Example of essay on postmodernism in literature and culture

Hayles describes the Turing imitation game to illustrate the idea that information, rather than material knowledge or senses, help us to determine what is a human and what is a machine. This particular trope has manifested itself in a great many pieces of literature, including Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In these works, the lines between what is human and what is machine are blurred, from the sentient AI seeking freedom (Wintermute and Neuromancer) to androids that look and feel just like humans, making them indistinguishable from us. These postmodernist works are also posthuman, imagining a time in which we are beginning to become obsolete, and other forms of life (or ways of life) are coming in to replace us. The material world is starting to fade away into the realm of computers and information – the worlds of these works are gravitating toward completely information-based existences instead of flesh and blood.

These ideas speak to postmodernist ideas of losing control, which is something that humans have enjoyed for a long time, especially in literary realism. ” The very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent process through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted” (Hayles, 2010). According to postmodernists, we are not the body – we are the thoughts that reside within that body. This is proved by these posthumanist works demonstrating sapient, human life outside of the constraints of physical bodies and pumping organs. Using these cyberpunk works allows Hayles to liken the move from literal realism to postmodernism to these specific examples of stories where humans move beyond their original understanding of life to a more metaphysical, interpretation-heavy and abstract way of thinking.

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