Posthuman physics

The question of embodiment is at once the question that makes posthuman theory so exciting, and the area in which posthuman discourse sometimes stumbles over its own false alternatives. In order to consider the body of the posthuman, and the modes of corporeality available to posthumanity, we need to develop a more expansive body theory that can encompass nonhuman as well as human bodies. The place to start is with early modern physics, which is the study of what we would consider today both physics and physiology. This article dwells on the figure of the Echo in John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, arguing that reading the scene through the lens of early modern physics illustrates an alternative mode of corporeality for the posthuman. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 39–45. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.13 DELIO: Hark: the dead stones seem to have pity on you And give you good counsel. ANTONIO: Echo, I will not talk with thee, For thou art a dead thing. ECHO: Thou art a dead thing. (John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi) The Echo scene of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi begins, as the 1623 Quarto’s stage direction notes, with the entrance of three characters: ‘Antonio, Delio, [and] Eccho, (from the Dutchesse Graue.)’ (Webster, 1623, sig. K). As Antonio talks to the grave of his murdered wife, a voice ominously repeats his phrases, r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 39–45 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ warning him of his own impending danger. Antonio’s friend Delio interprets the Echo as a well-intentioned artificial intelligence: ‘the dead stones seem to have pity on you’ (5.3. 36). Antonio notes that the Echo might be read as the Duchess’s ghost, which lives as a voice that has shed its body, and the Echo agrees: Antonio’s observation ‘Tis very like my wife’s voice’ is echoed, ‘Ay, wife’s voice’ (5.3. 26). (The reading in the 1623 Quarto seems to assign the Echo to the Duchess more forcefully: ‘I, wifes-voyce’.) Antonio nevertheless refuses to heed the Echo’s warnings, rejecting the post-human or ghostly voice as less than human: ‘thou art a dead thing’ (5.3. 39). The Echo replies that, from the point of view of the post-human, it is Antonio’s embodied soul that has become less than human: ‘Thou art a dead thing’. Each refuses to recognize the other as a body. Who is right? Katherine Hayles reminds us in How We Became Posthuman that posthumanity should not forget its body. The project of her book, as she describes it, is both to track ‘the historical separation between information and materiality and also to recall the embodied processes that resist this division’ (Hayles, 1999, 20). When she later revisits the notion of the posthuman, she takes an opportunity to, as Timothy Lenoir puts it, ‘rethink the mind / body split’: ‘she has come to feel that while rejecting the Cartesian conception of a disembodied mind, she did not elaborate clearly enough what the alternative would be’ (Lenoir, 2002, 218). As the alternative, she rejects her earlier distinction between the body (as a conceptual object) and embodiment (the individual experience of embodiment) in order to privilege the primacy of the relation of the two (Hayles, 2002, 320). But this is only one alternative. Because the strength and potential of posthuman theory lies in its ability to unlock alternative theories of embodiment, I want to suggest that an understanding of early modern physics, as the study of bodies human and nonhuman, can provide a way of breaking through an impasse in contemporary body theory, and also supply some alternative corporealities that posthuman theory needs. The impasse in current body theory has not greatly changed since Paul Valery articulated three different bodies in his ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’. The first body, for Valery, is the lived body, the body we perceive as ours. The second body is the body others perceive, while the third body is the scientific body, the body rendered into an object by the scientific, ‘objective’ eye. The philosopher usually condemned for putting into effect the separation of the self from this third body is René Descartes, and the philosopher to most stridently take him to task – among many who have taken him to task – is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty describes it in his Phenomenology of Perception, claims that selfhood is inextricable from embodiment, and that every self is an embodied self. Like Descartes, Merleau-Ponty begins the section of his treatise on the mind-body relation with an examination of the material object (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, 77–83). Merleau-Ponty attempts to undermine the idea of ‘objective thought’, and argues that because we can never 1 Unless otherwise indicated, citations