Presenter: Ana Carolina Fiuza Fernandes
Registration Number: 038
Institution: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Abstract: This work discusses the notions of corporeality presented by the novel The City and the Stars (Arthur C. Clarke, 1956). It is a part of the research in development in the PhD program in Communication Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which constructs a genealogy of artificial bodies using science fiction narratives as an analytical lens and thought experiment. It problematizes how technology, transfigured in the machine's image, redefines representations of the body and plays a leading role in contemporary processes of subjectivation. In this sense, Clarke's narrative anticipates issues that would emerge in the decades following its publication; namely, the impacts of cybernetics, computer networks, and Artificial Intelligence advent, on representations of corporeality—its limits and transmutations. Also, it forebodes the philosophical implications arising from "technological immortality," expressed in the mind upload theory and its ideal body transcendence, in a singular junction between metaphysics and computer sciences. It tells the story of Diaspar, a hyper-technological city millions of years into the future, completely isolated—the last stand of humanity on Earth. According to legend, humanity has conquered the galaxy but lost its stellar glory to a race of alien invaders. The condition for human survival was isolation inside the city walls, making it its founding myth of confinement for fear of extinction. Diaspar is controlled by a central computer, which regulates the material existence of its inhabitants and manages their lives, that is, administrates birth and death. People from Diaspar have a practically immortal existence: after a prolonged life, their consciences fall asleep to be reborn in new bodies, using personal data stored in the memory databases. Thus, the mind continues existing after the death of its biological support — a kind of digital survival. An expansion of temporal experience is observed, but the counterpart is a reduction of how space is experienced—in which the inhabitants of Diaspar move, and the one occupied by their own bodies, now reduced to informational patterns. In the light of Clarke's cybernetic prototype, it will be established that there is a link between corporeality, time and space, and the current context of virtualized experience, clearly accentuated during the current pandemic and the challenges of confinement. There was precisely a confinement in space and a feeling of enlargement and cyclical repetition of time, and the use of cyberspace and hyperconnectivity as an “antidote” for boredom or loneliness. Simultaneously, there was a return to the body: as a concern and fear of disease, that is, of body’s fragilities and limits. Over and above that, the experience of the flesh, the body-to-body relation, proved to be perhaps not unavoidable, but fundamentally necessary for what Spinoza called “joy in the flesh.” It is within this tension that the problem of the body, technologically produced/mediated, must be formulated: not understanding the body as excess, as opposed to immortality aspirations, but perceiving how [potential incorporations of] emerging technologies can, in some contexts, even save the flesh.
