Posthuman Photography

"The human body is no longer an absolute entity, fixed by nature and destined to be eternally replicated...the era of genetically engineered body has begun. We are beginning to think of the bodies we inhabit in much the same way as we do the clothes we wear - as changeable according to climate, task, fashion, and whim...We are allowing our bodies to be transformed..." (From The Century of the Body: 100 Photoworks 1900-2000, Edited by William Ewing, Thames & Hudson, 2000). 

On a break from Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman this past weekend I was researching another project and came across this opening to a photography book concerning the human body. The introduction continued on the topic of how artists, specifically photographers photographing nudes, are reconsidering this reconfigured body of the digital age. The introduction also pointed to the fact that photographs of the body are both the core of our dreams and of our nightmares since by representing the body they bring both an enjoyment of and fear of the body. The picture accompanying this post by Pierre Boucher called “Electra” from 1961 evokes the terror and pleasure that Hayles speaks of in the prospect of becoming posthuman. 

The photograph displays the paradox between the pleasure and terror of the prospect of posthumanism because it displays Hayles’ argument that the “human being is first of all an embodied being” (283). It is pleasurable to see a new way of thinking the nude. Yet the machines in the photograph cannot articulate the beauty of the human form. In the conclusion to Hayles’ book she points to the fact that “the body itself is a congealed metaphor, a physical structure whose constraints and possibilities have been formed by an evolutionary history that intelligent machines do not share” (284). This picture I see as a perfect display of that statement.