Beyond Flickering Signifiers: Frissonic Value and Shifting Boundaries in the Context of Contemporary Hybridity

GARNET HERTZ / 18 MARCH 2004

In "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" N. Katherine Hayles proposes the term flickering signifier to refer to the linguistic and psychodynamic experience of the human confronting the posthuman; the point at which the individual confronts the concept that humanity is lo longer the most important figure of the universe – that information, technology and machines are the reference point to which humanity now views its reflection.

Hayles’ concepts, however, do not delve deeply into the psychodynamic mechanics of the moment of encountering the posthuman, and are obfuscated by the skeuomorph of virtuality.  In other words, her explanation of flickering signifiers focuses on positioning the concept within the frames of Lacan, communication theory, literature, informatics and the internet – as opposed to the psychological experience of the individual, and why the symbolic moment creates unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations and dispersions.  Hayles is on the right path and lays necessary bridgework for exploring the human/posthuman encounter but does not give voice to the embodied, personal implications of it.  As such, this paper will:

·	Seek to clarify the dynamics of the exact point of confrontation of the human with the posthuman
·	Strive to articulate this confrontation beyond the skeuomorph of virtuality, and
·	Begin to develop a framework in which this confrontation experience can be viewed within the larger contexts of consciousness and meaning.

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES OF HUMANITY: VARIABILE, ABSTRACTED, NON-HUMAN

Before beginning, however, it is important to consider the term posthuman, seated at the core of this discussion.  Posthumanism and its ancestry, as described by Hayles in “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics” is birthed out of the pregnancy of three generations of cybernetics.  Through these phases, she argues the transformation of the human to the posthuman.

Hayles interprets the first wave of cybernetics, which – within the context of human – focused on homeostasis, and concluded that the boundaries of humanness are variable; the second wave, oriented around the themes of self-organization and reflexivity, proposed among other things that humans and life-forms are part of a wider cybernetic system.  Not only are the boundaries of the human variable, but the mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system eclipse the dynamics of information, message or signal; information itself becomes subsumed by the organizational principles of a system.  In human terms the second wave of cybernetics saw foundational concepts like “life”, for example, become abstracted into a broader concept like self-organization and self-generation: autopoiesis.  The third wave of cybernetics, as interpreted by Hayles is seen as being virtual-based: self-organization and autopoesis are not only taken to be descriptors of life in a system, they are actuated as agents in emerging new virtual life forms: namely, within the fields of artificial intelligence and artificial life

Within the definition of posthumanism, though, Hayles points to the ebbs in cybernetics as revealing a trend of information becoming dematerialized and the reflective point of reference for humanity becoming variable, abstracted and eventually non-humanized.  And this is the posthuman: the human that is not the key player in the universe – informatics, technology and machines provide the mental canvass for what it means to exist.

THE SKUEOMORPH OF THE VIRTUAL

Hales’ concept of the flickering signifier is firmly positioned within the context of semiotics, information theory, literature and virtuality: she sees posthumanism from the vantage of a world of increasingly disembodied information.  Although this is valid, there is a simpler and more direct method of encountering the frissonic encounter with the posthuman – confronting the embodied byproducts of its age: physically intelligent robots, embodied software agents, genetically modified organisms and other reconfigurations and explorations in hybridity and demarcation-plays of “human”.

Predictably enough, Hayles’ perspective is limited by the cloud of “virtuality” which she defines as being the most recent constellation-wave of third order cybernetics.  Although she gracefully charts the pattern of how each successive generation of cybernetics was limited by the paradigm constraints of the previous era [page 16, “How We Became Posthuman – see appendix], she ironically is fettered by the same restraints; the skeuomorph of virtuality – including, perhaps information theory, Lacan’s semiotics, informatics, literature, narrative, and the internet – hinders her from confronting the posthuman forms in our daily, embodied world.

For example, Hayles’ summary of Brooks’ and Varela’s works, under the banner of “virtual” , and continuing on a trajectory of disembodiment, is jarring.  Brooks’ work in physically mobile robots is explicity embodied in both form and inspiration, and he clearly agrues for the importance of embodiment.  Similarily, Varela’s work can be seen as an attempt to re-embody information.  Granted, their mediums of embodiment are non-human, but they are – especially Brooks – far from virtual.  The skeuomorph of virtuality obfuscates her interpretation of these contemporary hybrid objects.

Echos of the posthuman are not virtual: they grow in the fertility labs and genetically modified foods we eat, they exist as intelligent agents in the videogames sold at WalMart, they operate and reproduce in the university labs around our corner.  Shedding the discourse of virtuality for a moment reveals a straightforward, visceral encounter with contemporary hybridity that is more than cerebral: it benefits from the high-bandwidth interface of embodiment as opposed to the abstracted.  The posthuman is embodied: its eyes are in front of us, staring back.

ENCOUNTERING THE POSTHUMAN AND THE HISTORY OF THE HYBRID

So, what composes the psychodynamic moment when the human confronts the posthuman?  What is the subject thinking and feeling while contemplating the posthuman, and why?  Drawing metaphors from history provides rich contexts for understanding this encounter.

Throughout history, humans have attempted to endow life into the non-living: societies – through imagined or physical objects – have expressed awe for the creation of life, and have speculated in hybrid variations in this realm throughout time.  Cultures have conjectured about the mystery of the creation of life, and have created a fascinating history in the pursuit of creating it.

Hybrid variations in the creation of life continue to be pursued in the posthuman age: our contemporary history has added genetically modified organisms, artificial intelligence and artificial life to this narrative.  The age-old story of the human-created living is actively being written.

However, creating sentient, animated life is a complicated affair: the tales of its development are populated with hybrid, malfunctioning beasts and bisections of what it means to be alive, embodied or sentient.

This malfunctioning semi-living hybrid has historically served as a key focal point for defining the boundary lines of life, humanness, and ethics: providing a construction of something most-like-us while simultaneously being most-unlike-us.  The mirror of our attempts to create life are most jarring when the reflected image portrays a unique signature of our human presence, while at the same time being profoundly different than who we think we are.  And so is posthumanism.

I propose that the encounter between the human and the posthuman, and thus the flickering signifier, is similar in function: the encounter breeds a similar response to the uncanny confrontation of us to the other, the standard to the hybrid, the human to the cyborg, the self to virtual bodies and identities.  The posthuman is only an alternate configuration of the narrative of the hybrid.

In a functional sense, I propose that encountering the hybrid is primarily induces a psychodynamic space of frisson, a deep emotional undulation between attraction and repulsion: a pleasurable sensation of fright that proposes the viewer with the parallax between the image of their self and the reflection of their hybrid.  This frissonic moment, I propose, has historically been used as a tool to gain a clearer understanding of what it means to be alive, embodied, cognizant, creative and human, and as such, is relevant to exploring the flickering terrain of the posthuman.

MORI AND ROBOTIC DESIGN: THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF THE UNCANNY VALLEY

"Automata since the sixteenth century have intruiged the public without frightening or intimidating them.  The average person craves "safe" magic, the titillation and tiny ecstacy afforded by the occult kept securely in its cage."
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, p. 187.

Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist and author from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, provides some clarification in describing the uncanny sense of frisson that is experienced when encountering objects that are most-like-us and simultaneously most-unlike-us.  Although his work was written in the 1970's and was originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to anthropomorphized robotic design, it still provides a useful metaphor toward the analysis of similar creations, including the flickering attraction/repulsion of the human to posthuman.

In summary, Mori proposes that the creation of life-like objects go through a clear pattern of psychodynamics: as the object becomes more life-like, one's familiarity and comfort with the object increases until a point in which it is perceived as being convincingly life-like.  As the object's life-likeness approaches a close proximity to humanness, one's familiarity and comfort with the object plummets: the object is no longer "safe magic".  It is within a zone termed the "uncanny valley".  Although it appears virtually human, its contrasts to humankind are perceived through its nuanced shortcomings: its embodied deviance, malfunctioning sentience, or glitched humanity makes the object more uncanny and unfamiliar than the "cute" objects that do not attempt to approach literal humanness.

Mori's interests are thrust toward the design of robotic devices, and that increased anthrorealistic design does not consistently cause an increase in one's level of object amiability: similarity does not directly correlate to familiarity.  Applied to the field of robotic prosthetics, for example, Mori argues that the uncanny valley should be avoided by making prosthetics that are clearly designed with a mechanical aesthetic, not a latex facsimile of flesh-and-bones.  By not masquerading as something more lifelike than it is, the hand avoids the uncanny valley and averts the frisson of a cold, spongy handshake given to an individual that was expecting a warm, fleshy grasp.

FRISSONICS OF THE FLICKERING SIGNIFIER: CONTEMPORARY HYBRID ENCOUNTERS

"...even though we think we have heard about, or watched the ultimate uncanny movie scene or computer game moment, every possible combination of living flesh hosted by lifeless flesh, dead flesh motile through living non-flesh, dead non-flesh quickened by flesh, etc., etc., an experience of the uncanny in our own day-to-day lives will always be possible.  Psychoanalytic theory claims that as long as we begin as babies in the arms of somebody, we will end up susceptible to uncanny experiences."
Jeanne Randolph, "Looking Back at Cyborgs" p 221 in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

Anthropomorphic uncanniness extends beyond the realm of robotic prosthetics, of course.  The signatures of humanness go beyond external appearance and mobility: cognition, visceral embodiment, creativity, culture and language compose a portion of the palette of our complex and dynamic definition of the human creature and self.  Life-likeness extends into the contemporary regions of research that probe what it means to be intelligent, alive and human.

Regions of posthumanism – genomics, artificial life and artificial intelligence - are founded on an uncanny, frissonic premise: to understand the formal basis of life or a computational reconstruction of cognition sans-human or without life in its standard format.  Artificial life, for example, is engaged with how life arises from the non-living, the potentials and limits of living systems, and how life relates to mind, machines and culture.  Life itself is the subject of abstraction, being taken from its traditional moorings, reconfigured and re-created in order to understand its primal components.  Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is primarily engaged with the top-down computational re-creation of intelligence within a non-physical software format.  Intelligence, in other words, is dissected from life: intelligence is disembodied and developed as mind-itself.  These new configurations into the exploration of life are uncanny: they take elements of "natural" life and strive to artificially re-create them in synthetic media.

For example, artificial intelligence begs the question: "Where is the body?"  The concept of being able to re-create intelligence without a physical body or brain is a novel point of reflection.  To think that true intelligence can be constructed outside of the neural mappings, complex chemical balances and synapses of the brain is somewhat strange: as if the visceral touch, taste and smell of our world has nothing to do with our core human mind.  The endeavor to create intelligence – a key signature of humanness – in a non-physical format creates the contrast of an embodied tension.  An individual witnessing an artificially intelligent presence is brought into a new relationship with their own body by being presented with the revelation that their flesh may be somewhat obsolete: at least for the purposes of intelligence.

In a similar fashion, artificial life asks the question: "What is alive?"  The concept of being able to re-create life and genuine life-like traits in a synthetic format offers a similar life-oriented embodied tension: if signatures of life can be generated outside of the visceral world, then how do our bodies define us?  Observing what appears and behaves like a living thing in a posthuman format jogs our mindset for a moment; being simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the mirrored life in the unfamiliar system creates an existentially frissonic tension stimulates a valuable contemplation and discourse into the formal basis and components of self.

CONCLUSION: FRISSONIC ENCOUNTERS WITH THE POSTHUMAN

"...there are some rare experiences, some trivial, some delightful, some revelatory, and some profoundly disturbing, when not a single interpretive template has any accuracy whatsoever... In this state, which I would term "cognitive lysis", in this aperceptual moment, the unreliability of ones' judgement is total.  Cognitive lysis is an experience of being exiled from thought; not drowning in nonsense, but gliding in a stratosphere of un-sense."
Jeanne Randolph, "Looking Back at Cyborgs" p 183, in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

In summary, the symbolic place of confrontation between the human and posthuman is an updated form of encountering the uncanny, and can be thought of being subject to the same “uncanny valley” psychodynamics as other anthropomorphic-positioned constructions of humankind.  As Mori’s theory goes, as an object’s life-likeness approaches a close proximity to humanness, one’s familiarity and comfort with the object plummets: the object becomes strange because of its simultaneous similarity and profound otherness.

This, of course, is what posthumanism presents us with, but instead of approaching humanness the posthuman posits the potential surpassing of humanness at us.  Nonetheless, the valley of uncannyness between what-we-are and what-we-almost-are is still subject to the same psychodynamics: the valley can be thought to exhibit a frisson of attraction/repulsion that can be used as an existential tool in re-evaluating one’s understanding of humanness and, in turn a profound point of reference to rethink the boundaries of the human and one’s self-concept within the context of reality.

The frissonic encounter can also operate independently of the skeuomorph of virtuality: direct encounters with the products of contemporary hybridity bypass an intermediate layer of simulation: if we accept that the manifestations of the posthuman age are around us, then encountering them is a matter of an embodied engagement with them.  As previously stated, the posthuman is embodied: its eyes are in front of us, staring back.

And by staring into these eyes, the age-old story of the human-created living is actively being written in a format that goes far beyond the uncanny, human or posthuman: generating a paradigm-shifting frisson into the deep definition of what it means to be.

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APPENDIX

The three waves of cybernetics, as illustrated by Hayles in "How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics" (p. 16).