Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism

by Ann Weinstone
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2004
208 pp., Trade, $49.95; paper $17.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4147-1; ISBN: 0-8166-4146-3.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

There is some truth in the claim made on the back cover of Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism, that "Posthumanism thus far has focused nearly exclusively on human-technology relations." It is common in certain academic and literary circles to regard posthumans as our cybernetically-enhanced successors, or worse, as our biotechnical nemeses. There is, however, an implicit technological determinism in this view, or more precisely, a technological antagonism that assumes an essential separation between humans and machines. Technology is often cast as a greedy and acquisitive external force, gradually gnawing away at the core of what it is to be human.

Ann Weinstone largely avoids this problem, preferring to develop instead a posthumanism of human-human relations in which the rupture between selves–between one human and another–is abrogated: "In order to create the conditions for the emergence of a nonexemptive, nonelitist ethics . . . we will have to give up our reliance on concepts of the radically other, or the other as such" (p. 14).

As soon becomes apparent, Avatar Bodies is an exercise in ethics, an ethics ‘woven’ (as one meaning of the word Tantra has it) from a complex fabric of ideologies: postdeconstructionist philosophy (late Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari), Tantric and Yogic wisdom, consciousness studies, posthuman theorising and broad cultural analysis. For the most part, the complexity is productive, that is, generative rather than merely accumulative, and rich connections are teased out. For instance, a poetic iteration of the word ‘post’, with its dual associations of ‘coming after’ (as in posthuman) and as a form of communication (as in the postal service) manages to connect the renunciation of what has gone before and the ethics of personal communication (p. 185).

For Weinstone, the ethical project is the eradication of difference, of self, of individuation, and all the presumptions and behaviours that attend. At its best, this eradication leads to a state of intoxication, an ‘oceanic’ experience, as she puts it.

"If we want to fundamentally alter our experience and conception of self, we must break the law of the other, the law of the alien, the irremediably unfamiliar, of exteriority (or interiority) as such. We need to get drunk with each other so we can become posthuman (p. 107).

But as she implicitly recognises, a doctrine of absolute undifference is unsustainable in the longer term since it contradicts habitual experience, which consists of an infinite series of differentiations embedded in our conscious state of being. To redress this she applies the metaphor of the membrane to describe the permeable barrier lying between the world and ourselves. She dreams of the ideal state of inter-human relations being:

". . . an energy not quite bound or unbound, inside the edge, virtual and actual, potential and manifest, an intense emanation, and, at the same moment, a thoroughfare, a passage, a gateway, the sheerest membrane" (p. 171).

The case is made with some force, although not without passages of irritation and not without a little naivety in its ethical prescriptions. The author has imbibed Gallic inflections from Derrida et al., which can render her prose opaque, and elsewhere her style is bemusingly florid. The book opens:

"Pleasure is, perhaps, a love child of the 60s. Wafting lavenderesque from cracks in the cosmic egg, pleasure recalls indulgence, mild intoxication, a polymorphous romp well shy of the imperatives of desire" (p.1).

But the greatest structural irritation is the frequent and lengthy quotation of personal correspondence (or what appears to be so) between the author and her friends. At its worst it smacks of indulgence; the letters are full of the intimate self-reference and loose rhetoric typical of the form. Their inclusion is justified at some length towards the end of the book with an extended essay on e-mail as "computer mediated communication" (what she calls "CMC"), which Weinstone urges us to embrace "as a practice of hospitality to strangers":

"I am proposing, then, as a gesture that would invite a posthuman ethics to come, a commitment to an every day practice of writing in relationship via e-mail relations with those we have never met" (p. 206).

Anyone, like me, who receives upwards of 100 junk e-mails per day from "those we have never met," might take her proposal with a dash of cynicism. She seems to give less consideration to the fact that the actions of fellow humans, and indeed our intimacy with them, can become a source of displeasure as well as pleasure.

The book draws to a close with a provocative account of the trauma suffered by high-risk inmates put in conditions of isolation at Colorado State Penitentiary. The mental and physical collapse that quickly results is strong evidence for the main thesis: that we are not humans on our own, but become human through our intimate relations with others–what Weinstone calls our "entanglement" (p. 217). Again the point is well made, but the closing remarks confuse the point:

"I asked, earlier in this text, but will I feel less lonely when we speak the language of the membrane? When we are "together"? Instead I find I want to follow loneliness toward the breakdowns of both terror and pleasure. I want to devote myself to this capacity, to our profound intimacy and the thread of my undecidable belonging to you" (p. 218).

Despite the flaws (including its lack of an index), Avatar Bodies is a novel and valuable contribution to the rapidly expanding literature on posthumanism. Moreover, it offers a gentle, spiritual alternative to some of the more aggressively technological tendencies to be found in that field.