Unnatural Futures

As a locus of discourse in American culture, technology often activates familiar oppositions between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the cultural. Technology provokes reiterations of particular norms in an uneven process that seeks both to reinforce existing categories of meaning and to accommodate newness. This study examines how conceptions of the human, the natural, and the social are defended, re-articulated, or challenged in the discourse of technology. In a reading of popular and scientific accounts of experimentation with the artificial heart, the author finds that technological objects are situated in a normalizing discursive apparatus that imperfectly secures them in a fictional “history” of progress and inevitability. The second chapter demonstrates that science fiction films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence ostensibly master the anxieties of confronting otherness—the technological other—while positing a universalized (but exclusionary and constraining) definition of humanity, which reifies particular versions of racial and sexual difference. Martins's reading of Don DeLillo’s White Noise argues that in interactions with everyday technologies such as the ATM and television, Americans develop a complex techno-sensibility that affords an ironic distancing and acknowledges both the pleasures and threats of the high-tech world. Finally, in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Martins suggests that technology becomes a signifier for change itself, for a process of revision that offers the possibility of re-imagining that which has been conceived of as unchanging, or simply “natural.” This book concludes that the discourse of technology stages predetermined contradictions in order to enact comforting rituals of transcendence and human triumph—resolutions that nevertheless remain partial and incomplete. In the process of repeating these confrontations, the discourse of technology generates moments of disruption and excess that provide opportunities for revising and re-imagining the future as well as the present.