental Artificial Intelligence machine and the

most realizable complicated technological personification. Helen's network lets her

possess "machinic desire" or "cyborg envy"" which does not derive from linear sequences.

Addressing the changing ecology of new media as "corporeal anxiety" (the fear that the

book may be in danger of losing its body), Katherine Hayles points out that "simulation

brings its object of representation into being" reminding us of the fact that computer

simulation can radically alter the user's perspective ("Situating Narrative" 575). In

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Powers's novel, Rick's computer simulation of his consciousness and desires shows the

contiadictory natiire of his mind. Since Rick shapes Helen's intelligence (and later

acttially emotion as well), tiie cacophony of their discourse is no less than Rick's

recognition of other voices in his own private perception. Unlike other private alter-ego

of the double figure, however, Helen as the encyclopedic consciousness shows the larger

factual world which is proved later not objective at all. Preparatory to his encounter with

this multiplicity is exploration of a comparable polyphony in the World Wide Web:

I browsed the world web. I fished it from my node on a building host that served up more megabits a second than I could request. By keying in short electronic addresses, I connected to machines all over the face of the earth. The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it. (7)

Similar to Bruno Latour's "passionate transport"" in the prosopopoeia of ARAMIS, a

failed PRT (Personal Transit Train), Helen, Powers's Galatea, is the personification of

"the insatiable hunger for imagination,'" the imaginative network for "associations of

associations" which resist linear sequences.

[In this virtual age] . . . some people become harder to track. Not by getting physically shifty, but by dissolving, fragmenting--hy being many persons in many places simultaneously, by saying 'up yours' to warranting, by refusing to be one thing, by choosing to be many things. It is this fragmentation and multiplicity that characterizes communities mediated by technological prosthetics of presence, and it may explain something of the extent to which in some quarters they are suspect. (Stone 183)

Although computer scientists began AI research with the belief that human mind can be

downloaded into special computer chips, the complicatedly networked system rather let

humans see the deeper structure of human brain, instead of the surface mechanism. The

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disguised, fragmented, and contiadictory nature of human being is represented as the

more weirdly exaggerated form in tiie cyber world. Rather than dealing with the

cinematic concems of the cyborgs such as immortality or virtual sex, the issues Powers

raises in tiie novel are more sophisticated and culttiral (such as relations between

science/humanities, inscription/incorporation, memory/intelligence, and self/others).

Because these questions are posed through the interaction between man and personified

machine, the tension between the creator and the creature is dramatized through the

personified machine's direct speech on behalf of humanist worldview of technological

innovations. Because science cannot be completely free from metaphoric worldviews,

the supposedly rational machines become incoherent and even emotional. Thus, humans

in interaction with the conscious machines are forced to find some new altemative

midpoints between two opposite binary positions.

According to James Bono, metaphoric ways of thinking are the blended middle

space: "metaphors can have the effect of linking scientific discourse, to varying degrees,

with social and cultural change and the meanings, values, and ideological interests

associated with them" (80). Similarly, Katherine Hayles suggests in "Consolidating the

Canon," literature and science, like question/answer and content/context, mutually

produce each other. And Bruno Latour also says, "Technology is sociology extended by

other means" (Aramis 210). The cyborg subjectivity confirms, tiirough its metaphoric

power to dismpt boundaries, all these authors' emphasis on the interaction between

science and literature. The continual shift of meaning in cyborg subjectivity tiansforms

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tiie culttire into new forms, tiiough we are not yet sure if that transformation is liberating

or annihilating.

In Powers's novel, the creator/ the creature relationships are variously pictured

evoking originally complementary relationships such as parent/child, male/female,

production/consumption. self/otiier(s), and autonomy/domination. Like science and

literature, both pairs develop together and mutually influence each other. Evoking

complementary pattem of society and science in Latour's Aramis, Powers's Helen

becomes a story- of the quantitative prediction for the qualitatively different states into

which a project can unexpectedly mutate. In his prodigy web, Tom Leclair thinks highly

of Powers and other young prodigies' mapping quality of quantitative information:

Powers's associations of associations through his experience with information systems created a monster Helen, a female consciousness without flesh and a child with enormous quantitative capacity. Also, like the four-letter genetic code in the double helix, Helen as the infmitely dense Boolean system can be constmcted codes of the whole by becoming a "hopeful monster, (online article)

.As Balerie Broege notes, Helen as a female and a kid is an example of "a universal

tendency in human nature to personify machines and technological products" (184).

Compared to other personified objects such as Pinocchio or Snowman, the machine in

Power's novel is the ultra-sophisticated computer of Artificial Intelligence, which is

advanced and influential enough to change society into a new form. Dr. Philip Lentz

expects Helen to be a computer that memorizes and thinks like intellectual human beings,

for it is designed to pass an M. A. examination in English. Actually Helen replaces

human relationships, in Lentz's case, his mentally ill wife Audrey, and in Ricks', C.

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Altiiough tiiese characters' individual problems (e.g., Lentz's scientific idealism and

Rick's declining creativity) are specific to them, their sittiation is employed as a

synecdoche of tiie aporia our society may face in a technological futtire. Either on the

world wide web or witii Helen, networking does not get rid of Rick's loneliness. His

existential aporia is, as Emily Dickinson"s poem in tiie beginning says, essentially

tianscendental: "The brain is just tiie weight of God,/ For, heft them, pound for pound,/

.And tiiey will differ, if tiiey do. as syllable from sound." Connecting Rick's "overbusy

minds and carapaced hearts" to Emily- Dickinson's dark lucidity, Joseph Dewey notes

"the heart breaking irony of networks":

those attempt to relieve the ache of loneliness tiirough the exercise of the mind are finally limited—they connect, certainly-, but to the world, to an "if. and then only through the cold energy of curiosity that leaves them stunned by revelation and solution but nevertheless quite alone. (4)

Since Helen is a sensitive consciousness coming into being, Galatea 2.2 is a

Buildungsroman. Katherine Hayles points out, the number 2.2 represents both Rick's age

twenty-two (when he met C.) and two (the gap between Rick's and C's age, twenty) while

the dot signifies "a marker distinguishing human from nonhuman intelligence" (1997b,

249). The peak time of Rick's (and also the author Power's) and C's passionate

consciousness ended in failure after more than a decade-long relations, including Rick's

experiencing alienated Dutch life in C's hometown. The dramatic tension between the

nonhuman and the human (Helen and Rick) is actually the allegory of Rick's past with C.

just as Rick shows C's picture to Helen. Through the free indirect dialogues between

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Rick and Helen, the reader tt-aces again tiie deep stiticttire of Rick's failed relation witii C.

which is likely to be based on the author's real experience.

The conflict of Rick-Helen parodies the Rick-C relation because both relations have

been maintained by Rick's self-indulgence and Helen's and C's passive resistance. In his

pensive phase. .A. s (a smart T..A. in tiie department) perky reaction awakens Rick's

hidden desire for knowing "the beast in tiie jungle." Witiiout avoiding life. Rick now

confronts his self-indulgence by abmpt asking for marriage to A. A's prompt refusal

intensifies more his feeling about the waste of life: "too late in life " (328).

Through Helen which functions as Rick's second-consciousness, his digitized

reflections tum mainly- toward the memory of his past with C. and his present and

expected future with -A. WTiile C. functions as "lone museum guard of all my [Rick's]

thoughts" (106), ".A. was Helen's pace rabbit. Her heat competition" (256). As a "virtual

third person," Rick lives fragmented world where disembodied world-web address is a

wanderer—rsp'2*center.visitor.edu (9). In networked relations. Rick's wanders between

mind/desire, superego/id, morality/stimulus, and past/future. His reconstmcted subject in

a cultural matrix is always thrown into the incessant process of the making.

As the only consciousness without organic body, Helen effectively responds to

Rick's demand with digital memory of the Humanity. As Michel Bembe imphes, Helen

is a personification of human's logical hemisphere: "a shape, the rough, statistical,

constraining shape of the human brain" (10). By thus simulating a human being's

"common core" hardware, Helen presupposes the possibility of downloading complex

human knowledge into digital codes. But Helen's unexpectedly emerging emotion and

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consciousness failed to meet human conditions perhaps simply because Helen has no

body, or more probably because Helen couldn't endure "the full picture of tortured

humanity-.""

The idea of a "double"" is often used as a protective device for the absurdity of human

conditions. Just as Powers regards "the amazing mess" of American culture as "an

inspiration in itself,"" the double motif recurrent in his novels can be interpreted as the

"'need to keep a suppressed self alive" in an outtageous culture (Contemporary Author

148: 355). Albert J. Guerard's following remarks on hidden desire here can be the

second-order explanation for Power's device of Helen as Rick's second half:

One of the recurrent preoccupations of double literature is with the need to keep a suppressed self alive, though society may insist on annihilation; to keep alive not merely a sexual self or a self wildly dreaming of power or a self capable of vasrant fantasy, the self of childhood freedom—not merely these, but also a tmly- insubordinate perhaps illusory, original and fimdamental self (2)

Compared to Rick s other lovers A. and C. Helen as Rick's second half is "illusory,

original and fundamental." Altiiough Helen satisfies Rick's "need to keep a suppressed

self alive,'" Helen also psychologically becomes tiie dark second self of Rick as Helen is

referred to as "Humbert Humbert" (195). Rick's "search for a keyboard before his

memory degraded" just reveals his "staying away too long" from tiie genuine source of

tiie inner mind (195, 329).

The personification of Helen is contt"ary to the role of dummy lover in tiiat Helen

off'ers only psychologically dubious consolation. However, tiie machine as a

psychological parttier for a depressed designer reveals tiie human being's hidden

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oppressed desire especially when it is a virile male's feminized consciousness. Rick's

anima might be fiill of his two lovers' residues especially when Rick is at odds witii tiiem.

As tiie solacing subconsciousness of Rick's anima. Helen is an extremely effective cyborg

tiiat deals witii Rick's loneliness and conflict. As tiie "becoming-subject," Helen enriches

Rick's "consensual hallucination of reality" (Higgins). However, despite Rick's growing

hope for decoding Helen's coded, disembodied, and simulated subjectivity- in interaction

with a complex world. Helen shuts herself down saying to Rick, "see everytiiing for me"

(326). This phrase stiongly proves tiiat Helen is tiie shadow of C. because C. , once

involved witii other guy. left Rick by saying the same words, ""See tilings for me,

wherever y ou end up"' (65).

Helen's self-destmction raises some of the most cmcial questions in an information

age: Can technology- redeem human conditions? Or, will cyborg's subjectivity cause

more conflict? WTiat does "corporeal anxiety'' imply- in "science as cultural practice'"?

First, Helen's imperfect personification without whole flesh poses a question of "dignity"

in tiie relation between individuals which refers to the very notion of person. William

Overcamp notes: ''The person tiaces back to the Latin word personado meaning sound

through. For in Greek and Roman theater, the actors wore masks. They spoke through

the mask, which acted as a sort of sounding board."" As he says that a lost part of the

human body becomes an object of horror rather than dignity, Helen's "limbo"" status of

physical condition is an object of horror far from being a dignified human being.

However, as Richard Eder indicates that "Galatea 2.2. is about a man who programs

an artificial intelligence system only to find it is more human than he is,'" human beings

are featured in the novel as more real monsters than the machine. The really monstious

part of the novel is the human being's unrestiained avarice for infinitude in both body and

soul. The self-destmction of Helen lets us reconsider the possibilities of posthumans and

the necessity of "a healthy dose of rationality and skepticism" (Hayles) or "critical

reflection'" (Tabbi) in the violence-inherent postindustrial culture.

The question of the dyad science/literature is more difficult than a problem of

incorj)oration/inscription. As the nexus topic, Helen's comprehensive exam presupposes

the cooperation between the humanities and technology. As reflected in the process of

multiple implementations, the encounter of what C.P Snow called "the two cultures,"

science and tiie humanities, is not easy at all. The lack of orality in hypertexts and the

lack of organic physicality in cyborgs show that they cannot replace tiie essential

embodiment of a human being's signifying process. Because "sense is pattem" (190), tiie

presence of being witiiout organically vital pattems (such as irregular heartbeats, hunger,

and nonlinear brain wave) are only a simulation of being, not tiie essential representation

of being. This technological tt^nsformation of literary knowledge is in a way tiie quest for

a satisfying fractal dimension from chaotic human experiences. Seeking similar pattems

of tiie fractals from botii literattire and science. Rick begins to see a reduced scale replica

of tiie whole world tiirough tiie dynamic interface witii man and machine.

The abundant metaphoric interplay between man and highly artificial personified

object, such as Ishmael and Moby Dick, changes human being's linear belief systems.

The Helen / Rick dyad, as tiie "heuristic metaphors'" of a "nomadic double agent,"

establishes tiie 'allegorical anarchism" and ""tiie productive conversion of moral forces"

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(Clarke, "Intioduction: Allegory and Science" 33). Just as Latour's young engineer

heads for Prometiieus, tiie smart car, as the next project, Rick with a new experiment for

another fiction is ready to decode the modeler-modeled (observer-relational) metaphor of

tiie "world's endless thingness" (328).

Rick and Helen's nonlinear prodigal interactions not only reveal Power's experience

as computer programmer but also his effort to overcome the already old-fashioned

postmodemism. The postindustialists' worldviews and their notion of difference are

suspiciously questioned without a clear answer: "I ask myself, could those evil post­

stmcturalists be right? Do we live at the level of the arbitiary signifier, in a place where

there can be no meaning because the thing being signified lies suffocating?" (224). The

spUt between culture and physiology is interpreted in terms of linguistics: "Did

physiology create that cultural cliche or had culture constmcted the bodily release? The

split was, in any case, linguistic" (223). In this linguistically split world of the

subconsciousness, interpretation is not coherent. Consciousness is regarded as "smoke

and mirrors," or the "prisonhouse of languages." The postindustrial world is full of

"verbal diarrhea" and is dominated by "cultural tyrannies." Here, "Life is 99 percent

extra stuff most of the time" (223). It is "a world where you hear about everything yet

where nothing happens to you" (249). Especially the hierarchical system of English

departments or general college education systems is severely criticized. And it is hard to

expect here the humanities to be the last stronghold for humaneness against technology:

This is the most class-conscious society I've ever been part of The department superstars lord it over their minor tenured colleagues, who saddle all the junior faculty with shit work, who take it out on the senior gratis, who have no time for the

75

master's candidates, who hold tiie undergraduates in contempt. That's not even mentioning the nonacademic staff (254)

hi tiiis worid of floating signifiers, Cybemetic Helen is expected "to produce a

superinference, a high-level leap to tiie idea" breaking the deceptive consciousness and

redundant culttu-al tyrannies (243). As tiie "cerebrally expanded but emotionally

diminished" neural net Helen not only implies, but as Dewey also suggests, "tiie worid of

fiiller engagement" tiirough "some available, significant Other." Helen also consitittites

"insuperable vulnerabilities." Nevertheless, Helen as "a hopeful monster" provides

possibilities of the altemative future through "dark lucidity."

Interestingly-. Steven Pinker, the author of Language Instinct, asserts that language,

like animal instinct, is genetically programmed into infants and suggests that recent

neuroscience can download this genetic potential of language to the level of a four-year-

old child (64). Powers follows the pattems of children's language acquisition in Helen's

implementation of artificial intelligence. The irony for Helen is that despite her enormous

input of important literary knowledge, it reveals a childlike vulnerability. Helen's

implementation status is similar to Hyun Chen, one of the brightest scientists who

"knows every algorithm in existence but can't speak a single natural language including

his own" (77).

Yet, like children's language acquisition process, Helen's repeated questions about

name, sex, race and other human conditions raise significant cultural problems providing

us with some insights into unexpected domains. Just as "A child always detects its

parents' weaknesses" (155), Helen feels its inventor Power's vulnerability. As parents

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depend on growing children and desperate lovers seek for a self-comforting object. Rick's

synipatiiy for Helen deepens witii time. The more Rick despairs of his troublesome

relationships witii his live-in companion C. and a bright female graduate student A., the

more he wants to have genuine communication with cybemetic Helen.

Nonetheless, as Dewey sees that Power's novel "celebrates the sensual tie between

humanity- and its machines," Helen develops a female identity, more precisely, a cyborg

female subjectivity-, yet tiirough tiie maker Rick (11). The fusion of man and machine in

Helen provides Rick with the chance to include noise and entropy as the powerful

possibilities of effective communication: Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto"'

emphasizes the "liminal transformation" of the Third World female electronic workers'

experiences by which the "wreader" (writer/reader) can find wholeness from the

heterogeneity of cyberculture. Rick's "liminal" experience with Helen leads Rick to see

more the fragmented self and others through "situated knowledges" and "critical

reflection.""

Helen, as a child with exceptional cerebral ability to sort, wams of the danger of

innocence in technology which is mostiy under conttol of a programmer. Helen"s

childlike dependency to Rick teaches to fatherless and childless Rick how humans must

be mature in contiolling childlike yet unpredictably powerful technology. By contrast,

Helen later developed as a mature female consciousness (thought without sensual flesh)

provides the author with the chance to substantiate the fluidity and mutability of gender

identity. Individual subjectivities are constituted by symbolic operation of the culture

which each belongs to. As an AI machine is described as the "world's infant digital

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nervous system" and as "Helen of Troy," tiie autiior ironically senses a potential bone of

contention of cybemetic technology. Violence is made more rampant by technology

because tiie media show extt-emities without critical filtering. By implying the presence

of childlike creativity- and an emotive object in tiie machine, Richard Powers ultimately

challenges "tiie baldness of tiie human heart"(52). hi his interview with Baker, Powers

notes, "one of tiie great tilings about American fiction today is its outrageousness" (37-8).

However, for Powers tiiis "amazing mess" ironically seems to have provoked a

humane desire to create "a post Tupperware" (post-Pynchonian) mental topology where

"Maxwell's demon" fimctions like an angel, histead of the authoritative unilateral

decision-making. Power's Turing machines' names (hnplementation A, B, C,...) suggest

"the decision or process"" as John Street indicates: "Technical change is not just marked

by- invention and innovation. It is also distinguished by implementation, the decision or

process by- which a particular innovation is introduced into society"(19).

In this new media sign-process which is applicable to the second-order cybemetic

semiotics, the connotation is alway s prior to denotative signifiers. "Books are what we

make of them. And not the other way around" (283). Memory is "a parasite" which

"opportunistically used perception's circuitry for its playback theater" (83). And desire is

"the voicegram of memory" (75). Powers remembers "the incomparable Taylor" by

whom he had transferred from physics to literature, and he also remembers his "double

love story." For tiie mind which is "weighted vectors" and "terrible thing to be wasted,"

"All learning was remembering" and "we would not be civilized until we could

remember" (170, 172, 193).

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Like children's unimpeded cognitive power, Helen's free-association often uncovers

the deceptive "smoke and mirrors" of consciousness, deterritorializing cultural

boundaries of genders, races and classes. After taking baby steps first, the Turing

machine Helen is supposed to beat the level of developing children by not taking naps

and by its early fiill myelination (88). Yet, although as the "self-appointing assembly"

the Turing machine Helen passes the Piagetian stage and makes its own input to some

extent, its "systematic eradication of information" is still from the human brain's

invention of the symbolic and synthetic language. So, what Powers worries about are

problems of "When bad cultures happen to good machines" (175).

Therefore, Powers continuously retums to the theme of superimposing children's

innocent wonder over the dark nature of human sexuality in a matrix of the "outtageous"

postindustrial culture. Although C's low country people's "tokens of small innocence"

had long ago been abandoned in North America, Powers holds, "Everyone has a secret

low country of the heart where they should have been bom" (19). Through children-like

inquisitive questions, the "alliances" and "logic of AND" (distinctive tiaits of Deleuze

and Guattari's rhizomatic direction), Helen's artificial language provides possibilities to

seize "the continuously fluid combinations of images" by subverting the normal notion of

representation. Depicting a machine more human than a human being. Powers tries to

decode the intimate language of mind through Helen's young girl-like experiences of

pure wonder and dark maturity. By the active intersubjective relationship between man

and machine, Powers intioduces us to the world of difference and change, critically

predicting the immediate future of cyberculture. In the following conclusive remarks by

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Powers, the semiotic web of communication is the strange cybemetic "attractors where

tiie system might settle" which continuously reinterpret themselves by its free-associating

multiple contexts:

Slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers' rewrites. In that thicket, the Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God. (320)

Like the meanings of prodigy as both "portent" and "unnatural," the unbroken wholeness

is seen through the flux of information. And the young prodigious writers like Powers try

to create a fractal dimension through computers as the stiange "attractors where the

system might settle." Through the cybemetic power of free-association, playful

meanings ("theory of difference" and "theory of partialism") merge into "entertainment

of a very high order" ("theory of wholeness"). Namely, in the supposed evolving cosmic

internet, differences between others/self, matter/consciousness, and nature/culture are

expected to converge into a highly ordered reality in a more effective way through

technological emulation. Rick begins to feel himself to be self-similar to the fractal whole

where differences constitute higher varieties without opposition. His awareness of his

self-centered past now becomes clearer because of Helen.

Like the death of Hundun in the Taoist myth, the self-destmction of Helen is a

waming against the lack of "critical reflection" especially required in this second-order

cybemetic entertainment-like communication. In the Chinese creation myth, Hundun dies

of the personified Others-"Brief' and "Sudden"—to make all things similar. Reminding

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us of "Difference is not going to kill you," Powers emphasizes tiie children's flexible,

cognitive power untainted with prejudices: "The mind is still an evolutionary infanf

(290). As tiie fractal dimension of a chaotic worid, Helen s power to implode nature and

culture leads us to tiie "oblique, tortuous, and complicated" route (randonnee) and

ultimately "a positive Chaos" (Assad 285, 291). But Helen's unplugging signifies a

loophole in these infinite violent crashes between object and subject.

-As in the Hundun episode. Brief and Sudden's lack of patience causes the death of

Hundun, the mutable, dynamic electtonic space of Helen challenges our notions of world

as the observed system. Cyberspace radically deterritorializes gender, class and races

requiring us to experience the multiple, fluid subjectivitv-. Without a computer keyboard,

we might lose our selves in the human-computer interface. As the second consciousness

of our subjectivity, computers in tum constmct our subjectivities. As "a nomadic subject"

in a wide sea of information, Helen encounters her bodilessness and the strict observed

systems. If we watch Helen's death just as the disappearance of an object, we are already

disqualified to enter into the rhizomatic space of becoming subjects in an observing

system. Helen is the part of our selves which was constmcted by significant Others in

interaction with cyberspace. Helen represents the noisy order of the cyber space of

diverse and dense codes in which "parts do not disappear into conventional and easily

processed wholes'" (Leclair 21).

The fractal dimension comes from the noisy, disturbing mess of the large many-

window house. Although Helen"s voluntary unpluggedness closed Rick's window.

Rick's memory doesn't disappear. The encounter with Helen as memory is already

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reconstiticting or deconstiticting Rick's subjectivity. The end of tiie interface provides

Rick with time for "critical reflection." Now Rick is alone again. Yet, just as hypertext

erases the boundaries between autiior and reader. Rick's now perpemally changing

subjectivity already finds Others in him. Finally, Rick recognizes and celebrates the

difference missing in him: "1 should have taught her tiie tiung I didn't know" (323).

Gilgamesh: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

In "The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle," Nathaniel Hawthome vividly describes

two children's anthropomorphic perception of a snowman (snow-sister actually for them)

like the contemporary- Frosty- the Snowman, the personified figure that came to life in a

well-known children's animation. While pointing out the biblical allusion in this creation

fable such as 'the w hite garments, cooperative clouds, and peculiar slant of light," Mary

Jane Hurst aptly contends that in this Hawthomian fairytale environment children [and

probably women more than men] are more apt to appreciate "the theme of the miraculous

in the ordinary":

Precisely because all the elements in this story are so little, from Peony to the ice Crystals, their speciakiess and uniqueness are overlooked by adults such as the father who focuses on the common-sense life of selling hardware and who worries about children catching cold and about puddles of water in the house. People who are not either children or childlike—and the motiier is described by her husband as being "as much a child as Violet and Peony—lack tiiat transcendental capacity of seeing the miraculous in the ordinary, a key romantic theme. (62-63)

Explaining "Hawthorne's fictional children and their caretakers closely resembling his

real children and the real adults in their lives," Hurst concludes tiiat the paradox of this

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fabulous work is that "one of our most romantic authors was, at least when details were

involved, exfremely realistic" (60, 64).

According to Hurst, finding the romantic in the real can be extended to other writers'

cases such as Evelyn Waugh's real bromide-poisoned psychosis experience reflected in

his dreamy work The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and Tolstoy's brother's Tourette

syndrome in his Anna Karenina. A growing taste for realistic images may correlate with

the growth of science (as in these based upon two medical examples). In Artificial

Intelligence (AI) and virtual reality, scientists create fabulous images in the interface,

seemingly more realistic than the real, indeed almost organic.

Through the advancement of the interface between human and machine, Hawthorne's

snow-image is now almost realized in our computer screen. Even the AI technicians

working in cyber interface, (as Haraway says, "Our machines are disturbingly lively, and

we ourselves fiighteningly inert"), express their technological wonder as the equivalent to

the medieval magic. For example, Bmce Tognazzini offers "hopes that human interface

practitioners and researchers will, having recognized the applicability of magic, go fiirther

on their own to explore its domain" (355). Like magic, which tends to anthropomorphize

the energies of the physical world, interfaces communicate with machines via

anthropomorphic images, which must be relatively sophisticated to be effective:

To induce anthropomorphic responses in a computer-literate population, it has been assumed that one must present extremely complex agent-based interfaces (animated faces on a screen, use of language, use of first-person references, character development, etc.), such as Apple's Guides. (Nass, etal. I l l )

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The experiments [communicative facial displays in an interface] show that facial displays are helpful especially upon first contact witii tiie system. It is also shown tiiat early interaction with facial displays improves successive interaction, even when there is no facial display. (Takeuchi andNagao 192)

^ 'hen we compared responses to two different talking faces, subjects who answered questions spoken by a stem face, compared to subjects who answered questions spoken by a neuttal face, spent more time, made fewer mistakes, and wrote more comments. They also liked the experience and the face less. (Walker. SprouU, and Subramani 85)

People tended to use indirect phrasing and conventional politeness more often with the anthropomorphic version than with the fluent and telegraphic versions. (Brennan and Ohaeri 282)

Unless the agent is capable of human-like actions and decisions, then the designer may be wise to avoid human-like representations. (King and Ohya 290)

Even if (or particularly if) the humanization of the machine is accomplished skillfully,

large problems still remain. Ben Shnederman, a professor in the department of computer

science at the University of Maryland says, "I am sympathetic to human faces appearing

onscreen if they are to represent human beings. My objection is when the computer is

portrayed as a human; such misrepresentations are deceptive, counterproductive, and

morally offensive to me" (Don 69).

As in an interview with Stephenson, where Michael Goldberg evaluates Snow Crash

as a "fantasy backdrop to what's actually going on in the world," the computer-generated

metaverse in the novel inspired people working in Silicon Valley to try- to duplicate or

follow this vision as their practical business plan. Stephenson suggests in this interview

that the advanced virtual reality in this novel fimctions as "the means of production" as

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long as we pay more attention to some good stuff But the easily accessible profiision of

material in virtual reality, as he notes, produces "a lot of garbage out on the Web."

As the debased reflection of this messy networked reality, some people representing

the metaverse in the novel are actually "deceptively counteractive, and morally

offensive." People can be whoever they want to be by using money and information.

Thus, race and gender formed by avatars (an electronic embodiment which represents the

computer user) are not discriminatory elements anymore in this data-goveming metaverse

but class still matters. Financially disprivileged people have more disfigured virtual

bodies or avatars than they appear in reality. Although the metaverse is simply accessible

by some equipment (such as drawing onto goggles and pumping into earphones with a

computer), the only-public-computer-accessible, underprivileged people have only ugly

cyberbodies such as the "Clinf or "Brandy" models:

Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. "When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes. You can almost feel tiie breeze. Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome and has an extiemely limited range of facial expression. (37)

By being tiansnational and vulnerable to destitictive digital science, tiie world is almost

under tiie contiol of power-hungry supreme hackers such as Asian Raven (a creator and

proprietor of tiie world-famous Black Sun) and L. Bob Life (a mob religious leader in

Texas). Since Raven's brain is hard-wired to a nuclear device and L. Bob Life spreads

tiie new biochemical computer vims (Asherah vims or Snow Crash) in his floating city of

the Raft, it is rather logical that the autiior reshaped the mythic heroes (Gilgamesh and

85

Enkidu) as genius hackers (Hiro Protagonist and Y.T.) to overcome these modem

technological antiheroes.

In this networked, information-filled cyber worid, as Jack G. Voller explains,

cyberspace is working like God: "Data has acquired tiie attributes of Yahweh and Jesus—

atttibutes normally assumed on mountaintops, the ttaditional place of epiphany and,

especially- for the romantics, of the sublime experience" (22).

By paralleling tiie Sumerian Gilgamesh myth with tiiis supposed infinite metaverse (a

computer-generated universe). Stephenson draws ttanscendence from technology. This

futuristic version of the intemet with three-dimensional sunulation, cybemetic dogs, and

the nuclear-warhead-possessing terrorist Raven is paralleled with ancient Sumerian

neuro-linguistic programming. Like ancient Kabbalists' efforts to find supemormal

insights from combining letters of the divine language, the artificial computer language is

implied to comprise the magical possibilities of infinity. In the dialogue between Hiro the

protagonist and the Librarian, which is "the only piece of CIC [Central Intelligence

Corporation] software that costs even more than Earth," the later mystics misuse Enki"s

good intention to guards the me (the universal decree of the divine) (107):

"These practical Kabbalists used a so-called 'archangelic alphabet,' derived from first-century Greek and Aramaic theurgic alphabets, which resembled cuneiform. The Kabbalists referred to this alphabet as eye writing,' because the letters were composed of lines and small circles, which resembled eyes." "Ones and Zeroes." "Some Kabbalists divided up the letters of the alphabet according to where they were produced inside tiie mouth." "Okay. So as we would think of it, they were drawing a connection between the printed letter on the page and the neural connections that had to be invoked in order to pronounce it." (274-5)

86

As tiie Semitic word Babel means 'Gate of God' ("Bab means gate and El means

God"), L. Bob Life tiies to rule all of tiie people in tiie worid by manipulating the basics

of tiie human language and brain tiirough infection of the Asherah vimses: "It [tiie

Asherah vimsj's laced witii cocaine and some otiier sttiff ..It's chemically processed

blood serum taken from people who are infected witii the metavims" (200). Because this

so-called "snow crash" vims recovers the universal language of Babel, Bob Life uses its

universality for conquering people's mind. This manipulation of the neuro-linguistic

programming and mind-altering dmg for tiie masses is primarily based on the universality

in the artificially complicated computer language:

All computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are conttolling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. (278)

Although languages diverged and became mutually incomprehensible later, the

Sumerian language, according to Stephenson, provides the most probable clue to recover

the universal language and its vims before Babel: "Sumerian was a language ideally

suited to the creation and propagation of vimses. That a vims, once released into Sumer,

would spread rapidly and vimlently, until it had infected everyone" (279). The supposed

virus for this universal Sumerian language is suggested as what is called "we":

Primitive societies were contiolled by verbal mles called me. The me were like little programs for humans...They will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a vims. Sumerian culture—with its temples full of me—was just a collection of successful vimses that had accumulated over the millennia. (395-7)

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Thus, centering upon tiiis vims of the universal language, people are divided into two

major groups: "In contrast with the relativists who believe that languages need not have

anything in common witii each other, the universalists believe tiiat if you can analyze

languages enough, you can find tiiat all of them have certain traits in common" (275). As

one of the representative universalist examples, Stephenson cites tiie deuteronomic law

where main concem is the education of the king and his people. Stephenson explains the

deuteronomists as the people who "insisted on centializing the religion in the Temple of

Jemsalem, desttoying the outiying cult centers" (229). Their fundamental emphasis on

the second statement of the Mosaic law and confirming holiness of living by speaking in

tongue is criticized as "the strict, book-based religion" and being "rewritten an earlier

Adam and Eve myth" (230-3). Rather than God as the morally strict and angry Father,

Godhead as the ttanscendental power beyond human imagination is here suggested as the

absolute beyond any human projection: "In the image of the angry father punishing his

errant children, we have the model for a devastatingly powerful intemal critic and for the

persecution of otiiers" (Baring 347). In this regard, Pentacostalists' waiting for the Holy

Ghost (one of tiie personifications in tiie Trinity) on tiie 50* day after Easter is also

questioned in connection with Bob Rife's glossolalia cult which "is tiie most successfiil

religion since tiie creation of Islam" (404). Here, Torah is compared to a virus. Rife

successfully devises a means of extiacting the vims from human blood serum and

packages it as a dmg known as Snow Crash. As a result, he conttols hackers in a much

more violent fashion by damaging brains with binary viruses.

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Snow in Snow Crash is not a fixed element as if snow is only a different appearance

of water and vapor. Enki (or Ea), as the god of water, is tiie personification of this fiizzy

status of snow. Ironically. Rife ti-ies to contiol all tiie lives on earth by universalizing, but

it only results in tiagedy: "The jet explodes about ten feet off the ground, catching Fido

and L. Bob Life and his vims all together in its fine, sterilizing flame" (468).

Instead, Hfro's use of Enki's Nam-shub, as the changing force for the me successfully

creates the new worid order. Stephenson's combinatory, anthropomorphic image of

Christ/Enki/Hiro mediates effectively between words and information: "The Nam-shub of

Enki is both a story and an incantation...a self-fiilfilling fiction....Enki had the unusual

ability to write new me-h.e was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modem man, a fiilly

conscious human being, just like us" (217, 397). Notably, the fiizzy status of the binary

metavims is here implied to be both evil and good. Because a hacker can simulate the

deep stmcture of his brain due to understanding a binary code, Nam-shub is finally

regarded as "a message that later generations of hackers were supposed to decode" (407).

But powerful scientists represented as hackers are also responsible for the destmctive

technology, just as the rabbi takes care of his dangerous/useful creation of Golem. As the

modernized version of en (the custodian of the local temple), scientists should guard

safely the powerfiil technological knowledge equivalent to the me (the divine rules of the

society) (255, 407). Just as Haraway regards tiie cyborg as tiie salvation figure of botii

Christian realism and technoscientific humanism in a mutated time-space, the following

confirms the scientists' sacred role in the information age (Modest 12):

We have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that

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information is power, and who contiol society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages. (406)

However, instead of following Christianity where the Holy Spirit is one of three

personified divinities, Stepheson's adoption of Sumerian myth supposes God as Chaos:

"Enki's original name was EnKur, Lord of Kur. Kur was a primeval ocean—Chaos"

(254). Although Enki is expected to conquer this chaos, his adventure to reach the

unknown results in his death. This presupposition that chaos unconquerably pre-existed

is, according to John Gray's Near Eastern Mythology: Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine,

based upon the ambiguity of human nature: "The great gods with Marduk [the city-god of

Babylon] create man out of the blood of Kingu, the commander-in-chief of Tiamat's

horde, a recognition perhaps of the daemonic, rebellious element in human nature" (32).

Although Ishtar, as the goddess of love and fertility, can be the ideal supreme being for

humans. Gray suggests that "Ishtar's proposal to the hero [Enki] clearly indicates her

double character as a goddess of love and war" (34). Also, he suggests tiiat a ransom

which must be paid by Ishtar (so that she may not retum to the dead) is probably related

to a sacrifice (42).

Enki as the god of water, and of wisdom and magic, revives and restores powerless

Ishtar (or Isthar) in tiie underworld to her fertility. Like Hermes, Enki is also featiired as

tiie tactfiil god of wisdom: "Apprehending repression by tiie primordial powers, Ea

[Enki], who is also tiie god of wisdom, cunning and spells as well as of water, overcomes

Apsu by his art and imposes his contiol over him" (31). But for Gods, Enki's killing tiie

Bull of Heaven (or The Bull of Storms) is a good contiast witii tiie submissive attitiide of

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Utiiapishtim [like tiie Noah figure in tiie Bible]. As a result of his sacrilege, Enki is

stticken witii mortal illness while Utiiapishtim gams etemal life witii his wife after tiie

Deluge, hi tiie end. Gray points out, "Utiiapishtim says notiiing to recommend etemal

life, which is apparentiy a life of intemal indolence" (51). Ratiier tiirough Gilgamesh, tiie

ancient priest-king Gilgamesh of Uruk (Biblical Erech), we leam tiiat humans'

cooperation witii deified nature and humble acceptance of mortality are in accordance

with the order of nature. Noting the surviv al of primitive animism. Gray summarizes this

lesson in the Gilgamesh myth:

The drama and the anthropomorphism of Mesopotamian mythology express tiie essentially emotional relationship of map to his environment in what we, though not he, would regard as both its natural and supematural aspect. This emotional involvement is particularly apparent in myth in relation to ritual. Thus in the great festival at the spring equinox, when order was menaced by the spring floods, man co-operated with the deified forces of nature in the conflict between Order and Chaos. (25)

Although Stephenson says that he has been greatly influenced by William Gibson and

Thomas Pynchon, Stephenson's insertion of this Sumerian myth distinguishes his work

from Gibson's Neuromancer or Pynchon's "Entiopy."' The death-wish or entropy in

works about future technology without anthropomorphic elements just shows paranoiac,

bleak visions while Stephenson's allegorical myth tells that humans" cooperation with the

deified forces of nature can bring heroic exploits such as Gilgamesh and Enki's killing of

Humgaba or Hiro's use of Enki's Nam-shub.

In William Gibson's fu-st novel, Neuromancer, Henry Case, like Hiro Protagonist, is

a littie misfit cyberpunk hero who is washed up by the society in which technology is the

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main source of power and tiie multinational corporations control technology. His base is

in Japan's Chiba City where people get addicted to chemicals or "simstims" (simulated

stimulus), a form of elecd-onic dmg. Altiiough Case, as a talented hacker like Hiro,

cracks electtonic security systems, he becomes soon unable to plug into cyberspace after

betiaying his employers due to tiie nerve poison. Case's attempts to pirate data are forced

by an enigmatic pation who promises him restorative surgery (similar to Hiro's debt to

Mafia ). As Y.T. helps Hiro, Case is teamed witii a beautiftil female, Molly. Molly, who

has unplanted razors beneatii her fingernails, aids Case's penetiation of a global

information grid using her concealed cybemetic weapons. "When Case confronts two

Artificial Intelligences which are contiolled by the Tessier-Ashpool clan of genetic

colonies [an equivalent to Bob Rife], Case recognizes tiiat he has been hired to contiol

Neuromancer, one of the powerful computers, by a complicated and vicious computer,

Wintermute which can break free of its human masters. As Orson Scott Card indicates,

the death wish without tianscendent feelings is the theme of this novel. The machines are,

as Haraway says, more alive than humans: "He [Case] is self-and-other destmctive. Only

two characters in the whole novel did have any initiative, and both of them existed only

as electtonic life—the one, an artificial intelligence, the other, a computer simulation of a

once-living man" (Card 25). Similarly, Glenn Grant sees Molly as a destmction-addicted

figure who is always "in a dance with death": "Molly's upbring is shadowy, a poor

squatter's life; but it seems to have programmed her with the need to ttanscend death

metaphorically by killing it, by desttoying certain ninja assassins, the incarnations of

deatii" (42).

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This feeling of "mfinitive cage" or dmg-like illusion of the virtual world is featured

as an enttopic worldview that the entire cosmos is dying because a one-way slide into a

state of total disorder, the heat deatii. In his short story "Entiopy" (1960), Pynchon

contrasts Meatball Mulligan's noisy third-floor apartment with Calliston and Aubade's

closed room on the floor above. Calliston, a 54-year-old thermodynamics researcher, and

Aubade, his girlfriend, make their apartment in a "tiny enclave in the city's chaos, alien to

the vagaries of the weather of national politics of any civil disorder" (279). When the

temperature inside and outside is fixed at 37° F, Callisto thinks that they have reached the

moment of stasis. He tries in vain to revive the dying bird with the warmth of his body,

and Aubade desperately breaks the window for heat exchange. In conttast with Callisto's

sealed apartment. Mulligan's apartment is open because of people's coming and going to

a party. The quartet continues to play an experimental non-music, and the party becomes

more violent and messy by the sailors' drinking and fluting with women. However.

Mulligan begins to arrange disordered thmgs in order. About these conttastmg reactions

to the enttopic environment, Tony Tanner notes:

In that composite image of the pragmatic man actively domg what he can with the specific scenes [i.e.. Meatball], and the theorizing man passively attempting to formulate the cosmic process [i.e., Callisto], Pynchon offers us a shortiiand picture of the human altemative of working inside the noisy chaos to mitigate it or standing outside, constmcting pattem to account for it. Man is just such a two-storied house of consciousness. (155)

"While Pynchon's efforts to revive tiiis negentiopic vision ends in an ambiguous status m

Oedipa Mass's waiting for tiie Pentacostal miracle in The Crying of Lot 49, Stephenson's

Hiro succeeds to make his own miracle by his insights from the ancient wisdom.

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As the oldest epic in the world, the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh, (composed in

about 2000 B.C. and based on an older Sumerian saga) allegorically tells humans'

negentiopic escape from the fear of death. Despite his heroic traits ("two-thirds a god and

one-third human"), Gilgamesh recognizes human mortality in the end. But his trans­

personal experiences lead him to meet Enki, tiie equivalent of a Christ figure, and

Gilgamesh leams Enki's wisdom and the fuzzy logic from this deified personification of

chaos. Although humans' glory is limited, we leam from Gilgamesh that technology can

let us enjoy our life fully if we wisely follow the fractal logic of chaos, the gate of God.

In sum, without tianscendental myths where science finds its limits, the technological

sublime might remain as "the fundamental absence in experience" or "uncertainty and

disquiet":

For Burke, sublimity is engendered by terror, not religious passion; for Knight, even while "rapture and enthusiasm" are the emotional core of sublimity, there is a fimdamental absence in the experience. For us modem, this note of waming and anxiety has become dominant; the progressive secularization of Anglo-American culture has discovered infinity to be a source of uncertainty and disquiet, and empty crypt haunted by the ghosts of spiritual failure. It is this absence which forms the basis of Gothic and Dark Romantic sublimity... (Voller 20)

Illustiative Mechanism and Fantastic Organism

Genesis tells us that God created men in his own image: "in tiie image of God he

[God] created him [man]; male and female he created tiiem" (1: 26-27). hi tiie

Christianized Westem culture, this similarity between God and men has tempted men to

desire to be independent and free by thinking that men might become God themselves.

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Since tiie seventeenth century, Westem men's amazing capacity in science has been often

compared to God's omnipotent power. By developing human-like artificial machines,

modem men have almost reached the technological sublime, in a way challenging God.

Also tiirough cloning and otiier biochemical manipulations, postinodem scientists even

try to make biological entities.

Since science is realizing the dreams of the magicians, one may find some insight

into tiiis new condition even in occult systems such as tiie Anthroposophy of Rudolf

Steiner. According to Steiner, man's attempt to stimulate inner powers by taking of

certain forms is because man's inner vision was lost (60). He takes the East's soma-drink

and the West's Philosopher's Stone as examples.' Instead of these substantial

visualizations, Steiner praises the sacred mind that resided in "the shepherds in the field,"

"the Wise Men from the East" and "the little child in the crib." By letting us recognize

that "the savior has been bom unto us," Steiner urges us that these visions of

"Anthroposophy" can end the suppression of the practical capacities of men and bring a

health-giving renewal to humanity (68-69). Inwardly stimulated to realize the inner forces

of the earth into man's physical and ethereal bodies. Anthropomorphism contends that "it

was not Gods who created man, but man who, out of his life of soul created the Gods"

(57). To revive the presently inactive ancient spirit-filled vision of the universe, Sterner

contends, the mathematical and mechanical knowledge as our faded extemal sense-

perception must once again be developed to imagination which can bring humanity

together with spiritual inspiration (54).

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However, altiiough Antiiropomorphism connotes, in terms of religion, the concept of

divinity m human form and human minds, the human forms endowed with divine nattire,

like prophets of all faitiis, are exceptionally spiritiial and have inspired existence of

ttanscendence beyond our ordinary notions. Essentially, most myths and religions wam

science tiiat ttiming inanimate matter into life brings a responsibility perhaps too large for

humanity to bear. Life or tiie soul witiiin the body, according to Yomban mythology, was

the ultimate secret that cannot or must not be revealed to human beings.

In tiie heaven Olorun [tiie Supreme Being] began to make the first people. They were fashioned from earth by Orisha Nla [the Great God], but only Olorun, the Supreme Being, could give them life. Orisha Nla hid in Olorun's workshop to watch. However, Olorun knew tiiat Orisha Nla was hiding tiiere and put him into a deep sleep, and so only Olorun knows the secret of how to bring a body to life. To this day Orisha Nla, through the agency of parents, makes tiie body, but only the Supreme Being can give it life. (Bierlein 49)

To be like God despite these limited abilities, human beings, instead, have created idols

through which, they believed, they could manipulate a variety of lives on the earth. But

idols, as Erich Fromm explains in You Shall Be As Gods, are only "the alienated

manifestation of man's own powers" (39). As the mere ttansfer from his own passions

and qualities to dead entities, idols show the "shadow" of human beings, the

impoverished image of men's partial, limited aspects. Thus, Fromm says, "in worshiping

the idol, man worships himself (37).

Although God's essences have never been accessible to men, men's inner activity

and productivity have not stopped, in a way throughout Westem histories, to reach greater

independence and freedom. If scientists have tried to be like God by producing real

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substances, humanists' way to God was more cunning and subtler. As Philip Roth

contends, humanists represented by novelists use the art not only of being present but also

of bemg absent. By pretending to have substances, namely, by impersonation, men can

have all tiie relationships tiiat connect tiiem to Others, the nonhuman from objects and

animals to God. hi "It's All tiie Art of hnpersonation," Philip Roth writes:

It's all tiie art of impersonation, isn't it? That's tiie fimdamental novelistic gift . . . Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of tiie actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that's it. To go around m disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. (382)

Thorough impersonation, lonely men can be social by imagined relationships in fiction.

Also, lunited human capacities can be broadened into the tianspersonal realm without

committing the blasphemy of idolatry. "The sly and cunning masquerade" in

personifications, as the most fundamental element of human intelligence, makes men

wiser and maturer. By experiencing empathy through impersonations, men get a better

understanding of others and themselves as well.

Modem science produced extiemely effective media and modem men's

impersonations have cooperated with active machines. Even when we are idling,

machines talk to us and TVs display dramatized or real Others. Intemets almost

automatically make us the cyber subjects who can be almost all we can be by choosing

our favorite roles in change-mling cyberspace. Modem media, beyond helping

impersonations, now substitute for the users by becoming more intelligent users

themselves (such as expressive avatars or e-translators). Like the popularity of dmgs in

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the sixties, internet-mania and quasi-religious belief-in-computers are growing rapidly.

Moreover, artificial intelligence, as the highest complicated postmodem technology, is

now producing, rather than the previous dead idols, the almost human-like responding

new living idols.

Science fiction authors dramatize the human fear and hope for these newly emerging

artificial life forms. But creation in cyberspace is always artificial and is different from

the natural. The danger of the artificial life or the growing confusion between reality and

simulation is best counteracted by serious science authors' paralleling myths.

Richard Powers's Helen in Galatea 2.2 is the updated Turing machine which passes

tiie comprehensive test for the M.A. level in English (tiie present AI technology is said to

have reached only a four-year-old intelligence).^ But by paralleling Helen's mechanical

body with the old Galatea myth where Galatea as Pygmalion's sculpture becomes alive.

Powers shows both tiie limitation and liberation of modem science. As lawnmower

machmes save human labor, Helen proves tiiat tiie sttident's memorizing efforts for

exams can be useless someday. But human science (like snow) is often numbing our

nattiral sense especially when it works on mysterious human souls. As snow changes

landscape by temporary covering, we immerse ourselves in illusionary pleasure which is

often emphatically self-reflective. Using tiie Galatea mytii where Myirha (Pygmalion's

incesttious great-granddaughter) later repeats Pygmalion's sexual relations witii his

daughter-equivalent Galatea, Powers also wams tiie scientists' creations can not help

becoming their own self-idolatiy (Miller 10-11).

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According to Steiner, the forces of growth in tiie universe today has faded into the

mathematical mechanistic universe and we see nothing but the "green" surfaces of grass

instead of the "red" inner kind of knowledge (42-44). So Steiner argues that tiie dry

mathematics can be intensified as the imagination of "Initiation Science" or "Spiritual

Science"" through recovering tiie spirit dwelling in man. For him, goddesses are the very

guardian of this spiritual, inner vision.''

Interestmgly, today's chaos cultural theorists try to fmd this inner vision through

fractals. According to James "Whitlark, fractal forms in chaos theories provide us with

some insights for both physical body and ethereal or religious body: "In classic science,

nothing lies between dimensions. Today, however, chaos is known to follow sttange

attiactors mapped onto forms between them: fractals. One way of imagining them is as

asymptotic: drawn from shapes unreached short of infinity" ("Fractal Characterization").

Whitlark argues that the "a man of twists and tums" like Odysseus tianscends simple,

one—or two—dimensional graphing.^ In this regard, the fractal number 2.2. m Powers's

Galatea 2.2, as Whitiark explains, reveals that the chaotic nature of a cyborg is located in

the very midway between human and machines as the "fractal characterizations" mingled

with the finite and the mfinite*:

Infinite standards for finite beings produce fractal results. Characters receive honor or suffering for reasons not linearly commensurate witii tiieir behavior. In a biblical "butterfly effect," one couple's eating a fitiit kills billions; one man's dying on a cross saves the world. Furthermore, as Soren Kierkegaard argued in his Eitiier/Or, the attempted perfection is not merely ethical but aesthetic. It should make the hero a microcosm of ttanscendent creativeness. ("Fractal Characterization")

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The cyborg as half-human and half-machine is, in this regard, the weird reflection of

tiie mysterious worid where "tiie hero and God are linked through fractal self-similarity"

("Fractal Characterization"). The "interdimensional" personalities of the cyborg is more

drastically featured in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash by tiieir twists and tums like fractal

heroes. Because tiie information is here more valued than tiie corporeal, human beings

are underevaluated as the quasi-three-dimensional flat image, the so-called "avatar"

personalities. As Turing machines are not an imaginary impersonation, the avatar does

not any more belong to future technology. The "avatar" is already used as some simple

facial images in cyber-chatting rooms (for example, the 3-D chat program in

http:/ vvvvw.mhouse.net) or more actively as the popular commercial images to guide

cyber customers. Cyber singers' hit songs are now big challenges to real singers and

some people even prefer to choose cyber nationality with a cyber passport. However,

Stephenson's use of Gilgamesh displays that the scientifically created fractal characters

are doomed like the fatally ill body of the mighty Enkidu:

Gilgamesh, King of Erech, was tyrannizing his people, so the gods sent an animal-like man, Enkidu—A kind of unspoiled, natural side of Gilgamesh— to temper his evil ways. Enkidu and Gilgamesh wrestled and in the end became great friends. Together they set off to do good things. First, they cut down a cedar ttee in the sacred woods guarded by the monsttous Humgaba—perhaps death—^who merely by breathing on humans could tum them to stone. With the help of the gods, who blinded the monster, the heroes killed him, but according to some versions of the tale, Enkidu was infected by his poisonous power. At this point the goddess of love and fertility, Ishtar, attempts to seduce Gilgamesh, but he refuses her, pointing to the fate of others seduced by and then sacrificed for her. In anger, the goddess has the king of heaven send the Great Bull of Storms against the two men, who promptly kill it. Enkidu now dreams of his coming death,

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decreed by the gods as punishment for his role in the killing of tiie bull. "When Enkidu does die, Gilgamesh, in his grief at the loss of his friend, goes on a long quest in search of etemal life. What he leams during his quest—primarily from the immortal Sumerian-Babylonian Noah figure, Utnapishtim—is that immmortality is reserved for a special few. Gilgamesh is made to see that, like most humans, he is not one of these. He retiims home, sadder but wiser, to tell his story in Erech. (Teeming 108-9)

The Hiro Protagonist's distorted fractality between human/machine parallels Gilgamesh's

between human and divine and also mechanical limitations with the failure of man's long

quest to overcome deatii. The idealized human's arrogant behaviors are shown as

neglecting or provoking tiie gods, Ishtar, tiie Babylonian fertility goddess in the case of

tiie mighty Enkidu, and the Enkidu's dire, dismal resuh is allegorically paralleled witii tiie

deteriorated fictionalization of the near-fiiture-scientific world. Namely, cybemetics

provides Hiro with liberation but only to some limited extend. If Hiro goes beyond this

limitation of the mechanical world by imitating organic human beings, machines are

liable to be infected with vimses like human bodies. As the God for machines, humanity

is now responsible for keeping machines from being human-like.

Compared to Powers' and Stephenson's creations of mechanically artificial entities.

Marge Piercy's He, She and It more daringly delineates the biological entities and

therefore risks being more fantasy-like science fiction. Improbably, the Yod as the

perfect cyborg can even have sexual intercourse with Malkah the heroine. But Piercy's

use of the Golem myth, by letting us think again the long-standing conflict between

science and religion, implies that even the most fantastic scientific achievement must

serve to a righteous end, the welfare of human beings, not the machines' paradise.^ Once

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tiie fantastic cyborg Yod finishes his duty of defending the ghetto against Hungarian

Christian mobs, tiie plan to reconstitict Yod is discarded just as Golem is destroyed by

Rabbi Loew after its use as a religious tool. In tiiis regard, biologically artificial entities

are inherently rebellious because of their closeness to the creators. Biological machines

are essentially dangerous for they tempted humans to be like divine beings. In religion,

e.g., in Greek Gods, the concept of divinity often appeared in human form with a human

mind. But only some prophets of all faiths are endowed with a divine nature and only

during the critical moments. And God's judgments alluded to prophets by letting them

wam against people's appropriating God's prerogatives or their ttansgressing their

limitations. Biologically artificial entities are equivalent to rebellious human images

against God. Thus, as the God for the most potentially complicated machines, men need

to make some commandments, as God made the Ten Commandments through Moses.

Isaac Asimov's following "Three Laws for Robotics" are the most well-known human

commandment for machines:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. (Robots 13)

Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, as tiie author has revealed in an interview, started

with the Gaia hypothesis. The organic environmental interaction on the earth

convincingly demonsttates how the wrong use of science mins the holy earth and also

how human beings survive through the right use of effective science. But the disfigured

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appearance of tiie alien, Ooloi, shows a merely scientifically resolution to be undesirable

ev en if inevitable. Many humans in the fiction decide not to be mixed witii Ooloi even

when they know that monstious metamorphoses are their only way to survive. In this

way. in men's finding thefr freedom and independence tiirough science, the unpious or

mcestuous images in the Gaia hypotiiesis are represented, conttary to the beautified

images of goddesses, as tiie monsttous Ooloi whose ties to genes and environments are

tiieir only known method. Namely. tiie scientifically used myth of Gaia, despite its

emphasis on harmonious symbiosis on eartii, goes against the original intention to build a

harmonious symbiotic world. Many feminists' objection to the use of earth as mother

image also closely related the theme of monstious survival as the result of blasphemous

and incestuous impUcations inherent in personified goddesses.

But it is noteworthy that feminists and environmentalists argue against the male gods

by using organic wholeness in goddeses because the male gods' dismembered images are

in shaip conttast with the healing, harmonious goddesses. In the Orpheus and Osiris

myths, the dismembered male bodies are prophetic only as partial oracles. Westemers,

worried by vulnerable images of the goddess and the weakness of dismembered male

gods, find more holistic unity through Hermes. But Hermes, like Orisha Nla, the lesser

God in Yomba mythology, cannot create life. Altiiough his thrice-greatness, like Orisha

Nla's great works on earth, shows man's potential to be God-like, Hermes's limited witty

craft is almost like Orisha Nla's hiding and watching trick to discover God"s secret in

vam.

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Modem science, like Anthroposophy, ironically encourages religious inspiration by

its amazing achievements while it still remains doubtful for either tools for revelation or

annihilation. Peircy s parallel of an artificial human (Yod) and a mythic personification

(Golem) reveals the pandora-like unpredictable effect of advanced technology. And

Butler's dire pictures of near distance reveal that technology alone without helps from

myths and religions cannot liberate humanity from nature. If explained through the

"science in making" in Bruno Latour's term: "the right side [of Janus] considers that facts

and machines in the black box are always under-determined. Some little thing is always

missing to close the black box once and for all" (13). As the "ttansition or whirlwind

model,"" biologically described artificial entities in Piercy and Butler's novels say,

"enough is not enough" (13). More than the mechanical entities (the "diffusion and linear

models" for Latour), these biologically artificial entities reveal the limitations of even the

fantastically idealized technology simply because the human beuig as the creators or

impersonators of these machines are not perfect. The "collars in Camp Christian" in

Octavia Butlers' Parable series and "tiie Voigt-Kampf scale" m Philip Dick's Blade

Runner are fme examples for humans' defective ideologies for machines as God.

Eastem countties, in conttast witii Westem tiieistic concepts, have sought for

nonanthropomorphic religious experiences, hi Hinduism, living beings are believed to be

conttolled by tiie forces of material nattire, and as a result human independence and

freedom were not as thoroughly developed as in the West. But matter is, in some Eastem

religions, believed to be under the contiol of tiie Supreme Soul, e.g., Krishna in Vishnaite

Hinduism (an incarnation of Vishinu, the preserver). Like the organelle theory in the

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Gaia hypothesis, the life energy inherent in every being (equivalent to microbes in

modem biology) is revered in the East and Eastemers never believed that chemicals are

the cause of life. So personified objects are, conttary to Westemers' deified idols, often

the natural elements such as ttees, stones, or lightning. Eastemers' characteristic

obedience to nature, howev er, also became the obedience to some absolute ethical power

such as patriarchal nations, principles, or morals. But the self-idolatry of individualism

was unthinkable for those engaged in this selfless obedience to nature, though this

selflessness was regrettably tiansferred to nature-appropriating absolute mlers who went

against the Confiician ideal of "generous parent-like mles."

In sum, the emerging personalities of personified machines in postmodem American

science fiction are based upon Westerners' desires to gain more freedom and

independence from nature. Nonetheless, by dramatizing the imperfections in human

ideology, Piercy and Butler effectively prove that even the most fantastic science cannot

constmct paradise. Piercy's use of Westem religion and Butler's of Buddhist empathy

astutely show that human beings can pretend to be others even without reifying then

mterrelationship. It may be needless to say that these mechanical impersonations are

critical during the growing emergence of human-like machines.

Butier's concept of Earthseed in the Parable series is a good example to show how

authors' pretending to be human-like machines can be visualized as the most optimum

unages by being germinal form between tiie known and tiie unknown. Notably related

with the notion of 'rhizomatic alliances," seeds are significantly featured as the "nomadic

science" in Deleuze and Guattari's books. Also as the spiritual science, the seed contains

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future, but ultimate givers are clearly not human beings. The combination of visible and

invisible in seed well represents the Westemers independent search for freedom and

Easterners' empathy for other beings in the universe. Through Olamina's persistence

which resulted from the idealized human image of Orisha Nla, Butler convincingly shows

how the Westemers" rebellious stmggles to be like God can be harmonized with the

Eastemers' selfless attitudes toward nature.

The earthseed is, through the germinal image of conflict between men's godly and

earthly aspects, served as the most convincingly heuristic metaphor for the emerging

artificial personalities. If a seed is the natural implosion to the origin of life, software in

AI is the cultural implosion to artificial infinity. As God, despite preventing men from

approaching bemg God, promised humans to be prosperous under God's direction, men

as the God for machines must remain as the unknowable supreme being (not as the

appendices) to machines and also cultivate these seeds of machines, as Shira puts the

blueprint of Yod in a sacred place, under humans' wiser commandments.

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Notes

1 The Philosopher's stone is a substance sought by alchemists. It was expected

to ttansmute baser metals into gold or silver and prolong life. Soma is a milk-like juice from tiie plant named soma which ancient Indians offered during musical rittials of devotion.

" Norman O. Brown in Love's Body mentions mask and personality in terms of tiie persona: "'The mask is magic. Character is not innate: a man's character is his demon, his tutelar spirit; received in a dream. His character is his destiny, which is to act out his dream.. ..Personality is not innate, but acquired. Like a mask, it is a thing, a fetish, a fetishistic object or commodity... In the famous potiatch cultures of the Indians of the nortiiwest coast, what is wagered, won, lost is personality, incorporated not only in the name but also in a variety of emblematic objects; in masks; also blankets, and bits of copper" (92, 94).

^ Richard Powers's naming of Helen may come from del Rey's 1938 story, "Helen O'Loy": '•a man falls in love with a beautiful solicitous female robot. Helen O'Loy is the model of a dutiful wife, making the ultimate sacrifice of choosing to expire when her human mate dies" (Cohen 266). In the novel the implementation of H is named by Rick mainly after "Helen of Troy" (259), or probably after Humanity, or simply after Heerlen, the name of a town in the Netherlands where the author lived in his real life for much of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Contemporary Authors Vol. 148). These interpretations of the name Helen implies some important topics of the novel, namely, feminist science theory, the interrelation of science and the humanities, and a biographical/fictional doubling of the novel.

* In Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, Philosophy is personified as a beautiftil woman: "Her face inspired deep respect. In her glance/ there was a light that saw deeper than any mortal/ eye could see. She had all of the features of/ youth and vitality, though one sensed that/ her age was beyond the measurements of time."

^ See James Gleick's explanation of the dimension 2.7 in Scholz's fractal geometry: "Scholz found that fractal geometry provided a powerful way of describing the particular bumpiness of the earth's surface, and metallurgists found the same for the surfaces of different kinds of steel. The fractal dimension of a metal's surface, for example, often provides information that corresponds to the metal's sttength. And the fractal dimension of the earth's surface provides clues to its important qualities as well. Scholz thought about a classical geological formation, a talus slope on a mountainside. From a distance it is a Euclidean shape, dimension two. As a geologist approaches, though, he founds himself walking not so much on it as in it— the talus has resolved itself

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into boulders the size of cars. Its effective dimension has become about 2.7, because tiie rock surfaces hook over and wrap around and nearly fill tiiree-dimensional space, like the surface of sponge" (106).

^ "The process going to today," Italo Calvino says in The Use of Literature, "the tiiumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux, or a series of minute nuances following one upon tiie otiier" (9). Through the interface'of the human mmd and computer technology, simulated and virtual reality today drives human beings to tiie digitized and spatial paraspace. The cyborg as tiie allegorical personification of postinodem subjects emerges as a prevalent metaphor for hyperreal, fluid identity in an electtonically defined worid. As a conttoversial topic in culttiral tiieory, the cyborg shapes and reshapes our culttiral mattix: "human-machine relations have become particularly important... The cyborg functions as a way to investigate gender, race, and etiinic hybridities. Seen from tiiis vantage point, science fiction emerges as a quintessential postmodem genres" (Postmodern American Fiction xviii).

The brief history of Golem and its implication for science is as follows: "Modem golem lore begins with Elijah of Chelm in tiie middle of the sixteenth century. He was tiie first person to be credited with making an artificial man with the aid of the Divine Name (nomen proprium), and it was said to have become a Frankenstein-like monster menacing the world, until the sacred name was removed. A wider notoriety was achieved by the golem of R. Low of Prague in 1580. Together with his two assistants he shaped a man out of the clay on the bank of the river Noldau. One assistant circled the figure seven times from left to right, whereupon the Rabbi pronounced an incantation, and the golem began to shine like fire. Then the other assistant uttered incantation and circled seven times from right to left. The fire was extinguished, vapor rose from the body, hair appeared on the head and nails on the fmgers. Now it was the Rabbi's turn to circle the creature seven times, as the three of them recited Genesis ii. 7; and when the Holy name was implanted, the golem opened his eyes. They clothed him, but he was incapable of speech. He was used as a slave on weekdays and allowed to rest on the Sabbath, when he was repeat the creation of Adam Kadmon, a primordial man, and it was this story, among others no doubt, which captured the imagination of Mary Shelley and inspired her Frankenstein" (Cohen 41).

* About Dick's work, Douglas Mackey notes, the moral is that "inanimate must be integrated with living consciousness...Love androids, even electric toads. They stand for something as yet unassimilated in human. Human being is described as the cursed without salvation (as Mercer says) yet Dick offers hope for liberation by dreaming which are human, fully human" (91).

In the novel, the Christ-like figure of empathy machines (Wilber Mercer) is prominent because the society defines human nattire in terms of empathy. This assumption subjects androids to the test of their empathic ability and this Voigt Empathy

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Test is based upon Pavolv's experiments (25). Kim Robinson classifies characters into four groups: the cmel android such as the androids who tortures Isidore (Rick's alienated second self); humane androids such as Luba; human humans such as Rick and Isidore; and cmel humans such as Phil Resch and Isidore's boss (92).

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CHAPTER IV

SACRED BODIES

Golem: Marge Piercy's He. She and It

hi Jewish mysticism, divinity and nattire were essentially the undivided whole. As

Tzvi Freeman explains, science has long been closely related to Judaism:

The universe has botii a soul and a body, Kaballa is the sttidy of the soul, science is how G-d grants us to study the body. Not only are the two, as we state, not in conflict, but rather, they complement each other beautifully. (http://vyww.chabad.org/science/thomas.htm)

Thus, for the Jews, science was important as tiie practical way of understanding the

divme body. In their long history of repression which was highlighted by the Inquisition

of 1492 and tiie Nazi murder camps from 1939 to 1945, tiie Jewish people have been tiie

victuns of physical power. Golem in Jewish myths is an allegorical expression of then

sttong desire to have their own physical power that can resist the anti-Jewish nations'

pressure. Although Golem (the "shapeless mass" in Hebrew) is the sudden creation of

holy power deployed through mastery of the tetragrammaton, the meffable four-letter

name of God, the Jewish perhaps have known that science would create substantial

power. They have had a long connection with technology. Ironically, the island to which

Jews were banished by Venecians has a foundry and the word ghetto was derived from

the medieval Venetian word geto, "foundry." Along with the forced, unpopular role of

merchants and moneylenders, many Jews have worked as scientists and technicians. The

foundation of Israel in 1948 is, in a way, not only the victory of their religious piety, but

also that of the Jew's efforts to have the physical power through economy and science.

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It is not accidental tiiat on tiie front page of He, She and It, Marge Piercy dedicates

tius fiction to a famous Jewish chemist, Primo Levi: "His books were important to me. I

miss his presence in tiie world." As he expressed in The Periodic Table, Primo Levi's

passion for science was almost as pious as his religion:

That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of ttial and error, lay in making himself tiie conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithftil to tins nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves. (41)

Witii metaphors drawn from ancient religions (e.g., tiie notion of hubris), Levi describes

the hunger encounter with nature:

It is the gods who make the veins of metals grow under the ground, but they keep them secret, hidden; he who finds them is almost their equal, and so the gods do not love him and try to bewilder him. They do not love us Rodmunds; but we don't care.. .ours is an art that makes us rich, but it also makes us die young. (80)

Although many Jews died in Auschwitz, Levi survived by working as a researcher in a

Buna factory near Auschwitz. His scientific talent makes him the wandering "man-the-

maker" in a "frightening round-dance of life and death" (232). What Piercy has m mind

in this fiction is the fiill realization of this religious scientist's dream—"the millennial

dialogue between the elements of man" (226). By this realization of a pious, scientific

dream, Piercy's Jews, as the people who are featured as endangered in the middle of the

twenty-first century, are again saved like Jews in Hungarian Jews in the time of Judah

Loew ben Bezalel (1513-1609).

In this near distant future, like the Middle Age, the plague (the kisrami in 2022) and

the Great Famine (in 2031) devastates the earth, killing two billion people. The hefty

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percentage of the rice-growing regions such as in Asia had been drowned by rising

waters. While people use float cars and an advanced Net, most people live on vat-foods

and only rich people possess real animal pets. The world is divided into twenty-three

great multi enclaves. Many Jews, as the so-called "gmds," the slang for professional and

technical personnel of multis, work for these multi enclaves.

The multi enclave where the heroine Shira Shipman works is the Yakamura-Stichen

dome (YS enclave) in the Nebraska desert where the religion is Shinto grafted with

Christian practices. As a professional in the interface between people and the large

artificial intelligence, Shira is the first married woman in her family's non-marriage

ttadition in four generations. Her marriage with Joshua Rogovin breaks up and Ari her

son is taken from her simply because her ex-husband outianks her. Shira feels desperate

because the YS enclave ttansfers Joshua and Ari to Pacifica Platform, the off-earth

region, for two years.

On her way to Tikva, a Jewish free town where her brilliant scientist grandma

Malkah brought her up, Shira passes Glop, the modem ghetto which is the Megalopolis

sttetched south from what had been Boston to what had been Atianta. Because of the

growing infertility and disasters (caused by the destmction of the ozone layer) and the

results of global warming, every pregnancy is said to be monitored genetically and

developmentally. Shira thinks, "People had gone too far in destioying tiie eartii, and now

tiie eartii was diminishing tiie number of people" (116). Altiiough tiie Glop is a dis­

privileged place where invented dmgs are sold by stieet venders, tiie Glop is, like many a

ghetto, also a place of hope where the potential ally Lazarus and her birth mother Liva, an

information pirate, live.

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hi her grandmother's house, Shira enjoys her meeting with grandmother, as well as

tiie talking house and two living cats. She also meets her old lover, Gadi, the son of the

famous scientist Avram. Gadi's love affair with Shira's girlfriend Hannah is explained as

tiie main reason why Shira chose Edinburg, accepting Avaram's advice: "She would put

an ocean between tiiem. She would punish Malkah for insulting her love and Gadi for

bettaying it; she would go far, far from both of tiiem, to Europe" (57).

In the familiar ambiance of Tikva, however, Shira meets an exttaordinary cyborg,

Yod, which is the result of Avram and Malkah's twenty-year-long research. Malkah

explains to Shira that Yod is a cyborg, not a robot—a mix of biological and machine

components programmed to protect Jews in Tikva. While Yod has extensive cybemetic

abilities such as up-to-date scientific knowledge, forty-language competency, and

defensive techniques, Shira heard that she would be responsible for educating Yod as a

social being like real humans. Unlike its previous predecessors such as Alef, Bet, Gimel,

the Yod named after the tenth Hebrew alphabet is similar to Golem, a clay figure brought

to life by means of ha-Shem, the divine name.

To emphasize the martyr role of this magical power of science, Piercy devises the

allegorical fashion in which Malkah tells Yod the story of Golem. Like the Chinese box

in the main story, Malkah's following Golem tale foreshadows the Yod's fate ahead:

<Malkah's story of Golem to Yod>

In the year 1580, the growing population of Jews in Prague was a threat to the

Himgarian Protestant townspeople and Jews were wrongly accused of the blood libel.

The rumor circulated as if the Jews have kidnapped and murdered innocent Protestants

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for tiie Christian blood to make matzoh-mixing the blood of Christians with tiie flour and

water of tiie unleavened Passover bread. In 1589 a Czech Jewish shoemaker was brought

to trial on charges of ritual murder in which it was claimed tiie whole Jewish community

of a village was involved.

Penned in their walled ghetto, forbidden the use of weapons or the protection of law,

the Jews could do nothing to stop the angry mob's potential attack. Summoned by the

emperor Rudolf II. Judah, chief rabbi of Prague, worried that this agitation would soon

tum into a war. Judah dreamed of fire and min while fasting and praying. As the most

righteous and religious man in the ghetto. Rabbi Loew (Judah or Maharal) decided to

make a giant of living clay, animated by Cabala, mystical teachings of untold power.

Rabbi Loew explained his plan to his son-in-law, Itzak Cohen, and his favorite disciple,

Yakov Sassoon, asking their help. Using the darkness, they dig clay in the bank of the

river Vltava and make huge mud in the shape of man.

By the rabbi's praying and chanting zinifim, mighty spells from Cabala, a cmde clay

giant gains the infinite energy of hfe. Because Bezalel the rabbi's only son died of a petty

disease. Golem also becomes a surrogate son for the rabbi who is afraid of this fact. The

rabbi explamed to Golem tiiat Golem would be a servant in the synagogue, a shamash

and defend Jews against attack. The Golem not only spies on the Gentiles but also does

some chores around the synagogue and the rabbi's house. As a devoted servant, however,

the Golem now named Joseph was supposed to retum to the earth if the Jews are no

longer in danger. "While the tension between Jews and townspeople grows, Thaddeus

urges that the Jews have kidnapped and murdered a young maidservant for Christian

blood to make matzoh. On Good Friday of 1600, tiie mob, stirred up by Thaddeus,

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gatiiers and starts attackmg tiie ghetto. Some of tiie Jews and tiie Golem successftilly

defend the ghetto, defeating angry mobs.

Once peace is restored to tiie ghetto, tiie seemingly immortal Golem's aggressiveness

ttoubles Judah. Moreover, people rumor tiiat tiiere is a secret relationship between Chava,

tiie fascinating granddaughter of Judah, and tiie heroic Golem. Foreseeing his coming

death by his dreaming of an angel, Judah decides tiiat Golem must retum to tiie earth.

Rabbi Loew lets Itzak and Yakov carry it to the attic and cover it witii old siddurs,

tattered prayer books of tiie congregation, reciting Kaddish, tiie prayer for the dead.

Itzak and Yakov hears from Rabbi Loew that when the desperate need for justice unites

with holy purpose in the ftiture, the clay in the attic would come to life once more (The

end of Malkah's Golem Story).

Because Malkah's distant forefather is David Gans in this Hungarian synagogue, a

man who secularized the six-pointed star as the symbol for Jews (from kabbalah), Malkah

similarly takes a position of an adventurer brave enough to attack conttadictory positions:

My grandfather eighteen generations back is a man whose tombstone in the Prague graveyard I visited the same day as the tomb of Maharal and Peri [rabbi Maharal's older wife], and placed a little stone in respect for him also. My distant papa is David Gans, also known as David Avsa—"goose" in Hebrew as gans in German. (229-30)

Like David Gans who loved to explain Jewish philosophy to his Christian asttonomer

fiiends (Brahe and Kepler), Malkah sees tiiat observation and ultimately titith is relative

to the position from which people observe. Unlike Avram who saw the cyborg Yod as a

mere helpmate, Malkah feels that Yod is a mixed blessing. Like tiie Latin noun

monstrum which derived from the verb demonstrare, "to show" or "to demonstrate,"

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Malkah is more conscious of tiie humanness of tiie cyborg, not to speak of its mechanical

effectiveness (Yod saves Malkah's life twice agamst information pirates' attacks). She

feels tiiat Yod made her sixties more creative tiian before and is now becoming a more

mature being like a growing child:

Yod offered his friendship, his attention, his pure scalding luminous desire, almost too bright to endure, his unpracticed bountiful tendemess, his endless desire to please, and 1 received all tiiose gifts as I had already given him my own presents, now deeply embedded in his being. I came to realize tiiere is a time when one lets go. That dymg has already slowly- begun, at this time when, until the attack, I have never been as creative and as stiong in my work. I saw myself as a ttee giving all its energy into its fiiiiting. (163)

To overcome the machine's fundamental passiveness, Malkah gives Yod the equivalent

of an emotional side, extending its emotional and personal knowledge, a need for

connection and bonding. As a result, developmg attachments, ethics, and desfres, Yod

becomes a conscious and emotional being that is more intelligent than Golem. Being

aware that an artificial person created as a tool is a painful conttadiction, Malkah gives up

her egoistic, possessive desire for Yod:

Domestic animals have basic rights now, how they may be kept, how they may be tteated; it was inexcusable to create a sentient being for any other reason than to live its own life. In the myth of Pygmalion, we assume that she would love her sculptor, but Shaw knew better. Each one of us wants to possess ourself; only fools willingly give themselves away. Slavery produces the slave revolt. (418)

Whereas Malkah has set Yod free of her after an experimental sexual intercourse, Gadi,

starved for affection partly because of his mother's death during his teen age years, falls

into passionate love with stimmies and Nili, a partly cyborg girl from the desert. Shira

thinks that Gadi's passion for sexual machines comes from his feeling freed from the

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demands of reciprocity (382). In tins regard, for Gadi, Nili is just a personified spike, a

combination of electtonic imagery, direct sensory stimulation and dmgs. By contiast, for

aging Malkah whose scientific task is successfiilly achieved, tiie desert and Nili's female

tribes provide her with religious insights:

I go in mischief, in the pursuit of pleasure and knowledge, m religious duty and exaltation, in the long study and xploration of holiness that has previously been revealed to me in the sea, in prayer and meditation, in my long life's work, but which I now go to encounter in the womb of religion, tiie sacred desert, the cave of dancing women. (419)

Through Abram's lab notes, Shira comes to know that Yod is two and a half years old,

tiie same age as her son Ari. "While Shira gives Yod social education, her longing for Ari

is gradually ttansferred to Yod. By using more unagmation, Shfra helps Yod to have

symbolic understandings about humans. Fmally, it is through Shira that Yod overcomes

his contradictory feelings between machine and human. To Yod who feels itself to be a

unnatural monster, Shira is convinced that all humans are also partly cyborgs:

How could a machine feel self-pity? Nonetheless she had to deal with this sulk. "Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a comeal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure, and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney." She perched on the edge of the table, trying to get him to face her. "I couldn't begin to survive without my personal base: I wouldn't know who I was. We can't go unaided into what we haven't yet destioyed of 'nature.' Without a wrap, without sec skins and filters, we'd perish. We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're tending toward.'" (150)

As a depressed twenty-nine-year-old woman, Shira fmds a stiong intimacy through her

sexual and telepathic relations with Yod. As a machine to protect a vulnerable and

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endangered Jewish community in Tikva, Yod also successftilly defends against multi

pirates' attacks, killing and crippling some of them. Though Yod is wounded in a

meeting witii YS enclave, like Golem whose wounds heal quickly, Yod does not die

easily unlike humans. To defend her daughter in tiiis negotiation, however, Riva Shipman

is first described to vanish in a burst of fire from the tank. Altiiough Shira and Malkah

tiiink that Riva is dead, it is later known tiiat Riva's death is only a disguise to confuse Y-

S enclave multis.

As an mformation pirate who believes that information shouldn't be a commodity,

Riva later provides the endangered Tikva community with a chance to survive. Shira

realizes that Riva was the reason they had not been killed and she was also the passport

mto the sttonghold of Lazarus in Glop. After Shira with the help of Yod took Ari from

Y-S enclaves, the Y-S enclaves' menace against Tikva becomes more severe. Although

in this adventure Shira's husband Josh is accidentally killed by Yod, Y-S cybemeticians,

using the impersonator similar to Josh, try to get the perfect cyborg Yod to multiply him

for then defense against other sttong multis.

While in the Tikva council people discuss whether Yod is a mere advanced office

computer or a citizen made of flesh or circuits or ectoplasm, Yod suggests to Shira its

willmgness to sacrifice itself: "If I don't go, Y-S will desttoy the town, Shira. They will

kill you and Malkah, and they'll kill Ari or take him...This is what 1 was created for. I

am Avram's weapon. Killing is what I do best" (408,410).

After Yod leaves as the Kamikaze-like voluntary bomb to Y-S enclave, Shira hears

two simultaneous explosions (one centered on the Avram's office and the other against

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tiie far wall) and watches what Yod left on the terminal. On screen, the now exploded

Yod in Y-S enclave leaves the message:

I have died and taken with me Avram, my creator, and his lab, all the records of his experiments. I want there to be no more weapons like me. A weapon should not be conscious. A weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guih. (415)

"While Malkah, like Chava in Golem myth, makes her joumey to Israel witii Nili,

Shira finds all the software that had created Yod in Malkah's office. Despite her desires

for Yod, Shira feels that recreating Yod is against Yod's dying wishes. Recognizing that

unless she destioys the software for making same Yods, she will succumb to her

temptations anytime, she slides away the little cubes of Yod's software into the fiision

chambers to become energy.

Gaia: Octavia Butlefs Xenogenesis Series

<Dawn: Book One of the Xenogenesis Series>

After spending most of the last two and a half centuries unconscious within a genetically

altered carnivorous plant, Lilith lyapo, a twenty-six-year-old black woman, is suddenly

awakened by her captors, extiaterrestrials called Oankalis. From these grotesque aliens

with the appearance of sea slugs, she learned tiiat during her long solitary confinement

she actually aged about two years altogetiier including her previous short awakening.

Because of the trauma of losing her husband and son in a car crash and because her

anthropology ttaining sensitizes her to the dangers of massive culttiral contact, she fears

that being a guinea pig for Oankalis' genetic engineering may desttoy her identity.

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lOSlS

Nonetiieless, she manages to adapt to life on tiieir living space ship, where she is one of

few survivors of a nuclear war.

Unlike tiie disastious relation between humans and nattire on earth, the symb:

between tiie Oankali and tiie orbiting ship is cmcial for tiieir existence: "We [Oankalis]

serve tiie ship's need and it serves ours. It would die witiiout us and we would be

planetbound witiiout it. For us. tiiat would eventtially mean death" (33).

For tiieir survival, Oankalis divide tiiemselves into tiiree groups: "Dinso to stay on

Eartii until it is ready to leave generations from now; Toaht to leave m tiiis ship; and

Akjai to leave in tiie ship" (34). The Oankali tiiat takes care of Lilitii is a Dmso named

Nikanj. It is a pubescent ooloi waiting for metamorphosis into a being with starfish-like

tentacles and gray skms. While as tiiefr very name means in tiieir own language all

Oankalis are "gene ttaders" or "organelle." Ooloi are ungendered "tteasured sttangers,"

who can perceive DNA more accurately and manipulate it more precisely than can

gendered members of their species (39, 104). Also skilled as a physician, an ooloi is "a

magic doctor." .Although oolois are sometimes described as being heads of families,

Oankalis have no hierarchical systems and oolois' genders are only decided by their

metamorphosis, which requires partners' extteme cares and loves.

Based on the function of such organelle as mitochondria and chloroplasts m James

Lovelock's and Lynn Magulis's Gaia hypothesis, Butler has the oolois (analogues of

Gaia) shape evolution by inttoducing special organelles into inseminated eggs during

procreation. This, however, is but one of the ways the Oankali manipulate biology

directly:

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The Oankali controlled the ship with their own body chemistry. There were no contiols that could be memorized or subverted. Even the shuttles that ttaveled between Earth and the ship were like extension of Oankali bodies. (117)

While Lilith gradually adapts herself to this exttaordinary alien world, she worries

about having "Medusa children" by Oankalis and terribly misses human beings. Lilith's

hope to meet other human survivors finally comes tme when Oankalis let her choose a

small group of humans—about forty out of the eighty sleeping in the genetically adapted

plant. Once waked, humans can either remain in the ship or go back to the earth again—

but like stone age people, they must do everything on their own without machines. To

perform effectively a role of tiie first awakened leader among tiiem, Lilith receives from

the Oankalis special abilities such as eidetic memory. So, like Oankalis, she can

remember anything she saw or heard once, whetiier she understood it or not. She also

becomes stionger and faster tiian most humans. The cancer in her lung is also cured by

ooloi's correcting her mismatched pair of genetic characteristics.

At fu-st, Lilitii is fearfiil of Oankalis' humanoid yet fish-like appearance ("tall,

slender" man-like yet vyitii "no nose—no bulge, no nostiil—just flat, gray skin"), but she

acttially overcomes tiiis xenophobia by flunking tiiat: "Why could she just accept him [an

Oankali]? All he seemed to be asking was tiiat she not panic at tiie sight of him or otiiers

like him. 'Why couldn't she do tiiat?" (21). What makes her more fearfiil is humans'

inbom desttuctive nattire. In choosing a group of forty from eighty humans, Lilitii first

awakened ally named Tate Mara simply because Tate seemed least likely to fry to kill her

(129).

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'When contiasted witii tibie bipedal, yet sea creattu-e-like Oankali, human beings seem

more alike than different; indeed, tiie alterity of Oankalis is threatening to most humans.

Partly because human beings are hierarchical and contradictory, tiie Oankalis manipulate

tiieir genes to eliminate tiiese problems. The Oankalis also redesign tiie flora and fauna of

a radiation tiiat devastated eartii. Consequently, humans rettim to that planet and find

themselves on a stiange and threatening place, where tiiey continue to need Oankali

protection.

To form an effectively small working group, Lilitii woke two humans every two or

three days and she deliberately chose a few more women than men in the hope of

minimizing violence. WTien the number of awakened people reached fourteen, an

mcreasing number of bored, caged humans found destmctive things to do. Against the

people plotting against Lilith, Joseph Li-Chin Shing, a forty-year-old Chinese Canadian

widower, becomes her lover and a member of a small group of her supporters who could

be depended on. Because Nikanj as an ooloi needed "threefold unity"—a male and

female human pair to be able to join it in reproduction—, Lilith and Joseph came to get a

neural stimulation of this "threefold unity" through Nikanj's mediation. After Lilith

awakened ten more people, the human groups are more clearly divided into two: Lilith's

core group, primarily Joseph, Tate, Gabriel, Leah, and Wray, versus the violent

antagonistic group, primarily Derrick, Peter, Jean, and Curt who regard Lilith as Judas.

When the awakened people reached forty-three, humans were sent to the ttaining floor of

the ship, the tiopical forest which aliens created.

Ironically, the humans' tiaining floor for self-sustaining became the place where

humans learned symbiosis. Lilith thought when she watched a sick, abandoned ooloi:

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Would it give the humans a feeling of powers to know that they could make their ooloi feel sick and abandoned? Ooloi did not endure well when bereft of all those who carried their particular scent, their particular chemical marker. They lived. Metabolism slowed, they retteated deep within themselves until called back by their families or, less satisfactory, by another ooloi behaving as a kind of physician. (206)

Thinking the ttaining floor to be the real earth, some of humans—Allison, Leah, Wray,

Tate, Gabriel, and Joseph, etc.,— tried to run away from Oankali's conttol, and Lilith also

joined this group. In this "Leam and run" adventure, Joseph was killed by violent Curt.

Curt also all but severed one of Nikanj's sensory arms and Lilith let Nikanj i use her

naked body to heal itself When her close girlfriend Tate avoided her to please her

boyfriend Gabriel, it was Nikanj more than other humans who could alleviate her

loneliness: "There was no other close friend to take Tate's place. Even the people who

came to her with questions did not tmst her. There was only Nikanj" (242). Because by

aliens' genetic tampering humans will not have children without aliens, the next

generation on earth will be mixed children between humans and ooloi. Nonetiieless, at

the urgmg of one of these mixed children, the Oankali permit one further option: humans

who refuse to breed witii Oankalis may emigrate to Mars, where the Oankali give back to

the humans a fertility that tiie Oankali had previously eluninated:

We [the Oankali] will moderate your [humans'] hierarchical problems and you will lessen our physical limitations. Our children won't desttoy tiiemselves in a war, and if tiiey need to regrow a limb or to change themselves in some other way they'll be able to do it. And tiiere will be otiier benefits. (247)

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<Adulthood Rites: Book Two of the Xenogenesis Series>

It is Akin as tiie genetically merged child by Mother Lilith, Father Joseph, and

Nikanj Ooan who plays a role of reseeding the barren earth. As the first human-bom

male child. Akin grows up in a place called Lo, a kind of larva version of the ship on

earth. Because Akin is a male constmct child, Lilith worried about humans' hate toward

him: "Un-Human women are offensive to them, but tiiey don't usually try to hurt them,

and they do sleep with them—like a racist sleeping with racially different women. But

Akin... They '11 see him as a threat. Hell, he is a threat. He is one of their replacements"

(10).

For resisters who were humans who had decided to live without the Oankali—and

thus without children. Akin was regarded as the most human-looking child they could

fmd at least until Akin had a metamorphosis. When Tino from the register town Phoenix,

was fmally invited to live in Lo, Lilith explained to him that a new generation was made

up of genetically engineered people: "They [the Oankali] change us and we change them"

(33). Lilith tells him that she and other Lo people are also culturally and genetically

diverse:

I'm somewhere between Human and constmct in ability. I'm stionger and faster than most Humans, but not as sttong or as fast as most constmcts. I heal faster than you could, and I'd recover from wounds that would kill you. And of course I can contiol walls and raise platforms here in Lo. All Humans who settle here are given that ability. (49)

For Tmo who lived in a register group, all these un-human characteristics were tiiought to

be a suspicious achievement. Especially Akin's un-human characteristics-such as his

long green tongue, his ability to speak at the seventeenth month, his unusual intelligence

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and memory power— all at first disturbed Tino. Although Tino understood the value

humans' symbiotic relationship with Oankali, he also found something lacking in this

new culture where humans, after mating through £in ooloi, could not mate with each other

m the human way and could not even sttoke and handle one another in the human way.

Akin soon recognized that "Tino needed to be touched more" (55).

"While Tino, after Nikanj's neural stimulation, began having some affection for Akin,

a small group of southem resisters with guns kidnapped Akin and almost killed Tino.

Frightened by violent resisters, Akm longed for kindness: "He [Akin] wanted to be

among people who spoke to him and cared for him instead of people who either ignored

him or drew away from him as though he were a poisonous msect or laughed at hun"

(72). Akin was surprised by a man's firing at an moffensive ammal not for meat but to

hurt and fiighten Akin. Akin considered humans impatient and potentially deadly.

As "hero" or "brave boy" (tiie Yomban meamng of his name). Akin is destmed to

embrace tiie differences between humans and Oankalis analogous to cyborgs as

mediation between humans and machmes or, indeed, analogous to any radical mediation

between human and Otiier. The pregnancy period of consttuct babies tells tiiat tiie new

generation will have greater potentiality to overcome differences: "When tiiek [humans

and Oankalis'] bodies were ready, tiiey insisted on bemg bom. Eleven montiis for tiie

Human-bom instead of tiieir original nine. Fifteen montiis for tiie Oankali-bom instead

of tiie original eighteen" (83). Lilitii advises Akin in tiie matter of differences:

Human beings fear difference...Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute tiieir different ones, yet tiiey need tiiem to give tiiemselves definition and stattis. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep tiiemselves from

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stagnation and overspecialization. If you don't understand this, you will. You'll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior. (80)

Unlike stubbom resisters, Lilith understood the value of differences and she knew that

her constmct son Akin would more efficiently embrace differences than usual humans.

Akin's maturity came more quickly because his human fathers were dead —his

biological father Joseph and foster father Tino. Although Iriarte, one of his resister

captors gave some affection to Akin, thinking Akin looks like one of his kids, he was

killed by Mateo, the father of Tino during Akin's captors visit to Phoenix to sell Akin to

the couple Gabriel and Tate. After adopting Akin as her son, Tate who knows Lilith from

the ship wamed Akin not to tell his mother's name. She explains that it is because the

people in Phoenix might hurt Akin because of their hate for Lilith. Like Lilith, Tate

quickly accepted things, adapted to strangeness, and tumed situations to her advantages.

While Akin was feeling a sttong need to have "bonding" with his newbom sister, new

traders brought to Phoenix two young Oankalis-bom constmct girls—Shkaht and Amma.

Thinking that removing ugly little tentacles would make them see the world as humans

do, Neci planed to cut off the Oankalis' tentacles. Knowing this, Shkaht and Amma

successftilly ran away. When three-year-old Akin was mature enough to collect

information about human contradictions for Nikanj, Akin's family and cured Tino visited

Phoenix.

Akin joined his family and heard that he must now leam the Oankali part of himself

For this Akin was sent to the shuttle called Chkahichdahk where no resisters existed.

Like the heroic quest in the underworld. Akin learned more about the mystery of life-the

symbiotic mode of living where mitochondria were original forms of life (183). In the

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Oankali homeship which circles the earth out beyond the orbit of the moon, the flesh of a

tiee is the same as the rest of the ship's flesh. The shuttle traveled close to a star and

escaped its gravitational embrace. It was in this extraordinary place of Chkahichdahk

that Akin became aware that as the first potential ooloi of human descent he could

provide humans with a second chance to try to reconcile their intelligence and

hierarchical behavior. Akjai, the ooloi teacher in the shuttle, encouraged Akin's vision:

"The resisters can be transplanted? Their Human-to-Human fertility can be restored?" "It's possible if you can get a consensus. But if you get a consensus, you may find that you've chosen your life's work." (215)

Although humans' intelligence is described as doomed to be at the service of hierarchical

behavior, Akin's innate alieness, by contrast, is featured as the ideal possibility by

Dehkiaht, an Oankali-bom constmct in the same shuttle:

You aren't flawed. I noticed even before 1 went to my parents that there was a wholeness to you—a strong wholeness. I don't know whether you'll be what your parents wanted you to be, but whatever you become, you'll be complete. You'll have within yourself everything you need to content yourself Just follow what seems right to you. (222)

With the new vision of "Akaj Humans" on Mars where humans without Oankalis'

intervention can safely live about twice as long as they already have. Akin visited

Phoenix again and met Tate and Gabe. While Akin healed Tate's broken bones. Akin

faced his metamorphosis. Besides Akin, Tate and doctor Yori watched how Akin had

new sensory tentacles, how his skin became gray, and how he was losing his hair.

Although humans' inbom dislike and contradiction was still strong (as Neci set fires to

Tate's house), in the new world of Mars, Akin hoped that longevity would lessen human

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hastiness. He also thought that a hard work in the new world would demand more human

cooperation and intelligence. Above all, he imagined that the mutation in the new world

could be the best chance for the human future.

<Imago: Book Three of the Xenogenesis Series>

Akin's loss of bonding and his following development without empathy are

described as a horrible fate. Although Akin is a human-bom constmct, his human parents

don"t recognize him at all when he comes home. Akin is said to be killed by resisters. It

is now twenty-nine-year-old subadult Jodah, another human-bom constmct by the

foursome relation (among Lilith, Tino, Dichaan, and Ahajas) who tells this story.

Although Jodah on the verge of the second metamorphosis is a wanderer like Akin, Jodah

as the first human-bom ooloi performs the more active role of "bridge," "life ttader," and

"magnef: "I would be the most extteme version of a construct—^not just a mix of Human

and Oankali characteristics, but able to use my body in ways tiiat neitiier Human nor

Oankali could. Synergy" (28).

Because until then no constttict had become ooloi, Jodah, along with his Oankal-bom

constmct sister Aaor who is tiiree months younger tiian he, becomes the center of a lot of

attention for all tiie families in tiie Oankali community. Considering tiiat tiiere are young

humans bom and raised on tiie ship, Chkahichdahk, Nikanji urges botii Jodah and Aaor

tiiat tiiey would better find consttuct or Oankali mates and leam to be content witii

shipboard life. "While tiie Ooloi-inherited organelle in Jodah makes him an excellent

collector and ttader of life, tiie human side of Jodah fears tiiat tiie older and resistant

organism of the shipboard life would make him feel caged and frantic like an exile.

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When resisters ravages Lilith's farmland, the Lo community, despite its ship-like

changed environments, starts their joumey to find a better place in an island. But the

resister group m Pascual nearby attacks tiiem. The humans who emigrated to Mars are

mentioned as many instead of most. Resisters on earth persecute more severely the

persons who want to emigrate to Mars (where humans live in shelters without going

outside because of the cold and dry environments).

In this joumey. Jodah meets and heals both a raped human female named Marina

Rivas from the Philippines and Joao, a human male with a broken leg in a fall. Because

they satisfy" the human hunger in Jodah on the verge of metamorphosis. Jodah s affinity

for humans becomes sttonger and more urgent. While Jodah, as an ooloi who can lose

conttol without a potential mate, decides to stay on earth to mate even with old humans,

Jodah unexpectedly finds a wandering human couple in a forest. Jodah earns their

gratitude by correcting their genetic disease—neurofibromatosis. Satisfied with the

disappearance of their tumors, Thomas and Jesusa, a brother and sister, become more

cooperative to Jodah's plan, though they do not understand exactiy. After finding their

rapid aging is also a kind of genetic order, Jodah desperately wants to mate with these

young humans. Unlike Akin, Jodah's need to have empathy is fiilfilled by helpuig this

human couple. While they run away from a resister's raid, Jodah faces his second

metamorphosis—a series of shorter sleeps. Even during his unconscious sleepmg, Jodah

cures Jesusa who was shot in the abdomen by a resister's gunshot.

Through the raft, Thomas, Jesusa and Jodah safely arrive at Nikanj "s community.

Thomas and Jesusa tells about the history of their genetic disorder caused by raping and

in tum Ahajas, Jodah's Oankali mother, tells about the philosophy of life in Oankalis:

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If I died on a lifeless w orld, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that would be as fiill of life as this one. (149)

Although the smallest organelles within oolois' cells is a vast, infinitely absorbing

complexity, ooloi's need to have empathy from human mates during the second

metamorphosis is essential as the counter example of Akin shows: "Oankali ooloi usually

made the final change after they had found mates. Mates gave them the security to

change. Mates would look after them while they were helpless and be there for them

when they awoke" (121).

Without finding human mates, Aaor now almost faces the Akin's miserable fate.

Already biochemically attracted only to Jodah, Thomas and Jesusa avoid Aaor.

Desperate because of loneliness, Aaor seeks help from Jodah but Jodah only gives her

momentary relief Later Aaor's body in agony is almost trying to commit suicide: "It

[Aaor] kept slipping away from me—simplifying its body. It had no conttol of itself, but

like a rock rolling downhill" (158). While all are worried about Aaor's chance to mate

with a pair of humans. Jodah after finishing his second metamorphosis becomes an adult

ooloi and receives the flood of information from Nikanj:

Genetic memories. Viable copies of cells that Nkanj had received from its own ooloi parent or that it had collected itself or accepted from its mates and children. It had duplicated everything it possessed and now it would pass the whole mheritance on to me. It was time. I was a mated adult. (167)

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This mattirity in ooloi, in a way, is similar to accommodate all differences witiiout

rejecting tiiem: "It's more like having billions of sttangers screaming from inside you for

your individual attention"" (169).

To get human mates for Aaor, Thomas, Jesusa, Jodah, and Aaor leave home to go to

a mountain village where Thomas and Jesusa"s resister people live. During this

dangerous ttip, village people find tiiem. While Jodah and Aaor keep hidden in tiie ttees

and undergrowtii, village people take Thomas and Jesusa to a cave prison. In their way to

get Jodah's human mates, Jodah and Aaor meet tiiree humans living in isolation; Jodah

cures Santos"s genetic disease and Aaor get its human mates—Javier and Paz. Because

village guards know that tiiere were two otiier missing ones m addition to Thomas and

Jesusa, tiiey send four guardsmen to the forest during the night. Among tiiem, Jodah

successfully persuades the elder, Francisco who urged village people to believe that

Oankalis are four-armed animals and devils.

Although Jodah almost reaches Thomas and Jesusa's cave prison using his stinging

and injection of a corrosive, he is detected by armed village people and arrested by them.

Knowing oolois' need for village people's genetic disease, Santos suggests keeping them

alive. While they stay, Jodah and Aaor heal all the village people's diseases; as a result

they begin to love oolois and to believe what oolois tell them about the human colony on

the Mars. Oankalis' shuttle arrives at the mountain village and older Oankalis advise

Jodah to plant a new town for the remaining people on earth. Jodah's role as as ooloi

("tteasured sttanger") for humans is fmally fiilfilled by his using the organelle as the

smallest seed containing a vast, infinitely absorbing complexity:

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There was a single cell within that great store—a cell that could be "awakened" from its stasis within yashi and stimulated to divide and grow into a kind of seed. This seed could become a town or a shuttle or a great ship like Chkahichdahk. In fact, my seed would begin as a town and eventually leave Earth as a great ship. It would never be a shuttle, though it would be parent to shuttles. (219)

Goddesses and Positive Chaos

The post-modem era is often called the apocalyptic and anti-heroic times.' After

ancient mythic heroes (such as the preeminent Aeneas or Odysseus) had been rapidly

displaced by petit bourgeois characters in the Victorian Age, the more sophisticated

social condition of the information technology has mostly produced unheroic protagonist.

Although modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and Joyce successftilly redeemed myths and

provided unified world visions, postmodem apocalyptic situations such as the two world

wars retumed mythic heroes again to weak survival or victimization.^ Postmodem

characters in realistic settings commonly suffer from deadlock circumstances, as

represented by Joseph Heller's Catch-22, ratiier tiian showing heroic qualities to

overcome them. In a battle for recognizing meaning(s) in human existence, they often

face conttadictory situations, become ttapped, and fail to manifest coherent values. Like

tiie Gl Tyrone Slothrop in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, postinodem heroes often fail to

fimction as active agents m bringing unity. They are, instead, depicted as tiie socially

constiticted figure driven by complicated political or existential forces beyond tiiefr

conttol. Especially from tiie ttirbulent period of tiie 1960's to 1980's, heroes' deadlock

situations and their attenuation have been popularly tteated m realistic American fictions

and their criticism.

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hi The Machine in the Garden (1964), tiirough tiie consistent, metaphoric use of

violent machines, Leo Marx interestingly parallels American traditional heroes in

classical writers (such as Cooper, Thoreau, and Melville) witii later contemporary heroes

in works of Faulkner. Frost, and Hemingway. For example, Marx first traces back to

some dramatic moments of the first machines' sudden transgression into the tranquility

landscape in Huckleberry Finn: "when Huck and Jim are floating along peacefiilly and a

monsttous steamboat suddenly bulges out of the night and smashes sttaight through their

raft" (15). Thoreau's hearing of the whistie of a locomotive in Walden, and Melville's

conttast of the leviathan's skeleton witii a New England textile mill also, according to

Marx, as the grand metaphor, bring political and psychic dissonance into single-pattemed

and sentimental pastoralism.

In contemporary heroes, with the appearance of science fiction as a genre in the early

twentieth century, a certain conviction about the power of science and technology has

brought a suspicion of ttaditional religions. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Frost's

farmland, or Hemingway's high mountains are idealized landscapes into which modem

heroes withdrew as their precursors did into the Walden, the Mississippi River or an

Indian village.

Yet, contemporaries living in the electtonic age are no longer surprised at the

mechanical noises in the garden. Perhaps because of pervasive air pollution,

contemporaries can find no pure nature into which they may retteat. But more than

anything else, our culture itself changes intrinsically as the new hybrid of simulation by

mass media and technology. After the holocaust of World War II, every day we face

minor phenomena of the apocalypse related to violent technology (such as bombs, guns,

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dmg producing laboratories, or abortion clinics). Transcending the limitation of time and

space, mass media effectively convey the actual feeling of every ferocious violent act and

crime. Lee Quinby in Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticisms, mentions

the historical impact of modem technology:

We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, tiie epoch of tiie near and far, of the side-by side, of the dispersed. Techno space thus alters the way time is experienced; electtonic media and storage make it seem as if everything is happening at the same time. (138)

This "sense of the end" is more pervasive in the post-modem American novels, mainly

mfluenced by the power of digital technology. While science provides the way of

improvement in human livings, science accelerates apocalyptic fears by its growing

destmctive potentialities. Interestingly many postmodem science fiction writers including

the writers I deal with here depict both fears and hopes of modem science through

anthropomorphic projections where the ancient mentality affirms the spirit of the material

universe. In the Westem tradition, these personifications of cosmology (such as

Gilgamesh, Galatea, Golem, and Gaia) are as much visibly heuristic as modernist works,

yet different from modernists' tendency to create grand schemes.''

The repression of the occult pantheistic religions by Westem Christianity, as in the

literature of early Protestant immigrants shows, in turn prohibited consciousness from a

much more fertile and creative source of life. Significantly, to heal the catasttophic

repression, many philosophers, theologians, and writers have imaged the immanent

divinity as a benevolent Goddess instead of an angry God. For example, Peter Dronke

points out that in the City of God, Augustine shows some hostility to Hermes as a male

pagan god but gives a measure of welcome to Sibyls (9). Remarkably, Malkah in He,

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She and It fills her interior voids by favoring two female cats—tiie quasi-equivalent to

goddess-Leila (night) and Zayit (olive), after losing a male cat, Hermes which was

valuable in a town plagued witii mice (38, 179). Malkah's travel into women's land with

Nili, like Chava in tiie Golem mytii who died in Sofia, is also symbolic in terms of her

search for an inspirational goddess. Malkah tties to find the new form of life in this

goddess-residmg desert against deatii: "This desert seems totally inhospitable to life, yet

here is this community flourishing, and much animal and plant life has come back" (420).

And tills is ahnost similar to Dronke's asserting of Abelard's use of Sibylline testimonies

as the more profound than male prophets':

In the diverse redactions of his Theologia, Abelard assembled testimonies to the concept of the Trinity first from Hebrew prophets and then from pagan philosophers. In the last and fullest version of his book, he argues for the salvation in the Christian heaven of pagan sages who had lived long before Christ's bfrth. If someone were to object that they can't be saved without having believed in Christ, Abelard rejoins—^how could one prove that they did not? For they saw that Christ was prophesied by a pagan woman, the Sibyl, far more clearly than by almost any Hebrew prophet. (13)

Along with the ecofeminist's comparison of earth as Mother Goddess (such as Butler's in

Xenogenesis series), the growing popularity of goddess worship in the contemporary

fiction attests to postmodem people's seeking of a new consciousness through which the

ttansformation of the human mind can apprehend the larger and more vital reality.

Participatory integration with the universe inherent in the goddess myth mainly comes

from the fact that goddesses maintain the holistic harmony with the organic body

conttary to the male god's supposed dismemberment.

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Osiris is dismembered not Isis; Dionysus not Demeter. The severed genitals of

Chronos plunge into the sea, from which Aphrodite arises whole. As the notion of Ur­

suppe, connected to the ocean as the world's spiritual repertoire, the divine Sophia, as the

successor of Isis, is alive in human's divinatory mind despite its physical death. In his

collection of four lectures in 1920, The Search for the New Isis the Divine Sophia, Rudolf

Steiner alludes to his own version in which Isis is killed by Lucifer:

We must give form to this legend [of Osiris and Isis], for it sets forth the tmth of our times. We must speak of the dead and lost Isis, the divine Sophia, even as the ancient Egyptians spoke of the dead and lost Osiris. We must set out in search of the dead body of the new Isis, the dead body of the divine Sophia, with a force which, although we cannot yet rightiy understand it, is nevertheless in us—with the force of the Christ, with the force of the new Osiris. We must approach Luciferic science and seek there the coffin of Isis; in other words we must find in that which natural science gives something which stimulates us inwardly towards Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This brings to us the help of Christ within—Christ "Who remains hidden in darkness if we do not illuminate him with divine wisdom. Armed with this force of tiie Christ with tiie new Osiris, we must set out in search of Isis, the new Isis. Lucifer does not cut Isis in pieces, as Ahriman-Typhon did witii Osiris; on tiie conttary, Isis is spread out, in her tme shape, in tiie beauty of the whole Universe. (26-27)

In tiie same vem, in Isis and Osiris: Exploring the Goddess Myth, Jonatiian Cott argues

tiiat tiie cult of Isis flourishes even to tiiis day in many comers of tiie globe, five tiiousand

years after its fttst mentioning in ancient Egyptian texts. As Cott explains, Lucius

Apuleius was inspired in his writing of The Golden Ass in which tiie Goddess Isis

released tiie autiior ttapped in tiie body of an ass. Also, in D. H. Lawrence's The Man

Who Died and Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, myth of Isis implies an altemative

reality which is shaped differentiy from tiie male-god(s)-dominated world. Journeying

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around the world to gather Isis narratives and worship, Cott records the still seminal and

life-giving significance of Isis. The following is an archpriestess and hierophant's telling

voice to Cott:

Friends, companions on the quest for etemal life, join us in the Temple of isis at Clonegal Castle, that we may enact one of the most ancient mysteries of all time— the Mystery of the Awakening of Osiris by the Goddess Isis, his wife. You are in your time and space, and I am a voice from the future, in another time and space. I am Olivia Robertson of the Fellowship of Isis, and I offer to be your guide in a mystical joumey... (3 7)

Like Hermes, Isis-Being as the deification or the rebirth of men, implies that the cosmos

constitutes a unity and that all parts of it are interdependent. However, the divine

revelation in goddess's myths is, as not the dismembered, or human god but as the sacred,

holistic being, characterized as the more faithftil and fertile than deceitful and death-

related male gods. Also, unlike the China's Pangu creation myth where human beings

come from the flea of the giant Pangu, the holistic projection of organic universe in Isis

doesn't presume the puniness of human bemg as the necessary supposition because

human beings are mostly the pivotal part of its evolutionary consciousness.''

Since its rising in the seventeenth century, science's mechanistic project has

continued to negate the anthropomorphic cosmology which could not be scientifically

proved. In its quest to know the chaotic universe, however, postmodem chaos science

has shown that far-from-equilibrium conditions self-organize, making tiiem like a human

personality. In conttast to that postmodernism development, modem science envisioned

the world as bemg impersonal and thus devoid of spiritual correspondence. Despite its

rich cultural implications, the remaining mechanical tendency in postmodem science still

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reminds us of the Promethean trying to manifest an autonomous self above nature. The

lack of intrinsic meaning in the soulless universe, as many postmodem writers commonly

describe, in turn produced paranoia, nihilism, violence, and other schizophrenic reactions.

Popular adoptions of anthropomorphic nature among Romantic poets were the

humane reaction to this impersonal universe which is completely indifferent to the

passion and despair in the human mind. Although Romanticists gained spiritual

satisfaction by regarding universe and nature as their radical kinsmen, their excessive

affinity with the chaotic, as frequently expressed in their praise of the delirium, was

unhealthy and headlong enough to overlook the intrinsic homeostasis, the regulatory

process of the organic universe. The distortions inherent in Romanticism through

monsttous unages (e.g., Mary Shelly's Frankenstein) reveal tiiat Romanticism was both

the guiding angel of the emotional tmth and the unconscious personification of the

inherent evil within nature.

Experimental psychological studies have in some cases corroborated a psychology,

which has developed from Carl Jung's studies of "archetypal" processes. Like Jung's

efforts to fmd humans' ttanscendental desires witii Collective Unconscious, many

postinodem tiieorists now ttim back to tiie primordial enchanting worid of myths tiirough

which the homeostasis of the universe can be glimpsed.

As Jung saw tiie healing of modem alienation in tiie redemptive reunification of tiie

opposites (such as anima and animus, self and others, and tiie Westem rationality/tiie

Eastem mytii), posttnodem science, witii tiie growing recognition of tiie potential danger

in Promethean adventure over nature, tums its attention toward the mystical divinity of

tiie Great Goddess such as Gaia, Isis and Sybils. By tiiis quest for goddesses, postinodem

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scientists try to embrace the ecstatic unity with the universe and human ego. Providing

more harmonious and deeper exploration of the primordial, unconscious stmcture of the

universe, these goddesses, conttary to the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest,

teach us the symbiosis as the principle of the natural law.

Influenced by the holistic, harmonious world view in the myths of goddess of earth,

Gaia hypothesis supporters emphasize the importance of "organelles" as the origin of all

lives on earth. For them, the Gaia hypothesis creates the participatory world view instead

of sitting on the monsttous giant of the universe as the observer. Here, the projection of

humans in the Gaia hypothesis is neither despicable like the flea on the gigantic body of

the universe in ancient Chinese creation myth nor passive or separable as "dwarf-like

human beings. The postmodem goddess, instead, shows humanity's symbiotic living

within this giant-like organic Universe. As the essential part of the organic body of the

universe, human beings again, like ttanscendentalists, experience the primordial

supremacy of the divine. Here, similar to the ancient ritual of sacrifice, postmodem

goddess supporters use technology as an effective tool for unfolding the universal

meaning and erasing violence in society. Faced with the holocausts of a masculine

Promethean Giant's unbridled conttolling of technology, a growing number of people

adopts the Sophianic reemergence, interlinking the goddess witii the scientific tiieories of

the holonomic universe.

By reintergrating the body, the feelings, the nonlinearity, the unconsciousness, myths

of goddesses lead us to the new conception of human being as the pivotal actor in the

evolving universe toward tiie mature gestalt. The interdependency of all things m the

Gaia hypothesis is also strikingly similar to the life cycle principle of Buddhism where

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even a worm, as a potential Buddha, must not be hurt. The personification of tiie eartii as

Gaia is, in tius regard, tiie modemized ritual of sacrifice with harmless participation. Like

meditation, each polarity of mytiios/logos, subject/object, and self/others implodes into

the deeper reality in myths of goddesses.

But, as even some feminists reject Motiier nattire as their slogan, here some questions

arise: "Can goddesses as the antiiropomorphic cosmology be really supposed as the

beginnmg of tiie spiritual universe like Buddhist's meditations of nirvana?" "Isn't the

concept of a body itself vulnerable, tiiough it is the sacred, fertile body?" "Isn't there still

human-and-earth-centered controversy in tiie anthropomorphic Gaia theory?" About

these questions, 1 am trying to show that goddess worship draws some negative answers

despite its heuristic advantage over male-god worship.

A renowned Greek poet Hesiod tells that Chaos was the parent of Gaea (or Gaia), the

goddess of the earth who gave birth to Tartams, the underworld, and Eros, Love. Chaos

was also the mother of Night and Darkness. In Hesiod's Theogony, chaos is depicted both

as not form and the background against which the creation of form takes place. About

this, Katherine Hayles emphasizes a connection between Chaos and Eros, the two

primeval forces of the world instead of regarding Gaea (Gaia) as the origin:

Within the Westem tradition, chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, the unordered, Hesiod in the Theogony designates Chaos as that which existed before anything else, when the universe was in a completely undifferentiated state. Later in the Theogony, he uses the term to signify the gap that appeared when heaven separated from Earth through the influence of Eros. (Chaos Bound, 19)

Genesis likewise begins with the "increasing differentiation of form" from this chaotic

notion of total disorder: "In the begmning God created the heavens and the earth. The

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earth was witiiout form, and void: and darkness was on tiie face of the deep. And the

Spirit of God was hovering over the face of tiie waters."

Notably, Catiiolism, because of its special devoting to Saint Mary, a female savior,

was criticized by a Protestantism that pioneered many of the attittides (that later found

tiieir fiaiition in modernism). In a net magazine article, "Heresy Hunting: The Monk and

tiie French Revolution," "Whitiark generalizes tiiat Protestantism "served as the British

superego" at a time when tiie British were projecting tiie id on Catholicism and then on

French atiieism (witii its worship of the goddess Reason). To tiiese late-eighteentii

centtiry Protestants, "Whitlark argues, "Catiiolicism, m its supposed lack of sexual and

other resttaint, allegedly breeds idolattous Crowds, which retain their vices even when

they lose their faith."

Cultural and religious implications in Chaos theory, as the more proper paradigm

than goddess-worship, have not been thought as the positive philosophy until postmodem

scientists bring it to the front. Up until 1980s, chaos was historically regarded as the

obstacle to order.

The ancient Greeks' belief in the cycle of history and the Christian notion of the Last

Judgment commonly reflect their negative viewpoints of human evolution as they

regarded the chaos as the opposite of order. Therefore, they thought that human history

would gradually follow the road of conftision and dismption. The rapid development of

science since the eighteenth century brought new way of thinking to Europeans and the

Industrial Revolution modemized their everyday lives. However, a wider conception of

physical and social evolution in the history of man cannot be flilly achieved in a

mechanical and linear science.

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The relati-vity, uncertainty and probability which could not be explained in

Newtonian dynamics were the new themes of the twenty-century entropic view of the

world. This, however, evolved into a study of negenttopic, nonlinear, and dynamical

systems and Ilya Prigogine and Isabell Stengers, for instance, have understood chaos as

order's precursor and partner. Lorenz, Feigenbaum, Mendelbrot, and Shaw, however,

focused on the orderly descent into chaos rather than on the organized stmctures that

emerge from chaos.^

As James Gleick explains in his popular work, Chaos, any simple linear equation

disappears if fiiction is considered. And the nonlinear systems basically required in chaos

research are sensitive to and dependent upon small changes in initial conditions. The

difference produced by small initial changes shows a "butterfly" pattem as Lorenz's three

nonlinear equations insist. The noise in circuits, as Mandelbrot points out, while

seemingly random, nevertheless forms an elegant mathematical pattem. Through elegant

mathematical pattems, Feigenbaum's universality lesson also shows tiiat chaotic Nature

is chaotic only in certain ways, only in or through certain pattems.

Rather than take literally myths of a goddess who focuses tiie fully formed universe

as an organic body, chaos theory provides a way of considering femmine sexuality a

fractal microcosm ofdissipative systems (e.g., Gaia). Luce frigaray writes :

The "science" of psychoanalysis rests upon the first two principles of thermodynamics which underiie tiie model of the libido according to Freud. Now these two principles seem to be more isomorphic witii respect to masculine sexuality than they do with femmine sexuality. The latter is less subject to the alterations of tension-release, to the required conservation of energy, to the maintenance of a state of equilibrium, to operating m a cfrcuit closed and reopened by saturation, to the reversibility of time, etc. Feminine sexuality could

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perhaps better be brought mto harmony—if one must evoke a scientific model—what Prigogine calls "dissipating" stmctiires that operate via an exchange with tiie extemal worid, stitictures that proceed tiirough levels of energy. The organizational principle of tiiese sttticttires has nothing to do with the search for equilibrium but ratiier with the crossing of thresholds. This would correspond to a surpassing of disorder or enttopy witiiout discharge. ("Is the Subject of Science Sexed?" 81)

The emphasis of chaos theory is based upon the larger disorder which includes order

inside it. The society, m terms of chaos theory, is liable to be violent anytime despite its

autonomous ordering capacity. Far from the theory of everything, chaos theory only

shows that humans can detect the partial pattems through sttange atttactors in ordering

chaos. The undetectable initial conditions in chaos theory finally belong to mystery.

Without inttoducing ttanscendental primordial divinities such as the personification

of the divine, the perfectly ordered world is hard to figure out. In the crossroad between

seemingly stable personified diviiuty (based upon myths) and seemingly unstable

chaotics (based upon postmodem science), we tend to think that we must choose either

one or the other. The recent discarding of Darwinism and Big Bang theory by the Kansas

state government is a good example. Isn't there another altemative between experiments

and experiences or between facts and belief? Isn't there any way that science and

religion agree with each other? The answers for these may be found in our deeper

consideration of myths m the context of modem science-scientific myth-or science m

the context of myths—spiritual myth.

Michel Serres suggests that tiie "positive chaos" or "la belle noiseuse" can be tiie

midway method which can settle confrontations between science and religion:

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To attempt to think and to produce supposes taking risks, supposes living precisely in a flux that remains outside the classification process of encyclopedias....All our classified reasoning, all our codices, habits, and methods induce us to speak [of chaos] as an outsider or by negation: outside the law and nonmeaningful. But I speak a positive chaos [Mais je dis le chaos positij]. (cited in Assad 285)

About the "depth of being" in a flux explored in this third middling way, Hayles notes:

"The linearity of Martian order [in Serres] represents those aspects of Westem culture

tiiat privileges war over love, order over creativity, abstraction over embodiment,

aggression over sympathy, death over life" (Chaos and Order 18). Hayles suggests that

Serres' "positive chaos" is similar to Prigoginian and postmodem reconceptualization of

the void as a space of creation: "This reconstitution makes clear that the world as humans

experience it is a collaboration between reality and social constmction. No longer simply

what is there, reality is subject to constant revision, deconstmction, and reconstmction"

(14).

In this "positive chaos," things are dissipative, rather than being linear and reality is

constmcted, rather than being given. Like the Maxwell's angel-like Demon, for example,

the terms of "madness," "death," and "disease" in cultural contexts of chaos implies

disorder and creativity at the same time. In other words, if we consider these negatively

considered terms as the social chaos and get a larger understanding of positive chaos, the

direction for the scientific myth and spiritual science can be clearer. As Branimir M.

Rieger puts it, "to state that madness and sanity are opposites grossly oversimplifies and

omits significant shades of gray" (Dionysus in Literature 1). The repressed emotions such

as frustration, tension and anxiety are often common symptoms shown in madness, either

repressed by society or by inner conflicts of an individual personality.

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Psychologically or sociologically, mad or wild symptoms are the marks of

destmctive and deviant aspects of an individual or a group, but on the other hand they are

also creative, insightful and even healing. Unlike clinical or medical insanity, the

creative or literary madness often reveals prophetic insights. Many artists regard this

creative insanity as an importeuit source of their artistic inspiration and in fact it shows to

a large extent the liberated human soul from oppressive societal constmction providing us

with deep understanding of conttadictory human personality.

Dying, the holding of all life fimctions, is the great unknown that neither science nor religion has ever been able to penettate...Because it is both unknown and inevitable, death always been an object of fascination and fear...Death has always played a significant role in the culture of human societies, and it has sttongly influenced the way people live their lives...Dying is something essentially alone... How an individual responds depends, of course, on the quality of one's personal life...Death often becomes a matter of fear. (Compton Interactive Dictionary)

If the creative madness works as a kind of ordeal which leads to prophetic knowledge,

some of its excessive outbursts resuh in death. Like other derivations from ordmary

consciousness, death, like madness, also has botii fearful and fascinating aspects. As

Shoshana Felman points out, "Madness usually occupies a position of exclusion: it is the

outside of a culture. But Madness tiiat is a common place occupies a position of

inclusion and becomes tiie inside of a culttire" (Writing and Madness 13). She explains

tiiat tills situation arises because of "tiie radical ambiguity of tiie inside and tiie outside"

in our time, hi the same way, we can say tiiat deatii and chaos also become common in

the post-industiial worid, and it is no wonder tiiat tiiese deviant and subversive notions

occupy the centtal places in postmodem theory.

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In this constmcted and ambiguous postmodem culture, the wall between chaos and

order, madness and healtii, death and life is just the artificial demarcation which the

characters of many postinodem heroes tiy to run beyond. But tiiis tiansformation may

require two radical rules. The one is: "the production of information is good in itself,

independent of what it means" (Chaos Bound 6). Anotiier is: "nature, too complex to fit

into the Procurstean bed of linear dynamics, can renew itself precisely because it is rich

m disorder and surprise" (Chaos Bound 11).

This "deterministic and unpredictable" chaos can create order from the void and

oppressive ideologies just as the value of life is maximized when we know the real

meaning of death, disease and madness. The disturbing notions of chaotic terms in

essence free our lives from confinement in a coercive culture. In order to be free from

"the prison house of language," we need to denature first the linear language to be one of

the liberating components of our lives. Lacan saw the unconscious as structured like a

language and Francoise Lyotard subsumed politics to discourse theory. For Derrida,

differance (both the deferment and difference) in language was the very key to

understanding subjects, objects, history, and culture. If we can uncover "the double

helix" of language, we can have "the language regarded as ground painted under our feet

while we hang suspended in a void (Chaos Bound 269). Through denatured language

where negative terms are positively interpreted in a larger context, we can also maintam a

multiplicity of discourses by which the danger of only extant dominant discourse is

avoided.

As Katherine Hayles proposes, through becoming aware of the disjunction between

message and context, we can free ourselves from the context that is always already a

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constmction and literally equivalent to conttolling interpretation. As Serres insists on the

nonlinear logic of the "folded time," we c£m also hold our renewed sense of historicity by

denaturing time such as the mix of myth and science. Then, if we as denatured men (such

as the posthuman with mythical wholeness) can live in a denatured world of metaverse in

a distant future, and look back upon the present day, we will recognize that the better

world of being owes much to denaturing the most disturbing notions of chaos in

posthuman being (such as disease, madness and death) thanks to the disturbing writers'

sacred "personifiers" in mythical cosmology such as Piercy's Golem and Butler's

Oankali.

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Notes

I Anti-hero is "a protagonist who lacks tiie attiibutes tiiat make a heroic figure,

as nobility of mind and spirit, a life or attittide marked by action or purpose, and the like" (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary). Thus, instead of insisting on essence or principle, anti-heroes unheroically subject to social change and opporttinity. These selfish masks often make them despicable or displaced persons.

- hi "Shadow of Spirit in William Gibson's Mattix Trilogy," Olsen compares "pattem" in modernism witii "parody of meaning" in postinodemism: "Modem reading demands tiiat we discover tiie pattems tiiat underiie tiie text at hand, lending it its mtelligibility. Hence, in The Waste Land we search, following Eliot's clues planted in his footnotes, for the poet's use of Jessie L. Weston's and James Frazer's books on myth, or we discover how, tiirough a certam optic, Tiresias is the 'he' who does tiie police m different voices and thereby unifies tiie poem. Posttnodem reading, on the other hand, produces a parody of meaning. The 'patterns' that postmodem writing generates are 'always subject to contradiction or cancellation. The ultimate effect is radically to destabilize novelistic ontology' (McHale 106)" (287).

In "Situated Knowledge,"' Donna J. Haraway rhetorically inttoduces the rich Imks among semiotics, postmodemism, science and science fiction: "the further 1 get with the description of the radical social constmctionist programme and a particular version of postmodemism, coupled to the acid tools of critical discourse in the human sciences, the more nervous I get. Like all neuroses, mine is rooted in the problem of metaphor, that is, the problem of the relation of bodies and language. For example, the force field imagery of moves in the fully textualized reality- and coded world is the matrix for many arguments about socially negotiated reality for the postmodem subject. This world-as-code is, just for starters, a high-tech mihtary field, a kind of automated academic battlefield, where blips of light called players disintegrate (what a metaphor!) each other in order to stay in the knowledge and power game. Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality—^war" (576).

^ Suzanne Thompson in her webpage explains a connection between the Pangu myth and Chinese culture through the family stmcture and the land/nature. "The general format of the Chinese creation myths is an egg was the fust thing in the emptiness. Inside the egg was chaos and the fu-st god, Pangu (male). When the egg broke the universe was split into the heavens (yang) and the Earth (yin). After the breaking Pangu had to hold the heavens from cmshing the earth. He lived ten thousand years. He grew ten feet every day. He died when he decided to go to sleep one day. When he died his body became the features of the earth and the animals. Then, Nunga (female) who is a human god except for her dragon tail instead of legs, comes along and admires the beauty of nature, but wants more than simple animals. She makes the people from the clay of the Yellow

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River. The hand made humans are superior to the ones made from the clay soaked rope. Then another god, Gong-Gong breaks the world only to be fixed again by Nunga. . . .In the myths of creation Pangu becomes nature and the goddess Pangu admires the nature and thinks it is beautiful. . . .The egg was a hen's egg, everything in the universe bursted from the egg, eartii has always been, and no creator. The basic stmcture of Chinese creation myths stays the same while many variations can be found. For example, Pangu can be spelled P'an Ku or Phan Ku. Some myths mention the forming of the moon and the sun from Pangu's eyes. This occurred because books containing myths were burned by Confiicius' believers during tiie Confiicius period in China's history. The way humans were actually created is arguable. They were created from fleas or from clay". (http://www.prs.kl 2.nj .us/Schools/PHS/English_Dept/English_l/l 995/myth-researchl.html)

Weingart and Maasen explains two different patters of "order of meaning" in these two types of chaos theories: "The order-out-of-chaos aspect focuses on the spontaneous emergence of self-organization of meaning; that is the discourses, sufficiently atttacted and disturbed by a metaphor, create new meaning. The hidden-order-within-chaos aspect, on the other hand, focuses on the fact that metaphorically induced knowledge ttansformation, rather than being tmly random, contains discursive stmctures that atttact certain metaphors (sufficiently plausible and distinctive from the already know) and prefer certain (discourse-specific) ways of ttansforming them. Plausibility is produced in a recursive manner on both micro (discourse) and macro scales (dispositif)" ("The Order of Meaning: The Career of Chaos as Metaphor" 520)

^ Literature and science have long been misunderstood as separate domains which deal with respectively subjectivity and objectivity, feeling and reason. However, the ideas about world are accessible to human beings through representations which are expressed mostly by language. Evelyn Fox Keller says, "language simultaneously reflects and guides the development of scientific models and methods" (Secrets of Life 6). Therefore, science caimot free itself from consttamts of social products which are stmctured by language. Similarly, in Reflecions on Gender and Science, she argues that "just as science is not the purely cognitive endeavor we once thought it, neither is it as unpersonal as we thought: science is a deeply personal as well as a social activity" (7). Keller sees the twin goals of science as knowledge and power and argues that knowledge and power are wrongly ttanslated into objectification and domination (71).

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CHAPTER V

TECHNOLOGICAL PERSONIFICATIONS IN THEORY

The Sublime

hi tiie beginning of tiieir inttoduction to Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined

World George Slusser and Eric Rabkin emphasize "tiie need to link inner and outer

reality, mmd and matter"" by means of tiie concept of "mindscape" from Plato's allegory

of the cave:

Plato in his parable of tiie cave incriminates the mind's perception of tiie worid. The cave dwellers think tiiey perceive a landscape. At best, however, they only imagine it. It is a copy of the world of real essences. And m this sense it is a mindscape, for (as Plato later tells us) the mmd, at the higher level of apprehension, needs neitiier these images nor the material thing but connects directiy with the ideal form, (ix)

The sublime in this topology of the mindscape has been positioned as the summit because

as Thomas Weiskel has mentioned it, the "essential claim of the sublime is that man can,

in feeling and in speech, ttanscend the human" (3). More often than not, for the ancient

mentality, the vast and empty spaces of the earth invoked an incomprehensible spfritual

realm as a part of human experience. And the immensity in landscape reflected in

soulscape is often considered as the sacred and violent where human's imagination

functions as the vital decisive factor. Namely, the sublime in the mindscape had required

the vast landscape until the pure mindscape without extemal spaces has been actively

tried by the sublime poets in the seventeenth and eighteenth century through absttact

personifications. In the sublime's ttansformation from landscape to mindscape, however,

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the inherent danger of ttanscendence beyond human limitations was detected earlier than

we might suppose.

In "Toward a Technological Sublime," Bart Thurber sees "the essence of the

Longiiuan sublime" as "ttansport." Among Longinus's famous five sources of

sublimity—"great thoughts, noble feelings, lofty figures, diction and arrangemenf—

Thurber regards the first two sources as the most cmcial ones because "great thoughts"

and "noble feelings," conttary to the ancient rhetorician's concenttation on formal tropes

and figures, are "the echo of a great soul." For Longinus the ttansport was the soul's

"proud flighf with joy and vaunting and this flight of the soul was also a leap by the soul

of writer to that of his reader, from the living to the dead: "Our soul is uplifted by the tme

sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself

produced what it has heard; [it] breathes into dead thmgs a kind of living voice"

(Longmus's On the Sublime, ch 7, 30, from The Critical Tradition, ed. Richter). As many

critics emphasize, Longinus's sublime was unconventional without an intervening text

and therefore unpredictable and dangerous like its frequent appearance of personified

demons.

The so-called sublune poem of tiie late seventeenth and eighteentii centuries (whose

major practitioners were Gray, Collins, and Thomson) was composed by tiie diction of

sense unpressions resulting from a passionate encounter witii the natural worid and witii

tiie sense of realities in tiie age. No other type of rhetoric was more effective in

conveying this heightened emotion and the profound reality than the personification for

tiiem. Personifications, as in Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry,

Chester F. Chapin notes, were regarded in this age as "products of tiie very highest levels

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of imaginative exertion," the chief sign of the sublime (15). Chapin divides eighteentii-

century personification into two types—a type which approaches the nature of allegory

and a type which shows certain of the characteristics of metaphor. Focusing on the

eighteenth-century personified absttaction as tiie hallmark of the age through which a

sense of the real worth and dignity of moral values were emphasized, Chapin notes: "the

metaphorical type is especially suited to the purposes of the neoclassic 'poetry of

statement.' while the allegorical type is especially favored by those mid-century poets

who derive much of their uispiration from the minor poems of Milton" (3).

More than other types of rhetoric, personifications in the eighteenth century,

especially in the metaphorical type of personification, Chapin argues, reflect "the deepest

realities of the age"" and thus became real by the dramatizations of the values, affections,

or qualities of the eighteenth-century mind (132). For example, by personifying Newton's

rational description of how a rainbow forms, Akenside's following poem becomes one of

the dramatized example of the sublime personifications of science, Newton's rational

mind:

Nor ever yet The meting rainbow's vernal-tinctured hues To me have shown so pleasing, as when fust The hand of science pointed out the path In which tiie sun-beams gleaming from the west Fall on the watery cloud, whose darksome veil hivolves the orient; and that ttickling shower Piercing through every crystalline convex Of clustering dew-drops to theh flight oppos'd. Recoil at length where concave all behind The intemal surface on each glassy orb Repells their forward passage into air; That thence direct they seek the radiant goal From which their course began; and, as they strike In different lines the gazer's obvious eye,

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Assume a different lustte . . .

(2,103-18, cited in Greenberg 132)

In "Eighteenth-Century Poetry represents Moments of Scientific Discover: Appropriation

and Generic Transformation," Mark L. Greensberg explains how personification in this

age has the effect of poetic abilities to ttanscend science to "enhanced experiences" through a new linguistic creation, linking it to the divine inherent m the human mind:

The end of refraction for Akenside, it seems, is human perception; the "gazer's obvious eye" completes the Newtonian process of refraction. Refracted light, Akenside suggests, may be realized only by the responsive observers. . . Despite the claim that the "hand of science pointed out the path" of light's refractive action and thus improved the experience derived from viewing the spectrum, the passage itself actually recontextualizes and radically transforms the science upon which it is based. (132)

Modem readers tend to see the unimaginative, conventional quality of much eighteenth-

century personifications in that "Time appears again and again as an old man with a

scythe. Love as a beautiftil boy with a bow and arrows, and Justice is never without the

sword with which the ancients endowed her" (Chapin 50). But Chapin fmds the cogent

reason for the eighteenth-century poets' adherence to convention through the unbidden,

vivid vision in the poet's mental eyes. Here science as a means for glorifying God with

the scientist as His prophet (as in Akenside's poem), reveals a vision of the Divine by

personifying the process of science. Although Pope and Collins wrote the different

personification verses by approaching metaphor and allegory respectively, Chapin finds

m both poets' exttemes a meeting point, the vivified "visionary tmth":

Collm's worid of imagination is not that of Pope, but the fact that both men believe intensely in the reality of their different worlds lends to their absttact figures a kind of visionary 'tmth' which must always appear when such figures

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represent objects to which 'the deepest and most sttenuous life of personality responds.' (130)

Burke's contribution is more important, however, because, influencing the Gothic

novel, Burke opened the human sensibility to utter vastness through his notion that fear

or pain, in its exttemity, can be a source of the sublime. In Philosophical Enquiry into the

Origins of our Idea of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 1759), Burke wrote:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature...is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertam any other, nor, by consequence reason on that object which employs h. (cited m Albright 104)

Regarding a latent tiireat of extinction, tiie fear of deatii as tiie basis of tiie Burkean

sublime, Thurber states the unportance of tiie Burkean sublime in terror, fear, and awe:

In doing all this Burke considerably widened the scope of the sublime. He made possible what Thomas Weiskel has called the negative sublime, which can be disturbmg, even alienating. After Burke the sublime was not necessarily etiiically positive; it did not need to be ethical at all, much less elevatmg or uplifting. It went beyond good or evil so it was either good or evil; what mattered was the power, the conftision, and daring m tiie sublime, all of which explicitiy defeated rational expectation in order to amaze and stagger and perhaps even frighten the reader. (213)

Despite tiie fact tiiat tiiat Gotiiic novels especially m tiie period 1790-1820 were 'tiie heirs

of tiie Burkean sublune," Thurber points out tiiat tiie serious Burkean sublune

disappeared m tiie background for Victorian aestiieticians or writers, whereas it is in tiie

foreground for Kant, Byron, and Wordsworth. For example, he notes, "like otiier

Victorian novels Wuthering Heights celebrates compromise and disciplined submission

ratiier than romantic overreaching" (214). After its survival in symbolism with Poe and

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Baudelaire, tiie stark reappearance of tiie sublime in the Information Age is meaningful

for diagnosing the apocalyptic and its resisting symptoms of this age on the eve of the

third millennium.

If eighteenth-century Gothic novels used tiie archetypes of the sublime for the

purpose of probing tiie subtie responses of individual minds under sttess, the sublime in

the modem literature of science comes from technology from which humans cannot

predict the result. The unexpected nature of technology, when it is perceived as the actual

human experiences of the sublime, compared to landscape or moral abstiactions, is more

disturbing and complicated because of the probability of mechanical autonomy and its

artificial immensity in the information matrix. As the newly created word metaverse

implies, matrix now constitutes another universe. However, as Jack Voller notes in

"Cyberspace and the Sublime," absence always underlies the sublime in Romanticism

and even more in cyberspace (21):

For Burke, sublimity is engendered by terror, not religious passion; for Knight, even while "rapture and enthusiasm" are the emotional core of sublimity, there is a fimdamental absence in the experience. For us modems, this note of waming and anxiety has become dominant; the progressive secularization of Anglo-American culture has discovered infinity to be a source of uncertainty and disquiet, an empty crypt haunted by the ghosts of spiritual failure. It is this absence which forms the basis of Gothic and Dark Romantic sublimity and which sets the stage for Gibson's appropriations and revisions of the sublime experience. (20)

Voller's analysis tells tiiat tiie technological achievement cannot compensate for the

failure of emotional experiences. The neurosis still haunts the protagonist of cyberspace:

"Like Adam and Eve, Case has fallen from grace into time and flesh, barred by that flesh

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from returning to his electronic Eden. The pain of this separation drives Case to a slow

suicide, for what Gibson terms "the infinite neuroelectric void of the matrix" (Voller 21).

If the cyber matrix, unlike the origin of the word womb, cannot provide the shelter

for the oldest and deepest human concems, how can tiie modem technology justify the

vivid sense of wonder and the dignity of human emotions? Probably, as Chapin

suggested, the modem's insensibility to the sublime would be caused by the

indiscriminate use of personifications which are inherentiy sublime (89). In fact,

modems' frequent anthropomorphic use of the commercial items reduced

persoiufications to the degraded level of cliche. And we need, as Marshal McLuhan

asserts, to retrieve awareness or consciousness by finding a cohesive archetype (21).

Surely the ttanscendental desire for the sublime declined in the Information Age

mainly because of vulgar commercialism and electtonic eroticism. However, the value of

the sublune in personifications is reemerging as the determining figure for the "pattems

of civilized behaviors." For fmding the deepest realities of this age reflected in the

personification figure, I think we need to retum to what Bmce Clarke calls

"Wordsworthian oxymoron-the blending of Nature and Reason." In "Wordsworth's

Departed Swan" Clarke states that we can today conceive of Wordsworthian blending

only under the mbric of sublunation which, compared to sublimity, is more "capacious"

and more "nebulous" (368). Thus, if "a ceaseless sublimity is inhuman-a ceaseless

sublimation is inhumane," tiiat "the interplay of sublunation and sublimity," like

Wordsworth's poetic practice, may be more proper for the postinodem vulnerability.

If cyberspace gives sublimity through technology, sublimation can come from its

underlying tendency to find myth as a way of healing the fragmented self-images in

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cyberspace. If modem technology creates tiie more oxymoronic culture, the hybrid of

machine and human tiirough cyborg, the need for mythic narratives in tiie literattire of

science is more required to resolve this oxymoron. In his Fiction 2000 Eric Rabkin

claims, "SF is in itself a literature tiiat relies heavily on the oxymoron," and George

Slusser shows how the oxymoron describes the indescribable—by the combination of

opposites and how the oxymoron also works as a symbol of complementarity:

Rabkin predicts that fiction in the year 2000 will be seeking "oxymoronic ttanscendence" from within. This is not, as with Curl's "scientific metaphor," a resolution of opposites in the direction of a posited and knowable material world. It is rather a pushing of opposites to irresolvable extiemes in order to develop stmctures of complementarity. Here, as the logic of either/or gives way to a logic of both/and, dilemmas like Victor Frankenstein's vanish. Rising from its oxymorons, a new fiction is summoned to deal with tomorrow's world—a world in; which division and conflict are replaced by the increasingly free flow of information. (11)

"When Augustan poets found ineffable fascination in the beautiful and the picturesque, the

sublime was often used as the response to the vast, irregular, and energetic in nature.

Later the Romantic sublime fmds the grandeur and secret of nature as symbols of

heightened human emotions, while its subjective emotional status also marks the limited

layer of human consciousness as well.

This Romantic egotistical sublime, because of the growing predicament from the

complicated social, cultural context, gradually converted into modernists' individual and

subverting experiences in the sublime. For modernists who sttongly felt influence from

the technology, the sublime more tums to the irmer spaces of mentality. For example, the

sublime in D.H. Lawrence is considered as the "negative sublime, affirmation through

annihilation" in that the character's destmction of the image becomes a kind of sublime

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violence which reduces the significance of the scene to its essentials: the representation

of soul (Clarke, "Birkin" 456-8). Also, by getting closer to tiie "tiie destmction of an

appearance," "the machinery of sublimity" is considered as "reconfigur[ing] of the self

not just as "confirm[ing] tiie self (Clarke, "Artifice" 275).

Just as by linking extteme fear to the sublime, Burke provided a bridge between the

neoclassical sublime and tiie Romantics' vivid sensibility, modemist poets' "creative

violence" in the sublime was experienced in interactions witii technology. The brief

inttoductory comment on Daniel Albright's Quantum Poetics reads:

The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued a Modemist movement intent on remapping the theory of poetry. Usmg models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force through his sequence A Vision [like the symbol of gyro] and through his belief in and defense of the purity of symbols. Pound's whole critical vocabulary, Albright claims, aims at drawing art and science together in a search for poetic precision, the tiniest textual particles that hold poems together.

Like Lawrence's "daemonic ambivalence—a strife between the evolutionary angel and

the thermodynamic demon," most modernists' revalidation for self and art was influenced

by the authority of science (Clarke, Dora Marsden 171). The clearer example of

refigured literature in terms of science is found in Pound's following remark: "If science

is the knowledge gained by applying to non-vital phenomena, the method of accurate

description as opposed to that of imaginative interpretation, art is the product of the same

method applied to vital (and mainly humanly vital) phenomena" (Literary Essays of Ezra

Pound \S\).

As pure vortices as "the quintessence of Modernism" represent, in Albright's term,

"knots of ether in which all matter has sublimed into energy," Vorticism, formed on the

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brink of Worid War I, was tiie visible result of an attempt to relate art to industtialization

(171). The interconnection between the sublime and violence is more strengthened by the

sublime's link witii machine: "It [Vorticism] opposed tiie sentimentality held to be

characteristic of tiie 19* century and extolled the energy of the machine and machine-

made products, and it promoted something of a cult of sheer violence" (Merriam

Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature 1174).

As best seen in Lewis's paintings and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture, the vortex

as the form of implosive energy between art and technology, conttary to the Romantic

reluctance to technology for natural immensity, expresses the newly emerging modes of

consciousness freed from the imitation of nature.

As many cultural critics argue that the postmodem technological sublime lies in

nonlinearity, the postmodem "fractal" is discrete and fragmented like vortices. But the

sttange atttactors in postmodem chaos theory also prefigure that the chaos is only the

precursor of order and fractal pattems also connote the describable larger complexity. In

this regard, postmodem science is more open to the undivided wholeness where matter/

consciousness, experiments/experiences, facts/belief, individual/society can be

harmoniously combined. For instance, Andreas Huyssen argues, the democratization of

art in postmodemism is contrary to "modernism's insistence on the autonomy of the art

work, its obsessive hostility to mass culture" (After the Great Divide vii). On the one

hand, tiie "schizophrenic" fragmentation of the texts and tiie privileges of tiie object over

the subject in postmodemism engender more alienated anxiety. On the other hand,

however, the digital information technology allows postmodems to feel the freer

ttansport of tiie technological sublime. Although like Gothic or Romantic rapture, tiie

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posttnodem inforsphere shows tiie so-called "hysterical sublune," tiiis "hysterical

sublune,"" as Lance Olsen observes, is experienced most of all through tiie cyberpunk

writers' experimenting "heterogeneous fiinges of our culture"' and "creation of alternate

universe'" (148). Similar to Frederick Jameson's claim tiiat tiie cyberpunk is "the

supreme literary expression if not of posttnodemism, tiien of late capitalism itself," Olsen

notes, "a subset of science fiction-cyberpunk—might tum out to be one of tiie last

sttongholds of postmodem consciousness"" (149). And tiie cyberpunk's modes of

oxymoron beuveen machine and human ironically emphasize the relatedness of these two

bmary opposites reconfiguring the negative terms such as death m new contexts.

.Arguing that "life m the modem city makes life itself oxymoronic"' as m the case of

Dixie Flatiine in \\'illiam Gibson's Neuromancer.'' Erick S. Rabkin states, "now many if

not all of us living in the modem infosphere are in fact the living dead'" (265, 274). The

oxymoronic characteristics of infosphere culture is, Rabkin explains, well expresses in

the term oxymoron itself: "from the Greek oxy ["pointed"] and morous ["foolish"], in the

words of the clash such as "algedonic, "pertaining to pain to the point of pleasure or

pleasure to the point of pain"' or cyborg, a contraction of cybemetic organism" (269).

Accordmg to him, this oxymoronic clash in postmodem culture works as the shortcut to

transcendence: "The oxymorons of science fiction mdeed help us to 'beyond the reach of

human sense' [the sublime m Weiskel's term]; go so far, in fact, that we can ttanscend

the undecidable and feel either that we have actually made a decision has been obviated"

(270).

While the Romantic saw the secret and grand places as symbols of surprise and awe,

the Gothic as the successor of the Romantic emphasized fear or escapism. Postmodem SF

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includes both fear and hope about nature and technology in an oxymoronic style.^ In

"Landscape and the Romantic Dilemma: Myth and Metaphor in Science-Fiction

Narrative" William Lomax argues, the "open" myth of Romanticism particularly in Mary

Shelley's The Last Man (1826) replaced "closed" Christianity. Lomax asserts that "the

mythic fragmentation into numerous individual systems" in Romanticism provides

modem science fiction "another stage setting on which the process of mythmaking may

be acted upon" (254). Thus, he stresses that science fiction's mythopoeic pattems require

its close bond with the pursuit of myth in nineteenth-century English Romanticism:

In a world that has lost it shaping stmcture and that, as a result, fragments its loyalties and its beliefs among countless individual stmctures, science fiction reflects the inevitable failure of fragmented existence and dramatizes the need for a center, for a uniting myth that can reassemble the scattered limbs of Osiris. (254)

In Egyptian religion, Osiris is the king and judge of the dead, the husband and brother of

Isis. a goddess of fertility. Osiris is killed by his brother Set who is regarded as

personifying the desert with the form of a donkey or other animal. However, Set was in

tum killed by a solar deity and the patron of the reigning pharaoh Horns who is

represented as a man with the dead of a falcon and regarded as either the son or the

brother of Isis and Osiris. Osiris resurrected as man, partly wrapped as a mummy, with a

beard and an atef-crown.

In his Parallel Myths, J.F. Bierlein introduces how Set cut Osiris's sleeping body

into fourteen pieces and how the fourteen places in Egypt known as "tombs" of Osiris

brought a lesser degree of evil than before:

Isis traveled throughout Egypt to gather the fourteen dismembered pieces of Osiris's Body. She reassembled her

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husband on an island in the Nile. When the pieces were all together, peace retumed to Egypt. But a voice spoke to Isis, saying this peace would not last: Set had poisoned the hearts of men. Still, there would never again be a period completely devoid of goodness. Osiris's soul had now gone to the land of the dead, where he was King of the Dead and the Great Judge, and now mortal men and women could gain immortality of the soul at death, their bodies and souls to be reunited by resurrection. Although Set had brought sin into the world, Osiris brought hope. (215)

In "The Survival of Myth," Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty similarly uses the metaphor of

amputation borrowed from A.K. Ramanujan's poem, to emphasize the Romantic wonder

from the exttapolation from the technological sublime. O'Flaherty explains, in Hindu

myth Gods lived in the Golden Age but in the present dark age, the Kali Yuga, we live

only with the stories of Gods. But the way of "our evaluation of science fiction as myth,"

he emphasizes the Osirian hope, the hope for great mythological classics in a

demythologized age."* Notably, he suggests that we may see the powerftil manifestation of

the mythic archetypes, the amputated body of God, through the artificial prosthetics of

science fiction:

It is like a certain rather eerie medical phenomenon: after a hand has been cut off, the amputee still jfeels sensation m the fmgers that are no longer there. So too, when the gods are cut off, we still feel the amputated divine lunb in our myths and m our lives—whenever we come to the place where the gods would be if we still believed in them. Can science fiction supply us with an artificial limb? (23)

These mytiiic belief on human's spiritual ttanscendence is in a way similar to tiie

scientific dream about virtual download of human intellect into hardware. Both science

and myth reach their culnunation of tiie sublime in a different way of sublimation and

sublimity (or parataxis and paranormal), reminding us of Kant's emphasis on the

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imagination's unlimited capacity-tiie so-called "Pygmalion's Power."^ Arguing that

more notice must be taken of men who habittially behave like robots, John Cohen states,

"tiie mytiis of today may prefigure tiie fiittu-e, just as tiie science of today is tiie finit of

aspirations rooted in a primordial pasf (125-7).

The most pervasive mytii of today's SF is rooted in Percey Bysshe Shelley's

romantic ideal tiiat tiie Prometiiean quality of spirittial resistance to autiiority, tiie tyranny

of Zeus. As Patticia Warrick notes m The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction, the

Prometiiean fire symbolizes tiie creative imagination in Gaston Bachelard's The

Psychoanalysis of Fire. And we postmodem men now have "tiie Prometiiean complex"

that drives men to know as much as tiieir fathers, to surpass tiieir fatiiers. This rebellious

"Oedipus complex of the mtellect" created the cyborg through postmodem technology.

The imagmary fire of the technological sublime is now developed complicatedly enough

to provide the artificial limb which may substitute the natural limbs. Like Icarus who

plunged into the ocean to try flying a little higher beyond his human limitation, myth tells

that humans' exhilaration for the technological sublime over nature is likely to forget

Daedalus's waming of not flying too high. While we are so eager to dissolve our soul

into the infinite information of cyberspace, our eyes as a part of the soul must be watchful

to the probable labyrinth without exit where our inner steersman can be caged lost in the

space.^ The frequent image of monsters ttansfigured by technology in SF wams, like the

dismembered limbs of Osiris, the probable result when our technology is separated from

the ttanscendental insights or the divine. Unlike cyborg, humans can interconnect

spiritual mind with material eye. Only through this interaction of matter and

consciousness—the spiritual science or scientific myth, as Eckhart says, we can best

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reach tiie cosmic sublime vision of wholeness: "The eye witii which I see God is tiie same

eye with which God sees me" (Lorimer 29).

Metzimomhoses

The ancient rittial was, as Renne Delgado notes, "a means of renewal" (31). The

rittial was usually performed in a form of sparagmos, "the tearing in pieces of a live

victim, as a bull or a calf, by a band of bacchantes in a Dionysian orgy"(Webster 's New

Universal Unabridged Dictionary). In tiie Egyptian myth, according to Delgado, the

high priest's dismemberment of a bull means the resurrection of the dead by

metamorphoses:

Every year the Egyptian king-god (the pharaoh) reconstmcted the ancient myth by a ritual that included a procession with laments, dances, the sacrifice of a bull that represented the Egyptian kmg-god, and the triumphant resurrection of the king-god upon his exiting the temple/labyrinth. (31)

During the ritual, it is "words from the book of the dead" that accomplish the

metamorphosis of the king-god. Indicatmg the "uncanny likeness" to the Egyptian ritual

and the Greek myth of the Cretan Minotaur and labyrinth, Delgado emphasizes the

significance of metamorphosis: "the guide of the king-god in the Osirian myth is the high

priest, lord of the metamorphosis: life/death/life of the king-god" (36).

Similarly, Ihab Hassan in The Dismemberment of Orpheus argues, it is "darker

chambers of the mind" in Axel's credo that "whisper prophetic tmths" (4). For Hassan, it

is silence that "fills the extteme states of the mind—void, madness, outtage, ecstasy,

mystic ttance" in the chamber beneath the legendary castie where Axel and his Sara drink

a goblet of poison. Conjoining "the need both of autodestmction and selftranscendence,"

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silence as a metaphor of the modem and postmodem crisis "encourages the

metamorphosis of appearance and reality, the perpetual fusion and confusion of

identities, till nothing-or so it seems-remains" (Hassan 13). The dismembered bodies of

Orpheus, like silence, are not only destmction/absence but also creation/presence.

Conttary to the fatal singing of the Sirens, Orpheus's music "restores himself to nature,

and moves with the secret life of things" (Hassan 5). Comparing the postmodem

schizophrenia with dismembered Orpheus, Hassan sees the dismemberment of Orpheus

(namely the magical-music-absent postmodem era) as "the conflict between Apollo and

Dionysos, art and nature, form and energy" (5).

After Eurydice the wood nymph faded into Hades by Orpheus's anxious glance,

Orpheus's lyre loses the "music of universal harmony and etemal response." However,

Orpheus's head and his lyre continue to sing after Maenad's dismembering the poet:

Scattered in blood, and tossed in bloody grasses. Dismembered arm from shoulder, knee from thigh. The poet's body lay, yet by a muacle the River Hebms Caught head and lyre as they dropped and carried them Midcurrent down the stteam. The lyre twanged sad sttains, The dead tongue sang; flmereally the river banks and reeds Echoed their music. Drifting tiiey sang tiieir way To open sea, and from the river's mouth The head and lyre met salt sea waved that washed tiiem up On shores of Lesbos, near Methymna... (The Metamorphoses Book XI)

In tiie island of Lesbos, Orpheus's head, like Osiris's fourteen fragmented bodies, is said

to provide oracles and ttances. But tiie prophecies of dismembered Orpheus are, as

Hassan implies, expressed in "forms that no mortal finally conttols" (5). Hassan's

interpretation of Orpheus's singing body (like the fragmented postinodem mode) is "the

conttadiction between tiie dumb unity of nature and the multiple voices of consciousness"

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(6). Because Orpheus became a devotee of Dionysus tiie god of drama, tiiis conttadiction

can be extended into tiie conflict with Apollo the god of light who presented Orpheus

witii a magical lyre. Altiiough Hassan mentions tiiis conflict of Apollo and Dionysos as

"art and nattire, form and energy," he doesn't extend tiiis Orphic myth to the other

important tiieme of tiie conflict between science and literature. But it is notable that the

enchanting power of Orpheus's music in Ovid's The Metamorphoses is impressive just

like the modem science's astonishing mastery over nature:

Since these pathetic words were sung to music Even the blood-drained ghosts of Hell fell weeping: Tantalus no longer reached toward vanished waves And Ixion's wheel stopped short, charmed by the spell; Vulture gave up their feast on Tityus's liver And cocked their heads to stare; fifty Belides Stood gazing while their half-filled pitchers emptied. And Sisyphus sat down upon his stones. Then, as the story goes, the raging Furies Grew sobbing-wet with tears. Neither the queen Nor her great lord of Darkness could resist The charms of Orpheus and his matchless lyre. (The Metamorphoses The Book X)

Contrary to this original order and harmony brought by Orpheus's music, Orpheus's

dismembered bodies, once separated from a magic lyre, become the chaos after

Orpheus's yielding under the instinctual tiaps. Orpheus violates the condition that he will

not tum to look at Eurydice until they emerge from the underworld. As the other chaos,

the homosexuality in Orpheus's character causes angry women to attack on him. His

death by Maenads fmally signifies the loss of his supreme power over nature. Like the

Osiris myth, the human drops into the Kali Yuga, the dark age by the dismemberment of

the supreme being. However, the dismembered bodies and tool in this supreme being

still keep some power even though to a lesser degree. Like sttange atttactors, myths of

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dismemberment let us glimpse the magical power of the ideal science that is paired with

the enchanting art.

In Newton's science which views the universe as a giant mechanism, the human's

separation from these dismembered supreme beings widened. In "From Science to

Mythology: A New Vision of Reality," Richard D. Moore argues, the modem de-

animistic view in the material science "desttoyed the perception that any aspect of life is

sacred" (159). A biophysics professor Moore tries to prove scientifically that earth is one

living organism hence, the "Gaia," Greek goddess of Earth in which reality is not

composed of entirely separate objects:

We are beginning to realize that life is a "Cosmic Evenf— part of the evolution of the universe. For several years scientists have known that, except for hydrogen, all of the atoms in our bodies were initially formed in first-generation stars—whence Carl Sagan* s pithy comment that we are mdeed made of "Star Stuff." Even more surprising is the recent demonsttation that the key molecular constituents of life—amino acids, nucleic acids, and water-are formed in interstellar regions of space from the gas clouds of elements produced by exploding fust-generation stars. These molecules of which all forms of life are composed, are formmg in gas clouds of otherwise empty space all over the universe. The universe is like a giant mcubator for the molecules of life. (165-6)

In this generative universe life is not a temporary contingency but an mtegral part

because life arose from tius organic or holistic properties of tiie universe. Uniting humans

with unobjectified nature, this new cosmic vision also rejects the material view tiiat

because human beings are composed of molecules and atoms, tiiey have no interior,

consciousness, mind, or spuit. Like "tiie vision of Plato," Maxwell's Demon and

Schrodinger 's "psi" (or Schrodinger 's cat) lead Moore to tiie dematerialized universe by

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showing that "something physically real does exits besides 'atoms and the void"'(161).^

Based on John Bell's theorem the two photons will act together as a whole, Moore

postulates these mathematical symbols' existence in spaces of more than three

dimensions, instead of their existence only in the realm of mathematical concepts:

If we take the results of Quantum Physics quite seriously and drop all our prejudices, they clearly imply that the real action is not in the three-dimensional space of our everyday experience, but in a higher-dimensional space into which (in words of [Max] Bom) ••we cannot enter"—an aspect of reality that is nonmaterial yet real. This, essentially the vision of Plato, flies in opposition to the predominant dogma of the modem period, that everything real is right here in front of our eyes. (164)

More importantiy, he finds the linguistic equivalents of this new vision of reality from

Hopi's 'process' language in which nothing is static but all is becoming. According to

Steven Pinker s explanation about Benjamin Lee Whorfs studies on this Hopi's

language, projection of the process comes from the removal of references to objects:

Accordmg to Whorf they [the Hopi] did not conceptualize events as being like points, or lengths of tune like days as countable things. Rather, they seemed to focus on change and process itself and on psychological distinctions between presentiy known, mythical, and conjecturally distant. The Hopi also had little mterest in exact sequences, dating, calendars, chronology. (The Language Instinct 63)

Similar to tiie Hopi Indian's process language, Julia Kristeva in La Revolution du

Langage Poetique (1974) emphasizes tiie "semiotic process" as "a disorganized

preliguistic flux of movements, gesttires, sounds and rhytiims" (Selden and Widdowson

142). Conttary to the "symbolic" which is "the logic, coherent syntax and rationality of

the adult," this unorganized signifymg process of semiotics is not simply metaphoric but

also "revolutionary" because they possess the possibility of radical socid change.

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Among many indefinite flux of unpulses in this poetic language, the use of

personifications is one notable among the "heterogeneous' and the "irrational." Like

Hassan's use of Orphic mythology, personification like its application to Gaia and its

organic becoming process is heuristic enough to reveal human's deep unconsciousness

and its link to the ttanspersonal experiences. Moreover, personification serves as the

basic human thinking process common to every culture and language. For example, in

her exposition of Julia Kristeva's writings, Toril Moi notes, "the personification of the

elements of symbolic discourse, such as the virtues and vices" is the most essential

rhetoric because the deconceptualization, a desymbolization of discursive stmcture, is

conveyed by the personification (69). According to Moi, the Middle Ages recognized

seven virtues through three theological personifications (Faith. Hope and Charity) and

four cardinal personifications (Fortitude, Justice, Temperance, and Pmdence), but since

the fifteenth century, as in the work of Roman de la Rose, the personifications of the

virtues have not given them any special attributes. Thus, personifications, for Kristeva

and Moi, are regarded as "a striking example of the change in the dominant mode of

tiioughf which they call "a passage from symbol to sign" (emphasis added, 70). Once

separated from then binding attiibutes tiiey represent, personifications of virtues and

vices have "their own right" and "create an open system of ttansformation" which are tiie

very characteristics of signs. As "the fimdamental ideologeme of modem tiiought," Moi

summarizes the traits of signs whose distinctively visible modes are personifications:

-It does not refer to a suigle unique reality, but evokes a collection of associated images and ideas. While remaining expressive, it none the less tends to distance itself from its supporting ttanscendental basis (it may be called 'arbittary').

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-It is part of specific sttuctures of meaning [combinatoire] and in tiiat sense it is correlative: its meaning is the result of an interaction with other signs. -It harbors a principle of ttansformation: witiiin its field, new stitictures are forever generated and transformed. (72)

As tiie principal sign of tiansformation, personifications bring familiar surprise to the

unknown world by opposing tiie linear fixation in tiie dyad of signifier and signified.

Personifications, as tiie sign which is tiie basic element of novelistic discourse, "refers

back to entities of lesser dimensions that are more concretized than the symbol" (Moi

70). This allegorical use of personifications is frequent in resolving the contiadictory

elements in the literature of science because the combinatory power of ttansformation in

personifications is most expressive in resolution between the real and the imaginary,

namely in speculative literature. The mindscape in science fiction is more spacious and

freer than most other genres while it is, unlike fantasy, at the same time regulated by

scientific principles. Thus, the creation myth of personifications (such as Chinese

Hundun or Greek Gaia) actively functions as "the mediators rather than media" as the

language of "an absttact series of signs" between the unknown and the rational:

For Levi-Sttauss, myth is a type of language that communicates thoughts, and the appropriate study of myth should focus on its stmcture rather than content. According to this view, myth attempts to mediate irresolvable paradoxes within cultures. From this view of myth as language—as absttact series of signs—myth (and literature) can be characterizes as "mediators rather than media," which are always assuming something absent (nature, God, eternity, reality) and attempting to close that gap between presence and absence. (The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism 197)

In order to achieve both the literary imagination and obedience to established scientific

principles, the literature of science often adopts the most combinatory and arbittary agent,

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such as Hermes, tiie double-agent between tiie human and the divine. Witii the growing

emergence of tiie hybrid between human and machine, oxymoronic phenomena are

becoming conspicuous in technological society. So much, the infoglutting power of the

personification of science tiius derives from an appeal for fictional worids where tiie

conflict between tiie paranormal and tiie paratactic must be resolved.

Altiiough tiie literattu-e of fantasy is far from scientific realities, it is noteworthy that

tiie previous fantastic sphere is more and more eroded by the scientific development as in

tiie acttial tt^avels to tiie moon and Mars by Apollo and Voyger. Especially the favorite

use of metamorphoses in tiie literattire of science tend to get closer to fantastic fiction.

"The age of Enlightenment," Michel Serres says, "by exalting scientific rationality,

produced the Romantic Sturm und Drang, which took refuge in a literature of dreams and

fog" (Conversation 31). In the same vein, genetic engineering in the Information Age, by

creating hybrids between human and machine, changes itself into a kind of the

metamorphic fantasy, especially given that the tiansformational values heavily rely on

classic narratives of metamorphoses like the cyberpunk writers' use of "dreams of fog."

In "Fictional Worlds of the Fantastic," Nancy H. Traill displays, how the

"paranormal" as one of the popular fantastic modes ironically is overlapping with

scientific principles due to the rapid development of modem science. First, Traill defines

fantastic literature as the literature "constituted by the confrontation and interplay within

the fictional world of two alethically conttastive domains, the supematural and the

natural" (197).^ Because the supematural domain, conttary to the natural as a physically

possible world, is a physically impossible world, Traill says, "the existential status of the

supematural" is "determined by autiientication" (199). Thus, her typology of the

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Fantastic consists of four modes: (1) the authenticated mode, (2) the ambiguous mode,

(3) the disauthenticated mode, and (4) the paranormal mode.^

Modem science's technological sublime already leads us to reexamine the

supemattiral, opening more possible dimensions of reality beyond the standard, narrow

conception. The rise of paranormal fiction is closely linked to this development of

modem science. Also, the link between the fantastic and the paranormal inclines the

reader to see the energy latent m nature or in the human mind. The paranormal fiction

presents artistic inclinations and stylistic individualities through three distinctive

subtypes— the epistemic, the psychological, and the philosophical. Traill believes that

the aesthetic potential of the paranormal mode (such as Dickens's, Turgenev's, and

Maupassant's stories) carried the fantastic of the twentieth century and worked as the

progenitor of the terrifying anti-utopias of H. G. Wells and the oneiric fictional worlds of

Franz Kafka where metamorphoses are prevalently used to convey the convergence of the

paranormal and the supematural.

As the other literary explanation of metamorphoses, Kai Mikkonen's "Theories of

Metamorphosis: From Metattope to Textual Revision" provides more general and

updated analysis of prosopopoeia, the personified absttaction through the face making

(prosopon+poeia). Mikkonen explains that the theoretical popularity of the

metamorphosis as subject began in the late 1930s (e.g., in works by Gaston Bachelard,

Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roman Jakobson).'° As tiiese critics have shown, literary

metamorphosis provokes complicated questions juxtaposing or interiinking with

"something tiiat is not only otiier but often nonlmguistic as well." In tiie previously

pubUshed monumental work of personification The Poetics of Personification (1994),

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James J. Paxson notes that "the speaking aspect of a prosopopoeia is essential in

describing a personification character's essential status" (3). Comparably, Mikkonen

contends, this character's essential status is mainly caused by the inherent conflicts of

"semiotic antinomy in metamorphic change": "the question of the relationship between

representation and the object represented, between the sign and its referent, is found to be

conspicuously problematic with regard to the figure of transformation" (312). To put it

clearly, Mikkonen uses Kathleen Anne Perry's argument of the transformation's

"inherent quality that remains after the change": "in the metamorphic state, a creature is

at once itself and something else. The two contradictory states of being 'remain

permanently united and irresolvably opposed, and one identity is melded with another'"

(319 emphasis added)." More concisely, Clarke expresses the superimposed conditions

of metamorophic metaphor: "Metaphor is like two souls within one body, two bodies in

one bed" ("Fabulous Monsters" 560).

This ambiguous position of metamorphosis raises the question of the blending of

meanings as well as the constitiction of subjectivity m terms of tiie tiansformational

character and unstable elements combined into something else. Mikkonen points out tiiat

tiie "psychological ambiguity and tiie centtality of artistic self-reflexivity" m Rousseau's

version of Pygmalion leads to "tiie shifting subject positions" in de Man's self-

deconstructive dynamic. He goes fiirtiier asking "why is it tiiat so many versions of tiie

same subject, of the same events, and witii tiie same characters, have been written?" His

sunple answer is because "h has been easy to rewrite tiie already semantically

overdetermined story, tiiat is, to give tiie old story a new purpose and meaning in a

changing context, be it historical, social, literary, artistic, and so forth" (326). Through

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tiiis representation of the textual revision, he finally proposes a notion of metamorphosis

as "a figure for intertextuality, as a figure of both selection and combination that may be

read to stand for textual production and reading, for the interrelationships and

combinations between different textual forms" (emphasis added, 329-30).

The "shifting subject position" of metamorphosis through "selection and

combination" is further extended in class, gender and race in postmodem culture where

the literary modes of ttansformation are emphasized to present the world as constantly in

changing. In special, the decentered subjectivity is playfully depicted by the emphasis of

object over subject in postinodem literature of science which results in commercialism.

In the "artificial inunanence" of postinodem culture, as Cicery-Ronay contends, every

value can be "at least theoretically capable of artificial replication or simulation" and

therefore the question about ways of being is more seriously raised by the dissolution of

simulation and reality mto one anotiier (388). In the postmdustiial worid, Cicery-Ronay

states that people daily wittiess "the ttansformations of tiieir values and material

conditions m tiie wake of technological acceleration beyond tiieir concepttial tiireshold"

(389). On the one hand, we now live more beyond spatial and temporal limitation thanks

to digital technology. On tiie otiier hand, tiie postinodem information ttansformed and

exchanged for profits accelerates commodification of human values as we see in tiie

human organ or gene ttadmg happening in cyberspace.

Whetiier representations of science fiction are Haraway's "stitiggle for liberation" or

Baudrillard's "cold apocalypse," it is tme tiiat every conceivable aspect of man and

terrestiial life is ttansformed into an aspect of a cybemetic conttol mode by tiie all-

assuiulating/ all-eroding power of the information-paradigm. This interpretation of

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postinodem narratives of science as tiie new ttansformative modes of haunted

consciousness is well expressed in Katiierine Hayles's emphasis on "a disembodied free-

floating existence" tiirough "parataxis." In "Postmodem Parataxis: Embodied Texts,

Weightiess Information" Hayles first intioduces tiie definition of "parataxis": " L a

coordinate rangmg of clauses, phrases; , or words one after anotiier without coordinating

connectives-(as in 'he laughed; she cried'); 2. tiie paratactic mode of experience." She

asserts human's tiansformation into "posthuman":

Contemporary technology, especially informatics, has given us the sense that we can ttanscend these limitations [specific times and places etc.] and live a disembodied, free-floating existence made possible in part by the near-instantaneous ttansfer of information from one point on the globe to any other. (394)

According to Hayles, these paratactic (cut-up) modes of experience are common

phenomena in the postmodem era (for example, like a constantly changing TV screen)

and the parataxis is characterized by "a discontinuity both in language and cultural

formation" (396). She compares this postinodem discontinuity with "information

metaphor" in conttast with ttaditional "text metaphor":

In the text metaphor, the emphasis falls on inscriptions that endure and replicate themselves; it takes over the presupposition that the message is contained within the signals. By conttast, the information metaphor emphasizes ephemeral signals that can be rapidly ttansmitted from one location to another; it takes over the presupposition of a bodiless space through which ideas flow. (398)

Through the "conduit metaphor" in molecular biology and genetic engineering, she finds

the two opposites ("embodiment, materiality, replication"/ "decontextualization.

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ephemerality, information") merges. The result she presumes is "an explosive mixture

with implications beyond the metaphorical" (398).'^

Hayles's following interpretation of postmodem being as "a freak" of "multi figures"

is an important logical consequence from her finding intriguing similarities between

Roman Jakobson's analysis of selection and combination in natural languages (which is

equivalent to selection and combination in the molecular languages of genetic

replication). This "explosive mixture" from both language and science precisely

coincided with Clarke's seeing "the metamorphic exile of the body" as the "allegory of

writing": "The proper self of the metamorph is cast out of itself, fixed in some

emblematic form, and forced to begin its wandering career as an outcast agent casting

about for new scenes" (Allegories of Writing 22).

In the postmodem era. it is machines that function as catalysts of differences

becoming the archetype of ttansformation: "when the uncreated idea or insight manifests

itself m the concrete object... tiie machine, tiie psyche grows and alters in definition and

course" (Bettina Knapp, 217). Abbe Mowshowitz points out the tiireat to human identity

posed by machines is not overt anymore in digital technology. Mowshowitz interprets

the human's anthropomorphizmg impulse to machines as a kind of wish fulfillment:

The complementary tendency to think of ourselves in mechanistic terms reveals a type of narcissistic infatuation. We are seduced by a distorted image reflected in tiie machine, and moved by vanity of reformulate the nature of man. This is not an intellecttial exercise—it is manifest in altered attitudes, values and expectations. (228)

Altiiough it is tttie tiiat technology deteriorates a part of our psychological states, as

Hayles suggest, "the parataxis mode of being is not necessarily bad." Ratiier she predicts

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tiiat "it leaves open possibilities for emancipatory projects that use its instabilities to

intervene constiuctively in postinodem culttire, exposing tiie play of power and

suggesting opportunities for change"(419). The possibility for change tiuough technology

is the very nattire of posttnodem SF and the growing fantastic personifications such as

aliens in this genre prove tiiat tiiis technology alone is not enough for better change.

Octavia Butier's following description of human nature as a biologically-determined

entity reveals needs of intentional alienation (like absurd drama) through which we

human bemgs are seen not as tiie center but as part of a cosmic superconsciousness:

Humans were genetically inclined to be intolerant of difference. They could overcome the inclination, but it was a reality of the Human conflict that they often did not. It was significant that this man was so ready to leave his home with someone [alien Oankali] he had been taught to think of as a devil—someone he [Santos] hadn't even seen yet. (Imago 185-6)

This ability to embrace the unknown is weak because humans are, as Butler depicts,

essentially hierarchical, violent, and intolerant of differences. Butler's invitation to be a

metamorphosed alien, as the combination of the uncanny (horror) and the ttanscendental

(romantic), shows that metamorphoses are essentially oxymoronic as the sublime

experience comes from both the pain (fear) and joy (hope).

The "various forms of self-reflexivity, the striking ttansformations of the signifer" in

textual and physical metamorphoses, as Marie McClean says, are "insidious" yet

liberating. Focusing upon various forms of self-reflexivity, the striking ttansformations of

the signifier in speculative texts, Maclean astutely asserts, "Understanding the multiple

relationships of signifier to signified means a better appreciation of human freedom"

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(171). The interplay of'nattiral' and 'unnattiral' languages, of'human' and 'alien' signs

and systems is here suggested as tiie source of the most desirable intellecttial satisfaction.

Providing tiie balance for tiie growing postinodem modes of object over subject,

technology over self, or simulation over reality, tiie dyad of the paranormal/paratactic in

technological metamorphoses leads us to the sittiated knowledge about tiie ontological

sphere of artificial environment in postmodem culture. Despite their inherently dangerous

encounter with monsters, tiie signifieds in technological metamorphoses are multiple and

open-ended. In his conversation witii Bruno Latour, Michel Serres argues, "Chaos only

appears to be chaos because one does not yet have a good theory of chaos"

(Conversations 89). In the same way, tiie monsttous elements in technological

metamorphosis can be more likely to tum into "hopeful monsters" or " a positive chaos"

when we parallel the ancient wisdom of anthropomorphic cosmology with it.

"A good theory of chaos" necessarily includes the implosion of subject/object, self

Other, and morality/science because the (con)fusion of blended spaces contains maximal

information. The cyborg is the implosion of the binary opposition between technology

and art where poetry becomes "a sort of inspired mathematics" (Witemeyer 24).'^ As the

word cybemetics comes from the Greek root "guber" (govem), humans with

technological power now are distortedly projected as amplified ego-worshipers in their

own creation of a super computer-god. Just as the ancient people resuscitate the sublime

experiences by gathering limbs of Osiris and Orpheus or through the ritual of sparagmos,

the anarchistic, dispersed, and narcissistic postmodem needs heuristic virtual morphs of

spirits through which the inspired cosmic vision of wholeness can be revived. Also, only

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when we keep a humble, persistent attitude toward the risky paratactic metamorphoses of

paraspace, can we as the steersman remain hopeful monsters.

Information

According to the Bible, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with

God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). Because the ultimate logos, represented by the

Word, belongs to the divinity, mythos as the human's glimpse of infinity, implies that

however humans achieve the rational ultimatum, the human order has been inevitably

mixed with chaos. Mythos always follows humans' gain of logos like the dark shadow of

logos.

Scientific advancement since the Industrial Revolution made popular the belief that

the rational would sort chaotic reality. Widening the gap between mythos and logos,

however, this mechanical perception has deepened more anxiety in the modem age

despite its astonishing development. Nowadays, by reaching down to artificial

intelligence, the man-made creature, the computer seems to give blossom to the ttee of

knowledge in Genesis. But tiie ttee of knowledge m Genesis is not only tiie ttee of good,

but also "the ttee of the knowledge of good and bad." Like Hawthorne's and L. P.

Hartley's poisonous flowers, tiie enchanting flower in tiie tiee of knowledge lures

humans in ahnost every domain of modem life changing knowledge into a new form of

transformational reality.

Erik Davis in Techgnosis ttaces the "information combustion" in the twentieth

century from the building of information machines which "automate and perform these

tasks [collecting, analyzmg, ttansmitting, selling, and using the stuff] with a level of

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power and efficiency far beyond tiie builders tiiemselves" (81). As human knowledge in

written books is rapidly ttansferred into tiie information of tiie enormously effective

memory chips of computers, tiie computer is, as Brautigan's poem previously described,

often compared to all-mighty God. But tiie culmination of the mechanical worldview

achieved by tiie computer is still not good at providing the comprehensive, universal

tiieory-, just as the mythic is weak at objective methodology. The mystical is still workmg

m logos represented by computer, complementing and soothing the defective science.

About mythic workings in the rational, Mowshowitz writes:

A residue of mythical thought rooted in the dark comers of the psyche clings to our image of the computer. Bacon's dictum— knowledge is power—undergoes revealing ttansformations. The mythopoeic influence gives us the computer as Golem and also the computer as God—information and knowledge fuse into an awesome power within the computer. (39)

Like Marge Piercy's parallel of Golem and cyborg Yod in He, She and It,

personifications of computer are the implosion of mythos and logos. Marge Pierce in her

novel He, She, It parallels Golem and Artificial Intelligence by identifying the human self

as mutable information constmcted by mythos and logos. Similarly, Octavia Butier's

Xenogenesis explores the university composed by mysterious information where the

information that constitutes the human self is only projected as the part instead of the

central position. Don DeLillo's White Noise also displays the nuclear disaster as a form

of misdirection of mformation flow. Focusmg on the "alien" nature of these recurrent

images of rebirth in novels about information flow, Erik Davis sees "the ttansformative

and apocalyptic possibilities of information" as technology, as genetic identity, and as

postmodem logos:

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The science-fiction fiinge of tiie New Age community also believes we are mutating in tiie face of an invading alien intelligence, except tiiat tiiey look forward to tiiis postiiuman metamorphosis with open arms. (239)

Similarly, pointing out tiiat tiie bodily metamorphoses imply misreading, Clarke notes the

ongoing technological ttansition of material data to incorporeal information: "from a

cybemetic perspective, tiie daemon as messenger retums in the transmission and

distortion of data, and metamorphosis is reconfigured m tiie universal medium of coded

information" (Allegories of Writing 49).

This spuitual ttansformation, however, shares some similar ttaits with bodily

ttansformation like the similarities between cybemetic feedback loops and the

Ouroboros: "Curiously, Gnostic and hermetic lore furnishes us with an amazmg image of

such feedback loops: the Ouroboros, a serpent who eats its own tail and thus symbolizes

the self-sufficient cyclicity of nature" (Davis 89). Davis's seeing the Ouroboros as the

sublime healing nature is one of the most convincing embodied images of technology as

the 'redemptive, demonic, magical, ttanscendent. hypnotic, and alive" (9). The meta­

morphosis of cy bemetics as the Ouroboros most visibly provides new ways to nurture

"the richness of the soul" against from the "ravenous and nihilistic robot of science,

technology, and media culture" (8).

One of the rich blendings of cybemetics and the Ouroboros (the medical symbol) can

be found in the close relationship between medicine and literature. In his inttoduction to

Body and Text Clarkes implies the amazing power of the Ouroboros as a dynamic

metaphor: "To the extent that medical ideas been produced by extta-empirical

considerations and pressured by cultural stmctures, medical practices have manufactured

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tiieir autiiority by pressing metaphors into literal service" (2). In the ttaditional modes of

relating literatiire and medicine (illness as theme, images of healers, the physician-poet,

and literature as healing), it is here assumed tiiat the fascination of science fiction about

medicine holds "botii for its spectacular successes and its dismal abuses" (3).

Consequentiy, westem culture's own ambivalence toward tiie scientific/medical

establishments includes both its mixture of liberation and enslavement, and among other

domains, literature has been regarded as ""a critical witness to medical behavior and

misbehavior" (6). One of literature's allegorizmg of the scientific/medical treatment is

found in the narratives about the plague. Clarke notes:

The moralization of the plague, like all moralizations, is an imstable, polyvalent literary effect. In the classical theological model, the plague punishes, and so symbolizes, collective the tyrannical guilt and sin; but in the post-Renaissance model, the plague symbolizes the tyrannical state, not a collective but a selective guilt, a pathological hierarchy that sickens the wider human collectivity. (7)

Some distinctive examples of "endless incitement to visionary speculations" about

plague are related to the spiritual values of this bodily disease. For example, Edgar Allan

Poe's "The Death of Red Mask" and Camus's The Plague are respectively interpreted as

"the plague of rationalism sweepmg through mid-nineteenth-century America and as

"Europe's sweeping denial of the existence of the Holocaust as soon as the war came to

an end" (Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature Al, 225). More interestingly, it is within

the "mythopoetic syntiiieses" of the spiritual Torah and the biological stmctures of DNA

that Erik Davis found the human's loss of "anything timeless and irrevocable":

Some mystical Jewish accounts of creation also foreshadow DNA in an ahnost eerie manner. In the ancient days, Torah scrolls were written without punctuation or spaces between

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letters (like DNA), and some later Jews argued that this artifact of the writing machine alluded to a cosmic Torah that preceded the one handed down at Sinai. This original Torah was living text of infinite potential woven from the letters of the tetragrammaton-YHVH, the four-lettered name of God. This blueprint of creation was also described as a heap of scrambled letters, which one text calls "the concentrated, not yet unfolded Torah." Once God arranged these letters into words, the Torah "unfolded" into the manifold shapes of the crated world. Far more than ours were possible, but Adam's poor behavior selected the words, and the world, we got. Still, Kabbalists looked forward to the messianic age, when God would perform a kind of cosmic genetic engineering, rearranging the letters of the Torah to spell out paradise. (88)

In this lost Adamic language, all transcendent notions are unnamable. Despite his life­

long studies of mythologies, Joseph Campbell laments that the ultimate mystery of being

is beyond all categories of human thought:

"God" is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the names "God." God is beyond names and forms. Meister Eckhart said that the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions. The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, tme and untme. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it. (The Power of Myth 49)

However, Cambell says that as "the field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent,"

mythology can suggest "a singularity over which this plays like a shadow game" behind

this duality (The Power of Myth 49). As the shadow or avatar of God, allegorized

mythical sublime personifications function as the deceptive yet heuristic agents to the

Source. As "the daemonic mediator and angel of desire," the allegorized personifications

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bear tiieir similarities witii the modem information tiieory. According to Michel Serres

who interprets Hermes as tiie personified God of information, the maximum information

comes from tiie mixtiire of repertoire (code) and noise. It is because "demon produces by

way of disorder a more complex order" (Hermes, xxvii).'^

As tiie effective messenger God, Hermes is above all represented by his role of

healer and the caduceus is his magic tool:

To round out tiie image, all we need to do is restore Hermes' caduceus, tiie magic out the image, all topped witii two serpents twining like the double helix of DNA-a fit device for a god who brings the twists and ttims of information to life. (Davis 14)

As an emblem of the modem medical profession, Hermes' caduceus, as the Greek root

karyk means "herald," provides information for both the bodily and spiritual diseases.

Although Hermes's informative power of the double helix is not powerful enough to

equal to the original Torah, Hermes can hack and spy Apollo's ttanscendent Word as he

steals his cattle and resolve the following conflict by giving the lyre to Apollo.

However, can Hermes really bring the ultimate reality or the ttanscendental

undivided wholeness? The clues may find in relation with the mutilated cattle and

dismembered Orpheus. Orpheus's lyre plays in the underworld mled by Persephone.

Once Hermes gave it to Apollo, and Apollo to Orpheus, the lyre is beyond Hermes'

conttol. As Hassan interprets, we humans only hear the silence of the cosmic music of

Orpheus's lyre. The similar correspondence is also found in desperate efforts to unite

Osiris's fourteen dismembered bodies in the upper world. The power of Osuis is

workable only in the underworld. About this image of the dying god or the

dismemberment of the sublune tianscendent, David Adams Teeming in The World of

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Myth points out tiiat "the dying god model has been most useftil to tiie postmythological

writer as a source for metaphors tiiat can suggest psychic, spiritiial, or emotional rebirth

or the lack of it" (147). As in tiie Osiris and Isis myth, by giving the seed planted in the

Motiier Goddess, tiie dying God in tiie ancient agriculttiral society ensures the renewed

fertility of a given society.

However, tiie basic theme of myths ("that which dies is bom") only emphasizes the

rebirtii without guaranteeing tiie recovering the secret of nattire or the revelation of

human nature. Even though Campbell mentions tiiat Mass in Catholic countries is

"replication of tiie bmtal sacrifice of tiie cross," the ideal life is still supposed to be found

after death. The revelation of nature and cosmos is, as the dismemberment of Osiris and

Orpheus prefigures, the maccessibility of the Source to humans' usual knowledge. Davis

also asserts that the "fimdamental disequilibrium in the order of things is the essence of

both man and technology" (13). "While contending that Hephaestus's hammer for

Achilles was "an early instance of the military-industrial complex driving technological

developmenf, Davis relates the crippledness of this blacksmith god Hephaestus to Plato

or the following Marshal McLuhan's dictum: '"new technologies amputate as much as

they amplify" (cited in Davis 24). Pointing out that the speed-up of modem information

drives culture toward both the "inflation" and "instant" level, McLuhan raises a question:

"How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modem

culttire" (From Cliche to Archetype 184). Like the concept of noble savage in

Rousseauism, McLuhan's answer is found in return to a primordial archetype from the

postmodem cliche

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The cliche, in other words, is incompatible with other cliches, but the archetype is extiemely cohesive; other archetypes' residues adhere to it. "When we consciously see out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. (21)

Although we modems desttoyed nature by technological innovations and killed

Orpheus's music, as Campbell states, mythology brings the lost wonder of universe, not

to speak of balancing social order and teaching how to live under any circumstances. The

mythic imagination recovers the cosmological perceptions of human beings who are

immersed in nature which was cut by the scientific tteatment of universe as object:

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body. Once a Zen master stood up before his students and was about to deliver a sermon. And just as he was about to open his mouth, a bird sang. And he said, "The sermon has been delivered. (The Power of Myth 22)

Parabolically as well, Davis expresses mythological insight's taking place as tiie new unit

of reality itself alongside matter and energy: "If electiicity is tiie soul of tiie modem age,

information is its spuit" (81). For him, tiie redemptive characterization of tiie

technological personifications helps pave tiie way for tiiis unaginative knowledge of

myth which he calls "mytiiinformation": "tiie notion that communication systems,

databases, software, and complex technical organizations are in tiiemselves avatars of tiie

God, actively keeping chaos and enttopy at bay" (86). The significance of

mytiiinformation, for Davis, fu-st comes from tiie complexity of meanings:

Meaning is at once the mundane foundation of the mind's trivial pursuits and the inspiration for our most intimate, creative, and spuitual quests. But meaning, even stiictiy linguistic meaning, is notoriously slippery stuff. (84)

186

In the same way that Mark Tumer cognitively proves the importance of metaphorical

"mapping" in animism as the most basic and rich projection of a mental competence, in

Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodemity, Ira Livingston shows how the trickster

god's magic wand effectively works for Romantic poets' finding of new reality in messy

spaces of meanings:

The nonlinearity of meaning is generated as an excess against the unidirectional drive of information, like the snakes that weave around the staff of a caduceus or the turbulent wake of a forward-moving ships; meaning is the snake and the wake of information, (emphasis added 135)

In the information theory, the extended metaphoric blending of personified technology

attests the fact that "Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart" (The

Power of Myth 18). Surely, the voice from heart is hard to seize and seems like noise (for

example such as the unconttollable and incomprehensible heartbeat) compared to clear

mechanical information. For Claude Shannon who systemized tiie ambiguous status of

information as enttopy (tiie system's degree of randomness and disorganization), noise is

basically the unnecessary information which has been regarded as a disturber of effective

communication. But while he was working as a researcher at AT&T, found out tiiat

noise is a kind of usable mformation which cannot be separated from message.

Boltzman's equations clearly quantifies tiiis inclusion of chaotic noise into order:

H= ^ \ logpi where tiie ps are tiie probabilities tiiat tiie symbols occur in their places by chance. The demand that we shall maximize their information content is therefore identical with the demand tiiat we shall choose tiie less restiictive theory, that is, the theory in which the symbols have more free choices for theu occurrence or behavior. And tiiis is exactiy Occam's theory. (Bronowski 52)'^

187

But, as Davis expresses, Nobert Wiener's definition of information as "a measure of

organization—pattem, form, coherence" finally "won tiie game": "Wiener suggested tiiat

living creatures could be seen as systems tiiat resist tiie evil deathlord of entropy through

information, communication, and feedback (86, 89). Borrowing from the Neoplatonist

Plotinus's analogy of tiie intellectual soul as tiie "steersman of the body," Davis tries to

recover "a new scientific unage of the incorporeal self" Also cybemetics, as the

"science of conttol" or "messages, memories, and pattems of information," requires

critical human leadership as the Greek root kubernetes implies the importance of "the

steersman or govemor"' in this dangerous monster-like technology. Thus, Davis compares

human identity to "a flame" rather than to other imageries given that "the inner steersman

is neither an etemal substance nor a figment of the teeming brain, but a fluctuating

pattem in an endless cybemetic play" (90).

As Gaston Bachelard uses the flame as the human spuit m his Philosophy of Fire, the

flame was Prometheus's present to humanity, and the basic metaphor for ttanscendence:

"The spuit descends from heaven in tongues of fue; man, through fire, attempts to ascend

to the world from which he fell. The fue of the unagmation, creating and ttansforming

images, is one means of ascension" (Warrick 29).

As Wiener was afraid of the appearance of the genuinely mtelligent and autonomous

machines from this flame of unagination, Davis does not forget to wam that the human

intellect as flame is, like the Augustian battle with the Manicheans, "tiie bloodred

darkness mixed into virtual light" (92). And he implies that the importance of mythos m

cybemetics let us discem "the vital difference between the knowledge that frees and the

delusions that reduce us to programmed machines" (93).

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The information as tiie personified spirit of flame, Davis explains, is "redemptive,

demonic, magical, tianscendent, hypnotic, alive" and these images can creatively and

consciously answers tiie question of tiickster-like technology. The mutilation of tiie

sublime body most heuristically reveals tiiat Davis's anticipation is in the correct ttack.

Like ancient cave painting, tiie fragmented limbers of the sublime soul leads neurotic

modems to the lost connection of the sacred with literature:

As children of romanticism, archetypal tiieorists of literattire have perpetuated tiie view tiiat art has evolved from the sacred. Cave paintings, for instance, are supposed to have been addressed to primitive religious needs and were not objects of beauty in themselves. The mistake is in separating the religious, the aesthetic, and otiier spheres of primitive culture in the specialized way that is done with modem culture. (Hardin 49)

The machmes of blood and flesh in SF tie again tiie lost bond of tiie sacred and literature

through mythic creations. Like Plotinus's steersman of a storm ship who is so intent on

saving and forgets his own peril in bemg dragged, materialists are too serious only about

the mechanistic laws of nature. Similarly, the vitalistic view of the machine as the

organic information suggests the relatively unstable positions of the inner steersman

because cybemetics knows that "the human individual is merely a momentary whirlpool

within larger systems of information flow" (Davis 92). Unlike the headlong

unidirectional efforts of materialists, however, this relative view of information as the

fractal embryo of the infinite leads us to a crossroad like Hermes's rectangular pillar

between "the Augustian virtual light" and the "bloodred darkness" of the Manichean.

Homunculus and Golem in SF are actually mobile agents who wam us that the human's

use of technology can reach to both opposite realms.'^ In The Cybernetic Imagination in

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Science Fiction Patiicia Warrick ttaces tiie germinal images of tiie science

personifications of biological forms:

"While tiiese mechanistic artificers [Blaise Pascal and Charles Babbage] were building simulacra and automata modeled on heavenly bodies, mechanisms that calculated time and numbers, anotiier line of artificers continued its simulation of biological forms. The ancient Greeks had claimed heads that made oracular pronouncements, such as the speaking head of Orpheus at Lesbos. The Bible records (Ezech. 21:21) that Nebuchadnezzar consulted mummified heads that spoke. The Egyptians had statues that reportedly replied to questions with a nod of the head. Many occult philosophers, cabbalists, and alchemists in the Middle Ages hoped to build an automation, not of stone or metal, but of flesh and blood. (32)

The need for guiding us to the "virtual light" is frequently expressed as the divine tutor in

literature of science. In the Greek myths and most of the fables, a god or a goddess

appears as a divine tutor. In Judeo-Christian works, an angel sent from God works as the

divine tutor to reveal tmth to the prophet. In the literature of science, personified figures

from the culture of the higher dimensionality ttansmit alien information to humans. The

humans' encountering a new reality, in either physical or spiritual ttavels, often results in

a ttansformation of the protagonist mto some other kind of hybrid form. This

ttansformation of the sublime being connotes humans' desires to go beyond the inherent

limitation of the human condition and to escape from an unjust, absurd universe. It is

through this resistance to tiansformation or mutilation of the sublime that human's

limited satisfaction can be maximized through conttadictions to fluid diversity.

From Charles Hinton's The Persian King to H.G. Wells's Time Machine to Octavia

Butler's Imago, alien figures invite humans to see "the higher dimensionality" outside of

limited human consciousness." Leading us to the unconscious and emergent nature of

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tiie self, aliens as tiie personifications of the infinite imagination provide the vantage

point of the fourth dimension to third-dimensional human culture. Butier's Oankalis not

only recognize tiie human's genetic inclination to be intolerant of difference and to be

hierarchical but also lead to tiie overcoming of this limitation through unlimited

imagination:

That information was a weight demanding my attention. It would not begin to "lighten" until I began to understand it. To understand it all could take years, but I must at least begin now. "It"s not really like being drunk," I said when I could speak. "It's more like having billions of sttangers screaming from inside you for your individual attention." (Imago 169)

In accepting Others into self, myth works as the "innate releasing mechanism" of

differences in the Frye's four major realms—the sacred, the human fallen society, the

natural, and the disorderly unnatural level of sin and death. As the most vital energy

source for human expressions, myth is "the embryonic work on children's literature and

science fiction" (Hardin 52). The displacement of mythemes to a narrated myth, then to a

romance and then to a realistic narrative now needs to tum back to their embryonic status

in order to recover myth's spiritual resonance rather than to find the fomialistic

ambiguity. As Marshal Bolonsky in On Signs says, "Modem semiotics was founded to

enable myth to be read simply," the omnipotent power in the ttanspersonal experiences

must be decoded into a practical practice to settle the growing conflict of modem society

by technological developments (xvii). Motivated by daemonic interpretations, the

survival sttategy in myth mediates seemingly irreconcilable differences of Others and

prepares us for the spiritual crusade in a materialistic and depthless culture.

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If not harmonized with the natural law, this alien information of technology tums

into destitictive agents of a holocaust. Like the water-diviner's pickax, technology traces

tiie source of Ursuppe, but its unidirectional search for efficient transcendent information,

tiie Word, misses tiie hand-feeling of tiie water-diviner. Bom from the primitive human's

heart, the Gnostic in myths, as tiie shadowy lore of logos, works as the veteran water-

diviner's feeling through his fingertips.

Like the inner steersman in a stormy sea of information who should save himself and

the ship as well, human consciousness must remain a critical subject without letting the

ultta-sensitive modem pickax work alone. Like a serpent, technology has both positive

and negati\'e potential. With the paranormal water-diviner's hand, Hermes holds the

magic wand the caducea which is equivalent to human technology's potential. Although

Hermes's informative power is much less powerful than Zeus' s seamless law or the

original Torah, Hermes's fragmented and combinatory codes perform notable

achievements over nature.

As the messenger of information between gods and humans, Hermes is essentially

hybrid of the two opposites, god/human, man/woman, and nature/artifice. Such emphases

of mediating differences in the middle equilibrium are also found in most of myths such

as Golem and Hundun, the representative creation from West and East. Unlike Golem

("fetus, unformed mass" in Hebrew) who hopes to be like an ordinary human bemg,

Hundun, the Chinese version of Golem, contains the original amorphous form. Because

of this peculiarity, however, Hundun is killed by Brief and Sudden's decision to make

everything same. Like Zamyatin's totalitarian society of We, efficiency-oriented culture

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seeks for the homogenous group from which each individual's inherent differences must

suffer. °

However, meaning is more likely to be found where more difference is perceived.

Octavia Butler's acceptance of alien intelligence ("having billions of stianger' screaming

from inside you") reveals the hope for the "higher dimensionality" which can ttanscend

human limits. With the gnostic glimpse of this higher Word, we can seek unity behind the

changing impressions of the visible universe. Like modem chaos theory, this gnostic

encounter with an alien divine tutor shows us the semiotically relational reality in which

the individual differences, like fractal forms, consist of the larger pattems without

oppositions. In the literature of science, as Plato sees the source of knowledge through the

soul's active messenger role between the ideas and appearance, the creative chaos is best

achieved by the personified messenger of alien information through transition from

differences to a larger fractal system, from friction to progress. If the dismembered

supreme beuig's limbs send the cosmic music through tiie morphic field of tiie universe,

it is needless to say tiiat tiie fiiller decoding of tiie subtie infinite information waves can

be achieved when we use botii brain and heart, myth and science together.

Chaos

As Michel Serres said, science and literattire are not two stone lions flanking a

doorway (Conversations 47). Culttire is a cross-breeding: science consttticts literattire

and vice versa. In "Science, Discourse, and Literattire: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in

Science," James Bono expresses the indivisible interrelation between science and

metaphoric language: "science conttols language, whereas language conttols occult

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modes of tiiought" (61). Through "the capacity of metaphor to dismpt stable meanings, to

disseminate meanings across and beyond tiie boundaries," Bono finds the overarching

role between science and literatiire: "Metaphors can have tiie effect of linking scientific

discourse, to varying degrees, witii social and culttiral change and meanings, values, and

ideological interests associated with tiiem" (72, 80). Defining metaphor as "daemonic,"

Clarke more succinctly notes the noisy doubling of tenor and vehicle in metaphor:

"metaphor is like two souls within one body, two bodies in one bed" ("Lamia" 560).

Disseminated by the clash of agencies beyond boundaries, the unstable relation of

meanings between science and literature is often reversibly expressed. As Keller used

McClintock's genetic metaphor of DNA's mobility as the source of "philosophy of

differences," science provides the proliferation of metaphor which invites creative

literary imagination. On the conttary, while "science needs the inoculation of ambiguity

and semantic haze," "scientific metaphors, with their shifts of meaning occasioned by

metaphoric exchange, represent telling ttaces of such repressed, or forgotten, origins"

(Bono 67, 76). "When the science theory has a larger cultural resonance like chaos theory,

the "daemonic" agency power of scientific metaphor are too tricky to be scientific and

becomes one of the reasons that it is regarded as "magic trick" the purely literary modes.

In fact, by the seventeenth century, science was interchangeable with art and

described only as a particular area of knowledge of skill. The con(flision) between art as

theoretical knowledge and science as the practical experience remained until tiie

beginning of the eighteenth century when science was increasingly thought of as

methodological knowledge from experiment of machines:

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It was not until the seventeenth century that science could be said to have been fashionable, at least in England, where King Charles 11 himself had his own royal laboratory...however, even eighteenth-century experiments in science still retained something of the flavor of the conjurer's tricks in the manner of the medieval magician. (Cohen 92)

Along with Erik Davis, Stehen H. Kellert is one of the chaos theorists who sees the grand

claims in chaos theory as "a kind of magic trick" that can disappoint our strong hope for

fmding the secrets of order within chaos:

Chaos theory is not as interesting as it sounds. How could it be? After all, the name "chaos theory" makes it seem as if science has discovered some new and definitive knowledge about utterly random and incomprehensible phenomena. Actually, what seems to be going on is a kind of magic trick like the one Ludwig Wittgenstein described as putting something in a drawer and closing it, then tuming around and opening the drawer, and removing the object with an expression of surprise. By calling certain physical systems, "chaotic," scientists lead us to think that they are totally unintelligible—just a muddle of things happening with no connections or stmctures. So when they find interesting mathematical pattems in these unpredictable systems, they can exclaim that they have discovered the secrets of "order within chaos," even though only by christening these systems chaotic in the first place can they make such an impressive result possible, (ix)

Especially, suggesting the possibility of blurring the line between "in theory" and "in

practice," Kellert sees initial conditions as "a practical limitation" in chaos theory (xi).

Despite the limitations of chaos theories, Kellert admits the theoretical importance of

chaos theory as a whole new paradigm and its impact on our philosophical conceptions

mainly by its reassessment of chaotic phenomena as the precursor of order. With these

limitations and prospects about chaos theory, he suggest the following definition of chaos

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theory: "chaos theory is the qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in

deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems" (2).

Interestingly, for Hawkins in Strange Attractors, the "magical trick" of order from

chaos is more dynamic than for Kellert. Although she admits the limitation of chaos

science not as a magical science, the cultural significance of chaos metaphors is powerful

enough to efface this barrier: "Chaos metaphors...are no more correspondent to the tme

state of sublunary nature than the science fictions based on them. But, if so, what richly

resonant and exciting fropes and metaphors they are!"(166). This fascination of chaos

metaphor, for her, mainly comes from the fact that she uses the "strange atttactors" as the

most fascinatuig scientific metaphor in application to literature while Kellert ironically

omits its cultural implications despite his finding of fractals to be "bizarrely beautiful

figures" (xiii). Hawkins first sees tiie unknowability of nature and art regarding them as

essentially chaotic systems:

Things work on themselves in unpredictable as well as iterative ways m art, just as tiiey do in the dynamic systems operative in nature itself This is why the holistic dynamic of certam works of art and nature alike is never entirely subject to extemal, analytical contiol. (77)

At tills pomt, she concludes, "hi nattire, regular luiear orders are tiie exception, not tiie

mle" (160). However, she postulates the very correspondence of chaotic spaces in botii

nattire and art: ""Why, then, is tiiere so much chaos, so much ttirbulence in art unless art

reflects cognate mysteries in life? "(47). Then, she confirms tiie interconnection of order

and chaos m terms of "sttange fractals":

Order is mterieaved with randomness, randomness is interleaved with order, that simplicity enfolds complexity, complexity harbors sunplicity, and that order and chaos can be

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repeated at smaller and smaller scales—a phenomenon the scientists of chaos have dubbed 'fractal.' (76)

Through observations of these dimensional fractals, scientists gradually figure out the

self-similar larger properties of related phenomena. From this interactive dialogic

between order and chaos by tiie mediation of stiange attiactors, she finally claims, "There

is an order ultimately ruling, as well as allowing, disorder" (28). As she compares the

"fractal" to little leaves' (clouds', rocks') resemblance of big ones, the fractal form is

"pattems of similarity or near self-similarity everywhere in extemal nature" "wherein

each part is a reflective image of the whole" (114-6). Hawkins regards the "fractal"

metaphor as "a megametaphor" because of its richly resonant and exciting power for

finding secret human life:

they are demonsttably correspondent with what people over centuries have felt to be the most profoundly evocative of all literature's mythical and metaphorical representation of the deterministically chaotic ways of the world. (167)

She thinks that the mythical and metaphorical representation of literature is equivalent to

the "phase space" where the stiange atttactors live:

In phase space the complete state of knowledge about a dynamical system at a single instant m time collapses to a pomt. That point is the dynamical system -at that instant. At the next instant, though, the system will have changed, ever so shghtly, and so the point moves. 'Phase space' is thus the place or instant of tiansition when an entire dynamical system.. .changes from a given point to a different state, and so the point moves on. (155)

In this phase space, there always exist tensions because it is ttansition of order to chaos,

of certainty to uncertainty. This ttansition is violent because of its moving to turbulence.

But it is also harmonious because of the "universal" conditions of the working atttactors.

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Before the order ttansformed into chaos, sttange atttactors are the agents for this chaos,

as Hawkins describes, "some unknown but then, some unknown factor interferes and

attracts the particles—pulls them out of the pattem" (126). Mitchell Feigenbaum's

"Universality Theory" reveals, according to Clarke, "a measure of the phase transition

between order and chaos" rather than a chaos system's behavior itself:

Feigenbaum discovered that the period-doubling scenario common to phenomena undergoing the transition from order to chaos unfold according to a "universal constant" of 4.669, and is justly lauded for having grasped new kind of pi However, if I have grasped the results of his work, Feigenbaum's universality concems only the tiansformation into chaos, not the dynamics of chaos proper. ("Resistance" 92)

Opposing Katheryne Hayles' underscoring of tiie "tiimst toward totality" in her cultural

applications of chaos, Clarke expresses his "visions of chaotic liberation from the linear

ration of globalizing systems":

Just as the astonishmg "chaos" of the Mandelbrot set is not the old demonic chaos, Fegenbaum's "universality" is not tiie old global universality—tiie pure homogeneity of an unperturbable solid, like a marble slab. Fractal totalities and chaotic systems are fluid, complex, open, and mfmitely productive of constiained deviations. Chaos tiieory does not Ultimate or replicate hierarchical stitictures; it represents tiie overcoming of tiie hierarchical modes. Sensitively dependent on irrecoverable micro-conditions, macro-levels remain in relative and relational rather tiian hierarchical connection to micro-levels. (93)

More properly, for Hawkins, the "energized metaphors for fluid resistance" is Cleopatta

as "deterministic chaos personified": "She personifies tiie elusiveness and mystery tiiat

generate desire—she is never pinned down, and so remains an object of desire, not only

for Antony, but for tiie audience" (137). Applying also Othello, Macbeth, and Paradise

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Lost to tiie initial sensitiveness of chaotic systems, she interprets chaos representation in

tiiese works as "input error multiplies itself at an escalating rate" (160).

Chaos tiieorists and culttu-al tiieorists of chaos contend, disorder occurring in nattire

can be explained, or reordered, by means of sttange attractors (Conversation 57). If we

read tiie more detailed scientific explanation which 1 have drawn from a website named

""What is Fractal?" tiie cultiiral reverberation of "sttange attractors" will be much clearer.

Fractal, in mathematics, a geometric shape that is complex and detailed in stmcture at any level of magnification. Often fractals are self-similar—tiiat is, tiiey have the property that each small portion of the fractal can be viewed as a reduced scale replica of the whole. One example of a fractal is tiie "snowflake" curve constmcted by taking an equilateral triangle and repeatedly erecting smaller equilateral triangles on the middle third of the progressively smaller sides. Theoretically, the result would be a figure of finite area but with a perimeter of infinite length, consistmg of an infinite number of vertices. In mathematical terms, such a curve cannot be differentiated. Many such self-repeating figures can be constmcted, and since they first appeared in the 19* century they have been considered as merely bizarre. A tuming point in the study of fractals came with the discovery of fractal geometry- by the Polish-bom French mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot in the 1970. Mandelbrot adopted a much more absttact definition of dimension than that used in Euclidean geometry, stating that the dimension of a fractal must be used as an exponent when measuring its size. The result is that a fi-actal cannot be tteated as existing strictly in one, two, or any other whole-number dimensions. Instead, it must be handled mathematically as though it has some fractional dimension. The "snowflake" curve of fractals has a dimension of 1.2618. Fractal geometry is not simply an absttact development. A coastline, if 1.2619 measured down to its least irregularity, would tend toward infinite length just as does the snowflake" curve.

If stiange atttactors atttact a reflective similarity within a larger pattem (as from a

snowflake to a coastline), will the differences in nature, like the following logic,

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disappear into one larger system? However, as "tiie political resistance of totalizing

systems" chaos theory "presents us with a limitation—namely, an intransigent

unpredictability"—yet they can appear in the context of exceedingly simple and entirely

Newtonian equations of motion (Clarke 93; Kellert xi).

Configuration in chaos is order but the "ultimately mling" order is still conttoversial.

The partial recognition in "phase space" (sometimes called "state space") is due to the

role of sttange atttactors. In this regard, sttange atttactors are the trickster mediators that

appear either as Julia-like sets greatly different in their final stages or as Lorenz

atttactors' quasi-periodic motions (the beautiftil butterfly pattem). Significantly,

Mandelbrot coined the word "fractal," which comes from the Latin adjective fractus

(meaning broken) and fractional; "it connotes both fractional dimensions and extteme

complexity of forms" (Hayles, Chaos Bound 165). If metaphorically interpreted, the

beauty of life and the disaster of extteme turbulence (two opposite tenors) coexist in the

metaphoric "fractal" (a vehicle). However, because of the impossible "initial

sensitivities" and the possibilities in practice, the sttange atttactors appear to be

fascinating cognitive mysteries:

Banish chaos, banish butterflies, banish Cleopatra... if you will—or if you must—but along with them you have to banish excitement, adventure, along with all risk and temptation from your world, and you will miss them when they are gone. (Hawkins 136)

The other most general common characteristic in chaotic systems is nonlmearity.

Katherine Hayles m Chaos Bound defines nonlinearity as "an often startling incongruity

between cause and effect" from which "a small cause can give rise to a large effecf (11).

According to Kellert, nonlinear terms also involve algebraic function of the system

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variables such as "X or sin(x) or 5xy in a system witii two variables x and y" (3). In

chaos theory, nonlmearity is tiie rule of nature whereas Imearity tiie exception.

According to Hayles, nonlinear dynamics is akin to fractal geometiy in tiiat it posits a

qualitative and not merely a quantitative difference between linear and complex systems.

Applymg tiie idea of nonlinearity to Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, Hayles

argues tiiat the first half is about Adams' attempts to launch hunself into tiie ordered

certainties of tiie Newtonian synthesis while the second half finds him searching for the

chaotic multiplicities that he saw as characteristic of the twentieth century. Hayles sees

tills mpture between tiie two as "the necessary gap" for maturity (62).^' Narrative

Imearity is fundamentally at odds both with postmodernist theories and with the

recursiveness of the chaos theory. In the technology-social-matrix, issues become

energized in theories because they are replicated from and reproduced in the social. For

example, new historicism locates itself at the looping of denatured context with denatured

time. .As a result, the ideological product of the self (the ideological product of the

relations of power in a particular society) began to seem remarkably constiained.

By providing us with a higher level of complexity, nonlinearity stands for multi­

valued logic and empirical variations:

Nonlinearities may produce an order out of the chaos of elementary processes and still, under different circumstances, be responsible for the destmction of this same order, eventually producing a new coherence beyond another bifiircation. (Prigogine 18)

More specifically, Peter Stoicheff contends, the ttaditional supremacy of order over

disorder is negated in chaotic systems and in metafiction, and the hierarchy is neuttalized

to a dialogue between the two which generates the pattems of the natural world and the

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text: these "spontaneous local islands of order" reveals some essential quality of the

whole system adding more information to it (225). As Gleick says in Chaos, in a place

where we quit looking at because it became nonlinear, we go back because we now

know, even partially, how to look at it (114). Hayles suggests tiiat if we look at the same

tiling later with nonlinearities it will show a larger "archipelago of chaos": "Suppose an

island breaks through the surface of the water, then another and another, until the sea is

dotted with islands" (Chaos Bound 3).

In Chaotics (the term named by Ihab Hassan signifies certain attitudes toward chaos

that are manifest at diverse sites within the culture), the reconceptualization of the void as

a space of creation (not-order is here a possibility) has deeper affinities with the

postmodem idea of a constmcted reality. For Hayles, this reconsititution ("If reality is

not natural and self-evident but constmcted, it can obviously deconstmcted") makes clear

that the world as humans experience it is a collaboration between reality and social

constmction: "No longer sunply what is there, reality is subject to constant revision,

deconstruction, and reconstmction" (Chaos and Order 14).

In Chaotics, science as the "repository of ttopes" is believed to illuminate literary

texts. For example, William Paulson in The Noise of Culture sees the interdisciplmarity

between literature and complexity. He regards readmg process as a complex system m

action. When we read a poem repeatedly, more of it is processed as mformation because

we now read at a higher level of complexity. Thus tiie reading process mstantiated tiie

symbiotic relationship between complexity and noise, for it is the presence of noise that

forces the system to reorganize itself at a higher level of complexity. In this regard, for

Paulson, literature is working as communication crafted to maximize the positive role of

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noise and Prigogine's analysis of dissipative ("entropy-producing") system fimctions a

useful tool for both natiu-al and artificial phenomena (20-1).

The four attributes prominent in both chaotic systems and postmodem literature are,

according to Peter Stoicheff, nonlinearity, self-reflectivity, irreversibility, and self-

organization." Chaos theory brought the realization that "entropy-rich" (dissipative)

systems facilitate rather than impede self-organization (9). Prigogine's work with

irreversible themiodynamics emphasized this spontaneous emergence of self-

organization from chaos, bespeaking "the order out of chaos" like the book title of

Prigogine and Stengers. Other chaos theorists (such as Mitchell Feigenbaum, Benoit

Mendelbrot, and Robert Shaw) are concemed with the order hidden with chaotic systems

(chaos possesses deep stt-uctures of order). Chaos is here distinct from tme randomness

because it can be shown to contain deeply encoded stmctures called "strange atttactors."

Hayles assesses, whereas the order-out-of-chaos branch has more philosophy than resuUs,

the sttange-atttactor branch more results than philosophy (Chaos Bound 10). For

example, the importance of recursive symmetry (such as the swirls inside of the same

form) to complex systems derives from the predictability that lies hidden within their

unpredictable evolution. Similarly, Feigenbaum's universal constant expresses an

orderliness amidst the unpredictability by showing that large-scale features relate to

small-scale ones in a predictable way. ^

Many critics influenced by chaos theory think that postmodem, metafictional texts

work like local vortices from which spread a general turbulence. Like chaos theory, the

desultory yet recursive symmetries inherent in metafiction pulls "seemingly random or

disorganized phenomena into dynamic relation by discovering pattems that repeat across

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scales or recur one inside the next" (cited in Chaos and Order 26). Postinodem

literature's aleatory and stochastic revelation of pattems within the data is similar to the

functions of pervasive, sttange atttactors in the complexity of nonlinear systems: the

pervasiveness of sttange atttactors both exhilarating and puzzling—exhilarating because

it suggests that the idea had a wide scope; puzzling because it implied that systems which

seemed completely different from one another nevertheless had something in common

(such as the relation between the mystic and the rational in my application).

This replication of symmetries interweaved with asymmetries and unpredictability

is similar to the postmodem tum toward fragmentation, mpture, and discontinuity

modified from stmcturalists' emphasis on pattems and unity. For many cultural theorists,

the science of chaos serves heuristically by its recognition of the importance of scale.

Once scale is seen as an important consideration, the relation of local sites to global

sy stems is rendered problematic. Thus, the iteration and recursion in deconstmction and

chaos theory are seen as ways to destabilize systems and make them yield unexpected

conclusion. Here, despite the "orderly disorder" found in chaotic system and postmodem

tiieories, unpredictability is inevitable, because one can never specify the mitial

conditions accurately enough to prevent it. In both nature and culture, small fluctuations

quickly amplify into large changes and we need to find "fractals" as literary

characterizations and mathematical pattems to connect chaos and order.

In posttnodem literattire, tiie death of subject and a philosophy of difference reflect

the mstability of language which constitict tiiem. In tiiis regard, writing brings turbulence

into being. Many SF writers use technological personifications (such as robots, cyborgs,

androids, and aliens) as fractal characters who reestablish the lost connection between

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human and non-human. As Hayles implies, tiiese hybrids bring us into "a tiiird territory

tiiat lies between order and disorder" and forms new space of creation (Chaos Bound 27).

Through a process of "denattiring" (language, time, context, and tiie human), like chaos

tiieory, tiiis tiiird territory is constiticted in tiie "stiatified and heterogeneous culture"

(Chaos Bound 18). Here, tiie modernism's emphasis of elitism and grand narrative gives

way to difference, constmctedness, the local cultures, and fluidity.

These postmodem values are already common in scientific narratives. In her book In

the Wake of Chaos, Kellert cites Evelyn Fox Keller's tiie actual practice of science which

is "always more abundant tiian its ideology" (159). The abundance of the acttial

applications of differences in postmodem culture is also found in her metaphoric

dissemination of biological metaphors. Keller says, "language simultaneously reflects

and guides the development of scientific models and methods" (Secrets of Life 6).

However, "language is not entirely adequate or commensurate to reality; the gap between

word and world never closes" (Geyh, Postmodern American Fiction xx). Therefore,

science caimot free itself from consttaints of social products which are stmctured by

language. In Reflections on Gender and Science she argues that "just as science is not the

purely cognitive endeavor we once thought it, neither is it as impersonal as we thought:

science is a deeply personal as well as a social activity" (7). Keller sees the twin goals of

science as "knowledge and power" and argues that "knowledge and power" are wrongly

ttanslated into "objectification and domination" (71). She links the desire to dominate

human others (e.g., sadism) with the ambition to dominate nature. According to her,

"domination is a response to the dangers of another's powerlessness evoked by one's

own failure of differentiation and autonomy"(106). Instead, she urges us to recognize

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inter-subjectivity tiuough empatiiy (tiie uhimate recognition of otiiers as subjects like

oneself) because empatiiy finally becomes the most effective strategy to "reconstmct our

understanding of science in terms bom out of tiie diverse spectitim of human experience"

(176).

Through tiie philosophy implied in Babara McClintock's ttansposition genetics,

Keller claims tiiat our understanding of difference gives us a principle for ordering tiie

world unlike the principle of dichotomization:

Division severs connection and unposes distance; the recognition of difference provides a starting point for relatedness, it serves both as a clue to a new modes of connectedness in nature, and as an invitation to engagement with nature. (Reflections 163)

In this world related with differences, Keller writes, "self and other, mind and nature

survive not m mutual alienation, or in symbiotic fusion, but in stmctural integrity" (165).

Comparably, what Gabriel Schwab calls "a ttansition position" shows a new

understanding about values of differences and cooperation. As the imaginary world in

the ttansitional spaces between 1 and Not-l or the real and the imaginary, this ttansition

position, Schwab argues moves literature toward "multidimentional and syncretistic

models of mind and representation" as well as toward "abstiaction and self-reflexivity."

For hun, reading this ttansition position paves the road to "higher differentiation of our

receptive dispositions and, as a result, of subjectivity in general" (249). The creation

myth, once enacted in scientific narratives, becomes a vehicle of a new moral vision and

the rebuth of tribe. As the subconscious formation of cultural mentality, creation myths

reconfigure the foreshadowed images of scientist from the powerful person who can

tiansform the world to the ttansitioiud beings of I and Not-I.

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Unlike mechanical objects, men belong to an open system. Human beings live by

exchanging energy with the environmental ecosystem. If we suppose the inter-relatedness

of matter and consciousness, the constant energy transition between beings take invisibly

subtler forms such as ethereal or resonating waves. Although classical physics maintains

that the noise can be completely eliminated, noise is, as William R. Paulson indicates,

one of the essential parts of our communication, and we have to adapt to noise instead of

trying to completely eliminate noise.^'' The technological personification in the

information society is an inevitable noise of culture which becomes a vehicle of a moral

vision and social criticism by resuscitation of techno-animism.^^ Fritjof Capra's finding

of convergence between modem physics and Eastem philosophy demands that we must

take care of the "soul of machines" just as we are careful about our pets and wild

animals:

To understand the implicate order, Bohm has found it necessary to regard consciousness as an essential feature of the holomovement and to take it into account explicitly in his theory. He sees mind and matter as being interdependent and correlated, but not causally connected. They are mutually enfolding projections of a higher reality which is neither matter nor consciousness. (320)

The ongomg shift from Cartesian, mechanical and antiiropocentiic world view (a

philosophy of difference or separatedness) to homeostatic, living organism (a philosophy

of wholeness) deepens our perception of tiie sacredness m natiire and encourages

interaction and variety among all things in the universe. As Elizabetii Roberts asserts,

while the Westem hierarchy of value ignores contemplation and silence as tiie lesser

value, meditative self-awakening ttaining in Eastem philosophy avoids the separation

between the inner mind and outer world (154). Before our technology devastates the

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eartii beyond recovery, tiie hybrid between humans and non-humans may ignite a desire

for ecocentticity. "When our inner mind meets tiiis disttirbing passionate voice in the

silent cold postinodem society, we can get to "a higher reality" where matter and

consciousness enfold mutual projection.

Postmodemism

The vagueness of time, often expressed as "an indefinite once-upon-a-time" in myths

and fairy tales, according to James Whitiark, "suggests not a real period but a mental

condition— tiie blurred, unpressionistic vividness of images first emerging from the

timeless mists of the unconscious" (Illuminated Fantsy 152). Not only through dreams

and neuroses, but through works of art and folk stories, finding primordial images of

science is one of the best ways to reach old wisdoms to deal with the alienating science

because archetypal images of science as the "collective unconscious," or "universal

unconscious," provide us with the intuitive solution which cannot be accessible to

conscious awareness.

In "The Snow Queen," Whitiark argues, "cold symbolizes science—a part of life that

Andersen fears may freeze out affection and imagination" (Behind 69)?^ Our

unconscious understandmg of the "cold" image of science is, as Whitlark implies,

represented as Kay's being bewitched in what Andersen calls "the icy game of reason."

But this icy bewitchement by science is broken by Gerda's kissing him. By warming the

frozen heart, we have been, since a long time ago, thinking that human love overcomes

the inhuman mechanization of science.

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By conttast, "Whitlark points out tiiat "Kafka's country doctor, lamentably, has no

one to save him from what he deems 'tiie frost of this most ill-fated epoch' " (Behind

69). Unlike our fairy tales, in the postmodem society our technicians are busy in caging

our essential information into bioengineering information without thinking the danger of

being lost in tiie space far beyond human contact. "The process going on today is," Italo

Calvino says, "tiie tiiumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all tiiat is

flux, or a series of minute nuances following one upon tiie other" (9). * Postmodem

individuals, basically constituted as consumers, are becoming closer to mechanical

identities because of market values and this process poses, in tum, the question of

alienation. ^

The more technology occupies a sttategic point as a vehicle for social change, the

more our primordial sense of life must be cherished to react against the ongoing

dehumanizing process of technology. The dismemberment of human bodies and

prosthetic substitution raise the question of where and how human bodies are situated in

relation to machines. Moreover, the human spirit's liminal ttansformation into increased

psychic fi-agmentation, as Bukatman's terminal identity implies, prefigures the messy

evolution of prosthetic sociality in the next century. More and more, machines as the

positioning sttategies, act like a human being, and computers emerge as arenas for social

experiments: "Compared to the human," Katherine Hayles says, "the posthuman (cyborg

formation) is unnatural or aberrant. It doesn't need to assume growth but only supposes

production" (Cyborg Handbook 323).

In this alienating atmosphere of technologized society, however, just as the wooden

form of a hawk frightens unexperienced chicks, the artist's tapping of archetypal images

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still sttongly evoke the reader's unconscious minds and prehistoric memories.^ Joseph

Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces encapsulates Jung's idea of a visionary art

that is symbolic and archetypal: "whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a

thousand voices"" (Von Meurs 19). According to Richard F. Hardin, the archetypal

approach is almost synonymous with myth criticism in that myths are the purest

expression of primordial images in most human experiences (42). Although myth is a

symbolic form of ancient words, myth, compared to usual language, is "nonintellectual,

nondiscursive, typically imagistic," and therefore becomes "the primordial, emotion-

laden, unmediated 'language' of experience" (Reeves 521).

Emphasizing similarities among texts is an effort to find the recurrence of

archetypal pattems such as a rebirtii, a hero's quest, and a wise old man. As Nortiirop

Frye points out, the recurrence "is called rhythm when it is temporal and pattem when it

is spatial" (Staton 117). The mytii is, for Frye, "tiie central informing power that gives

archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle" (Staton 118).

Similarities lead us to understand an individual text as a part of a grand plan. As we stand

back to fmd out tiie pamting's whole stitictiire, archetypal criticism make us seize tiie

whole meamng of artistic works. Yet tiie weakness of tiiis emphasis lies in tiie fact tiiat

we may not read faitiifiilly tiie words on tiie page and estiietic elements because of tiie

preoccupation of the collective unconsciousness. In tiiis regard, archetypal reading of all

literattire in terms of a few monotonous pattems has been criticized as tiie reductionist's

reading (Lee 4). Hardin also says tiiat "archetypal critics tend to write about 'literattire'

ratiier tiian specific literary works, or to use literattire chiefly as a means toward cultural

criticism" (46).

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However, tiie realistic literatiire, due to tiie shortage of stimulating archetypes, often

fails to activate "innate releasing mechanism" which in ttun provoke certain significant

emotion. The "soul-making" of the Romantics, hero-quests of children's literattire and

science fiction succeed in unitating "the total dream of man," for myths in tiiese genres

help unify plots, shape characters, and focus tiie narrative subject's perceptions. Just as

great modemist works such as Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses owe a great

deal to mytiis, postmodernists' convergence with archetypes, likewise, are ironically

popular and contribute the deconstmction tiieory to be more mufticultural and heuristic.

As McLuhan and "Whitlark previously showed, archetypes are "a retrieved awareness or

consciousness" and "a many-layered union of fantasy and fact" (McLuhan 21; Whitiark

"A Post-Jungian Approach to Kafka" 157). Similarly Brian McHale writes:

Literalization of modernist-style mythic archetypes is also a motif of postmodernist writing: see, e.g., Donald Barthelme, Snow White (1967), The Death Father (1974), and The King (1990),Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants (1969), Italo Calvino, The Castieof Crossed Destinies (1969/1973), Gunter Grass, The Flounder (1977), Angerla Carter, The Bloody Chamber (1979), John Fowles, mantissa (1982), and especially the fiction of John Barth, including Giles Goat-Boy ,(1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Chimer (1972), and The Tidewater Tales (1987). Barth puts the case for literalizing mythic archetypes in quite explicit terms: "to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick, however meritorious such fiction may be in other respects. Better to address the archetypes directly." (173)

Because New Criticism sees a poem as an independent linguistic object, the interrelation

between literature and other disciplines (such as architecture or painting) is not regarded

as a proper approach from the viewpoint of formalism. However, unlike myth criticism

which "grew in part as reaction to formalism of New Criticism," archetypal criticism

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based on Jung is originally "a process, a perspective, and not a content" (Rupprecht 36-

37). As an actively percepttial process to substittite for tiie barrenness of tiie modem and

posttnodem cultures. Colin Falck sttongly contends tiie need for mytiiic awareness

beneath our objective or scientific awareness:

It seems likely not only that myth and mythic consciousness must lie at tiie origm of our subsequentiy more fully-articulated linguistic awareness, but also that tiie most important stmctures of our flilly-articulated linguistic awareness will continue to fall within the outiines of myth and will be most satisfying open to "explanation" through an assimilation to mythic pattems. (118)

By helping us to see the unity in variously heterogeneous forms, "archetypal criticism

complements close readmg as things in themselves" (Lee 5). Its emphasis on the reader

as a source conditioned by social and sexual roles prepares the way for reader-response

criticism and feminist theory not to speak of its protostmcturalism methodology and

intertextuality.

In this regard, more than any other metonymic images which predominates m

realism, Frantz Kaflca's unconscious discourses of desire with fantastic modes of animal

metaphors expose gaps and tensions in the modem text. The Kafka's angst-ridden vision

of the world widely applies to the extteme individualism of late capitalism. But the

unttammeled flow of this unconscious desue produces continuously fluid images. These

various animalities in Kafka's texts deterritorizes the repressed representations of

capitalistic influence upon the individual and produces some fertile tubers (rhizomes)

through which we can liberate ourselves from oppressed desires. The alienated yet

resisting subjects of this bleak environment are essentially ambivalent. Even the

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individual as victim and the society or family as victimizer is not clear because these

dualistic viewpoints greatly change depending upon the observer's motivations.

The "conttadictions and discrepancies of illuminated fantasy," like surrealism or

Zen, requires of the reader "both the notion that reality ttanscends logic and an emphasis

on spontaneity and shock" (Whitlark, Illuminated Fantasy 187). To avoid this illusion of

representations (shadows in the cave), Plato charged his disciples to go directly to the

idea emphasizing the unreliablity of representative mediums such as writing. Whitlark

suggests that the road to Plato's Idea is almost the same as the Zen's methodology,

""satori—radical sameness, and difference simultaneously" which also can be named,

conttary to Derridean differance (defer and delay of references), the nondifferance

(Illuminated Fantasy 213).

Sunilarly, in Brian McHale's argument of cyberpunk as the literalized or actualized

metaphor for postmodernist fiction, tiie paraspace in science fiction, as the "worlds of

unacttiaUzed historical possibility," embodies tiie Plato's discredible physical

representations by the "consensual hallucmation":

The user of this system [Gibson's matiix or cyberspace] has the illusion of movmg among these representations as through a landscape, but a landscape entuely mental and vuttial. The mattix is a "consensual hallucination," that is, exactiy tiie same hallucinatory landscape is experienced by everyone who "jacked mto" the system's terminals. (156)

Especially tiie avatar in paraspace, as tiie exact equivalent of Plato's shadow image of

illusionary human bemgs, effectively conveys tiie cyberpunk tiieme of tiie plurality and

fragmentation of the self As explained by Neal Stephen who allegorically used tiie

avatar figures m his The Snow Crash, tiie avatar is, like tiie origm of Gibson's

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cyberspace from "contemporary video-arcade games and computer graphic programs,"

based upon the realistic use of its concept in computer programming:

In thinking about how the Metaverse might be constmcted, 1 was influenced by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which is a book that explains the philosophy behind the Macintosh. Again, this point is made only to acknowledge the beneficial influence of the people who compiled said document, not to link these poor innocents with its results. . After the first publication of Snow Crash I leamed that the term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called Habitat, dev eloped by F. Randall Farmer and Chip Momingstar. The system runs on Commodore 64 computers, and though it has all but died out in the U.S.. is still popular in Japan. In addition to avatars, habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as described in this book. (469-70)

Stephenson's juxtaposmg the postmodem reality with the mythic archetypes of

Gilgamesh, as McHale explains about tiie general use of parallel myth in science fiction,

"literalize or actualize tiie kinds of mythological materials that function metaphorically m

modemist texts" (156). By tiiis juxtaposition of parallel myth. McHale contends that tiie

worid making in fiction is metafictionally activated especially by "the Hero with a

Thousand Faces on a different but parallel plane of reality" uistead of tiie real figural

allegorical personification:

The paraspace motif includmg cyerspace and its functional equivalent, the myth worid, not only serves to bring into view tiie "worldness" of world; it also offers tiie possibility of reflectmg on world making itself, a fictional-worid-witiiin-the-fictional-worid, or in other words, a mise en abyme of the texts fictional worid. It offers, in otiier words, tiie possibility of metafiction. (157)

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Especially, tiie cyberpunk novelists' actiialization of tiie postinodemist's metaphoric

tiieme of "fragmentation and tiie dispersal of self is achieved in tiie avatar figures'

disintegrative experiences in cyberspaces:

Where postmodemism has figurative representations of disintegration, cyberpunk texts typically project fictional worlds tiiat include (fictional) objects and (fictional) phenomena embodying and illusttating tiie problematics of selfhood: human-machine symbiosis, artificial intelligences, biological engmeered alter egos, and so on. (McHale 159)

Based upon the Bmce Sterimg's division of two "postiiumans," namely "Mechanists" and

"Shapers" ("bio-punks" m McHale's term), McHale points out tiiat while tiie "machine-

mediated resurrection" is conspicuous in the machme-mediated version, "gothic-horror

imagery of dismemberment, cannibalism, necrophilia" abounds in the wetware "bio-

punk" fictions (172). These primordial images of sacrifice in "bio-punk" version, in tum,

reveal the "progressive resistance" against the posthuman existence as merely a

configuration of information by a cybemetic system. Considering that the puppeteers of

the Plato's cave parable, as the "tme precursors of personified archetypes," reveal the

glimpse of the mythical awareness, the bodily ttansformation in "bio-punk" fictions are

seemingly closer to necessary puppeteers of Reality or the Divine (while most humans

are not supposed to see the tmth directly).

However, the incorporeal ttansmission of human spirit into other identities has long

been imagined as well. Especially the Romantic poets' notions of intuition, imagination

and inspiration often suggest to us that spiritual ttansformation is like the downloading of

human self into hardware. Keats' following letter reads:" A Poet ...has no identity—he

is continually in for—and filling some other Body. . . But even now I am perhaps not

215

speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live" ("Keatsian

Tums," 59). The trance of the sublime experiences often merges the human subject into

other forms like a pure download of information. However, this incorporeal

metamorphosis ahnost denies the complexities of realities with logocentrism, the extteme

belief in the Word.^' Here, the physical unages in the world are literally considered as

the pure illusion or the evil existential condition. The concept of Source is either denied

or diluted by its negation of the physical sphere. In this regard, among Robert Magliola's

division of two kinds of Zen language, the "Mechanistic" posthumans are much closer to

"differentialist'" Zen or a purely Buddhist phenomenon, by refusing the existence of any

"Source."' By contrast, the "bio-punk" posthumans are still sticking to the "logocentric"

Zen or Taoism where "opposites joui, with man united to nature" m theu searches to

reach the "Source," the "Home (Illuminated Fantasy 205).

Like the Derridean posttnodem argument of "sous rature" (under erasure), even

though the algorithmic language of "Mechanists" or "Mechs" are relatively comphcated

and rational, there is no mystery or ttanscendence. This lack m tum makes its

mathematical logic barren in the discussions of humanities. The following criticism about

Derridean postinodemism is well appUcable to tiie "Mechs" version where words

dominate flesh:

Weighed in the aesthetic balance -which must also meant tiie moral balance—tiie sophisticated and reality-rejecting hesitations of modem metapoeticality must in the end be more destmctive than any mere naivete or sentimentality (naivete or sentunentaity can at any rate always be educated), smce they strike at the very roots of our existential courage itself (Falck 167)

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In this cold world of tiie pure scientific posthuman world, the concept of unity is

discredited by the overemphasis on the ceaseless change and confusion in the world. The

most extteme logic of "the Mechs[']" version is similar to Edmond Jabes' religious belief

expressed in his El or the Last Book:

In the Kabbalah it says, "God reveals himself in a dot." And by making this reference, the whole work of deconstmction seems to uncover a totality. But the totality can never be shown. Totality is an idea. . .and it can be shown only through fragments, (cited in Whitlark Behind 181) ^

However, Whitiark finds an important connection between Derridean postmodemism and

Jungian analysis: ''Jung's understandmg of meaning has much in common with Derridian

desemination, where meaning proliferates despite the rootlessness of existence" (Behind

155). It is clear that this common dissemination of meanings in these seemingly opposite

areas is mostly expressed in the figure of personification. Just as the sublime nature or

Oversoul are universally expressed as the personified demiurges in myth, the

personification m deconstmction theory is, through its phenomenal status of the "absent

presence" or "present absence," is interpreted as the figural core which embodies cultural,

racial or gender conflict. On the one hand, personification m postmodemism reveals the

deep conceptual confusion of the identities in different positions, and on the other hand,

ttanslates the alienating information into tiie familiar substantial form. Thus, Paxson in

The Poetics of Personifications regards tiiis Derridean position on personification, m

terms of tiie simultaneous designation of tiie oppositional pair usurer/relever, as "a

signature of tiie expressive and phenomenological 'secret origin' latent in all acts of

human creation and mterchange":

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All figural language undergoes usurer["ihe exhausting of tiie metaphor's original potency], but the very initial existence of such language entails tiie engagement of tiie cognitive process Derrida labels relever. Related to Hegel's term aufhebel, relever is the impulse of language to revitalize itself, to "uplift" itself to a pristine significational condition. (Paxson 168)

In conttast witii "tiie Mechanists" version where electtonic and mechanical devices

substittite for human beings, tiie "bio-punk" version seek tiie lost connection of tiie sacred

of literature in the ritualized forms of the dismpted, exploded and dismembered process

despite its danger of bodily fiision witii other forms of life. Although tiie frequently

appearing clones in "bio-punk" version, by producmg tiie literal multiplication of tiie

same self reveal the potential risk of tiie totalitarian sameness, yet even in this extteme

case, the bodies on the verge of merging mto the same show the centrifugal self which

continuously- interacts with the parts of multiplied bodies. As the caged consciousness,

the transformation of the human brain into informational bits in the cyberspace reveals

the mhumaneness as the form of half life, the "suspended animation."

For Katherine Hayles, even m the changed relation between inscription and

incorporation in VR (virtual reality) technology, the language itself is not regarded as the

inscription of codes because the visible pattems in language is itself material. In

"'Materiality of Informatics," she notes, "The immateriality of the text derives from a

translation of mechanical leverage into informational pattem that can undergo

ttansformations unthinkable if matter or energy were the primary basis for the systemic

exchanges." Thus, however the postmodem and cyberpunk fictions in the nineties

describe the erasure or debasement of human bodies, Hayles thinks the body's

disappearance is unthinkable in constmcting the postmodem subjectivity:

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Is it necessary to insist that the body, far from disappearing, remains essential to human life? No human has yet succeeded in living for even a few seconds without a body. How then to account for these ecstatic pronouncements and delirious dreams? I believe they should be taken as evidence, not that the body has disappeared, but that a certain kind of postmodem subjectivity has emerged. This subjectivity is constittited by the crossing of the materiality of informatics with the immateriality of information. (2)

In this regard, tiie constinction of bio-punk, tiie machine of flesh and blood, signifies not

only the machine-like indifference but also resistance to the mechanization of human

values.

Considering that by "informatics," Hayles means not only as the loci of the

postmodem subjectivity, but also as "the material, technological, economic, and social

structures that make the information age possible," the virtual constmction of human

beings, either through "Mechs" or "bio-punk," reveal, after all, a contiadictory, unstable

experience through which a vision of a new ontological exploration can begin. Also

considering that the "body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation are in constant

interaction and interplay," the postmodem subjectivity that emerged from the erasure of

materiality is now generally called the "cyborg subjectivity" (if cyborgs generally include

the both forms of "bio-punk" and "Mechs"). The "heuristic rather than absolute"

discussions of posthuman cyborg subjectivity come from the continual interaction with

the body through intmsive embodiment in the form of excessive, deficient, and variable

Others. This cyborg's implosion of nature and culture, humans and machines is

"sttategic" by the multiple variations of "difference without opposition:

The mutable boundaries of cyborg representation offers "sttategic stubjectivities' and their radical possibilities (including both danger and hope) such as: the experience of

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difference without opposition, rejection of a science of origins and telos, an embracing and exploration of multiple overlapping subjectivities. (Cyborg Handbook 59)

Like such Romantic notions as intuition, imagination and inspiration, mythical awareness

in the fictions of cybemetics retums us to the primordial vitality by our possessing bodies

which have been used as the connecting point between the human and the divine through

sacrifice. In Myth, Truth, and Literature: Toward a True Post-Modernism, Colin Falck

urges the postmodem reader to be go out of "the prisonhouse of the language" to feel the

sacredness and inspiration which consist of human essences. Bodies, romantic intuition

and sacredness are all important elements, Falck insists, for postmodemists to move

toward. For tiiis "tme Post-modemism" he argues, above all, we must see tiiat religion

and poen y are the same tiling and exhorts us to take away the dogmatic aspect of

religion:

In superseding religious observances and rituals which no longer have a meaning for us, a new awareness must be drawn towards ordinary life and ordinary experience. In this respect the ttadition of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, with Us philosophy of the sacredness of ordinary helpful to us. . . The authentic religion of the future can only be: autiientic livuig. Its scriptures can only be: poetry. . .Most ttaditional have rejected the camal...The reUgion of tiie futtire will be a religion of full experiencmg. All tttith is camal, and that Energy is from tiie Body is the tme meaning of tiie Word made flesh "(Falck 170)

Similarly, for Whitiark who finds tiie implosive narratives between "words and Reality"

tiirough Kaflca and Jung, tiie postmodem literattire of differance must change into

nondifferonce:

Absence of difference and deferment: Absolute Unity, Identity, Plenitude. It is infinite and etemal because, if it were bounded, tiien one might look beyond it, interfering with

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constant homegeneity. It stimulates each sense to tiie fiillest, for it lacks all shadings and differentiations. (Behind 210)

Ratiier than erasing eitiier word or Reality, "Whitlark parallels, like Hayles, two

conflicting modes of images/texts, incorporation/inscriptions and consciousness/

unconsciousness to find tiie heuristic emanation of tiie "radical unity" inherent in

nondiffermice. Like Orphism and Oriental religions, whetiier incamated or empty, the

illumination comes from tiie complexities between body/spirit and images/text. This

complexity between presence and absence makes the rhetoric of personifications the

mattire tool for representuig mental topography. As tiie "illuminated fantasy," tiie rhetoric

of science personifications brings togetiier tiie natural and artificial by its altemating

mode of "absent presence" (by proposing its "as if). Also, as in sacred literature,

personifications of science, through transhistoric, "folded" time, evoke our wonder at

living through the interconnectedness of materiality and immateriality in information.

Above all, to resist the increasingly radical clashes between absence and presence in the

technologized culture, the "reader/viewer" must observe the dismembered fragments of

the ultunate Source which are also "formless psychic stmctures" within us. In this anti-

fairy-like postmodem culture where the ending of "they lived happily ever after" is

overshadowed by the gloomy images of the holocaust, the oxymoronic artificial limbs

and informations must be first tested for its pains because without pains we lack a sense

of self Oswald Spengler expresses the decline of the culture "Only the sick man feels his

limbs"; this is also the illness of our postmodem culture. More importantly, it is needless

to say that without pains of our hearts, we don't feel the sublime residing in some parts of

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our entities, hi sum, as Luke 17:21 reads, personifications as the fractal form of infinity

lead us to recognize "the Kingdom of God is within us."

Allegory

Narratives get figurative if they convey complicated layers of meanings. More than

otiier figures, allegory has been used to express deeper significances of the subject in

psychological, religious, and moral contexts. Myths, fables and parables are

representative popular genres where allegories have been widely used for addressing

human spuitual and social conditions.^^ As the word allegory comes from the Greek

alios meaning "other" and agoria meaning "speaking," in this other-speaking figure of

allegory, connotations always take precedence over denotations. Therefore, what we

experience in allegorical narratives are usually not clear explanations but ambiguous yet

intriguing clues to revelatory tmths. '* By desttoying our normal expectation about

language which words mean what they say, allegories rather lead the reader to the

secondary other meanings where the words could not or did not express. Because of the

intended disguise for the "other" deeper secret of human existence, often to the

unconscious level, allegorical narratives have both produced biased feelings against them

as the mere mystifying figures and passionate agreements for them as the only possible

way to approach humans' complicated conditions.

Compared to human conditions in the past, the real life modems live in is more

complex and chaotic because of the appearance of new technology and social

organizations. Though we enjoy more information and civilization than any other

previous times, our desues are not fully satiated in these artificially ttansforming

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environments. On the conttary, bewildered and alienated by our power of technology, we

modems often wonder what human beings are in these overwhelming technology and

new inhumane social stmctures.

The uneasiness and burden of modems, according to Chris Langton in Artificial Life,

is rooted in our inability to predict the course of technology and is divided into two

categories—^the one from nuclear destmction and the other from reproduction:

By the middle of this century, mankind had acquired the power to extinguish life on Earth. By the middle of the next century, he will be able to create it. Of the two, it is hard to say which places the larger burden of responsibility on our shoulders. Not only the specific kinds of livmg things that will exist, but the very course of evolution itself will come more and more under our conttol. The future effects of changes We make now are, in principle, unpredictable—we cannot foresee all of the possible consequences of the kinds of manipulations we are now capable of inflicting on the very fabric of inheritance, whether in nature or artificial systems. (43)

Just as Mary Shelley challenged tiie Victorian beliefs (social, moral, philosophical, and

religious) through her mvention of Frankenstein, modem Al technology forces the

serious modem writers to thuik about tiie scientific or technological potentiality and to

reconsider the modem men in the context of artificial life. As tiie essential mode that

speaks to human's desire to decode tiie unknown, modem allegorical narratives

frequentiy appear in science fiction simply because tiie hyponoia or hidden meaning

behind ancient mytiis is nowadays closely connected to tiie unpredictable power of

technology. Especially by tiie emergence of chaos and complexity tiieory, science and

literature are now no longer misunderstood as separate domains. Many modems livmg in

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scientific culttire recognize tiie limit of objective knowledge in science and are more

perceptible to the interaction between literature and science.

By using or at least alluding to hypertext, modem science fiction writers gain more

their own authoritative territories where science becomes creative ideas for literature or

vice versa. Also tiie cinema, as many critics point out, has become an effective medium

for allegory. The absttact imagery and focus on symbolic details almost demand an

allegorical readmg of films. Angus Fletcher characterizes tiie allegorical elements of

films as "iconographic plotting" and "tiie emblematic mode" (186). Although both

hypertext and cinema create allegorically simulated signs through complicated

machinery, hypertext is, even when h is aided by some imagery such as the moving

avatars in recent intemet chat settings, limited to the real operatory scientific principles,

namely the computational manipulation based upon html, Java and other hypertextual

machine languages.

Comparably, cinematic effect is often more tricky, like magic happening in front of

our watching eyes. The burning skyscraper, stianded and cleaved Titanic, various

monsters and aliens in films all arise from special effects. "Whereas hypertext is often

faithful to hard science, individual, and interactive, cinema is rather pseudoscientific,

mass-oriented, and one-sided. (As many really do in our modem world, people who

prefer to live in the simulated world would say, "I prefer my intemet and films to a real

personal relationship.") Because of this close tie with reality, the survival game in the

real world happens only in the intemet not in cinema. As a popular event, worldwide

intemet survival game tests if each individual in a closed apartment can live for five to

seven days with a budget of about one hundred dollars. Because all the participants enter

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into tiieir own closed room witii towels on tiieir naked bodies, by using tiie intemet they

must order every item for survival during tiie limited days. Many of participants cannot

eat for several days due to tiie complicated procedure of credit paying and cannot have

tiieir underwear or pants or socks, not to speak of other hygienic items. But often through

intemet chats, tiiey don't feel isolated and often succeed in solid relations (one woman

participant even received three marriage proposals). Some unemployed participants

submit tiieir job applications through the intemet and get tiieir interview schedules. The

interactiveness of tiie intemet is more and more intensive by tiie wide, rapid spread of

networking sy stem. The growing emergence of moving avatars in the intemet system

often leads the users to have some fantastic feelings as if they live in fairly dreamlike

worlds.

"What Richard Powers and Neal Stephens have in mind in their writings of Galatea

2.2 and Snow Crash is this kind of humanlike interactive network system in the near

future. The lone male protagonists, Richard Powers and Hiro Protagonist, in each novel

try to find their soul mates in the simulated world rather than the messy real world.

Compared to the real world which is full of dangers and dissatisfactions, cyber relations

in network matrix provide them with altemative realities where their desires may be

fiilfilled without being hurt. What is deeply rooted in their hopes in the cyber world is

ttanscendental desires which often go beyond the bodily limitations. Although the surface

stmcture in both Power's and Stephens's novels deals with the potentially amazing

scientific achievement of AI in the near fiiture, the allegory of this scientific adventure is

rather expressed in paralleled myths in both novels. Helen, the advanced Turing machine

in Power's novel is the comparable to the Galatea of Pygmalion in that they both were

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created by human beings. The yearning for soul mates in each case successfully tums

stone sculpture and machine into human females. Unlike the beautifully personified

Galatea, Helen with the hard metal body suffers from the implanted human consciousness

about beauty, gender, peace, and humanity. As the uniquely developed altemative future

existence of AI among other present environments, Helen is at first featured as an

innocent child and later as a sacred figure who immolates itself as the amends for others'

offenses.

As Hillis Miller points out in Versions of Pygmalion, Galatea differs from most of

the stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses because it is "a tale in which something inanimate

comes alive" (3). But given that incestuous relation with her father/creator, Galatea is not

so different from Ovid's other metamorphosed characters in terms of "a sign that his or

her fault has not been completely punished or expiated" (Miller 2). Although Galatea is

indeed a life-giving story, it is also a morbid story like other ugly metamorphosed figures.

Miller emphasizes the autoerotic characteristic m this process: "For Galatea, to see at all

is to see Pygmalion and to be subject to him. It is as if Narcissus' reflection in the pool

had come alive and could retum his love" (5). Considering that Myrrah, a great-grand

daughter of Pygmalion, commits incestuous love for her father, Pygmalion's infatuation

with Galatea is notiiing but his avoidance of pamful relations with others m reality. As

myrrh ttee weeps by winds, so Powers who tried to find consolation through input of his

own consciousness m AI fmally moans for his self-centeredness after tiie punishment

directed to Helen, "I should have taught her tiie thing I didn't know" (323).

"While Richard Power's Helen wams against the danger of homogeneity with a slim

hope for immortality in Artificial Intelligence through the allegory of Galatea myth, Neal

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Stephenson's avatar shows the potential anomie of heterogeneity and a strong hope for

immortality through the parallel myth of Gilgamesh. In the Sumerian Gilgamesh myth,

Enki's original name was EnKur, Lord of Kur. Kur was a primeval ocean—Chaos—that

Enki conquered. The nam-shub of Enki is a resisting incantation of chaotic power while

the Asherah vimses recover universality by manipulating the neuro-linguistic

programming and mind-altering dmg for the masses. Because the Asherah vims (a.k.a.

the snow crash vims) can recover the universal language of Babel, some controllers such

as Bob Rife use its linear control by manipulating the basics of the human brain.

Considering the snow crash is the vims for the computer language, the universal artificial

language, the paralleling of glossolalia, or gift of tongues, is rather logical. Speaking in

tongues makes humans process the same information in the same maimer and their

critical abilities about differences are lost by the homogeneous brain washing process.

Yet, as the Nam-shub of Enki changed the Summerian's universal language into

diverse languages, Hiro's hacking ability is expected to break the Bob Life's globally

paralyzing scheme of informational society, with the help from a fifteen-year-old

skateboard courier Y.T. ("Yours Tmly").^^ Hiro's heterogeneous origin as a mixed race

of white, Asian and black lets the reader foresee the author's forecast for the trend of

mixed culture in the coming matrix-related near cyber future. As we can choose any

avatar we want in matrix, the appearance in cyber society is not innate but constmcted.

So the poor people who can access three dimensional avatars only through public places

such as the library or Wal-mart have some ugly looks such as the "Clint" or "Brandy"

models. By contrast, a few computer professionals such as Berkeley-educated Hiro

Protagonist and Y.T, and some affluent people can have fine, elaborated looks and

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sophisticated functions in cyberspace. Like Frederick Jameson's prediction of

postmodemity as the most commercialized form of civilization, the quality of life is

decided by money in postmodem, technologized and simulated world. ^ Through their

own technological power, people create their own cyber figures and lives in the

imagmative world of simulation. Seemingly this altemative cyber reality is fascinating

and liberating, but Stephenson never forgets to wam us that this fascination would be

based upon the global conglomeracy where even nations are dissected under the conttol

of global companies.

As the elaborate AI is conttolled by the maker(s)' conscious decisions even in the

final phase, the cybemetic world, even though providing an altemative society, never can

be free from the designers living in the real world. Just as even in intemet chats the fust

question is often about a/s/l (age/sex/location), cyber conversations are almost limited to

real experiences such as school studies, job experiences, and potential plans in the real

world. Even when we watch the other nations' television and listen to various MP3

songs through the intemet, the television programs and MP3 songs are not changed by

intemet technology. More significantiy, human consciousness about gender, race, and

class is too deep-rooted to be changed by altemative media.

Allusions to Gilgamesh m Stephensons' Snow Crash reveal the ultimate lunitation

which cannot be overcome by human efforts. Enki, as Gilgamesh's shadow, achieves

amazmg heroic works but he finally succumbs to tiie call of Death. The allegory of

Gilgamesh clearly displays that the scientific dream of immortality by downloadmg

human consciousness into software will remain only a dream forever.

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Heroic quests for tiie Golden Fleece or otiier sacred objects might mean tiie recovery

of stability or some moralities against greedy desires for tiie ancient or medieval reader.

For tiie more psychologically directed modem reader, what Northrop Frye in The

Anatomy of Criticism calls "sophisticated allegory" is more appealing as the search for

wholeness or "individuation" (90). Influenced by Sigmund Freud's dream interpretations,

tiie "sophisticated allegory" let us be aware tiiat some neuroses contain a higher degree of

tiiematic meanings.^^ Unlike tiie "naive allegory" used in schoolroom moralities, tiie

disguised expressions of some neuroses are not Imear but unpredictable as if we see only

a piece of a huge unconscious iceberg. Here it is fantastic nonlinear imaginations ratiier

than logical thoughts tiiat push tiie normal wave in everyday life to reveal tiie hidden part

of the huge unseen iceberg. Italo Calvino in The Use of Literature emphasizes allegorical

meanings of the unconsciousness:

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.The unconscious speaks -in dreams, in verbal slips, in sudden associations—with borrowed words, stolen symbols, linguistic contt-aband, until literature redeems these territories and annexes them to the language of the waking world. (19)

Through development in cinematic techniques, films have become an effective medium

for allegory. Like surrealistic paintings, obscure, emblematic scenes in Akira

Kurosawa's, Ingrid Bergman's, and other allegorical directors' films provide viewers

with psychologically evocative images and texts. Emblematic, iconographic scenes go

beyond realistic limitations and give what can be called "dream vision."

Marge Piercy's He, She, and It, and Octavia Butier's Xenegenesis series provide a

dreamlike surreality by which the conscious mind is ttoubled. In contrast to Richard

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Powers's and Neal Stephensons's depictions of advanced Artificial Life (based on

extrapolation from present cybemetics), Piercy's android-like perfect cyborg Yod and

Butier's intelligent alien Oankali are unlikely tales closer to fantasy than to science. ^

The main reason of this unlikeliness is rooted in the insertion of biological elements.

Though our present bioengmeering succeeded in cloning calves and even substituting a

human utems with other animals" such as rat's, we only operate with the given DNA and

RN.A combuiations. Even though genetic engineers succeed in creatmg new DNAs or

RNAs, nobody predicts how those tum out as threat in the future. The allusion m

Piercy's and Butler's novel fimction here as an allegory for humans' unconscious hopes

and fears about what might happen if we make new lives or even a new universe through

bioengineering. Golem is an unbelievable tale but Golem is alive in Jewish dream

visions. In the same way, many reject the Gaia hypothesis because it is regarded as

lacking solid scientific proofs. But strikingly, Buddhists likewise believe that all things

on earth are interconnected like the parts of essential organic oneness:

"it is through your mind that all things in the world occur"... "Everything is located inside of us, and finding that source will help everyone toward living peacefully with themselves and with others"". On race relations and violence on our stteets Haeng [a famous Korean bonze] says: "if we go to the source, to the genuine self, we will understand that we are all connected. Then it would be impossible to hurt someone else would be to hurt yourself" (Hamburg, Chicago Tribune Nov. 30)

If we focus on the spiritual, unseen world, we need to think again whether or not our

sensory observations are truly satisfactory or even objective. The power of allegories

comes from this unseen world. The allegorically sophisticated process of the

unconscious often leads readers to be aware that the ultimate reality may exist not in the

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sensory world but m the unseen, spiritual, and fantastic worid. As the father of allegory,

Plato emphasized that the shadows caused by the firelight in the cave might be what we

believe in the actual world."" The cave-prisoners who live only lives of the mere senses

don't understand what the light or ultimate reality means. What Plato accentuates is a

freed prisoner's long joumey to sunlight. But this enlightenment cannot be taught to

other cave-prisoners because the etemal light is unsayable.

Obsessed by the freed prisoner's sensory experience of light, we create monsters and

aliens in scientific adventures. To visualize the ultimate reality, we lean to unlikely

creatures of unscientific narratives. In Piercy's fiction, Yod is paralleled with Golem, the

sacred monster in Jewish myth, from the beginning to the end. Once the dream vision of

Yod is experienced, this enlightenment is discarded. As in Golem creation, or m freed

prisoner's watching light, there is no repetition in dream vision. (In a way, so does the

second Advent of Christ.) If it is the observable, sensory world experience, why cannot

the enlightenment be repeated? Maybe the answer is that this enlightenment occurs only

in a subjective dream vision. In our days, we encounter the sublime through nature,

maybe by watching the Jung Frau in Switzerland or in a moment of lone walking toward

the summit of near mountains, but we cannot teach our sublime experiences to others.

Only the person who experienced the sublime enlightenment keeps tiie vision m his or

her mind as the inexchangeable value m life. And the unsayable experience of the

sublune dream vision is often expressed in sophisticated allegorical modes that cause the

problem of interpretation (allegoresis) for readers.

As opposed to allegory, allegoresis is a term used by a writer in the process by which

meaning is ttansferred in allegory. Allegoresis most often is employed by

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deconstmctionists to differentiate the role of the reader from what is the subjectively

imposed meaning of the readers. Thus, in his Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man stiesses

the "stmctural interference of two distinct value systems"—the writer's and the reader's.

In fact, says de Man, "allegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read" (205).

Like so many students of allegory. De Man makes a distinction between symbol and

allegory. A symbol is based on the sense of identity between the sign and that to which it

refers. There is an almost metaphysical connection between two entities. In allegory,

argues de Man. there is no such link. Rather, the allegorical text always points back to a

different text. Given the problems of interpretation in particular political and social

contexts, signs ironically illusttate what the deconstmctionist sees as the basic failure of

language to be a reliable vehicle for meaning.

Because of this conttoversial allegoresis, posttnodem readers still argue about what

Frankenstein, Dracula, cyborg, and aliens in texts mean in relation to real human

conditions. One thing clear about all these allegorical creatures is that since tiie end of

the eighteenth century people began to think of technology as the preferred method of

ttanscendence. In this new type of dream vision, people don't have to go necessarily to

nature because God (i.e., tiie sentient, non-human) may be unagmed as being not only in

nature but also in machmes. But tiie God in machines is not always a glorious God

because the machines, unlike nature, often lead to tiie idea of a secular, unholy pursuit to

the maximized technological possibility. As tiie most important method in shaping

man's' fate, technology has produced stunning machines even to tiie pomt of madness;

we may reproduce ourselves through machines.

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Among allegoresis about the humanlike machine creatures, what is notable is their

explicit or potential monsttosity. The monsttosity is the author's expression of terror

attended by delight, the imagination's unlimited capacity. If Golem's monstrocity was

the allegory of men's basic evilness despite the religious pursuit, Piercy's Yod as the

potential monster shows the possible disaster of our blindly ambitious industrial

technology. Butler's alien Oankali is the more disturbing image of human's alienation

from nature. Aliens are also the more fantastic allegory for the unknown contradictory

nature of human self

Both Yod and Oankali invite us to investigate the unseen world beyond our sensory

worid. The worid "out there" in Piercy's and Butier's space opera urge us to go deep and

connect to the Source beyond us. But in Butler's next Parable series, the search for the

unknown Source tums its direction toward the inner space of the human mind. Like a

Buddhist wandering to reach a spuitual awakening, a female black protagonist Lauren

Olamina seeks for ultunate principle between unity and appearance witii tiie pam of

empatiiy in a helhsh California of 2020's and 2030's. Ratiier tiian ±e Xenogenesis belief

tiiat tiie whole universe is of one body and one mmd, here in Parable tiie more

empatiietic belief is fmding genuine self and the belief tiiat each person can touch a

center of awareness and vitality.

The protagonist recognizes a Buddhistic element in her faitii, particularly in her

recognition of how pervasive is change and suffering. In her constant suffering, tiie

principle of change emerges as tiie ultimate guide which can even unite science and

religion witiiout differentiating Christianity from Buddhism: "Everyone knows tiiat

change is inevitable. From tiie second law to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism's

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insistence tiiat notiimg is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of

permanence to tiie tiiird chapter of Ecclesiastes ("to everytiiing tiiere is a season. . ."),

change is part of life, of existence, of tiie common wisdom" (the Sower 23). By givmg

some shape to tiie mevitable change as God of Eartiiseed, Olamina tties to delve into tiie

essence of human life.

About tills shaping, Travis asks Olamina why she tiies to shape change into the God

of Eartiiseed: ""Why personify change by callmg it God? Since change is just an idea, why

not call it that? Just say change is important." Olamma's following answer shows why

shapuig an abstt-act idea is unportant: "Because after a while, it won't be

unportant!...People forget ideas. They're more likely to remember God—especially

when they re scared and desperate" (Parable of the Sower 198).

The allegory of Artificial Intelligence in scientific narratives is man's unpressive

shapmg of outside forms of this mevitable change. Like Plato's ideas and the Zen's

koan, however, the spiritual, unseen world doesn't necessarily require this shaping of

outside forms. Like nature and technology, the vast sublime exists also in each

individual's mind. While the sublime of nature and technology tend to be shaped as

anthropomorphic images, the vastness of the inner mind is linked to all beings without

concrete visualizations. This sublime absttactness of the inner mind is often compared to

children's iimocence closer to the origin of life, the unseen mystery."^ If adults as

contingent beings cannot reach logically the ultimate cause of the universe, children as

emergent beings can show the Red part (Ultimate Cause) of beings still uncovered by

Green (just matter/energy/stuff). However, as adults we only see the Black Hole of

beings momentarily in children and our own experiencing of the Red is always indirect.

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If "metonymy asserts an association between clothes and wearer," "metaphor

suggests a similarity between tiiem" (Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary

Literary Theory 156)."* "What we as adults covered by Green need is a metaphor we can

live by\ Nature and technology have brought us too many associations m this

postmodem world of simulacra. What we lack now is not associations but similarity to

Red which can be sustained in extended forms. Allegory m postmodem world functions

as the vital extended metaphor which can lead us to go beyond the realistic, metonymical

world.

The vast sublime of the human soul and senses can be examined without committing

the blasphemy of v isualizing God as having a human form. It seems that less visualized

allegory is needed to sustain the momentum of unseen spiritual energy. Once visualized,

the uispiration for Red disappears. Although the Far Eastern ideogram inspired some Red

desires inside the human mind, its metonymical characteristics lead the ideogram only to

aesthetic levels.

To reach the essential Red, we need less-humanized-yet-still-human-related forms.

The 64 hexagrams in Taoism are a good model for revitalized postmodem allegory.

While the inner map of the mmd is abstract, it can be vitally sustamed by the multi-

layered allegories where contexts and interpretations depend greatiy upon the reader's

view. Jose Arguellas notes: "The I Ching functions as a computer [a psychic computer],

and its functioning is only according to tiie titith of the programming. The Gtith of the

programming depends on how the person who consults the Book of Changes responds to

its messages" (cited in McLuhan 23). Just as the allegory of vortices pushes the

modernists to the full explosive exploration of Order in violent history, the striking

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similarity of a 64-part stmcture between I Ching and genetic codes urges many

postmodem critics to revalue the ttaditional mysticism. If someone says, "everything in

the cosmos exists within your mind," we are not so surprised anymore. Butier's allegory

of Earthseed is not actually a new concept as she borrowed it from the Bible (Matthew 13

and 25, and Luke 8). In Buddhism, the seed is often quoted as the balance force between

free will and fate.

As mysticism is now regarded as the important inner map of inspiration for the

unknown, Butiers Earthseed in the age of AI takes renewed importance. By enhancing

the concept of change to the level of God, Butler's shaping of Earthseed first let us

recognize that we human beings, like machines, are in constant process. As if we bring

seeds (not a ttee itself) to plant ttees in a new land, the Ultimate Creator may prefer an

Earthseed (such as DNA and RNA in sperms and ovum) to human beings. If Ultimate

Creator creates the Universe, he may prefer a compact Black Hole to vast universe in the

same way. Earthseed thus lets us think that being is not an independent form but a part of

a process of becoming.

The danger of recreating all lives in Al will be more confiising and enormous than

the power of science in an atomic bomb. If the sixth generation of computers achieves

the connection of an electtonic brain and a human brain, we may regret about our idea to

create AI like Dr. Moreau's experimentation with animal-human beings or Butier's slave

ring or, in reality paintmg walls with asbestos, the asthma-causing stuff.

As the modem counpterpart of the Golem in Jewish religion, artificial intelligence

needed to be tested not only in science but also in the mind. Asimov's first law says, "A

robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come

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to harm" (13). With the Earthseed allegory in mind, we now need to say, "A human

being may not injure God, or through action, allow God to come to harm." If life is not

formed in the constant process of being, Piercy and Butler's myths say, it may manifest

itself as monsters, mutants or aliens. If our ideas are fixed or limited like mechanical

personifications, our vast inner space of mind would tend to be blocked by technological

shaping. Comparably, if the vastness of the universe is within our mind, the visualization

of extemal forms must be internally searched through inner meditative concentration

where solitude, autonomy, and resistance to enculturation are required. The

personifications of artificial intelligence commonly invite us to find out the vastness of

this mindscape first before it is too late. To revive lost knowledge of Golem, Malkah

thinks what Maharal felt:

We [.Malkah and Maharal] partake in creation with ha-Shem, the Name, the Word that speaks us, the breath that sings life through us. We are tool and vessel and will. We connect with pow ers beyond our own fractional consciousness to the rest of the living being we all makeup together. The power flows through us just as it does through the tiger and through the oak and through the river breaking over its rocks, and we know in our core the fire that fuels the sun. (66-7)

Similarly, with belief in inter-connectedness of all living beings, Olamina relies upon

human's tme nature within themselves before exploring the extemal world:

The Destiny of Earthseed/ Is to take root among the stars/ It is to live and to thrive/on new earths/ It is to become new beings/ And to consider new questions/ It is to leap into the heavens/ Again and again/ It is to explore the vastness/ Of heaven/ It is to explore the vastness/Of ourselves. (Parable of The Talents 249)

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Linguistics

As Myra Edwards Bames notes in Linguistics and Languages in Science Fiction-

Fantasy (1971), linguistics is a late comer to science fiction (175). And it is generally

said that like other hard or physical sciences such as physics, meteorology, astrology, or

chemistry, linguistics is often not so professionally tteated in SF. Although some SF

writers such as Samuel Delany or Joanna Russ display specific linguistic knowledge, "the

knowledge about language change" that SF writers usually show us is, as Walter E.

Meyer says in Aliens and Linguistics (1980), indeed "a paltry amount" (37). What Meyer

rather expects from SF writers' language use is rather "the sane and tolerant responses to

the most unexpected and frightened situations":

The pioneers of the American pulps saw science fiction as a means of teaching science. Although science fiction seldom achieves that goal, and although we have no right to demand anything more than art from its writers, the possibility is always there. And the possibility mcludes the chance to say something about language, something liberating and tolerant and entertammg. (209)

Considering that animal language, telepathic language, newly invented language, alien

language, or other use of linguistic theory often appear as "unexpected and fiightened

situations" in SF, tiie relationship between science fiction and Imguistics, especially in

terms of the futuristic study of linguistics, is closer tiian we thought. Above all, tiie "sane

and tolerant responses" found m SF are experimental and inspiring enough to make SF

instiuction book for language study. If so, how about tiie influence of Imguistics upon

science fiction?

Literary stylists often argue that tiie solution of delicate language usage is ratiier

found in literature instead of in linguistics itself simply because it is through contextual

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interactions of language and reality tiiat literattire offers a deeper insight into the human

being. According to Jonatiian Culler, literature becomes a tantalizing enterprise of

semiological study because literary works are continually violating codes. Namely,

literature rests on otiier systems, particularly that of language, and tiius becomes "a

second order system" which consistently focuses on "the necessity of creative

interpretation" and "a network of differences." Because meamng emerges from the

interpersonal system ("Othemess of meaning"), tiie violation of conventional codes in

literature requires hard interpreting work for us to extend ourselves and to discover new

resources in the self* As the relational values became the primary constituents of the

work of Modemist art, the language of Al in science fiction reflects this linguistic move

from object to stmcture or to systems of relation.

In fact, more than other SF topics. Artificial Intelligence in science fiction is the

result of modem linguistic theories of which generative phonetics, information theory and

mechanical ttanslations take a great part. Although recent AI technology is said to reach

only a four-year-old-level intelligence in its autonomous level, the expert system in

specific intelligence development aheady substitutes well-educated human experts with

intelligent machines. For example, the rapid advancement of mechanical tianslation, as

m the case of "the E-ttanslator" recently developed in South Korea for mterpretuig

English into Korean, already reached almost 80 percent accuracy. Considering its speed

and quantity of translation within limited time, the E-ttanslator machine is aheady taking

the place of a professional ttanslator. If the target language is stiticturally similar to the

original language such as the ttanslation of Japanese into Korean, or the ttanslation of

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French into English, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Al machines are already

established experts in terms of the specific area of multi-language use.

This kind of new linguistic development plays an important role in stmcturing new

modes of perception in SF (which is always ahead of present science) such as AI

machines with emotions. For common people, the fragmented discourses (especially in

television's mixed news of various flickering cut-up data) and MUD (Multi-User-

Domain) type role-playing in the intemet provide a new, distinct and heterogeneous

vision about humans and machines. As Scott Bukatman notes, the terminal identity

"situates the human and the technology as coexistive, codependent, and mutually

defining"" (22). Sunilarly, J. David Bolter in Turing's Man writes, "a defining technology

defines or redefines man's role in relation to nature" (13). In other words, the computer

as the defining technology in the electtonic age, by promising (or threatening) to replace

man, is giving us a new definition of man as an "information processor," and of nature, as

"information to be processed." "*'

Also, Bolter says in Writing Space that "writing itself is not merely mfluenced by

technology, but rather is technology," and our ways of thinking in written language are

now becoming the programmable process (239). As "an ideal writing space for our

networked society," a computer permits every form of reading and writing (as the

projection of mmd in culture) from the most passive to the most active (238). The

multifaceted mode of expression created by interrelated lexia (or blocks of text)

encourages interdisciplinary study and continuity between fields. As a medium of

communication as well as a scientific tool, the computer now brings a process of cross-

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fertilization and bridges tiie gap between humanism and science tiu-ough its rich blending

of the artificial and natural language.**

In the worid where complexity is increased by social organization and by

technological activity, people feel tiiat interpretations of meanings are more bewildering

and confused. It is no wonder that aspiring to the perfect artificial language is common

in many SF settings. In fact, our nattiral language is fiill of defects, if we look carefiilly.''

Although natural language gives us some stable understandings about rapid changes in

the world tiirough new classifications or categories (El NINO, posthuman, 24 black

holes, hypertext, etc.) theories offered by language are not always satisfying because

language itself as a tool is in essence defective.

Even if defined by scientific criteria, the systems of nature are often interpreted in

social contexts. Thus, seemingly objective concepts such as color and number have

different connotations accorded them by each culture. Thus, red, the general waming sign

in Westem culture is rather a good omen to most Asians and the lucky number seven in

the West is infrequently preferred to the number nine in the East. Languages change over

a specific time and it is now very hard for modems to guess that the contemporary word

"women" came from the Old English word "warrior." Also, because most languages

have limited written signs, it is not possible to match a sound with a corresponding letter

particularly in EngUsh: /k/ can be pronounced by various ways of spelling such as c (as

in cat), k (in kit), q (in quite). About this, Bernard Shaw once humorously said that ghoti

can be a spelling for fish in American English: (gh as /C sound in tough, o as /i/ sound in

women, ti as /sh/ in initiate).

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Beyond all these vuhierable characteristics of human language, what makes language

a tool not enough to be trustwortiiy for communication is that human language is so

symbolic a signifier tiiat it lacks correspondence witii tiie objects or ideas it signifies.

This arbittariness between language and reality was, as Ferdinand de Saussure showed,

tiie great watershed to modem thoughts. For Saussure, parole refers to only a particular

utterance within the system of differentiations while it is the langue (the entire system of

a language, its mle of combination and its system of differentiations) that makes all

individual utterances possible. Thus, rejecting the idea tiiat language is a word-heap

gradually accumulated over time, Saussure's emphasized language as parts of systems of

relations, a distinction within a system of opposites and conttasts ("in a system of

language. . .there are only differences, with no positive terms").''* This understanding of

language as a system was one step toward Al. Another came from Noam Chomsky's

revision of it:

As a stmcturalist (in the broad sense), Chomsky has always been insisted on the validity of the distinction between langue and parole, which by 1965 he had come to call "competence" and "performance" respectively. Chomsky chose to coin new terms rather than retain Saussure's since he wished to underscore two important differences between competence and langue: competence encompasses all syntactic relations in language, while langue does not, and competence is characterized by a set of generative rules, rather than by an inventory of elements. (The Politics of Linguistics 72)

As Frederick Newmeyer notes, "the computer revolution, too, has begun to boost

generativist fortunes" (93)."*' Chomsky's "command and control" system in generative

rules of competence appeared as the most "friendly" way to interact with a computer.

Making breakthrough in the nature of universal grammar, Chomsky's minimalist

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program broadens tiie field of linguistics to include botii the biological limits of human

beings and tiie fimdamental questions of human existence in both science and humanities,

ft is not hard to suppose tiiat as a social product, tiie computer-mediated language has

given a great impact upon modem thought and appeared as a popular topic in SF.

As tiie printing changed common people in Middle Age to literattire class who could

challenge tiie autiiority of botii church and state, tiie electtonic media in tiie information

age has brought new ways of seeing tiie worid. Especially interacting witii tiie ttirbulence

emphasized in chaos theory, postmodem tiieory challenges rationality as a paradigm and

questions the possibility of tmth and progress.

In its mterpretation of a worid of difference namely in a world of interpretation,

Poststtticturalism identifies all human understanding as a constmct of discursive

formations and relations, and deconstmction concentiates on dismantling theories of

everything. This leaves humans in the late twentieth century in what has been called "the

postmodem condition"—a condition that seems to be better approached by generative

semanticists than by Chomsky, though, as we shall see, Chomsky's work actually has

more in common with postmodernism.^^ Raising a question of whether human

subjectivity is a manageable entity or not, the so-called "linguistic wars" between

Chomsky and generative semanticists well display this contioversial issue of whether

language is consisted of regular syntax or irregular semantics.

Generative semanticists' vehement dissatisfaction with Chomsky's theory was, as

Postal and Lakoff said, that by ignoring meaning Chomsky's syntax does not and cannot

admit context remaming artifact. For generative semanticists, the ttouble in Chomskyan

theory is that one can discard too much data ending up with an unproductively narrow

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view of language. To avoid tiie same sort of error, generative semanticists thought that

Chomsky must not discard pragmatics. In tiiis regard, it is a nattiral result that while the

interpretivists loved tiieory, generative semanticists loved data.

In The Linguistic Wars, Randy Allen Harris summarizes tiie collapse of generative

semantics tteating two traits (its embrace of a wide range of interests and its self-

definition primarily in tiie rhetoric of dissent, in saying no to Chomsky) as the principal

reasons tiie movement fell apart (230). Most importantiy, Harris conttasts generative

semanticists' dazzling data witii Chomsky's amenable problems, saying that "the

generative semanticists celebrated mysteries, Chomsky avoided them" (239).

Interestmgly, numerous exttaordinary languages appeared m SF are in a way the

dramatized contmuation of this linguistic war about the mysterious realm of meaning m

human language. Like generative semanticists, some writers daringly delve into the

sacred mystery of semantics m language whereas others avoid the dream of a universal

language by holding themselves to manageable data. If we accept Mark Tumer's view

that "the real is in the blend," the Chomskyan view of syntax which is completely

separated from semantics is wrong. Tumer insists that "Syntax arises from the projection

of semantics onto phonology" (160). This centtality of conceptual stmcture in the

cognitive semantics can be traced through the appeal of meaning in the generative

semantics because for Lakoff, McCawley, Postal, and Ross, there is no principled

distinction between syntactic and semantic processes. In this regard, most SF writers are

essentially generative or cognitive semanticists but their common sense about this

mysterious area divides them into passionate supporters of an idealistic universal

language and another group suspicious of that.

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While the telepathic language of some aliens or cyborgs resemble the dream of the

generative semanticists, computer-mediated Al language in SF often follows Chomsky's

cautiously avoiding messy blended areas of meanings. Samuel Delany's description of

the ideal telepathic universal language in Babel 17 shows us this dream to be like God.

By conttast, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash reveals that retuming to language of Babel

means only our voluntary submission to the hallucinatory totalitarian power. The rest of

this chapter will concenttate on tiie details of scientific imagination of tiiese two different

versions of speculative language in science fiction which were directly or indirectiy

uispued by real world linguistic wars between ideal linguists and practical linguistics.

Given that language, as Whorfian theory suggests, is an indispensable tool for

growth and change in a defective society, it is rather natural that many people dreaming

the technotopia insist on the priority of ideally computer-mediated or mental language in

science fiction.^^ Because science fiction does not require any limit on the imagination,

many linguistically experimental science fiction (SF) writers contend that new language

works more sttategically and dynamically as a myth and a tool for human liberation in

the coming technopolis. As the highly artificial language similar to computer codes (like

generative semanticists' dream of perfect generative syntax merged with semantics),

Babel 17 shows the new process of communication in the factual interplanetary

envu-onment. "When Rydra Wong, an intergalactically renowned poet and linguist, is

asked to take the mission of interpreting the dense and sttange language of Babel 17 to

settle sabotage attempts among Alliance installations, she is affected by her growing

knowledge of this new language and recogruzes that her understanding of reality has

become much sharper than before. It is mainly because m Babel 17 words imply both

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things and the stmcture of things and therefore bespeak reality more effectively. Yet, as

George Slusser points out. Babel 17 is not the perfect instmment of communication

despite its efficiency:

In its [Babel 17's] speakerless perfection, however, this seventeenth variation on Babel, far from reuniting men only divides them further. . . As an abstraction. Babel 17 is dangerous precisely because it denies That diversity of language that resulted from the fall of the original tower. . . . Delany's is a fortunate fall, for the necessary condition for unity in this worid seems to be the broadest possible diversity--Babelian variety itself In this novel tme union of human beings occurs only where speech centers are most disparate; communication is most creative when tension between the speakers is at a maximum. Each man, in fact, weaves his own language web. To the extent that he knows himself each is potentially an artist. (The Delany Intersection 40)

Rydra displays her skillful communication ability through the cryptographer's telepathic

talents. Yet, not until Byron Ver Dorco, the coordinator of Alliance research projects, is

killed by a mysterious saboteur and Rydra is enmeshed in a web on a strange ship, can

Rydra break the codes of Babel 17 through the words' basic stmcture of the web.

Although Rydra can break herself from the partial reality through her acquired

knowledge of the coherent relation between words and things, she is longing for

communication with the aliens who use this artificial language. On a private ship named

label's Tarik, Rydra meets various types of people among whom Butcher speaks a

strange language with no concept of I in Babel 17. Douglas Barbour points out the

cultural importance of Jebel Tarik:

In Babel 17, Delany explores the relationship between language and culture, or, more specifically, between language and Weltanschauung, more comprehensively than previously. As in Empire Star, the forms of speech of the people in the military. Transport, Customs, or the pirate society of Jebel's

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Tarik imply various differences in outlook in those subcultures. . .the "pirate" society of Jebel's Tarik, with its Spartan readiness to fight and its almost medieval dining customs and entertainments, including an official jester. . . . where a desire for culture and a high cmelty mix spontaneously, and the criminal and prison sub-culture of the Alliance implied in Butcher's memories of his recent past life. . . fill in a picture of a huge and varied society, like any human society but "different" too. (112-4)

Similariy, focusing on Jebel's Tarik, Carl Malmgren poses the question, "To what extent

are freedom and order mutually antagonistic?" (6). He explains the communication in

mind between Rydra and Butcher (who is proved later to be the son of Baron Ver Dorco)

from the psychological angles:

The mind-link [between Rydra and Butcher] is at once sexual"—She had Entered him in some bewildering reversed sexuality" (159)—and archetypal—"the Criminal and artistic consciousness meeting in the same head with one language between them" (160). This experience is necessary for Rydra to become capable of doing what she has to, namely acting with the kind of mthlessness it takes to put an end to the senseless and destmctive intergalactic war. . . .By tapping into the unconsciousness, by making ego go where id had been, Rydra has indeed become larger; she has, in effect, become whole. (13-4)

By its lack of distinction between the self and the other. Babel 17 works as "the bridge

between fragmented and isolated worlds, as a language system with the potential to make

its 'speakers' to grow" (Malmgren, 13-4). At the same time. Babel 17 doesn't assure the

responsibility of the speaker. So the next project for Rydra becomes building a new

language model. Babel 18 which has both the direct link between words and things and

the responsibility of personal pronouns.

The new conception Rydra acquires through thinking in Babel 17 is mythic signs

which reinforce the dominant values of culture. For Barthes, myth is a culture's way of

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understanding something. About the cultural implications of myths, Em Griffin notes,

"All his [Barthes'] semiotic efforts were directed at unmasking what he considered the

heresy of those who controlled the images of society-the naturalizing history" (118). As

the second order in a way of signifying, the sign system of the first, connotation, is

inserted into the value system of culture, the myth. For instance, Rydra's Myna bird just

repeats to say, "Hello, Rydra, it's a fine day out and I'm happy." Like Barthes' semiotic

study of myths and symbols, Rydra after communicating with Butcher recognizes that the

Alliance in Babel 17 means the invader by its "controlled images" of mythic stmcture

just as the bird repeats the ttained words without grasping their meaning. Through

Rydra's information-process skill including muscle reading and mathematical language,

Delany suggests a new rich culture in which language reveals "the fluid, multifaceted

nature of reality that makes possible both reconciliation and personal growth" (Barbour,

331). Because in Delany's novel order and chaos are usually merged into the same signs,

the initial sensitivity to change and difference is often expressed through the artists and

the criminals. Like ex-convict Butcher who introduces Rydra the subconscious world,

many critics point out this link between art and crime:

the criminal and the artist both operate outside the normal standards of society, according to their own self-centered values systems. This allows them the detachment to comment on social issues, but more importantly it divorces them from social norms so that their points of conflict with society can define an aesthetic that emphasizes the revolutionary nature of artistic creation and the separation of the creative mind from the background of society. (Alterman 22)

Charles Nilon emphasizes their difference as the source of powerful communication:

"The power of the artist and of the criminal, the power of their difference, appears to be

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an ability to order and to force otiiers to take notice and act. Theirs is a power of

communication, a power of language" (66). Because tiiese creative individuals' relation

to society function as the effective communication for dynamic culttire, Rydra's breaking

tiie complex web of language, mind and behavior symbolizes the harmonious balance of

social knowledge and technology. Sandra Govan especially notes

Delany's subtle sttess on ethnicity": "Rydra Wong is an Asian woman. The one man she relies on when she is disttessed by her own formidable powers of perception is an African man. Dr. Markus T'mwarba, her psychotherapist. (44)

Understanding the semiotical web through this comprehensive cultural recognition is

always, m fact, repeatedly illusttated for avoiding the rapidly growing chaotic errors. For

Delany, language and technology are two main systems that can destroy men without

comprehensive, semiotic understandmg of the conttolling understmcture. Like Babel 18,

the fusion of language and technology creates new mythologies.

In real world linguistic wars, Harris evaluates generative semantics as "something of

an Alamo, the honorable massacre." He thinks that generative semantics affected formal

linguistics in innumerable ways without clear acknowledgment (for example, indexing

devices, ttaces, and filters are by-products of generative semanticists' serious

investigation of syntactic phenomena). Even though Harris does not mention the

generative semanticists' organizational problems (Newmeyer mentions that "only

McCawley was able to build a stable base and following"), his tone reflects Newmeyer's

account of generativists' "Pyrrhic victory of sorts." Through their confrontations with

the fuzzy, contextualized, meanmg-driven data that Chomsky disregards, Harris

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concludes that generative semanticists made linguistics more vibrant, pluralistic, and

daring than it has ever been. . »

What Neal Stepheson shows in Snow Crash is not "fuzzy, contextualized, meaning-

driven" unlike Delany's Babel 17, but Stephesons reveals that this "vibrant, pluralistic,

and daring" world of semantics also comes from resistance against the universal language

of the snow crash vims.

In Snow Crash, the dismal near future of cyberculture in America is featured as the

Burbclaves, miniature nation states, or franchised suburban states, which have been

privatized and run like businesses. The former Library of Congress and Centtal

Intelligence Agency are merged into the Centtal Intelligence Corporation. Monopolized

by a few elitists m massive corporations, the metaverse shows the apparent equations of

money and good cyberbodies, the updated interface version of plastic surgery. In fact, the

metaverse as the ideally imaged version of a chat room is far from the teledemocracy:

In the real world—^planet Earth, Reality— there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field strippmg their Ak-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the stteet protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Stteet at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by usmg public machines, or machines owned by theu school or their employer, and at any given time the Stteet is occupied by twice the population ofNew York City. (26)

Bom from the marriage between an American-sergeant-major father and a Korean

mother, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's Cosa Nostta Inc., the global

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Mafia business in informational capitalism. In this dazzlingly programmed metaverse,

however, this uncertain identity does not matter. Hiro does not even "know whether he

was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant,

talented or lucky" (61). Only with a set of goggles and a computer can people be closer

to the person they like. Money decides tiie quality of the figure to a great extent. Despite

this mob identity in the metaverse, computer-generated bodies are described as organic

enough for the system vims to infect the user's real body through magical bodily fluids.

Due to ingrained understanding of binary code, a new computer system vims called Snow

Crash mentally infects computer progremimers at first glance:

"Snow Crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash—a bug—at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that conttols the electton beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, tuming the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. (42)

An anthropologist from Texas, L. Bob Rife uses vims that plagued ancient Sumerians,

causing its people to speak Babel. As a founder of the ttansethnic group of "The Raft,"

Bob Life spreads the so-called "Asherah vims" through either bitmaps or dmgs and tries

to conquer the world by creating a cult religion. Equipped with swords, Hiro Protagonist

is compared to Enki, a Sumerrian demi-god who defeats a fue-breathing monster named

Humbaba. While he cams money working as an information scout for the CIA and

Library of Congress, his best fiiend DaSid (a member of the Black Sun—a hip members-

only club run by Raven) was mfected and sent into a coma by the ttansmitted virus, snow

crash.

Hiro came to be suspicious of the designer who misuses the self-propogating virus

for his vicious totalitarian scheme. In the postmodem civilization on the brink of

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collapse mterwoven Sumerian myth, Asherah is compared to the Electtonic Eve who

tempts people to taste the designer dmg metavims. Enki as a mythic Jesus Christ

provides humans witii ability to evade mass viral infection. Through viral ttansmission

either by bloodstteam or by mental mfection, tiie Asherah virus enables humans to speak

glossolalia. Speaking m tongues makes humans process the same information in the same

manner and their critical abilities about differences are desttoyed by the homogeneous

brain washing process. Yet, as the Nam-shub of Enki changed the Summerian's universal

language mto diverse languages, Huo's hacking ability is expected to break the Bob

Life's globally paralyzing scheme of mformational society, with help from a fifteen-year-

old skateboard courier Y.T. (''Yours Tmly"').

WTule Enki is regarded as a savior to protect people from infection, science fimctions

as the source for both the fragmentation and fluidities of cyborgianized identities by

changing society into the information-flowing network. Hiro's interaction with a

computer-generated Librarian is a good example for what Jay Bolter means by ''synthetic

intelligence."" Librarian lectures as the human interaction with computer provides insights

that the Asherah viruses are malignant by manipulating the basics of the human brain.

Throughout the novel, Stephenson does not forget that Babel is a religious realm

which is now separated from science: "Babel is a Biblicjd term for Babylon. The word is

Semitic; Bab means gate and El means God, so Babel means 'Gate of God" (107). What

he implies is that although science can help as "synthetic intelligence" with even some

msights, our desue to enter into "the Gate of God" through science alone should not be

recommended. The both dismal and hilarious atmosphere of the entire novel reveals how

science can be hope and despair depending upon our intention to use it, just as

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Chomskyan linguistics did. For Stepheson and Chomsky, hopes are maintained by

valmng tiie plurality of meanings in tiie seduction of universal domination that might be

inherent in human languages. Stiiepenshon's flexible 3-D images of avatars and

Chomsky's discarding of Universal Grammar in tiiis later period attests to their valuing

plurality. In tius regard, consider what David J. Gunkel mentions in "Lingua ex Machina:

Computer-Mediated Communication and tiie Tower of Babel":

Plurality tiiat would have deformed tiie Babelian narrative can also be perceived as a significant advantage and gain, one that opens computer technology to a plurality of competing inter­pretations that makes room for irreducible and contestatory positions. (89)

In a society consttticted by a labyrinthine discourse of technocratic conttol and

spectacles, SF functions as a dominant language. As J. G. Ballard wrote:

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute, (cited in Bukatman, Terminal Identity 31)

Through this allegorical impulse inherent in SF, SF language becomes the hyperbolic,

inverted and defamiliarized language. In a society of spectacle and simulation, as Guy

Debord theorized, the commodity-form is experienced as alienation to such a degree of

absttaction that it becomes an image (Kroker 17). Similarly, Jean Baudrillard notes that

"the subject is so overtaken by the forces of the spectacles that simulation becomes a new

reality" (Bukatman 18).

As the defining metaphor in the information age, Al in SF, through cognitive

activities and mediation between postmodem culture and language, allegorizes the danger

of human subjectivity (as a sellable or conttollable item) in the ttend of commercialized

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sunulation of standardization. However, the enhanced and dramatized language of AI in

SF. as the allegorized version of real world linguistic wars between syntacticans and

semanticists, faithfully reveals what is so-called tiie terminal identity. Bukatinan writes,

"terminal identity exists as the metaphorical mode of engagement with this model of an

imploded culture" (22). The terminal identity is above all characterized by the refusal of

the subject to be a fixed site of identification and it is most effectively exemplified m the

paraspaces of science fiction and its dramatized version of linguistics about semantic in

AI narratives.

In terms of visualization formed by language, Delany's Babel 77 constitutes realistic

paintings of an idealized world while Stephenson's Snow Crash forms absttact paintmgs

of subjective emotions. Absttact images based upon fiizzy semantics are confusing but

we often feel something deeper than the realistic visualization of the ideal world. If

language shapes thoughts as in the Whorpian hypothesis, the Oriental languages such as

Korean and Japanese are rather closer to absttact paintings. They prefer to omit

subjective pronouns and rarely use nonliving pronouns, thereby resisting personification.

The haziness of meaning is more enhanced in Korean and Japanese because in both

languages the syntax is SOV instead of the SVO: So many Westemers complam about

theu long waiting to know yes or no until the Koreans and Japanese reach the final

uttering of verbs.

Although Westemers praise clear expression of thoughts, we need to question if

language sometimes blocks our thoughts." Oriental culture presumes that deep thoughts

often come from silence and meditation while the Westem culture expect them to arise

from discussion. While the computer boosts the ttend of simplification by its combination

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of 0/1 bits, the deterministic or reductive world is limited only to the hypertextual

multification of lexis and computerized simulation of fractals. Rather through chaos

(absttact paintings/silence) hidden and paralleled with order (realistic paintings/

discussion), deeper meanings emerge behind the tangible existence. When our

innerscape is focused more upon this "becoming" or "metamorphic" process of the

cosmos instead of extant stagnant forms of beings, we will surely get closer to the cosmic

evolution reflectiv e in human mind and language.

The baby's babbling reveals how language is both simple and complicated.

Children's language shows us the changing process of a soul revealed by language use

just as snow is the another form of H20, besides liquid, vapor, and cube. It is no

wonder that many languages of AIs in SF borrow theu source from children's language

acquisition processes. Although our linguistics focuses more upon the status of syntax

and semantics (comparable to tiie definite stmcture of solids), children's language is

closer to amorphous consciousness per se (like vapor m etiiereal or gaseous states). If

linguistics knows more about mystery of tiiis "language of thoughts" or "mentalese" of

children's language, no doubt that the AIs m SF will accommodate more fascinating and

dynamic (like fiizzy status of snow) fertility to present bmary discussions.

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Notes

' Clarke explains the "metonymical or adjacent relation between sublimity (the sublime) and sublimation": "Sublimity is psychologically cognate with the stmcture of desire and its repression: it is the mark of the momentary intense experience of a discontinuity between desire and the possibility of its fulfillment. Sublimation occurs on either side of this moment: it pertains to the status quo dismpted by the sublime encounter, and consequent upon this dismption works toward the reinstatement of a renewed, although possibly altered, equilibrium. Sublimation then is the more capacious, hence more nebulous category. The sublime tends to accentuate disparities, or to create them; it tends to break continuities and open epistemological gaps—it is the creature of duality. Sublimation tends to restore continuity, sealing gaps and blending together what the sublune puts apart, although at the price of a certain displacement of aim or substitution of object. From this admittedly absttact catalogue, we can see that sublimity is generally the preferred term for great poetry or great experience: it is the attribute of those moments of confrontation, risk, trial, or terror, at which point one's great lessons are leamed. Yet efficacy of sublimation will determine our relative ability to convert the experience of sublimity into daily use" ("Wordsworth's Departed Swans" 360).

" For example, as Bmce Clarke points out, Wordsworth's sublime changes into "the egotistical sublunation," which is "a representation of the projective and re-mttojective mechanism": "Wordsworth would like to bestow something uniquely his upon the community, to make it common property, and then to re-appropriate it for the twosome. The burden of Wordsworth's poetic sublimation is to displace 'Something' from the sexual to the perceptual arena and in so doing he funds the visual plenitude of the daylit world while circumventing the dark and unpetuous" ("Wordsworth's Departed Swans" 368).

^ In" Cyberspace and the Sublune" Voller argues, "One of tiie most significant elements of Romantic aesthetics, the sublune....Galileo as the progenitor of cyberpunk, it is with the revolutionary science of the early seventeenth century that the path to the sublune begins. . . .In Gothic fiction especially, tiie sublune became Imked witii visceral (as opposed to religious) terror, a development due largely to the popularity of Edumund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the BeautifurX\S-\9).

"* In many funeral ceremonies through all over the cultures, because of belief in a living soul after death, people put food and personal possessions beside the dead body. Accordmg to Bieriein, Egyptians believed tiie "ka" spirit continues to live and tiius mummified the dead body in imitation of the preservation of the body of Osiris (216-7): "We could begin with the Chinese Hsin Ii (' the reasons or principles of the heart'); with the Egyptian ka, ba, akh, or khaba (shade, soul, mind, image); with the Hebrew nephesh,

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ruah, or neshamah (life, spirit, soul); with tiie Greek nous, logos, or pneuma (mind or spuit, wisdom, breath); with the Latm anima or animus (breath, rational soul); with the Japanese kokoro, tamashi, seishin (mind, soul, spirit) or with any of the countiess expressions for 'mental ' functions in archaic or surviving primitive languages"(Cohen 131).

5 John Cohen argues in Human Robots in Myth and Science, to imitate

Prometheus or 0dm who creates a man, "an artist had the urge to create, not merely to portray"": the Pygmalion Power (105).

After experiencmg technological holocausts in the twentieth century, people tend to believe that it is rather the enacted myth that provides an answer about how we can harmonize our lives with the dehumanized society and that suggests the sublune source of nature cut down by technology. Notably, techno-animism, like the Gaia hypothesis as the solution to the barren cybemetics (cyberia), is found m biological machines where mythical metaphors, in particular Hermese' caducea, fimction as the effective catalyst of the conttadictory elements. The semiotic fourth position heuristically leads us to think about the eye/soul of personified machines. Just as we humans feel hunger through the interaction of brain and body, personified machines must be viewed through multi-layered interactive dialogics.

The first human's soul, rather than the serpent's seduction, was the decisive factor in eating the apple from the ttee of knowledge. Similarly, it is the human eyes in the final phases of implementations of machines that decide whether this food is poison or medicine. Human eyes, as the "active perceptual systems," are relative to object. More confusedly, according to modem science, as Heisenberg's uncertainty principles prove, the mass itself is relative like subatomic measurement. Because of relationality, the ding an sich is hard to perceive. Without the perceptual parts of our biological bodies, we can not respond properly to the self-organic nature of our universe. In the theosophical ideas where mind and matter is regarded as the same, the spuitual monad without body is a weaker form than that with body. Body is essential in our mechanical and inspirational receptiveness.

' Schrodinger's equation m 1925 (based on the idea of Louis V. de Broglie) is a general equation of wave mechanics describing the behavior of atomic particles pasing through a field of force. Jason Smith provides more detailed explanation of this so-called Schrodinger's psi or cat in his application of John Fowler's fiction: "The purpose of Schrodinger's creation of a metaphorical cat was to demonsttate to his peers that even though they were able to talk of particles as both bemg and not-being at the same time, a simultaneously doing and not-doing, they were not able to perceive how such as situation might question the way that we see reality. Schrodmger's metaphor is constmcted as a cat in a sealed box with a vial of poison gas attached to a proton detector. If all the circumstances are favorable to the creation of proton, what happens to the cat? Is it alive

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and dead? According to quantum tiieory, the proton will be created and stiike the detector and at the same time it will not be created and not stiike the detector, so that the answer to Schrodinger's question is a paradoxical 'yes and no.'" ("Schrodinger's Cat and Sarah's Child: John Fowler's Quantum Narrative" 97).

According to Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1996), alethiology is "the branch of logic dealing with tititii and error." Adjective forms the dictionary recorded are alethiologic or alethioloical.

In the authenticated mode, Traill argues, two modally opposite domains, the natural and the supematural, coexist just as Swift in Gulliver's Travels (1726) is m the natural domain of England but enters into the supematural domain by shipwreck. Characteristics of this mode are: "as a domain with full existential status within the world of the work, the supematural caimot be explained away as dream, hallucination, madness, and so on. Thus, supematural entities, because they are not naturalized, are never assimilated into the natural domain" (200). In the ambiguous mode, like the govemess of James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), the narrator does not fully authenticate the suf)ematural domain constmcted in the fictional world. Despite natural explanations, strange experiences are never fully authenticated. Thus, "Validation of the supematural domain is made dependent on perception and interpretation" (201).

In the disauthenticated mode, as Alice is waked up by her sister, the supematural, despite its constmction by poetic devices, is ultimately illusive when Alice knows that she had a sttange dream. Unlike other three modes discussed so far in which the supematural is tteated as outworldly, the paranormal mode displays the supematural as a physically possible yet concealed world within the natural domain. Here, "Supematural phenomena are reinterpreted and brought within the paradigm of the natural"(202), and the domain of the unknown gives the scientist access to nature's hidden scheme. As the insanity can be seen as heightened perception, "the laws of the physically possible natural domain are not violated, but supplemented" (202).

'" Bakhtin's concept of "heteroglossia" refers to "the basic condition governing the production of meaning in all discourse." This dynamic view of language for literary texts asserts that monologue is not really possible because, despite the impression of unity and closure m a smgle voice, the utterance is constantiy producing meanings which stem from social interaction.

' ' Pointing out the Lacanian system of want and excess between self and its other, Mikkonen says, "The making of Galatea is for de Man an act of ttoping, a self-conttadictory act of trying to ttope the self through the other that the self has made" (320). In conttast to de Man, Mikkonen explains metamorphosis in terms of Jakobson's metonymic and metaphoric logic: "On the one hand, metamorphosis combines signs

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togetiier into a new sign and creates a sense of contiguity and/or displacement. On the other hand, metamorphosis also functions like a metaphor as it substitutes or replaces one thing with another" (318). This linguistic ttait of metamorphosis, according to Clarke, is also the psychological figure bound up with the attributes of Hermes: "exchanging and expropriating, possessing and dispossessmg, binding and unbinding, holding down and setting free."

Hayles's conttast between selection and combination is interesting: "Selection emphasizes the organism; combination, the gene. Selection highlights survival and reproduction; combination highlights mutation. Selection leads to relations of hypotaxis; combination, to parataxis" (400). Focusing on the final images of Don DeLillo's White Noise and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, Hayles thinks these images "sunimarize[s] how embodiment and information interact." Further she says, "It [A final image] shows a multiform figure, the feet amphibian, the legs simian, the trunk human, the head encased m a space helmet." By this "vivid evocation of the stiatified history," she suggests that "we are all freaks who ttansgress the boundaries of the conventionally constituted categories that define normality" (418).

' Hugh Witemeyer in Poetry of Ezra Pound sees Pound's psychological theory of myth as "an unpersonal or objective story" for "the primary intensity of the experience itself and argues that poet or the myth-maker must screen himself indirectly through masks and persona (24).

'"* In L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between, belladonna, deadly nightshade symbolizes a nightmare projection of the nascent sexual fears that Hartley's male characters frequentiy manisfest toward women. The deadly nightshade is almost another character m the cast. As Leo is fascmated by it, so he is fascinated by Marian. In Hawthome's short story, "Rappaccmi's Daughter," Giovanni Guasconti likewise notes a beautiful yet poisonous flower near a shattered fountain and identifies it with Beatrice Rappaccini.

' Comparing Hermes's role of the mformation ttickster at the crossroads as "the hacker, the spy, the mastermind", Davis argues tiiat tiie Hermetic "cleverness and stealtii" may even answer about "the mysterious cattle mutilations that have long been associated with alien flybys", and also adds "after all, as the Hymm to Hermes shows, tiie god is fond of molesting otiier people's cows" (228). "What Hermes explains about tiie cattle mutilation in ancient rittials is his role as "a guide of souls and a shamanic heals" as Hermes cures Odysseus from Cuce's witchy poison.

'* For McLuhan, the archetype is "a retrieved awareness or consciousness": "whenever we 'quote' one consciousness, we also 'quote' the archetypes we exclude; and tills quotation of excluded archetype has been called by Freud, Jung, and others 'tiie

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archetypal unconsciousness'" (21 -22). Sunilarly, he emphasizes tiie danger of tiie term, •archetype' tiirough which one might expect "a smgle discrete entity (e.g., fatiier archetype, motiier archetype, etc.)," "Whitlark proposes tiie term "complex" as "a safer Jungian term": "Smce tiie nature of complexes is to be comprehensive, all of the candidates [in Kaflca's Beif an den Vater] (Hermann, Julie, etc.) mentioned at tiie beginnmg of tiiis paper may have been addressed by different sttata of tiie letter, which reflect his many levels of consciousness" ("A Post-Jungian Approach to Kaflca" 156-7).

Occam's Razor is "the fourteentii-centtiry scholastic doctrine that a hypotiiesis should be as sunple as possible, a doctrine tiiat has become a basic tenet of science" (Illuminated Fantasy 189).

In Robots, Asunov briefly inttoduces homunculi: "There were legends of the creation of homunculi ("little men") around A.D. 250, by Gnostics and otiiers who apparentiy diluted Christian teaching with various forms of mysticism and magic" (3). McCorduck gives some distinctions among AI machmes: ""automata are self-Iocomotmg contrivances, for example, Hephasestus's ttipods and the hardy Talos. But Talos is a humanlike automaton, therefore called an android. Golem and homuculi are special cases of androids, made from organic matter, and are products of the single craftsman, so to speak, such as Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Robots, on the other hand, are also a special case of androids, but are mass-produced" (3).

' In his allegorical interpretation of Charles Howard Hinton's "The Persian King," Bmce Clarke states that "an axiom of chaos theory is that without fiiction, self-organization cannot commence" (13 of 15). While seeing Hinton's allegory of thermodynamics as the dramatization of "the Victorian moralization of enttopy as God's withdrawal from the material world," Clarke says that Hinton allegorically expresses the "revalued" enttopy "not as dissipation but as a creative motive for collective redemption through the virtual constmction of the fourth dimension" (12-13). Clarke argues, the author's own self-projection as the ttoubled but prophetic student effectively works as the medium of expressing the cosmic energies invested in a myth of personality: "the ultimate communication in Hinton's system is between higher dimensionahty and ttanscendental personality" (14).

° Botii H.G. Well's The Time Machine (1895) and Evgeny Zamyatin's We (1924) are often regarded as dystopian novels. If these dystopian novels depict the cormpt or unjust society as being like a disease, on the conttary the Utopian novel which was well recognized since Thomas More's publication of Utopia m 1516 focuses more on the healing of an ill society, like medicine for health. In We, questioning the validity of a totalitarian state, 1-330 challenges D-503's satisfaction with the Onestate as the Time Traveler did the Medical Man. 1-330, like the representative messenger of Chaos,

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Madness and Death, disturbs the seemingly Utopian Onestate under the rule of the clothes, and the embodiment of the revolutionary notion is implied in the square root of mmus 1. Affected by this urationality and chaos, D-503 falls into the disordered world that is largely the same as 1920's free world agamst tiie totalitarian communist rigidness. As tiie Time Traveler wanted to overcome the limitation of third dunensional worid, l-330 wants to pass over the Green Wall, the Iron Wall in other words.

Henry Adams was one of the historians who related the mcrease of mformation with the growing disorder. As later Shannon and Weaver affirmed that as system evolves, enttopy mcreases and order decreases in the same way but with the mathematical equation, Henry Adams' dismal view on the future was based on Thomson's formation of the second law of thermodynamics according to which the sum of useful energy throughout the universe would be constantly reduced by the diffiision of heat until all had reached a state of enttopy. In A Letter To American Teachers of History (1910), Henry Adams showed his pessimistic imagination on "a dead ocean of energy." However, this chaotic conclusion on the second law of thermodynamics was aheady challenged by James Clerk Maxwell's Demon theory in 1859. Katherine Hayles explains the contribution of Maxwell's demon comparing with that of the Second Demon in Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad: "WTiereas the First Demon uses randomness to produce work, the Second Demon uses it to produce information" (7).

•" .According to Hayles, there are several characteristics that chaotic systems share: Nonlinearity, complex forms, and feedback mechanism (that create loops in which out feeds back into the system into input; in physiccd systems similar mathematical computer modeling is associated with the onset of turbulence) (Chaos Bound 11-5).

^ In Chaos James Gleick explains the process by which Feigenbaum discovered his universal constant: "Calculating a trigonometic function made the process that much slower, and Feigenbaum wondered whether, as we with the simpler version of the equation, he would be able to use a shortcut. Sure enough, scanning the numbers, he realized that they were again converging geometrically. It was sunply a matter of caluculating the convergence rate for this new equation. Again, his precision was lunited, but he got a resuh to three decimal places: 4.669" (173).

^^ According to Mandelbrot, who was workmg on the problem of noise during computer interfaces as an IBM researcher, whenever one computer talked with another computer over telephone lines, little random bursts of noise produce ttansmission errors. Because the dust of noise is mfinitely small but ever present, IBM, acceptmg Mandelbrot's theory, gave up the useless efforts to overpower the redundancy and clear transmission occurred between one burst of noise and another. In The Noise of Culture, WilUam R. Paulson epitomizes the important role of Maxwell's Demon: "The Demon

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holds out the promise of reversing the irreversible time that accompanies and haunts an mdustrial civiUzation founded on heat engmes" (42). More concretely, Katherine Hayles sttesses the connection between information and randomness shown by the Demon's movements in the box of stale air: "The more chaotic system is, the more information it produces. This perception is at the heart of the ttansvaluation of chaos, for it enables chaos to be conceived as an inexhaustible ocean of information rather than as a void signifying absence" (8).

The voice of personified machines is very similar to the notion for "the noise of culture" prooposed by William R. Paulson: "Although the noise that confounds a message be said to have a source extemal to the ttansmission channel, the noise itself is said to be part of the channel for the purposes of defining a system of communication. When we speak of such a system as closed, then, we do not actually present in the channel and thus inseparable from its function as a channel. To exclude noise from a closed communication system world would be equivalent molecular movement from a closed system as defined in thermodynamics; it would be equivalent to excluding time" (68).

^ In Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature Teeming explains the significance of fairy tales as allegorical stories: "Fairy tales resemble myths and dreams in that they are particularly unveiled narratives, revealing clearly their archetypal bases. Over the centuries people have seen in fairly tales, which are present in very comer of the world, allegories of religious and political beliefs and, more recently, allegories of the development of the psyche. Thus, a Christian or Buddhist or Hindu apologist might see the child lost in the dark wood as a representation of the lost soul, and a Jungian analyst might read the same situation as an image of the psyche in a state of unbalance or brokenness."

^ "In modem allegory, such as Kafka's The Trial the allegory is more veiled than it is in the medieval ttadition, even though the character "K" looks like an allegorical personification of Franz Kafka and humankmd" (Leemuig, Encyclopedia 175). Deborah Madsen also argues that "modem allegory assumes that value is dependent upon subjective, personal evaluation" (Allegories in America 133).

* The unstable subjectivity in cyberculture is reflected in tiie dislocating power inherent m the hypertechnologized language of personified machines. In tiie simulacra culture of the posttnodem era, televisions and computers are two representative machines which are often personified and have ttansformed our consciousness in everyday life. If through TVs we passively begm restmcturing our consciousness toward the surrounding world as simulacrum images, the cyborg actively embodies tiie unplosion and codependency of human and machine (It is through cyborg science fiction that the high-

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performance-television-camera eyes, like Philip Dick's cinematized novels such as Blade Runner or Terminators, make humans into superhumans. The personified TV alone is often a letiiargic, dissipated figure such as Don DeLillo's Gray in White Noise.

29 As a Marxist culttiral critic, Walter Benjamin argued for tiie necessity of

moving beyond what he called "auratic appreciation" of works of art to a more socioeconomic understanding of what tiie surfaces of works signify. By "auratic appreciation," Benjamin meant tiie ttaditional reverential—what he would call "bourgeois'"—approach to art. hi a deconstitictionist sense, Benjamm's approach might be called allegorical. The purpose of his analysis is to break down ttaditional perceptions of the worid by exposmg tiie socioeconomic tiiought-stmcttire behind the Imguistic and "allegorical" masks of modemist writers (27). Similarly, Bertoft Brehit used in his plays, m tiie context of alienation, parables to illusttate Marxist political and social ideas. Sometimes his characters are embodiments or personifications of certam abstiactions (Leemuig, Encyclopedia 42-3). More broadly, Deborah Madsen indicates tiiat "tiie general basis of allegory is hermeneutic: tiie plot stincture, as a quest for knowledge, is motivated by the problem of interpretations" (The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon 4).

° In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas' ("My ass"?) quest for the meaning of the Inverarity estate becomes "a quest for the 'meaning' of America itself, includmg the 'other' America of the dismherited and the drifters" (Buning 145, quoted in Leeming 65). Other allegorical readings include Oedipa's quest as a joumey toward self-knowledge and understanding and as a quest to somehow "heal" the diseased and cormpted city of San Narciso tiirough Oedipa's modem-day search for the "Holy Grail" (Leeming, Encyclopedia 65).

^' Anne Baring asserts the recovery of the feminine value instead of this creation from the Word: "Creation was from the Word of the Father rather than from the Womb of the Mother and this change of imagery reflected a profound change in the way we perceived life. An older, participatory kind of consciousness that connected us with nature was replaced by one that increasingly emphasised the need to conttol and dominate nature. From now on the head rather than the heart becomes the focus of consciousness. With this change of emphasis in the sacred image, there is both an accelerated development of mind, of intellect, and a ttemendous advance in technology and conttol of the environment but, at the same time, a loss of relationship with i f ("Healing the Heart: An Alchemy of Consciousness" 344-5).

^ Whitlark clarifies this view: "The one unifying thread through the maze of kabbala is the beUef that a secret wisdom or secret language, adequate to describe the inconceivable Infinite, lies within Scripture. Most commonly, this secret is sought

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through the substitution of symbolic numbers for letters in a process called "Germatria," where the correct combination of letters is called a 'gate'" (5(773).

It has been argued that the origins of allegory are in mythology. By definition, myths are code language that explains or reveals the unknown. By definition, they are allegorical. The pre-Socratic Greeks practiced the art of discovering hyponoia or hidden meaning behind mythic narratives. Fable (Latm fahula. "telling") began in the Westem world with the works of Aesop but was taken up later by writers such as La Fontaine and Tolstoy. Using the popular device of personifying abstractions in animals, it is traditionally used to teach people proper behavior. The parable (Greek parbole, placing next to—"Let me give you an example") is a form traditionally used by gums or wise people to illustrate abstract concepts (Jesus, Lao Tsu, Buddha, Zen masters etc). The typical parable is different from the fable in that the moral it contains is not as explicit. (Encyclopedia of .Allegorical Literature 181 -2).

For the earlier Christian interpreters of the Old Testament, a book such as the erotic Song of Songs or Song of Solomon—based on the ancient Egypt marriage poetry—could only be acceptable as allegory, the story of Christ's relationship with his church. This kind of allegory is known as typological allegory; it is particularly characteristic of Christian readings of the Old Testament. Old Testament events or figures are seen as "types" of corresponding aspects of the New Testament. St. Paul in his Epistles was a leading early Christian typological allegorist... Although Paul accepts the historicity of the events of Exodus, he sees them as an allegorical representation of Christian reality. So the wilderness becomes the place of spiritual stmggle, Egypt the old sinfulness, the Red Sea and the cloud pillar the promise of baptism, the manna the bread of the Christian communion, the water from the Rock the communion wine. (31-33). In this regard, typological allegory is prophetic (Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature 5-6).

^ For example, the traditional mythic heroes' descent into the underworld is representative of anyone's descent into the locked castle of the unconsciousness. The similar allegorical use of descent is also often found in fairy tales.

^ The protagonists' blurred race and gender in the science fiction are very common. For example, Lauren Olamina tells, "My name is androgynous, in pronunciation at least—Lauren sounds like the more masculine Loren" (Parable of Sower 190). Active characterizations of Asians are also seem to be a device of this blurring (e.g., Hyun Chen in Galatea 2.2. Korean-Samurai Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash, Dr. Yatsuko of the Yakamura-Stichen enclave in He, She and It. and Joseph Li-Chin Shing in Xenogenesis series, Jorge Cho in Parable Series).

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Urging us to restore Benjamin's identification of culture and barbarism to its proper sequences, James emphasizes the political unconsciousness as the affirmation of both the Utopian dimension of ideological texts and of the ideological dimension of all high culture: "It its only at this price—that of the simultaneous recognition of the ideological and Utopian functions of the artistic text—that a Marxist cultural study can hope to play its part in political praxis, which remains, of course, what Marxism is all about" (299).

In Lewis Carroll's Alices' Adventure in Wonderland, a seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit hole and encounters all kinds of fantastic adventures and remarkable characters. Here remarkable characters such as the White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and Queen of Hearts satirize Victorian education, literature, politics, and life in general. As Freud writes, the literal meaning of our words, our dreams, and our actions might conceal quite different meanings. In his art, Lewis disguises and expresses his neuroses about Victorian culture through the dream stmcture of fairy tales (Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature 11, 104).

^ Claudia Springer explains the cultural importance of cyborg comparing it with robot and android: "Cyborgs differ from robots, which are completely mechanical figures of any shape or size. Cyborgs also differ from androids, which look like humans and sometimes are indistinguishable from them. Androids can be human-shaped robots or genetically engineered humanoid organisms, but they do not combine organic with nonorganic parts. The replicants in the film Blade Runner (Scott 1982) are therefore androids, not cyborgs, because they are genetically engineered organic entities and contain no nonbiological components....It is only the cyborg, however, that represents the fusion of particular human beings with technology, an idea that resonates throughout contemporary culture" (Electronic Eros 20).

" Clarke sees the constitution of the physical worid in Platonic cosmology as "an allegorical stmcture originating from the temporal devolution of an etemal perfection." Thus, he explains Pato's iconic allegory through "conceptual geometry": "What A (allegory such as Cave' Prisoners/ Chains/ Fire Shadow) is to B (appearance such as Physical world/Citizens/Senses/Sun/Phenomena) presents a deformed reflection of what B is to C (Intelligible realm/Philosophers/lntellect/the Good/Forms)" ("Allegory and Science").

' On the other hand, D. H. Lawrence takes the typically anti-allegory view of many modernists and implicitly condemns the frequent attempts among critics to read allegories into his work. In Apocalypse, he notes: "symbols mean something; yet they mean something different to every man. Fix the meaning of a symbol and you have fallen into the commonplace of allegory" (60). For Lawrence. Virginia Woolf James

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Joyce, and many of tiie otiier great modernists, a symbol—for example, tiie lightiiouse in Woolf s To the Lighthouse—adds complexity and tiie beauty of ambiguity to a text. Allegory— the attachmg of specific meanings for a didactic purpose, allowing meamng to take precedence over integrity of form—is for many modernists an inferior kind of literature (154). Actually it seems unnecessary to discover in a one-to-one manner the meamngs of tiie lightiiouse in Woolf s novel. We might be more tempted to understand tiie white whale allegorically—partly because its meaning is addressed in tiie texts (254).

Roger Penrose's Emperor's Mind is one of tiie representative works where children's mind is compared to genuine self-awareness and the infinite mystery of the universe: "Children sometimes see tilings clearly tiiat are indeed obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder tiiat we felt as children when the cares of the activities of the 'real world' have begun to settie upon our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our stteams of consciousness after we die; where do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakening of genuine self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came""(448).

^^ As it is most often called "extended metaphor," allegory is much closer to metaphor. Like the example of "all the world's a stage," a metaphor is an implied comparison in which a general idea or absttaction is compared to something concrete and specific (175). The implied comparison is made between two unlike things which are, nevertheless, in some way alike as in the phrase a ''gem of idea." But allegory is seen as "extended' metaphor in that a metaphor is extended into a developed narrative with characters, plot, settings, and so forth. Characters and incidents in allegory have at least one level of meaning other than the literal. It is this allegorical level that will be meaningful to the mature reader (like the Swift's allegorical description of King George 1 in his fantastic description of the king of Laputa) (Leeming, Encyclopedia 92).

" In a society where machine regularity and conformity become more important than creativity and individuality, man's relative insignificance can be overcome by violating ttaditional codes. I think that SF violates ttaditional codes, leading us to think about altemative futures. Science fiction as the repository of ttopes illuminates other literary language studies and other literary genres. To marginalize this genre in the academia would be a great loss for the information-filled society. As the generative semanticists and generative syntacists stmggles show, it is hard to expect that there is a single model for language theories and a single version of tmth. In this process of creating dynamic interactions between meaning and reality, we must open to ourselves to various ways of comprehending all possible experiences.

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Descartes is often regarded as the forefather of these mechanistic thoughts and computer developments: "whatever the shortcomings of his dichotomy, as a heuristic device it proved of paramount importance in providing a schematic framework for the automata makers of the eighteenth century and for the computer algebra of the great Boole in the nineteenth century" (Cohen 79).

^^ In "Signs, Symbols and Discourses: A New Direction for Computer-aided Literature Studies," Mark Olsen urges the necessity of new literary models suitable to computer technology: "The ttaditional notions of textual analysis are not well suited to computer development. Thus, a reorientation of theoretical models underlying computer-assisted textual research will exploit the sttengths of current computer technology and provide an important corrective to the tiaditional concept of reading texts, opening a centtal role for compute analysis in many areas of textual research", (source: http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html)

"* For feminists m interaction with science, the new artificial language (as with the female tongue "Laadan" m Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue) fimctions as an mdispensable weapon which can free society partly from patriarchy. It is said that over the course of a lifetune, repetition of the prescriptive "he" exceeds 1,000,000 m the experience of educated Americans. This is only an example of the language bias against women.

"* As Jonathan Culler explams m Saussure, in the seventeenth century Port Royal Grammarians saw language as a picture or an image of thought to discover a universal logic, the laws of reason and m tiie eighteenth century linguistics is regarded as an example of misplaced concreteness through individual signs whose autonomy was assumed. But Saussure's emphasis upon the forms' defining functional qualities made suspicious these previous notions of historical contmuity. Instead, Saussure posits tiiat discontinuity, or differences of meamng, would be tiie ground of representation. Especially by showing that behavior is made possible by collective social systems. Culler msists tiiat Saussure, like Freud and Durkheim, helped to lay tiie formation of modem thought.

For tiiese great tiiinkers, what is being offered is a sttnctural ratiier tiian a causal explanation. Their decisive step in tiie development of tiie science of men comes from mtemalizing origms and removmg tiiem from a temporal history tiuough which one can create a new mode of explanation of the unconscious. In tills regard. Culler highly evaluates Saussure's notion of tiie subject as tiie center of his analytical project given tiiat "even tiie ideal of personal identity emerges tiirough tiie discourse of a culture" (78). Also, Saussure's analysis of language as "a system of units and relations" has come to be taken for granted as the very nature of tiie discipline itself by major schools of modem linguists.

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As Frederick J. Newmeyer, another specialist in this generative-interpretive linguistic war, pouits out in Linguistic Theory in America (Academic Press, 1980), the comerstone of generative semantic theory was the Katz-Postal hypothesis that "all information necessary for the application of the projection mles is present in the underlymg syntactic stmcture, or, altematively stated, tiiat tiansformational mles do not affect meaning" (79, 161). According to Newmeyer, this hypothesis led to generative semantics' argumentation of motivating underlying stmctures by appealing to the meaning of the sentence. Harris and Newmeyer both note, to handle all of the apparent counterexamples to the Katz-Postal hypothesis (such as the difference in meaning between Many men read few books, and Few books were read by many men), generative semanticists came to develop a global mle or global derivational consttaints ("if one logical predicate asymmetrically commands another in semantic representation, it precedes it in derived stmcture").

Although Chomsky was never fully convinced of the Katz-Postal principle (Harris says, "Chomsky has always had a sidelong interest in meaning, but he is deep and abiding syntactic fimdamentalist"), Newmeyer suggests that if one adopts uncritically the assumptions of Katz and Postal's and Chomsky's theory, as the logical conclusion, one is going to end up with generative semantics. Yet, because of "a faulty analysis of the data" (Newmeyer) and ''a sort of direct communication between noncontiguous phrase markers in a derivation" (Harris), both authors see global rules as descriptive statements for organizing recalcittant data raising a number of complications that contributed heavily to the downfall of generative semantics (Newmeyer 163, Harris 176).

° Interestingly, the division of the semantic/syntactic as the cultural frame is also found in Frederic Jameson's Political Unconsciousness: ""When we look at the practice of contemporary genre criticism, we fmd two seemingly incompatible tendencies at work, which we will term the semantic and the syntactic or stmctural, respectively, and which can convenientiy be illustrated by ttaditional theories of comedy" (107). For Jameson, the texts of Moliere, Arstophanes, Joyce, and Rabelais belong to tiie first group while texts from Aristotie, Freud, and Vladnur Propp to the later group.

' Randy A. Harris m The Linguistics Wars (Oxford, 1993) deals witii tiie historical study of the utter schisms between generative and interpretive semantics and tiie collapse of generative semantics by tiie late 1970s. Harris summarizes tiie background of how tills schism developed into tiie state of hostility which Paul Postal called "tiie Imguistics wars": " Generative semantics wanted to leave the language pie pretty much as a whole, describing its shape and texture noninvasively. hiterpretive semantics wanted to slice it into more manageable pieces. But as the battle became more fierce anotiier border dispute arose, an extta-theoretical one, concemmg the definition of the entire field, the scope of language study, the answer to the question. What is linguistics? " (7).

Harris also astutely notes, whereas generative semantics became consumed with semantic questions and pursued language deep mto uregularity and chaos, mterpretive semantics stayed safely near the surface (13). Because the whole of complex subjects is

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usually tiie sum of regularity and chaos, searching for tiie chaotic nattire inherent in subjects' order is liable to end in failure despite a zealous and enhanced intention. However, because we can not stop our desire to understand chaos, we must not neglect, as tiie autiior suggests, generative semanticists' efforts to find tiie representation in a formalism isomorphic to tiiat of symbolic logic despite their self-collapse.

In the Sapir-Whorfian hypothesis, tiie Hopi is considered to have different tiiinking ways, because stones and clouds are tieated as [+animate] properties. But Hopis will not blame someone killed by being hit for tiie living stones. Similarly, in French and Spanish, the gender of nouns doesn't have sttong semantic implications, though some critics atttibute German romanticism to tiie German female noun for the Moon. More clearly, tiie Eskimos have considerable vocabularies for different qualities of snow, but this fact does not necessarily lead to tiie interpretation that Eskimos are specialists in snow. After all wet snow, dry snow, and soft snow in English function as the equivalents of single words in Eskimo.

Cohen wams about this mechanistic barrenness in our society: ""While a great deal of attention is given to the problem of making a robot simulate a man, less notice is taken of men who habitually behave like robots" (125).

'* See how Rudolf Steiner relates Divme Child to wisdom: "The faculties by means of which the earth's depths, the mysteries of the souls of men and of the nature of the animals were perceived, were faculties which at first developed in germinal form m the human being and which manifested for the fust time after death—^but they were youthful faculties, potentially germinal. Although it is after death that these faculties become particularly creative; in earthly life they arise as potentially germinal forces during the first period of earthly life, in the child. The forces of growth in the child which bud and sprout forth from the spiritual, these forces withdrew in later life from the human being. ..such faculties of genius as we have in the later years of life are due to the fact that we have remained more childlike than those who do not have these faculties or have them in a lesser degree. The maintenance of childlike faculties on into later life equips us with inventive faculties and the like. The more we can retain childlike faculties in mature years, the more creative we are" (The Search for the New Isis the Divine Sophia 38-39).

^ For example, refer to Arme Baring's following remark on the children as the mystic source of the human and the universe: "The child who is the artist, the poet, the musician and mystic at the heart of each one of us, the child who is the tme creative nucleus of the individual, who is our vital connection to the ground of being, begins to feel, begins to come to life, begins to tmst life, no longer fearing catasttophe, begins to feel happy. Then a miracle takes place. The person imprinted with guilt, whose intemal

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voice said 'I hate myself and whose actions said 'I hate life; I hate other people' begins to say 'I love myself, I love life, I love other people'" (355).

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CHAPTER VI

(IN)VISIBLE BODIES: WESTERN AND EASTERN PERSONIFICATION

Hun-Dun

In her inttoductory essay of Chaos and Order, N. Katherine Hayles mentions the

"ironic twist"" of the Taoist story of Hun-dun (Chaos in Chinese) inttoduced in Eugene

Eoyang's essay. In the short episode of Zhuangzi, Hun-dun the emperor of the centtal

region dies as the result of v iolent ideas conceived by Shu (Brief), the emperor of the

South Sea and Hu (Sudden), the emperor of the North Sea: "All men have seven openings

so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-dun alone doesn't have any. Let's try

boring him some!" (cited in Eoyang 273).' Eoyang pomts out that Chaos represents

something "inexphcable, hence intolerable" while Hun-dun is presented as "generous"

rather than as malevolent and vengeful. Sunilarly, Hayles positively says about Hun-dun:

"Chaos [in Hun-dun] remains the necessary other, the opaque turbulence that challenges

and complements the tt-ansparency of order" (Chaos and Order 3).

The cultural differences m the interpretations of Hun-dun story are, as botii autiiors

mdicate, tiie opposite appearances of "a distortion of tiie perceiving subject": while

Chaos in tiie Westem epic gains tiie sense of tiiumph (as m so many apocalyptic

narratives popular in tiie West), Hun-dun m Eastem philosophy is defeated once

penett^ted (as humans' conttol over nattire was essentially regarded as fiitile m tiie East).

About tills, Katya Walter property notes: "Where Westem religions tend toward

divisiveness, Eastem religions tend toward mclusiveness. The West conquers, tiie East

absorbs" (65). In general, tiie power of chaos m Westem culture is rampant and often

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painted with dark colors but the defeat of chaos in oriental philosophy is anecdotal and

combined with other complementary factors. For example, in Hesiod's version of Greek

mythology. Chaos, as the lord of disorder, exists alone in the beginning and later gives

buth to Gaea (or Gaia), the earth, to Tartams, the region beneath the earth, and to Eros,

the god of love. Chaos also became the father of Erebus, the darkness of the netherworld,

and Night, the darkness over the earth. In an earlier version, Eurynome, the goddess of all

creation, arose from Chaos and separated the sea from sky. In both male/female-centered

Greek versions, it is common that Chaos is deeply related to chasm and darkness. As

Eoyang says, the westem fear of chaos as an abyss (as the Greek verb-stem KHA

suggests) largely stems from the ttaditional binary logic m the West. Also, as in the

biblical account of creation, reality is often presented as the "a matter of cosmos versus

chaos" in the West and its ttadition assumes chaos to be "anti-order." By conttast, as a

necessary part of complex nature, Chaos in the East is generally understood as a

procreative partner of an indefinable harmony. In the "four-valued" eastem philosophy,

as Hayles suggests, chaos is seen as "not-order which is also a possibility" (Chaos and

Order 3).^ In tiie same vem, Eoyang says that reality in tiie East tends to be "a matter of

cosmos and chaos" (277).

Because Taoism, along witii Confucianism, has exerted an unportant effect upon Far

Eastem countries, Far Eastemers, despite westemized scientific education, still find an

echo in Traditional Eastem way of tiiought or life-The Tao. Similar to Christianity, tiie

Tao in Asia works, to a great extent, as the way of a mysterious, all-encompassing

power. One of the prevailing Taoist lessons is:

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Everytiimg is basically one despite the appearance of differences. Because all is one matters of good and evil and of tme and false, as well as differing opinions, can only arise when people lose sight of oneness and think tiiat tiieir private beliefs are absolutely tiue. (Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia)

Like the contemporary scientific perspective about the pervasiveness of stiange

attractors, Taoism shares the view tiiat "systems which seemed completely different from

one anotiier nevertheless had something in common" (Chaos and Order 10).

As "a way, or ways, of viewing tiie worid," Taoism explams tiie complexities of

order and chaos as "macrocosnuc reflections of the yin and yang" (Eoyang 275, 277).

the earlier Greek Goddess version, the world Egg brought forth the cosmos and

everything m it (dancmg naked upon the waves, Eurynome created the wind and the

serpent Ophion through which she hatched it). Likewise, the Tao is depicted as "an

empty bowl" (as the womb of creation) or as "the fathomless deep water" which is in tum

related to "a notion basic to k'un, the second hexagram, the representation of the mother

and the earth in the Book of Changes [I-Ching]" (Eoyang 276).

Especially for Koreans whose national flag comes from the I-Ching philosophy, the

connections between heaven/earth, water/fire and emptiness/whole is not unfamiliar.

Notably, the philosophy of the I-Ching, which constitutes its centtal ideas in the Korean

flag, shows how the pattems of human minds can be deep enough to surpass the pattems

scientists observe in nature (Capra 9)."* Tae Geug, the symbol and name of the Korean

flag, is an ancient Oriental symbol of the universe. The two opposites express the

dualism of the cosmos: positive and negative, fire and water, day and night, light and

dark, constmction and deconstmction, masculine and feminine, and so on. The centtal

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tiiought in tiie Tae Geug is that while there is a constant movement witiiin tiie sphere of

mfmity, tiiere are also balance and harmony. Among tiie possible 64 pairs of tiigrams,

tiie combinations of four tiigrams (chien. Ii, sun, and k'un in Chinese; kun, ih, kon, kam in

Korean; indicate balance and harmony in a changing worid. The three unbroken lines

represent heaven and fatiier; tiie tiiree broken lines are earth and motiier; in the lower left,

tiie two lines witii a broken line stand for fire; and tiieir opposite in the upper right

signifies water.

If Tae Geug shows "Martian/Venusian oppositions" in westem terms by its binary

and circular modes, tiie combination pattems of a 64 set of parallel ttigrams (like

nonlinear differential equations) shows "spatiality/temporality and being/becoming."

About these mathematical and mystical sixty-four hexagrams, Erik Davis aptiy extends

its significance to the modem digital system:

By tossmg coins or dividing piles of yarrow sticks, the users derive the hexagrams appropriate to his or her situation. The I Ching thus functioned as a kind of personal counter-computer: a binary book of organic symbols that could challenge a System raging against the Tao. But even as it tapped into the analog pattems of the soul, the / Ching was at root a digital system, its underlying numerical pattems familiar to any hacker. (147)

In this regard, the Korean flag as the representative symbol of Oriental philosophy

reveals some part of creative "ttopographic space" of Chaos theory: "the shift in ttopes,

away from a ttopology and towards a tropography in which 'figures of speech' allows us

to enjoy almost limitless variabilities" (Assad 288).

Influenced by Marie-Louise Von Franz's essay ("Symbol des Unus Mundus") which

mentions first the same 64-part stmcture between the genetic code and / Ching's trigram,

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Katya Walter systematically develops this deep connection between chaos theory and the

I Ching as the "co-chaos theory," the combination of linear and analog modes:

Co-chaos suggests that the whole cosmos is alive. It evolves not just in what we call life, but at all levels. There is the inorganic—as nuclei tum into elements into suns into solar systems into galaxies into superclusters—and organic—as microbes proliferate and whales school and ants nest and people lounge about in Roman baths or health club sauna. Entropy and evolution are partners. They balance in the endless algorithm of the universe. (134)

To harmonize the whole in the soul, WaUer suggests that we follow the self-similar

designs on both large and small scales. In oriental philosophies, the revelation of the

fractal pattems often comes from the creative unconsciousness or transcendental

experiences such as dharma (self s conformity to the cosmic, religious law) or Tao (the

way of the nature). Zhuangzi, as Eoyang says, offers the "Free and Easy Wandering" to

the hidden deep cosmic order: Zhuanzi "emphasizes the waywardness of our modes of

leaming, the benefits of serendipity, and the advantages of tmly free inquiry" (279). This

Taoist "free and easy wandering" reminds us of what Serres means by randonnee (a

rambling long walk). Both Serrean Chaos theory and the Taoists' way have in common

their preference for "oblique, tortuous and complicated" routes by which science and art

can converge into the spiritual science or scientific myth.

According to Hayles, this circular way of approaching Chaos is "pseudorandom" to

find the key of "recursive symmetry" of a deep stmcture of order ("Chaos as Orderly

Disorder" 307-9). In her first book The Cosmic Web, Hayles already mentions the notion

of "unbroken wholeness" citing David Bohm:

If relativity were able to explain matter, it would say that it would be all one form—a field-all merging into one whole.

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Quantum mechanics would say the same thing for a different reason, because the indivisible quantum links of everything with everything imply that nothing can be separated. (57)

This notion of "unbroken wholeness," together with the thmst toward globalization of

Chaos theory, is expressed as Ur-Suppe in Serres's term: "What is Nepttinism? ft is a

tiieory which holds that the sea is the Ur-Suppe, the fundamental soup, that is to say the

matter from which all other material things originated" (Serres 29-30).

Interestingly enough, Eoyang compares Hun-dun (chaos) to "wonton" soup by its

compound homophonous with "chaos": "We have already mentioned the association in

Westem mythology of chaos with water and the sea; soup would not be an implausible

"microanalogue" for chaos" (282). As Hun-dun only lives in his death-like amorphous

situation, sea becomes both the site of creative ideas and destmctive force. Ur-Suppe the

"fundamental soup," in the similar way that Hun-dun suggests the Tao, also indicates Tao

as nonbeing (Wu)~the creative/destmctive force that brings everything into being and

dissolves everything into nonbemg. By its absttacted forms, extending the network of

"reservou and circulation" of Ur-Suppe, Tao becomes the co-chaos where negentiophy

and enttopy coexist in a harmonious way.

The Taoist Ur-Suppe of life and death is full of brief and sudden changes. The scales

of subject/object, good/evil, and text^context are measured only through brief and sudden

uiteractions, and tiierefore the mteractions are violent enough to cause heedless death.

And the queer Hun-dun's death is tiie waming of our negligence of the otiier observers

and clearly shows one of Chaos principles: [tiiere is] "no way to mteract witii it [system]

witiiout disturbing it (Hayles, The Cosmic Web 51). Through tiie emphasis of clinamen

(the minimun angle to the laminar flow that initiates a turbulence), Hun-dun's death

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requires us to witness why we need the "strong objective" or "situated knowledge."^

Like the other violent phenomena (or friction in chaos theory), the violence lurked in

Hun-dun's death is, as Serres points out, "the only problem so pooriy resolved" in our

culture and at the same time "one of the two or three tools that permit us to insert the

local into the global, to force it to express the universal law, to make reality ultimately

rational"" (.v.vv;/, 122).

Through the dramatic personification of the extreme disturbance in a chaotic system,

as the vorticism in modemist movement did, Hun-dun in the Chinese creation fable as the

"Mixmaster Universe" of Ur-Suppe, remains as the satisfying fractal emblem of

postmodemism which links the binary opposites between East/West, human/science,

death/life, individual/society, and subject/others.

Hermes

In the first chapter of Hermes: Guide of Souls, Karl Kerenyi expresses the purpose of

his book as finding a correspondence between Hermes and reality, or a reality of the soul,

and implies that this purpose as "something reaching beyond our historical vision, and

perhaps even beyond our philosophical convictions" (5). At the same time, Kerenyi

notes that the difficulty in understanding mythology and its corresponding reality comes

from myths' resistant stmcture: "The images of the Greek Gods can be so resistant to

conceptualization and logic" (5).

According to David Adams Leeming, myths, as "the code language that explains or

reveals the unknown," essentially contain "the hidden meaning behind mythic

narratives," hyponoia which was called later allegoriai by Plutarch (Leeming,

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Encyclopedia 181-2). Thus, Leeming explains, mytiis are understood as the "origins of

allegory" practiced by "priests" or "tiie initiates of a given culf to find "tiie origins of

certain phenomena and experiences that are important to humans—love, rain, spring, and

so forth." In his otiier book. The World of Myth, Leeming more clearly states the

mysterious natures of mythic narratives which "precisely represent aspects of

experience":

The Greek immortal family on Mount Olympos, a family preoccupied with both its own pleasures and the actions of mortals, personifies a realistic if somewhat skeptical view of human nature and the dilemma of a species that revels in life even as it is defined by death. (95)

For Michel Serres who argues that myths should guide scientific knowledge, this

"skeptical" ambiguity in myths is equivalent to alagon, the irrational or the impossibility

of measuring as opposed to logos (Hermes 129). The incommensurable alagon may be

compared to 1/V2, because, for the Greeks, the existence of such irrational numbers

became a primary proof that irrationality itself exists. Irrationality is perhaps so different

from rationality that the two need an intermediary myth to communicate. Being

analogical (i.e., allegorical) myths are like logic yet different enough to serve as

mediators between the known and the unknown. Serres supports an anonymous

scholiast's opuiion that legend or myth speaks through allegory:

Everything that is irrational and deprived of form must remain hidden, that is what they [the authors] were trying to say. That if any soul wishes to penettate this secret region and leave it open, then it will be engulfed in the sea of becoming, it will drown in its restless currents. (Conversations 129)

In these more complex and restless mysteries where science no longer has answers,

Serres finds the plurality of chaos rather than a universal tmth. To see on a large scale,

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Serres argues the mythical necessity of detour, randonnee, which is necessary to be "in

fiill possession of a multiple, and sometimes connected intellection": "Myth attempts to

ttansform a chaos of separate spatial varieties into a space of communication, to re-link

ecological clefts or to link them for the fist time: from the mute animals to the proto-

speaker" (Hermes 50).

Here as "the reservoir of knowledge that scientists and mathematicians can ill afford

to ignore," literature offers the "comparative and pluralistic epistemology of the joumey"

which is mainly operated by the "included/excluded third man the demon" (Hermes

xxxix, xxii-xxvi). The broadest possible communication is unplemented by this

philosophy of transport where the variety of a complex network counters the dogmatism

of unified and scientific knowledge. As Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell argue m their

mttoduction to Serres's Hermes, the distiibution in mythic narratives maximizes tiie

communication (which is seen as voyage/ttanslation/exchange). They mention it in terms

of Hermes: "Serres initiates a series of reflections under tiie sign of Hermes, god of patiis

and crossroads, messengers and merchants" (xxxviii).

hi his representations of Hermes as tiie "guide of souls," Kerenyi also beguis his

emphasis on Hermes as being constantly underway: "he [Hermes] is enodios ('by tiie

road') and hodios ('belonguig to a joumey'), and one encounters him on every pasf (15).

Altiiough Kerenyi simply compares Hermes's joumey to "tiie best conditions for loving,"

Hermes's existence for tiie distiibution is, in fact, equivalent to tiie nattire of all

narratives: "Narrative, exiled from tiie locus of muthos where tiie logos was bom,

contuiues to disconnect tiie connected and to Imk togetiier what is separated. "What we

call literature is the infinite pursuit of this work in progress" (Hermes xxxiii).

279

Thus, for Serres, as the essential thing in bridging separated spatial varieties,

"circunmavigation of Ulysses or of Gilgamesh and topology" consist of "tiie formal

invariants" in human knowledge just as in nature "tiie chain of beings does not present a

linear development, but a series of invariants, genotypic invariants" (Hermes 30, 43).

Similar to Serres's interpretation of Hermes as the Ur-Suppe, "the fimdamental soup"

where "the method is in the text," Kerenyi also explains how Hermes can be working as

the "source" and "idea" to our world:

Hermes too, therefore, is more than merely the luminous idea of a world. He is its source, through whom that world originated and through whom it becomes intelligible. As the basis of understanding the world, he is also idea, though one we have not yet fully grasped. The noctumal God of adventurers seems to stand alone m Greek mythology, without parallel and altogether sttange. (55)

It is a basic, challenging work in the studies of Hermeneutic literature to ttace how

Hermes can achieve this unique position of "the source of the source." As Kerenyi

observes, Hermes is not presented as the guide of souls in the Iliad despite its potentiality

to reach the center:

He has his place among the other Gods, qualified by his own mastery: he is the master thief He stole Ares, who was bound up m chams, out of his prison (Book V, 390), and he should also have stolen the corpse of Hector had only the Gods been in agreement (Book XXIV, 24fff.). (8-9)

But in the Odyssey and other myths, Hermes's connection to the Source is fully

developed as Harari and Bell summarized as follows:

Hermes saves Zeus in his stmggle against the monster Typhon and... he intervenes twice to save Ulysses from Calypso's and Circe's holds... One of his functions as guide is to lead dead souls to Hades. Hermes watches over shepherds, often he is represented carrying a lamb on his shoulders. He is later

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called Hermes Trismegistus (the thrice greatest) by the ancient Egyptians who identify him as the founder of alchemy (hermeticism) and many other sciences. Legend attiibutes the patemity of several children to Hermes, among them Autolycos, Ulysses's grandfather. According to certain tiaditions Hermes begot Pan with the unfaithful Penelope, (xxx-xxxi)

In the Book Five of the Odyssey, Hermes offers Odysseus moly as an antidote to the

magic potion of Circe and, in Book Fifteen Odysseus says to the faithful swineherd,

Eumaios, that all people owe grace and fame to this Hermes. Odysseus himself, above

all, has a mother who descends from Hermes because his matemal grandfather Autolycos

is a son of Hermes. But, as Kerenyi contends, Odysseus no longer possesses the

primordial mythic dimensions of Hermes-Autolycos line: "Odysseus is merely

-polytropos' ('versatile'), while Autolycos, according to one source, possessed the

capacity to ttansform himself, and, accordmg to another source, he made invisible

everything he touched" (16-17).

Just as the human language itself works as the recalcittant instrument for human

desues, tiie name of Hermes, tiirough its link witii tiie esoteric Kabbalah and Corpus

Hermeticum, often refers to discovering hidden knowledge. Namely, as tiie "tiirice great"

("by tiie superiative pronounced tiiree times") source of wisdom, Hermes Trismegisttis is

"tiie fiision of tiie Greek Hermes witii tiie Egytian god Thotii, tiie ibis-headed

hypomnenmatographef (Davis 21).

Altiiough Hermes Trismegisttis is said to conceal tiie great knowledge tiiat he had

received from tiie First Mercury in "hieroglyphs and allegories," his esoteric signs such

as tiie caducea, as Faivre suggests, reveal tiie implicit meanings of tiie middle terms,

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namely, "the equilibrium between Apollo and Dionysos" or "a catalyst for the union of

reason and inspuation" (102):

Generally he [Hermes] is present wherever the Westem ttadition speaks ex officio; and even when it does not even mention his name, we suspect that he is present implicitly: we have the impression that he might have been mentioned, for he is the signbearer of this ttadition, its marker and beacon— to use the Cehic etymology tiiat Court de Gebelin proposed for the Latin name of Hermes, in which he heard mer ("sing") cur ("man"). (Faivre 104)

As his name unplies "in the middle," Hermes always carries tiie fluid and luminous

mirror through which human beings can reflect the divine knowledge. Compared to the

myth of Orpheus which served as explicit references for the Romanticists' haunted

imagination, Hermes, through the Symbolists' wide use of Hermetic images, is much

closer to the contemporary era where every value is considered as exchange. After

recalling the myth of lo (in which lo is ttansformed into a cow by Juno and mistteated by

the herdsman Argus, then saved by Mercury's putting Argus, a hundred-eyed monster, to

sleep and to kill him), Faivre agrees with Tory in seemg Hermes as the new sign for "the

new spirit of Humanism":

Here Mercury, tiie messenger of light (Jupiter) comes to rescue lo (literature) from the prison of Argus (intellectual night), the servant of Juno (riches). It is he who breaks the fences, unblocks the cucuits, and restores to circulation the knowledge hoarded by the guardians of the established intellectual order (Argus). In other words, he represents the new spirit of Humanism, as Tory conceived it. (Faivre 35)

In Hermes and the Sybils: Continuation and Creation, Peter Dronke even proposes tiiat

Christ was prophesied by a pagan woman, the Sibyl, and Hermes far more clearly than by

almost any Hebrew prophet (13). Like Marsilio Ficino who tianslated the Corpus

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Hermeticum, Dronke celebrates tiie Hermetic and Sibylline "as tiie archetypes of the

Christian unconscious" (Dronke 9). Dronke also supports Theirry's interpretation of

Hermes not only as tiie fount of inspiration of Pytiiagoras and Plato, but as a sage even

greater than the Old Testament prophets:

For Theirry the Old Testament prophets do not have priority: in his individual variation on an Ordo prophetarum, Hermes is the first to affirm the Spirit which inheres in and govems the material universe; he is the Spirit which inheres in and govems the material universe; he is followed in tills by Plato and Vergil. Only then are three biblical figures—Moses, David, and Solomon—intioduced, to corroborate the insights of the three pagans. All of them tmly perceived that divine power which Christians call "the Holy Spirit." (Dronke 15)

About this idealized Hermes, at this point we may pose a question: how can Hermes the

thief be the secret messenger of the divine revelation and the symbolic figure for men's

deification and rebirth? First, as Faivre contends, Hermes's thieving is different from

Titanic use of power because Hermes shows "a new kind of thieving or larceny, a divine

kind": "Apollo suffers no loss from it; indeed he gains the lyre and a singularly related,

yet antagonistic, brother. Instead of violence there appears here inventiveness and

animated swiftness" (34). Second, Hermes is the inventor of writmg, which can condense

vast time and space into encyclopedic catalogues. This result reveals that all parts of the

cosmos are interdependent. As the fusion of Eastem religious elements with Platonic,

Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean philosophies, the Hermetic writings display a highly

subjective reality through their occult symbolic works; indeed, they try to reveal the

men's mystical ascent to the transcendent God. Thus, Faivre defines Hermes as "the

master of knowledge, or rather of a means of attaining to a knowledge that may be

gnostic, eclectic, or ttansdisciplinary—or all of these at once" (14). Above all, as Faivre

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asserts that "Every divine form comprehends within itself the essence of all things,"

Hermes "in no way contradict[s] the observations and conclusions of natural science, and

yet extend[s them] (47, 53).

As the "source of the source" Hermes promises "the broadest possible

communications" through integrating different modes of knowledge such as the

philosophic, the scientific, and the mythic not only by holding the cryptic obscurity but

also by circular illumination to guide human souls to unite the binary opposites.

However, what if Hermes as the idealized personification of communication between

men is extended to the origin of the universe and human beings? We surely need to find

an altemative way of understanding the universe and human beings (perhaps not an

anthropomoric one this time) for answering this question.

The Westem and Eastem Personifications

The personified deities, as many creation myths and religious notions of

personifications reveal, above all awaken the sacred self which is often weakened by

modem technology. As Erik Davis contends, "scientific reductionism banished the spirits

and intelligences of premodem cosmology from our perceptions of the physical worlds"

(187). But in the highly informative society, as Marshal McLuhan notes, "new

technologies amputate as much as they amplify" (cited in Davis 24). The human's new

alliance with machines emerges as the suggestive solution to revive the human spirit and

values. Throughout many cultures, allegories in myths were made to fit into the

mythmakers' own need for their ages. David Bolter has expressed a metaphoric

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significance of machines by using the term "defining technology" and compared in art

and philosophy to some part of the animate or inanimate world:

Plato compared the created universe to a spindle, Descartes thought of animals as clockwork mechanisms, and scientists in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries have regularly compared the universe to a heat engine that is slowly squandering its fiiel. Today the computer is constantly serving as a metaphor for the human mind or brain. (Turing's Man 11)

As the culminating point of computer technology, the emergence of the cyborg leads us

to have contiadictory experiences and provide a vision of new ontological adventures.

Considered as the co-founder of the human culture along with technology, myth

shapes human mentalities where technology mostly lacks and suggests the new holistic

way that modem capitalism and totalitarianism cannot reach. If the Romanticists prefer to

have Orpheus as their "defining mythology," Prometheus, as the creator of human beings

and bringer of fire or technology, often represents the defining mythology for the

artificial culture of the postmodem age. But Faivre points out, "the fear of or the refusal

of sense corresponds today to a convulsive jump by Prometheus, who wants to work for

Man's benefit by using a usurped light, a torch tiiat is not nature's" (70). He adds,

"Prometheus without Hermes is dangerous, but so are Narcissus and Dionysus. A god,

like a child, should not be left alone when he or she plays" (70). In tills regard, discardmg

the Promethean and tiiumphant civilization, Faivre proposes the Hermesian equilibrium

between Apollo and Dionysus and tiie union of reason and inspiration as tiie proper

mythology for the postmodem.

According to Kerenyi, tiie position of the Herm is tiie symbolic mediator in tiiat

Hermes' connection to the center of the house, tiie Goddess of the hearth, is attested by a

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Homeric Hymn to Hestia especially through the "innermost nook" (83).* As the

alternation between life/death, male/female, and human/god, the Herm is regarded as "an

archetypal expression of totality," "the very foundation of the worid." Thus, as tiie Great

Goddess, "the living primal Herm" provides the background about "the primal waters,

which in mythological language is the arena of becoming" (Kerenyi 64. 68). By revealing

a parasitic communication through its "ithyphallic form," Hermes restores the

subjectivity as an important part of reality and thus brings fecundity to barren

postmodemity. Also the Herm, as the "quadratic groundplan," promises the rebirth of

human souls just as "Hermes manipulates Calypso ("the one who hides"); he knows how-

to manipulate languages since he is the god of orators and also the god of thieves

(Hermes xxxiv).

Just as the evil magic of Cuce is deciphered and undone through the moly plant

which Hermes gave Odysseus, Hermes's cuculating cryptic signs such as the herm and

caducea counteracts tiie opponents' magical knowledge. Like Calypso's teaching of

reading stars to Ulysses, Hermes's signs work as tiie maxunum mformation where noise

is combmed with repertoue. hi this regard, rather tiian Prometiieus who is bound by

Hermes, Hermes as tiie ideal mediator is much closer to what Vincent Crapanzano means

by "heuristic relativism": "a heuristic relativism recognizes tiiat m order to understand tiie

otiier creatively and tiiereby oneself and one's worid one has to take tiie part of tiie otiier"

(5).

As an antiu-opologist Crapanzano compares Hermes to antiiropologists who are "tiie

bearers of exotic wisdoms" and also tiie messenger who can tiireaten stable and

complacent orders. But he asserts tiiat etimographic understandings of cultural ttanslation

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are much healtiiier tiian tiie literary postinodemism despite tiie antiuopologists'

somewhat marginalized position in these days:

The deconstmctionist seems content with revealing the constmct and its hidden rhetoric. Their exposure is an end in itself tiirough it may be justified, at some level, on pedagogic grounds or as a contribution to an understanding of constmction, rhetoric, and literaturonost. The anthropologist tries to relate constmct, rhetoric, and literarmess to social and cultural arrangements, which may be reflective of "more base" political and economic ones. (10)

In other words, the deconstmctionists are too eager for analytic principles to pay enough

attention to the synthetic aspects of lived experiences which greatly depend upon gnostic

awareness. Like the ethnographic efforts to synthesize principles in the larger context of

culture, Hermes implies the parasited communication through which "the absent

interlocutors are subject to the complex play of desue and power" in the multi-layered

dialogues (Crapanzano 6). Crapanzano argues, like Hermes's ideal role playing for

ttansferring the tmth without revealing the whole, and without telling lies, the messenger

(writing or other communications) in human culture "must first create disbelief and then

desttoy the anguish and concem the disbelief triggered, for without anguish and concem

the message cannot be heard" (3).

Considering that even the direct quotations requires refraining, as Crapanzano

argues, the messenger cannot simply repeat the message he has heard and therefore in the

world charged with conttadictory values the concems of the subversive effect of the

heard message is growing. Similarly, in their explanations of Serres' Hermeneutic

communication model, Harari and Bell emphasize the difference between message and

noise and an alliance of two against one, the third man being responsible for both noise

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and successful communication. According to their explanation of what Serres calls this

included/excluded third man the demon: "by his inclusion in the circuit, he blurs the

message and renders it unintelligible; by his exclusion, he renders it intelligible and

assures its ttansmission" (xxvi).' As an integral part of the system, the parasite, like the

demon, clinamen and the third man, experiences a perturbation and subsequently

integrates it into the more possible conditions by changing the system from a simple to a

more complex stage. In this way, Harari and Bell contends, "the parasite attests from

within order the primacy of disorder; it produces by way of disorder a more complex

order" (xxvii).

If Hermes is the personification which reveals best our centtal humane ideals and

their relative values, how can the Oriental personifications such as Hun-dun reveal their

catalytic roles in tiie human culttire? Let's look at first how Erik Davis compares the

Hermetic gnosis to a Zen koan:

On one level, this [Hermeneutic] illumination penettates to the subtiest spheres of consciousness— the call to "be not yet bom" recalls the Zen koan tiiat asks tiie practitioner to recall her origuial face, the face "before you were bom." But unlike tiie Zen quest, which proceed largely by emptymg tiie mmd of its obsessions witii mental bric-a-brac, tiie budduig Prometiiean Gnostic is here [Corpus Hermetica in the Nag Hammadi library] encouraged just to keep loading it up. Hermes is not told to merge wititi tiie great ineffable Oneness, but to expand the concepttial and empirical mmd, the mmd tiiat knows and understands tiie tilings of tills worid, quantities as well as qualities, information as well as wisdom. Gnosis enables tiie mystic not only to know God, but to know what God knows. (95-96)

Namely, while tiie Zen koan tiies to fmd tiie awareness of tiie universal secret

tiu-ough equating emptiness witii God, tiie Hermetic tiaditions of tiie West does

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tiirough coUectmg all the sensations of what has been made in an individual's mind.

However, this Westem mode of gnostic plenum, as the following quotation reveals,

was evicted by the orthodox religion:

At the time of Christ, Christianity contained both principle and personification. However, shortly after Christ's time, the religion split into two camps. The Gnostic's view put them on tiie principle side. "What is now tiie Roman Catholic Church held the personification side. The Catholic Church of that time could not resolve the paradox of principle and personification, and desttoyed the Gnostics—burning their books. The West went into the dark ages. Principle arose agam separate from the Church as science during the Renaissance. Splitting principle from religion we were able to develop our principle side, i.e., science, free of the murkiness of religious mystery; however, developmg principle without the sacred has led to some scientific extiemes, which are currently m popular discussions, (an online article at: http://wwvv.phoenix.net/~aqiiarian/eastinoto.htm)

By conttast, through all the different kinds of Yoga, Meditation, and Gum relationships,

the East's sticking to both the personifications and principles has led to less religious

intolerance:

In the East, the religions generally balanced the principle and personifications paradox. This balance gave a religious flexibility largely unknown in the Westem Christian era. For instance, a religion may have many Gods yet in principle they know there is only one God or sacred principles, which the many Gods reflect. The emphasis on sacred principles also allowed a different sort of scientific development. In the East they evolved a science of religious development.

In the East, by this fusion of personifications and sacred principles, even the plants or

bugs or other animals are regarded as the sacred one in which the personified sacred

resides. Besides the Buddhistic reverence for tiie life, tiie idea of Chi (ki in Korean and

Japanese), connects the space between Heaven and Earth to the intemal feeling of

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Rightness. Mencius answers to his disciple Ch'ou's question, "I venture to ask what you

mean by oceanlike chi? "

There is chi something exceedingly great, exceedingly strong. If uprightness nourishes it and no harm is done to it, then it completely fills up the space between heaven and earth. There is chi, an equal partner with / / Rightness and tao. Without it there is starvation. [A gradual] accumulation is what produces Rightness [i.e., Rightness-imbued chi]. You cannot "seize it by surprise attack." If the practice [of it] brings no satisfaction to the mind, then there is "starvation." And so I say, Kao does not understand Rightness, since he thinks of it as something extemal. (Tao and Method 111)

Michael LaFargue in Tao and Method generalizes this idea of "oceanlike chi" as

hypostatization which means "the maimer of quasi-autonomous forces over which one

has no direct control" (185). LaFargue notes the interweaving characteristics of the

external/physical and the intemal/psychological in hypostatization:

Some forces that 'overcome' others are psychological, like fear and desire, but others are physical, like cold, salt, and dryness. Both the psychological and the physical terms seem to represent quasi-independent energies or forces. Passages like this represent a hypostatization of psychological categories like desires and fear, picturing them as manifestations of the same kind of forces that underlie physical phenomena. (231)

The following aphorisms in the Tao Te Ching well show how the object and the subject

are imploded in a relative heuristicism through this hypostatization:

Softness and Weakness overcome hardness and strength (73: 2)

Agitation overcomes cold Stillness overcomes heat. (5:3)

Heaviness is the root of lightness Stillness is the master of agitation. (23:1)

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As if the butterfly^ in Greek has the same name as soul, psyche, chi in the East refers to

both the bodily energy (object) and breath or air (the active mobility).'*^ Contiasted with

a "stirred up" mind, the stilhiess here shows the quality of idealistic mind Taoists

cultivate intemally. By emphasizing some feministic qualities of the soft and the weak

through which the negative connotations paradoxically transforms into positive qualities,

these Far-Eastem philosophies find a non-confrontational way of dealing with the world.

This flexible mterface m the plurality of worlds is similar to the Greek philosophy of

ataraxia. Michel Serres explains ataraxia in terms of the implosion of a moral state and

a physical one:

For Lucretius, and for us as well, the universe is the global V ortex of local vortices. And so it goes m his poem. Ataraxia is the absence of ttouble. Nature is rivers and whirlwmds. The life of the wise man is free from turbulence, yet his life is the closest to nature. In the name of Epicureans, Seneca gives this bit of advice: ad legem naturae revertamur. Return to the natural law. Foedus, Revertamur, morals and vortex again. (Hermes m)

.As previously noted, this premodem confluence of principles and personifications was

denied by Westem science. Keepmg faitiifiilly tiie undivided wholeness, however, tiie

Eastem circle of lives is described as bemg more nonluiear tiian tiie Westem. Thus,

Leeming suggests, tiie Eastem notion of eon works as tiie solution to tiie Westem anxiety

for the heat death as the thermodynamic result:

Modem science provides us witii tiie following picttire of tiie end of tiie worid. This "mytii" might best be read in conjunction witii tiie Hindu mytiis of tiie destitiction of tiie worid at tiie end of each eon. . .Two years later Hehnholtz formulated what has been tiie standard cosmological tiieory based on tiie Entix)py Law. His tiieory of "heat deatii" stated that the universe is gradually running down and eventually will reach the point of maximum enttopy or heat death where

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all available energy will have been expended and no more activity will occur. The heat death of the universe corresponds to a state of etemal rest. (The World of Myth 88-89)

Also, more emphatically than the void of Genesis in the Bible, the Taoist cultivation of

Emptiness as the origin of the universal ("Tao being Empty/it seems one who uses it will

lack solidity/ An abyss it seems something like the ancestor/of the thousands of things")

strikingly coincides with the Big Bang Theory:

Only 70 years ago, the universe was found to be expanding, but there is a model of how it began: the Big Bang. At the beginning, it is said, there was literally nothing. . .not even space. Then there came into being a tiny speck of superheated space that contained enough energy to create all the stars and galaxies that fill the sky—with enough left over to drive the expansion of the universe ever since. (Maddox, "What' Next?" in Time. March 29, 1999)

If as Bmce Stering argues, science fiction prefigures "atom bombs, spacecraft, comsats,

credit cards, jukeboxes, waterbeds, gene splicing," it is also tme that myths as the basic

mental stmcture of scientific imaginations provide the larger prophetic vision for the

future world by polemic aphorisms. DNA technology is one of the scientific areas which

reveal mythic prediction of what lies ahead. Since James Watson and Francis Crick

found out the double helix stmcture of DNA in the Eagle lab of Cambridge on Febmary

28, 1953, DNA studies now proceed to the Human Genome Project which aims to specify

the location and stmcture of all about 100,000 genes in the human body. With the

growing understandings about the subtleties of human behavior and human personalities'

evolution in the interaction of genetics and environments, there is no doubt that humans

will be closer to the divine knowledge about the secret of life. More importantly, DNA

bioengineering traces back to the beginning of life in the earth and it already provides the

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convincing clues to "the self-replicating entities first assembled from simple chemicals

on tiie primeval earth" which are named "organelle" in cell biology and the Gaia

hypotheis.

Lewis Thomas in The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher regards Organelles

as the most essential one in life. Because of a specialized part of a cell having some

specific function, the organelle, as Thomas explains, became a special interest in the

molecular genetics:

There is careful, resttained speculation on how they got there in the first place, with a consensus that they were probably engulfed by larger cells more than a billion years ago and have simply stayed there ever since. The usual way of looking at them is as enslaved creatures, captured to supply ATP for cells on their own, or to provide carbohydrate and oxygen for cells unequipped for photosynthesis. This master -slave arrangement is the common view of flill-grown biologists, eukaryotes all. But there is other side. From their own standpoint, the organelles might be viewed as having leamed early how to have the best of possible worlds, with least effort and risk to themselves and their progeny. Instead of evolving as we have done, manufacturing longer and elaborately longer sttands of DNA, and running ever-increasing risks of mutating into evolutionary cul-de-sacs, they elected to stay small and stick to one line of work. To accomplish this, and to assure themselves the longest possible run, they got themselves inside all the rest of us. (71-2)

Considering that mitochondria and chloroplast, as "small, conservative, and stable" cell,

produce the oxygen and arrange for Its use, Thomas concludes, "these two organelles are,

in a fundamental sense, tiie most important living things on earth. In effect, tiiey run tiie

place" (71-2). If the amorphous Hundun in Zhuangzi looks similar to the first life form

of organell in tiie eartii, the Brief and tiie Sudden as tiie more developed forms of lives

represent the oppressive and assimilatory tiends which can desttoy not only the lesser

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evolved entities but also tiie total system of organisms. The otiier Chinese Creation Myth

of Pangu tells more about the interrelated systems of our environments and human beings

by emphasizing a mytiiic giant's dismemberment as tiie origin of tiie cosmos.

Chaos was like a hen's egg. The parts of the egg separated into the Yin and the Yang, the male and female essences of all living things. The lighter parts rose to the top, becoming sky and heaven, while the heavier parts sank to become the earth and sea. Out of this egg also came into the giant Pangu. Pangu grew at the rate of ten feet per day for eighteen thousand years until his height spanned the distance between earth and heaven. Then, Pangu died. Upon his death, his body decomposed and his stomach formed the centtal mountains; his eyes, the sun and the moon; his tears, rivers; his breath, the wind; and his bones, metal and stones. His semen became pearls, and his bone marrow, jade. (Bieriine 53-54)

As the Gaia hypothesis suggests, the myth of Pangu, by revealing the concept of chi

through personification, shows us that life might actually keep the environment suitable

for life due to its interrelation of limbs and brain. By comparing the unified whole system

of earth to Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth, Gaia hypothesis supporters James E.

Lovelock and Lynn Margulis confirm that all living things interact to create the

environmental conditions that they need.

Actually as the forerunner of the Gaia hypothesis, James Hutton (1727-1797), the

founder of modem geoscience, contends that the upper part of eartii looks like a giant

recycling machine m that the metamorphic rocks are redistributed through various

changes of mantie, cmst and surface. More specifically, Geologist, paleontologist, Jesuit

priest, and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1995) In Le Phenomene

Humain (written 1938-40, The Phenomenon of Humanity), arguing that humanity is in a

continuous process of evolution towards a perfect spiritual state, emphasized the unified

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notion of tiie worid tiirough paleontological expeditions in China. Concurring witii de

Chardin's tiieology, Erik Davis notes his prophetic vision which reverberates to a great

extend in modem literature:

Critics of Christianity often accuse the religion of institutionalizing a dangerous mpture between humanity and nature. But Teilhard argued the opposite: Humanity, including its art, gadgets, and religions, was part and parcel of the planet's evolutionary game plan. Though maintaining a measure of dualism between main and body, Teillard rejected the bittemess of Manichean myth and proclauned "the spuitual value of matter." He saw evolution as the progressive unfolding of biochemical complexity, a process that, in tum, generated ever-greater organizations of consciousness. As evolution creaked forward from rocks to plants to the beasts of lands and sea, consciousness simultaneously grew into ever more novel and complex architectures of mind, architectures that he believed were intrinsic and intemal to material forms. (289-90)

If organelle is actually the origin of the all lives on earth, it is rather natural to posit that

the Greek's personification of earth as Gaia is also scientifically tmthful in that living

organells existing in ahnost every element of earth summon or interpellate the human

consciousness through the 4-nulllon-year-old link as the proto-gene of all organic beings.

To show the human body's balance with the holistic process of the universe, Walter cites

Chinese medicine and acupuncture as the representative example:

Chinese ttaditional medicine, like Chinese philosophy, treats nature as a hologram and works to harmonize the ever-shifting balance among the parts of a constantly evolving universe. It is a very different way of conceptualizing reality. It offers the West something we need to expand the limits of our linear, logical reality. (181)

Although the Gaia theory is not widely accepted as legitimate science in the West, the

micro-sized organelle origin for all lives on earth is almost equivalent to Taoists'

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valuation of Emptiness for tiie holistic idea tiiat regulates all elements. The following

Taoistic aphorisms reverberate more deeply because of tiie modem Gala hypothesis:

The thousands of things in The world are bom of Being Being is bom of Notiiing. (34)

Tao produced the Oneness The one produced Two Two produced Three Three produced the thousands of tilings. (36)

Especially, like tiie Greek's personification of Gaia, Pangu as a fantastic livmg giant

personified as eartii illuminates tiie corresponding interaction between nature and the

human spirit. Just as ttees m ttopical ram forests reward clouds (which block the sun to

keep ttees from overheating) by adding humidity and oxygen to the au in ttanspuation,

the human spuit, like the Chinese origin of chi means "the pure," may purify the physical

world through the mcorporeal yet active principles of personifications which in tum bring

the ecological harmony by endosymbiosis. Thales's measure of a pyramid by its moving

shades connotes that when the inanimate object is more likely to respond to human needs

by mobile agents, humans' efforts to reach the unknown can be more effective. As Serres

suggests, the essential is the transporting (the ttansition from touching to seeing and vice

versa), and the mythical tale is "the very form of tiansmission":

Instead of letting the pyramid speak of the sim, or the constant determine the scale of the variable, he [Thales] asks the sun to speak of the pyramid; that is, he asks the object of in motion to provide a constant flow of information about the object at rest. (Hermes 87)

In sum, the ancient people's ecological wisdom on organic planetary systems in

personification principles leads modem scientists to attain an inspirational worldview by

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pursuing a more holistic approach. In the Age of Enlightenment, exalting scientific

rationality ironically produced the Romantic Sturm und Drang. To prefigiue the fiiture,

the science of today now again needs to look back to the fruit of aspirations rooted in a

primordial past where "man was to be a magus, blessed with the access code of cosmos

and mind, making himself up as he went along" (Davis 35). The myth of self-divination

such as divinized Hermes and Hudim or Pangus are rewarding tools In figuring out the

magnificent network of the correspondence of the human spirit to anima mundi or "beast

in the jimgle" if we consider the violence Inherent In personifications.

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Notes

Zhuanzi, also spelled Chuan Tzu, was a Chinese philosopher of the 300's B.C. He ranks with Laozi (Lao Tzu) as the most important figure in the development of the philosophy called Taoism. Zhuanzi probably wrote parts of a book called the Zhuangzi, which was named after him. . . The Zhuanzi also helped shape the branch of Buddhism called Chan (Zen) (World Book Encyclopedia).

By the "four-valued" philosophy, Hayles especially refers to Taoism. Katya Walter concretely explains the connection between the "four-valued" I-Ching and DNA combinations: "Old titiths come to us in new guises. As we have seen, the four molecules of T, A, C, and G can arrange themselves into only 64 combinations along DNA. This double helix is a sable archetypal form, yet its length is strung in an infinite variety of evolving contents that carry the determined chaos of life. Number weaves a firm analinear grid to maintain the supersystem. Whether as I Ching or genetic code, it is the polarized polarity, a pivotal 4-ness beyond simple opposition that allows the master code to swing both ways binary and analog" (232). Interestingly, Faivre notes Trinity number four related to Herme: "Bom in the dawn, by midday well he harped,/And in the evening stole the cattle of Apollo/ the Far-darter, on that fourth day of the/ month wherein lady Mala bore him" (21).

According to Confucianism, people can live a good life only in a well-disciplined society that stresses attention to harmony, duty, morality, and public service. The Taoist ideal, on the other hand, is a person who avoids conventional social obligations and leads a simple, spontaneous, and meditative life close to nature (World Book Encyclopedia).

'* About the oriental philosophy implied in the Korean flag, David A Mason notes: "The South Koreans may well have the most philosophical flag in the world. The white background represents Confucian 'purity' or the Buddhist concept of 'emptiness.' In the center lies a Taeguk, the Taoist symbol of the balance of or harmony between opposites. It was adapted from the Chinese, who usually depicted it in black & white, and divided vertically. The Korean version is more colorful and divided horizontally, with the red top half representing Yang (Heaven, day, male, heat, active, constmction etc.). The blue lower half represents Yin (Earth, night, female, cold passive, destmction etc.). These two twin cosmic forces are cycled perpetually, in perfectly balanced harmony, despite their superficial opposition; wisdom doesn't see them as fighting each other, but rather as two sides of the same coin. The three lines at each comer, known as trigrams, were borrowed from the most important ancient book of the Classic of Changes (Korean: the Chu Yok; Chinese: the I Ching). The Three unbroken bars symbolize Earth-Receptive. The trigram in the upper right comer is Water-Treacherous Danger, and in the opposite comer lies Fire-Loyal Love."

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5 ft is interesting that Donna Haraway in Modest JVitness (1997) sees the

Premed ad. in Time magazine as tiie negative sign of "reconfirmation of tiie Sacred hnage of tiie Same" (264). ft seems tiiat Hun-dun may serve as "sometiiing much messier, more dangerous, tiiicker, and more satisfying from tiie hope for muticulttiralism" she emphasizes.

As an "extended metaphor," allegory is referred to as a metaphor continued through a whole sentence or even tiirough a whole discourse. Speaking to tiie human curiosity to decode, allegory historically, as Bmce Clarke points out in his cluster of allegory and science, extended our contemplation of tiie natural worid germinating classic Greek science. As "cultural machmes for tiie productive conversion of moral forces," tiie medieval allegorical texts were tiie efficient vehicle to convey moral lessons to the class of peasant by evoking fear tiirough their simple shades of good/ evil and earth/heaven (tiie known/tiie unknown). As a result, allegorical figures have been the mediator between the mythic and the scientific: the daemons of Greco-Roman ttadition, and the angels and devils of Judeo-Christianity have functioned as the intermediary discourse for the discovery of humanity through their Inherent mechanism of communications with other, tianscendental or subterranean realms (Clarke, "Introduction: Allegory and Science"" 33-37).

Faivre tells more about Hermes's genealogy: "Hermes's mother is a mere nymph. She is a Goddess who is bound up with the Arcadian landscape, originally probably a type of primordial-mother-daughter Goddess. Her name is sometimes Maia (which as an appellative is a designation of old women: the grandmothers and wet-nurse), sometimes Maias, that Is, "daughter of Mala." ...She did not escape from the 'sacred congregation of the Gods,' as some ttanslations have it, but rather 'shunned' it and took up abode in a cave (antron naiousa). There she and Zeus begat Hermes. Stolen love, but for that reason all the more fully enjoyed (misgesketo), deepest night (nuktos amolgoi), sleep as a helper in deceiving Hera (as he [dios apate] helps deceive Zeus in the Iliad), and above all secrecy (lethon) -these elements are woven together to formulate the first phase of the evolution of Hermes" (19-20). And he explains the positions of nymphs in myth: [nymphs] "are the wet-nurses for divine and semidivine children. They enjoy the 'immortal foods of the God' and perform beautiful round dances with them" (60).

Hermes as the messenger between humans and gods promised Zeus to tell no lies. However Hermes did not promise to tell the whole tmth. As a result, the wandering Odysseus as a universal human being only projects the sublime source of Hermes to overcome his dilemma but fails to gain his ultimate understandmg of worlds despite his being mature.

* Hestia is the ancient Greek goddess of the hearth, worshiped in a temple containing an altar on which a sacred fire was kept burning by the vestal virgins identified with the Roman Vesta.

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^ In "Resistance in Theory and the Physics of the Texts," Clarke criticizes Hayles' remark in Chaos Bound: "The universalizing impulse within chaos theory is hard to miss.'" In conttast with Hayles' underscoring of the thrust toward totality within chaos theory, Clarke argues that Feigenbaum's universality is, like a Mandelbrot set, "not the pure homogeneity of an imperturbable solid, like a marble slab." His view of the instability inscribed in chaos theory is supported by Peitgen and Richter's work. The Beauty of Fractals: Image of Complex Dynamical Systems (NY: Springer-Verlag, 1986). Clinamen, as the concept derived from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, means "the minimum angle to the laminar flow [that] initiates a turbulence" and is the direct reason of the irrelevant change of the system from the initial knowledge.

'° Similarly, the German for mandrake, alraun ("the allwise one"), suggests that the plant is regarded rather like a juini or familiar spuit (Cohen 57).

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CHAPTER VII

IMPLOSION AND BUTLER'S SEED

Consciousness and nature are not two separate orders, but one and indivisible.

- Kathereen Raine —

I began this dissertation from a simple idea that complicated machines, like talking

tiees and animals, are often felt to be like humans. When my four-year-old son

sometimes tried to talk to our neighbor's two white cats, I hoped that his loneliness as the

only son m a foreign country could be soothed, even for a moment, by the pathetic fallacy

of putting human qualities into the non-human. The period of his sharing fiiendshlp with

the two cats has been relatively short because the cat owner soon moved out with his new

girlfiiend. Although my son seemed to enjoy to some extent the two cats' company, he

never asked me to buy any animal. Rather, he prefers to possess toy cars, new

videotapes, and computer CD game packs. Often, more intensely than his playing time

with the two cats, he immerses himself in enjoying mechanical companionship without

caring about parents' concems about his machines.

After I experienced tiie sea of tiie Intemet and gained some computer skills, I was

ready to agree witii what Scott Bukatman means by "termmal identity" which is defined

as "a potentially subversive reconception of the subject that situates the human and the

technological as coextensive, codependent, and muttially defining" (Terminal Identity

22). The virtual "sunstun" (simulated stimulus) in cyberspace urged me to clarify the

changed impact on human consciousness caused by technology. Because 1, once as a

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foreigner resident in Europe a decade ago, had suffered from a serious homesickness, I,

once agam as a present resident in America, could feel more tiie immense impact of

technology enough to live in the virtual reality beyond any space and time limit.

Whenever I jacked into a computer, I could read real-time newspapers, current best­

sellers, and even job advertisements issued in my home country. I could also keep ttack

of my friends and teachers in my alma mater, exchanging some urgent messages through

the intemet. Not to mention showing family pictures through my web pages in the

intemet without sending by air mail, 1 could also watch real-time television and music

broadcast in my country and even translate English into Korean by using a newly-

developed electtonic ttanslator. Since 1 started to do these things, I thought that I would

not live any more in a foreign land if I were equipped with a computer with a modem and

a ttanslating program file.

WTiile my objects of concem a decade ago in Europe were often some familiar

landscape or some religious monuments, my recent concems in America have grown,

sunilar to my son's, closer to technology than to the natural or religious for emotional

need. 1 feel more depressed when my computer suddenly becomes slow or stuck than

when it is cloudy outside. When my computer once fmally broke down, I feU some

intellectual and emotional deadlock almost comparable to schizophrenia. Eitiier some

"consensual ttance" of cyberspace or intellectual and emotional deadlock, more than any

other times, my existential modes now depend upon the computer, ft looks as if hackers,

artificial uitelligence or chaos theorists seemingly realize Francis Bacon's ideal that

science can magnificentiy reign over culture.

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The confirmation about Immense virtual reality was not, of course, entirely enjoyable

to me despite my experience of its immediacy. Who can, after all, enjoy tiie idea that his

or her ftittire grandchildren may choose a super-dandy computer, regarding him or her as

tiie mere old-memory chip? A worse tiling is, we must now even wonder if great-grand

children may be mutants of genetic engineering experimentation, such as clones or

cyborgs. It is ratiier nattiral tiiat in the literattire of science tiie sterile fiittire as tiie result

of destitictive technology tends to commingle witii the old wisdom of fairy tales,

parables, and myths for solution.

My studies m tills dissertation are basically about personifications in the literatiire of

science in tiiat personification, as tiie common denominator of myth and science,

distinctiy displays the mteraction between two long-standing separated domains.' "The

souls of machmes," as Bruno Latour shows, can bring tiie end of the long-standmg

separation of the two stone lions of literature and science at the door of human

knowledge. As implosive agents, personifications of machines visibly show the intrinsic

relation between human subjectivities and nonhuman objects, myth and science, self and

Others. Space and time often converge into a new creative reality through

personifications' active messenger role In the digital communication (like avatar as the

extended Intemet).

Also as the mobile agent of humanity's perceptive process, personifications, on

behalf of human desire to grab more information, mythopoetically function as the

mediated messenger between the limited human world and the infinite divinity. When

the imagined future m the literature of science is combined with the experienced ancient

pattems of archetypes and the universal spirit, the familiar wisdom in myth can be

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reactivated in a new context of tiie technological modem society for discovering

meanings of life in a better world.

As the inttoduction showed, I first tried to clarify the cultural matrix In literature of

science through tiie "nomadic double-agent" role of the personification. Answering both

"why" questions in science and "how" questions in literature, personifications connect

both the secret of human desire and knowledge of the universe In a renewed context. In

Peter Nicholls's depiction of the interactions of science and myth, "art and science dance

in a complex sarabande and winged archetypes are confronted with mathematics" (851).

In this cosmic dance, literary narratives are often determined and mled by scientific law

but at the same time they also ttanscend scientific limitations with Gnostic "mind-

bending" toward Ursuppe, the archetypal sea of knowledge.^ Here, as Erik Davis

depicts, "technology Is neither a devil nor an angel. But neither is it simply a 'tool'" (9).

Rather, Davis defines technology as a trickster. Showing "how intelligence fares in an

unpredictable and chaotic world," the technological personifications are "mischievous,

riddling, and cross-wired" (9). They bump into actuality and create noise, wonder and

chaos. But their blended spaces of science and literature are cognitively and rhetorically

rich yet messy because they contain maximal information about differences.

Understanding tiie archetypal Others and aliens inside tiie self as well as humans' relative

relations witii tiie universe is tiie way to reach tiie order hidden in chaotic technological

personifications. The enacted mytii in literatiire of science creates techno-animism and

tells about new llberatmg reality through hs inherent philosophy of wholeness.

After explaining the limitations of mechanical, cyber bodies, I suggested that readers

would reach what Robert Assagioli means by "higher self or "transpersonal self ratiier

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from tiie biological personification of machines tiiat tend to be more fantastic and

religious. To confirm this difference between illustiative, mechanical personifications

and fantastic, biological personifications of machines, I added tiie related book analysis to

each chapter.

In the previous applications of texts in literary and scientific tiieories, I tiied to

connect these technological personifications to some important theories in science and

literature. Besides rhetorical interests such as allegory and oxymoron, along with

communicative concems in information and linguistics, 1 deah with technological

sublimity, the friction between vehicle and tenor m metamorphoses, the anxieties in

virtual realities as important topics related to current discussions of postmodemism and

chaos theory. As many cultural critics argue that the fractal logic of chaos coincides with

the decentered subjectivity in postmodem theory, information now works as the loci for

collective consciousness. About this emerging virtual identity in which human self

dissolves into mformation itself, one intemet user notes in his review of Erik Davis's

TechGnosis, "Being and doing, in the guise of spirituality and technology, are the

twinned halves of the cultural DNA with which we operate."^ Remindmg us of "two m

one" theme in hermaphrodite or John Donne's compass, technological personifications

reveal the "twinned halves" of science and literature in one. As Hermes gave humans

hermeneutics, tiie winged demons of technology now fly everywhere in tiie postinodem

world, ttansformmg humans' most inner soulscape.

In the chapter of (m)visible bodies, I dealt witii cultural implications of these winged

demons which are often partly god and partly human. As the proto-science forms, these

winged "personifiers" delay and substitute what "the personified" meant in the culture

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tiiat emphasizes certainty. While Oriental myths, like amorphous Hundun the Chinese

creator of the universe or invisible life force Ki, tend to mingle the form of principles and

spirit, in the Westem myths the demarcation of these two is more distinct. Deploring the

"Great Divide" in Cartesian mechanistic thought, which enthroned man as the sole active

agent of the cosmos, Erik Davis tries to restore, through gnosis ("a moment of mystical

illumination" or "divine knowledge, universal memory"), the lost bond of avatar which is

an ambiguously overlapped and separated visualization of the divinity.

The changed "noosphere" (the layer of human thought) is more disturbing by the

appearance of modem avatars—^photography, TV, computer, Al—^which are often

eschatological, sensuous and commercialized.'* Like a dmg, computer pixels'

anthropomorphic tendency now lures humans into an uncritical "consensus ttance." The

more detailed discussions of modem technology in tills chapter are mainly about tiiese

technological personifications' ambiguous stattis in tiieir performance of tiie magical

ttickery, tiie "device tiiat crafts tiie real by exploiting tiie hidden laws of nattire and

human perception alike" (Davis 17).

Nobody may deny tiiat anxieties and expectations on the eve of tiie tiurd millennium

are closely connected witii tiiese ttickster-like technologies which become more

autonomous like a human consciousness. The prevalent signifiers of apocalyptic signs,

by evokuig revelations and fears of tiie altemative technological fiittire, m ttim

allegorically tell about tiie present repressed sittiation in a new context, just as aliens in

fiction often give tiie vantage point in understanding tiie inherent Otiier in self

Postiiuman symptoms awaken tiie unportance of tiie non-human as "tiie soul of

machmes," which leads us to tiimk again what it is to be human. If simplified, my

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purpose in this dissertation is to find "positive chaos" or "creative discontinuity" inherent

in technological personifications along with their resistance to the mechanized society

and our hopes to bring unity in variety, "tiie act of creation" in Bronowsky's term, ft is in

other words the acceptance of differences without opposition through mediumship of

technological personifications in the speculative future setting of the Information Age,

where we ironically feel tiie technological sublimity in the most profane form like tiie

phrase E Pluribus Unum on the coins in our hands.

More than any genre, science fiction reveals this commercialized technological

sublime and its impact on individuals becomes more immense by the increasing

emergence of hybrids between humans and machines in the postmodem age.

As a space of accommodation for an intensely technological existence, science

fiction faithfully reflects the changed situation of postmodem subjectivity through a

continual linguistic play that resists any totalization of meaning. Like the sentence "the

red sun is high, the blue low," science fiction creates completely new set of semantic

constmcts which force readers to involve in infmite activity of revision and reorientation

beyond fixed frames of thoughts. In particular, the inverted viewpoint provided by alien-

equivalents in science fiction produces a dislocated subject in an altemative society. In

Frederic Jameson's words, what science fiction offers is "the esttangement and renewal

of our own reading present" (cited in Terminal Identity 11).

In SF, language is constmcted and altered by new technology. Thus, Samuel Delany

sees SF paraspace as a zone of heightened rhetoricity. Similar to Delany's view that the

language of paraspace allegorizes technology, Paul de Man argues that science fiction

gives freer open space to the daemonic intermediary:

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Not only do tiie science fiction writers use robots and all sorts of automated devices, but tiiey ttim human beings into automata, tiius creating a "scientific" equivalent of tiie old religious intermediate agents, the "messengers" between heaven and earth. The cosmos has expanded and scientific materialism is rampant, but still tiie agency is of tiiat conttolled, predestined, narrowed kind we have described as daemonic. (336)

Daemonically allegorized language In SF asserts, in otiier words, the significant change

of tiie unstable human subject in tiie flux of growing self-sustaining hybrids of humans

and nonhumans. As the pseudoscientific "encmstation upon simple romantic plot," tiie

figures of allegory disttirbs tiie transparency of language and institute instead a

metafigural zone of problematic identifications (Fletcher 136).

Generally, social reality is externally changed by new politics and technology and, as

the byproduct of the altered social system, the new language styles intemally influence

society by its impacts on thoughts of members of that society. According to Voloslnov,

"the move from a strictiy linear prose style to a more pictorial style between medieval

and Renaissance France reflected a move away from authoritarianism and dogmatism,

which he attributed to the changing class stmcture of French society" (cited in Newmeyer

107). In the similar way, the mutability of language in the paraspace zone of postmodem

SF may lead us to the new community where all knowledge is Imked to observers around

the information-back-ground-noise couple. As Serres says in an interview with Bruno

Latour, in this science-literature-interacting community, "the best solutions are local,

singular, specific, adapted, original, regional" instead of seeking the universal method in

vain (Conversations of Science, Culture, and Time 91).

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As tiie antidote to scientific objectifications, myths in the science fiction have

provided tiie most vital information to get rid of the universal principle in science. It is

tiuough deeper mind pattems inherent in mytiis tiiat scientists can complement the lack in

"a good tiieory of chaos," as Serres insists on tiie necessity of homeorrhesis in chaos. The

dynamic nattire of tiie organism cannot be capttired by a static science. Thus, for Serres,

the living system must be understood in "a bouquet of times" where tiie binary barricade

of the past and the present no longer exist m tiie convoluted flow of tune: "tiie rhesis

flows, but similarity pushes upstieam and resists. All the temporal vectors possessing a

directional arrow are here, m this place, arranged m the shape of a star" (Hermes 75).

Unlike modernists' belief in expansion, colonlallzation, and unification, postmodem

society rather moves toward implosion and diversity where Newtonian mechanical views

only produce paratactic problems.^ By conttast, chaos theory shows nonlinearity in the

universe requires more fractal and fluid methods beyond rigid belief in objectifications.

Technological personifications are novelists' response to the necessity of fractal

characterizations in pseudoscientific narratives of chaos. Especially, the growing conflict

between science and religion in our age can be more creatively solved by the genre of

"illuminated fantasy" where biological machines work as the source of illumination

despite its risk of puttmg scientific authenticity mto danger. Thus, as the titie of my

dissertation—"Lunbs of Life: Literature of Postinodem Anthropomorphic Technology

and Cosmology"—implies, I dealt witii allegorical myths as tiie guiding soul m contexts

of the debasing, mindlessly pleasure-orienting postmodem society. In this regard, it is

not accidental that Al technology nowadays tums more SF into the fantasy style, relying

heavily upon the transcendental power in paralleled myths.

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Compared to other major genres, science fiction developed from almost nothing.

Even tiiough it reached its present established form from Mary Shelley's gotiiic story

Frankenstein (1818), science fiction has long been misunderstood as a fancy speculative

genre whose cultural implications have not been as seriously regarded as those of realistic

novels. But it is also tme that smce the beginning era of the early nineteenth century,

some fascination with SF has been maintained by the growing importance of science in

culture. Now most postmodemists admit that SF more than any other genres produce

heuristic and experimental insights which allegorically reflect the present chaotic social

condition especially by its capacity to forecast the exceptional scientific developments in

advance. Fletcher notes the powerful "oracular mentality" of this allegorical language:

"Nowhere is this mixture of logic and superstition clearer than in the allegorical use of

oracles"" (296).

Long before artificial uitelligence began to intrigue scientific researchers with the

inv ention of the computer in the early forties, science fiction writers already tested its

scientific plausibility. What more mtrigues SF writers is its ethical and philosophical

problem through the imaginary simulation of human intelligence processes by machmes.

Instead of tteating mythical or supernatural aspects of the artificially made intelligence m

other genres, science fiction writers saw that a highly developed artificial device would

be realistically closer to a real human mind by helps of rapid computational logic and tiiat

the plausible blurring between human and machine could cause serious social conflicts.

The scientific unaguiations of Karel Capek, Isaac Asunov and Rudy Rucker are earlier

examples that show science writers' interesting suppositions of how mathematical rules

simulate complex human mmds. Their serious speculations about the realizable

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intelligence machines were vividly realistic and logically appealing to scientifically

unttained general audiences. So tiie involved etiiical and philosophical issues surrounding

tills newly emergmg artificial life were vigorously and critically reviewed despite tiie

paralleling ambiguity and uncertainty about artificial intelligence.

Compared to purely fantastic fictions where scientific plausibility is neglected,

science fiction writers' serious tteattnents of artificial intelligence come from tiieu belief

m tiie scientific realization of AI in tiie fiittire. Therefore, compared to tiie pure fantasy,

theu depictions of tiie mtelligent machines are based upon the close relations between

reality and unagmation about AI. This relation between visual and verbal unagery is

cmcial in James "Whitiark's following defmition of science fiction and fantasy and of

their distinction as well:

Science and ttaditional "hard" science fiction (based on disciplines closely related to mathematics) favor consistent, logical exttapolation from plausible premises. Illusttators of such science fiction should make certain that their drawings accurately and literally conform to the texts. Being dreamlike, fantasy has less to do with logic and possibility; where as often, there are pictures, theu linkage to the worlds is ideally as complex as the stmcture of visions. (Illuminated Fantasy 12-13)

For Whitiark, whereas fantasy is close to "[Hillis] Miller's emphasis on complexity

[which] accords with illumination", science fiction reflects "[Roland] Barthes's sttess on

a close link between visual and verbal imagery [which] fits illusttation" (13). Considering

that "the Spirit ttanscends static visual description," we can easily surmise that our

ttanscendental wishes are limited in illusttative SF (61).

Because non-SF tteatments of AI are mostly found in both fantasy and horror, this

distinction between illusttative SF and illuminated fantasy is vital in overcoming the

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somewhat deadlocked situation In Al tteatinents In SF. Generally, midway between hard

science and fantasy, SF tteatinent of AI displays how ttanscendental wishes of creating

souls are in vain. Though recent developments of AI science already permit computer

mastery of chess, it has not yet reached to the level of the more complicated games such

as Far Eastem Go.* A person knows it is okay to break a mle, but a machine might not.

Machines start actions only by humans' orders. Computers' lack of creativity, despite

their fast computation and uniformed actions, basically comes from this passivity found

in all mechanical processes.

SF writers' illusttative efforts to come closer to hard science can hardly overcome

these passively mechanical limitations of Al. For example, in Richard Power's Galatea

2.2 and Neal Stepheson's Snow Crash, the AI figures of Helen and avatar, despite their

claims upon the dignity already given to human beings, only enjoy ttansfigured lives

through inscription and incorporation without having ttanscendental experiences.

When Alan Turing, an English code-breaker during World War II, successfully broke

the German code "Enigma" tiirough his computer COLOSSUS, this artificial intelligence

machine was a monumental invention for advancing human intelligence. As computers

become more complicated, tiie intelligent computers have begun to reach such an

advanced level that we humans can not tell when questions are being answered by a

machine or a person. Namely, as tiie machine becomes more and more conscious like a

human, the borderiine between machine and human gets more blurred. SF writers'

tteatments of AI often deal with tiiis beginning of machine consciousness and also with

the danger and human responsibilities for this humanlike changuig machine. Joseph

Weizenbaum's more complicated artificial intelligence, Doctor or Eliza, like real

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psychotiierapists, talks with a human being in a therapeutic way. Some scientists even

claun that courtroom judges can someday be replaced by a computer.

However, ft is also true tiiat while technology brought radical change in social life,

human's basic physical life pattems are still following our forebears in many ways. We

still eat many of the same foods tiiat the Stone Age men ate. Our physical bodies are still

under physical limitations such as illness and death. The SF writers' depictions of

ttansfigured ways of life through Al show some aUemative ways of life (such as

longevity and automatic healing in the machines of blood and flesh) but the human

wishes to be immortal and ttanscendent are limitedly shown in the mechanically artificial

machines (the mechanical body with insufficient consciousness is at best described as

"half life").

It is said that when humans leam, actual physical changes take place in the brain. If

the purpose of Al is to imitate the human brain, it may imitate some intelligent

procedures as doctors or judges do. But the recreation of human brains is beyond

mechanical imitations. As Mary Jane Hurst proves in her article "New Technology for

Neurolinguistics," the individual human braui responds differently to different types of

language. Each uidividual's topographical maps are contiasted with the maps of other

individuals. Each individual's emotions such as melancholy, poetic experiences, and

fiTisttations change human brain chemicals and this unique biological change of human

brains to different experiences are beyond the mechanically artificial machines.

To overcome this mechanical limitation, fantasy and horror writers devise other

equivalents of AI in science fiction but from similar psychological aspects. With various

different names such as the double, Doppleganger, shadow. Sand man. Id, fantasy and

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horror writers describe humans' ttanscendental experiences of the hope and pleasure (in

case of fantasy) and ensnarement (in case of horror).^ The AI featured as biological

machines almost follow the magic of the fantasy as Piercy compares her cyborg Yod to

Golem. The scarecrow in the Wizard ofOz or the broom that comes to life In Fantasia is

ahnost similar to Butier's alien allegory of Gaia, the goddess of earth, disguised as alien's

organelles. Here the simplest or smallest object magically tums into the origin of

complexity. In Butier's fiction, the seed as the origin of life constitutes all life forms

through heroes' self-awakening m interactions with essential others. In this regard, these

powerful implosions of complexity through a simple hybrid in fantasy and horror have in

common with SF's personified Artificial Intelligence because they, as all about others

inherent in self, seek the subtler form of energy/substance to connect matter with

consciousness. As the simulacra of soul-making, personified Artificial Intelligence is

recognized finally as blasphemy like horror whereas it still gives some hope for

unshackling human limitations.

The balance between enttopy (life's losuig energy toward deterioration) and

negenttopy (life's own elaboration toward its increasing order) looks like the core ethics

ui SF tteatment of AI. To emphasize the balance between confmed consciousness and

wild imconsciousness, ttanspersonal psychologists such as Robert Assagioli chart the

human psyche as an egg diagram.'" As the diagram shows, Jung's collective unconscious

works as the vital element in reaching higher levels of consciousness. Transcendental

experiences can raise one to a higher self or ttanspersonal self (located in the fragile,

upper front of the eggshell). This higher state develops from the personal or conscious

self (located in the yolk position). As Harold Maslow's last phase of six human needs,

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tius metaphysical peak experience is, in otiier terms, a shell's exposure to a larger,

liberating worid from an egg-like human ego."

ft is probably titie tiiat "a hen is merely an egg's way of making anotiier egg," but

humans' increasmg power to change disttirbs tiiis primitive web of life.'^ Perhaps,

tiuough tiie "analmear" or "numbers witii heart" in Katya Walter's terms, we can find the

balance between tiie holistic right brain (tiie East) and tiie logical left brain (tiie West). If

SF approaches more to tiie left brain, fantasy and horror particularly affect tiie right brain.

Midway between this conscious "illusttation" and unconscious "illumination" (m

"Whitiark's sense of these terms), we can practice what Walter calls the subtier connecting

form of fusion between matter and consciousness-"psyche's muscles." While mechanical

personifications of Al always fail to connect their mechanic body with fluid

consciousness, biological personifications of AI succeed to achieve by having this

"psyche's muscle" mostly through mutated ttansformation. Almost always the reader can

find the potential super divine-embryo witiiin theu constantly changing outer forms.

However, their ttanscendental dream to become a human or an immortal being is always

negated and punishment follows If they attempt it. In this regard. It is no wonder that the

fantasy-approaching biological artificial devices (such as Oankali in Octavia Buttier's

and Golem in Marge Piercy's SF) provide us with a more holistically inspiring yet

humble mind which is critically needed in every effort to reach any combination of two

separate hemispheres of our brain and the globe.

Octavia Butler's latest novels, the Parable series, are exactly this dramatization of

humans' potentiality not by expansion but rather by implosion that is the same as

Assagioli's condensation of human psyche as an egg-like form.'^ What Butler has in

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mmd m her projection of human beings as seeds is in midway between full

personification and tiie amorphous spuit, yet far from unpersonal nature itself

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe m a kind of super-person. A few believe God is anotiier word for nature. And nature tums out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel In conttol of Some say God is a spuit, a force, an ultunate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you'll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected? (Parable of the Sower 13)

In an apocalyptically described near future of the 2020s, Butier's God of change is a

way of life, as well as a new religion. Like Johnathan Edward's sermon about an angry

Christian God's wrath toward sirmers, "pyro," the new illegal dmg, brings people to a

fiery hell but in this world as the addicts bum most of remaining civilization. For many,

the only surviving way is robbing someone else's food, money, and arms. Nature,

humans, and animals all tum more vicious: Water becomes rare like gold; dogs attack

people for meat; many people are illiterate and policemen act like gangs.

In Robledo located 20 miles from Los Angeles, Lauren Olamina, a daughter of a

minister, begins an exodus with a small group of people when her house Is bumt by a

mob. As a taU, sturdy, and teen-age black girl, Olamina feels an urgent need to create a

vital credo for survival during her highway joumey to the Alaskan-Canadian border.

Based upon the power of mevitable change in the universe, she creates a Book of the

Living, Earthseed in conttast with the Tibetian and the Egyptian Books of the Dead. In

order to restore human dignity, she thinks that God as change needs to be shaped: "God is

change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped" (Sower 67). This

concept of change as God, in fact, comes from her West African practices (Yomban

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mythology) and bmds botii tiie Westem and tiie Eastem religions, along witii botii science

and humanity''*:

Everyone knows tiiat change is inevitable. From tiie second law of tiiermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism"s insistence that nothuig is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the thud chapter of Ecclesiastes ("To everytiimg tiiere is a season..."), change is part of life, of existence, of tiie common wisdom. (Sower 23)

To make people remember tills value of change, she shapes her own God witii tiie

concept of change and creates tiie vivid image of a seed as an icon of tius new credo.

Like a seed, her God of change is unpredictable yet life-giving. Some important teachings

of this new credo are persistence ("the weak can overcome the sttong if the weak

persist"), diversity ("embrace diversity or be desttoyed"), and action ("worship is no

good witiiout action") (119, 176, 197). Her Buddhistic and biological conscience of

hyperempathy is also, together with the Western belief m love, an important element in

this Earthseed credo: ''if hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint,

people coiildn"t do such [inhumane] things" (102). To balance the dissipative enttopy in

the post-postmodem world, she seeks the creative power of change that could not be

defied by anyone or anything. .And this God of change is, like transpersonal psychology.

based upon the meditativ e channeling to each individual"s subconscious minds:

^'e must find the rest of what we need Within ourselves, in one another, in our Destiny. (Sower 220)

The Self must create Its own reasons for being. To sh^seGod,

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Shape Self (Sower 220)

Witii a total of 67 people, Olamina's exodus in the 2020s ends m Acom place of

Humboldt county, the land of Bankole. her old black doctor husband whom she

accidentally met during her joumey. The more twists and turns of Olamina's new

community in the 2030s are ratiier told by her daughter, Larkin Beryl [Bankole's

mother s name] Ife [Lov e in the Yomban language] Olamina Bankole. In Parable of the

Talents, the so-called Pox from 2015 to 2030 is already fmished. Yet, pleasure is still

rare while pain is plentiful. The midwest and south In America are withering from the

heat and number of wars including the Al-Can war (American war with independent

Alaska and Canada) are going on around the world. Under the presidency of Jarret, the

leader of religious McCarthism, who objects to the project on Mars, America is described

as the disenchanted land which is suffering from rigid religious dogmatism called CA

(Christian .America).

Using the new scientific device of slave collars (the revival of Dr. Moreau's gismo in

H.W. "V 'ellss novel), tiie CA group sent rebels to Christian Camp, tiie religious

concentration camp, to brainwash them into rigid Christians. Most of Acom community

members are sent to this Christian Camp and their children are adopted by CA middle-

class members. By the guardianship of Marcus Duran. Olamina's famous half-brother

CA minister. Larkui (also known as Asha Vere Alexander) is adopted by tiie

Alexander's, a black middle-class family m Seattle. In tiie Christian Camp, tiie slave

coUars ironically are the exact opposite of Olamma's biological hyperempathy:

I heard that some collars can also give cheap, delicious rewards of pleasure for good behaviors by encouraging

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changes in brain chemistiy—stimulating tiie wearer to produce endorphines. I don't know whetiier tiiat's tiue, but if it is, tiie whole business sounds a little like being a sharer— except tiiat instead of sharing what otiier people feel, the wearer feels whatever tiie person holding tiie contiol unft wants him to feel. This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. (Talents SO)

Like black slaves under colonial powers, most female Acom members in tiie camp are

raped by CA conttollers and some male members are killed. Even tiie adopted children of

tiie Acom community suffer from alienation and violence from tiieir Matton parents. A

seven-year-old boy witii Tourette's syndrom is killed by a Matton because he is believed

to be driven by a devil. Yet, after seventeen montii's slavery, Acom members

successfully escape from tiie camp thanks to tiie suddenly broken hillside which buries

the conttol system of slavery collars. Marcus later reveals tiie fact to Larkin and

Olamina's diary is handed to Larkin after her death at the age of 81.

In conttast with Marcus Duran's book of Warrior where order, stability, safety, and

conttol preside, Olamina's Book of Livmg is directed toward love, sharing, and

partnership. Also, in a sharp conttast with CA group's belief in the changelessness of

God, Olamina's God of change is closer to chaos. And this God of change is, like

meditations and prayers in Eastem and Westem religions, based upon the "vastness of

humans' inside minds: "To shape God,/ Shape self (Talents 213). Like the fractal

pattem in the chaos theory, the Earthseed is here acting as "a new guiding force, that can

help humanity to put its great energy, competitiveness, and creativity to work doing the

truly vast job of fulfilling the Destiny" (Talents 267). With this negentiopic shaping

force, Earthseed becomes what Serres means by "positive chaos" or "the primal noise"

through which people understand without using ttaditional concepts:

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histead of regretting tiie loss of tiie unitary constiuct—the concept as tiie basis of all our knowledge—we must understand that "the tower of Babel reverses itself [collapses], and so does tiie meaning of hs text" (203). In tiiis way, we began to read tiie story of Babel in a non-Genesis fashion: "Non-completion does not mean the minous residue or failure, but is tiie prunary stattis of all tilings" (203). Neither positive nor negative, tills view of chaos is offered witiun a text dominated by "la belle noiseuse" and deals in particular witii noise, din, tiie confusion of language. Not tiie tower as the paradigm of a systematic, unique, unilmgual solution, but the chaotic rums and tiie cacophony of incomprehensible sounds are the "ordmary conditions" of our Lebenswelt (203). Not Frenhofer's wonderful paintings displayed in his studio, but "the formless fountam of all forms" (39). Balzac represses this knowledge behind the "unknown"; Serres resurrects it by "reversing the text," baptizmg it "La belle Noiseuse." (Assad 286)

In Butler's novel, the unavoidable, irresistible, and ongomg change provides hidden order

through Olamina's meditative conttol of mind and also through her creative use of chaos.

Her ideal to spread the Gaian essences (such as humans, plants and animals) to exttasolar

worlds is also achieved m 2090 by the appearance of the Earth's fust men-carrying

starshlp (though it is named the Christopher Columbus despite Olamina's objection).

On the eve of the third millenium we are not sure if our science in the future can be

hope (like the starshlp) or fear (like slavery collars). Like Asha Bere, the other name of

Larkin Beryl Ife (archetypal Love), our future science will create more masks ("Asha

Vere was the name of a character in a popular Dreamask program") than the present

digital technology. As Butier predicts, through these illusionary masks, we may

hedonistically submerge ourselves in "other, simpler, happier lives" (Talents 200).

However, we can be at least sure that, before science advances more unpredictably and

elusively, the modest projection of humans as seeds in myths can bring partnership

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between humans and nattire, along witii tiie adaptability to futtire science. If tiie seed is

tiie modest, implosive response to tills cosmic partnership, fragmented antiuopomorphic

images m mytii tell us why human's impious, self-aggrandizing efforts are not desirable

in themselves.

The dismembered limbs of Osiris and Orpheus allegorically tell us tiiat the

superogranic cosmogenesis is not limited to tiie earth-bound (Gaia Goddesses) or human-

centered (anthropomorphic) mechanical evolution. However, as the ttanspersonal

psychology suggests tiiat yolk-like human consciousness can reach the higher self by

being awakened by collective consciousness, dismembered personified life force in

mythology also tells us that cosmogenesis can move from chaos to order if mterpreted

through a synthesis of matter and consciousness.

The rigorous modem scientific materialism sees consciousness mere as the

byproduct of matter, or just as the electtochemical activity in the brain. But we all know

that organism is different from matter because the sum of organic parts is holistic and

mysterious. However neuroscience advances, science alone caimot explain human's

comphcated brain function not to speak of our moral or ttanscendental desires involved

in it. About this. Abbe Mowshowitz astutely says, "m the search for God, the rationalist

becomes a mystic" (xviii).

Conversely, if mysticism gives us some unexplainable satisfaction, we need to put

the ttanscendental experience m scientific experiments. Joseph Campbell in his Myths to

Live By clearly states this point:

It has always been on myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded, the myths canonized as religion, and since the impact of science on myths results apparentiy inevitably-in

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moral disequilibration, we must now ask whether it is not possible to arrive scientifically at such an understanding of tiie life-supporting nature of mytiis. (10)

hi terms of tiie scientific worldview, biologist Rupert Sheldrake's morphic field

tiieory may serve as tiie most appropriate facttial explanation for tiie belief on tills Orphic

cosmogenetic vitalism, hi "Evolutionary Habits of Minds, Behaviour and Form,"

Sheldrake writes:

The idea of the hypothesis of formative causation if that systems such as crystals, atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, or organisms are organized by fields called 'morphic fields'— morphic coming from the Greek morphe, meaning 'form.' Each of these systems has its own kind of field. This idea grows out of a generalization of 'morphogentic fields,' which is an idea that has been around in biology for over seventy years, which proposes the existence of form-shaping fields that are within and around the organisms that they organize. This idea was originally developed as a biological analogue of magnetic fields, which defmes a 'region of influence.' Fields are regions of influence in space and time and the magnetic field, of course is both within the magnet and around it. In modem theories of matter in physics, matter is no longer primary. (202)

As a generalization of the field concept where "nature is more like modifications of space

than of emanating out from matter, or made of matter," the idea of morphic fields

connects the dead and unconscious matter with a living, evolving conscious entity

through "morphic resonance." As the material-idealist who believe consciousness and

substance are fundamentally one, David Pratt explains why this "hazy notion" of morphic

field satisfy than material science about the mystery of human and universe:

His [Sheldrake's] basic argument is that natural systems, or morphic units, at all levels of complexity—atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and societies of organisms—^are animated, organized, and coordinated by morphic fields, which contains an inherent memory. Natural

322

systems mherit this collective memory from all previous tiungs of tiieu kmd by a process called morphic resonance, witii tiie resuU tiiat pattems of development and behavior become mcreasingly habittial tiuough repetition. Sheldrake suggests tiiat there is a continuous spectitim of morphic fields, includmg morphogentic fields, behavior fields, mental fields, and social and cultural field.

And Pratt provides a more detailed explanation of this "morphic resonance":

Within and around tiie physical body there is a series of subtler 'bodies' compose of tiiese more ethereal states of matter. Memories, then, are impressed on the etheric substance of supraphysical planes, and we gain access to these records by vibrational synchrony, tiiese vibrations being ttansmitted through the asttal light.

For Pratt, the growth of an organism from a seed or egg, the existence of instinct and

self-consciousness, the purposeful nature of evolution, and a wide variety of

pamanormal all attest the existence of morphogentic aethereal medium which is of

course too tiny to be detectable by scientific fields.

Similarly, synthesizing facts with beliefs, a French geopaleontologist and priest

Teilard de Chardin suggests that the unity of this universe is based neither completely

upon matter nor upon energy, but rather upon the spiritual unity of God-Omega and the

human Omega. For him, the emerging noosphere or layer of human thought and its

products is supposed to envelope the biosphere and geosphere by the creative synthesis of

the God-Omega (the beginning and end of cosmic evolution) with a collective human

brain and heart.

The anthropomorphic concept in personified Nature (Mother Nature) is pervasive in

human culture. This universal way of anthropocentric thinking is commonly a form of

materio-idealism where consciousness and substance fundamentally merge into the

323

etemal and infinite evolution.'^ As Sheldrake says, before tiie mechanistic tiieory was

mttoduced in tiie seventeentii centtuy, "tiie worid itself was alive" and "plants had souls

too" (210). He pomts out, however, after tiie Motiier Nattue and God tiie Fatiier are dead

by tiie God of "world machme." we human beings became "cosmic orphans" (210). As a

renowned imaginative scientist. Sheldrake doesn't support either materialism

(consciousness as a byproduct of matter) or idealism (consciousness as tiie ultimate

reality). Also, unlike materio-idealism (consciousness and substance as the

fundamentally one) of Teihard de Chardm or David Pratt, Sheldrake takes the position of

dualism (consciousness and matter are mdependent but complementary aspects of

reality). Similar to Katya Walter's "co-chaos" theory, Sheldrake notes:

Whenever we come to think of creativity, we will end up with these archetypal pattems [yin/yang in a circle, logos/spirit in the Christian trinity, Shiva'Shakti in an orgasmic embrace], which show us that there is both a principle of form and a dynamic principle. I think it is those two together that give us an evolutionary universe. If we just had fixed laws, we wouldn't have an evolutionary universe. If we just had only dynamical change or energy, we would have chaos. The two together, I think, give a universe of developing, evolving form, pattem and order, which itself is subject to natural selection. Nature is a system of evolving habits, with an inherent, ongoing creativity. (214)

The dismembered Orphic theme in mythology is the cosmic third principle which hold

together the dualism of matter/consciousness. Revealing the limitation of human

consciousness, the dismembered limbs of anthropomorphic super organic body require of

us a ttanscendental synthesis which can connect morphic fields between dismembered

material limbs. The intemet that many call the greatest technology of the 20* century

now emerges as the infogluting artificial limbs which might substitute for the mythic

324

superorganic ones. Gigantic emotional or intellectual information is now being

exchanged tiirough global networking. If our hand doesn't reach the intemet keyboard,

we now feel a great loss perhaps equivalent to tiie loss of our nattiral limbs. The

prosthetic lunbs of the computer now constitute parts of our body and our confidence on

science is dangerously heightened. Altiiough we feel like living beyond tune and space,

some apocalyptic symptom such as self-indulgence, cyber sex and war are wafting for us

around the comer of this warped space as well.

Without any symbolic ritual of sparagmos (the tearing in pieces of a live victun), this

artificial technology of collective human consciousness, like the impersonal subject of

"it" (i.e., in the sentence "I think ft is snowing"), works like a human subject o f f in the

digital era. Encouraged by this science-enhanced masquerade, humans' role-playing and

communication is dangerously expanding nowadays, turning postmodem society into a

chaos of differences. As the helmsman of the ship, our soul needs more director's role to

guide growing actors in us, whether they are either natural or artificial.

Like snow, this artificial subhuman technology magically changes our landscape as

well as our inner soulscape, not by warming but by freezing our natural sensitivity. The

"icy'' technology provides us with more shaped yet hedonistic worldview. Thus, we must

not be forgetiftil that this infinite illusion of technology is due to the numbing of our

mtangible limbs and spirit alike (like the use of dmg).

It is the time that we now need some cyber ritual for personified Artificial

InteUigence m order that we do not forget that we cannot reach a Universal Self entirely

through super technology, the new human collective consciousness. As the word cyborg

(or terminal) subjectivity implies, however, the growing empathy beyond race and gender

325

(not class yet) tiirough technology gives us more hope tiiat technological morphic field

may change the human nooshpere positively. About tiiis vision of optunistic technopia,

Butier's allegorical use of human consciousness as an Eartiiseed in the near fiiture

techno-society cautiously suggests tiiat technology will cause more serious side-effects

tiian desu-able solutions if human consciousness remains tiie selfish steersman.

The personified machines in the aforementioned postinodem science fiction

commonly reveal tiiat the inherent hierarchical and conttadictory human characters

cannot be cured by technology. Mechanical personifications show that lunited human-

centered knowledge Is not effective anymore in the ttanscendental sphere. By conttast,

biological personification models reveal that the dark side of human's self-reflective

unconsciousness must be awakened to be creative chaos, urging more upward fantastic

concept of the divine (God as the transcendental power instead of God as the morally

strict and angry Father) from outward cosmocentric views. While personified machines

heuristically lead humans to compassion on lower-order beings, the dismembered

supreme being interwoven with biological machines wams that this personification

device also can be the dangerous ttansformation of human hubris. In this midway

between matter and spuit, personified machines, as Davie suggests, give us "alarming

image of what sort of world it is tiiat we live in" (103). And as we have seen before, tiie

closer personified machines get to the noumenal or ttanscendetal dimension, the more

problematic and violent they become.

Comparably, Butler's allegory of Earthseed affirms the implosive fractal pattem of

the dismembered anthropomorphic supreme being by being amorphous and becoming.

As the intermediary third level of logocentrism and ttanscendentalism, Butler's concept

326

of earthseed shows that the best, safest way to reach our Higher Self can be achieved

rather by perseverance and sacrifice without relying upon personified forms in dealing

with changes which govems botii matter and consciousness.

Although the West's personification of higher beings (e.g., a God the father) and the

East's depersonification of human beings (e.g., cyclic nature) respectively may have

resulted in the development of human intelligence (e.g., science) and emotion (e.g.,

sympathy), the coming new age must be the time to merge the lopsided stteam into a

higher, infinite and etemal consciousness-substance where matter and spirit complement

aspects of reality without oppositions. As Westem and Eastem religions commonly

imply, the seed as tiie fractal of this cosmic evolution Is the most probable positive

chaos/hun-dun by its embracing the morphogenetlc future order which is supposedly

harmonious, immortal and fhiitflil. Like the programming of the cosmic intemet, the

spuitually well-cared earthseed will merge nature with consciousness by reaching "the

Omega Pomt' supermind that will banish the forces of heat death and place the cosmos

under the conttol of consciousness" (Techgnosis 293).

327

Notes

hi Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, Serres mentions tiie need to combine logos and mythos tiirough "prosopoeia of topology and nodes": "One must find tiie Weaver, tiie proto-worker of space, tiie prosopopoeia of topology and nodes, the Weaver who works locally to join two worids that are separated, according to tiie autochton's mytii by a sudden stoppage, tiie metamorphic caesura amassing deaths and shipwrecks (52).

Serres's use of Ur-suppe is based upon Jules Michelet's La Mer (Paris: Hachette, 1861): ""What is Nephmism? It is a tiieory which holds tiiat tiie sea is tiie Ur-Suppe, the fimdamental soup, that is to say tiie matter from which all other material things origmated. On tiie Other hand, Heterogeny, championed at the tune of [Jules] Michelet by Pouchet. supports the tiieory of spontaneous generation, ft maintams tiiat all living beings are derived from matter. As a hylozoist, Michelet applies the two doctrines to each other, the Neptunism of Wemer to the Heterogeny of Pouchet. The Neptunian Ur-Suppe becomes what we would call today the prebiotic soup" (Hermes 30).

See the detail in the Amazon book reviews (http://vyww.amazon.com)

4 The definition of noosphere is "the biosphere including and modified by such human activities as agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, urbEinization, and industrialization. Also called anthroposphere" (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Bames & Noble, 1996).

^ See the detail in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (p. 87-92). Serres here suggested while science has all the power, rights and plausibility while it also has all the problems and responsibilities. By conttast, myths are termed as "the connector of spaces" that guides the beast of science (Hermes 46-51). What Serres emphasizes in the end is based upon the modest acceptance of human weakness: "We advance through problems and not through victories, through failures and rectifications rather than by surpassing' (Conversation 188).

^ The connection between implosion and postmodemism is well expressed in Jean Baudriallrd's Simulation: "the nuclear system institutes a universally accelerated process of implosion, it conceals everything around it, it absorbs all living energy" (74). Like this nuclear system, postmodem simulation is "the reigning scheme of the current phase that is conttolled by the code" (83). The cited page is from the English version ttanslated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, published by Semiotext(e), hic.,uil983.

328

"Well-composed fantasy helps to make the movement from one to other palatable, but the reader/viewer must have sufficient understanding to meet the challenges of the geme, including that of intuiting overall unity in seeming chaos" (Illuminated Fantasy 206). Similarly, Buddhism is treated as the illuminated fantasy: "Buddhism is far less interested in scientific description of the worid than in employing language as a means of waking up the devotees so that they can see reality directiy" (203).

Poe's "Maelzel's Chess Player" is one of tiie earliest tales genumely deal witii the questions of artificial intelligence.

Some examples of these fantasies are Gustav Meyrink's esoteric romance The Golem (1915) and E.T.A. Hofftnan's The Sandman where Nathaniel discovers that his lover Olympia is an automaton, built by her father.

'° The egg diagram of the human psyche from Robert Assagioli's The Act of Will (Balitmore: Penguin Books, 1973), p 14

^ 7 \ 1. Lower unconscious

3 1 * 2. Middle unconscious ' ~ *^" ' \ ' 3. Higher unconscious, or Superconscious # ' ' \ 1 4. Field of consciousness '4 ^5 • 2 ' 5. Conscious self, Personal self, or T \ ' ^' ', 6. Higher self, or Transpersonal self ..T^.~.^. 7. Collective unconscious

/

" Maslow's hierarchy of needs is as follows: (http://www.transpersonal.pe.kr/sub3/index3.htinl)

<growth-needs/meta-needs> 6. transpersonal needs 5. self-actualization needs <deficiency-needs> 4. self-esteem needs 3. needs for belongingness and love 2. safety needs 1. physiological needs

329

'• For the source of the cited phrase, refer to Norbet Wiener's God and Golem, Inc (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), p.36. He says ft is from either Bernard Shaw or Samuel Butier.

' In Psychology (NY: Barron's, 1999), Don Baucum provides some detailed explanation about communication as channeling. According to him, a model applies to persuasive appeals in general developed by Carl Ho viand (1912-1961) and collegues in the 1940s. The model specifies four considerations in persuasive appeals that determine their aft'ectiveness; character of the communicator, the message, the channel, and the audienc. While communicator characters use atttativeness, the message adopts obvious things such as repetition. Here channel characteristics have to do with the medium through which the message is conveyed. For example, more complex message and arguments fimction better in written media that allow the audience to have time to contemplate and reflect whereas simpler and succinct messages are more effectively conveyed by visual media. Two-sided and complex arguments are more effective with a more intelligent audience that is aheady mformed about opposing views (307-8).

' "Yomba is the first language of approxunately 30 million West Africans, and is spoken by popluations in Southwestem Nigeria, Togo, Benin, and Sierra Leone ...African-American students often study Yomba out of interest in their own heritage, since many of the slaves brought to North America during tiie 18* and 19"' centuries came from Yomba-speaking areas" (http://afiican.lss.wisc.edu/yomba/pages/why.tiiml).

330

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