Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

After Humanity

The "birth" of Frankenstein's monster registers the fact that life changes. If it hasn't happened already (and it has), human life will change too. It will cease in any recognizable way to be human. [1]   Humanity's wholesale rejection of the monster in Shelley's novel augurs ill for the coming metamorphosis. How might criticism compensate for this rejection? How to write and to think on behalf of monstrosities to come? [2]   Romanticism itself provides an example. Its formal contortions (Blake's hybridized Marriage, Byron's interminable Juan, Equiano's remixed Narrative) register the propinquity of monsters to polite society.

Notes

1. For one powerful version of this transformation, See Donna Harway's "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-82.

2. Criticism is performative, after all, or ought to be. Consider Derrida in this regard, almost anything he wrote. Or more mercilessly, Nietzsche.

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