Monsters inc. - amy's webliography

“From Frankenstein to the Visible Human Project, the body is continually reinterpreted as a limit to what it means to be human.” Discuss critically.


Catherine Waldby’s article[1] makes vital reading for exploring this topic and it is in her utopian rather than an apocalyptic vein, that I have approached this question. This is contrary to many popular interpretations of Frankenstein and other “mythic creation stories”[2]. Throughout her discussion, Waldby clearly juxtaposes Frankenstein alongside other important works of fiction and non-fiction concerned with the body and technology and in doing so her essay made an important starting point for my research. However, because this is a webliography I will premise my discussion with a brief look at her text before widening my discussion to texts which are available electronically.

Waldby’s article brings together the central themes of the often cited text Frankenstein with contemporary ethical and intellectual debate surrounding the issues of humans and technology. She draws on Donna Haraway’s[3] image of the cyborg and Margaret Shildrick’s[4] image of the monster suggesting that as the categories of human, animal and machine blur through technological innovation this is a “a valued moment of transformation”. Seen in this context, she argues, the moral dilemma in the Frankenstein story, the monster turning on his master, is redefined. It is no longer an issue about the monster retuning to an organic state or nature versus technology but about the monster or alternatively the cyborg’s place in the world. Waldby’s article instigated my search within online journals and search engines for different combinations of the terms, human, machine, categories, the body, cyborg, Frankenstein, Posthuman, monster, Visible Human Project and for references to Donna Haraway.

It was partly through reading Katherine Hayles [5] presentation, which I discovered online while searching for articles about the distinction between the categories of human and machine, that I came to the thesis that while texts such as Frankenstein and The Visible Human Project have been portrayed as explorations of humanity and the limitations of the body, what is more prevalent is that our subjectivity or conventional perceptions and ideas about the body are at stake. In Hayles presentation she discusses the demise of liberal subjectivity in terms of the uneasy relationship between liberal humanism, self-regulating machinery, possessive individualism and the cyborg. In her discussion Hayles explores the contradictions in Norbert Weiner’s, “the father of cybernetics”, work, the contradiction being between the potential of cybernetics to transcend the barriers between human and machine and the notion of the self-regulating, autonomous liberal human. Her discussion is easy to follow and thorough in her analysis of the advent of technology and the subsequent dilemmas this has posed to our concept of humanity. I would use the article to establish the premise of my argument that texts such as Frankenstein and The Visible Human Project propose more than moral or scientific arguments about humanity.


After familiarizing myself with different ideas about liberal humanism it seemed necessary to pursue the posthuman discourse. In Hari Kunzru’s article[6] this trajectory is mirrored in his discussion of the cyborg from its early history to its contemporary form. He argues that despite its apparently uncomplicated and largely scientific origins, the cyborg body – “an irresolvable paradox” over the boundaries and limitations of the body- has become highly politicized. A crucial point in his argument is that this political contention is not unprecedented. Kunzru draws a link between contemporary debate surrounding the cyborg with scientific dissection during the Renaissance when “pictorial allegories … used to justify the practice of anatomy,…presented an identical problem of bodily integrity”. This links well with arguments also made by Thacker. What his article highlighted for me in particular was the important contribution Donna Haraway’s cyborg has made to the new and enlightened understanding of the relationship between the body and technology. The cyborg he argues “forces us to situate thought in the body, and in turn to situate bodies in networks which contain elements of biology, politics, desire and technology…allowing us to think what would otherwise be unthinkable”. Having come a long way from its original conception as an engineering or scientific feat which would allow the body to “transcend physical limitations”, Kunru argues that Haraway’s cyborg “operates by transgressing the regimes of signification which deny links between bodies, power and technoscience”.

The Visible Human Project seemed the obvious next focus for my research. Eugene Thacker [7] approaches The Visible Human Project from a medical and scientific perspective which made it very accessible. Thacker links The Visible Human Project to Western science’s historical approach to the study and organization of the human body highlighting the similarities between historical and contemporary debate about the production of anatomical references. At the same time, the article also provides an insightful analysis of the ethical and philosophical debate surrounding the Project in terms of the arguments posed in Georges Bataille’s text, 'The Impossible'. Perhaps its one downfall is the lack of social context given about The Visible Human Project which Waldby[8] offers. Thacker uses Bataille’s concept of the body’s ‘extreme limit of the possible’, in his analysis suggesting the challenge this poses to historical anatomical and medical practices “truths” about the body. In doing so he proposes the potential for a new framework for understanding the body.


In her essay about Seiko Mikami's interactive installation "World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body", Sabu Kohso [9] provides an insightful analysis of the body and how it responds to changed sensory experiences. I liked this article for its practical dimension, a real example of technology and the body at play. According to Kohso, in this installation the body’s visual and acoustic perceptions are thrown into disarray in an anechoic (echoless) chamber. The notion of Donna Haraway’s cyborg which blurred the boundaries of nature and technology and human and machine, is integral to Mikami’s installation and presented clearly in Kohso’s discussion where she argues “neither the body nor the device nor the environment—is the main objective to be experienced...Rather, it produces and reveals the mechanisms of representation itself—how the representing subject and the perceiving subject are part of the techno-cultural productive machine”.


Verena Kuni’s article[10] examines old and new “mythologies” about the “artificial human” in terms of contemporary art and our current game culture. Her article draws on Haraway’s 'Cyborg Manifesto' to explore the contemporary manifestations of the cyborg. By contrasting recent examples of images in contemporary art which draw on posthuman or cyborg themes, such as Tina Porta’s Future Body and Stelarc’s Ping Body with images typical of the 1990s such as Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, Orlan’s Gendernauts and the Japanese “virtual pop starlet” Kyoko Date, she shows how these earlier images tended to be projections of conventional perceptions of the human body into virtual space. She argues that with the advent of new technologies as well as developments in the “means of communication through media” the works of artists such as Porta and Stelarc for example have challenged the boundaries of self-creation and created a whole new range of possibilities for “monsters” in “virtual space”. What was particularly interesting about this article was the way it seemed that only recent technologies have enabled theoretical notions of the cyborg or cybernetics as transgressing gender and other subjective boundaries to proliferate.

The broad range of theoretical and interactive articles chosen here was deliberate. The explorations of Waldby, Hayles and Kunru provide a framework to explore the contemporary images presented in Kohso and Kuni’s discussions. Using these texts I would argue that the notion of subjectivity and the body is integral to Frankenstein and The Visible Human Project. At the same time the use of digital technologies is a necessary part of any discussion of this kind.


[1] Catherine Waldby, Zoe Sofoulis, 'The instruments of life : Frankenstein and cyberculture; Cyberquake : Haraway's manifesto', In: Prefiguring cyberculture : an intellectual history [2002].

[2] Ingrid Hoof’s 'Cyborg Manifesto 2.0' provides further discussion of “dystopian” and “utopian” discourses, http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/theory/hoofd/discussi/dystopia.html, accessed 23/8/2006.


[3] Donna Haraway, 'A Manifesto for cyborgs : science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s' In: The Haraway reader [2004].

[4] Margrit Shildrick, 'Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body', Body and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 1-15, March 1996.

[5] Katherine Hayles, Presentation for the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, July 6-9 1997 'Prosthetic Rhetoric and the Posthuman Body' Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Wiener.htm, accessed 20/8/2006.

[6] Hari Kunzru, 'futurism: cyborgs' http://www.harikunzru.com/hari/cyborg.htm [1997] accessed, 25/8/2006.

[7] Eugene Thacker, 'Lacerations : the visible human project, impossible anatomies, and the loss of corporeal comprehension' http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j003/Articles/Thacker/Impossible.htm, accessed 20/8/2006.

[8] Catherine Waldby, 'The visible human project : an initial history' In: The visible human project : informatic bodies and posthuman medicine [2000]

[9] Sabu Kohso, 'On Seiko Mikami's "World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body"',
http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/default.xslt/nodenr-128166 [1998] accessed 23/8/2006.

[10] Verena Kuni, 'Mythical Bodies II Cyborg configurations as formations of (self-)creation in the imagination space of technological (re)production (II): The promises of monsters and posthuman anthropomorphisms'
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/cyborg_bodies/mythical_bodies_II/1/, accessed 23/8/2006