Content area
Full Text
On the Eve of Destruction: Technology, Nostalgia, and the Fetishized Maternal Body
In the late twentieth century, this continuing narrative of the embattled and calculating mortal individual elaborates the fantasy of the breakdown of already fantastic "coherent" subjects and objects, including the Western self, for both men and women. All subjects and objects seem nothing but strategic assemblages, proximate means to some ultimate, theoretic end achieved by replicating, copying and simulating -- in short, by the means of postmodern reproduction. No wonder cloning is the imaginary figure for the survival of self-identity in cyborg culture.
-- Donna Haraway(1)
[I]t is in [the] gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises. The nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss. For the nostalgic to reach his or her goal of closing the gap between resemblance and identity, lived experience would have to take place, an erasure of the gap between sign and signified, an experience which would cancel out the desire that is nostalgia's reason for existence.
-- Susan Stewart(2)
A number of contemporary popular technological discourses restage the modern drama of "embattled" identity with a heightened sense that in the age of (post-) mechanical reproduction, the human and its technological "second self" are no longer mutually exclusive. In a cultural moment variously defined under the rubric of the postmodern, it would seem that technologies of communication and simulation promise to "literalize" poststructuralist theorizations of subjectivity as social-symbolic construction. Such formulations resonate with N. Katherine Hayles's characterization of postmodernism as a denaturing process, hence "the realization that what has always been thought of as essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions."(3)
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the denaturing of the human subject, already a common theme in the science fiction cinema, found quintessential expression in a wide range of films which featured artificial humans in the form of robots and androids -- or cyborgs, as they are now popularly known (Android, The Terminator, Terminator II, Blade Runner, Weird Science, Robocop, Robocop II, Cherry 2000, Eve of Destruction, Cyborg, Universal Soldier, etc.). The human-machine figure of the cyborg (cybernetic organism), described by feminist and "cyborg theorist" Donna Haraway as...