the routledge companion to science fiction

"posthumanism and cyborg theory" veronica Hollinger 267-278
269-270
As a cultural signifier, "posthuman" faces in a number of diverse directions. Following Lyotard, for example, Neil Badmington understands it as a perspective from which(philosophical) humanism can question itself, arguing that "the'post' of post humanism does not (and , moreover, cannot) mark or make an absolute break from the legacy of humanism," which is, in the final analysis, what makes us "us". For neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "posthuman" might identify a new kind of embodied subjectivity resistant to the operations of global biopower. Judith Halberstam and Ira Lingston find "posthuman" less useful as a chronological marker than as a (non) identity category that, like the category of "queer" in analyses of human sexual identities, can fold into itself a wide range of potential significations, including bodies that are redolent of difference and perversity.

The discourse of cultural theory and of sf are ineluctably entwined here. In Hayles' words, "Embedding ideas and artifacts in the situated specificities of narrative, the literary texts give these ideas and artifacts a local habitation and a name through discursive formulations whose effects are specific to that textual body " (Hayles 1999: 22). Recalling the historical defamiliarization that marks the conclusion of Foucault's work(1973), I want to suggest that one history of sf is the story of the end of "Man" as the unique human(ist) subject. Many sf stories, whatever else they are about, are also about the uncanny process of denaturalization through which we come to experience ourselves as subjects-in-technoculture.