Even Better than the Real Thing? ~ Introduction

Humanity’s relationship with science and technology is rather elusive. Human minds have developed and shaped science and technology as we know these disciplines today, but arguably science and technology have equally shaped and allowed humanity to progress to its current condition. The relationship appears to be a symbiotic one. Prehistoric inventions such as the wheel, weapons and utensils helped make certain difficult tasks much easier for a species which was considerably vulnerable in the wild. Scientific study has allowed for medicine to keep sustaining human life further. Humans constantly develop science and technology in order to make human existence less burdensome. The continual merging of science and technology has given birth to a new signifier; techno-science. Donna Haraway, a feminist theorist who was extremely influential to the beginnings of cyberculture theory, regards the term techno-science as that “which mimes the implosion of science and technology” and thus “designates dense nodes of human and non-human actors that are brought into alliance by the material, social, and semiotic technologies through which what will count as nature and as matters of fact will get constituted.”[1] Therefore techno-science indicates that not only have the individual fields of science and technology consolidated, but that they have also become inseparable from human.

It is evident that today more than ever before, society is burdened by the very entities that were meant to set it free. Philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard questions postmodern society in relation to science and technology in his book The Inhuman; a collection of similar themed essays first published in 1988. In an essay titled Rewriting Modernity Lyotard argues that;

“Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.”[2]

Throughout The Inhuman Lyotard seems to suggest that the postmodern condition and the future of humanity are determined by our “capacity to negotiate a more creative, symbiotic, relationship with these technologies.”[3] Humanity must therefore embrace the techno-scientific and “the evolution of technology as part of the essential destiny of the human species.”[4]

This dissertation will explore various postmodern and cyberculture theories in relation to literature and film, regarding how humanity is evolving and changing with its latest techno-scientific creations. Specifically analysing two seminal science-fiction novels - Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer - this dissertation will firstly discuss how humans are integrating technology with their bodies, and consequently becoming cyborgs. This will lead on to an analysis of how science and technology is being utilised to create humans artificially in laboratories and factories. The second half of this study is dedicated to theories regarding the human in relation to the virtual; specifically exploring the relationship man has with computers and the internet. Ensuing this will be an investigation into the possibility of a future humanity that is autonomous from the physical bodies that presently define human. By exploring these different elements, this dissertation will try shed light onto what the term ‘human’ means in context of our present day techno-scientific existences.
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[1]Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.Female.Man_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminsim and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), p.50.
[2]Jean-François Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 34.
[3]William Martin, “Re-Programming Lyotard: From the Postmodern to the Posthuman Condition,” Parrhesia 8 (2009):60.
[4]Ibid. 68.