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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Posthuman Desire in Robotics and Science Fiction

Author : Sophie Wennerscheid

Published in: Love and Sex with Robots

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This article explores how human-posthuman intimate relationships are thematized in both robotics and in science fiction film, literature and robotic art. While on the one hand many engineers and computer scientists are working hard, albeit in an altogether affirmative way, toward the technological development of anthropomorphic robots which are capable of providing social assistance, emotional support and sexual pleasure, aesthetic representations of intimacy between man and machine give us on the other hand a more nuanced and critical picture of possible future forms of desire. However, these fictional works are themselves very often complicit with the use of familiar dualistic paradigms as male-female or self-other.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of ‘becoming-other,’ scholars in critical posthumanism counterpose to this as an essentially traditional approach a nondualist reconceptualization of human beings and of the technological other, a reconceiving which is centered on ‘encounters of alterity’ and ‘unnatural alliances.’ The aim of this article is to expand on and to further develop these theories into what can be called a theory of ‘new networks of desire.’ According to this network idea, romantic entanglements between man and machine can better be seen as a specific form of power which does not leave us just where and who we were, but transformed. Desire is thus shown as a site for challenging our restricted self-understanding as humans and for transgressing humans’ self-centeredness.

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Metadata
Title
Posthuman Desire in Robotics and Science Fiction
Author
Sophie Wennerscheid
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Love and Sex with Robots

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76368-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-76369-9

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76369-9_4

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