"Why won't God give me what I ask? Why won't he answer my prayer? If only he would go ahead and kill me! If I knew he would, I would leap for joy, no matter how great my pain." —Job 6: 8-101
Various fictional characters portray characteristics and traces of the posthuman. In the Book of Job, Job's suffering is meaningless because he wants his suffering to mean nothing. His friends are regular humans, who try to justify God and impart meaning to his misery. Job does not resist their interpretations, their strictly human, psychoanalytically determined reactions. He simply refuses any meaning whatsoever, yet still accepts the suffering and God's incredibly despotic explanation.
"As soon as you are afraid of succeeding, my dear Vicomte, as soon as your object is to furnish arms against yourself, and you are less anxious to triumph than to combat, I have nothing more to say." —Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos2
The Vicomte de Valmont and Marquis de Merteuil derive pleasure from excess in general, raising the stakes progressively higher as they create cruelties exquisite in their design and execution. Not only must Valmont seduce Madame de Tourvel, he must "make her virtue expire in a slow agony." Not only must Marquis de Mertueil revenge herself on Gercourt, she must ruin his future wife in the process. They take pains to converge their thoughts and reality. Like God in the Book of Job, Valmont and Merteuil often refer to themselves as "divine," untouchable and invincible. Yet the fact that Merteuil is effectively ruined by Valmont may suggest that Valmont was never interested in Tourvel but in destroying and exposing Merteuil concomitant with his own downfall.
The games of Valmont and Merteuil are an escape from boredom, but for today's posthumans, escape is less direct, and any escape is merit enough for a similar type of investment.
"It was not absurd, Bruno's world; it was a melodrama where the characters were babes and dogs, cool guys and losers. Michel, on the other hand, lived in a world where everything was precisely regulated, a world without history where all the seasons were commercial ones: the French Open, Christmas, New Year's Eve, the semiannual arrival of the 3 Suisses catalogue." —Elementary Particles, Houellebecq3
Houllebecq's characters, because of the hypermedia, suffer excess of boredom—not "meaninglessness" in the sense of Kafka—but emptiness. In Elementary Particles, Bruno's sexual obsession is for commodified virility and youth. He dreams, however, that "the world he'd known had ceased to exist."4 Michel manifests listlessness and vacancy, a desire for something beyond the ordinary human happiness offered to him by Annabelle.
Houellebecq's ending to Elementary Particles is not a resolution to the posthuman condition. The speculative aspect of humanity free of desire and death is almost a joke aimed at postmodernists; the creatures at the end are not "posthuman" by any definition but "inhuman."
"I would prefer not to be a little reasonable" —Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville5
Knowledge and desire are both premised upon measurement and limitation. With regard to the hypermedia, knowledge and desire remain structurally unchanged; it is the notion of limitation and measurement that is radically altered. The distance between the false and the true collapses and approaches an indeterminate, minimal value. Likewise the distance between privation and satisfaction approaches indeterminacy at maximal levels (i.e. the gap between rich and poor). Because the distance between truth and falsehood is minimal, knowledge proliferates meaninglessly, and the signs of knowledge (i.e. academic credentials, Doctorates for Dummies) appear everywhere. As such, knowledge is the field of transgression par excellence because its minimal limits (i.e. what is "known") are constantly being surpassed. Yet this constant surpassing, far from expanding limits, only reduces the threshold between the limits of the known and the "unknown beyond." And because postmodernity makes us conscious of this "beyond," it is not really "unknown"—we know of it, we just know nothing about it—it alone constitutes the object of our desires.
In our world, there is no lack of things for us to desire. Yet desire is never for a mere thing but an object(ive) attained from the thing. This is the human model of desire. The posthuman model of desire includes for impossible things as well as impossible objects, objects beyond knowledge, objectives that are nonexistent, impossible to attain. These include the impossible goals of fundamentalism, perversion, and utopianism. "Conquests," either in Valmont's terms or in the terms of desire in general, fail to grasp the thing along with the object the thing is supposed to contain.
Melville's Bartleby's ultimate "preference" is for nothing. He rejects all logical suggestions and "reasonable" offers, even such "human" necessities as food. He does not want to change anything, or do anything at all. Likewise, posthuman desire is for that which escapes hypermediation. And it is for precisely this reason, that only nothing can escape the hypermedia, that posthuman desire is for nothing made material. Of all the things that are offered to our senses or intellects—however meaningless they may be—this material nothing is still not available on the consumer market. The sheer impossibility of attaining nothingness in a thing or object is the posthuman desire par excellence.
Notes:
1 From the "Good News Translation".
2 Translated by Richard Aldington, Pocket Books, 1988, Letter XXXIII.
3 p. 101
4 p. 113
5 See http://www.bartleby.com/129.
Louise Norlie has or will be published in a variety of places, including Mad Hatter's Review and elimae. Brandon Chan-Yung lives in Canada. Louise and Brandon have collaborated on work that appears in Dark Reveries and Sein und Werden.