Introduction to Part II

Summary

This volume so far has outlined a position that many would dismiss as humanist, at least in the sense that it clearly centers a biological humanity. Moreover, it does not treat this centering of the biologically human as something radical, though it does depart from a much more typical critical tendency to subsume the body within a paradigm dominated by systemic thinking. To a critic such as Margrit Shildrick, for example, the monstrous body becomes ‘an opening onto becomingin- the-world-with-others which sustains alterity as différance’ (131). That is, a perpetual and processual sounding board that constantly challenges the normativity of any one body. While a laudable goal—the focus on sport here is also not meant to universalize any one body—this is simply not a statement about embodiment. It is a self-limited statement about the environment in which the body exists, all the primordial aether with which the body may interact but excluding precisely that which it purports to discuss. This exclusion should not be surprising given the tendency for cyborg theory to position the body as a ‘material-semiotic node’ within a much larger system. Thus, Shildrick concludes that the challenge to a ‘humanist’ separation of body and mind is primarily possible through ‘the discourse of the monstrous’ (9). I contend that emphasizing the discursive or social system in which monstrosity operates in many cases works to extend and strengthen the Cartesian rift between mind and body left by the classical humanist tradition. The next three chapters interrogate the interplay of the individual human body with the systems in which it exists from a biopsychosocial perspective and via the figure of the athlete in science fiction.

It is first important to note again, however, that this examination takes place within wider discussions of importance especially to sf studies but also literary and cultural studies more generally. The emphasis on systems is an inflationary model of criticism that currently enjoys great popularity, and that is in many ways a posthumanist position. In his introduction to Green Planets, Gerry Canavan follows Carl Freedman outlining the utopian nature of inflationary critique that exists in a dialectical relationship with deflationary critique.