1. The body’s mistake: technology and an inclusive model of the posthuman
Abstract
The novel Antibodies, by David J. Skal, explores a dilemma between the body as a
dispensable space and the technology as the utopian answer for the body‟s
insufficiency. Considering that the disembodiment is just one more version of the issue
concerning the continuity man-machine, this paper argues that a body‟s place which is
only connected with technology is a mistake. Instead, this paper sustains the need for an
ethical and inclusive model of the posthuman that shall encompass the idea of the body
as a utopian space, in the sense that the body is a transitorily utopian space. This model
overlaps the pluri-scalar use of technology and has some points in common with the
transhumanist view of human nature as a work-in-progress, which means that the
current humanity is not the endpoint of evolution. This paper concludes with a
theorization of the “wrong place” or “mistake”, a speculative and heuristic concept of
imagining a new model of belonging-in-transience where the body fits.
Keywords: man-machine interaction, technology, science fiction, society, body, utopia

2. 1. Technology and disembodiment
The impact of informationalism in the social and cultural domain is defined by Castells
as the emergence of a „culture of real virtuality‟ (Castells, 1996,2000). We perceive the
world as a succession of electronic signs that not only represent reality but increasingly
become reality. This is explained, amidst other reasons, since we are living in an audio-
visual multimedia environment. In this way, what is created is “a multifaceted semantic
context made of a random mixture of various meanings” (Castells, 1996:371). It is, in a
sense, a homogenized culture. Receivers still interpret this cultural context but
individually, not starting from common cultural codes, or do so to a lesser degree. This
generates fragmentation but at the same time leaves room for collective actors to
communicate and participate in the system, as no single actor, most even large
companies or governments, can completely control this system. Unfortunately, this
emancipator power of the new system is only realized in principle because computer-
mediated communication is unevenly distributed and the prosperous, the wealthy, and
the skilled are far more likely to participate in it than others.
This brings us to another aspect of the network society, that is, power relations.
Networks lack a single centre and have no clear-cut hierarchy. Networks are clusters of
relations that can change in number and intensity, unbound by a fixed space or time in
the interaction with changes in their environment. Networks are, therefore, at odds with
territorial and hierarchical organizations such as nation states, churches and schools
(Castells, 2000:19). As far as the nation state is concerned, it loses some of its powers in
a network society because of the aggregation of interests and policies at a supranational
level and the tendencies towards decentralization (Castells, 1997). As a result, national
identities are waning and new identities are being built on the basis of other cultural,
ethnic, social or geographical elements. This can lead both to a rejection of the globally

3. networked society and a turn towards local, narrow cultures or to new forms of
democracy embracing local democracy, electronically stimulated participation and
communication and political mobilization (Castells, 1997). Furthermore, some thinkers
as, for instance, Arthur Kroker, perceive technology as a basis for national identity
while others, like Marshall MaLuhan or George Grant emphasize the technology‟s
influence on people. However, one of the most accessible sources of information about
different discussions on technology is literature, particularly, science fiction literature
characterized by a fascination for computer technologies and their fusion and interaction
with human beings, corporate economies and the darker elements of ultra modern urban
culture. The reasons for this are clear; it is argued that „cyborg imagery can suggest a
way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to
ourselves‟. Haraway has asserted that the dissolution of three crucial boundaries or
dualisms is what makes cyborg
discourse possible: a) the distinction between humans and other living beings; b) The
distinction between animals-humans and machines, c) the boundary between the
physical and the non-physical.
Fátima de Oliveira thinks that the main question about cyborgs (which is the future of
all of us) is to choose what kind of cyborg we will be. In Antibodies the problem is that
the disembodiment is just one more version of the issue concerning the continuity man-
machine, with all of its worries, namely in what regards the fear that such mixture may
lead to new forms of domination, loss of intensity and human singularity.
The ideal type of the network society will take on a different form in specific societies
because each society has its own history, its own culture and its own institutions. On

4. this matter, what Antibodies (1987), one of the science fiction novels written by David
J. Skal, questions is precisely this notion of diversity or cultural diversity in favor of the
above mentioned homogenized culture, but also as somehow feminist culture in line
with the Feminist work on computing technology that has for the most part concentrated
on concepts of cyborgs and notions of (dis)embodiment in cyberspace. However, as
argued by Martina Gillen, these conceptions have outstripped the realities of the
technology and that an alternative and technically realistic model is that of the
disembodiment (Gillen, 2002). The disembodiment has all the positive theoretical
advantages of the cyborg, as well as the added benefits of being in existence now as
opposed to the product of science fiction, and disembodied beings may be capable of
use as a tool for education and activism.
2.Technology as a driving force
The network society could not have developed without Information and Communication
technologies (ICT), which has become an important part of social life since the 1960s.
The existence of ICT and the level of use of its instruments strongly influences the
development of the network society. Inversely, too, the network society contributes to
the development and dissemination of ICT. In other words, there is a dialectical
relationship between the network society and ICT.
In the novel Antibodies, Skal tells us a story about a young woman – Diandra -
searching for immortality at the expense of bodily existence and an aging
psychologist/writer - Julian Nagy - who specializes in the shock deprogramming of cult-
addicts come together for a bizarre confrontation of wills that erupts in a violent and
graphic finale. Disturbing in its implications as well as in its explicit descriptions, this
near-future story – Antibodies - is, nevertheless, compellingly written. A body is a

5. system and all systems develop some features to maintain competitive efficiency.
Among these features, as stated by Alexander Chislenko (1997), is liquidity, which is a
mean to allow transformations and growth. By liquidity, the author means two things:
one is independence of structure from the physical substrate, facilitating more
replication and other functions. Structures originally imbedded in the substrate
developed more independence; the other concerns growth, that is, the possession of
internal structural liquidity. “Functional structures should be able to modify
themselves and combine with each other, to optimize behavior, to adapt to changing
conditions, and to occupy new domains. This liquidity requires generalized layered
architectures, modular adaptable designs, common communication interfaces, etc”
(Chislenko, 1997).
Recently, Spanish researchers have carried out a study looking into the potential future
impact of robots on society. Their conclusions show that the enormous automation
capacity of robots and their ability to interact with humans will cause a technological
imbalance over the next 12 years between those who have them and those who do not.
All agreed on 2020 as a technological inflection point, because by then robots “will be
able to see, act, speak, manage natural language and have intelligence, and our
relationship with them will have become more constant and commonplace”, said López
Peláez. This will follow a revolution in robotics after which they will no longer be
sophisticated machines, but tools to be used on a daily basis, helping us with a large
number of work and social activities.
3. What will robots do for us?

6. Automation currently exists in areas such as water management or unmanned aircraft
that fly and shoot missiles, but whole new areas of robot use will open up in future. One
such use will be in a medical context, as exoskeletons to help disabled people move,
helping to make them less dependent on others.
Even more significant will be the insertion of robots into our bodies, such as intelligent
implants in the brain, which will improve our rational thought, and nanorobots to be
released into the blood to clean our arteries.
Another important role will be the replacement of people working in the areas of
security, surveillance or defence. According to Professor López Peláez, it is predicted
that 40% of armies will be automated with robot soldiers by 2020 “just as a car factory
is today, which will result in less human deaths during violent conflicts”.
Robots will be intelligent machines to be incorporated into both domestic and industrial
life: they will help us to clean our houses, will milk cows on farms, and will be
programmed to work 24 hours per day in factories without resting, with a yield
equivalent to three day shifts. In addition, replacing human labour with robots will
prevent workers from being exposed to dangerous, stressful or unhealthy environments,
thus reducing labour-related risks.
The most striking feature of this technological revolution are social robots, machines
with artificial intelligence, and with which we will have emotional and even intimate
interactions. “A robot might be a more effective partner and a better person than the
humans we actually have in our immediate lives: just as you can see dog owners talking
to their pets today, soon we will be talking to robots,” says López Peláez – to such an
extent that sexual robots are currently being designed to carry out pleasurable personal
interactions. These will be equipped with the required sensorial abilities, such as touch.

7. “Since they will be used as objects, sexual robots may be able to act as a future
substitute for prostitution or pornography.”
4. The impact of a robotized society
The study also looks at the possible repercussions of incorporating robots into society.
On one hand, just as with uneven access to technologies such as the Internet, they will
open up a new gulf, this time a robotic one. This will result in a cultural distinction
being drawn between companies and people who can afford to buy robots to help with
their activities – and those who cannot. The robotic gulf will also favour more
industrialised societies, potentially widening the gap between the first and third worlds,
or providing greater possibilities for success in logistics and war. On the other hand,
López Peláez says argues that “just as many Japanese people today believe that their
robots are alive, we will attribute human characteristics to robots, and we may even
define robots‟ rights”.
Another major concern is that if robots are to carry out so many labour tasks and replace
human labour, unemployment may rise just as it did in the 19th century with the
invention of textile machines. The robotics experts interviewed for this study claimed
that factories with high robot use will retrain workers to work in other, though possibly
more poorly paid, areas. However, they also point out that the situation will balance out
with the development of new services involved in the design and maintenance of the
robots.
5. A very instinctive «self»
At a certain point, Veronica Tramhell, the rich, maimed sculptress who presides over an
underground network of performance art and human vivisection, asks Diandra if she has

8. had any training in cybernetics. “No, I have only studied art and I have been reading lots
of science fiction”, Diandra replies, which leads Veronica to think that Diandra owns a
very “instinctive” intimate nature. In fact, human rules of social interaction are based on
the concept of the permanence of human identity. Without it, some social rules may
become outmoded. For example, if a person breaks some laws, and then replicates into
lots of clones, and modifies himself beyond recognition, who should be punished for the
crime? If currently you may not be allowed into a court with cameras, weapons, or
drugs, then what will they do if you could turn any part of your body into any of these
things at any time? Would they restrict the quality of your visual memory and monitor
the chemical composition of your blood stream? (like it happens in the movie I, robot).
One may, thus, say that the personal identity becomes an increasingly fluid and
reconfigurable thing. At some stage, you may be able to change yourself rapidly and
dramatically and whenever you want you may experience a kind of “death forward”,
meaning a modification beyond recognition, in which you will lose your identity. This
is one of the beliefs and aims of Diandra, as she considers herself as a most progress-
oriented person who is not interested in a very wide identity life span and she‟s
definitely not interested in prolonging the life of her physical substrate. She thinks of
herself as a truly morphologically free person and, therefore, she may change all her
parts and configuration and preserve only the general goals that all converge in the
desire of becoming a machine. That‟s why she is true in every way to the Antibodies
cult– starving and draining the blood from her body to entirely prepare herself for
mechanical integration. However, circumstances prevent her from completing her
transition smoothly. She is captured by the notorious hedonistic psychiatrist Julian Nagy
who runs a therapy clinic to heal, and eventually exploit, those of the cult. At the same
time, her only guides through this process are vague and ominous directions from the

9. Antibodies authority while contending with the resentment of the public. As we can see,
this novel takes many elements of our current society and exaggerates and stretches
them into a possible future universe in which people worship and want to become the
technology they have created. The depravity of humanity is evident as its constituents
are each proponents of some broken part of our very system. Coilhouse writes:
“That‟s what Antibodies is, at its heart: a horror novel. There are no heroes here,
only the deluded and the ruthlessly predatory. But for all its Gran Guignol
touches, Antibodies hits home. In a rush to the future, it‟s easy to forget or
ignore the wreckage that draws in the alienated and insane into any dream that
offers them easy transcendence from their previous lives”.
For Coilhouse, Antibodies is just a “detailed examination of how nasty it gets when
humans try to permanently scrap flesh for metal, and how easily believing plebs are still
led to the slaughter by their puppet-masters”. However, what Coilhouse doesn‟t refer to
is the reality and desire patent in many science fiction stories: the pursue for intelligent
entities that will be extremely fluid and highly independent from the physical substrate
of this world. This means that in a real post- human future the identities may completely
dissolve.
Regarding the Sherryl Vint's study - Bodies of Tomorrow – in which the author
examines a large body of science-fiction writings from the last two decades, bringing to
bear an array of current scientific, cultural, and ethical debates on her analysis.
Championing an ethics of embodiment and an epistemology of the dynamic
interconnectedness between mind and body, Vint argues that representations of cultural
practices encountered in selected science-fiction writing can help audiences better
evaluate the ethical challenges differently composed future bodies and communities

10. might pose (that is, indeed, one of the roles played both by science fiction and utopia). I
agree with Vint on one of her major arguments: “we are currently in a moment of
defining a new human subject, a posthuman subject, whose features and implications
will be intrinsically bound up with the assumptions about identity and embodiment that
inform it” (Vint, 2007: 171). This is, as we have already seen, the main issue of the
novel Antibodies, but the problem it raises is that a body‟s place that is only connected
with technology is a mistake, as argued in this paper. That is, machines, even the most
intelligent ones, will continue to be our tools but what really matters is an intelligence
amplification (considering intelligence as a dynamic attribute), which will not be
created, as sustained by some authors, by a complete human-computer interface. It is
true that “the bio and techno media are mutually transforming and transformed” and that
the “relationship between the biological body and technological body will be presented
from the perspective of proposing a revision of the ways of understanding the two
bodies, now no longer separate and distinct” (Santana, forthcoming).
Instead, the argument of this paper is more in line with Vint‟s idea when she says:
“As Foucault makes clear in The order of Things, the idea of man as the cogito
has a specific historical beginning, and perhaps we are now reaching the moment
where that vision/version of humanity has a specific historical end. Struggles
over posthuman identity are thus more than strategies over technology and the
ethics of various technological ways of modifying what it means to be human
(…) I believe that it is important to maintain this category and struggle for an
ethical and inclusive model of the posthuman because, like the category of
human before it, the posthuman has achieved a status such that we cannot ignore
the concept, cognizant though we might be of its dangers” (Vint, 2007: 172).

11. The need for an ethical and inclusive model of the posthuman encompasses the idea of
the body as a utopian space, as argued by Pere Gallardo-Torrano (2007), but not in the
sense of a quest for the body perfection. The sense of the body as a utopian space that
overlaps the pluri-scalar use of technology has some points in common with the
transhumanist view of human nature as a work-in-progress, which means that the
current humanity is not the endpoint of evolution, but just a tiny step towards it.
“Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other
rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with
vastly greater capacities than present human beings have. Transhumanists
(transitional humanists) see themselves as a logical evolution from humanists
and as the logical stage prior to posthumans. They defend technoscience as the
obvious vehicle to reach the posthuman condition, though they are not
necessarily optimistic about the results of the indiscriminate” (Gallardo-Torrano,
2007).
An ethical and inclusive model of the posthuman must, instead, perceive technology not
as a vehicle to reach the posthuman condition, but as a tool that should move hand in
hand with the moral, intellectual and learning progress of beings. Just as the body. In a
certain way it is true what Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of the magazine Wired, says
when he states that we have created our humanity and that humanity has been created
by technology, since our humanity is defined by things we have invented. Like the
alphabet. Our culture is one thing we've created. But, he adds, there has been an
evolution of morality. Culture and cultural inventions are part of the technologies,
according to him. Of course there are bad technologies, but the answer to that can only

12. be a good technology and the answer for a good technology can only be a better
technology. Technology, thus, broadens our set of possibilities and choices and that is
its main contribution: providing possibilities, opportunities and diversity (in a similar
way that utopia does when considered as a moving target and a ongoing creative driver).
We just have to replace the technologies that limit our potential and capacities for
technologies that broad and improve them. Each choice and each possibility only works
when there are values to guide them; values that emanate from the main purposes of
life: learning and sharing with others. Only in this manner technology can contribute for
the human being self-knowledge and evolution. This is exactly what doesn‟t happen
with the antibodies of David J. Skal as it expresses a view according to which the
technology (a machine) is a further step in evolution, posing, however, the question of
the commercial orientation of that “ideal” behind technology. In reality, Diandra‟s
mistake (and the rest of the antibodies‟ community) is that she doesn‟t understand that
they are only replacing one technology by another; because the human body is also a
technology. In fact, it seems that, in the novel Antibodies, Skal evidences a dissipation
of the site in site specificity when this means a prioritizing of its discursivity, its
displacement by the community. Instead, that dissipation and site specificity is exposed
in relation to the dynamics of deterritorialization as elaborated in architectural and
urban spatial discourse. While the accelerated speed, access and exchange of
information, images, commodities and, especially, bodies is being celebrated in one
circle, the concomitant breakdown of traditional temporal-spatial experiences and the
accompanying homogenization of places, identities and erasure of cultural differences is
being decried in another. The intensifying condition of spatial indifferentiation and
departicularization (disembodiment) – that is, the increasing instances of locational and

13. emotional unspecificity – are seen to exacerbate the sense of alienation and
fragmentation in contemporary life.
Furthermore, there is one aspect that neither literature, nor science fiction novels have
been approaching. That aspect consists of the possibility of the parallel existence of
much more developed technologies in worlds parallel to ours. I mean, at the present
time, but in a place different from ours, may already exist a high level of technology
development that we, now or in a near future, may not even dream of. Obviously, this
encompasses the idea of multiple inhabited worlds. In science fiction books and films
we have only been dealing with future possibilities of technology. However, and if
those possibilities already exist in parallel worlds populated by more developed beings,
who may influence, by several mechanisms (such as intuition), the developments made
on planet Earth as we currently know it? Technology is also what we are, but its
purpose is not to take part of us or of the substrates that hold our existence. That is, once
the body is a temporary object which purpose is to help us (or to provide us the means
to progress moral and intellectually as spiritual beings that we are), technology will
always be hand in hand with that progress, not with the body, not even to replace it. In
other words, the more developed are we as spiritual beings the more developed will be
the technology, which will always be a tool for intellectual and cognitive practice and
not for the real configuration of the being?
6. Concluding notes
Countering both the nostalgic desire for a retrieval of rooted, place-bound identities on
the one hand, and the antinostalgic embrace of a nomadic fluidity of subjectivity,
identity and spatiality on the other, this paper concludes with a theorization of the
“wrong place” or “mistake”, a speculative and heuristic concept of imagining a new

14. model of belonging-in-transience. As evidenced throughout Antibodies, even though we
may consider it as a frightening, fascinating, and perversely erotic novel, this task of
imagining altogether new coordination of technology and its relation with the body site
is an open-ended predicament. Moreover, Skal‟s book shows the critical capacity of
intimacies based on absence, distance and ruptures of time, space and dystopias, which
is very common in dystopic science fiction novels.

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