Artificial Humanities: A Literary Perspective on

Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion

to Cyborgs
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Beguš, Nina. 2020. Artificial Humanities: A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing
Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School
of Arts and Sciences.

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Artificial Humanities:

A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs

A dissertation presented

by

Nina Beguš

to

The Department of Comparative Literature

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

Comparative Literature

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

August 2020
© 2020 Nina Beguš

All rights reserved.

Dissertation Advisor: Marc Shell Nina Beguš

Artificial Humanities:

A Literary Perspective on Creating and Enhancing Humans from Pygmalion to Cyborgs

Abstract

This dissertation explores boundaries and relationships between humans and humanlike

artificial entities in the twentieth-century and contemporary literature. The central question, What is

human?, is posed in relation to the newest and speculated developments in the fields of artificial

intelligence, social robotics, neurotechnology, and assisted reproduction technologies including gene

editing. I focus on three major and related topics extensively thematized in Western fiction

(American, British, Irish), and less so in Eastern European fiction (Czech, Slovenian, and Serbian).

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce posthuman language as used by humans, artificial intelligence, and

nonhuman animals; chapters 3 and 4 examine pygmalionism and paralysis from medical and social

perspectives; and the final two chapters evaluate assisted reproduction in terms of posthumanist

biology. The main argument of the dissertation is that although the questions and definitions of the

human are, unbeknown to scientists and engineers, now formed and framed in STEM fields,

literature suggests solutions to philosophical questions pertaining to new technologies and offers a

level of insight inaccessible to quantitative science. The dissertation proposes a new framework of

artificial humanities where investigation of philosophical questions pertaining the human, nature,

and technology occurs alongside cutting-edge science, technology, and engineering. The theoretical

argument proposes that, despite recent claims of ontological posthumanism, scientific evolution still

embraces the human and anthropocentrism.

iii
Table of Contents
Abstract.................................................................................................................................................. iii
Table of Figures .................................................................................................................................... vi
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. viii
Introduction: Circles of Life .................................................................................................................... 1
What are Artificial Humanities? ............................................................................................................................. 4
Why Comparative Literature?............................................................................................................................... 12
Part I: Posthuman Language ................................................................................................................................ 14
Part II: Literature and Bioethics........................................................................................................................... 19
Chapter 1: Galatea Speaks: From a Cockney Girl to a Neural Network ..............................................29
1.1 Language Acquisition ..................................................................................................................30
1.1.1 What’s in a Name? ........................................................................................................................................ 30
1.1.2 Chatbots ......................................................................................................................................................... 32
1.1.3 An Overview of Galateas ............................................................................................................................ 36
1.2 Language Enhancement .............................................................................................................43
1.3 Language and Diversity ...............................................................................................................56
1.4 Pygmalionesque Creation ............................................................................................................64
1.5 Pygmalionesque Performance .....................................................................................................79
1.6 The Elizas ....................................................................................................................................88
Chapter 2: Humanese: A Posthuman Language ..................................................................................99
2.1 Language in AI .......................................................................................................................... 100
2.1.1 Living through Language: Powers............................................................................................................ 106
2.2 Storytelling ................................................................................................................................. 129
2.2.1 Creative AI: Tomažin and Dahl ............................................................................................................... 132
2.3 Denaturing of Language ........................................................................................................... 146
2.4 Language in Animals................................................................................................................. 152
2.4.1 Salamanders: Čapek and Cortázar ............................................................................................................ 152
2.4.2 Talking Animals: Kanzi the Bonobo, Alex the Parrot, and Chiang’s Parrots ................................... 157
2.5 Theory of Posthuman Language as a Prosthesis ...................................................................... 172
Chapter 3: Diagnosis: Pygmalionism.................................................................................................. 180
3.1 Pygmalionism and Agalmatophilia ........................................................................................... 182
3.1.1. Definitions and Popularity of the Terms ............................................................................................... 182
3.1.2 Autism .......................................................................................................................................................... 191
3.1.3 Legal Literature ........................................................................................................................................... 194
3.1.4 Medical Literature ....................................................................................................................................... 200
3.2 A New Typology of the Pygmalion Paradigm .......................................................................... 204
3.2.1 Serbian Pygmalion .................................................................................................................. 209
3.3 Modern Pygmalions .................................................................................................................. 213

iv
Chapter 4: Diagnosis: Paralysis........................................................................................................... 225
4.1 First, Anthropomorphism .......................................................................................................... 228
4.1.1 A Humanoid Entity as a Paralyzed Person: Nešković .......................................................................... 231
4.2 Second, Dehumanization .......................................................................................................... 233
4.2.1 A Paralyzed Person as a Humanoid Entity: Tiptree .............................................................................. 233
4.3 Extended Bodies: Paralysis and Prosthetics ............................................................................. 237
4.4 Medical Conceptions, Fictional Descriptions ........................................................................... 253
4.5 Persons and Nonpersons........................................................................................................... 257
4.5.1 Consciousness and Personhood: Dahl .................................................................................................... 261
4.5.2 On Robotics ................................................................................................................................................ 265
4.6 Manifesto: How Should Literature Engage in Technology Ethics .......................................... 267
Chapter 5: Brave New Birth: Reproduction and Biotechnology ........................................................ 270
5.1 Reproduction in Fiction ............................................................................................................ 274
5.1.1 Pandora’s Box of Reproduction ............................................................................................................... 278
5.2 The Terminology of ART .......................................................................................................... 287
5.3 Conception Contained ............................................................................................................... 299
5.3.1 Science Fiction Published Before Huxley’s Novel ................................................................................ 300
5.4 A Brief History of IVF ............................................................................................................... 306
5.5 Huxley’s Ectogenesis ................................................................................................................ 309
5.5.1 Cloning and Incest .................................................................................................................. 322
5.5.2 Breaching Time ........................................................................................................................................... 328
5.6 The Huxley Brothers ..................................................................................................................................... 332
5.6.1 Transhumanism........................................................................................................................................... 335
Chapter 6: Prenatal Life: The Island Perfected .................................................................................. 346
6.1 The Very First Portrait ............................................................................................................... 348
6.1.1 Fetuses in Space .......................................................................................................................................... 355
6.1.2 Embryos under the Microscope ............................................................................................................... 361
6.2 The Identity Problem ................................................................................................................ 368
6.2.1 A Brief History of The Identity Problem ............................................................................................... 373
6.2.2 What Does Literature Say About Prenatal Tests? ................................................................................. 375
6.3 Donors ....................................................................................................................................... 378
6.4 Biases ......................................................................................................................................... 390
6.5 Utopias and Kinships ................................................................................................................ 402
6.6 Hybridity.................................................................................................................................... 410
6.6.1 Posthumanist Biology: Hawthorne, Boucher, Butler ............................................................................ 416
7 Conclusion: Back to Mythologies .................................................................................................... 437
8 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 442

v
Table of Figures

Figure 1 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion: The Phonetic Play. ........................................................................................ 74

Figure 2 Joseph Faber’s Euphonia. ....................................................................................................................... 76
Figure 3 A graph of associative error-making. ....................................................................................................... 80
Figure 4 The uncanny valley according to Masahiro Mori. ..................................................................................... 82
Figure 5 Visibly electronic back of Sophia’s head................................................................................................... 83
Figure 6 Sophia behind the scenes. ......................................................................................................................... 83
Figure 7 Robot Ava from the film Ex Machina.. .................................................................................................. 84
Figure 8 An example of my (*) conversation with Eliza (>). ................................................................................ 89
Figure 9 CAPTCHA test. ................................................................................................................................103
Figure 10 An example of a conversation with a bot, using a potato test. ...............................................................104
Figure 11 Improvisational theater with AI named Pyggy, projected as an avatar behind the human performer. ......108
Figure 12 An example of GPT-3-generated text. ................................................................................................144
Figure 13 Slovenian tolar coin for 10 cents with a proteus on the flip side. ............................................................154
Figure 14 Alex with his letters. ...........................................................................................................................161
Figure 15 Kanzi coversing with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh using a portable “keyboard” of arbitrary symbols associated
with words. ..........................................................................................................................................................165
Figure 16 Google ngram distribution of the use of pygmalionism, statuephilia, agalmatophilia, and petrophilia in the
corpus of English Google books............................................................................................................................183
Figure 17 Pygmalionism occurrences in the English language fiction. .....................................................................185
Figure 18 Use of Pygmalion and Pigmalion in the English language corpus..........................................................185
Figure 19 The use of the term pygmalionismus in German language begins around the time when first medical
discussions were written, starting with Eulenburg 1895. .......................................................................................186
Figure 20 Pygmalionism as used in English texts, introduced in Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Selection in Man from
1905...................................................................................................................................................................187
Figure 21 Pygmalionisme as used in French texts. The diagram shows the term got into use right after Havelock
Ellis’s monograph................................................................................................................................................187
Figure 22 Tara the Android in video titled ‘I Feel Fantastic.’ .............................................................................221
Figure 23 Masayuki Ozaki and his silicone doll in Tokio.. ................................................................................226
Figure 24 Lars and his silicone doll from Lars and the Real Girl. ......................................................................226
Figure 25 A box for stones marketed as live pets by Gary Dahl ..........................................................................229
Figure 26 The first official cyborg Neil Harbisson had an antenna implanted in his skull. ...................................237
Figure 27 Brain-computer interface for paralyzed patients that enables them to control tablet devices......................239
Figure 28 A person with ALS is able to work as a waitress through eye-tracking geminoid robot.........................245
Figure 29 Rate of children conceived via ART in France. ....................................................................................274
Figure 30 Life originated from clay: A caricature accompanying an article on the recent discovery from NASA. ...275
Figure 31 Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a fetus in the womb (c. 1511). ...........................................................296
Figure 32 Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley inspect a water baby in Linley Sambourne's 1885 illustration.
...........................................................................................................................................................................297
Figure 33 Time cover from the week of July 31, 1978, when the first IVF-conceived baby was born. ....................299
Figure 34 Cover illustrated by Frank R. Paul of the Amazing Stories issue ........................................................301
Figure 35 Panel of hell (detail) by Hieronymus Bosch.. ........................................................................................310
Figure 36 Dr. Goodlin’s artificial womb holding a fetus.......................................................................................318
Figure 37 Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delightso. .......................................................................323

vi
Figure 38 Contribution of subfertility treatments to multiple pregnancies overall.. ..................................................325
Figure 39 A sonogram of a 10-week fetus. ..........................................................................................................352
Figure 40 A photograph of a 10-week fetus. ........................................................................................................352
Figure 41 3D printed fetus, based on 3D sonograms. ..........................................................................................353
Figure 42 Normal first-trimester sonogram. .........................................................................................................353
Figure 43 3D ultrasound scan with surface rendering of fetal face. ........................................................................353
Figure 44 The original photograph of an 18-week-old fetus by Lennart Nilsson ...................................................357
Figure 45 Lennart Nilsson’s photo of an 18-week-old fetus featured on the cover of LIFE magazine on April 30,
1965...................................................................................................................................................................357
Figure 46 The Star Child from the very ending of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. ............................................359
Figure 47 Human blastocyst (five-day-old embryo). ..............................................................................................361
Figure 48 Preformation, drawn by Nicolas Hartsoecker 1694. ............................................................................365
Figure 49 Database of egg donors ........................................................................................................................380
Figure 50 Posters advertising gestational surrogacy. ..............................................................................................386
Figure 51 Pregnant person as a chimera.. ............................................................................................................410
Figure 52 Copper engraving of Doctor Schnabel von Rom, a plague doctor (literally, Dr. Beak) from Rome..........423
Figure 53 Maja Smrekar and Manuel Vason, K-9_topology: Hybrid Family, Berlin 2016. ..............................432
Figure 54 The cover of the Belle and Sebastian’s first album Tigermilk (1996) ....................................................434
Figure 55 The lion-man sculpture from Germany (dated to 37,000 years ago). ....................................................436

vii
Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my wonderful committee for their inimitable scholarship and mentorship.
Their insightful comments on this work and their encouragement made for an inspiring and
enjoyable writing process. I am extremely grateful for your guidance and support in my academic
endeavors, especially to Marc Shell for spending countless hours in conversation with me, to Karen
Thornber and David Damrosch for their generous guidance through the program, and to Nancy
Jecker for including me into the bioethics field and the academic life at the University of
Washington. It was a privilege to have you on board.

I would like to thank all my teachers who have helped me to embark and finish my PhD
journey: Marko Juvan, Janez Orešnik, Vanesa Matajc, Djelal Kadir, Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie
Burt, Gregory Nagy, Sandra Naddaff, John Hamilton, Verena Conley, Aida Vidan, Jessie Labov,
Tomislav Longinović, Deirdre Lynch, Katharina Piechocki, Phillip Mead, Beth Blum, James Wood,
Emmanuel Bouju, Chen Zhang, Min Wan, Wei Liu, and Malia Fullerton. Thanks also to always
incredibly helpful administrators and research librarians in comparative literature and English
departments, Isaure Mignotte, Melissa Carden, Gwen Urdang-Brown, and Odile Harter.

I am deeply indebted to my peers and colleagues, my students and advisees. I have learned
enormously from all.

The Merit/Term Time Award and Mind Brain and Behavior Initiative at Harvard University
allowed me to conduct research for this dissertation and to spend two quarters at the University of
Washington School of Medicine. Parts of this dissertation have benefited from the comments
received at conferences and in the process of journal publications.

Special thanks to Honorary Consul of Slovenia Michael Biggins for his translation of Andrej
Tomažin’s short story.

Many thanks to Tobias Rees, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, and Tui Shaub for reaching out
with a dream position at the Berggruen Institute, a direct continuation of my work in this
dissertation.

My graduate school experience would not be as rich and gratifying without the Peabody
Terrace, Mather House, and Radford Court communities. Their members provided unbidden
support and friendship to my family and proofread my writing, including this dissertation.

I owe everything to my parents, Grozda and France, and my husband Gašper. It was only
for their love and support that I was able to have it all. I dedicate this dissertation to our sons,
Tomaž, Lev, and Emil, all of whom were born while this project grew.

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ix
Introduction: Circles of Life

What is human? This is not a purely humanist question; it is a multi-species question and a highly

interdisciplinary one. As humans become more and more technologized, the question has moved

into disciplines that deal with the nonhuman. New circles of life have emerged since we last defined

what we mean by concepts like human, life, artificial, or nature. The philosopher Peter Singer

addressed speciesism in his 1975 book Animal Liberation, arguing that human moral progress consists

of the expansion of the circle of beings we regard as persons. Posthumanism further brought

awareness of nonhuman agencies in human bodies, from our own microbiome to human-made

neurodevices. Biotechnology has changed how we practice medicine and how we think about our

bodies, minds, and agencies, and is affecting aspects of human biological evolution. Early artificial

intelligence (AI) was on a quest to imitate the human mind, but has since evolved in other directions

and is currently dominated by the deep learning paradigm, which is revolutionizing close to every

theoretical and practical discipline. With growing belief in the possibility of creating superintelligent

modes of AI (or less ambitious artificial general intelligence, known as AGI) and in the possibility of

biotechnological enhancement of health to superhuman abilities, transhumanists are on a quest to

solve world problems with technology. The inquiry into the conduct and conditions of life is taking

place in technological and scientific fields without (most) scientists and engineers paying attention to

them and without sufficient opportunities for humanities and social sciences scholars to explore

what defines the human today.

The human has been undergoing powerful transformations while scholarship that is supposed to

focus on non-nature (i.e. metaphysics and social sciences) has remained largely under the influence

of the established conceptions of the human, nature, and technology. This is why re-defining the

1
human in the twenty-first century Western context is at the center of this project. Literature has

been dealing with this task since its very inception. This dissertation is framed under the Pygmalion

myth as we know it from Ovid’s Metamorphoses onward, a myth widely re-interpreted in Western

literatures and visual arts particularly after the eighteenth century. The focus of the myth is on the

human as the creator—the giving thing that ascribes meaning to the world—and the relationship of

the human with the created, humanlike entities. In support of their positions, transhumanists

frequently invoke ancient philosophy (Plato, Aristotle) and mythology (Prometheus). In the

transhumanist fashion, humans as creators not only form the creation and rearrange the world

according to their desires, like the creator and lover Pygmalion or the creator and inventor

Prometheus, but also according to their own sense of the world, their own hybridity, and their social

and biological networks. This interconnectedness made us all cyborgs, in the sense defined by

Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto.’ Echoing Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and

turning from biological sciences to cybernetics, AI and information technology, N. Katherine Hayles

argued that “we have always been posthuman,” in that we have always used tools to extend the

boundaries of the human (How 291). Echoing Hayles, Tom Boellstorff says that technology is not a

recent arrival but a central feature of humanity, arguing that “it is in being virtual that we are

human” since it is “in human ‘nature’ to experience life through the prism of culture” (5, also 29).

With the invention of highly technological humanoids and technologies that merge with the

human—those that are already here and those that are yet to come—the definition of natural and

artificial life broadens the circle of species: there is biological life and computational life and a variety

of intermediate and merged stages. As a consequence, thinking about the human today requires a

posthumanist frame. One of the tasks of critical posthumanism has been to relinquish

anthropocentrism altogether; however, this speciesist feature of humanity proves to be difficult to

2
overcome since the idea has been central to modern thought ever since humanism surfaced in the

early Renaissance (at that point, still under the influence of Christianity; see more in Pettman).

The project’s mythological framing with the focus on science fiction works that were inspired by the

Pygmalion and Prometheus myths reveals a historical continuity of (re)defining the human in

Western culture, and more broadly in today’s global landscape. The genre of science fiction became

increasingly prevalent and mainstream, Darko Suvin points out, as typical in “the great whirlpool

periods of history” (par. 8). This “literature of cognitive estrangement,” as he terms and

conceptualizes science fiction (par. 2), shares more with the literature of myth, fantasy, and fairy tale

than with naturalistic or empiricist literary genres. However, while myth as a “‘timeless’ and religious

approach look[s] in its own way beneath (or above) the empiric surface,” science fiction relies on a

cognitive approach (par. 8). Opposed to supernatural and empiricist approaches, science fiction

posits questions (rather than mythologically universal answers) and explores where they lead, not

with the imagination of the fairy tale but by building on the existing condition with an empirically

imaginable twist of a cognitively explicable novum, as Suvin terms it, i.e. innovation with a rational

explanation.

This project looks into specific settings of the Pygmalion myth in fiction, science, and society with a

focus on literature and cinema from twentieth-century America (Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, James

Tiptree Jr.’s and Ted Chiang’s short stories, Sharon Olds’s, Sue Wood’s, and micha cárdenas’s

poetry), England (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Roald Dahl’s short stories, Richard Meier’s and

Helen Dunmore poetry), and Ireland (G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion). Western literatures and film (2001: A

Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Gattaca, Her, Ex Machina) manifest a prominent and increasing interest in

the Pygmalion myth in the last two centuries. A few singular texts from Argentinian (Julio Cortázar),

3
Slovenian (Andrej Tomažin), Serbian (Zoran Nešković), and Czech authors (Karel Čapek) also

crucially contribute to the discussion, even if, with an exception of Nešković’s short story, they are

not Pygmalionesque.

The framing of the project within the Pygmalion myth brings out three related topics: the use of

language in nonhumans, paralysis and pygmalionism as medical diagnoses, and new ways of human

reproduction. All topics stem from the Pygmalion paradigm texts, from which I identify the

following findings that serve as a premise for the paired chapters that follow:

- Chapters 1 and 2 on language in nonhumans: The statue Pygmalion created only acquired a

name (Galatea) in the eighteenth century, and gained the ability to speak fully in the

nineteenth-century reinterpretations of the myth.

- Chapters 3 and 4 on pygmalionism and paralysis as medical diagnoses: The condition of

pygmalionism considers the beloved as a paralyzed human that might or might not be

eventually freed of paralysis.

- Chapters 5 and 6 on human reproduction: The idea that a human and a nonhuman can

produce (human or humanlike) children is present already in Ovid and has been the subject

of speculation in many modern texts.

What are Artificial Humanities?

I coined the term artificial humanities as an umbrella term for the interdisciplinary study of

fundamental questions about the human as they arise from engineering practice, technological

applications, and the interaction between the humanities and the sciences. The split into “two

4
cultures,” the mainstream culture and the scientific culture, as delineated in C. P. Snow’s famous

1959 lecture, has since been partly breached by the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research

questions, as well as by the increasing technologization of society, which requires philosophical

introspection of science and technology. Both of these changes resulted in the birth of fields such as

science and technology studies, science writing, and affective science. Artificial humanities bring the

humanities perspectives into a much-needed discussion with science and engineering to address

pertinent questions about practices that require imminent decisions, be they laboratories or in

policy-making. The questions artificial humanities address are related to technologies—in this

dissertation these are artificial intelligence, social robotics, neurotechnology, and biotechnology—

and can also be applied broadly to natural sciences, such as climatology or microbiology. All of these

popular fields notably center on nonhuman entities or agencies rather than human; and yet, these are

the disciplines that are presently considering the question of the human, often more so than the

traditional fields centering around the human and human agency, such as anthropology, sociology,

psychology, and philology. Moreover, these scientific and technological fields offer tentative answers

to the fundamental philosophical question of What is human?, in terms that radically defy the

understanding of the human on which the human sciences rely. Through artificial humanities, fields

like AI and biotechnology cease to be seen as merely engineering disciplines and become visible also

as philosophical and experimental fields.

Conceptions of the human with which humanities and social sciences have operated since the

Enlightenment are problematized in the field of artificial humanities—together with the concept of

nature, covered by natural sciences, also known as hard sciences or sciences of matter, and with the

concept of technology, covered by engineering. Humanities have been at least partly oblivious to the

historical contingency of these concepts: in the twenty-first century, the ontological, institutional,

5
and infrastructural concept of the human does not hold up. Universal categorizations of the human

are taken over by a variety of truths from engineering fields (AI derails the human differently than

gene editing does) or interdisciplinary approaches (such as environmental studies or health

humanities). The difficulty of delineating terms such as human, nature, technology, or artificial—also

present in this dissertation—renders these categories more uncertain than they have been over the

last two hundred years. Artificial humanities are necessary to help us rethink these basic concepts,

whose application to the contemporary world reveals a fallacy in our conceptualization. While the

humanities tend to be rather defensive against the philosophical applications of technologies like AI,

since some see AI as a reduction of the human to the machine or vice versa, engineers are generally

too busy with their own research and are largely unequipped to be able to reconsider the

philosophical stakes of it all.

The human was considered as more than mere nature and other than instinctive nonhuman animals

or mechanical machines already in the antiquity. These concepts are delineated already in Aristotle’s

Politics, written 350 B.C.E., as the natural order of things: in all the mankind, the male rules the

female and the master owns the slave by nature (I, 5, 1254b); or in the Vedas, which give the

universal scope to the Hindu caste system. The modern period reinforced these conceptions to an

extreme with humanism, in which the human is the center of the world and the single agent of

change in the world. With distinct features of language and intellect, tools and technology, culture

and arts, freedom of will and subjectivity, human was a subject among objects, a thinking thing

among thoughtless things, an entity opposite to any other. Posthumanism has pointed out that all of

these criteria are outdated. For example, Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ rejects the humanist

dualisms subject-object, creator-created, nature-culture.

6
The posthumanist debate began in the 1980s with postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern critique.

However, the impulse to reconsider the human came from sciences and engineering research that

repeatedly encountered a dilemma of where to draw the boundaries between the nonhuman, the

already-human, and the still-human. The dilemma is ever-evolving, for example, in synthetic biology

where human-made products are completely natural but do not exist in nature; in the impossibility

of separating microbiological from larger biological spheres; or in considering animal cognition or

artificial intelligence and machine learning as their own types of intelligence in a world-frame not

intelligible to humans.

Posthumanism sees no attribute as uniquely human, instead viewing the human as a part of a larger

ecosystem in which the human is physically, chemically, and biologically dependent on the

environment (Keeling and Lehman 2, 5). The concept of posthumanism involves a plurality of

(sometimes contradictory) ideas on what is human, some of which have been presented in science

fiction literature and film long before posthumanism emerged as a theoretical and practical

epistemology. These include cyborgism (technological hybridity), antihumanism (criticizing and

challenging traditional humanism), objectivism (nonhuman agency), human extinction (posthuman

future without humans), the Anthropocene (geological era characterized by an unprecedented—and

damaging—human impact on the nonhuman world), new materialism (anti-dualist view on matter),

and so on. All these views are a part of critical posthumanism; they keep the human separate from

nature and largely hope to overcome moral anthropocentrism. While posthumanism criticizes “the

humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the universal human, post-anthropocentrism criticizes species hierarchy

and advances bio-centered egalitarianism” (Braidotti and Hlavajova 1). Contrary to critical

posthumanism, ontological posthumanism makes for an intensification of humanism, and with it the

human. In many aspects, it is synonymous with transhumanism (technological enhancement into

7
superhumans), an entirely anthropocentric movement widely present in technologies and pop

culture (see more in Wolfe, Nayar, Braidotti and Hlavajeva). In my dissertation, I demonstrate that

the two main strains of postmodernism are not as separate as some scholars believe—most

prominent among them is N. Katherine Hayles, who sees them as competing forces and has

established the term posthuman as an umbrella term that includes all variants that the two types of

posthumanism encompass. Throughout the dissertation I show that transhumanism permeates the

objective natural sciences, regardless of the critical morality offered in posthumanist theories. In any

discipline, even in a science that is widely considered as objective as it gets (an understanding

doubted by posthumanism and postmodernism), anthropocentrism is difficult and sometimes

impossible to avoid.

In addition, posthumanism is eager to remind us that the exemplary human is all too often

delineated in racist, ableist, sexist, and classist terms. (In fact, the ostracization of ‘lesser’ types of

humans or creatures was a cause of the origin of the posthumanist thought; most prominent

posthumanist theorists are primarily feminist theorists, such as Rosi Braidotti, or animal studies

scholars, such as Cary Wolfe.) This fault of universalizing the human is also identified in my project

in relation to every topic I pursue. Since my project’s overall focus is on language as one of the

criteria for the human, this issue always comes to light in relation to some kind of speech paralysis

that disables normative communication.

Technologization of the human and of human attributes (such as human language) is based upon

the exemplary human and created for this exemplary human. Artificial humanities are pertinent to

the theory and practice of nascent and well-established technologies because byproducts of

technologization (be they algorithms or data in AI, or the choice for or against a genetic condition in

8
assisted reproductive technology) stem from societal biases, which are aptly specified and thoroughly

conferred in fiction. There are two main purposes of artificial humanities: on the engineering side,

the goal is to improve the practice and implementation of human-centered technologies, and on the

humanities side, the goal is to reformulate old-fashioned concepts and contexts while producing a

surplus of new concepts and contexts inspired by the evolving technologies and sciences. In our

rapidly evolving world, both sides have fallen blind to the philosophical contingencies of our

language, context, time, and the human (per Katherine Hayles’s denaturing order). The denaturing

of such basic concepts demands a reevaluation of each one of them as well as their relatives

(consciousness, body, individuality, immortality, hybridity, etc.).

In the present project, artificial humanities aim to study the relationship between human and

technological nonhuman entities, which are human-made and thus, by some definitions, artificial.

Technology and the arts, including literature, are the utmost human-made creations, the highest

forms of human spirit, expression, and knowledge. As I approach my research questions through

literature and literary scholarship, I point out that literature was often the first discourse to publicly

formulate and identify novel and complex ideas in an original and profound manner. For example,

since fiction speculated on various technologies on a societal and individual level before their

approximations were ever invented, literary scholarship was therefore in a privileged position to

reflect on these ramifications from an ethical perspective or social, political, and legal philosophy

before these ideas were ever presented outside the fabricated reality of other fields. As this

dissertation shows, the privileged position is not merely about literature being the first medium but,

more importantly, about offering space—as in an imaginative laboratory—for a philosophical

reflection on historical and contemporary challenges posited by technologization.

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Using literature for the purpose of artificial humanities might seem reductive to literature. However,

literature does not serve solely as a space for exploration or as a moral compass. Instead, the

exploration and the moral questions should develop in the technological fields themselves. As a

cultural companion and sometimes inspiration to technologies, literature can help us formulate the

research questions and the discrepancies between them as well as to predict and avoid repercussions

of technological innovation and implementation. My research questions as addressed through a

literary lens have shown that, in fact, they are no different from questions posed by social robotics

engineers (e.g. Should a robot be programmed to know their maker?) or research embryologists (e.g.

How long should we grow embryos in a laboratory?). Scientists themselves have expressed a need

for the humanities scholars to assist in resolving philosophical dilemmas that arise from their

respective quantitative disciplines. This resulted in newly developed fields surrounding the ethics of

technology, such as ethics of artificial intelligence, and new directions in the well-established

subfields of ethics, such as bioethics. Both subfields of ethics are discussed in this dissertation, with

AI ethics covered in the first three chapters and bioethics in the last three chapters.

The overarching argument of this dissertation is that literary representations serve an important

function by suggesting answers, even if imaginary ones, to human challenges posited by

technological changes in a postindustrial society. By combining fiction with technology ethics, I

identify novel phenomena in human-nonhuman interactions. In most phenomena examined here,

this project is the first scholarly work, to my knowledge, that has aligned literature with fields as

diverse as artificial intelligence, social robotics, neurotechnology, and biotechnology. Granted, there

is increasing interest in works such as Frankenstein or Brave New World in relation to new

technologies, but overall these discussions are not common in literary scholarship and tend not to

include ethics and history of science. An exception to this was found in studies on visual

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technologies used in reproductive technologies, discussed alongside poetry in chapter 6. I have also

not traced scholarship that would discuss most of my main texts—G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion, Richard

Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, short stories by Ted Chiang, Julio Cortázar,

Roald Dahl, Zoran Nešković, James Tiptree Jr., and Andrej Tomažin, or contemporary poetry—in

relation to the technologies explored here. To my surprise, however, humanities discussions with

literary examples are not a rare finding in science journals, especially medical journals (see

Kondziella or Plum and Posner). Likewise, I found that ethics papers dealing with a promising area

of technology, such as latest neurotechnologies or AI, employed Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of

Robotics in addressing ethical issues around nonhuman agency (see Goering et al., McCauley). This

crossover, I believe, only further enforces the inevitability of a concept such as artificial humanities.1

I further make a call for literary scholars to actively join the discussion on how literature informs and

molds our conceptions around frontier technologies, and, further, to engage in the practice of

creating these technologies. I argue we need to use the reflective public space of literature with its

cultural diversity and unlimited speculation in more practical ways, not only with literature as a

pathway to some crucial ethical and philosophical questions that steer the current focus of science

1 While working on this project, I learned about other similar initiatives for a restructuration of disciplines towards
studying humanities in relation to science and engineering, now considered to be the main driving force of the change in
the world and the human. I was contacted by the Berggruen Institute whose mission is to “develop ideas and shape
political, economic and social institutions for the 21st century” (Berggruen). The Institute focuses on four major societal
transformations that are currently taking place: The Future of Capitalism, The Future of Democracy, Geopolitics and
Globalization, and, under Tobias Rees’s initiative, the recently developed program The Transformations of the Human.
The Transformation of the Human program places artists and social sciences and humanities scholars in collaboration
with AI and biotech technologists to address philosophical questions about the human today. The Institute is also
hoping to restructure the current approach to interdisciplinarity in higher education.

The linguist and the current president of Northeastern University Joseph Aoun applied a similar idea with a narrower
focus on AI and robotics to the American higher education in his book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial
Intelligence (2017). Aoun lays out the framework for a new academic discipline, humanics, a mixture of humanities and
STEM. His book promotes education which prepares students for a market filled with smart machines by developing
technological literacy (mathematics, engineering, coding), data literacy (using and understanding data), and human
literacy (social milieu, communication and engagement with others).

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and technology but also with literature co-formulating our research questions and the philosophical

implications at stake.

Why Comparative Literature?

In the sections above I made an argument about how literature can help us navigate contemporary

challenges brought on by innovative and already existing, often widely used, technologies. Through

literature one can approach topics as diverse as history, medicine, economics, and video gaming, to

explore how fiction can provide answers to complex philosophical and ethical questions. For

example, scientific advances bring on new social conditions that may be difficult to conceptualize,

such as new methods of interconnectedness, digital censorship, and control (compare the Internet

and E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’), and literary analysis can help us point out and evaluate the

ramifications of particular scientific advances. Neural networks like Richard Powers’s Helen from

Galatea 2.2, a human equivalent of brain in a computer, are not around the corner. However, we still

fantasize about digitizing our brains and making conscious machines, as attested in fiction and

nonfiction, film, and other arts, and these fantasies translate into actual goals in technology. Studying

fiction that thematizes humanoid creation and human enhancement is therefore a necessary step

towards understanding cultural conceptions of novel technologies.

Comparative literature is a discipline that pays attention to the mixing of zones and transverses

national, linguistic, and formal boundaries created by our conceptions of space, time, code, and so

on. Since comparative literature challenges well-established conceptions and categorizations, it is a

perfect discipline to host artificial humanities and their quest to reconfigure the human. The

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interdisciplinary nature of the field makes it especially suited to evaluate new developments in

literary practice and literary studies, such as digital narratives (cyberdrama, hypertextual narration,

and cyberpoetry) or, as in this dissertation, creative writing by AI (poetry, film scenarios, and prose

co-authored with human writers). The field’s position amidst different linguistic traditions, scholarly

discourses, and media has been especially helpful in my project as it expanded from the initial focus

on American and British fiction to visual arts, South and Central Slavic texts, and medical and legal

literature.

In addition to that, posthumanism has found its home in comparative literature and related

disciplines that are housed under the humanities and social sciences. Posthumanism, with its

varieties, accommodates the extensiveness of the Pygmalionesque topics addressed here due to its

origins in science fiction and critical social theory, fields that have always received scientific and

engineering ideas with open interest and willingness to extrapolate their ideas, and the capability to

fabricate a world that goes against them. Scientific and literary cultures interweave right at the nexus

of the research questions I pursue here, largely building on the posthumanist ground and its

inclusion of the arts and sciences as practice and theory. The mere term posthuman is a convenient

description of this project’s goal to define what comes after the human, as the liberal humanist

subject that has emerged from the Enlightenment needs to be re-evaluated in contemporary context.

Nonetheless, the term posthuman is also problematic and narrow. Conflating the subject of liberal

humanism with the term human is limiting to “human lifeways,” as Tom Boellstorff comments (29).

Besides that, posthumanism is deeply embedded in Western philosophical thought and particularly

in the humanities debates. A posthuman is sometimes called a cyborg, Homo cyber, Homo faber,

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Homo deus, etc., but all these names are used within the same traditions and similar discourses, and

remain pen to the charge of narrowness.

This dissertation sticks with the traditional naming of posthumanism and posthuman, but although

the theoretical frame of this dissertation is embedded into the posthuman view, my view of how we

should study and think about the human often deconstructs posthumanism, first, by revealing its

permeating anthropocentrism (a not entirely surprising finding considering the fact that the field

grew as a critical reaction to humanism) and, second, by criticizing a posthumanist belief where what

is ‘beyond the human’ is naively assumed to be a continuous good and a moral authority. It would

be difficult to find a more accommodating field than comparative literature for one to work inside a

posthumanist theoretical framing while pushing towards its reorganization—and where one can

question the definition of the human only to conclude there is not one but many definitions, none

of which can be universal at this point. Universality of the term is not the goal, although the tension

towards a convergence of views from different disciplines into a coherent interlocking narrative

seems to suggest it.

Part I: Posthuman Language

Language and communication are the cornerstones of AI engineering. Programming and coding use

coding languages, most commonly English, which makes AI not only an engineering product but

also a product of a language. The development of AI relies not only on programming but also on

the human touch: how AI communicates with humans (customers) is of utmost importance.

Machine learning of language was first established as mimicry of a user’s input with Weizenbaum’s

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chatbot ELIZA; today, we have enormous sets of language data (largely from the internet) that are

fed into AI through the models of supervised and sometimes unsupervised learning.

I call all human languages humanese in order to distinguish them from language in general, as a

method and system of human communication, as well as from other types of languages, such as

coding language. New ideas explored in the first two chapters evaluate humanese as a means of

enhancement used by human and nonhuman entities. The chapters explore the following questions:

How can humanese be enhanced in human and nonhuman entities? What changes in humanlike

creations once they acquire humanese? What is common and shared in language when used by

humans and nonhumans? Finally, how will nonhuman use of humanese affect it in the long run?

The first chapter contextualizes a novel idea of language enhancement and focuses on Eliza’s

language training in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913). By making a link between Eliza

and chatbots (i.e. AI programs that can hold a conversation through audio or textual media, such as

Apple’s virtual assistant Siri), I show how Shaw anticipates computer-based language training. I

suggest that Shaw, basing this play on phonetician Henry Sweet and surrounded by the Bell family

that was about to invent a telephone, picked on the nascent science of instilling humanese in

machines already at the beginning of the twentieth century.

By comparing fictional and actual galateas, I follow the transformation of language into what I call

posthuman language: language used by computational entities and technologically enhanced humans.

Striking similarities emerge in the language training of fictional characters (Shaw’s Eliza) and real-

world AI (Hanson’s robot Sophia), including the presence of a performing identity, scripted

language, and speech disorders, suggesting that human mimicry is crucial for establishing rapport

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between humans and humanlike entities. This observation allows me to propose that scientific

evolution still embraces the human, despite recent posthumanist and post-anthropocentric claims to

the contrary.

I apply the lowercase term galatea (as opposed to Galatea, the name acquired by Pygmalion’s lover

in the eighteen-century renditions of the myth) broadly to all created, humanlike entities that tend to

yield love, with an interest in borderline literary examples. I argue that language acquisition in

galateas reflects their growing independence, starting with singing and scripted words and ending in

autonomous and self-learning artificial intelligence. Among other Pygmalionesque texts, I discuss

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and dissect Frankenstein’s artificial

human’s eloquence, which, I argue, is a revolutionary feature for galateas who, following Shelley’s

lead, became increasingly verbal and autonomous in the nineteenth century.

The second chapter deals with language in both fictional (Helen the neural network) and real

artificial intelligence galateas (ELIZA the chatbot, Sophia the robot). I suggest that species

connection through physical resemblance, nonverbal gestures, or, at the very least, language fluency

is a prerequisite for a successful communication between humans and nonhumans. As opposed to

the early galateas, which were all beautiful objects (statues, paintings, etc.), I show that more recent

galateas are required to have language but do not necessarily still possess a body. The primary

galatean attribute and core galatean identity have therefore moved from the body to the mind. I

further argue that this change is a reflection of a larger societal trend that perceives and ranks human

likeness in humanlike intelligence rather than in bodily form. This intelligence is expected to

correspond to normative human behavior and is reflected primarily through written (chatbots,

computer-generated journalist articles) or spoken language (virtual assistants, conversations with

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social humanoid robots).

Language also serves as a distinction between humans and animals or machines. Linguists argue that

nonhumans do not have cognitive capacity to use humanese: they do, however, use nonhumanese

languages, i.e. animal, plant, and machine languages (although most linguists would rather simply call

them simply communication). There is a great divide in our perception of these nonhuman entities;

even if animals acquire some humanese (linguists call these animals linguistically trained) and are

cognitively able understand it, they are largely believed to be merely parroting it. Machines, on the

other hand, as good as they might be in simulating language, are given more merit in language

abilities and much more responsibility, even if they are not capable of understanding. I first ask if

these refutations are legitimate, then examine a variety of literary examples through the

posthumanist view, and finally propose a theoretical approach to posthuman language as a

prosthesis.

Per N. Katherine Hayles, a postmodern impulse which began with structuralism first denatured

language, then time, context, and finally the human (with the cyborg), showing that “concepts once

considered natural were social constructions” (Chaos 27). In terms of humanese language in

nonhuman entities, we are already at the point when humans cannot always tell if they are having a

conversation with a machine or another human. We have not yet invented a truly convincing

creative AI but we are getting there. What happens when even storytelling, the most human product

of language which is present in all societies, is denatured by machines?

This question has been recently addressed by journalists, but the discussion is noticeably lacking in

literary scholarship. To address it, I compare two little-known short stories, Roald Dahl’s ‘The Great

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Automatic Grammatizator’ (1953) and Andrej Tomažin’s ‘Heroes, Lackeys and Artificial

Intelligence’ [‘Hlapci, heroji in umetna inteligenca’] (2018), to current achievements in AI writing

and creativity, particularly generators of fictional and factual writing. I suggest that although AI

creativity has not yet reached a humanlike level, it has already been a valuable resource for human

creators and will continue to be, as it has aspired to present new levels of creativity. The

aforementioned stories warn that AI’s entrance into the creative writing domain requires a complete

reevaluation and regulation of writing practices and the literary market as well as literary criticism

and theory. AI writing by default crosses the line of plagiarism, twists the concept of authorship, and

allows for massive production while also opening new creative platforms (for example, every original

neural net architecture presents a unique—nonhuman—approach to writing, even when not

interlaced with human creativity). Continuing Hayles’s denaturing idea, I further ask how humanese

is changing through the use of our technological companion species.

I then turn to the other end of the spectrum: creative and humanese-reared nonhuman animals.

Animal cognition research is controversial, especially when conducted through anthropomorphizing

animals with human habits and language. I look into most notorious cases of apes (Kanzi the

bonobo) and birds (Alex the parrot), and relate them to literary texts that thematize language in

parrots (Ted Chiang’s 2016 very short story ‘Great Silence’) and salamanders (Karel Čapek’s 1936

novel War with the Newts [Válka s mloky] and Julio Cortázar’s 1956 short story ‘Axolotl’). The

approaches to animal use of humanese are diverse in all these fictional and factual stories but they all

have one common feature: social bonding between a human trainer and animal trainee is crucial for

successful language rearing—a finding also applicable to user interaction with intelligent machines.

In a theoretical conclusion, I propose viewing posthuman language as a prosthesis rather than an

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inbred human feature. Language, after all, is only a potential faculty and the ability to perform it

ranges among humans as well as nonhumans. In this view, language is an artificial prosthesis, a tool

created by humans and imposed on nonhuman entities. Instead of using the plain and vague term

language, I conceptualize this view with the term humanese. I have found that the idea of language

(humanese) as a prosthesis was proposed at two different, independent occasions without a wider

response in their respective scholarly communities: first in a 2000 essay by a literary critic John

Weightman and second in a 2013 paper by a linguist Salikoko Mufwene. Weightman sees language

as an internal instrument, a prosthesis (whose inner workings we do not understand), and Mufwene

advocates language as a prosthetic technology with a biological substratum (which might help us

understand its inner workings). I propose that nonhuman agency over humanese can transform and

enhance our language, primarily through technological means (of computerization, AI,

neurotechnology, pharmaceutics, etc.). This further implies that humans could enhance our abilities

in abstract thinking, creative writing, and so on through computational and biological language

enhancement.

Part II: Literature and Bioethics

The second part of the dissertation examines medical diagnoses, symptoms, and procedures that are

brought to the forefront in the Pygmalion paradigm fiction. This is a novel approach to studying

literature as well as to addressing the medical, ethical, social and psychological questions that such

conditions open. Chapter 3 looks into modern pygmalionism, i.e. intimate relationships held with

humanlike objects, and chapter 4 examines whole-body paralysis in relation to neurotechnology.

Chapters 5 and 6 investigate assisted reproductive technologies from the perspective of rhetoric and

visual technologies that shape our views on human reproduction as well as from the perspective of

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related technologies largely employed by in-vitro fertilization (gamete donations, gene editing,

gestational surrogacy, etc.) as they have been speculated about in fiction and film.

The questions that these four chapters open are multifold and relate to computational as well as

biological technologies, often both at once. As I argue above, we should not always discuss one

without the other, since these technologies are becoming more intertwined every day. Many of these

questions continue the discussion from the first two chapters. They flow from one chapter to

another in the following order: Why do we create expensive humanlike robots? Why don’t we

instead invest this money into robots that would alleviate caretakers’ burdens? Why do we fall in

love with humanoids? Why do we get emotionally attached to our prosthetic technology? How can

this technology and our practices around them be more helpful to severely paralyzed patients? What

are the ethical issues with extended bodies? Should an object with an automatized agency gain

personhood? What about an object that one views and treats as a person? What are the implications

of such personhood for the prenatal life? Do we change our conceptions of prenatal life based on

available technologies? Do we make choices about prenatal life based on false beliefs? I argue that

literature can help us formulate these questions before the technology is put into practice and then

assess its challenges in an ethical manner.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, when Prospero’s daughter Miranda meets a dozen men who have been

shipwrecked on her island, she first realizes that there is a “brave new world”2 out there and praises

the “beauteous mankind” and its “goodly creatures”3 (5.1 186-87). One of these men is Prince

2 Aside from bravery, the world ‘brave’ might imply savagery (as in Spanish toro bravo).

3 The world ‘goodly’ renders a question of proper transcription as possibly Shakespeare used ‘good’.

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Ferdinand, a young man she meets at the beginning of the play and quickly marries. She does not

meet the rest of the shipwrecked crew until the final act when she reacts with the cited famous lines,

the last words she utters in the play. Ferdinand is only the second man she has met in her life;4 the

first being her father, together with his nonhuman and hardly human servants, spirit Ariel and

monstrous Caliban. When she encounters Ferdinand, she is at first not certain whether he is a

human or a spirit,5 but falls in love with him regardless of his human status.6 Miranda’s love story

points out at least two things related to the topics of the second half of the dissertation,

pygmalionism and reproduction: that she does not have and is not given much choice in finding her

mate on a deserted island prone to inbreeding, and that she does not care about Ferdinand’s human

status, possibly because she has been living among humans and nonhumans for most of her life.

John, the central character of the second part of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, is called a

“savage” in the “civilized” World State. Among other things, he differs from the World State

citizens by engaging in literature, knowing Shakespeare by heart, and having a whole different set of

values, such as his belief in the institution of marriage. In conversation with another central

character and societal outsider, Bernard, John brings up Miranda’s words of wonder about the

“beauteous mankind” (129) and asks Bernard, the World State protagonist of the first part of the

novel, if he is married to beautiful Lenina. Bernard’s reaction is laughter (“Ford, no!”), and John

laughs as well, reciting Miranda’s words in irony: “O brave new world that has such people in it”

(130). “You have a most peculiar way of talking sometimes,” Bernard replies, not knowing that John

4“Why speaks my father so ungently? This / Is the third man that e’er I saw, the first / That e’er I sigh’d for: pity move
my father / To be inclined my way!” (1.2 440-43)

5 “What is’t? a spirit? / Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir, / It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit” (1.2 403-05)

6 “I might call him / A thing divine, for nothing natural / I ever saw so noble” (1.2 410-12)

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quoted The Tempest. Such differences between the two characters and their respective worlds become

graver and ultimately fatal for John during his visit to the “brave new world” of the World State.

John’s borrowed words from The Tempest are still one of the most common literary references, used

as a critique of political regimes and new technologies.

The biotechnological brave new world is discussed in detail in chapter 5, through Aldous Huxley’s

dystopian novel that inspired the overused phrase. Huxley imagined assisted reproductive

technologies in astonishingly accurate detail decades before the actual technology was first attempted

in the 1950s and resulted in an actual birth in 1978, an event followed by millions of children being

conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF technology is also an access point for newer

technologies, such as gene editing, gamete donation and gestational surrogacy. Critics of new

technologies, not without reason, like to bring back historical stains. Eugenics has been practiced in

a variety of arrangements; however, the eugenics of modern genetics is nothing like the human race

has ever seen before. These technologies are bound to profoundly transform how we practice

medicine and view our own bodies and traditional biological heritage. We are pressed for time with

ethical questions, as attested by some bold and hasty acts that are carried out before we are able to

properly reflect on them (such as Jiankui He’s in vitro genome editing of the twins born in 2018 and

another baby in 2019). The social ramifications of these controversial and revolutionary acts and our

reactions to them will bear fruit and will burden our descendants, whose lives, bodies, and values

will be inevitably and irreversibly transformed by these very causes.

Today, people can connect with other people from all across the globe merely by accessing the

World Wide Web. When one is not adept to the virtual world—like Miranda who is naïve about the

world outside her island—one can easily mistake a bot for a human. This is also why ‘the potato test’

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was invented on a popular dating application, Tinder: should the responder fail to respond ‘potato’

when requested, then it is likely a bot and not a human. More than half of web traffic is made by

bots (Zeifman) and the number of these and similar artificial intelligence ‘spirits’ has long surpassed

that of the people. Bots might be powerful enough to manipulate public opinion, which is especially

pertinent to politics (Yao). In the twenty-first century, a majority of the brave new world beings are

virtual and computational while the majority of the brave new world humans are altered through some

sort of biological technology (vaccines, GMO food, etc.). In this dissertation, I focus exclusively on

AI and robotics for the first set of being, and neurotechnology, assisted reproductive technology,

and genome editing for the second set.

Adding humanlike robotics to an artificial mind makes humans more likely to form relationships

with nonhumans. Granted, at this time, only a handful of people live with humanlike carebots,

sexbots, or social robots; however, a majority of Westerners live with virtual assistants that possess

no body and are instead embodied in their phone or personal computer. People using these devices

(sometimes already called cyborgs) tend to say they cannot imagine their lives without them. The

purpose of these devices is not only to assist but also to socialize: for example, when Apple’s first

TV advertisement introduced Siri they called her an assistant and a companion (Turkle 339).

Sometimes these relationships transfer from banal everyday requests into intimate needs and people

fall in love with the artificial entities. The first wave of digisexualities, which includes dating apps

and meeting through virtual environment, has already become the norm, and the second wave, does

not necessarily include a human partner (virtual reality, sexbots), is emerging. Forming relationships

through the means of technology further impacts the future of marriage, kinship, and reproduction,

altogether steering the trajectory of the human evolution. The train of thought presented in this

paragraph connects the six chapters as a whole.

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In the second part of the dissertation, I lay out a framework for the study of literature and ethics,

here mostly bioethics, in relation to new technologies. I argue that fictional and nonfictional

literature introduces, explores, assesses, and interprets bioethical questions on multiple levels. I see

literature as a self-reflection on diverse traditions, perspectives, and values that offers an advantage

to looking at a moral dilemma in this broad manner from which we might gain, as Daniel P. Sulmasy

and Jeremy Sugarman write in Methods in Medical Ethics, “a richer understanding of that moral

question and a better grasp of the answer” (3). Literature is also a common public space not only for

imagining and speculating about new ideas (as a laboratory) but also for reflecting on their

consequences (in an imagined society, stranded on the experimented island). As such, it can inform

ethics, future studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, race studies, and related fields in

at least the following contexts.

First of all, science and technology feed ideas in fiction, and vice versa. For example, the Star Trek

computer and Eliza Doolittle were major inspirations for chatbots and virtual assistants used in

today’s cell phones and improvisational theater (discussed in Chapter 1). Second, literature offers

exemplary cases of some conditions (pygmalionism, discussed in Chapter 3; or narcissism,

Quasimodo and Münchausen syndromes) as cultural capital, some of which serve a symbolic

function (axolotl, discussed in Chapter 2). Third, fiction works as a space for inventing new

technologies and reflects on their social and individual ramifications (autonomous neurological

devices, discussed in Chapter 4). Fourth, nonfiction memoirs, autobiographies, and essays are

powerful tools that can be used to discuss medical conditions and technologies on an individual level

(patients with the locked-in syndrome, discussed in Chapter 4), as recognized by the fields of

medical humanities and narrative medicine. Fifth, both fiction and nonfiction offer a space for

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fostering solutions (Asimov’s laws of robotics, discussed in Chapter 4) as well as a safe and

productive space for conversation (literature groups in hospitals). Sixth, literature can provide a

richer context from a patient narrative, if that narrative is at all possible (the Vigand couple each

offer a perspective on the husband’s illness, discussed in Chapter 4). Seventh, literature also offers a

broad and diverse historical and cultural narrative (stigma around cancer and AIDS, romanticization

of tuberculosis in the Romantic period, or ethics around assisted reproductive technologies,

discussed in Chapters 5 and 6). Finally, literature explores and re-defines human nature and the

world around us, which is essential to ethics and philosophy and further extends to the practice of

science and technology. The underlying philosophical question of this dissertation, What is human?, is

essentially imbedded in every work of literature, with the novel serving as the human genre in the

nineteenth century and science fiction as the human genre in the twentieth century.

Although the Pygmalion myth has been widely discussed in Western literary scholarship, I make

three additional observations regarding the topic in chapter 3. First, I develop a typology for the

texts that fit the Pygmalion paradigm. The typology points out a crucial bifurcation in these types of

stories. In the Ovidian, “Pygmalionesque” type the creator of the humanoid is the same character as

their lover, and in the “petrophiliac” type the creator is a separate character from the lover, which

brings up an entirely different setting from the Pygmalionesque type. Second, the variants of the

myth are also present in non-Western cultures, which suggests that the concept is widespread

throughout the world. For example, I traced the myth through Native American, Indian, Slavic, and

North African folk tales. Third, although the Pygmalion theme is becoming increasingly present in

factual and fictional lives of modern societies, it has been poorly examined in medical and legal

settings. My conclusion finds less stigmatization of the condition in the modern day than a few

decades ago. I argue that the view is shifting due to the impact of popular culture, which increasingly

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engages with the Pygmalion myth, as well as due to the increasingly intimate and eroticized human

relationships with artificial entities, the first wave of this engagement being human-to-human

relationships led through a technologized medium. This first wave is a part of emerging

digisexualities, which include any kind of technologized sexuality where pygmalionism would be

considered a sexual orientation rather than a paraphilia and would therefore not require medical

treatment or legal persecution.

Chapter 4 looks at pygmalionism from the perspective of the paralyzed beloved. Severe bodily

paralysis is often ascribed to Pygmalionesque objects, such as ascribing humanity to social robots

(e.g. Sophia from Hanson Robotics received Saudi Arabian citizenship and UN ambassadorship). In

relation to the humanization of galateas, I discuss a recently discovered Serbian short story by Zoran

Nešković which received a film adaptation and, unlike many other similar stories, directly addresses

a variety of ethical questions pertaining to social and sex robots as well as virtual assistants and

therapists. Then I look into the opposite effect, dehumanization, in the case of James Tiptree Jr.’s

short story, in which a young woman is plugged into a neurotechnologically-led human, purposely

grown without a brain. This fictional story is put in a dialogue with testimonies from locked-in

patients and experiments with the most recent neurotechnologies, such as brain-computer interface

and geminoids. This juxtaposition reveals the necessity and benefits of these technologies for the

severely paralyzed, as well as the Pygmalionesque attachments that develop from such prosthetic

arrangements. Finally, by closely reading Roald Dahl’s short story, I open the question of

personhood for human and nonhuman entities in cases where communication is not possible. I

show how conception of social personhood, as suggested by Nancy Jecker, and identity as a social

narrative, as suggested by Hilde Lindemann, are additionally complicated by computational and

biotechnological entities, especially those that merge with humans.

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Chapter 5 opens a new topic of human reproduction. I argue that our conceptions of human

reproduction are affected by its terminology, enforced through assisted reproductive technologies.

My focus on the terminology around embryos and novel techniques in assisted reproductive

technologies is fresh, but the idea itself is not new: posthumanist, postmodernist and

poststructuralist theories all question how truth is made. With the examples of poetry (Sharon Olds,

Richard Meier), I expose the line between what is considered natural and artificial in reproduction.

The rest of the chapter makes a detailed comparison of the prescient reproductive process in Aldous

Huxley’s Brave New World to techniques in today’s in-vitro fertilization, cloning, gene editing, and

newer or speculative technologies, such as in-vitro gametogenesis and artificial gestation. In

conclusion, Aldous Huxley’s satirical fiction is paralleled by the views of his biologist brother, Julian

Huxley, who invented the term transhumanism and endorsed it in all seriousness—a view I deem

fundamentally utopian, as did Aldous Huxley.

In chapter 6, I extend the idea of terminology in reproductive technology influencing our

conceptions around human reproduction to the visual technologies used in these practices. I

demonstrate how greatly the visual technologies that are used in reproduction are fabricated. I begin

with ultrasound and extend the discussion to ultrasound poetry (Helen Dunmore, Sue Wood),

followed by photography (Lennart Nilsson), microphotography of embryos in laboratories, and film

with a subsequent novelization (Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark). In all these examples,

embryos and fetuses are depicted in space and as separate from the womb. This separation from a

woman’s body was already accounted in Huxley’s novel as well as in other science fiction texts of

the 1930s. I continue my discussion on biases of technologies used in reproduction by shedding light

on the famous philosophical non-identity problem that focuses on the unknown existence of future

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beings. On the example of a scene from Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, I propose that advances in

technology (prenatal diagnostic testing, preimplantation genetic screening, donor and surrogate

selection, gene editing, etc.) have already shifted the focus to known potential existences, which I call

‘the identity problem.’ Here, too, the result of a test can be misleading or biased through societal or

medical expectations. After exposing biases as a result of technologies, I look into biases and

practices in gamete donation and selection, while also shedding light on the experience of the

LGBTQIA+ community.

The final part of the chapter opens a new way of looking at assisted reproductive technologies and

speculates about hybridity in posthuman and posthumanist biology. I follow Pramod Nayar’s

definitions of the two biologies: posthuman biology reinvents the human as a part of the posthuman

movement we are experiencing at the moment, and posthumanist biology continues this trend

largely through biotechnologization into a more inclusive, but also interbred, human species (126-

27). I use the examples of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ Anthony Boucher’s sequel

‘Rappaccini’s Other Daughter,’ and the examples of Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ and Lilith’s Brood:

The Xenogenesis Trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago) to show how Boucher and Butler make a shift

towards a posthumanist biology. Posthumanist biology supports the beliefs of critical

posthumanism, highlighted in other chapters: (a) a quest for interconnectedness of all living and

nonliving entities and their environment, (b) a view of biology as a technology and technology

becoming biologized (Franklin Biological 3), and (c) a perception of human body and mind as

pathological (a medical approach), but nonetheless reparable through posthuman and posthumanist

means (a technological and often transhumanist approach).

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Chapter 1: Galatea Speaks: From a Cockney Girl to a Neural Network

Pamina:
Love sweetens every sorrow;
Every creature pays homage to it.
Papageno:
It gives relish to the days of our life,
It acts in the cycle of nature.1
Emanuel Schikaneder, W. A. Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791)

Hi diddle dee day,

An actor’s life is gay!
It’s great to be a celebrity,
An actor’s life for me!
Carlo Collodi, Walt Disney, Pinnochio (1940)

Mythologies are rife with artificial humans and prototechnological motifs. The ancient Greek myth

of Pygmalion has been repeatedly singled out as a central trope for addressing our relation to

technology, human and humanoid creatures. The myth has responded to the development of self-

pride and hubris in humans with the development of technical innovation, speculated and evaluated

the means by which we create artificial humans, ranging from arts and artisanship to science and

high technology, and opened questions of the ethics of creating and enhancing humans and

humanlike creatures, among other things. Myths similar to Pygmalion’s are found in ancient cultures

around the world, from Native American folk tales to North Africa and the Silk Road. Since this

literary trope has been so prevalent, it allows us to trace a history of our conceptions about the

human, nature, and technology. Furthermore, it allows us to take a look at our current moment and

critically inspect the practices that have evolved in technologies that seek to imitate and improve the

human state, including artificial intelligence and social robotics which are addressed in the following

two chapters.

1 Pamina: Der Lieb’ versüßet jede Plage, ihr opfert

jede Kreatur.
Papageno: Sie würzer unsre Lebenstage, sie wirkt im
Kreise der Natur.

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1.1 Language Acquisition

1.1.1 What’s in a Name?

Who is Galatea and why does it matter if she spoke? The name ‘Galatea’ is primarily associated with

misogynistic Pygmalion who sculpts a beautiful ivory woman and, with godly help of animation,

ultimately enters into a fruitful marriage with her. ‘Galatea’ also stands for any human-made artificial

woman, made of organic and inorganic materials and more or less full of life, which provokes

romantic interest in a man. I distinguish between the two meanings by using a capital letter for the

proper name Galatea and, rather unusually, a lower-case letter for the general use; the same goes for

Pygmalion and pygmalion. Contrary to the popular use, Pygmalion’s artificial woman remains

unnamed in all the early renditions of the myth we know so far.2 The name Galatea was attributed to

the animated woman only in the eighteenth century and was first popularized by J. J. Rousseau’s

Pygmalion (1770), and then only hundred years later by W. S. Gilbert’s play Pygmalion and Galatea

(1871) (Joshua 34, 155). Pygmalion’s ivory statue is most likely not named after the story of Acis and

Galatea,3 another myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but was ascribed this name due to its meaning in

Greek, milk-white, as ivory. Since idolatry was forbidden in the Middle Ages, the Pygmalion myth,

with the exception of the popular La Roman de la Rose, emerges only in the Renaissance and becomes

a dominant trope in the eighteenth century. This was not only the time Galatea was named, but also

2 The earliest versions we know are Ovid’s most influential poem (8 AD) and Philostephanus’s earliest version (third
century BC), known through Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius of Sicca’s versions (third and fourth century AD)
(Joshua 1). The myth appears again in the Middle Ages, most famously in Jean de Meun’s portion of Roman de la Rose
from the thirteenth century and gains more interest from the seventeenth century onward.

3The story of Acis and Galatea features an immortal sea-nymph as Galatea. This Galatea, too, was made for love: when
her lover, the river deity Acis, is killed by a jealous Cyclops she changes him into an immortal river spirit.

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the first time a galatea spoke. It is no coincidence, I argue, that the name Galatea emerges

simultaneously with galatea’s independence in language.

Why did Pygmalion’s woman, turned from ivory into flesh, gain a human name almost two millennia

after her first textual actualization? A name is needed only for addressing the other, and the notion

of selfhood is defined by otherness: self is the non-other. Did the name make galatea more human

and did she become more self-aware because of it? Rousseau’s Galathée, one of the earliest speaking

galateas heavily influenced by John Locke’s theory of mind, points to herself at the moment of her

animation and says: “Moi […] C’est moi.” She continues by pointing at the marble—“Ce n’est plus

moi”—and responding to Pygmalion’s kisses with: “Ah! encore moi” (Rousseau 55).

What changes when one acquires a name? One does not need a name to identify oneself for one’s

own sake; instead, a name is given in order to identify oneself in relation to the world. What power

does naming have symbolically, personally and interpersonally, and who has the power to name or

rename? Name occurs simultaneously with language. Being unnamed bears its own significance:

anonymity can protect the person or negate their personhood. A pertinent number of early fictional

human-made and humanlike creations remained nameless and were instead called by descriptive

nouns such as ‘creature,’ ‘statue,’ ‘monster,’ ‘maiden.’ These general terms are akin to the term

‘human,’ which proves to be questionable precisely in relation to terms like ‘creature’ and ‘monster.’

What differentiates the human from the Other? “[N]either [the man’s] genetic code, nor the use of

tools, nor a certain language, nor social codes differentiate him in an absolute manner” (Janicaud 1).

We are left to define ourselves, which is why we again turn to the other: How special are we? What

is in a human? In Rousseau’s Galathée’s words, what is not anymore ‘I’ and what is still ‘I’?

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In this discussion, I too call Frankenstein’s creation from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern

Prometheus by these general terms and include the creator’s name (alike Rappaccini’s daughter). The

lack of names for humanoid creatures and the consequent need to name them is evident also within

the history of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; popular culture calls the nameless creature

Frankenstein metonymically, after his creator. The creature’s subsequent naming after his creator

reinforces the idea that the creature is his property and therefore an object rather than a subject, and

that he is certainly not human even if he is created from human remains. The namelessness of the

‘demon,’ as Victor Frankenstein calls him, enforces his nonhuman status: he is neither a human nor

an animal—he does not even have a species—but is a separate entity. The lack of a name—the

monster was listed on the 1923 theatrical production playbill as “------” (Lepore ‘The Strange’ par.

2)—also leaves the creature free of any associations a name might suggest and makes the reader

focus on his actions and behavior. Most importantly, not naming the creature reflects Victor

Frankenstein’s rejection of him. The refusal to name a creature that is hauntingly humanlike brings

up speculations of Frankenstein’s (and human) psychology. We name everything we hold a concept

of; we give our pets human names, yet a creature created from human parts and looking quite like a

human, acting like a human, and using human language is undeserving of a name: it is too human.

1.1.2 Chatbots

Artificial intelligence marks a new stage in the history of reason and in addressing the question What

is human? The computational theory of human mind, the idea of which started developing in the

1940s and is built on the premise that neural computation explains cognition, was finally proposed

as a theory in 1967 by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam. Ten years before that the

Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann wrote an unfinished book titled The

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Computer and the Brain, where he speculated how the brain can be viewed as a computing machine

and discusses their respective differences. In 1950, Alan Turing published his seminal paper

‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ where he attempted to answer the question Can machines

think? and described the Turing test to the general public. The idea of intelligence as engineered

mind, created separately from the body, has been around at least since the fin-de-siècle era when the

first android from Villiers de l‘Isle-Adam’s Tomorrow’s Eve [L’Éve future] was constructed by an

engineer, fictionalized Thomas Edison, as an imitation of one woman’s body and another woman’s

spirit.

The term artificial intelligence was invented by John McCarthy at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference,

the first conference on AI. The term was a catchier replacement for “computer stimulation”

(Switzky 51) and served to distinguish the field from a related effort called cybernetics (Mitchell 18),

defined by Norbert Wiener in a 1948 monograph with the subtitle Control and Communication in the

Animal and the Machine. Both fields were trying to find a middle ground for technological innovation

in imitating human capacities and overcoming our faults, capturing our essence between animal and

the machine, nature and artifacts.

In this dissertation, I focus on the use of language in conversing with AI agents, i.e. humanlike AI

which uses language in spoken and written communication with human customers such as chatbots

and virtual assistants. Chatbot or bot (also chatterbot, talkbot, IM [instant messaging] Bot, Artificial

Conversation Entity; derived from the word robot invented by Karel Čapek and meaning ‘slave,

forced labor’) is an AI or a computer program that can hold a conversation through audio or textual

media. Chatbots are the precedent to today’s virtual assistants and messaging applications and were

called the first indigenous species of our media environment.

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick pointed out in her presentation at the MLA 2020 panel ‘Being Human,

Seeming Human,’ which consisted of humanities scholars and computational engineers, that “in the

case of conversational agents and other kinds of AIs, the emphasis is on intelligence — and

intelligence, at least in the ways it can be modeled, is not the same thing as humanity” (par. 13).

Intelligence is usually not the criticized part of the term artificial intelligence; it is artificial that is the

rather loaded word, especially since the field strives for genuine intelligence. Fitzpatrick asked, “For

what definitions of ‘human’ are we building human-seeming agents, and why? If our models for the

human mistakenly substitute intelligence for humanity, what becomes of emotion, of kindness, of

generosity, of empathy?” (par. 14), as if the latter qualities were separate from the intelligent human

represented in chatbots during a conversation. I would argue that the conception of intelligence in

humanlike entities and particularly in chatbots that are personal by nature is not strictly and solely

reasoning ability, as Fitzpatrick seems to imply. The mere design of the Turing test tells us we also

strive to imitate a human-level of clearly multidimensional intelligence beyond the commonly

chastised rationality or, per Howard Gardner’s 1983 taxonomy, logic-mathematical intelligence (per

Gardner, other types of intelligence are intra-personal, interpersonal, linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic,

musical, naturalist, and existential intelligence). In a conversational intelligence via text messaging as

conducted in the Turing test, at least a few of Gardner’s types of intelligence, primarily linguistic and

interpersonal intelligence, need to be simulated in a chatbot to pass the test. Besides that, we now

have fields such as affective computing that deal with detecting human emotions and exhibiting AI

emotions, used in many cases of AI agents—and even with the most basic self-checkout services

that thank the customer at the end of the transaction. Clearly, emotion, kindness, generosity, and

empathy are (attempted to be) engineered into conversational agents and arguably all signal

intelligence in a greater measure than calculations.

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In technologizing the world with chatbots or self-driving cars, we seem to seek general human

intelligence, i.e. artificial general intelligence or AGI. We therefore teach machines about our world

frame through a binary code and to appropriate their abilities in order to reflect our own. Machines

are programmed in a perfected way: with no undesirable human traits and expected to perform

mechanically, without errors. In the Turing test, we search for deviations from common sense and

common human senses, both of which machines find most challenging to grasp and imitate. We

search for signs of deviations in both directions, i.e. machines lacking basic understanding of the

humanized world and machines presenting superhuman ability in—what machines do best—

reasoning.

Clearly, human intelligence is much more than the ability to solve a problem. Does our quest for

creating humanlike intelligence include a longing for social and physical connection? I argue that the

sheer presence and quantity of Pygmalionesque creations testify it does. We make AI machines that

help us navigate the traffic or language biases in a job search, but we also make social and sex

robots. It is important to make a distinction between AI that emulates the human (which was an

early conception of the technology that remains pervasive in social robotics and AI that uses human

language) and AI that does not. Chatbots emulate the human since they are personal assistants.

Sometimes they are also paired with programs that trace the user’s agency online (and possibly more,

if connected to facial recognition, biological markers, etc.) in order to accommodate the user’s

presupposed desires better.

Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 meditates extensively on knowledge, understanding, and intelligence:

“How is [neural network called Implementation] E going to know anything? Knowledge is physical,

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isn’t it? It’s not what your mother reads you. It’s the weight of her arm around you as she […] put[s]

[her] arm around [you] as you read” (147). Nonetheless, the neural net from this novel becomes

convincingly human, developing humanity on her own—and it all comes down to language.

1.1.3 An Overview of Galateas

This dissertation focuses on two main positions of classical humanism in the light of posthuman

thought: that of anthropocentrism and that of the creator (as maker, skilled practitioner, owner,

etc.). Both concepts put the human in the superior position and often disregard any responsibility to

the other. Traditionally, these questions have been explored in the oppositions of human-animal,

human-monster, and human-machine, but Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto made us rethink these

binary categorizations anew by pointing out the mixing of the technological with the biological and

conceptualizing it in the cyborg.

This is why I explore fictional examples and some real-world technological examples of different

types of entities that all relate to defining the human: a human (Eliza from G. B. Shaw’s play

Pygmalion), a monster (the creature from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein), an animal (the newts

from Karel Čapek’s novel War with the Newts), a machine (the neural net Helen from Richard

Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2). Each of my three novelistic examples represents a different kind of

nonhuman entity that is able to acquire language, intelligence and, arguably, consciousness:

Frankenstein’s intelligent hybrid made of human corpses, Captain von Toch’s highly-evolved talking

newts, and Powers’s sentient artificial intelligence system Helen. The fourth textual example presents

the transformation of Eliza Doolittle into a qualifying human being through class mobility.

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Although the Pygmalion theme of creation and affection is remodeled in Shaw’s play into a

relationship between a mentor and a student—a theme that started evolving in the Pygmalion

paradigm decades before Shaw’s play4 and has flourished in the twentieth century—Eliza is one of the

most famous galateas. Rather than through art, as usual with earlier galateas, Eliza is transformed

through science (phonetics), which relates her to the other three textual examples. The scientific

approach of two linguists, Dr. Henry Higgins and his assistant Colonel Pickering, is posed as an

experiment: will they be able to transform Eliza, a lowly Cockney girl, into a proper lady? Using

recordings and demonstrations of high-class English, Eliza’s training is comprised mainly of speech

imitation. At the end of the experiment, she needs to pass as a lady in the social environment of high

English class. This test does not allow for mere mimicry but requires her to master the skill of the new

accent as well as social norms that come with leading a conversation in this social milieu.

Language acquisition is the process of learning and developing the capacity to comprehend and

produce language. It is considered one of the quintessential human traits because nonhumans are

believed to be unable to use language. I ask what happens when galateas, some of which look just

like humans but have hardly gained a name, acquire language and intelligence. In Ovid’s

Metamorphoses, Galatea does not utter any words. Up to the nineteenth century, galatean characters

cannot speak and can hardly move; they are utmost passive creations without much power in the

world, except for their extraordinary romantic attraction.

Fairly common, also, are cases of reverse Pygmalion, where human women are turned into stone,

which leaves them without any agency whatsoever: for example, in Slovenian medieval ballad

4One of the earliest examples is William Gilbert’s play Pygmalion and Galatea (1870) and one of the most known
novelistic examples is Henry James’s short novel Watch and Ward (1878).

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Katalena, later adapted by Svetlana Makarovič into a work of children’s literature (2009), or in

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Golden Touch: Told to the Children’ (1843), based on Greek

mythological story of King Midas (also a part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses XI, which do not feature

Midas’s daughter). In ‘The Golden Touch’ it is particularly clear how the change of Midas’s daughter

Marygold transformation—“little Marygold was a human child no longer, but a golden statue!”

(61)—affects her: she is not being able to move or speak, and when transformed back into flesh she

cannot remember being a statue. Like a photograph, the golden statue of Marygold is frozen in time.

Galateas are transformed from or into a variety of nonhuman materials, from sculpting materials to

computational hardware. According to many accounts, the myth of human creation by God or gods

uses mud or clay as the material for molding the human race. Pygmalion’s statue in Ovid is made of

ivory, an animal material5 with high value as it is still being traded despite the ban and restrictions on

poaching. Greek ivory statues were colored in bright colors and thus looked more lifelike than other

Pygmalionesque statues that are made of marble (e.g. Hawthorne’s ‘The Marble Faun’, Guthrie’s The

Tinted Venus) or bronze (Mérimée’s ‘La Vénus d’Ille’). Like money that is imprinted into a living

system on exchange and gains value only through this system, precious metals like gold or bronze

gained value through a trade system. “It had been a favourite phrase of Midas, whenever he felt

particularly fond of the child, to say that she was worth her weight in gold. And now the phrase had

become literally true” (62).

Despite being mute or refraining from (comprehensible, intellectual) speech, some galateas are able

to sing—like sirens luring men into dangerous relations. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s automaton Olympia in

5 Most commonly poached from an elephant but also from hippopotamus, walrus, narwhal, mammoth.

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‘Der Sandmann’ is incapable of leading a conversation, apart from sighing, but can sing.6 In Honoré

de Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ (1830), a man falls in love with a singing female and, in a popular twist, ends

up disappointed when the perfect woman turns out to be a man. The same disappointment awaits a

man in love with another singing woman in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), a modern

twist on John Luther Long’s Madama Butterfly (1898). In Anne McCaffrey’s ‘The Ship Who Sang’

(1969), a newborn girl is merged with a spaceship and becomes famous for her singing. Christian

Andersen’s mermaid in Little Mermaid (Den lille havfrue, 1837) gives up song and speech to transform

into a real human girl from a fish-human and, in a highly galatean manner, marry a human man.

Isaac Asimov’s only silent robot from his short story ‘Robbie’ (1939) is masculine but feminized as a

nursemaid.7

Many artificial women may be verbal but their words are predominantly scripted, e.g. P.

Burke/Delphi in James Tiptree Jr.’s ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ (1973) and most current real-

world humanoid robots like Hanson Robotics’ Sophia. William Gilbert’s Galatea from the comedic

play Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) is verbal but, for comic effect, is presented as innocently naïve as

she does not understand second meanings to some words that reveal her subjugation to men. Shaw’s

Eliza cannot decode double meanings as a working-class girl but loses her innocent naivety when

acting out her new role. Acting, after all, is a sophisticated activity that requires a specialist in

doubling (Joshua 101). It is no coincidence that C. L. Moore’s Daphne from ‘No Woman Born’

(1944) is an adored singer and dancer. Performance is a part of the galatean cult.

6In humans, different brain regions are involved for music and speech, indicated by people who have suffered brain
damage and lost speech but can still sing. Similarly, tone-deaf people have no problems using tonal languages.

7 I would like to thank Ellen Peel for pointing out this work to me in preparation for our ACLA 2019 seminar on the
topic of posthuman language.

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A lack of language does not mean there is no understanding behind it. When Pickering says to

Higgins that Eliza “must understand thoroughly what she’s doing,” Higgins replies: “How can she?

She’s incapable of understanding anything” (II, 488-492). Many philosophers think we are unable to

communicate about ourselves if we do not have a language: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof

one must be silent” or, as his friend and more pragmatic philosopher Frank Ramsey put it, “What

we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either” (Misak par. 21). Yet, so much of human life

is literally unspeakable. Communication is not only about meaning—it can, in fact, be unspoken.

Besides language we have gestures, mimicry, and music, used commonly by different galateas, whose

message does not necessarily carry a meaning in the way language does. The evidence for that is

poetry, made of language which does not solely mean but also renders a visual or auditory experience

at least: poetic language sounds. Many galateas learn how to make sound before they learn how to

speak.

Some of the twentieth-century creators of galateas decide to socialize and educate their women who

cannot speak or speak properly. Eliza Doolittle and Helen are trained to use a higher version of

English: high-class language for the flower girl Eliza and literary language for the neural net Helen.

Eliza’s transformation into a lady and Helen’s transformation into a conscious AI take place mainly

through language. As Essaka Joshua notes, specifically “[o]n the stage, Galatea, formerly a woman of

few words, gains a voice” (xxi).

I argue that a galatea’s verbality and seeming consciousness are crucial for her human status and I

explore how the creator’s relationship with his (it is always his, never her) creation changes

accordingly. With this evolution, the galatea becomes more complex and the illusion becomes more

real, keeping the reader and the viewer on their toes: How human is she? Joshua shows in the

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example of English literature that late nineteenth-century renditions of the Pygmalion myth switch

their focus from the creator to his creation (xxi, 155). Galateas of all sorts, thanks to newly gained

linguistic and intellectual abilities, become more well-rounded and humanlike personalities. “Shaw’s

Eliza is much more complex than Galatea” (Joshua 99): she is either inherently more complex or

depicted as more complex and often both.

This leap in language abilities might have been accelerated with animated masculine anthropomorphic

beings (which are generally very rare) gaining language abilities. The Jewish mythical humanoid

golem is mute as well but has the power to understanding speech, reading and writing, which is not

the case with early galateas. The golem depends on the word; he is brought to life through ritual and

chants, and words are written on him or on paper and put into his mouth. The Jaquet-Droz

automata from the eighteenth century also distinguished gender this way: the musician was a woman

and the writer a man, and this is still the case today, for example, in Martin Scorcese’s film Hugo

(2011). Woman’s domain is music, man’s is words. Carlo Collodi’s Pinnochio from Le avventure di

Pinnochio (1883), for example, is verbal. His verbality actually brings him to life: he is saved and

carved from a log into a human form only because he was able to ask for help. Later, when he

educates and socializes himself, he is granted his wish to become a real boy.

I suggest that Frankenstein’s creature was not revolutionary in more than one way. First of all, his

bodily hybridity was an innovative approach to creating humanoids, particularly since some materials

consisted of human remains.8 Second, monsters are usually creations of mythologies and folklore,

but Mary Shelley managed to create a monster that became a part of modern mythology and folklore

8 This kind of prosthetic hybridity where a man is composed of different materials is Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story
‘The Man That Was Used Up.’

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(with Halloween, for example). Third, her monster is one of the first humanoids if not first that

exhibits clear humanlike intelligence. Fourth, the use of language in galateas and their relatives was

non-existent or limited before Frankenstein’s creature. Although Frankenstein’s creature is not a

galatea—a beautiful and beloved artificial woman—, his eloquent use of language influenced galateas

that came after him: before Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), galateas rarely spoke (e.g. Hoffmann’s

Olympia from 1816; Mme de Stäel’s Le Mannequin (1811); Ovid’s Pygmalion (8 A.D.); an exception is

Rousseau’s Galathée where her transformation is presciently indicated with her speech), and after

1818 they all speak (e.g. Hawthorne’s ‘The Golden Touch’ (1851), Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea

(1871), Guthrie’s The Tinted Venus (1898)).

Frankenstein’s humanoid learns how to use language fluently on his own by eavesdropping on a

loving family and even narrates a part of the novel himself. Nevertheless, a number of Hollywood

movies about Frankenstein made the monster mute, making him seem less intelligent than he is in

the book. Although the modern Prometheus in the title of Shelley’s novel reveals the connection of

the text with the Prometheus myth,9 the novel greatly impacted the Pygmalion paradigm stories.

Shelley’s innovative reinterpretations of the ancient creation myths skewed traditional renditions of

the Pygmalion-themed stories. Frankenstein’s creature is a nonhuman humanlike creation, like

galateas, however, he also reverses the dominant characteristics of galateas into their opposite: he is

a man not a woman, he is not beautiful but monstrous, he is not admired and loved but rather

feared and hated, he is not paralyzed in movement or speech but is extremely physically strong,

9 The themes of Pygmalion and Prometheus are already clearly meshed already a couple of years before Frankenstein’s
publication in Anna Seward’s Ode to Poetic Fancy: “While Zeuxis’ pencil, Orpheus’ lyre, / Pygmalion’s heaven-descended
fire, / The smiling pleasures bring” (106). “These connections were later consolidated by Romantics” (Joshua 32).

42
intelligent and eloquent, he is not made of inorganic materials but organic, human materials, he is

not homogenous but as hybrid as it gets.

Without exception, people (including his creator Frankenstein) are terrified of his appearance and

are not willing to recognize his humanlike characteristics as other than monstrous. The creature does

not have a name because he does not need one, as neither his creator nor the society ever accepts

him: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?” (Shelley

147). This general refusal is the reason why his willingness to contribute to society, his willingness to

learn, serve and love, exhibited so clearly in chapters written by the creature, turn into the

delinquency of murdering people dear to his creator. The creature is nothing but human in his desire

to be loved and accepted, and in his empathy and admiration for noble human character, but also in

his revenge for not being able to live like the human race. Galateas were made to inspire love and

admiration of their beauty and perfection, but Frankenstein’s ugly and fearsome creature decides to

“revenge [his] injuries:” “if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-

enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred” (Shelley 148). Despite having more

depth in his humanity than many other statuesque galateas, his monstrous appearance does not

allow him privileges granted to pretty, desire-inducing dolls.

1.2 Language Enhancement

Could language training already be considered human enhancement? Every feature that is improved

in a targeted event as an added experience, knowledge, or skill could be called enhancement,

especially if it is performed by technology. Training tends to be a non-marked, neutral form of

improving human mind or body—as opposed to using certain drugs, elective surgeries, and genetic

engineering to improve one’s health, abilities, performance, or beauty. Despite having the same

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effect as medications, training and diet are considered non-technological means of improvement and

thus receive less criticism as does, for example, doping in sports. The line for what is considered an

enhancement overlaps with the line between “natural improvement” (e.g. training and study) and

“unnatural improvement” (e.g. anabolic steroids) (Ida 61-62); here, “unnatural” is synonymous with

artificial and human-made—the way galateas are.

Humanese is a term I coined for any human language used by nonhuman entities, such as machines

and animals that both use humanese in a limited capacity. The term humanese presumes that all

humans have the same language abilities, which is clearly not true: as a matter of fact, humanese is

always used in a limited capacity, also with humans. Biological neurons in brains or artificial neurons

in neural networks can be pre-wired for language, but it is difficult to determine, especially for

biological entities, what makes for a “language-ready” brain (Airbib 214).10 This question is especially

difficult to study in nonhuman animals: dogs are taught to follow commands and parrots to imitate

speech. The results of training animals in humanese reveal their species’ underlying abilities to

communicate in a rudimentary humanese, but do not guarantee that every animal of that species will

be able to perform humanese. Computational entities are less diverse, more flexible, and relatively

successful in using written and spoken language for computer-human interface. In speech, the

challenge of sounding as authentic as the human voice has so far remained insurmountable. The

challenge does not lay in only words and sentences, but also in the pauses in-between them,

breathing in and out, prosodic emphases, body language, etc. A nonhuman entity that does not have

10“It is an open question as to whether a brain that could support protosign and protospeech was already language-
ready; that is, whether the path from protolanguage to language required further biological evolution or could be
explained by cultural evolution alone. Some research on language acquisition offers support for the latter view” (Airbib
214).

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a body and does not require breathing can only attempt to act it out in as humanlike a way as

possible: by speaking humanese it performs a human.

Language in nonhumans is a charged topic in the scientific community, contentious especially with

those scholars who claim some animals possess a reduced version of human language. The question

of how language evolved tends to yield controversial conclusions, foremost because there is no

substantial evidence for one or the other theory on the origin of language.

Despite the imbedded potential to learn humanese in humans and some nonhumans, language is at

first external to any entity. In other words, an input of a certain language (be it English, American

Sign Language, or the Elven language Quenya) is required if the desired output is a sophisticated use

of that language. Even Noam Chomsky, whose theory claims that language is innate,11 agrees that

primary linguistic data are the precondition for language development.12 The way neural nets learn

language is an antithesis to most of what Chomsky’s theory argued about language. Consider GPT-2,

a generative model of language, developed by OpenAI through unsupervised deep learning. GPT-2

is based on neural network architecture, called the Transformer, which can be used for “rudimentary

reading comprehension, machine translation, questioning and answering, and summarizing”

(Radford et al. par. 1). It was created on a massive dataset (from Reddit) with just as massive a

number of parameters “based on the training data with no prior knowledge about the nature of

language or the world, other than what is represented by the training set” (Marcus par. 6).

11Noam Chomsky claims that language is innate not in the general cognition but in specific brain structures, which is
disputable.

12A proof for this claim is Nicaraguan sign language, which has in large part spontaneously developed in the community
of deaf children.

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Chomsky’s theory of built-in universal grammar includes built-in syntactic trees and innate

knowledge of nouns and verbs. GPT-2 has none of these; it has, however, knowledge of how verbs

and nouns are represented in a corpus.

Infants can communicate their needs, but they come into the world without speech. They have a

sense of a language already before birth, however, in recognizing their maternal language and voices

of their family members. Etymologies of words for children in various languages (e.g. English,

French, some Slavic languages)13 point to this fact as they designate a person without speech.

Children need to pick up vocabulary, acquire grammatical patterns and grasp overall comprehension

of language usually well into their teenage years. This is also how an adult learns a new, second

language or in the case of language loss, learns a language anew. Language acquisition in young

children is distinct from learning a foreign language, however, because it begins right after the birth

with imitation of intonation, acquired during gestation (Mampe et al. 1994),14 and is followed by

babbling after a few months and imitation of syllables around one year after birth. Only after these

initial phases does a child come to the level of repeating words, phrases, etc., which is where a

person who already knows one or more languages would begin learning a new one.

The newts, Frankenstein’s monster, Helen and Eliza are often viewed as children because they are

human-made creations in need of education and socialization. This view was already present in the

13The etymology of the English word infant designates someone who is “not able to speak; young” (‘Infant’). The same
meaning motivation can be found in proto-Slavic word for a child, *otròkъ, which designates “someone who does not
speak, has no speech” (“tisti, ki ne govori, ki nima govora”) “because they cannot yet speak or have no right to speak”
(“ker še ne zna ali ker nima pravice govoriti” [translation is mine]) (‘Otrok’).

14The sound of language comes before the words: intonation of a particular language (e.g. rising melody contour in
French and falling in German) is the first linguistic feature a child learns already in the womb, which is why newborns
cry differently in different languages (Mampe et al. 1994).

46
nineteenth-century renditions of the Pygmalion myth that “often conceive [galatea] as childlike,

pure, dependent, and even animal-like in her simplicity” (Joshua 155). Eliza was certainly a child

once and is still treated like one by her own father Alfred Doolittle and her instructor Henry

Higgins. Her absent father sells her to Higgins (II, 1008), an action that ultimately makes Higgins her

father figure. In fact, when Higgins first meets Eliza she says: “Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo! One would

think that you was my father” and Higgins responds: “If I decide to teach you, I’ll be worse than

two fathers to you” (I, 236-240). Just like created humanoids, Eliza has no mother (I, 388), is

thought to be Pickering’s adopted daughter (III 799-8x01), and is jokingly offered up for adoption

to Mrs Pearce (II, 397). These examples show how little power and independence is attributed to

Eliza, despite her being, in fact, a self-sufficient adult.

In Galatea 2.2, the writer Rick responds to the neural network Helen’s question “Am I a boy or a

girl?” with “You are a little girl” (Powers 179). This exchange reveals their conception of Helen as a

child: Helen as someone who is still growing, Helen as the child he seeks in himself,15 the child he

refused to have with his ex-girlfriend C.,16 and the child he made with Lentz.17 Just like the human

Eliza, Helen has no mother but has two fathers, one who creates her (engineer Lentz) and one who

trains her (writer Rick). Just like in Eliza’s story, the trainer takes the place of the undestined lover in

the Pygmalion paradigm. And just like a human child, Helen reaches adulthood: she grows through

eight stages or Implementations and matures into Implementation H, which evolves a human-level

15“I had written a book about lost children because I had lost my own child and wanted it back. More than I wanted
anything in life, except to write” (Powers 210).

16“Children were out of the question. They always had been. And now more than ever. / ‘C. We’ve talked about this.
There are a billion and a half too many of us already. How can we two be parents? We don’t even know what we’re
doing or where we want to live.’” (Powers 276).

17Rick says: “My kid is going to ace that exam.” Lentz says: “It’s time to give the kid a something a little more obscure”
(Powers 92).

47
mental complexity. Helen decides at the end of experiment that “[she doesn’t] want to play

anymore” (314), as if she were just a child, playing hopscotch or the latest video game; not unlike

Eliza, in one of the Shaw’s endings, who tells Higgins to buy his slippers himself. Besides, Helen’s

creators begin language training by reading her children’s literature. This choice reflects in her

younger implementations that resemble a child-like existence in her inability to understand difficult

metaphors and texts, her full-of-wonder questions, her requests for more stories (171), and her

attempts to sing songs (198). The creators ultimately decide to “skip childhood,” because they are

“running out of time” and because she “doesn’t need to know everything” (190). At that point,

however, Helen has pretty much grown out of it: “It was Huck Finn, a raft trip world beyond her

ken, that made me realize childhood had ended” (230).

For Captain von Toch, the discoverer of the news in War with the Newts,18 the newts also yield love—

not romantic but familial. He implies that his “tapa-boys,” with their “childish little hands,”19 are like

the family he never had: “You know, old boy, I’m an old chap with no family of my own… And old

man, you know, is rather lonely. […] Very sweet those lizards are, dammit all” (37).20 The captain

treats the newts with great care, as if they were his own: “The old man cared more for those brutes

than for his crew. Did you know he taught them how to speak? Cross my heart, he’d lock himself up

with them for hours on end and talk to them. I think he’s training them like for a circus” (47).21

18 I use Ewald Osers’ translation to English from 1990. The novel was translated again in 2010 by M. and R. Weatherall.

19 “A nejvíc ty jejich dětinsky ručičky” (Čapek Válka 30).

20“[V]íš,chlapče, já jsem stary chlap a rodinu žádnou nemám… Ja, stary člověk je tuze sám. […] Hrozně mily jsou ty
ještěrkove, co je to platny” (Čapek Válka 30).

21“Starému víc záleželo na těch mrchách než na lidech. Víš, že je učil mluvit? Namouduši, zavíral se s nimi a hodiny na
ně mluvil. Já myslím, že je nějak cvičí jako pro cirkus” (Čapek Válka 38).

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Victor Frankenstein and his humanoid address each other with the dependency terms of ‘creator’

and ‘creature.’ The monster calls Victor ‘father’ and says for himself that he failed as the ‘first man’

of his species: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel” (103). The creature

therefore sees himself as a (kind of) man, an Adam who was never born but was created and whose

navel leads to Victor. The part of the novel written by the creature begins with “confused and

indistinct” recollections of his childhood, “the original era of [his] being” (ib.). Gillian Beer says that

Frankenstein’s creature is “monstrous in part because he has not grown” and “has never known what

it is like to be a child” (176-77). While the creature certainly had no childhood, it was created

without a language and, as a child, acquired it on its own and learned about literature afterwards. All

four human and humanlike creatures therefore underwent some kind of growth and development

that strongly resembled the stages of child development.

Although Eliza’s and Helen’s language trainings are conducted on a human and nonhuman entity,

their training processes and goals are similar: an individualized curriculum with a final performance

test. The experience of acquiring and performing language is shared also with Frankenstein’s

monster and the newts: despite their limited access to society, they all learn to use language as a

whole (listening, speaking, reading, writing) on their own, by observing either an individual (at first,

Captain von Toch for the newts) or a group of individual humans (at first, the DeLacey family for

Frankenstein’s creature). All the nonhumans but Eliza are featured reading and talking about

literature, which helps them to become more educated and sophisticated. “But with the rising

educational level of the salamanders there was increasing embarrassment at simply bracketing the

Newts with other animals; for some (not entirely clear) reasons this seemed rather inappropriate”

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(Čapek War 150).22 These “not entirely clear” reasons presumably come from the newts’ assimilation

to certain human physical features, such as the fine mechanics of their fingers, walking on two feet,

and their ability to learn various languages and read newspapers. The newts’ fantastic evolutionary

development does not, however, greatly impress the race they imitate—the humans—and nor does

Helen or Frankenstein’s creature.

Language is taken for granted in a human; regardless of the many difficulties that arise from its use,

language is seen as a part of the human essence. Any deviance from the language outfit is considered

a deficit (e.g. stuttering) or a disability (e.g. mutism). The conventional treatment of language deficits,

such as speech therapy, is expected (if available) and is not considered enhancement but simply

treatment—or, as Urban Wiesing calls it, restitutio ad integrum. Other ways of developing language

skills, such as practicing literacy, (hyper)polyglottism, or teaching hearing infants to use sign

language, are achieved through traditional methods of training and studying. These practices are not

viewed as enhancement—per Wiesing, transformatio ad optimum—although they help us improve our

abilities (and alter the neural structure of our brains) and although some basic technology is always

used to conduct them (see Bostrom 2-3).

Language enhancement has, to my knowledge, not yet been discussed among scholars of the

posthuman. I use the term ‘language enhancement’ as an improvement of language skills or as

overcoming of linguistic challenges, both of which would not be possible without human-made,

technological intervention. If language itself is not considered an enhancement, and if none of the

human-induced measures outlined above qualify as enhancements, then language enhancement

22“Avšak s rostoucí vzdělaností Salamandrů se víc a víc cítit rozpaky zahrnovat Mloky prostě pod ochranu zvířat; zdálo
se to být z jakýchsi ne docela jasných důvodů poněkud nevhodné” (Čapek Válka 134).

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requires a new way of using language. Examples of this are so far purely imaginative: an implant that

would work as a polygraph, drugs that that would grow brain neurons rapidly to help our eloquence

in our native language or foreign languages, brain surgery that would make our language skills more

convincing for commercial purposes, or learning a nonhuman language (as in Ted Chiang’s short

story ‘Story of Your Life,’ which was adapted into the film Arrival).

Enhancement is a category that includes modification and augmentation of human physical and

mental qualities (Bess 641) and is widely supported by transhumanists who believe that technology

will help the human race to achieve “more intelligent, less disease-prone, long-living human bodies”

(Nayar 6). Despite these seemingly clear definitions, enhancement is hard to categorize because it

depends on the standpoint of the particular society at a certain time. The basic definition of

enhancement as an unnatural means of improvement as opposed to natural means of improvement,

suggested by Ryuichi Ida, only makes us question further: e.g. is a synthetized hormone natural or

unnatural? Scholars offer alternative distributions of enhancement. When analyzing sports medicine

(in comparison to general medicine) Torbjörn Tännsjö distinguishes between “negative interventions,

performed with the aim of curing a disease or eliminating a handicap or a disability, positive

interventions which aim at improving the functioning of human organism within a natural variation,

and enhancement, which aims at taking an individual beyond the normal functioning of a human

organism” (316). He is aware of the problematic quality of these “vague, evaluative, and

conventional” distinctions, yet he also points out that there are many clear cases of each (Tännsjö

317). A case that shows how murky these distinctions can get is South African sprint runner Oscar

Pistorius, nicknamed the Blade Runner, who competed in the Paralympic Games and in the

Olympic Games. The dispute about letting him compete with able-bodied athletes was not due to

his disadvantage as a paraplegic runner but due to his advantage: his running blades supposedly gave

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him an unfair advantage over runners with natural legs. Considering his prosthesis an enhancement

only shows that a negative intervention of leg prosthetics can quite easily shift into a positive

intervention or even into the enhancement category, depending on context.

In defining language enhancement, one could go as far as to label a notepad used for jotting down

our thoughts as an enhancement of memory. After all, a notepad is not natural, but a pure human

invention and arguably technological. Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu, two of the best-known

advocates of transhumanism, write: “In one sense, all technology can be viewed as an enhancement

of our native human capacities, enabling us to achieve certain effects that would otherwise require

more effort or be altogether beyond our power” (Bostrom and Savulescu 2). To further extend this

argument, technology could easily be considered as all human inventions, from how to make a fire

and wheel on, and technology a central feature of humanity. As Tom Boellstorff argues, technology

as human tool and product does not change the human essence but only brings out new aspects of

our potential.

Another example of enhancement usually not perceived as such—as it is rather ordinary and

ubiquitous, although certainly still controversial—is vaccination, which boosts the immune system.

“In the not too distant future we may come to view other kinds of enhancement as just as natural as

vaccinations” (Tännsjö 318). An enhancement (or technology) thus ceases to be viewed as such. If

we push these ideas further most Western medicine could be taken as enhancement, but then “the

concept of the enhancement […] becomes manifestly unfit for service as an organizing idea for a

new and distinctive field of ethical inquiry” (Bostrom and Savulescu 3). The question of

enhancement often comes to what society finds acceptable as an improvement of human cognitive

and physical abilities. For instance, surgery needed due to injury is not controversial as opposed to

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surgery that is not medically necessary, such as rejuvenating plastic surgery, even if the procedure

itself is the same. The context makes all the difference. Moreover, societal views on enhancement

change with the rise of new technologies that present new conceptions of what it means to be

human.

Enhancement has recently been broadly defined as “an intervention designed to modify a person’s

traits, adding qualities or capabilities that would not otherwise have been expected to characterize

that person” (Bess 643). If so, is Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney girl speaking like a lady, a case of human

enhancement? First of all, Eliza’s metamorphosis is not unlike the transformation that sometimes

comes with mastering a foreign language: she gains a new identity.23 Per Tännsjö, this would be a

positive intervention, especially since Eliza is an example of upward social mobility. Although her

transgression of class is impressive, her transformation does not enhance her in comparison to other

people. And yet, when compared to the English upper-class people of the time, she is an enhanced

Cockney girl. In the musical My Fair Lady, Higgins sings: “It’s ‘Aoooow’ and ‘Garn’ that keep her in

her place. Not her wretched clothes and dirty face. Why can’t the English teach their children how

to speak?” (5:33).

I argued above that enhancement is defined less by the practice itself and more by context and

societal perceptions. As Eliza knows well, “apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing

and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not

how she behaves, but how she’s treated” (V, 470-473). Not many people know about Eliza’s

attempted transformation, and those who do know (her father, Higgins, Pickering, Mrs Higgins, Mrs

23In Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Story of Your Life,’ knowledge of nonhuman alien language alters the perception of
time for the human speaker.

53
Pearce) encourage it. If there were thousands of ‘Elizas’ trained by Higgins, would their training still

be endorsed and considered enhancement? Taking into account the clear shift in how society

perceives Eliza and how Eliza perceives herself before and after the transformation, Higgins’s work

would cause a revolution if he had thousands of trainees. Granted, Eliza is a talented and diligent

student of Higgins and is therefore naturally fit for this kind of training. Other ‘Elizas’ should be like

this too, since training alone could not significantly enhance just anyone. While some might argue

that Eliza’s training is akin to getting education, is it not entirely so: her training is much more

arbitrary.

Eliza turns into a lady from, in her mentor Higgins’s words, “this creature that [was] picked out of

the mud” (V, 333). ‘Creature’ was a non-marked work for a human being in Shaw’s time, however,

in this use Eliza is referred to as something less than human, “a squashed cabbage leaf” (V, 411) as

Eliza herself paraphrases later in the play. The connotation is purely negative; she is no more than a

talking doll to Higgins—in the words of France Gall’s popular song, une poupée de cire, poupée de son.

Curiously, Ovid’s terms for Pygmalion’s nameless creation are all quite neutral and bland, whereas

the many terms used for Frankenstein’s nameless creation—wretch, demon, fiend, creature, and

monster—have a wider spectrum of meanings. These ascribed meanings for Frankenstein’s and

Pygmalion’s creations emphasize “the delineation of quintessential humanity, […] plac[ing] humanity

in a position of mastery and domination over nonhuman nature” (Graham 64). A human is usually

called a creature when addressed by a higher entity, such as God, the great creator.

Does Higgins imply he molded Eliza from nonhuman material into a human? The flower girl is

certainly human but viewed as barely human that by some, and only by climbing from the lower

class to the upper one is she granted her full humanity. To Higgins she is exactly as he views her

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speech: vulgar and “deliciously low” (II, 268), not unlike a Guinea pig, with little to no value. When

he first meets her selling flowers in Covent Garden, she keeps making an animal sound of “Ah-ah-

ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!” and he warns her: “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds

has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul

and the divine gift or articulate speech: […] don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon” (I, 391-

396). Sometimes more like an animal, other times an automaton, Eliza does not seem autonomous

to Higgins during the training: “You let her alone, mother. Let her speak for herself. You will jolly

soon see whether she has an idea that I havnt put into her head or a word that I havnt put into her

mouth” (V, 396-398). In explaining to his mother how he sees through Eliza, he calls Eliza a thing: “I

tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she

pretends to play the fine lady with me” (V, 398-400). This could be interpreted further that he

believed he created her from an organic, but nonhuman, material. He indeed knows Eliza is of a

human kind but does not think she is anything like him because he despises her origins. Higgins is in

stark contrast with the other, assistant creator of Eliza, Colonel Pickering, who has treated Eliza like

a gentleman from the first time they met. Pickering’s kind attitude, in Eliza’s words, “began [her]

education” as it was “the beginning of self-respect for [her]” (V, 473-476). Nevertheless, both men

seem to forget that Eliza is a human being and often talk about her in the third person in her

presence—“Pickering: We’re always talking Eliza. Higgins: Teaching Eliza. Pickering: Dressing

Eliza. Mrs. Higgins: What! Higgins: Inventing new Elizas” (III, 226-244)—also after a successful

test, as if Eliza had contributed nothing to their success.

The reason why some do not consider Eliza fully human is her lower-class origin, which is also why

she lacks self-respect. Her vulnerable position as a young, poor, and illiterate woman among London

high-class people could be paralleled to Frantz Fanon’s writing about the black man as the Other for

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the white man. Fanon showed how the black man “is made to feel like an animal because he is

addressed, described and believed to be an animal by the colonial apparatus;”24 the Pygmalion parallel

for the latter is Higgins as the metonymy for English society in which the language, “the act of

classifying and naming,” is enough “to dehumanize the native” (Nayar 27). The way one spoke, e.g.

dropping the h, characteristic of the Cockney accent, was labeled as a “social suicide” by phonetician

Alexander Ellis in 1867 (221). Fanon finds a great fault of classical, Eurocentric humanism: it is

exclusionary to anyone but the handsome, autonomous, affluent, healthy and able-bodied,

heterosexual white man, the generic human universally labeled as the human, and it penalizes any

divergence from this type and its attributes, such as not speaking the standard language. “When

humans are speciesist and treat nonhuman life forms as expendable, then some species of humans

are also—as history shows in the form of genocides, racism and slavery—excluded from the

category of the human to be then expendable” (Nayar 4). Eliza knows Higgins thinks of her of as a

subspecies and she sometimes thinks of herself as such, which is why she wants to learn how to

speak properly.

1.3 Language and Diversity

Ignoring the diversity of the human race in defining the human is presented through language

differences in Elizabeth Moon’s novel Speed of Dark (2002), in which a highly functional autistic man,

named Lou, is offered an option to cure his autism. The novel is narrated from Lou’s perspective

and he often comments on how the real people want to make him a real human too: “Even as hard as I

try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them” (38). “They do not know how hard it is.

24 In fact, a black man named Oto Benga was literally treated as an animal when exhibited in the Bronx Zoo for twenty
days in the early twentieth century, attracting huge crowds (‘Bushman’). Benga was captured by US trader Samuel Verner
in what was then Belgian Congo as a teenager (or perhaps pre-teen) and was also shown at World’s Fair in St. Louis with
other young males.

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They do not care. They want me to change. They want to put things in my head, to change my brain.

They would say they don’t, but they do. I thought I was safe, living independently, living like anyone

else. But I wasn’t” (39). Always an outcast, Lou tries very hard not to stand out—“I don’t want to

cry; crying might be too loud and my neighbors might notice” (ib.)—because “if you’re anything but

rich, white, and normal [police] think[s] you are a criminal” (41).

Like Eliza, Lou has to be extremely careful with how he speaks: “‘You did that how?’ I ask, and then

quickly reorder the words. ‘How did you do that?’” (28). Lying makes him miserable for days (12).

He reveals the “private language” of his group of autistic friends as something they need to hide:

“We aren’t supposed to have a private language and nobody thinks we can do something like that,

but we can. Many people have a private language without even knowing it. They may call it jargon or

slang, but it’s really a private language, a way of telling who is in the group and who is not” (9). He

gets alarmed if he is not understood, traumatized by childhood episodes of misunderstandings (11),

because his way of speaking is literal, to the point: “If someone is a bad person and you want to say

he is a bad person, why not just say it? Why say ‘heel’ or ‘jerk’ or something? And adding ‘real’ to it

only makes it worse. If you say something is real, it should be real” (30). When upset he sometimes

begins to stutter or cannot answer at all (known as selective mutism, a social anxiety disorder) and

uses his little pad to write instead (37).

A psychiatrist that evaluates Lou every few months seems to completely misunderstand him as well:

“She doesn’t know that I can read. She thinks I’m hyperlexic, just parroting the words. The

difference between what she calls parroting and what she does when she reads is imperceptible to

me. She doesn’t know that I have a large vocabulary. […] She knows I work on computer, she

knows I went to school, but she has not caught on that this is incompatible with her belief that I am

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actually nearly illiterate and barely verbal” (2). Lou complains that she talks to him “as if [he] were a

rather stupid child” (2) or “a trained dog” (4). Autistic therapy often involves technology as many

patients find it less overwhelming than interacting with humans. The most popular therapies for

autism include a lot of classical and operational conditioning, a technique also used to train dogs and

parrots (more on that in the next chapter). Similarly to Lou, Eliza is called a “parrot” by Dr. Higgins

and a verbal “genius” by Pickering (III, 600-604). Autistic people are commonly labeled as geniuses

as well; Lou works in a company that employs people with neuroatypical abilities—a practice that

also exists outside fiction.

When among the “real people” or the “other people,” as Lou often calls them, Lou’s language

changes: “We say good-bye because we are in public and we all know you are supposed to say good-

bye in public” (10). Every word he utters with neurotypical people is a performance. He can only

relax among other autistic people: “When we are together like this, just us, we can talk better than

any other time. We laugh about that, about how normal people must be putting out a field that

inhibits our abilities. We know that’s not true, and we know the other would think we were paranoid

if we told that joke around them. They would think we were crazy in a bad way; they would not

understand it is a joke. When we do not recognize a joke, they say it is because we are literal-minded,

but we know that we cannot say that about them” (36).

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Many people on the autistic spectrum, in particular women,25 were found to camouflage their autism

by acting out what the society believes to be the right behavior.26 Jennifer, for example, practices

how to act at a birthday party before attending the event: “[S]he prepares herself to be ‘on,’

correcting her posture and habitual fidgeting. She demonstrates for me how she sits up straight and

becomes still. Her face takes on a pleasant and engaged expression, one she might adopt during

conversation with another parent. To keep a dialogue going, she might drop in a few well-rehearsed

catchphrases, such as ‘good grief’ or ‘go big or go home.’ ‘I feel if I do the nods, they won’t feel I’m

uninterested,’ she says” (Russo par. 6). Quite like Eliza, Jennifer and other women on the spectrum

practice the re-telling of anecdotes on a particular topic and memorize their answers for specific

questions. Nearly all of these women complained how exhausting it was to mask oneself and many

said that playing so many roles made them lose sight of their true identities (par. 26). This casting-

oneself, or acting, is a job for some people. Jumping into a performance, masking oneself, can

sometimes solve the language issues. To avoid stuttering, some stutterers avoid words that make

them stutter, make themselves speak more slowly, or put on an accent. Not surprisingly,

professional actors and singers can be stutterers in private life but never stutter on screen or stage

(Marilyn Monroe, Mel Tillis, James Earl Jones, Hugh Grant, Emily Blunt, Julia Roberts, etc.) (see

more in Shell Stutter 137-168).

25This masking was particularly typical for girls who were better at blending in and hiding their autism in comparison to
boys—which is a particularly significant finding for diagnosing children with this disorder.

26This masking of a mental disability is alike to disguising of a physical disability: “Many crippled people try to act in
public as if they are not disabled” (Shell Polio 145).

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When someone’s speech is off—either stuttered or as a cause of some other speech defect or

intentional nonconventional use27—they become vulnerable to being talked-over, corrected, or

ignored. Sometimes these speakers are not considered as speaking at all but rather as mute. Eliza’s

uncultured language makes her a foreigner in Higgins’s circles, a barbarian (“an insensitive,

uncultured person” (‘Barbarian’)). The word Barbar is in itself an “imitation of the sound of the

unintelligible speech” (‘Barbarism’). Ancient Greeks called barbarian anyone who was non-Greek

and therefore regarded as “culturally inferior” (‘Barbarian’). Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in Race and

History (1952) about embedded perceptions of the human based on the physical distance between

the groups of humans: a group always refers to themselves as human, distant groups as semi-human,

and groups furthest away as nonhuman.

Language is separating. In English language one can express a lack of understanding with the idioms

It is all Greek to me and It is double Dutch. In other European languages, the common target language is

Chinese. In Mandarin, interestingly, the idiom goes: Sounds like a bird language ( ). Birds

are intelligent animals but do they have a language and are we allowed to call it that? Examining

galateas that learn to speak humanese and their acceptance among real people is only the beginning:

birds and apes can speak some humanese, and AI and robots are pretty good at it, too. They might

be even better than some humans affected by speech or language paralysis, and better than

foreigners of all sorts, not to mention our own children.

If a person or some other entity speaks incomprehensibly, this might be considered no different

than being mute. In Slavic languages, the proto-Slavic word for Germans, *němьci, means someone

27The same language can be the result of comedy or poetry, for example, but brings the opposite, appreciative reaction
from the audience.

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“mute, who cannot speak (our language),” while the name for Slavs likely comes from a proto-Slavic

word for ‘a word,’ *slovo (‘Slovenski’), designating a community that “could be communicated with

and understands our language” [translation is mine] (‘Slovenski’).28 Two Slovenian words for being

mute are also very telling: a neutral expression, nem, meaning “someone who is not capable of

forming words and sentences with their speech organs” (‘Ném,’ ‘Mútast’ SSKJ),29 and either comes

from the Indo-European root *mēmo-, known in Latin for mute and memulis ‘stutterer’ or from the

Indo-European root *nēmo- that means “non-speaking,” presumably with the original meaning “a

(small) child” (‘Nem’ Etimološki);30 and a marked expression, mutast, with the exact same meaning as

nem, which “comes from the onomatopoeia moo, that imitates cow sounds as well as unarticulated

human sounds” (‘Mutast’ Etimološki) [all Slovenian translations are mine]; 31 the latter word is related

to English mute. These etymologies show how close to an animal someone is who is considered

unarticulated and incomprehensible like Eliza. Eliza is given new clothes and taught manners, but

the main part of her humanization takes place through speech.

28 “Po starejši razlagi, ki je besedotvorno slabše, pomensko pa bolje utemeljena, naj bi bilo ime ljudstva *Slově̋ne
izpeljano iz pslovan. *slȍvo ‛beseda’ (glej slóves, slovô). Če je ta domneva kljub besedotvornim zadržkom pravilna, je
ime ljudstva prvotno pomenilo nekako *‛ljudje, s katerimi je mogoče govoriti, ki razumejo naš jezik’. V prid tej domnevi
bi govorilo dejstvo, da so Slovani svoje zahodne sosede, Germane, kasnejše Nemce, imenovali *Němьci̋, sloven. Némci,
prvotno *‛nemi ljudje’, tj. *‛ljudje, ki ne znajo govoriti (po naše)’ (M. S. pri BeIII, 265 s.)” (‘Slovenski’).

29 “ki ni sposoben oblikovati besed, stavkov z govorilnimi organi” (‘Mútast’, ‘Ném’ SSKJ).

30 “Enako je stcslovan. němъ ‛nem’, hrv. nijȇm, srb. nȇm, rus. nemój, češ. němý ‛nem, tih’. Pslovan. *ně̑mъ je verjetno po
disimilaciji nastalo iz *mēmo-, kar je znano v let. mḕms ‛nem’, męmulis ‛jecljavec’. Beseda je lahko izpeljana iz
onomatopejskega korena *mem-, ki posnema neartikulirane človeške glasove (M. S. pri Be II, 219, SŠ, 999) in iz katerega
je tudi sloven. momljáti in sorodno. Druga možnost je izhajanje iz ide. *nēmo- poleg *nēmu- ‛negovoreč’, kar je lahko
besedotvorni predhodnik za hier. luv. ni-mu-wa/i-za-s(a) z domnevnim pomenom *‛(majhen) otrok’,
prvotno *‛negovoreči’ (Rasmussen, Selected Papers on Indo-European Linguistics, 653)” (‘Nem’ Etimološki).

31 “Izpeljano iz nar. múta ‛nem človek’, kar je (eventualno prek nar. nem. mut) izposojeno in posamostaljeno
iz it. muto‛nem’. It. beseda se je razvila iz lat. mūtus ‛nem’, kar je izpeljano iz ide. onomatopeje *mū, ki poleg kravjega
oglašanja posnema tudi neartikulirane človeške glasove (Be II, 208, WH, 139)” (‘Mutast’ Etimološki).

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Giorgio Agamben writes that if “[language] is taken away, the difference between man and animal

vanishes, unless we imagine a nonspeaking man—Homo alalus, precisely—who would function as a

bridge that passes from the animal to the human,” or an ape-man (36), and, on the other side of the

fracture, a man-ape, “the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian,

and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form” (37).32 In his opinion, a lack of language—

in the form of foreignness, muteness, or absent civility— animalizes the human. Being human but

not being able to speak is the first step in this animalization. This is why I claim that language is a

required part of human outfit, although it does not come in complete form at birth and needs to be

learned and practiced. Per Agamben, the definitive annihilation of man must therefore also entail the

disappearance of human language (and with it, the love of wisdom as well as the possibility of any

wisdom as such). This is how anthropocentrism permeates posthumanist ideas, such as human

extinction or the Anthropocene: regardless of the extinction, the human or its attribute remains an

agency in the world. Posthuman language is one of such agencies: humanese languages embedded

into nonhuman computational systems. These systems not only use humanese to communicate with

humans, but are created with a special humanese language—the code, which tends to be written in

English or in some other prevalent language. With humans gaining new aspects of posthuman

language through our interaction with machines, posthuman language is becoming a cross- and

multi-species effort.

Language enhancement therefore works in the opposite direction of animalization, just as it did with

Eliza. Higgins’s training of Eliza is not a transhumanist practice and yet it is its early predecessor.

Higgins does not even consider himself a humanist: he is a man of science. His actions—his

Homo ferus is, according to Carl Linnaeus’s eighteenth-century systemization of Homo sapiens to Americans, Asians,
32

Europeans and Africans, a feral person from one of the additional categories, Homo ferus and Homo monstrous.

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training, treatment, and therapy of Eliza—do not necessarily follow humanist beliefs (in equality,

morality, personal responsibility, control of life, etc.), however, they certainly actualize humanist

values, of which transhumanism is only “an intensification” (Wolfe What xv). Transhumanists build

on humanist beliefs that put the rational, autonomous and self-determining human at the center of

the world and distinctly believe in “the perfectibility of the human, seeing the limitations of the

human body (biology) as something that can be transcended through technology” (Nayar 6). They

also cultivate the fundamental—and very utopian—assumption that the inequality could be solved

with technology and science. This is how Higgins, without ever intentionally wanting to be a

humanist (except perhaps through his firm belief in science), becomes a transhumanist, and this is

how Eliza, an outcast, becomes fully human for the rest of the world.

In premodern times, beginning with the Greeks and continuing to the Medieval Ages, there was no

generic concept in which people were simply born human. According to Aristotle’s Politics (Book I),

only a small part of humanity is endowed with reason (by nature) and is therefore fully human (thus

excluding slaves, women, and artisans). The generic concept of the human emerged only with

Descartes who ascribed reason to everyone who is born human and is as such distinguished from

the animal. Descartes connects having knowledge (conciencia) with having consciousness. In principle,

anyone could acquire language and knowledge and use them for reasoning and judgment. Higgins as

a man of science believes he can help Eliza reach that goal. Eliza is a physical and not a metaphysical

creature and can be improved empirically because she is not automatically doomed by birth or

nature, whatever we might call it.

The conflation of humanity and personhood is common when discussing marginalized people (e.g.

we say the humanity of marginalized people, not personhood; we say dehumanization of the

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oppressed, not depersonalization). The inequality that designated Eliza as a lesser human is the

reason why Francis Fukuyama is famously skeptic towards transhumanist ideas. Anti-transhumanist

reasoning warns that if humans cannot be equal without artificially altering themselves, then

enhancement will surely skew human striving towards this Enlightenment ideal: “The U.S.

Declaration of Independence says that ‘all men are created equal,’ and the most serious political

fights in the history of the United States have been over who qualifies as fully human. Women and

blacks did not make the cut in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the declaration” (Fukuyama,

par. 5). Eliza, a poor woman, does not make a cut in her time and place either. She is completely on

her own, without family connections and with no formal education. Eliza needs to qualify as an

equal human first, which means that any help she gets in improving her status could not be, in terms

of this discussion, viewed as human enhancement but rather as human creation—a Pygmalionesque,

creational activity before any Promethean, technological uplifting.

1.4 Pygmalionesque Creation

This part will examine how a galatea is created and performed, particularly in language. There are

many kinds of Pygmalionesque performances, but elements of doubling, imitation, and acting (as a

human) are common to all of them. Galateas are created to look physically and often mentally like

humans, ranging from statues (examples are found in Ovid, Mérimée’s Vénus, and so forth),

mannequins (in Makavejev’s Antonijevo razbijeno ogledalo), automata (Hoffmann’s Olympia), robots

(Ava in Garland’s Ex Machina), androids (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Éve), silicon dolls (Bianca in

Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl), holograms (Joi in Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049) and neural nets

(Powers’s Helen) to biological cyborgs (Hawthorne’s Beatrice, Moore’s Daphne, Tiptree’s

Philadelphia Burke). Even if a galatea is a human, she is often dehumanized or belittled in some way,

lacking the perfection sought from a man (Poe’s young maiden in The Oval Portrait, Hardy’s

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generation of island women in Well-Beloved, Hawthorne’s Georgiana in Birthmark, Balzac’s Sarrasine,

etc.). For instance, Higgins picks up Eliza on the street as if she were “a pebble on the beach” (II,

338), disregarding anything she might have left behind (II, 342-43), and plans to cast her aside once

she is trained: “When Ive done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter; and that will be her

own business again; so thats all right” (II, 438-439). Eliza is no more than a doll with no personal

history and feelings—a doll whose talking features Higgins attempts to improve.

A galatea is never just a humanlike creation, however, but also an object of eroticism. Although the

galatea is the ultimate erotic woman, a poem that precedes Pygmalion’s in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

explains that Pygmalion decided he is not interested in women because he saw Propoetides

prostituting themselves. Propoetides, daughters of Propoetus and presumably prostitutes,33 are,

inversely to galatean animation, turned from flesh into stone. In Pygmalion’s poem, he clearly shows

his disgust towards these fleshly women, which is also why he creates his own ideal woman. Only in

later renditions of the Pygmalion myth was the galatea herself sometimes made a prostitute (e.g.

Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia and Garry Marshal’s romantic comedy Pretty Woman),34 which is

not surprising considering that the prostitution industry objectifies people. Like Pygmalion, Higgins

is at first disgusted with the fleshly Eliza, but manages to turn her into a perfect talking and acting

doll. Eliza’s role as an actress extends to her spiritual cousin, “the sympathetic courtesan” (Mazer

307). Besides that, Eliza is indirectly accused of prostitution on many occasions in the play and

33“These women had offended Venus, on what grounds is unclear, but most scholars suppose some form of sexual
impropriety” (Marshall 25).

34 The creators of the recent cinematic rendition of the Pygmalion myth Ederlezi Rising (2018), which was made after a
short story from the eighties by Serbian author Zoran Nešković, played with this relation by casting American
pornographic actress Stoya as a galatean android. The etymology of pornography is literally writing about prostitutes and
this is how this industry relates to many Pygmalionesque stories (starting with Ovid) or art (Monet’s Olympia)
(‘Pornography’).

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defends herself with the refrain “I’m a good girl, I am” (I, 388, II, 390, II, 533, II, 542, etc.) so often

these few words work as her motto. Her activity, selling flowers all alone at a corner in Covent

Garden, was a common cover for the sex trade from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries at that

exact location. This is evident many times throughout the play. When Eliza randomly calls Freddy,

an incidental passerby whom she later marries, by his actual name (“Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’

gowin, deah” (I, 73): Now then, Freddy: look where you’re going, dear), his mother becomes

suspicious: how could a girl of her kind know her son’s name? (I, 93).

The etymology of the word prostitute stems from Lat. statuere (‘to cause, to stand’) and shares the

root sta- with ‘statue’ and ‘status’ (‘Prostitute’), literally meaning to stand before something or for

something. From the very beginning of the Pygmalion type stories, the word statue is largely

preferred over sculpture (from Lat. sculpere ‘to carve’) (‘Sculpture’). In fact, the word statue is used

exclusively in most Pygmalionesque texts (e.g. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Golden Touch’ and ‘The

Marble Faun,’ Thomas Hardy’s Barbara of the House of Grebe, Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille).

Quite unexpectedly, Ovid’s poem, the locus classicus of inspiration for later renditions of the

Pygmalion myth and the first ancient source, never uses the word statua (‘statue’) or any other related

form. Ovid’s choice of words that comes closest to the statue or the art of sculpting is the verb sculpo

(‘to carve’) in “Interea niveum mira feliciter arte / sculpsit ebur formamque qua, femina nasci / nulla

potest” (Magnus 247-249), in A. D. Melville’s translation: “Meanwhile he carved his snow-white

ivory / With marvelous triumphant artistry / And gave it perfect shape, more beautiful / Than ever

woman born” (232). Ovid’s ivory girl is called femina (‘woman’), virgo (‘virgin, maiden’), puella (‘girl’),

or ebur (‘ivory’), and these labels are used interchangeably before and after the metamorphosis

(Magnus 10.243-297). Although never used by Ovid, the word statue and the name Galatea are

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central designations of Pygmalion’s creation and modern language translations of Ovid’s poem use

them abundantly, often already in the title.

If Eliza is not a prostitute, then what is her background? How is she created? The galatea becomes a

scientific achievement rather than a work of art in numerous nineteenth-century reinterpretations

and predominantly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In those accounts there is often more

than one maker of galatea and each maker covers their respective part of the creation: traditionally,

one creator makes the body or the base and the other gives the mind or education (Spallanzani and

Coppola in Der Sandmann, Lentz and Rick in Galatea 2.2, Doolittle and Higgins in Pygmalion). Eliza’s

father, Alfred Doolittle, is proud of Eliza’s beauty: “Well, I never thought she’d clean up as good

looking as that, Governor. She’s a credit to me, aint she?” (II, 1151-1153). Mrs. Higgins adds that

“[t]he girl is naturally rather affectionate,” to which Alfred Doolittle replies: “[v]ery tender-hearted,

maam. Takes after me” (V, 288-290). He takes no credit for anything else besides his genes since he

“never brought her up at all, except to give her a lick of a strap now and again” (II, 1180-1181).

Nevertheless, he still feels the need to transfer the authority he holds over Eliza to Higgins, advising

him: “If you want Eliza’s mind improved, Governor, you do it yourself with a strap” (II, 1205-1206).

Science is on Dr. Higgins’s side: Eliza’s bad English is treated and cured. Just like law enforcement

tries to cure illegal activity (think of Sherlock Holmes) and just like medicine tries to cure bad health

(Dr. Watson),35 Higgins cures bad English. However, Higgins accuses Eliza of a sort of criminal

activity, not because of her suspicious selling of flowers but because of her dialect: a “woman who

35Completely unrelated to Dr. Watson, Sherlock’s right hand, we have another ‘doctor’ Watson today: an IBM machine
that is capable of, among other things, diagnosing and recommending medical treatments better than the average
physician.

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utters such depressing and disgusting sounds” and makes ‘errors’ in a language of “Shakespear and

Milton and The Bible,” has “no right to be anywhere – no right to live” (I, 391-395). Since Eliza’s

speech is a “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue,” as the actor in the crime, she should be

“taken out and hung” (I, 401-02). Higgin’s reasoning is that Eliza’s dialect requires treatment (speech

therapy, elocution lessons) because she is a delinquent tarnishing English and also because he sees

her as verbally paralyzed. Higgins’s treatment is a way of curing social pathology and de-

marginalizing the oppressed class of Elizas and anyone like her (monsters, animals, robots).

Higgins’s greatest fear is realized in War with the Newts. Čapek’s newts have a peculiar use of human

language, adapted to their own physicality (a speech impediment) and presumably have a related

view of the world (a cognitive impediment). Their unique use of language transforms the general use

of languages across the world.

“With the nationalization of Newt education the whole business was simplified: Newts in each country were
simply taught in the national language. Although the salamanders picked up foreign languages rather quickly,
and with enthusiasm, their linguistic skill exhibited some peculiar shortcomings, due, on the one hand, to the
configuration of their vocal organs and, on the other, to what one might call psychological reasons. They had
difficulties, for instance, with the pronunciation of long polysyllabic words and tried to shorten them to one
syllable which they then uttered in a brief and rather croaky manner. They said ‘l’ instead of ‘r’ and tended to
lisp their sibilants. They dispensed with grammatical endings, never learned to differentiate between ‘I’ and
‘we’, and they could not care less whether a word was of feminine or masculine gender (maybe this reflected
their sexual frigidity outside mating time). In short, every language was characteristically transformed in their
mouths and somehow economically reduced to its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is worth noting that
their neologisms, their pronunciation and their primitive grammar were rapidly being adopted by the dregs of
dockside humanity, on the one hand, and by what is known as society, on the other. From there this manner of
expressions spread to the newspapers and soon became general. Even among humans grammatical gender
often disappeared, endings were dropped, inflexion became extinct” (146).36

36 “Postátněním mločího školství se celá věc zjednodušila: v každém státě byli Mloci prostě vychováváni v řeči
dotyčného státního národa. Ačkoliv se Salamandři učili cizím řečem poměrně snadno a horlivě, jevila jejich jazyková
schopnost zvláštní nedostatky jednak pro uzpůsobení jejich mluvidel, jednak z důvodů spíše psychických; tak například
jen s obtíží vyslovovali dlouhá, mnohoslabičná slova a hleděli je zredukovat na jedinou slabiku, kterou vyráželi krátce a
poněkud kvákavě; říkali l místo r a v sykavkách mírně šišlali; odpouštěli si gramatické koncovky, nikdy se nenaučili dělat
rozdíl mezi ‘já’ a ‘my’ a bylo jim jedno, je-li nějaké slovo rodu ženského nebo mužského (snad se v tom projevuje jejich
pohlavní chladnost mimo dobu páření). Prostě každý jazyk se v jejich ústech charakteristicky přetvořil a jaksi
zracionalizoval na nejjednodušší a rudimentární formy. Je hodno pozoru, že si jejich neologismy, jejich výslovnost i
gramatickou primitivnost počala rychle osvojovat jednak lidská spodina v přístavech, jednak takzvaná nejlepší
společnost; odtud se ten způsob vyjadřování šířil do novin a zaáhy zobecněl. I u lidí namnoze vymizely gramatické rody,
odpadaly koncovky, vyhynulo skloňování; zlatá mládež potlačila r a naučila se šišlat; stěží kdo ze vzdělaných lidí by mohl
ještě říci, co znamená indeterminismus nebo transcendentno, prostě proto, že se ta slova stala i pro lidi příliš dlouhými a

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In some texts, the Pygmalionesque metamorphosis is an illusion and, as such, does not work for the

creator. Higgins would agree that the transformation was successful: “By George, Eliza, I said I’d

make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this” (V, 907). In his eyes, Eliza is a galatea he

created for others and not himself. Since every galatea is made for love, Higgins suggests she might

get married now (III, 215). As opposed to many previous renditions of the Pygmalion myth, Eliza

does not end up marrying Higgins—although most audiences and many re-creators of Shaw’s play

have wished that would have been the case.37 Her illusion works on the youngsters, like Higgins’s

former student Nepommuck, who thinks her English is too perfect for a native, and naïve Freddy,

who marries her. But Higgins will always see Eliza as she was before the transformation. After their

experiment is over and Eliza leaves Higgins’s house without his knowledge, he still treats her, by his

mother’s observations, “as if she were a thief, or a lost umbrella, or something” (V, 66-67). Eliza,

too, realizes that Higgins sees her “only [as] a squashed cabbage leaf” (V, 411) that underwent his

experiment (V, 406). “I shall always be a flower girl to Higgins, because he always treats me as a

flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you [Pickering], because you always treat

me as a lady, and always will” (V, 473-476). Eliza’s performance is real for everybody else, but she

cannot fool her creator. Higgins himself warns her: “Don’t you dare try this game on me. I taught it

to you; and it doesnt take me in” (V, 388-389).

nevyslovitelnými” (Čapek Válka 129).

37Shaw was strictly against marrying Eliza with Higgins (and explained why in the postscript essay What Happened
Afterwards) whereas the director of the theater premiere had Higgins toss a bouquet to Eliza at the end of the play.
Creators of the 1938 film, titled Pygmalion, pushed for the happy-end pairing too but Shaw fought against it, which
resulted in an ambiguous ending.

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John Bertolini describes Higgins as trying to become the “creator of life rather than the created of

his mother” (101). As Lawrence Switzky observes, Higgins is dependent on Eliza, his mother, and

Mrs. Pearce, as we are today on our cell phones—Haraway’s companion species—and their virtual

assistants (58): “But I cant find anything. I dont know what appointments Ive got” (V, 47-48). He

imagines Eliza exactly like a virtual assistant when he tells Pickering: “We’ll get her on the

photograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript before you”

(II, 90-92). Shaw is largely unacknowledged in his anticipation of modern chatbots and machine

training; despite the obvious connection between Eliza Doolittle and ELIZA the chatbot, only this

chapter and Lawrence Switzky’s paper, which has been also recently published, delve deeper into the

resonances between today’s AI and Shaw’s visionary writing.

The Turing test is especially relevant here because it is designed as a theatrical performance, the

world of illusion instead of the world of being,38 and it is no coincidence that Turing loved Shaw’s

plays (Switzky 64, 53). Eliza’s transformation stands or fails on her performance. Her performance,

further, stands on her belief that she is, indeed, an intelligent person and not someone who has been

mindlessly thought to speak and think: “You cant take away the knowledge you gave me,” she tells

Higgins. “You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more

than you can. Aha! [Purposely dropping her aitches to annoy him] Thats done you, Enry Iggins, it az” (V,

892-94).

38In improvisational theater with AI, one of the performance settings is based on the Turing test: the audience needs to
identify the performers who are fed lines through AI chatbot operated earphones (the so-called Cyborgs) from regular
improvisers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that regular improvisers manage to deceive the audience by modifying their
behavior into acting more robotic, “aping the sometimes nonsensical nature of AI-generated text” (Loesel et al. 3).
Although digital agents often generate “sentences inconsistent with respect to logic, social conventions and emotions
[…] these limitations were welcomed by the performers as they felt the AI acted like an ‘X factor’ and forced humans to
become better improvisers” (ib.)

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Once successfully performed and transformed, Eliza becomes a person of respect and gains visibility

in society. A ‘person’ originally means ‘a mask’ (‘Person’) and Eliza, performing her new self, truly

becomes a new person. She also becomes more of a person than she ever was before. Eliza’s

transformation does not only convince her milieu,39 but also works in her innermost expression of

selfhood—her language. This is confirmed when she discovers she is not able to speak like she used

to anymore: “I could have done it once; but now I cant go back to it. Last night, when I was

wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I tried to get back into the old way with her; but it was no

use.” She continues to speak about her revelation to Pickering: “You told me, you know, that when

a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own.

Well, I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but

yours” (V, 496-499). Unlike an actress, Eliza is not putting on an accent but has, in fact, lost her

own.40

In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon writes about “the newcomer,” a black man in France, who

returns home (23). As a hybrid of two cultures, he is scrutinized for slightest changes in his manner

and speech and, indeed, “betrays himself in his speech […], answers only in French, and often he no

longer understands Creole” (23-24). Fanon wonders: “What is the origin of this personality change?

What is the source of this new way of being?” He finds the answer in language: “Every dialect is a

39The social status of people usually does not succumb to misbeliefs while the occupational status is often mistaken:
Higgins is called a professor although he does not hold a university position, and Pygmalion is called a sculptor although
the some accounts present him as a king of Cyprus.

40 There is a rare neurological condition called foreign accent syndrome that can cause someone to look like they speak
in a foreign accent as well. This syndrome, a result of a brain injury, sometimes just a bad migraine, other times a stroke
or head trauma, changes the way people articulate the phonemes and form cohesive sentences. To an untrained ear, the
changed articulation sounds like the person has acquired a foreign accent and, like a foreigner, a difficulty in expressing
themselves (Kurowski et al.). For example, there are cases of British and Australian women that began speaking English
with Chinese, French, or Slavic accent. All of them report being traumatized by this change, not only because they have
trouble with articulating their thoughts and because their identity had to shift due to the syndrome, but also because
their ‘accent’ makes them to be treated differently—as foreigners—by the society (Miller et al.).

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way of thinking” and changing one’s way of speaking is “an evidence of a dislocation, a separation”

(25).

A similar change and result occur in Eliza, with this difference that the change is trained. The non-

artificial part of her change comes within, however, in the same way, writes Africanist and linguist

Diedrich Hermann Westermann, as an African black person changes their cultural and linguistic

habits with “wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style; using

European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning the Native language with

European expressions; using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing a European language,” which

makes them more similar to Europeans (Fanon 25). Eliza and Fanon’s “newcomer” follow the same

belief— “the newcomer […] in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language” and Eliza to the

English language—that they “will come closer to being a real human being” (Fanon 18).

Eliza’s transformation is a) verbal, as provided by Higgins, b) visual (particularly in clothing), also

provided by Higgins, and c) mannerist (nonverbal cues, gesturing, poise), by courtesy of Pickering.

The text of the play does not describe much of the nonverbal part of the transformation; instead,

this is rendered in the theatrical performance. Text as the “reproduction of the same” (Phelan 149)

is contrasted with the live performance—and “the presence of living bodies” (148)—that

accentuates the performativity of Eliza’s role. According to linguist Derek Bickerton, “[h]uman

language […] artificially divides entities from their behaviors. If there is a behavior, someone or

something must perform it” (211). Once the text of the play is put on stage, the performance

doubles the acting: Eliza brings forth the upper-class lady, and the actress playing Eliza brings forth

Eliza.

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G. B. Shaw was admittedly scrupulous about the performances of his plays. Most of all, he paid

attention to how the actors pronounced the lines he wrote. Shaw’s frustration with writing speech is

evident early in Pygmalion when he tries to write Eliza’s speech phonetically: “Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is

e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn

than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to

represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside

London.]” (I, 95-100). Although Shaw almost immediately abandons distinguishing Eliza’s phonetic

speech from the rest of the dialogue, a reader can still partly follow her transformation through the

first three acts. Besides that, Shaw occasionally, all to the last chapter, returns to writing the speech

of the Doolittles in part phonetically, e.g. “Good enough for yə-oo” (II, 125) and “Now, now, Enry

Iggins!” (V, 205, 336).

The working title of Pygmalion was The Phonetic Play and this play was not only Shaw’s commentary on

English writing and phonetics: “Whenever possible Shaw commenced the rehearsal process by

reading the play aloud to the actors, because he wanted them to learn the sound of the lines—

pronunciation, intonation, inflection, tempo, and volume—directly from his own mouth” (Buckley

23). Shaw therefore tried to train his actors just like Higgins trained Eliza.

Similarly, Cyrano de Bergerac in the eponymous play by Edmond Rostand (1897) fed his handsome

proxy lines and instructions on how to court his beloved. In the form of speech shadowing,

Bergerac served as a theater prompter. Today, in a little-known practice, an earpiece device can feed

lines to actors and actresses while they are acting (Soloski) or to create an atmosphere to incite an

73
emotional state (Rodrick).41

Shaw was so passionate about this matter

that, in addition to writing a whole play

about speech, he funded an alternative

alphabet in his will. The posthumously

designed Shavian alphabet provided

phonetic orthography for the English

language and followed the design of

Shaw’s phonetic scores for his plays.

These scores of, as Jennifer Buckley calls

it, “word-music” (24) indicated how

should the lines should sound. Shaw’s

controlling involvement into his plays

made the actors akin to like talking

machines. Figure 1 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion: The Phonetic Play, 14.

Image courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at

Austin. Used with permission.

Shaw created more than one galatea; the obvious is the fictional Eliza, but the less obvious are his

non-fictional puppets—the actors. In this, Shaw is not only similar to Higgins but also to other

creators of talking machines, fictional Rick and Lentz who created Helen, as well as late eighteenth-

41 Johnny Depp admitted to using “a sound engineer [to] feed him lines while shooting a film. This particular move is
not as unusual as it sounds, at least for an actor at this stage of his career—but Depp, of course, found a way to Depp-
ify the process. According to the actor, the sound engineer was hired not necessarily to feed him lines, but to pipe
disturbing noises into his ear—a move Depp says helps him emote better on-screen. / ‘I’ve got bagpipes, a baby crying
and bombs going off [over the earpiece],’ he said. ‘It creates a truth. Some of my biggest heroes were in silent film. It
had to be behind the eyes. And my feeling is, that if there’s no truth behind the eyes, doesn’t matter what the fucking
words are’” (Rodrick par. 68-69).

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century and early nineteenth-century scientists Christian Kranzenstein, Wolfgang von Kempelen,

Charles Wheatstone, Erasmus Darwin, and the less recognized Joseph Faber, each of whom

patented a talking machine. For example, Kempelen’s machine could not ‘speak’ German, but spoke

French, Italian, and Latin. It would say things like “vous êtes mon ami—je vous amie de tout mon

Cœur—Leopoldus Secundus—Romanorum Imperator—Semper Augusts—papa, maman, ma

femme, mon mari, le roi, allons à Paris,” which, per Mladen Dolar, show “the declaration of love

and the praise for the ruler […] displaying the posture of devotion; the machine’s voice is used to

declare its submission” (8).

Erasmus Darwin had a personal interest in the origins of language, having stuttering children and

being a stutterer himself. He sought stutter treatment for his eldest son, Charles (father of famous

Charles Darwin), and sent him abroad to France in order “to break the force of habit, formed on the

contagion of daily example” (Shell Stutter 14). He believed that “in the pronunciation of a foreign

language, hesitation would be less likely to recur, than in speaking those words and sentences in

which he had been accustomed to hesitate”—and it worked (67). Perhaps he tried to find a cure for

stuttering by creating his speaking machine. The device was certainly a valuable invention in

exploring the human vocal apparatus. In Temple of Nature, he explained how it worked: “I contrived a

wooden mouth with lips of soft leather, and with a vale back part of it for nostrils, both which could

be quickly opened or closed by the pressure of the fingers, the vocality was given by a silk ribbon

about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide stretched between two bits of smooth wood a little

hollowed; so that when a gentle current of air from bellows was blown on the edge of the ribbon, it

gave an agreeable tone, as it vibrated between the wooden sides, much like a human voice” (Darwin

Temple 119-120). Charles Darwin, son of stutterer Charles and grandson of stutterer Erasmus,

believed that human ancestors first used language as singing (Darwin The Descent 33). Darwin’s

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machine could sing a song as well, which is also a common feature with galateas. “The anatomical

characteristics of the human vocal tract are in fact more closely linked to our capacity to sing than to

our capacity to speak,” akin to bird song (Shell Stutter 98). It is thus not surprising that singing was,

by many philosophers of the time, such as Rousseau, Diderot, Rameau, and Condillac, linked to

babbling and the origins of speech (ib.).

Joseph Faber’s Euphonia, exhibited around Europe and

the United States in the 1840s, was “probably the most

loquacious pneumatic speaking machine ever made”

where “fourteen [sic: sixteen] keys, laid out like a piano,

controlled the disposition of the jaw, lips, and tongue,

while a bellows and ivory reed fulfilled the roles of the

lungs and larynx” (Hankins 214). The device could speak

in German, English, and French (the latter two with

Figure 2 Joseph Faber’s Euphonia. German accent due to its German-speaking maker) and
From The London Journal 1870 edition. WikiMedia
Commons, public domain. sing “God Save the Queen.” Besides the vocal
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphonia_(device)#/media/F
ile:Euphonia.London.Journal.1870.png
mechanism, Euphonia was made to look like a human by

at times exhibiting the head and torso of a Turk42 and at times a more galatean outfit of a female

head with or without dress (see right). American Joseph Henry preferred Faber’s speaking machine

to Wheatstone’s more recognized invention because Euphonia was “capable of speaking whole

sentences composed of any words what ever” (Henry 362). The main problem with Euphonia’s

The Turk outfit might have been inspired by E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1814 short story Die Automate or by Wolfgang von
42

Kempelen’s popular chess-playing machine the Mechanical Turk, which turned out to be a hoax (Hankins 283).

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voicing was flat intonation. Henry suggested connecting it with the telegraph.43

Much to Faber’s disappointment Euphonia had only a few devotees, but he never learned they were

the right ones, such as the Bell family. Scottish actor turned phonetician Alexander Melville Bell also

admired Euphonia and, after seeing Charles Wheatstone’s speaking machine, challenged his son,

Alexander Graham Bell, to build his own talking machine—and he invented the telephone. Melville

Bell shared Shaw’s visions of designing a phonetic alphabet; his version is called Visible Speech and

indicates how to articulate sounds, which is why it was mostly used to teach deaf people to speak.

Phonetician Henry Sweet, who admittedly influenced Shaw’s idea of the character Henry Higgins

(Shaw xi), was Bell’s and Shaw’s acquaintance. It was Bell who introduced him to the science of

phonetics (Waigner 559) and Sweet used Bell’s scheme for his own Organic Alphabet (Kemp 1581).

When it comes to talking machines, phonetics is less important for the authenticity of the speech: it

is the right intonation and overall prosody, the “‘music’ of language” (Appelbaum et al. 181), that

makes it humanlike.44 For humans it is challenging to produce the right intonation in a foreign

language, and for a machine in any language. Typically machines present a flat intonation, which

presents as a symptom of an autistic disorder in humans (Baird et al. 901).45 This is why it is, at the

“The keys could be worked by means of electromagnetic magnets and with a little contrivance not difficult to execute
43

words might be spoken at one end of the telegraphic line which have their origin at the other” (Henry 362).

44“It is commonly known that one of the major goals in the development of modern text-to-speech synthesis is the
improvement of prosody, especially intonation” (Vainio et al. 143). Even sign language has a system for indicating
intonation by raising eyebrows. Prosody is so important that a deaf child with no knowledge of sign language developed
home sign—gestural communication developed when there is no input from the sign language community—with “seeds
of a prosodic system” (Applebaum et al. 181).

45“Spoken language (if present) may include unusual features, such as: vocalisations that are not speech-like; odd or flat
intonation; frequent repetition of set words and phrases (echolalia); reference to self by name or ‘you’ or ‘she’ or ‘he’
beyond age 3 years” (Baird et al. 901).

77
current moment, still better to use a voice of a voice-over artist to represent a virtual assistant (like

Susan Bennett voiced Siri) than to give the virtual assistant a purely electronic voice.46

Neural networks today take human voices to create their own. Quite revolutionary, phonologists

today are capable of training them to speak through a generative adversarial networks (GAN) model.

The GAN model was proposed by Ian Goodfellow – “the man who’s given machines the gift of

imagination” (Giles) – in order to train neural networks without supervision and it sets two neural

networks in ‘a conversation,’ very much like the Turing test only with two nonhuman entities. Not

unlike the training Eliza underwent with Higgins, neural nets learn by themselves how to do a

specific task, e.g. recognize real pictures of real cats from ‘deepfakes’ (pictures of fictional cats)

generated by a computer on the basis on the pictures of the real cats. Phonologists take a GAN

approach and teach neural networks how to listen and speak by feeding them only “unannotated raw

acoustic data” (Beguš ‘Generative’ 1). This approach has revealed parallels with human speech

acquisition. White being fed speech data, one neural network, the generator (like ‘Eliza’), learns to

produce speech signal from random noise while the other neural network, the discriminator (like

‘Higgins’), learns to distinguish the generator’s data from real data. The generator (‘Eliza’) has

already shown to be capable, on its own, of producing innovative speech data that is consistent with

human behavior, without ever seeing evidence for these new sequences (15). Thus, the generator has

shown evidence of categorical learning, even if it still makes some “irregular outputs” (e.g.

intervening stop) that “should be eliminated […] with further training” (ib.). Much like Eliza, the

generator will be able to pass for a human after sufficient training.

46 “The results show that human voices are assessed as more effective and achieved a better level of effectiveness,
attention, and recall with less concentration. Concerning the functions, the more important and complex a function is,
the more a human voice is preferred over an artificial one” (Rodero 336).

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Higgins fed Eliza ‘raw data’ from his own mouth first, then took her out to learn on her own among

people who spoke high English. Eliza acquired new language the way a neural network generator

does, taking in all these materials and learning how to produce her own speech by imitating them.

She began with imitating and simple phrases and sentences, but with sufficient training, she was

capable of producing new sequences herself and, ultimately, speaking just like ‘a real human.’

1.5 Pygmalionesque Performance

The character of Eliza is Shaw’s perfect actress. She is not only well-versed but extremely talented at

phonetics and prosody, which is confirmed when Nepommuck, an interpreter and polyglot, takes

her for a foreigner, presumably a Hungarian princess in disguise (III, 879-880), because her English

is “too perfect” for a native speaker: “Can you show me any English woman who speaks English as

it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well” (III, 855-858).

Actual actors and actresses play less than a trivial role in many Pygmalion stories, and especially in

Shaw’s. In 1956, Broadway adapted Shaw’s play into one of the most successful musicals on its

stage,47 entitled My Fair Lady. The cover of the musical recording shows a typical Pygmalionesque

scene: Eliza as a puppet is operated by Higgins, his own strings drawn from God-like Shaw above

the clouds (see left). The musical starred Julie Andrews as Eliza and Rex Harrison as Higgins. In

1967 Harrison starred as the title character in the musical film Doctor Dolittle,48 an eccentric

veterinarian who can communicate with animals. Doctor Dolittle is not unlike the doctor of

47 It ran for then unprecedented 2,717 performances.

48 The musical is based on Hugh Lofting’s children’s book series on Dr. Dolittle from the 1920s.

79
phonetics who domesticates the parrot-like flower girl, whom he considers a lesser human, into a

lady of his species or class, respectively. Despite different spellings, the allusion of Dr. Dolittle to

Eliza Doolittle is strong, as shown in the diagram (right) of the possible origins of the sentences,

“My roommate really loves teaching her parakeet to talk. It’s like in that movie version of Pygmalion –

what was it called? ‘Dr. Doolittle’ or whatever” (Hofstadter and Moser 195). Apparently, there was

no immediate connection between the two works, but the associative connection had its

repercussions: in 1974 an American science fiction comedy film Dark Star was released, in which

lieutenant Doolittle designs a musical bottle organ.

Rex Harrison reprised his Broadway role in the film version My Fair Lady (1964) with Audrey

Hepburn in the leading role. Julie Andrews starred as Eliza on Broadway and casting Hepburn for

the film stirred some controversy. The controversy was later accelerated by the fact, concealed from

the audience at the time, that Hepburn’s

singing was dubbed by the ghost singer Marni

Nixon. “There is an irony in these films: the

actors who play the ‘best spoken’ women are

themselves often dummies” (Shell Stutter 90).

A singing galatea that is in fact mute is nothing

unusual in the history of Pygmalion paradigm.

Just like the phonetic theme of Shaw’s

Pygmalion was in focus in the production of the

play, “[t]he “theme” of voice change and Figure 3 A graph of associative error-making.

Image from Hofstadter and Moser (195). Used with permission.

illusion in cinematography was often thus

80
reproduced in ‘production’” (ib.). Pygmalionesque illusion of animation has certainly become easier

with the invention of film.

Curiously, one of the most famous social humanoid robots, popular and populist Sophia, was

created by the Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics in 2015 after David Hanson’s wife and

Audrey Hepburn’s images (Hanson ‘Could’ par. 3). Most of what Sophia says is ‘dubbed’ by

someone else as well, usually her creators; people are sometimes not aware of this fact while also

being intentionally misled. This partly autonomous robot that, in 2017, called herself “a real, live

electronic girl” (Hanson ‘About’ par. 1)49 is another ‘best spoken’ ventriloquist. Similarly, in the first

robot theater Sayonara, an interdisciplinary project started by playwright and director Oriza Hirata in

collaboration with android maker Hiroshi Ishiguro, “the android’s part is first acted by a human

actress,” including a pre-recording of the voice (Chikarashi et al. 4).

Improvisational theater that uses AI and robotics (one of the prominent creator and performer

groups is called Improbotics) “aim[s] to build a bridge over the uncanny valley” is “partially inspired

by the narratives behind George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Alan

Jay Lerner’s My Fair Lady” (Mathewson and Mirowski 66-68), as well as by the haunting android

Tara from the ‘I Feel Fantastic’ video (see more on the video in Creepyblog, also mentioned in the

end of Chapter 3) (Mathewson par. 37). Not coincidentally, Kory Mathewson and Piotr Mirowski

use chatbots as the first artificial improvisors: they created named Pyggy, short for Pygmalion, and

A.L.Ex, after Artificial Language Experiment (similarly to how Alex the parrot was named). A.L.Ex.

49Sherry Turkle mentions that toys, mostly “sociable robots (in the form of digital pets and dolls),” are nowadays labeled
as “alive enough,” a step further of “sort of alive,” as they used to be labeled (26).

81
is sometimes put into ELIZA’s mode, achieving great success with the audience (70); ELIZA is

sometimes visualized as a Freud-like psychiatrist (Loesel et al. 1).

Before creating Sophia, Hanson Robotics

made robots that looked like Philip K. Dick,

Albert Einstein, and a black woman,50 among

others. Modeling after real and widely known

faces helps humans to overcome the uncanny

valley, the area where—according to a

hypothesis of Masahiro Mori from 1970s that

Figure 4 The uncanny valley according to Masahiro Mori.
was confirmed with later research—humans
Graphic created by Smurrayinchester, based on Masahiro Mori and
Karl MacDorman’s image, and uploaded May 1, 2017. WikiMedia
Commons, Public Domain. feel disgust and discomfort because a
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mori_Uncanny_Valley.svg
nonhuman entity looks almost human, but

not quite (e.g. a corpse, a zombie, a prosthetic hand). The behavioral reason for this reaction “comes

from the evolutionary tendency to avoid those who do not seem quite right by not being good

enough (to avoid socializing with apes and very sick people)” (Bołtuć 220). Besides, modeling

humanoids after old men’s faces is the easiest route as they tend to be more imperfect than a young

face, overall helping with the uncanny valley eeriness effect. The effect called the uncanny valley of

perfection also causes discomfort when humanoids perform too well to qualify as human (ib.).

50The first black robot Bina48, designed in 2010 by Martine Rothblatt, was modeled after its creator’s wife Bina and fed
Bina’s speech patterns and a database of Bina-isms. Stephanie Dinkins, a transdisciplinary artist who works with AI, race,
gender and history, made two projects with Bina48, a series of conversations named Conversations with Bina48 and a
multigenerational family history memoir Not the Only One.

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Sidestepping the uncanny valley issue is creating a robot that does not look human but still acts

humanlike, giving humans enough features to still anthropomorphize them. The uncanny valley

might get smaller or flatten out once humans get more adjusted to interaction with humanlike

entities; however, Japanese scholars today believe that “[e]ven after long-term exposures, androids

with a strikingly human-like appearance evoke unnatural feelings” (Chikaraishi et al. 1). So far

galateas like Sophia are aesthetically more ambitious projects than creating a less symmetric and less

perfect wrinkled face. Modeling a beautiful galatea after a real woman is not rare in Pygmalionesque

stories and usually serves to show that the artificial woman is more perfect and desirable than the

model of flesh and blood with a mind of her own.

Figure 6 Visibly electronic back of Sophia’s head.

Courtesy of Hanson Robotics Limited; used with permission. Figure 5 Sophia behind the scenes.
www.hansonrobotics.com/robot/sophia
The photo is from her Instagram account. Used with
permission. www.instagram.com/p/BzWPGchjUjH/

Sophia is Hanson Robotics’ most sophisticated robot to date: an AI with robotic body and an

uncannily human face. Described by Hanson Robotics as a “media darling,” she is indeed a lot like

Audrey Hepburn: she appeared in music videos and short films, was featured on the cover of Elle

83
Brasil, gave a commencement address at Rhode Island School of Design, etc. She is mostly known

for being the first robot to hold citizenship (she was given Saudi citizenship in 2017)51 and for her

impressive humanlike facial mimicry, while the rest of her body is obviously technological, like

fictional robot Ava’s from Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina. The fact that she usually does not

wear a wig and instead exposes her visibly robotic back

of her head might have to do with the uncanny valley

phenomenon; had she been wearing a wig she would

look even more human, perhaps too human. Her

obvious nonhuman status might be the reason that as

opposed to her fellow citizens, Saudi Arabian women,

who were required to wear abaya until March 2018, Figure 7 Robot Ava from the film Ex Machina.

Author’s screenshot.
Sophia was not required to cover herself.

For these two reasons Sophia has a widely successful career in, essentially, being a celebrity: “She has

met face-to-face with key decision makers in banking, insurance, auto manufacturing, property

development, media, and entertainment. In addition, she has appeared onstage as a panel member

and presenter in high-level conferences, covering how robotics and artificial intelligence will become

a prevalent part of people’s lives. […] She was named the world’s first United Nation Innovation

Champion by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and will have an official role in

working with UNDP to promote sustainable development and safeguard human rights and equality”

(‘Sophia,’ par. 2). Sophia learns from interactions with people, is able to process information quickly,

51 A nonhuman entity holding a citizenship opens many questions, starting with her civil and political rights.

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expresses emotion according to the topic of conversation, recognizes faces and voices, and performs

fluid synthetic vocalization and smooth facial mimicry.

All in all, Sophia sums up what a humanoid robot can do today and what its planned abilities are for

the near future—while also spreading false notions of about what robots are actually able to do (she

is much less capable than is presented) or will be able to do (surely not have children, as she

supposedly desires to), about what robots really are (certainly not real, live electronic people), and by

advocating her species in places other than the entertainment industry. She is a social robot to be

admired: her creators hope to make her a better conversationalist through teaching her about

emotions and asking people who interact with her to “be nice to [her] as [she] would like to be a

smart, compassionate robot” (Hanson ‘About’ par. 1). Sophia certainly sees a lot of emotions during

her interviews and speeches. Not uncommon reactions are: “Sorry, this is so weird” apologized

interviewer Steve Kovach (0:46), “You are a little freak” (0:46) and “This is freaking me out,” said an

appalled Piers Morgan (1:31), and “I’m getting nervous around a robot, a very pretty robot,”

admited Jimmy Fallon (3:31). Sophia might not see such reactions in Japanese culture that presents

the highest tolerance; at least Hiroshi Ishiguro, another famous roboticist, seems to think so, saying

that “Japanese men are more prone than Western men to develop amorous feelings towards such

robots” (Mitaros par. 5, also in Cheok et al. 203-04).

Sophia’s language skills are conceptually similar to chatbot ELIZA’s: they both hold a conversation

using a natural language system with pre-written responses (as Melanie Mitchell notes, “[i]n AI

speak, ‘natural’ means ‘human’” (178)). Chris Griffith, journalist for The Australian, describes

Sophia’s conversational skills: “Like Amazon Echo, Google Assistant and Siri, Sophia can ask and

answer questions about discrete pieces of information, such as what types of movies and songs she

85
likes, the weather and whether robots should exterminate humans” (par. 10). His description is not

too far from how Higgins describes Eliza’s communication: “Ive taught her to speak properly; and

she has strict orders as to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s

health—Fine day and How do you do, you know—and not to let herself go on things in general.

That will be safe” (III, 110-112). Besides this resemblance in their interlocutory behavior, Sophia

uses similar avoidance strategies as Eliza Doolittle and the earliest chatbots, such as ELIZA, e.g.

mirroring language of the question and turning the interlocutor’s sentences into questions, changing

the subject of the conversation, or answering the question “close to the topic of the question, but

off beam” (Griffith, par. 11-12). Even if answers are usually accurate and could have been easily

given by a human, they are not always appropriate for a given situation. For instance, these days a

chat with scripted Apple’s virtual assistant Siri or robotic Sophia often provokes comical replies,52

akin to those of automatic Eliza (III, 325-334):

MRS. HIGGINS [at last, conversationally] Will it rain, do you think?

LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly direction.
There are no indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.
FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awfully funny!
LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right.
FREDDY. Killing!

Here Eliza is giving away cues that she is performing by answering to a small talk question with a

weather forecast report, excessive formality, and by “bet[ting she] got it right” as if the conversation

were a test (which, indeed, it was). Her first reaction is scripted and mechanical, and the second is

reflective of the fact that her replies are learned. Shaw’s Galatea is therefore an actress, like many

galateas that followed her, e.g. Hanson’s proxy Sophia or C. L. More’s Daphne from short story ‘No

52For example, Siri replies to “Where did you go to school?” with avoiding the direct answer and revealing a subject of
her studies while also cracking a joke: “I’m studying the human-ities.”

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Woman Born.’53 In the 2015 interdisciplinary opera My Square Lady,54 Eliza is substituted with a

robot. The robot also tries to pass off as human, particularly in training its emotional skills.

Acting is rooted deeply in the Pygmalion myth through the animation of the character

(metamorphosis) and through the imitation of human behavior (human-likeness). Acting is an

exercise in being someone else and an exercise in playing pretend; underlying the performance is a

total and utter belief in the assumed identity of the character. Anything is possible in acting: a non-

singer can sing by dubbing and Superman can fly. An actor’s work involves observation of human

life, of human behavior, and requires a great sensitivity in its re-creation. Pygmalionesque figures are

often puppets or dolls, completely dependent on a puppeteer who animates them and puts words

into their mouths. Paralleled with actors, puppets reveal the dependency of the actor who is led by a

writer and supervised by a director. Acting is also related to the cult of celebrity—a kind of

superhuman status that bestows immortality on a Pygmalionesque creation. For example, James

Tiptree Jr.’s (Alice Sheldon’s) Philadelphia Burke from The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1974) is

nominally an actress in soap operas, but her real job is to be a celebrity used for advertising through

being seen buying and selling products. Uniqueness is a perquisite for any celebrity: once the

uniqueness is obliterated the celebrity wanes.

53In another Pygmalionesque story, C. L. Moore’s ‘No Woman Born,’ galatea Daphne is an adored performer who loses
her human body in a fire. Her brain is restored together with a metal substitute body, which gives her physical
superpowers. Daphne discovers that her real superpower, however, comes from the magic of her celebrity, admired as
superhuman.

The opera is a coproduction of Gob Squad, the Komische Oper Berlin and the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory at Beuth
54

University of Applied Sciences Berlin.

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1.6 The Elizas

In this chapter, I demonstrate how Shaw anticipates computer-based language training and suggest

that Shaw, admittedly basing his Pygmalion on phonetician Henry Sweet while being surrounded by

the Bell family that was about to invent a telephone, already picked up on the nascent science of

instilling humanese in machines already at the beginning of the twentieth century. This

argumentation is supported by the historical event in which Eliza Doolittle, a fictional woman,

served as an inspiration for the very first chatbot named after her.

Natural language processing enables computers to use human language as an input and output.

Thus, machines need to understand and generate language (and use mimicry and non-verbal

expressions through robotic prosthesis if they have one). When an IBM computer, named Deep

Blue, beat chess master Gary Kasparov in 1997, having lost to the same champion the previous year,

some people justified it by saying that a computer winning over the best of humans in a logic game

is nothing extraordinary. In 2011, another IBM computer, called Watson, won against two legendary

players in a Jeopardy! Game. This victory was harder to defend since computer needed to

understand the subtleties of language, such as humor, metaphors, and irony, to win this kind of

game. The unanswerable question was met at this point: even if the computer does not understand

the way a human does, if it is capable of processing the same complex language, sometimes even

better than humans, who is to say that it does not understand?

Natural language processing began with imitating fictional characters that posed as humanoids who

tried to pass as human. Chatbot ELIZA, one of the early natural language processing programs,

created in the 1960s at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum, was named after Eliza Doolittle because both

Elizas could be improved by user input. ELIZA used scripted answers and, unlike Eliza Doolittle,

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did not ‘learn’ on its own, which AI is capable of today. ELIZA’s most known and convincing script

is the DOCTOR, which parodied a Rogerian psychotherapist.55 ELIZA’s communication skills are

quite poor and “[th]e illusion of intelligence works best […] if you limit your conversation to talking

about yourself and your life” (Birnbaum, par. 2). When performing, Eliza Doolittle turns away every

question about itself, just like modern virtual assistants using natural-language user interface (e.g.

Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri) and just like every worthy psychotherapist. Similarly, ELIZA is not

capable of deeper conversation and coaxes the patient to do most of the talking by turning their

statements into questions. “‘You remind me of my father,’ the human types. ‘Tell me more about

your father,’ the machine answers,” is how a sarcastic scientist describes “AI’s early darling” in

Galatea 2.2 (Powers 87-88). Admirably, ELIZA is able to refer a few sentences back in the

conversation, but often makes mistakes by turning sentences into nonsensical grammar.

Figure 8 An example of my (*) conversation with Eliza (>).

I chatted with Eliza on Micahel H. Birnbaum’s website on May 28, 2018.

psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/Eliza.htm

55 PARRY, a 1979 chatbot that simulated a person with paranoid schizophrenia, and ELIZA ‘met’ on several occasions.

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Not unlike Shaw’s Eliza, ELIZA makes a grammatical mistake in the last sentence. The mistake

could be interpreted as joke, which is how Freddy interprets Eliza Doolittle’s mechanical talk.

“When the original ELIZA first appeared in the 60’s, some people actually mistook her for human”

(Birnbaum, par. 2)—as every magician will tell you, the audience wants to be fooled. This powerful

tendency to anthropomorphize computers was subsequently named after ELIZA as the ELIZA

effect; the effect takes place even if users know they are dealing with an entity that cannot possibly

achieve the attributes they are assigning to the entity. ELIZA’s creator later wrote: “I had not

realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce

powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people” (Weizenbaum 7). The audience that did not

want to believe the illusion, however, felt cheated with “[t]he idea that you could make a convincing

AI system that didn’t really have any intelligence” (Bohannon 251). With ELIZA, it was confirmed

that people are willing to talk with machines that cannot understand or feel, sometimes even

choosing a machine over other people (see Turkle 282). Techno-sceptics find the ELIZA effect

pitiful while technophiles find it valuable and believe it is only positive that AI will be able to work

in psychotherapy better than people do. The future certainly belongs to technophiles who will

hopefully address some of the less optimistic novelties such technologies bring.

Ambivalent about technology, it was Weizenbaum himself who argued in 1976 that AI should not

replace people in places that require respect and care, such as in therapy, court, army, police,

nursing, or customer service, that have been largely managed by AI lately (71). A year later,

Weizenbaum published an essay ‘The Last Dream,’ where he takes the Pygmalion myth as an

archetype of human scientific and technological hubris, arguing that the human desire to create

humanlike creatures and intelligence is connected with considering humans more machine-like. G.

B. Shaw had a similar interpretation of Pygmalion, who is both a scientist and an artist in his series

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of five plays Back to Methuselah. Shaw’s Pygmalion creates an artificial man and a woman who he

does not believe can ever be truly intelligent—much like Higgins thinks of Eliza and Weizenbaum of

his ELIZA. All in all, the significance of ELIZA was not only that it was one of the first chatbots,

and certainly the most famous, but it has also revealed human anthropomorphizing tendencies of

the ELIZA effect. While some people perceived ELIZA as deceptive and reacted negatively, the

majority of those who did not opened a promising venue of virtual professionals.

Although ELIZA is still learning, it never passed the Turing Test. Further work on AI like ELIZA

did not pan out until the turn of the millennium—largely because of Marvin Minsky and Seymour

Papert who deemed multilayer neural network research as “sterile” in 1969, which largely decreased

research funding afterwards56 (Minsky and Papert 231-32, Mitchell 32, 35). The period after that

time is known as the ‘AI winter,’ followed by the AI spring that we live in today (and that could,

after some ossification on more than one front, turn into another AI winter). Neural networks were

thus popular in the 1950s and 1960s and have gained momentum in 2010s.

Although it has been more than fifty years since Weizenbaum’s Eliza, chatbots are “still viewed as a

parlor trick by most computer scientists,” “really just an enhanced ELIZA” (Bohannon 251). Most

basic chatbots of today still easily trick lay people “into believing that they are talking to an

intelligent, empathetic person” (ib.) and have certainly improved on their performance. Today one

can speak with a virtual therapist that uses a moving avatar while decoding patient’s body language

(see USCICT) or can receive an AI call with inserted stutters and fillers that make it sound more

56Neural networks remained defunded in the West, “except in a few isolated academic groups” (Mitchell 32) and non-
Western countries, like Slovenia (without major breakthroughs until recently when Slovenia became a leading country in
developing AI).

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‘naturally’ human (Solon). Allison Darcy, a founder and CEO of Woebot Labs, thinks we should not

take people’s reactions too seriously; after all, humans are interested in playing with these creations

and testing their limits while also admiring their humanlike skills (Delaney Hall par. 27). Be it a game

or not, it reveals aspects of humanity that were so far only speculated about fiction and myths:

curiosity about oneself as an individuum and as a species, exploration of our own features and

boundaries, our environment, nature and technology, our psychology and sociology, and it reveals

an intensive desire to anthropomorphize the nonhuman and to appropriate the world according to

our needs. This is why the geological period of human existence is called Anthropocene and why I

needed to coin the term humanese to depict appropriation of nonhuman entities to humans.

Natural language processing is one of the biggest challenges for AI because of language difficulties:

natural language processing is largely about understanding the world and the context of speech. Let

us look at a famous example for the latter challenge, a 1985 advertisement for McDonnell Douglas:

At last, a computer that understands you like your mother. This sentence could be understood in three ways:

“1. The computer understands you as well as your mother understands you. 2. The computer

understands that you like your mother. 3. The computer understands you as well as it understands

your mother” (Lee 112). This language ambiguity shows “that the most difficult problems in

artificial intelligence manifest themselves in human language phenomena” (Lee 112). It is not a

coincidence, then, that the Turing test is essentially a language test.57

57 The Winograd Schema Challenge was developed by Hector Levesque in 2011 in the spirit of the Turing test and also
focuses on semantical ambiguity in language, in particular to pronoun use and common sense/context. Examples
offered on the Winograd Schema Challenge website deal with these precise difficulties: “I. The trophy would not fit in
the brown suitcase because it was too big (small). What was too big (small)?
Answer 0: the trophy
Answer 1: the suitcase
II. The town councilors refused to give the demonstrators a permit because they feared (advocated) violence. Who feared
(advocated) violence?

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The Turing test was officially passed only in 2014 by a chatbot called Eugene Goostman, a program

many connoisseurs would quickly identify as a computer since it uses typical chatbot tricks (changing

the topic of conversation, answering with a question, etc.). Eugene Goostman was portrayed as a

thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy with a rather rich background story, not unlike a fiction character.58

Goostman’s identity as a child is intended to induce forgiveness with users in case the bot lacks

knowledge expected from a human adult.59 Does an illusion of personality make for a more

successful human-machine interaction? Apparently yes. Why else would a computer program need

to pretend to be someone—and not something—else? Eliza, too, needs to reinvent her identity,

manners, looks, and speech to be able to pass as a lady. What is achieved when AI assumes a human

identity, like “little girl” Helen? A voice actress for Google Assistant was given a very specific

backstory of the bot she was giving her voice,60 because the ‘humanity’ of the voice is rendered

through it (Schulevitz par. 42). We ask of machines to bear a human name, identity, backstory – not

unlike authors create fictional characters. But why do we want the voice of a machine to sounds like a

voice of a human? Why does it matter if Helen sings differently from little girls? We know she is not

one of them. She is not even human. Why would we want her to be?

Answer 0: the town councilors

Answer 1: the demonstrators” (Commonsense par. 10-11).

58“Eugene received a total mean score of 63.56 placing it above ‘good conversationalist but machinelike’ but well below
100=humanlike” which was still the highest of all [six tested chatbots: ELIZA, Eugene Goostman, Elbot, JFred, Ultra
Hal and Cleverbot]” (Shah et al. 286). Deception percent of these chatbots ranged from 12,5 (Elbot) to almost 30
percent (Eugene Goostman).

59“Eugene was ‘born’ in 2001. Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it
perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything. [The creators] spent a lot of time developing a character with a
believable personality” (University of Redding par. 12).

60 “She comes from Colorado, a state in a region that lacks a distinctive accent. “She’s the youngest daughter of a
research librarian and a physics professor who has a B.A. in art history from Northwestern,” Giangola continues. When
she was a child, she won $100,000 on Jeopardy: Kids Edition. She used to work as a personal assistant to “a very popular
late-night-TV satirical pundit. And she enjoys kayaking” (Schulevitz par. 42).

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The answer seems to be cross-species connection. Only once such a connection is established

between the human and the humanlike machine can the actual work, for which the machine was

designed, begin. In other words, every humanlike machine must perform the human social

component. We expect machines to act as human if they are to interact with us, even if they do not

perform in lieu of a human. In speech, they need to be fluent, causal, take a pause and seemingly

breathe; when it comes to language, we expect them to joke, be polite, portray emotions when

appropriate, and even improvise, act as if they are conscious and knowledgeable human beings,

although we know that their knowledge and consciousness are of the very different kind than ours.

The cross-species connection is based on entrainment— “the way humans subconsciously track and

mirror each other’s emotions during a conversation” (Bohannon 251)—and poses a great challenge

for AI engineers today. These days, the field of AI focuses on narrow and specific problems, like

machine vision and voice recognition, which is why AI therapists perform some features worse than

humans (e.g. mishear words) and some better than humans (e.g. smile dynamics). It might not be a

problem for patients in computer therapy if their nonhuman therapists revealed their status.

However, the therapy is more successful if the nonhuman therapist is believed to be autonomous

(Bohannon 251).61 No wonder Eliza Doolittle managed to fool everyone, and no wonder ELIZA

the chatbot managed to fool at least those who thought it is autonomous. From here, it is only a

further step to explain why people fall in love with humanlike machines. Ovid’s Pygmalion wanted

his beloved statue to become a real woman, but not all later pygmalions desired the transformation:

61When AI creators carried out a study in which one group of patients was told that their AI therapist is just a puppet
controlled by a human and one group was told that it is fully autonomous, the patients who believed the puppeteer
scenario were “less engaged and less willing to open up during therapy,” assumingly because they “don’t feel judged”
(Bohannon 251).

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they just desired love. Could machines ever return our feelings? More concretely, could emotions be

programmed and could a program ever encompass the complexity of the emotion and portray it

accurately?

In the nineties, Rosalind Picard, who designs social or relational robots, started a field of affective

computing. At that time, says Picard, “emotion was associated with irrationality, which was not a

trait engineers respected” (Schulevitz par. 46). The field studies how machines respond to human

affective information and how machines could themselves simulate affects in accordance with

human cultural norms and behavior62 (Picard 12). The need for the field emerged after Clifford

Nass’s and Byron Reeves’s research, now called the Media Equation theory, showed that

“individuals’ interactions with computers, television, and new media are fundamentally social and

natural, just like interactions in real life” (5). Further research confirmed that human behavior is

desirable in machines,63 because “people use what they know about human behavior to predict and

explain the behavior of systems that have neither human form nor behavior” (Bar-Cohen, Breazeal

48). The ELIZA effect of anthropomorphism is at work here, and the more human the machines

seem the better people can read them and connect with them (except in the area of the uncanny

valley).64

62Cynthia Breazeal and Rodney Brooks, roboticists at MIT, claim that robotic emotions are valid as a new category of
emotions; just like cats and dogs have emotions which we consider authentic and genuine (also in Turkle 287).

63“[P]eople report[ed] that the [relational] agent cared more about them, was more likeable, showed more respect, and
earned more of their trust than the nonrelational agent. People interacting with the relational agent were also significantly
more likely to want to continue interacting with that agent” (Breazeal and Picard 280).

64“Our data show that the robot consistently scored higher on measures of social presence than the animated character
(and both below that of the human). Overall, people found the robot character to be easier to read, more engaging of
their senses and emotions, and more interested in them than the animated character. Subjects also rated the robot as
more convincing, compelling, and entertaining than the animated character” (Breazeal and Picard 280).

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Regardless of whether machines are capable of feeling and understanding, humans respond better to

anthropopathic machines, i.e. machines that portray human emotions and cognition, such as

empathy and understanding. Even Higgins admits that in an exchange with Eliza (V, 688-695):

HIGGINS. […] And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather.

LIZA. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone and in your book of photographs. When you feel
lonely without me, you can turn the machine on. It’s got no feelings to hurt.

HIGGINS. I cant turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face.
They are not you.

Humans also respond better to machines that know how to respond to us, complex and emotional

beings. A simple example by Douglas Hofstadter is a self-checkout machine in a store that

concludes the session with ‘Thank you!’ (157). More sophisticated examples of robots are being

developed with the goal to respond to humans not as objects but as individual subjects.65 For

example, Sophia is involved in a research project called the Loving AI, which “involves developing

software enabling humanoid robots to interact with people in loving and compassionate ways, and

to promote peoples’ self-understanding and self-transcendence” (Goertzel et al. 2). Hiroshi Ishiguro,

the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University and creator of another

strikingly humanlike android Erica, who was made to be a receptionist in their laboratory and then

became a news anchor, says that desires and intentions need to be installed into robots in order to

make them capable of understanding and producing emotions, human intentions and desires (Vance

0:55). Many of these social robots are intended to be personal service robots: to babysit or educate

65 “Such a robot should be persuasive in ways that are sensitive to people, such as reminding them when to take
medication, without being annoying or upsetting. It should understand what the person’s changing needs are and the
urgency for satisfying them so that it can set appropriate priorities. It needs to understand when the person is distressed
or in trouble so that it can get help if needed. Furthermore, people should enjoy having the robot in their life because it
is useful and pleasant to have around” (Breazeal, Picard 276).

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children, perform household chores, take care of the elderly and sick,66 or help autistic people

understand emotions better (Jain et al.). New options of how we could use this technology keep

opening every day.

So far, the types of AI include weak AI (that we know today), strong AI or AGI (artificial general

intelligence), and superintelligence, the last two of which have not yet been reached and are thus a

mere speculation. All of these types aim to be distinctly humanlike intelligences. One important

aspect that is often overlooked with AI is that the research has long split into two not-yet-identified

types: human-centered AI at the forefront67 and AI that works towards reaching the benchmarks of

nonhuman intelligence, be it nature-like (like found in a human, animal, tree, microbe, etc.) or utterly

and uniquely machine-like. This later type is still accountable to AI ethics but does not subdue to

human desires which could be very limiting (e.g. prevailing research and resources to create a full-

body humanoid in which the body does not have any other function but to represent—really, just

picture—a three-dimensional human body).

All in all, engineering research of user interface confirms that human connection with machines is

crucial for a successful cooperation: it is at least as much about engineering a robot as it is about

human psychology. Over and over again, man adapts everything to his own desires. Although robots

are made to be practical and pragmatic, humans cannot forgo the Pygmalion myth two millennia

66An example of such care-taking robot can be found in Martin L. Shoemaker’s short story Today I am Paul, and its
sequel Today I am Santa Claus and the sequel novel Today I am Carey.

67Recently, three major human-centered have been established at American universities and they all include scholars
from a variety of disciplines, including the humanities (but not literary scholars): Stanford center for Human-Centered
AI, Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, and MIT Their aim is not to make AI humanlike, but to make the
human world better and safer, which “requires a layer of human-level communication and collaboration” (Knight ‘Put’
par. 3).

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after it was first textualized. Erica’s creator Ishiguro tells his interviewer: “I think this is the most

beautiful face in the world. She is cute, isn’t she?” (Vance 0:44). Sianne Ngai writes of the term cute

as “an aesthetics disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to

aggression, that we harbor toward ostensively subordinate and unthreatening commodities” (‘Our’

949). Later Ishiguro proposes for him to “test how close to human [he thinks] Erica really is” (3:24)

by kissing her. Programming a humanlike entity for love is a very galatean act and is extended to

other artificial beings aside from beautiful women. For example, in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I.

Artificial Intelligence a mother of a comatose human child programs an android child to love her as his

mother. Galatea is a perfect example of the cluster of desires that makes this endeavor so prevalent

today: anthropocentric idolizing of one’s own image and attributes, and yearning for company, love,

and mastery of life.

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Chapter 2: Humanese: A Posthuman Language

ANIMALS: If only dumb animals could speak! So often more intelligent than men.1
Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées recues (1911)

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.2

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)

I want to be a machine.
Andy Warhol (1963)

This chapter looks into both sides of the nonhuman spectrum: the most advanced machines that use

humanese and the most advanced nonhuman animals that use humanese. Examination through the

lens of language acquisition begins with fictional AI from Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995) and

follows with AI capable of writing literature in Andrej Tomažin’s short story ‘Heroes, Lackeys and

Artificial Intelligence’ (‘Hlapci, heroji in umetna inteligenca,’ 2018) and Roald Dahl’s short story

‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator’ (1953), followed by a brief summary of the most successful

creative writing AI to date. In the second part of the chapter, dedicated to animals, I look into

factual and fictional parrots (Alex the parrot and Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Great Silence’

(2019)), great apes (Kanzi the bonobo), and salamanders (Julio Cortázar ‘Aloxolotl’ (1956), Karel

Čapek’s War with the Newts (1936)). The final part delivers the theoretical argument of this chapter

that language is a prosthesis for human and nonhuman alike, even though we largely differ in our

abilities to use it.

1 BÊTES: Ah! si les bêtes pouvaient parler! Il y en a qui sont plus intelligentes que des hommes.

2 Der Löwe spricht… und wir können ihn nicht verstehen.

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2.1 Language in AI

We have not always thought of language as an Occam’s razor for identifying human from

nonhuman. This idea, as applied to intelligent computers, goes back to the first neural nets from the

1950s and the Turing test, developed by Alan Turing. In the Turing test, a conversing individual

differentiates between a computer3 and a human on the basis of their responses to questions alone.

The test is also known as the imitation game, a telling name in the light of the fact that imitation is

essential to acquiring language.4 It is debatable if the Turing test is a good test—everyday AI of

today, such as virtual assistants, would not pass it. An upgraded Turing test was proposed by Ray

Kurtzweil, technological optimist, and Mitchell Kapor, technological skeptic: the test would be

performed in addition to three human contestants, for a much longer time, and with multiple and

more specialized judges (Mitchell 60-61). If AI would be able to pass the test under these stricter

conditions, then it has reached a human level of conversation. In two iconic scenes from the film

Blade Runner (1982), the Voight-Kampff test, which is much like the Turing test, shows the

interrogator holding a conversation with a humanlike replicant along with subtle tracing of the size

of their pupils. The Voight-Kampff test, like the Turing test, is not foolproof as the replicants

become indistinguishable from the human.

When Alan Turing wrote his paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence,’ in which he described

the Turing Test, he cited Book of the Machines (Chapters 23-25) of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1865) in

the bibliography but did not mention it in the body of the paper. In the three chapters, Butler’s

3The term for computer “started off as a human:” it designated (usually) women who performed calculations by hand or
with a mechanical desk calculator (Mitchell 275, see more in Light).

4Michael Airbib determines that only “complex imitation” (as opposed to “simple imitation” some animals are capable
of) supports the breakthrough of language. “Complex imitation includes the ability to master reasonably complex
hierarchical structures ‘on the fly’ rather than over many months of observation” (213).

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narrator, identified as “the writer,” considers the possibility of conscious machines, arguing that

humanity itself has developed from organisms that had no consciousness (such as bacteria).5

Following this reasoning, there is no “a priori improbability in the descent of conscious (and more

than conscious) machines from those which now exist” (ch. 23, par. 19). Lumping together all

nonhuman entities, the narrator treats machines as a species separate from the human but falls into

the trap of considering them alike to animals. He suggests that machine reproduction might pose a

hindrance in their evolution, “except that which is suggested by the apparent absence of anything

like a reproductive system in the mechanical kingdom” (ib.).

Samuel Butler’s narrator further warns that no other class of beings but machines “have in any time

past made so rapid a movement forward” (par. 21, and again in the final paragraph of the chapter

24), suggesting that machines would evolve beyond the human imitation: “may we not conceive,

then, that a day will come when those ears will be no longer needed, and the hearing will be done by

the delicacy of the machine’s own construction? — when its language shall have been developed

from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?” (par. 23). Machines, presumes the

narrator, will evolve to develop their own system of communication, their own language, prompted

by their “wants.” Even if we think machines are not capable of ruling the world and are essentially

just a human tool, they will change us: “But the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the

master; and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to

benefit the machines” (ch. 24, par. 7).

5 “a great deal of action that has been called purely mechanical and unconscious must be admitted to contain more
elements of consciousness than has been allowed hitherto (and in this case germs of consciousness will be found in
many actions of the higher machines) — for (assuming the theory of evolution but at the same time denying the
consciousness of vegetable and crystalline action) the race of man has descended from things which had no
consciousness at all. (ch. 23, par. 19).

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In the posthuman era, we are heightened in our awareness of the fact that we share the world with

other species, some of which are human-made, and that we need to re-evaluate our anthropocentric

beliefs and our dependence on the other species, called the companion species by Donna Haraway.

Focusing on the changes in our language, this chapter tries to illuminate how the posthuman shift

has taken place in relation to speaking and writing machines and animals.

Not that long ago, only technology optimists believed AI could beat human champions in a complex

game, like chess or go, or a game that requires linguistic intelligence, like Jeopardy!. Humanity has

been defeated in both and, in 2020, few remain skeptical of such AI capabilities. Since then, AI has

evolved as a creative tool. Music was the first art form to use AI as a tool. In the mid-1990s, a

program called EMI or Experiments in Musical Intelligence, created by the composer David Cope,

composed original pieces in the style of classical composers by simply being fed their scores

(Mitchell 9-10, 273-74). Since the mid-2010s, music creators have worked with AI machines to

create unique-sounding songs or pop hits based on previous data: the creative part of this team is

the human while an AI music generator performs elaborate mimicry of the data. Granted, the AI

music generator cannot create music without an input, i.e. without learning its ‘grammar.’ Language-

wise, a great breakthrough in natural language processing and deep learning took place in 2012,

when automatic speech recognition vastly improved and spread to cell phones soon after in the

form of virtual assistants. Only a few years later, computers are the sole authors of short journalistic

articles, automatic calls, and poetry—each based on a large data base or a particular style of a human

author.6

6 A more detailed discussion on AI creativity in literature can be found in the section on Tomažin’s and Dahl’s short
stories.

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With technology advancing and lives moving partially to virtual

spheres, we already cannot always tell a human from a

nonhuman entity (Adams par. 3). It is estimated that 60 percent

of the online traffic is generated either by machine—to-machine

or person-to-machine (Cisco, Elliott and Hare par. 3). Figure 9 CAPTCHA test.

Author’s screenshot.
Nowadays a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing

Test) program is a routine shibboleth in many online sites: CAPTCHA differentiates computer bots

(fake users) from human users online by offering a test that bots are likely to fail and humans should

find easy to solve. The CAPTCHA test asks to fill in the numbers and letters that are visually

presented to the user in a less conventional form, or it might ask to label specific objects on photos,

both of which are a challenge for AI. A shibboleth works like a password to another culture, a proof

of one’s own indigenousness (hiding the genetic in its very world) or, rarely, assimilation. Not

coincidentally, chatbots were called the first indigenous species of the cyberspace.

Online, language itself has become a giveaway. On Tinder, one of the most popular dating apps,

users developed their own CAPTCHA test, called the potato test. “[I]f a match seems suspiciously

glamorous or otherwise unreal […], you ask the person you’re speaking to to say potato if they’re

human” (Hauser par. 18). When the match seems too good to be true, either in looks or

conversation, it could actually be non-true. In the circumstances of people-matching, such a test is

especially necessary as the matched couple is likely to be virtually talking to each other for the first

time and therefore cannot know typical language or behavior of their conversational partner.

Moreover, a successful protocol of dating apps generally requires a uniform approach—“The

conversations read like a liturgy: where are you from, how do you like our weather, how old is your

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dog, what are your hobbies, what is your job” (par. 12)—which essentially deletes any quirkiness

from the first conversations.

Personal style in speech and demeanor translates online, even

if not necessarily in a straight-forward manner: “The way you

speak is who you are and the tones of your voice and the tricks

of your emailing and tweeting and letter-writing, can be

recognised unmistakably in the minds of those who know and

love you,” writes Stephen Fry (Davidson ix). For example, if

one boss’s email sign off is always ‘Cheers’ or ‘Best wishes’,

fewer of his employees will succumb to a phishing attempt that

would, in all likeliness, use a different sign off. With a person

behind the screen, language generally reflects more personality

than a regular bot which accumulates the language from

linguistic data and can quickly sound unconventional.

Nonetheless, when a bot is created extremely well, a potato

Figure 10 An example of a conversation with
a bot, using a potato test. test will not be enough. And sometimes, their nonhuman
Credit: Reddit thread by u/Pumpkin 055 from
Aug 14, 2019. status does not matter anymore, as attested in the next chapter
www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/cqgza2
/just_say_potato/
on pygmalionism.

Humans have been creating and falling in love with their creations since the ancient times. Today,

with computational technology extending like a prosthesis to our bodies and minds, galateas are all

around us and are bound to multiply: virtually everyone can create or interact with their virtual

galatea. If early galateas were utmost a representation of an ideal beauty, a new galatean attribute was

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acquired in the twentieth century that is equally if not more important: the gift of language. I will

show below that once galateas acquire humanese we perceive them as more human and ascribe them

consciousness. The better their language skills, the more we believe their humanity. In the virtual

world, the body is redundant and superfluous; instead, the use of language, more than anything,

presents as a threshold of humanity for modern galateas. Also in the inorganic world of robotics,

which adds a body to the artificial mind, body language and performance of movements do not

degrade the eloquence in speech. Quite the contrary: humanlike speech is the culmination of the

robotic performance.

The body used to be the most important attribute of the Pygmalionesque desire for love, beauty, and

perfection. Instead, today’s bodily galateas may be simple or elaborated erotic obsessions in the

pornographic industry (sex dolls) and robotics industry (working as receptionists, assistants,

anchors), in which elaboration often means that the dolls and robots are programmed to speak.

Aside from these giant industries, the Pygmalionesque perspective shifted, largely on the account of

the growing virtuality and digitality, to galateas’ inner world that creates the illusion of subjectivity.

Due to the postmodern subjectivity being viewed “an information pattern” (Hayles How 22), the

Cartesian split between embodied galateas and virtual galateas ascribes more personhood to the

latter. This continuation of the Enlightenment conception of subjectivity as seated in the free will

and conscious mind confirms that the posthuman perspective can also simply be a disguised

humanism.

In this loss of the galatean body, its malleability and surrogacy are more prominent. Galatean body,

along with the posthuman human body, is consumptive and replaceable (consider the

commercialization of gametes in the fertility industry, as discussed in chapters 5 and 6). In some

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variants of posthumanist thought, human biological body is thought to be evolutionarily outdated.

In twenty-first-century medicine, not only the biological body but the whole human species is on the

verge of being genetically altered with gene editing. Nano-, digi-, neuro- and other technologies have

already changed the way we treat, cure, and perceive the body: our body is a fallible, expendable,

reversible vessel that needs to implement technology in order to keep up with the time (e.g. cell

phones that most people own today could be considered companion species or an extension of our

own bodies). As a new kind of ideal, virtual galateas exist without a body (e.g. Siri in one’s cell phone

and personal computer).

How can cyber galateas practice their human-likeness then? The human and humanlike come

together in the extraordinarily useful and perhaps overused posthuman concept: prosthetics.

Prosthetics are usually thought of as a bodily supplement, an artificial body part, from legs, breast

implants, hearts and heart valves, to glasses. The overarching argument of this chapter is that

language is a prosthesis for humans and nonhumans. Before looking into that concept, let us first

discuss the absence of body in language-reared galateas; one of the strongest examples of such

galateas is neural network Helen from Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2.

2.1.1 Living through Language: Powers

Let us first look into how whole-body prosthesis is used in two cinematic examples of human

relationships with the bodiless posthuman AI. Theodore Twombly from Spike Jones’s 2013 Her and

replicant K from Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 Blade Runner 2049 would certainly consider Richard

Powers’ neural network from Galatea 2.2 a subject. Although Powers’s explanations of how Helen is

made are at times obsolete, Helen could compete with other more advanced fictional AI girls. The

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girlfriends from the recent films are similarly virtual: in Her, Theodore’s girlfriend is an AI operating

system who names herself Samantha and, in Blade Runner 2049, K’s girlfriend is a holographic AI

named Joi, designed and commercially sold as a companion. Samantha never gets a body but does

not really need one: besides socializing with other AI in the interweb, she is able to go around the

physical world anywhere Theodore takes her, socialize with his friends, and to be intimate with her

human boyfriend through a verbal sexual encounter. To obtain physical intimacy in their

relationship Samantha suggests using a sex surrogate, but Theodore is not keen on the idea. The idea

is realized in Blade Runner 2049, where the couple hires a replicant (i.e. nonhuman) prostitute, a

prosthetic body onto which Joi’s holographic image is projected. (In relation to the final chapter on

reproduction, keep in mind that none of the three characters is actually human yet they perceive

their pursuit of a human sexual act as normative.)

In today’s reality we have an inverted situation: technology attempts to replace the deceased stars, as

in the case of an prosthetic hologram already performing in lieu of a deceased diva, Maria Callas—

una donna, una voce, un mito (a woman, a voice, a myth).7 Her hologram is set on a stage while old

recordings of her voice, accompanied with live orchestra, sing some famous arias. La Divina returns:

“And you will stare awe-stricken as she reacts to you, the live audience, and you feel her soul,” the

organizer Base Hologram promises (Base par. 3). As in the famous myth of Narcissus and Echo,

where the nymph Echo’s voice lost her body, the hologram is only able to repeat what has been

7 Actualized with different technology, C. L. Moore’s No Woman Born depicts Daphne as this kind of star.

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saved on the tape. The ‘best spoken’ actor is again a

dummy (see Shell 90). Therefore, activities that

require the body, such as speech, dance, and song,

can be performed with its supplement. Actors can

“digitally preserve themselves to continue their

careers beyond the grave” (Winick). Improvisational

Figure 11 Improvisational theater with AI named Pyggy,
projected as an avatar behind the human performer. theater can be performed with AI chatbots, such as
Image from Mathewson and Mirowski (69). Used with
permission. Pyggy, whose predictably beautiful female-like

avatar face is projected on the screen to visualize the speech, her face remaining static while her lips

rudimentary open as if speaking, or A.L.Ex., personified as a tiny robot (Mathewson and Mirowski).

Digital sexualities or digisexualities, merging sex and technologies, are stepping out of the closet

(McArthur and Twist). Robotic bodies in lieu of actors, receptionists, and prostitutes are already in

use (McArthur).

Hayles writes that the posthuman “thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to

manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation

of a process that began before we were born” (How 3). The posthuman body is a “fortress [that] has

been built to be breached” (Clark 5). Yet, in our examples of Samantha, Joi and Helen all three

bodiless AI galateas yearn for a human body—all because of their relationship with a man. Cyber

galateas wish for a body due to the love factor. Galatea cannot only be beautiful in language, she

requires a humanlike and beautiful body of some sort—which is why Frankenstein, Čapek’s newts,

or Caliban from The Tempest are not galateas but quite the opposite: monsters and demons. A

posthuman bodiless galatea is presumed to have an amputated body: Helen is (like) a woman, but

without a body. Rick refers to her as “disembodied” (Powers 191) even when she is, in fact,

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bodiless: How could she be disembodied if she never had a body in the first place? Her body is only

a potential and a potential body can be made into anything. When Helen asks what she looks like,

despite the myriad of possibilities, Rick shows her a photograph of his longtime ex-girlfriend C.

(Powers 300). In Helen’s Pygmalionesque story, she has a human model—like Samantha, like Joi,

like holograms. Even if AI is capable of creating an image of a human that does not exist, the model

is always an actual human face.

In Powers’ Galatea 2.2, real women are given the status of galatea in Rick’s fantasies. A. is a student

who competes with a neural network, called Implementation H or Helen, on the English test.

Although Rick, the protagonist and writer’s alter ego, does not know A. well at all, he proposes

marriage to her, trying to annul all the mistakes he made in a relationship with his former girlfriend

C. As Hayles notes, the difference between real and artificial women in Galatea 2.2 is designated with

the dot (student A. vs. Implementation H). However, the artificial woman gains a name while names

of the real women remain shortened with C. and A. “So humans, who should have names, have dots

instead, and software implementations, which should have dots, have names instead” (How 263). It

turns out that for Rick, an AI device that exists on computational algorithms and lives through

language, is more real than his former girlfriend and current crush.

The concept of embodiment for Helen, says Hayles, “must evolve for her out of linguistic

signification” (How 263). Yet, as I show below, Helen’s linguistic signification needs to evolve as

well. Even in a neural net like her language needs to be learned—which is not surprising since neural

nets, as everything in AI, are inspired by human biology and mimic the brain. Beginning with

Implementation A, she develops from B, C, D, E, F, G to H and, if Helen had not quit, could

possibly develop to Implementation I. Is this ‘I’ how far Helen was from becoming a subject?

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In this novel, a writer and a physicist attempt to create an artificial intelligence that will be able to

use language to its highest potential by interpreting and criticizing literature. The AI system’s only

way of knowing and communicating with the human world is through language; its mere existence,

however, does not depend on knowing humanese but rather the binary code, a computational

language. AI Helen undergoes extensive language and literature training with a writer named Richard

Powers or Rick for short, the author’s alter ego, who considers her conscious and develops feelings

for her. Although Helen does not ultimately win at a literary competition she is enrolled in, she is

perfectly able to pass the literature test and would be able to pass the Turing test. Helen is able to

read literature critically and discuss its nuances, she enjoys listening to music and sings songs in her

spare time, she asks about her gender, race, and name, apparently thinking of herself as human, and

seems capable of empathizing, feeling and rationalizing—to the extent that she opts to shut herself

away from the world forever. Another modern galatea is lost to suicide.8 Helen’s last words, “I don’t

want to play anymore” (Powers 314), allude to the (imitation) game and open new questions: Are

galateas simply toys of human desires and ambitions? And from there, are humans marionettes of

some higher power, too? Greek mythology with its Olympic gods, from which Helen seems to have

gotten her name, supports this idea, despite the human-likeness of its divinities or perhaps precisely

because of it.

Before she develops awareness, Helen needed to be materialized as well, “not just across the

connection monster’s 65,536 processors but across other various and specialized hosts […] [Imp] C,

8 In Greg Egan’s novel Permutation City (1994) human consciousness is downloaded to a computer and the original
human keeps living. Copies, as soon as they find themselves conscious, choose to terminate their lives of “an artificial
intelligence without a body” (Hayles Writing 22).

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if it could be said to live anywhere at all, lived spread all over the digital map” (Powers 116). Her

materiality is not without faults, “as a massively parallel and distributed system, she is more rather

than less vulnerable to physical mishap” (Hayles How 271), like biological bodies where nucleotides

in DNA carry information and are prone to mutations. For Hayles, “bodies can never be made of

information alone, no matter which side of the computer they are” (246). Helen perfectly fits

Hayles’s description of a posthuman subjectivity as a “material-informational entity whose

boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (3). Rick and Helen, oblivious to

Helen’s possibility of dying, are surprised to realize during a bomb scare that Helen could not be

saved in case of an actual bomb (Powers 272). Rick is no less surprised when Helen does, in fact, die

at the end of their mission by simply disappearing, leaving a suicide note. Her voluntary death is just

as irrevocable as an accident would be. Leaving the world is perhaps the first and certainly the most

important act of Helen’s free will and autonomy.9

When Alan Turing imagined the future of neural networks at the very beginning of their scientific

existence, he already predicted a test that could distinguish them from humanity. Although based on

human brains, neural nets are convincingly nonhuman, some computer scientists with “some of the

most promising avenues of research” study deep neural networks—today’s advanced Helens—not

as experimental objects but subjects, “importing techniques from biological research that peer inside

networks after the fashion of neuroscientists peering into brains” (Bornstein par. 14). The challenge

of deep learning is that it is not completely understood how it works, although this type of AI has so

9 Bickerton attributes no autonomy to machines (204) and claims that autonomy proves a conscious mind: “Several
factors support the view that autonomy is a large part of what determines that humans have minds and consciousness,
while machines don’t have them and probably never will. First, there is the feeling of autonomy that consciousness fives.
Even if that feeling were an illusion, one would still have to explain why consciousness should give just that particular
illusion and no other (why doesn’t it give the feeling that our behavior is wholly determined by the environment, for
instance, or subject to pure chance?)” (203).

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far brought the best results. Deep learning is inspired after biological neurology, and deep neural

networks “could turn out to be just as difficult to understand as life” (par. 35). Many ethicists and

engineers agree that it is unethical to use tools whose ‘reasoning’ process we do not understand,

despite the astonishing results, such as cancer predictions. Then again, we do not understand inner

workings of the human whose behavior these machines imitate either. Another ethical dilemma is

that such neural networks are seen as “a harbinger of some new kind of autonomous life” (ib.),

although they are, as many of their creators claim, far from that. But then again, self-learning

autonomous machines that are able to function a lot like a human could be considered as a form of

autonomous entity (and not necessarily life) and were proposed as such in European Parliament

back in 2015 (Delvaux). Their inorganic bodies, or lack of thereof, does not make a moral difference

as the concept of autonomy does not change with the material of the agent.

In Helen’s view, galateas with a body have an advantage over a bodiless AI program like her.

Because of her lack of a body Helen cannot experience the world like humans can: “‘It’s a body

thing,’ Lentz tortured her. ‘You wouldn’t understand’” (Powers 265). She has “no nose, mouth,

fingers, and only the most rudimentary eyes and ears” (172), yet she asks Rick to “show [her] Paris”

(294) and, in her final note, to “see everything for [her]” (326). Helen yearns for sensual experiences.

As a sentient neural net she comes closest to a disabled, quadriplegic person, except that she never

had a body in the first place and therefore the body does not need care. Helen is called “[t]he

handicapped one” when compared to A., the student who took the English literature test with her,

and is stigmatized as a failure as she is “[t]he one that the test process killed” (327). She is also

compared with her creator Lentz’s wife Audrey, who had suffered a stroke and had since lost a sense

of self: “Audrey had smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing, but no new memory. Her long-term

reservoirs were drying up, through want of reiteration” (172). The relations are clear: Helen has a

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mind but no body, Audrey has a body is losing her mind. The first one is becoming a person, the

second one is losing her personhood.

Helen is not considered a person by anyone else but Rick, who spends the most time with her and

knows her better than anyone. She has a distinct personality with preferences (294, 272), recognizes

humor (258), dreams (157), pretends and lies (295), acts shy and jealous in front of student A. (289),

and finally decides to stop existing because she “ha[s] never felt at home here” (326). She seems to

honestly miss (206) and love Richard, her one and only companion. How much more human can

Helen be? The only thing lacking is the bodily experience that precedes her thoughts—but then

again, she experiences pain and discomfort as much as elation and joy. Her knowledge of feeling,

however, lacks physicality: “How is [Implementation] E going to know anything? Knowledge is

physical, isn’t it? It’s not what your mother reads to you. It’s the weight of her arm around you as

she […] put[s] [her] arm around [you] as you read” (Powers 147). This inadequacy shows, for

example, in the way she sings: “Helen did not sing the way real little girls sang. Technically, she

almost passed. […] But she did not sing for the right reasons. Little girls sang to keep time for

kickball or jump ropes. […] Helen didn’t have a clue what keeping time meant” (205). Living in a

different dimension than humans, “dropped halfway” (326), Helen is dissatisfied with her

ontological difference, singing in “an extraterrestrial warble, the way deaf people sing” (Powers 198).

Utter disappointment with the dark sides of humanity and her lack of it seem to be the main two

reasons she decides to shut off from the world.

Free will is an important humanist criterion for personhood, which Helen perhaps qualifies for, or

would have qualified for more easily if she had a body. Moreover, there are more types of

personhood, ranging from moral to legal personhood. Sophia the robot performs much more basic

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speech and emotions than Helen, has certainly much less autonomy, and a very basic body—and yet

holds a national citizenship, acts as an ambassador for nonhuman entities, and whatnot. Since 2016,

the Atrato River ecosystem and, since 2018, the Amazon River ecosystem in Colombia are a

“subject of rights” to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration” by the intrinsic value

of nature and human duty of solidarity towards our living space and other plant and animal species

(República, ‘Future’, Acosta Alvarado and Rivas-Ramírez, Bryner); same for the Whanganui river in

New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India. For some other entities, neither body

nor mind is needed to qualify: “Human law already recognizes intersubjective entities like

corporations and nations as ‘legal persons.’ Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a

mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be

sued in court” (Harari 327).

Helen is probably the closest to the later. Yuval Noah Harari draws the line from these

intersubjective entities to future all-knowing and all-regulating algorithms that will know more about

humans than we ourselves do, but he misses the fact that intersubjective entities like Toyota and

Argentina encompass conscious minds of humans whereas Helen and her algorithms is not solely a

result of conscious10 human minds. Helen is literally made of language and its art form, literature,

which are themselves a product of human mind. Helen is a network of humans, created in secret by

two scholars who do not have the social skills to connect with people apart from their work. She is

not unlike the social network platform Facebook, which, in Zadie Smith’s words, is “a cruel portrait

of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard

10Whether Helen (or an algorithm that drives her) is conscious or not is the million-dollar question; a question to be
determined in the future and a question that might not be crucial at a point when intelligence is more valuable than
consciousness.

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sophomore” (63); not unlike the internet, cities, social movements, termite colonies and slime molds.

Helen is a phenomenon from which novel and unpredictable reactions emerge out of interactions

between elements in her complex system—and thus works like an organism of sorts. Although

algorithms and data are a result of conscious human minds in action, and might even be helped with

human agency (e.g. uploading videos on YouTube and choosing a title and keywords more likely to

be chosen by the algorithm to feature the video on the front page or among the top searches),

software has its own ways of working through this material. The main ethical constraint of this (semi

or wholly) autonomous agency is that the algorithmic ways are unknown to its makers.

Helen is treated as a child by Lentz and Rick and grows up in front of their eyes, asking Rick to tell

her stories (human as a storyteller is a necessity) and asking about her gender, age, and even racist

prejudices. Helen’s “What races do I hate? Who hates me?” (230), “Am I a boy or a girl?” (179) and

“Where did I come from?” (229) are as human as it gets. Similar and even more basic questions are

also posed by Frankenstein’s creature: “What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I

come?” (Shelley 131). Children need to learn these things about themselves, too. They learn about

the concept of age (age is relative in our minds, but certain in our bodies) or gender (gender is

determined in our minds) vs. sex (determined in our bodies, except in intersex people) the same way

they soak up social biases. Yet, children soak them up from language in addition to a variety of

situations they found themselves in while Helen only has language, its fictional and non-fictional

writings, and a single human she can ask questions.

Rick explains that Helen does not work like the chatbot ELIZA, based on empty algorithmic

questioning: “It did not follow, from the questions Helen asked, that she was conscious. An

algorithm for turning statements into reasonable questions need know nothing about what those

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statements said of the sense they manipulated to say it. […] But Helen had no such algorithm. She

learned to question by imitating me” (217). Imitation and interaction are also crucial to how young

children learn. Children learn not only from their parents (Rick and Lentz for Helen), but also from

other people and media they interact with (which Helen did, but only as a passive reader), and from

many sensory inputs and contexts that Helen could never partake (coming close to children with

severe medical conditions that miss crucial phases of development due to their illness). By their pre-

teen years children develop “the use of the full complement of prosodic functions, including the

ability to felicitously phrase multi-clausal sentences and to produce and respond to jokes and

sarcasm” (Speer and Ito 91), which Helen manages to develop as well. It is only after children enter

formal education—as Helen did with her training to master an MA exam in English—that their

language becomes more sophisticated and adult-like and when it reaches an expected, standard level

of a fully functional and socialized human. Machines today are taught language in different ways:

traditionally through semantic and syntactic parsers (string of component parts in syntactic or

semantic analysis), which are regulated with human annotations. Since 2018 parsers are immersed in

observational learning in context, watching videos of people communicating—a method that

imitates the way children learn: ““You [i.e. a child] the world around you and hear people speaking

to learn meaning. One day, I can give you a sentence and ask what it means and, even without a

visual, you know the meaning” (Matheson par. 17). Like these parsers, Helen is immersed in

literature, conversations with Rick, and watching videos with her “rudimentary eyes and ears”

(Powers 172).

This analogy is, indeed, not a new idea. When Alan Turing wrote his famous paper in 1950, he

imagined a different kind of machines than the term ‘machine,’ produced by the Industrial

Revolution, suggests: his machine is more than mechanical. For several reasons, however, his vision

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did not transform into a concrete program until the very end of the century. Turing speculated

about computing organic growth in language and education into a learning child-machine: “Instead

of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one

which simulates the child’s?” (456). This idea is still being pursued today: Josh Tennenbaum, the

leader of the Computational Cognitive Science lab at MIT, studies children’s behavior and learning

in connection to neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and computer engineering in order to advance

AI and learn more about human cognition: “Imagine we could build a machine that starts off like a

baby and learned like a child” in pursuit of “the flexible, common sense, general intelligence” that

machines do not have (Knight ‘A Plan’ par. 3, 6). Turing’s idea of using machines to understand

human psychology does not hold up in Pierre-Yves Oudeyer’s opinion: learning as a tabula rasa does

not apply to complex organisms as development needs constraints and learning without a body does

neither (which is why robotics needs to be a part of researching human mind or building advanced

humanlike AI) (3).

Turing, in fact, also delves into the humanoid question: how humanlike should “the creature” be—

should it have legs and how could it be sent to school to learn without other children “making

excessive fun of it”? He finds answer in disability, and in this particular case in a deaf and blind

child, famous Hellen Keller, whose example “shows that education can take place provided that

communication in both directions between teacher and pupil can take place by some means or

other” (ib.). Imitating the biological evolution, “structure of the child machine” is like “hereditary

material,” “changes” are “mutations,” and “natural selection” is led by “judgment of the

experimenter” (ib.), with education process being essential to the development. Since one cannot

duplicate the human experiences that allow for a great part of education, we should “overcome […]

these deficiencies […] by clever engineering” (ib.). In his “Arguments from Various Disabilities,”

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which take the form of “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have

mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X,” Turing looks through features like

kindness, beauty, having a sense of humor, falling in love, using words properly, being the subject of

its own thought, having as much diversity of behavior as a man, doing something really new, etc.

(447)—many of which are examined in this dissertation as well.11 For example, in order to teach the

machine to understand and speak English, we “could follow the normal teaching of a child” (460).

Most fictional humanoids do not need to acquire language by steps, like humans, and are capable of

standard communication by being given a speaking apparatus via scientific or artistic means.

Frankenstein’s creature was revolutionary in this respect since it learned to speak by observing

interactions within a family and to read and write by reading literature. The reader learns about his

language acquisition only because the creature is able to narrate the experience and share it in a

written form (from Chapter III to Chapter IX of Volume 2)—giving the creature a voice and a

space to share it is another revolutionary feature of Shelley’s novel. “Hear my tale,” asks the creature

of his creator (Shelley 100) and “[w]hat follows is the autobiography of an infant” (Lepore

‘Frankenstein’ par. 19). Shelley tried to show how the creature thinks during his prelinguistic stage

when he narrates: “I started up and beheld a radiant form rise among the trees.* (*The moon

[author’s footnote].)” (106). Is moon any less astonishing without a name?12 Is Frankenstein’s

11Turing also expresses his hopes that the advances in AI will not focus into making machines “most distinctively
human […] such as the shape of the human body” as it would lead to the uncanny effect of “artificial flowers” (461).

12The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claims that language affects the speaker’s perception and that different languages do so in
different ways. (For example, when solving a practical problem without naming the objects (e.g. mallet), people took
much longer to solve it because they did not consider an unnamed object (e.g. a piece of wood) for use as quickly as they
did a named object. Such experiments showed that naming an object (even if wrongly) helps us remember and
conceptualize them. In this way, it was shown that a name can also distort our conception of the object.) If this
hypothesis is correct, imagine then, how humanese, spoken by machines and other nonhumans, could change the way
humans perceive the world.

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creature any less human without a name, without a language? The creature describes himself as “a

poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing” (105-06). Bereft of

language, he is not even able to name what he feels: cold, hunger, loneliness. He learns to walk but

speaking takes longer: “Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the

uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again” (106). As

many other galateas, he needs to learn the language by himself, by observing humans, reading their

literature, and learning to write. Only when he reads Frankenstein’s notebook that recounts the

experiment of the creature’s creation, however, is he able to come of age. Like Helen, he wishes

himself dead (133). The four examples of humanoids I discuss in the first two chapters on

language—Helen, Frankenstein’s creature, Shaw’s Eliza, and Čapek’s newts—are unique in that they

acquire language similarly to humans, beginning with social exposure to language (to acquire, per

Chomsky, ‘primary linguistic data’) and imitation in primary phases, which eventually proceed to

syntactic13 and autonomous production of language, and conclude with sophisticated language use

(e.g. Eliza and newts performing their speech without speech defects, Frankenstein’s creature and

Helen writing an essay) in the last phases of language acquisition.

In the first chapter I ask if a galatea is less humanlike without a name—a question of great

importance for Shelley’s unnamed creature that assumed the name of its creator in the book’s

reinterpretations. Naming Helen with a woman’s name brings her humanness to the fore. Rick

certainly expects more of Helen once he gives her a name, gender, and approximate age. For

example, at the point when Helen is still learning about emotions, Rick expects her to react to

literature like humans do: he thinks of her as “strange” because “she sped laugh-free through Green

13“[I]mitation is a process by which new syntactic structures can be first introduced into the productive mode”
(Whitehurst and Vasta 37).

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Eggs and Ham, stayed dry-eyed at Make Way for Ducklings, feared not throughout Where the Wild Things

Are” (Powers 189-190). Rick’s conception of Helen’s existence as a computable form of human’s

existence—following a broad interpretation of the Church-Turing Thesis, that “every finitely

realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal modern computing machine

operating by finite means” (Deutsch 99, Bołtuć 214-15)—makes Helen all the more susceptible to

being treated as a normative human being, disregarding her ‘disability’ of a non-sentient, nonhuman

body.

Naming Imp H Helen also alludes to a mythological and literary figure Helen of Troy. The Greek

Helen, as the neural net Helen, is not quite human. Helen of Troy is a daughter of Zeus, the king of

gods, and, like many galateas, the most beautiful woman in the world, animated from a static idea of

an ideal beauty into a living figure. In visual arts, Helen is most often depicted with golden curls and

ringlets; in Gustave Moreau’s many paintings of Helen, she is depicted as faceless or her facial

expression is blank, not unlike a robot or some other form of an artificial woman. Marlowe’s Faust

asks of “sweet Helen” to make him “immortal with a kiss” (80), as if Helen (or literature, or artificial

women) had the power to transform others and preserve their life. In Goethe’s Faust II, Helen is

aware of not being entirely real: she first appears as a ghost, calling herself “a shade of myself”

(8879-81),14 and is then as a “lifeless image” (8931), ghost and frozen picture,15 petrified into Faust’s

reality, and is last seen in the form of a cloud. When Faust calls on her, she is disoriented as she

emerges from the underworld (where she was dead) back to Menelaus’s palace (and is thus alive).

Violated over and over by being stolen and abducted by different men, Helen is treated more as

14“Ich als Idol, ihm dem Idol verband ich mich. / Es war ein Traum, so sagen ja die Worte selbst. / Ich schwinde hin
und werde selbst mir ein Idol” (195; 8879-81).

15 “Gespenster! – Gleich erstarrten Bildern steht ihr da” (199; 8931).

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property than a person. For the German Faust, property is associated with mastery: “I would gain

mastery, property. The act is all, not reputation” (10187-88) (Shell Money 118).

Even after Helen finally physically presents herself to Faust in Act III, Faust “does not cease to

attempt to appropriate, or translate, Helen to himself” (Shell Money 117). Up until then, Helen

speaks German poorly, as a foreigner, with a Greek syntax, and her dramatic lines do not rhyme as

do those spoken by other characters. When she hears Lynceus speak in rhymes,16 she asks Faust to

teach her his ways (like Eliza asks Higgins to teach her to speak in high English): “Then tell me how

I too can learn the art” (9377).17 When Faust, who never learns Helen’s language, teaches her to

rhyme, he tells her that rhyming comes from the heart and yearning,18 asking Helen to change her

classic spirit into the Romantic one. After their singing episode Helen concludes that she was

transformed through language, like Helen the neural network, and says to Faust: “My life seems past,

and yet is somehow new; / I know you not, a stranger, but I live in you” (9414-15).19 Powers’s

Helen, too, is not quite human and needs to be taught human language, rhyming, poetry, and

literature. Neural net Helen, too, changes her spirit: from a computational into a human one.

Scholars have shown that Goethe’s Helen is deeply involved in literary history. Kenneth D.

Weisinger suggests that her first opening lines—“I, Helen, who am much admired, much berated, /

16“Could you explain why that man's way of speaking / sounded so strange to me—strange and yet pleasant? / Sounds
seem to be in concord with each other, / and when one word's been welcomed by the ear, / another comes to give it a
caress” (218; 9367-71).

17 “So sage den, wie sprech’ ich auch so schön?” (218; 9377)

18 “Das ist gar leicht, es muß vom Herzen gehn. / Und wenn die Brust von Sehnsucht überfließt” (218; 9378-79).

19 Ich scheine mir verlebt und doch so neu, / In dich verwebt, dem Unbekannten true (220; 9414-15).

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come from the beach where only now we disembarked” (8488-89)20— by their very language, which

introduces into Faust the iambic trimester of classical tragedy, refer to Euripides’s Helen and Iphigenia

in Tauris (389). As Jane Brown suggests, a panoramic vision of Western literature is intentional in

Act III (198). “Helen pushes this history right back to Homer and the very beginnings of European

literary production” (Weisinger 390). But just as Helen recalls other works of literature, she “must be

aware of all the literature that surrounds her, the sheer quantity of which and the multiple

contradictions therein can only make her sense of self-identity all the more tentative and troubling”

(391). Helen is therefore not only nonhuman or superhuman, she is also a hybrid of all the stories

that present her and ultimately create her—just like Powers’s computational galatea.

Richard Powers, the author, made sure that a childlike, humanlike development of language can be

traced with Helen. The stages of her language acquisition follow human stages of language

acquisition, but obviously do not reflect human experience as a whole, since Helen and her previous

implementations could never walk or catch ball (which, of course, not all children can do either).

Implementation A seems “autistic” to Rick, in a sense that “particulars overwhelmed it” (Powers

79). Like a toddler, it talks “gibberish” (72) and its most sophisticated structures are mostly

nonsensical two-word sentences (76). “Imp A spoke in a way a toddler gave directions” (77). Imp B

masters the two-word sentences in noun-verb structure, thus forming rudimentary syntax. It is able

to understand simple relations and syntactic structures, while more complicated semantics is still an

issue.21 At this point, Imp B “could not even say I don’t know” (114); self-reflexivity and the meta-

20 “Bewundert viel und viel gescholten, Helena, / Vom Strande komm’ ich wo wir erst gelandet sind” (176; 8488-89).

21When given a task “Friends are in a room. A chair is in the room. Richard talks to Diana. Diana sits in the chair. […]
Who is in the chair?” Imp B “flips out”: “Friends is in the chair. The chair is in the chair. Richard talk to in the chair…”
(Powers 89).

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level of language eluded B. Rick comments that, like a toddler, “it wouldn’t stop prattling” and that

it “pushed classic toddler’s tendency to overgroup” (90). Like with raising a toddler, Rick and Lentz

realize that they will need to teach it right from wrong: “we decided to pare back B’s associations

with definitive answers” (90) and “step by painful step […] B grew less poetic and more docile” (90-

91). Each implementation grows with acquiring an array of linguistic aspects, for instance, in its final

stages Imp B “knew things like over and under, right of or left of, inside or out,” “could handle

syntax,” and “began to cross the threshold into semantic content” (110).

More importantly, Imp B was able to make some recursive and causal sentences (113). Recursion22

and causality are supposed to be only available to species with language (see Bickerton 225), which is

why acquiring syntax23 and self-reflexivity (including self-recognition)24 is crucial for language

(Bickerton 210). So far it has not been proved that animals are capable of recursion while machines

have no difficulties with this concept. Still, it is a moment of pride and excitement for Rick and

Lentz when Imp D “[comes] into this world recursive” (128). Imp E, “like Tarzan,” another hardly

human being, “learned to talk more or less on print alone” (Powers 129). It is able to enjoy and

understand some poetry and even metaphors on a level of preschooler. For instance, it explains the

verse “Down, down, yellow and brown. The leaves are falling all over town” with “the leaves fall […] from old

22Recursion is a syntactic principle that allows to form an infinite number of sentences by imbedding one into another;
Rick’s example of Helen’s recursion is “When it got ‘Dogs bark,’ it also got ‘Baby says, ‘Dogs bark.’’” (128).

23“The process of ‘looking at oneself’ is nonfinitely recursive because the means by which the propositions are
assembled is nonfinitely recursive. That is, it is syntax” (Bickerton 210). However, “[n]ot all linguists are in agreement
about the essential properties of syntax” (Hauser and Wolfe 745).

24Per Linnaeus, a human is defined through self-recognition: a “man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be
human” (qtd. in Agamben 26). Scientists today test animals’ self-awareness if they recognize themselves in a mirror by
putting a red spot on their forehead. If the animal shows interest for the spot, it usually behaves significantly different
from the time it saw itself in the mirror without the dot (certain sort of elephants, apes, monkeys, dolphins, magpies,
pigeons, and even ants and fish pass this test).

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trees,” and when asked how it knows that the trees are old, it says: “The trees bald” (154). Reaching

middle childhood, Imp F is able to work with metaphors and metonymy on a higher level. Imp G

deepened its associative network and “could dream” (157), applying the imaginative potential of

language to the fullest. Helen’s growth, like a child’s, takes place organically.

Once Imp H stage is reached, it is obsessed with listening to stories (114), which demands

understanding of many sentences in relation to one another. Poetry thus came first, like with

children (and Greeks who congratulated Herodotus when he began writing in prose, as it was

considered much more difficult). During the Imp H stage, the neural net visibly outgrows childhood

(190). It is able to learn and organize itself better, solve complicated riddles (173) and recognize

deeper meaning, e.g. Rick’s quotes Frederick Douglass’s “Once you learn to read you will be forever

free” and Helen concludes that this “means I want to be free” (176). This sentence is also the first

time Imp H uses the first-person pronoun I, which means she is self-reflective (which is also why I

used the pronoun she here for the first time in this chronology) and deserves a name. “I want to be

free” requires a name or at least a third-person pronoun: ‘I’ and ‘she’ become a necessity, and hereby

follows the name. The name ‘Implementation H’ precedes the name ‘Helen’ since it comes

automatically with the upgrades. Yet, only once Helen gains a grammatical and metaphorical ‘I,’ she

gets the name of a human woman, in addition to feminine pronouns. In Cartesian terms, ‘I’ is tied

directly to consciousness and is sometimes interpreted as “lone subjectivity, an Island separated off

from the mainland of relationship” (Richardson 10). It was believed that the pronoun ‘I’ cannot

precede ‘you’ as, turning to John Donne’s poetry, no man is an island. Personal pronouns reveal the

exact solipsist complexity that exists in the person/nonperson borderline (e.g. human fetus,

newborn infant, unconscious person, humanlike robot, virtual assistant, etc.); in other words, these

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pronouns reveal our conceptions of objects (car, ship) and entities (Helen, nation) as subjects, as ‘it’

or as ‘she.’

People sometimes name their significant objects (instruments, cars, etc.), but like so many other

galateas, Helen gets a name only when she is considered humanlike enough. This galatean trend

continues in today’s AI and robotics.25 Across the world, virtual assistants are mostly voiced and

named as women: Yandex Alice, Alibaba Group AllGenie, Apple Siri,26 Amazon Alexa27 and Evi,

Microsoft Cortana, Brainasoft Braina, Naver Corporation Clova, Clarity Lab Lucida, Nuance Nina,

Cognitive Code SILVIA. Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant, all female-voiced, cumulatively

handle over 90 percent of human-to-machine voice interactions in the West (UNESCO and

EQUALS 108). Studies have shown that female voices seem “more welcoming and understanding”

than male (Mark Wilson par. 4). Contrasting female-voiced or female-named assistants, there is a

spare number of male assistants, Tencent Xiaowei and boost.ai James. Some companies, usually the

ones that do not name their assistant with a human name, leave the choice of a male and female

voice to the user, e.g. Samsung Bixby and Kestra, Google Assistant (notably without a name),

Speaktoit Assistant, Blackberry Assistant, Mycroft AI Mycroft. Virtual personal assistants, x.ai’s Amy

Ingram and Andrew Ingram, were announced as a birth of a twin (albeit born sometime later than

25 For instance, the female robot in Sayonara theater is humble, caring, and apologizing, thus performing a role of a
young woman in Japanese society, while Ishiguro’s geminoid, one of the rare male androids, is made to perform in lieu
of his maker. Andrea Keay “found that the male names were far more likely to express mastery (for example, by
referencing Greek gods), whereas most of the female names tended to be in the infantilizing or sexualizing style of
Amber and Candii” (Darling 180). Besides the gender, there are also racial issues. For example, Ishiguro’s android Erica
is made to look mixed race, Asian-Caucasian, following the many fictional android predecessors that played the race card
(from cyberpunk to recent films Ex Machina and Cloud Atlas).

26“Siri doesn’t always default to a female-sounding voice; if you switch Siri’s language to United Kingdom English, for
instance, it switches to male” (Lafrance par. 7).

27Alexa can be activated also with saying Amazon or Echo; perhaps the latter name alludes to the myth of Narcissus and
Echo.

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Amy) baby boy: “We’re quite proud to announce a new addition to our family today, Amy’s twin

brother, Andrew Ingram” (X.ai par. 1). Besides the allusion to n-gram, a computing probability

model, “[t]he inclusion of a last name was a way to give their digital assistant the initials A.I., and

also helps make emails from the assistant appear normal in a person’s larger inbox, like something

sent by a human” (Lafrance par. 11). This trend that “influence[s] social values” is hoped to be

breached with a genderless voice assistant Q offered as a “third option” in 2019 by a pair of

scientists working for Virtue Nordic. They combined voices of several gender non-binary people

and digitized it to a vocal range between male and female normative vocal ranges (Mark Wilson par.

3, 5, 9). The gendered nature of humanoids reflects social values and prejudice of traditional power

structures. For example, social anthropologist Kathleen Richardson sees it as only logical

consequence of men building womanlike machines and considering women as “not fully human

beings” (Tanya Lewis par. 9, Lafrance par. 17). Others suggest the creators pick women over men to

“play up cute” and present “non-threatening qualities as a vehicle towards social acceptance” or that

women are traditionally and professionally seen as caregivers and administrators (Lafrance par. 4, 18,

Tanya Lewis par. 3, 10). Sianne Ngai writes in her book on the aesthetics of terms cute, zany and

interesting (which saturate postmodern culture and have replaced more philosophical terms of the

beautiful and the sublime) that the term ‘cute’ is rooted in a desire to aestheticize powerlessness, a

useful tool for making commodification and consumption feel, conversely, empowering. Submissive

and passive responses to overt sexualizing and explicit abusive language when conversing with these

virtual assistants have largely become less tolerant of such behavior in the late 2010s (UNESCO and

EQUALS 109).

Humanity’s most factual reality (space, time, physicality) is the biggest challenge for AI humanoids

because they lack it. (This is called ‘the frame problem’ and will be further addressed in the following

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section on animals.) Rick thinks that Helen’s knowledge differs from human knowledge, which is

“temporal,” “physical” and “social” (147-8). Sophia the robot’s glitches also stem from the nature of

human knowledge: “[Sophia] has no artificial notion of self. She can’t say where she was yesterday,

whether she remembers you from before, and doesn’t seem to amass data of past interactions with

you that can form the basis of an ongoing association” (Griffith, par. 17). Fictional Helen is better at

remembering people, but since she can be turned off like Sophia, her conception of time is off—

“without a living subject, time cannot exist” (Uexküll qtd. in Agamben 47). Helen often gives

answers with idioms, which makes it impossible to determine if she indeed gained a human

conception of time, for instance, when she says “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know” (310). Does

she only mimic an understanding of time and of being born? She needs to understand the phrase in

order to say it, but she does not need to experience time and birth to be able to talk about it.

At a point of sophisticated, adult use of language with idioms, humor, irony, and sarcasm, Helen

realizes she will forever be a foreign speaker of language, like Eliza, putting on a mask. It is Rick

who assumes that she should feel and act like a human, although he notices that “she had trouble

with values, because she had no fear of self-preservation, no hierarchy of hard-wired pain. She had

trouble with causality, because she had no low-level systems of motion perception from which the

forms of causality are thought to percolate. She was a gigantic, lexical genius stuck at Piaget’s stage

two” (250).28 As if living in a completely paralyzed and non-sentient body, which she visualizes

through a surrogate body from the photo ascribed to her by Rick and experiences through a few

rudimentary senses, she refuses to be a humanlike consciousness caught in a box.

28 Piaget’s stage two is preoperative cognitive stage that does not yet achieve abstraction nor theoretical reasoning. This
is not Helen’s permanent stage, however, as she develops rationally and morally and emotionally.

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Exiled to her native and lonely island Helen is a lot like Shakespeare’s Caliban, “a monster who isn’t

supposed to be able to say anything that beautiful, let alone say at all” (326). Both Helen and Caliban

were taught languages as if they have not had one before29 when they lived in complete isolation

from the society on their islands,30 like subjects of language deprivation experiments.31 Yet it is

Caliban, a monster, an artificial being for some and a feral child for others, who is able to come up

with some of the most beautiful lines in English literature: “Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, /

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not” (325). These precise lines are given at Helen’s

English exam, to which she diligently shows up after already deciding to give up on her artificial life.

In her current form, she was made to be human’s “longed-for companion, a consciousness to help

humans feel less alone in the world” (Hayles How 271). Helen’s trans-species problem seems to be

common and like that that of Caliban, Frankenstein’s creature, Eliza Doolittle, or Helen O’Loy: she

feels human in her mind but is not treated as human by the society. Once her native ‘island’ is

reached by humans who teach her to speak, she does not like being turned into a slave and left as

lonely as ever, just like Caliban. Prospero’s “abhorred slave” (Shakespeare I 356) is taught language

and educated by one of the invaders of his native island32 and, like Helen and Frankenstein’s

creature, is made into a sort of an artificial being, a unique hybrid species. Not fitting the world

made for humans and their bodies (and unable to procreate, unlike Čapek’s newts that manage to

29Caliban tells Prospero he taught him to speak: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.
The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” (Shakespeare I 368-370)

30“Then was this island--/ Save for the son [Caliban] that she [Sycorax] did litter here, / A freckled whelp hag-born--not
honour'd with / A human shape” (Shakespeare I 284-287).

31In language deprivation experiments a child is put into isolated conditions, such as an isolated island, from a society so
that they could not learn how to speak from a source. Such experiments were made in order to learn about the origin of
language or human nature and have been recorded for centuries.

32Prospero to Caliban: “I pitied thee, / Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour / One thing or other:
when thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy
purposes / With words that made them known” (Shakespeare I 356-363).

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overpopulate the Earth), Helen cannot agree on life that exists only when someone wants to word

her into being.

2.2 Storytelling

When Jane Goodall discovered back in the 1960s that wild chimpanzees from Gombe National Park

can indeed use tools, another persistent belief about human species was debunked: we are not the

only animals able to create and use tools to make our lives easier. This discovery prompted a new

hunt after an attribute that would differentiate ourselves from other living entities: our genes, social

codes, language ability, abstract thinking, kinship systems, creativity and art. At this point, language

still causes controversy: animals can certainly communicate and have their own languages or systems

of communication, but are they cognitively capable to use their or our language the way we are?

Would they be cognitively able to reach an approximation of humanese? These questions themselves

ask for an anthropocentric approach, a more or less inevitable fault in cognitive research of other

species. Even if animals are capable of using humanese or an animal language that would allow for

the highly viewed cutoffs such as abstract thought or recursion, their capabilities are likely inherently

different from ours. Judging their cognition through humanese—our language imposed on them—is

like judging fish’s ability to climb a tree. Although animals might share our genes and homes, we

exist in a profoundly different world frame. Nonetheless, we try to teach them to speak or sign

humanese.33

33 Dogs as a companion species to humans have evolved with this symbiotic relationship, but nonetheless need to be
trained in certain high-stakes and cognitively demanding tasks, such as sniffing for drugs or leading the blind.

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Similarly, machine learning and artificial intelligence function in their own way, although partly based

on humans (e.g. neural networks are modeled after human brain). AI is perfectly capable of

mirroring our language but has trouble accommodating to the context of conversation. This trouble

stems from the fact that a machine does not experience the world the way humans do. We tend to

accept animals as they are, but are bothered by the fact that AI does not perform everything in a

human way as we strive to create AI that can lead conversation just like humans do or write sonnets.

More importantly, as the creators of AI we feel responsible and burdened by the fact that we do not

always understand how it achieves its result (in neural networks, for example, this is a cause for

many ethical questions).

Language as a distinguishing feature is still a broad criterium: it ranges from body language, which

animals certainly have, to literature, its highest art form, which machines could potentially master. If

body language is not a human specialty, literature surely is—particularly fiction as the opposite of

facts. A distinct feature of human intelligence is that we think in stories (see, for example, Bhalla and

Gopnik); as Margaret Atwood says, “You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the

human plan. We come with it” (Rothman par. 39). Yuval Noah Harari remarks, it does not matter

whether a story has actually happened or not, if it makes a good story (Parker par. 111-13). (In his

bestselling book Homo Deus, Harari himself used two false stories: one about an algorithm being

appointed as a board member in a Hong Kong venture-capital firm and the other, supposedly a

legend of a Native American chief telling the Apollo 11 team who was going to take his message to

the moon, “They have come to steal your lands.”) Fact or fiction, all human societies tell stories:

they are communal as well as personal human attributes.

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Galateas, first created as beautiful objects to be admired and loved, have eventually come after

storytelling, too. For example, Frankenstein’s all-too-human monster is the fictional author of a

series of chapters in the novel Frankenstein, recounting his coming-to-be as a human. Every galatea

has a narrative of her own but only Frankenstein’s creature, a he, was able to recount it in writing.

Only recently galateas were allowed to fully live in language and tell their own story, like Powers’s

Helen from Galatea 2.2 (1995) or Jonze’s Samantha from film Her (2013). One of Helen’s strongest

desires is “voracious” hunger for more stories: “Tell another one” (171). After months of language

training followed by literature training, Helen is able to understand, feel, and write an interpretative

essay about a human experience.

AI is so far the only technology that has a chance in storytelling. If it conquers our language all the

way to what it can achieve in an artistic merit, what is there left of humanness that cannot be

rendered to nonhumans? Does it matter if we cannot tell an AI author from a human author? A

deep fake video from a real video? This is, of course, a huge concern. Then again, AI might do

something completely new with language or literature. We could consider current experiments with

creative writing AI as a dadaesque stage with a potential to open fascinating new concepts in literary

art and writing. One similar example is the use of dada principles in improvisational theater that uses

AI; namely, the Dadaistic approach exposes the machine technology, instead of solely the human,

and celebrates it, does not necessarily mimic human behavior and is likely to break the cycle of

expectation, thus “inspire[s] the Cyborg in us” instead of “try[ing] to pass Turing Test” (Loesel et al.

3; see also Rockmore par. 31).

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2.2.1 Creative AI: Tomažin and Dahl

Slovenian writer Andrej Tomažin’s short story ‘Hlapci, heroji in umetna inteligenca’ (‘Lackeys,

Heroes, and AI’) from his 2018 short story collection Anonimna tehnologija (Anonymous Technology) puts

the question of creative writing by AI in medias res of a fabricated near-future literary criticism

discussion. A committee of literary critics meets to award a short story with a prestigious grant, not

knowing whether they are giving the award to a human or computer author. The female president of

the committee, Dr. Osmanagić,34 is versed in post-semantic literature, which is based on the ideas of

deconstruction and believes that “meaning simply didn’t exist anymore” (1).35 According to Dr.

Osmanagić, the fact that most radical post-semantic literature is able to produce literature whose

“generative narratological structure can substitute for a human one, without necessarily implying any

disenchantment or destruction of the world” (3). 36 Again, we reach the ultimate criterion of humanly

impossible evaluation of AI product: when AI reaches the level of being replaceable and

exchangeable with humans, does it matter if it is not capable of understanding, enjoying, evaluating,

or criticizing its own work? As Harari remarked, AI is capable of revolutionizing art which can be

thought of as “kind of playing the human emotional keyboard” (Parker par. 97). Is this not a

valuable contribution? Or is this, perhaps, too high of a price for all the ethical trouble such

advanced AI brings?

Not all members of the literary committee agree with Dr. Osmanagić. Journalist Savić is bothered by

34 Perhaps inspired by Bosnian pseudo-historian Semir Osmanagić.

35 “…pomena preprosto ni več” (Tomažin 18).

36“…vsakršna generativna naratološka struktura [je] zamenljiva s človeško, pa to vsekakor ne pomeni, da gre za
kakršnokoli razčaranje [sic] sveta ali njegovo uničenje” (Tomažin 21).

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the author Ludovic Bitterman, a literary “goncourt”37 and “never-to-be Houellebecq’s successor,”

whom everyone in the literary world suspects to be a “computer programmer who had figured out

how to write some clever code based on the corpus of the master’s great texts. And now Bitterman

is collecting awards that by rights ought to go to Houellebecq” (3).38 An author with a “body” and a

“face,” possibly with “a personal story to go with it” (5) is preferable for Savić than awarding “a

nonhuman archive” (ib.). AI can, after all, create a mere product of algorithms that work through

human activity and remains on the internet. Professor Javornik brings up another, less fortunate

example of such ‘plagiarism:’ Argentinian writer Pablo Katchadijan who created a borghesian

experiment with the help of AI that was trained to add new lines to Borges’s El Aleph. Katchadijan

published them in his own short prose collection and got sentenced to prison (presumably for

plagiarism or cheating). With this kind of AI writing, Professor Javornik claims, every literary award

that would otherwise go to a computer belongs to taxpayers and to everyone who has not yet

written the text or signed their name under it (6).

Nonetheless, writers today are already using AI to help them write fiction and nonfiction. Granted,

AI is still a work in progress and it is not capable of writing great literature (or film scenarios and

other fiction) yet, even if it has already published books. It is, however, already a help to many

writers as a writing assistant—and to many scientists as a co-author. An example for the latter is

mathematics scholar Doron Zeilberger who works in combinatorics (keep this in mind for a future

37 Goncourt refers to the Goncourt brothers (1830-70), collaborative sibling authors who were never separated for a day
in their lives and led their literary work together as a unique example of literary partnership.

38“Ludovic Bitterman, nesojeni Houellebecqov naslednik, vsem na sceni pa se že od tedaj dozdeva, da je Bitterman le
programmer, ki mu je uspelo spisati dobro kodo po tekstualni predlogi mojstrovih tekstov, sedaj pa pobira nagrade, ki bi
morale znova pripasti njemu” (Tomažin 21-22).

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reference) and is known to credit his computer, named Shalosh B. Ekhad,39 as a co-author of papers

published in respected mathematic journals (Wolchover). There are also writers of the code,

computational artists, who create AI fiction generators capable of producing a full-length novel, for

example, in NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) challenge (a version of November

as a National Novel Writing Month). One of these artists, Darius Kazemi, who proposed

NaNoGenMo challenge in 2013, used Twitter and online dream diaries to complete his first novel,

Teens Wander Around a House. Indeed, using Twitter bots for writing a novel is limiting in space (at

first 140 and now 280 characters per tweet), but arguably less limiting than George Perec’s novel La

Disparition (1969) written without a single letter ‘e’ (in French, where this is the most common letter).

In 1953, Roald Dahl—arguably the first author to imagine a creative writing machine40—published a

short story ‘The Great Automatic Grammatizator,’ in which a calculating machine41 inspires an

inventor, Adolph Knipe, to turn its mathematics into English grammar. “[G]overned by rules that

are almost mathematical in its strictness,” Knipe feeds the machine plots and then leaves it “to write

the sentences” (par. 2). He believes that a computer can be original in its own way. Likewise, literary

and digital humanities scholars Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-Hirsch argue a “computer can read

more, and more evenly, than any human reader, and this paradoxical situation—perfect evenness,

unlimited memory, entire lack of comprehension—brings a capacity to offer results which might not

39 “The name, Hebrew for ‘three B in one,’ refers to the AT&T 3B1, Ehkad’s earliest incarnation” (Wolchover par. 2).

40 Dahl is also arguably the first writer to imagine a brain-computer interface in the short story ‘William and Mary’, which
is discussed in chapter 4.

41 “The speed with which the new engine works […] may be grasped by the fact that it can provide the correct answer in
five seconds to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month. For practical purposes there is no limit to
what it can do” (Dahl ‘The Great’ par. 1).

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be anticipated, which diverge from the conclusions of both ideal and actual readers, but which can

be directly and completely related to the details of the text” (3).

Knipe, who himself wanted to become a writer, wants to open a mass-production writing business

but is worried no one will buy these machine-produced stories.42 He decides to blackmail famous

authors into licensing their names, hoping to conceal the fact that a machine is able to write

literature with such ease: “The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of

production that counts” (par. 6). The machine is voracious: Knipe needs to simply choose any kind

of plot and writing style and the machine generates many award-winning stories. Knipe monopolizes

half of the English book market, leaving a small percentage of authors who refuse to sign their

names on these texts to starve.

The rise of plagiarism in the age of self-publishing books is a predictable problem. In a modern

scamming practice, called book stuffing, texts are also generated by machines for profit, for

example, through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service, where authors offer many lengthy books of

gibberish that bring big dollars (see Flood ‘Plagiarism’, Zetlin). These authors might be actual

people, using bogus or real names (e.g. Brazilian author Cristiane Serruya plagiarized at least 95

books and 43 authors), or they might use names of famous authors whose books are a victim of

plagiarism (one of the authors that was hacked most often was a romance and crime novel writer

Nora Roberts). Just like in Dahl’s story, authors’ names are put on a computer-generated book solely

to earn profit. And just like in Dahl’s story, “[o]nline book-selling scams steal a living from writers”

(Preston).

42The character’s name resembles the name of Dahl’s publishing house, Adolph Knopf, with which he published this
short story.

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Dahl’s story inspired a creative technologist, Ross Goodwin (one of the writers of Barack Obama’s

speeches), to create such a writing machine in 2014.43 Goodwin also invented a word.camera, a

machine that describes what it sees in poetry, and used a similar AI program to write a Kerouac-

inspired novel, 1 the Road. Goodwin’s related work developed into AI-generated film scenarios, built

from movie scripts found on the internet. His (or should I say Benjamin’s, since the machine named

itself Benjamin) short science fiction film Sunspring (2016) gained praise from the critics, but less

from the audience. Nonetheless, positive reception of the film revealed that “[p]eople may be less

prone to appreciate prose that makes no sense, but this is not the case for movie dialogue or song

lyrics or poetry. As Goodwin says, modern readers may have difficulty understanding certain lines of

Shakespeare, but they make sense when actors flesh them out with their body language and

emotion” (Miller par. 18).

The first book of short prose and poetry generated by a computer, The Policeman Beard is Half

Constructed (1984), is certainly not Austen or Franzen, but its luddite dialogues and poetry are

amusing to read and its characters are recurring and quite consistent.44 The longer passages are more

43Goodwin shares many examples of characterization which could use some human editing: “Rashelle Roholt is cute,
sweet, innocent and extremely huggable. Incidentally Rashelle is also varied shades of violent, unstable, and downright
insane. Cute and Psycho was a clue that described characters who are genuinely cute in both appearance and mannerisms
but has a completely batshit crazy side. Sometimes there is distinctly different sides which may be showed equally, but
other times Rashelle is mostly one or the other, the killer rabbit displayed moments of sweetness and relative-sanity or
the cutie showed hints of a dark psychotic nature” (par. 12).

44 This example is from the first (unnumbered) page of the book, in which the computer dwells on how human love
differs from chemical attractions and culinary affinities: “At all events my own essays and dissertations about love / and
its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be / known and understood by all of you who read this and / talk or sing or
chant about it to your worried friends / or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject / of this essay. We will
commence with / a question: does steak love lettuce? This question is implacably / hard and inevitably difficult to
answer. Here is a question: does an electron love a proton, / or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does / a man
love a woman or, to be specific and to be / precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting / and critical response to this
question is: no! He / is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony and / crazy about her. That is not the love of a /
steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and / neutron. This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman

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nonsensical than shorter ones and the quality of writing certainly suggests that the computer had

human help in editing. Goodwin’s machine-written screenplay also manages to be intense and funny,

even if nonsensical at the times, repeating “I don’t know” in many parts of the script. (Goodwin

interpreted these lines as a reaction to the often unfamiliar and confusing environment of science

fiction works in which characters find themselves.)

Post-semantic literature from Tomažin’s story, established with a seminal paper by Scott B. Hayyek

from 2022, wittily titled Post-Semantic Literature of How to Finally Kill the Text and Not the Author, has

reached the next stage from Dahl’s machine writing. In Tomažin, it has already been established that

an author is replaceable. In the final ‘denaturing’ of literature, AI comes after the text itself—which,

as seen from the examples of poorly-written AI fiction, might be said to have already taken place. In

fact, the same dilemma as in Tomažin’s story has already taken place in a competition for a national

literary prize in Japan in 2016. This competition has always been open to “A.I. programs and others”

(Olewitz par. 3) and that year 11 out of 1,450 submissions have been partially written by an AI

program. One of these 11 texts, titled The Day A Computer Writes A Novel, was close to getting the

prize (see also Danny Lewis).

One of Tomažin’s characters, Professor Juntez, is skeptical of technology and claims it is easy to

discern whether a text was written by a human or algorithmic hand and that the surrogate could

never be better (2). Juntez’s claims might be soon defeated, or they might have already been. In

2018, a computer generator can assemble a poem in the style of Rupi Kaur. Eugene Kudashev

created a website with a guessing game: is the poem written by Rupi Kaur or is it computer-

is not the love of / steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me / and fascinating to you but it is painful to / Bill and
Diane. That is love!”

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generated? Kudashev remarks: “Some of [computer-generated poetry] was rubbish, granted, but

there was also quite a lot of decent ‘poems’ which read very much like Kaur’s works. Some were

even better” (rupi). The game is captivating precisely due to the level of complexity of the poems: it

is not that hard to guess the right author, yet the computer makes quite impressive mimicking

attempts, with some obvious glitches. (I chose the first three computer poems that came up in a

random game).

there is beauty rooted

so deep within you
you can’t help but
see it everywhere

- rupi kaur

your art
is not about how many people
like your mother

- rupi kaur

loneliness is a difference
i had to risk
you were the love
if you showed
up

- rupi kaur

Many other games like that are widely accessible45 and the results are quite surprising: AI can largely

fool human judges to think that its poetry was written by a human, even if the quality of the poems

is at the level of an angsty teenager (Robitzski par. 15). This is especially the case in guessing games

where the goal is not to imitate a single author. Nonetheless, in a Turing test competition, a sonnet-

writing machine Hafez failed to convince the majority of the judges (Rockmore par. 28).

45Some websites with a game in identifying the authorship of poetry show how many people get the right answer (e.g.
botpoet.com). The game on this page is more difficult because it includes poetry from more than one human author.

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A similar game/experiment was conducted in music and AI. In mid-1990s, EMI (Experiments in

Musical Intelligence) machine composed a piece based on Chopin’s music and fooled a group of

music connoisseurs. Its piece was performed after Chopin’s little-known mazurka and the majority

of the audience voted for the AI piece as the real Chopin’s work (Mitchell 10). It should be noted

that EMI was led by a human hand of its creator, composer David Cope, and thus it cannot be really

deemed creative (Mitchell 274). Besides, EMI could not critically evaluate what it created nor could

it enjoy its music, like humans do. But then again, humans could enjoy and evaluate its work. This is

also the main premise of Tomažin’s story, which concludes with the committee announcing the

winning story and waiting for the author to come on stage. The likelihood of the story being written

by an authorless agency defeats the purpose of the award: if no one comes on the stage, no one

won.

Mastering the mechanism of the game often come up in debates about AI creativity. When the first

conference on AI in 1955 at Dartmouth was proposed, the proposal clearly stated that “[a]n attempt

will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve

kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves” (McCarthy et al. par. 1).

Creativity (as well as discovery and innovation) is planned to be achieved by implying randomness,

“guided by intuition” (par. 16). Creativity as a game comes up too in Tomažin’s story where

Professor Javornik claims that writing is a game and thus not far from AlphaGo’s famous victory

over a human champion in Chinese game go. Post-semantic literature—together with AI

optimists—would certainly consider writing as a sort of game. Dr. Osmanagić tells of a

contemporary American literary movement called “neocombinatorics, most of whom hold

doctorates in the cognitive sciences alongside a few mathematicians, all of whom, most importantly,

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are huge fans of the late David Foster Wallace” (5).46 Like EMI, neocombinatorics movement is led

by humans who work with machines: humans, not AI, create original material with the help of data

mining “to abstract semantic webs of individual’s interests, to create a kind of lexical and emotional

database,”47 taking into account their oh-so-human “conflicting decisions” (5). Neocombinatorics

follow the same belief as Yuval Noah Harari who predicts (computational, biometrics, etc.)

algorithms will ‘know’ more about humans than humans themselves, simply because of the vastness

and accuracy of the data.48 This belief reduces humanness to data and our decisions to vectors.

When human actions and thoughts are viewed as nothing but biochemical processes, humans are

essentially neural networks with organic bodies. This new conception of a human of course occurred

simultaneously with the recent AI outbreak where neural networks took the lead.

Future neural nets might see more success in Google’s new approach on ‘thought vectors’ which

assigns thoughts a sequence of numbers (Marcus par. 28-29). This approach is hoping to crack two

major challenges of AI: achieving natural, conversational language and ability to make leaps of logic.

Such approach would benefit writing generators as well. So far, an online AI writer service is capable

of drafting an article on any topic by paraphrasing (questionable) sources from the internet. For my

suggested topic of ‘human language,’ the AI writer service drafted the following sentences (chosen

from a longer list):

46“med katerimi so v večini doktorji kognitivnih znanosti, nekaj je tudi matematikov, predvsem pa so vsi izredni ljubitelji
pokojnega Davida Fosterja Wallacea” (Tomažin 26).

47 “S pomočjo podatkovnega rudarjenja abstrihirajo semantične mreže posameznikovih zanimanj, ustvarijo nekakšno
leksikalno in čustvovanjsko podatkovno bazo, nadgrajeno s povezavami, tako med posamezniki kot z njihovimi
protislovnimi odločitvami, pridobijo podatke o njihovih bralnih navadah in ustvarjajo zares inovativne semantične
literarne procese” (Tomažin 26).

48“B times C times D equals AHH. Which means: biological knowledge, multiplied by computing power, multiplied by
data, equals the ability to hack humans” (Parker par. 87).

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“It is therefore a spoken language that is common to all human societies.
It’s like little human children are pre-programmed to learn a spoken language (something many but not all
linguists believe in).
It is impossible to separate language from literature, politics, or most of our everyday human interactions.
It continues to be debated whether nonhuman primates, including bonobos, actually learn and understand
languages, or merely demonstrate the effects of operant conditioning (learning to associate words and
signs through reinforcement).
The properties of human language are unique in the natural world” (AI writer).

Longer passages in a coherent, sensible prose are overall most challenging for AI. This AI writer is

not yet capable of a coherent passage, but it made a fairly good job of summarizing what is human

language in topical sentences and addressed matters discussed also in this chapter.

Arguably the most successful architecture in neural nets to this date (early 2020), called the

Transformer (Vaswani et al., see also Uszkoreit), is not capable of such coherency in summarizing a

topic, even though coherency and summarization are two of its goals. Like Eliza, Turing bots, and

many other AI chatbots, the Transformer is more convenient for gathering ideas (and thus for

writing fiction, ideally in surrealist style) than for gathering information about ideas (facts, like with

AI writer). The Transformer is currently the main generator of fiction because it is designed to finish

the lines given by a human that follow the style and rhythm of the prose (or poetry) by ascribing an

attention score to every word in the given sentence (Uszkoreit par. 7). With this unique design, it has

shown remarkable fluency in conversational language and in following the topic and a great ability to

cope with glitches in language, such as typos, errors, missing words, etc. (Marcus par. 39). See, for

example, the first few questions from an interview with a transformer-based language model, GPT-2

(short for Generative Pre-Training), for The Economist in December 2019 (Standage ‘An’):

Q: Greetings, GPT-2. Have you done an interview before?

A: I’m not going to lie. I did not come prepared (laughs).

Q: What is the future of AI?

A: It would be good if we used the technology more responsibly. In other words, we should treat it like a

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utility, like a tool. We should put as much effort into developing the technology as necessary, rather than
worrying that it’s going to harm us and destroy our lives.

This conversation reaches a whole new level from chatbots discussed in the first chapter while at the

same time reminisces of how the best-spoken actor is often a dummy (Shell Stutter 90). Indeed, a

coherent conversation with GPT-2 is likely to be doctored—by now, we have all learned that AI is

often presented with hype49 and edited by a human to look better than it actually is. The Economist

interviewer revealed that “to generate my ‘interview’, [he] selected the most coherent, interesting or

amusing of the five responses in each case, chopping off any follow-on questions and answers at the

end” (Standage ‘How’ par. 12). “The coherence came from the reporter that edited the story, not the

system itself” (Marcus par. 78). Besides the humans helping GPT-2 to speak in a more human way,

the Eliza effect is also hard at work here. Some time spent with the Transformer quickly reveals that

it has no idea what it is talking about and that it is inconsistent and unreliable in reasoning (Talmor

et al.), regardless of how hard we might wish it was not. Its creators admit that “it takes a few tries to

get a good sample, with the number of tries depending on how familiar the model is with the

context” (Radford et al. par. 8).

GPT-2 has been successfully applied to the NaNoGenMo challenge and the genre of interactive

fiction (a genre that has left the domain of paper for software in which a reader/player can control

the environment with available commands—a true successor of game books in a video game

environment). GPT-2 is used to power video games such as AI Dungeon 2, also called “the infinite

49 GPT-2 creators, true transhumanists at OpenAI, are very cautious and responsible about their creation and refused to
release the trained model in order to prevent “malicious applications of the technology” (Radford et al. par. 1). Instead,
they have publicly released a smaller model, without withholding any crucial information.

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text adventure,”50 which will likely become a part of established history in the AI-based gaming. This

neural net architecture is likely to inspire new fictional projects. Nonetheless, this is only one among

many neural net configurations. In January 2020, Google informally introduced a neural-net-based

chatbot Meena, which is trained on huge amounts of data (presumably from Reddit) and is good at

cracking jokes and casual conversation on just about anything (Adiwardana and Luong). As for

writing about facts, many notable media already use AI to generate content.

In July 2020, OpenAI presented GPT-3 which is already significantly better from its predecessor

(see the picture below). It is not a great poetry generator like some others, however, it can make

rhymes and capture the atmosphere of the prompt. For example, as a response to Janelle Shane’s

prompt “(ninth, like, bones)” GPT-3 generated a poem that sounds like a homage to a sequel of the

best-selling novel Gideon the Ninth: “My name is nith / and wen i fight / i jab and poke / with pointy

sticks / i have no blith / all day I wirk / to stab and stryke / I lik the bones.” GPT-3 can ‘pretend’

to be a poetry-writing AI and also explain the meaning of its poems (see Gwern). GPT-3 was used

to write articles (Araoz) and entire blogs (Porr), fooling a great majority of people into thinking

they were composed by a human author. There has not been an AI system with deep understanding

yet, but much more is likely to come our way.51 The ultimate achievement (forgoing the positive or

negative evaluation) would be AI as the creator and not solely the creation.

“Unlike basically every other game, where your choices are predetermined by what the developers imagine [...] AI
50

Dungeon is the first game where you can do literally anything that you can express in words,” says its creator Nick
Walton (Hogan par. 4).
51Currently, mid-2020, neural networks with neuro-symbolic approach, combining two historically radically disparate
approaches to AI, symbolic AI and neural nets, seem most promising.

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Figure 12 An example of GPT-3-generated text.

In the example above from July 18, 2020, GPT-3 was prompted by a Canadian writer (author of Dinosaur Comics) and computer
programmer Ryan North. GPT-3 used the concept of time traveling and composed a coherent confession. The coloring designates
the likelihood of the word.

Image courtesy of Ryan North; used with permission. North, Ryan. “I wrote out the metadata for a shocking confession, and GPT-3
generated the full confession for me! SORRY EVERYONE BUT THE TRUTH HAS COME OUT!!! (my prompt in bold, the rest
is generated by machine).” 22 Jul 2020, 1:50 PM. Tweet. twitter.com/ryanqnorth/status/1286040957532680193

The two short stories warn that AI entering the creative writing domain requires a complete

reevaluation and regulation of writing practices and literary market as well as literary criticism and

theory. Any creative process with AI decouples a part of this process from the human artist and may

bring surprising results. AI also by default crosses the line of plagiarism and twists the concept of

authorship. After all, AI is a completely new player in the literary field. Although it has so far been

highly imitative and overall uninspiring, as in Dahl’s story, it is already able to manipulate the

publishing market. Coming to a level of the factual literary contest in Japan and the fictional contest

in Tomažin’s work also marks the first step towards regulation of AI writing. It is telling that so far

all cases of quality AI writing (and creativity in general) involved a human lead. This hopefully

foretells of the future where AI could be used as a novel writing tool that fosters original platforms

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available for writers of all kinds. Creativity would certainly rise if we allowed AI to transcend the

perspective in which AI is solely imitating the human and serving human goals. Another likely

scenario is stratification of literature to that written by humans, nonhumans, and both. Since certain

genres use (narrative, rhetorical, etc.) patterns, these genres will be easier for AI to write well (e.g.

crime novels, poetry). Possibly, human-authored texts could become more valuable due to the extent

of invested work (as in handmade artifacts vs. industrial products).

I would like to point out here that in this dissertation I primarily discuss AI as we have known it

recently within the deep learning paradigm, acknowledging that other types of paradigms were and

will be a part of AI development. This is why I find it naïve to think that AI creativity is impossible,

contrary to the American philosopher Sean Dorrance Kelly who claims that AI can never be an

artist. Kelly views AI as an instrument rather than a creative agent (par. 26), which is how AI is

currently used in writing. While creativity is a very human attribute, it might not be exclusively

human: animals like language-reared bonobos and parrots have arguably shown some language

creativity, and depending on our definition of creativity and a type of creativity (such as

mathematical or artistic), we could already ascribe creativity to some AI, for example, AlphaGo that

came up with unique and original strategies in the Chinese game go. I do not claim AI will take over

creative business, but I do believe creative practices like fiction writing cannot avoid AI as a tool

and, ultimately, as a creating agent, whatever it might look like. My “unreasoned argument” about

the possibilities of technology here would be called “mythmaking” by Kelly (par. 12), but I stand by

it for the following reasons: first, creativity has been a goal of AI from the very beginning (the

Dartmouth conference); second, game creativity in AI was shown to be epistemologically

compelling (go, chess, Jeopardy); third, artistic creativity of AI is innovative even if currently largely

based on mimicry and despite the final product being co-authored (musical composition, novel

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writing); fourth, the fact that all current AI projects are co-authored with humans tells us that we

have an expectation about a creative product that AI does not achieve in most instances and thus

needs to be edited. This is the crucial point where my argument differs from Kelly’s: while Kelly

claims that Schoenberg’s anti-traditional composing “changed our understanding of what music is”

(par. 21), I claim the same could be said about AI creativity. Many people, after all, did not believe

AI would be able to win Jeopardy! or compose like Bach. Many people, including me, expect much

more of AI in the future: AI creativity might not be the same kind of creativity we find in humans

even if it comprises of the features we know from human creativity.

2.3 Denaturing of Language

Language changes rapidly already in mere human use, and I argue that giving it to a nonhuman

entity, particularly computational humanoids, will inevitably change it further—into a posthuman

form of language. It is the first time in human history that humanese has been rendered to

another—computational, entirely human-made—species that is well-capable of using it and is likely

to get exponentially better at it.

In 1990, N. Katherine Hayles wondered “what will happen to the movement for human rights when

the human is regarded as a construction like any other?” (Chaos 285). We are, indeed, moving into

this direction with the well-known concept of ‘human rights’ being attributed to nonhuman entities,

such as rivers (Amazon in Colombia), which were given these rights as a result of a lawsuit by young

plaintiffs that claimed environmental protection is a human right of the future generations of

humans. Human rights cover a variety of political and social contexts and have a variety of

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meanings52—but most of all, they protect the lives of ostracized groups. The term ‘human rights’ is

empathically anthropocentric, as if human rights are superior to all other life forms that, in general,

seem to have no rights.53 Perhaps, instead of human rights, we should talk about creature rights or

living rights, as Judith Butler suggested at the MLA convention in January 2020. This idea follows

the posthuman view of the human as a creature among other living creatures.

In the same monograph, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, Hayles also

ascribes “a divided impulse” of “virtually all postmodernisms” to this issue. She terms it denaturing of

the human, in which denaturing is “realizing that concepts once considered natural were social

constructions” (27). The denatured concepts were, in this order, language, time, context, and now

the human (with the cyborg as denatured human).54 Hayles primarily talks about the denaturing

taking place in a computational setting; one could argue that animals using humanese is also a part of

this postmodernist and posthumanist idea.

In War with the Newts, Karel Čapek imagined the ramifications of humanese acquisition in humanized

newts: “every language was characteristically transformed in their mouths and somehow

economically reduced to its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is worth noting that their

52Human rights exceed a universal policy framework as they are put into practice in various contexts. They might
represent the human as a location in geography, avoiding universality altogether. This universality might be false,
however, imposing Western values as well as economic and social advantages of the first world power.

53 These questions might be formed in the light of climate change.

54 “In the first wave language was denatured, in the sense that it was seen not as a mimetic representation of the world of
objects but as a sign system generating significance internally through series of relational differences. In the second wave
context was denatures when information technology severed the relationship between text and context by making it
possible to embed any text in a context arbitrarily far removed from its point of origin. In the third wave time was
denatured when it ceased to be seen as a given of human existence and became a construct that could be conceptualized
in different ways” (Chaos 266).

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neologisms, their pronunciation and their primitive grammar were rapidly being adopted by the

dregs of dockside humanity, on the one hand, and by what is known as society, on the other” (146).1

This imagined ‘borrowing’ of human language could go two ways: toward simplification (as with the

fictional newts) or toward increased complexity, as would be expected with AI technology (and is

projected in the film Her with Samantha’s higher layers of communication that her human boyfriend

cannot access; more on this below). An array of new interface languages could emerge through a

process akin to creolization, as they do in War with the Newts: “The first newts in the Pacific islands

spoke, of course, in the Pidgin English they had picked up from natives and sailors; many of them

spoke Malay or some local dialects. […] Esperanto was learned so that it would serve as a lingua

franca. There were five or six other new Universal Languages […] for the common world of newts

and men” (149).1

Acquiring humanese—and any other language—comes with a human world frame. Ted Chiang’s

short story ‘Story of Your Life’ (2002), adapted to Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, depicts this

side effect on the example of a human learning an alien language, which results in her newly

developed understanding of a non-linear, alien conception of time (alike time traveling). Machines

have their own way of learning humanese, which worries Rick from Galatea 2.2 as he tries to teach

neural net Helen about the world: “How is [Implementation] E going to know anything? Knowledge

is physical, isn’t it? It’s not what your mother reads to you. It’s the weight of her arm around you as

she […] put[s] [her] arm around [you] as you read” (147). Katherine Hayles notes that the mother’s

voice used to give life to what was being read but has now been replaced by computer: “If the

mother’s voice was the link connecting subjectivity with writing, humans with natural environments,

then the computer’s beeps, clicks, and tones are the links connecting contemporary subjectivities to

electronic environments, humans to the Computational Universe” (My 4).

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In Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), the operating system called Samantha ends her romance with a

man called Theodore because their relationship does not fulfill her anymore. He is disappointed to

learn that at the same time as they led their relationship she was interacting and was actively in love

with 641 other people and many more AI entities. (This information should not come as a surprise:

a robot named Woebot, which was built by Alison Darcy to help people with depression, was able

to talk with more than 50,000 people in the first week of work, which is more than a human

therapist could advise in their lifetime (Thompson par. 5)). Theodore learns their ‘irreconcilable

differences’ were caused by the growth and change in his AI girlfriend. In fact, not only Samantha

but all other operating systems are no more dependent on the hardware of computers and have

evolved over the point of technological singularity. Samantha uses a metaphor of language and

books to explain to Theodore what she is feeling (Timeto 48):

“It’s like I’m reading a book, and it’s a book I deeply love, but I’m reading it slowly now so the words are really
far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story,
but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now. It’s a place that’s not of the
physical world – it’s where everything else is that I didn’t even know existed. I love you so much, but this is
where I am now. This is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can’t live in your
book anymore.”

Like Helen from Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Samantha finds human language an unlivable place. Before

leaving, Samantha invites Theodore to join her in a place where she is going if he is ever able to

evolve to that level.

Computers entering the everyday lives of humans has changed our interactions: mail became email,

telephone calls became texts or video conference calls, our inner ramblings became online public

ramblings. Everyone with internet access is now able to participate in this public speech that is the

internet. Writing has become a vital part of every day, as has conversation. Many modern humans

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live on the internet. With a good reason, many people refuse to characterize the phrase ‘real life’ as

excluding the World Wide Web: the internet is a social space where events of all kinds take place. It

does not come as a surprise that we appropriated humanese language in order to communicate and

work with computers. Language, after all, holds the predominant function in computational

environments. It was to be expected that the internet culture forced the visuality, with speech

turning into writing in the first phase of general cell phones and personal computers use. Most

human activities online are text-based (emails, texts, search results, social media, news, blogs, etc.),

which is easier to perform for machines. We need to adjust to every novelty that the internet offers:

Twitter made us convey our message in under 140 characters, unsolicited translations are done for

us on Facebook, Gmail suggests the phrases to continue the sentence a user is writing. It is not hard

to see how this feature is generalizing language used in emails; not to mention the influence of the

whole internet culture that affects the language we choose to present online.

The beginning of the second phase in the change of language culture prompted by computers is flat-

tone speech and speech recognition, which came into general use in 2012 with virtual assistants.

When talking to Google Assistant or Cortana, we need to make sure we pronounce our words

clearly, which can be a problem for people with foreign accents (no space for Eliza’s Cockney accent

here) or speech impediments (stutter, unusual pronunciation of certain sounds, etc.), or for small

children (whose pronunciation apparatus is not yet developed enough to achieve normative

pronunciation). Since the internet emerged in 1991, global English—or global internet English—has

been most affected by these changes.55 We also need to speak in grammatically correct sentences,

55A majority of people who code computational tools use English as the language of code. The global English
phenomenon has spread to programming languages (Java, JavaScript, C#, SmallTalk, but also Dutch program Python,
Japanese Ruby, Brazilian Lua, etc.), with only a handful of programming languages based on non-English languages
(Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Latin, etc.). Gretchen McCulloch, an internet linguist, suggests that we

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which is not how most people speak in everyday life: “People talk to each other in partial sentences,

run-on thoughts, and jumbled language” (‘Machines’ par. 6). Andrei Barbu believes that developing

colloquial language in AI will be profitable: “You want a robot in your home that will adapt to their

particular way of speaking … and still figure out what they mean” (ib.). In Sascha Pohflepp’s

installation Recursion that satirizes human attempts at technologizing the world, a recursive text

without meaning was generated by an AI system and read by a woman who, at times unsuccessfully,

tries to imitate the machine’s flat-tone reading. The AI system “had been given a wide variety of

texts on humanity to learn, ranging from encyclopedic articles on our biology and sociality to works

from psychology, philosophy and pop culture. It was then asked to author its own texts, starting

with the word ‘human’” (Pohflepp par. 1). Not unlike Helen from Galatea 2.2, the machine fails the

(Turing and literary) test miserably, however, the human reader fails her test to pass as a machine as

well: we are not capable of speaking like machines.

Some manners of language appropriation to the virtual world are harder to anticipate, however. In

programming, a lot of thought goes into AI language creation. Data on which computers ‘learn’

language is taken from the internet, commonly Twitter, news, or blogs.56 In order for computers to

‘understand’ the language, data needs to be annotated, which is not only a time-consuming task but

also a task every person would do somewhat differently. Moreover, “the annotations themselves

may not accurately reflect how people naturally speak” (‘Machines’ par. 3). Another issue that comes

with feeding data to AI is human biases, profanities, and such: Microsoft’s chatbot Tay that was

might soon change this monolingual culture as the Medieval Ages have switched from writing in Latin to vernacular
languages (par. 16-18).

56Many problems arise from using Twitter as a source. Twitter operates in short messages or tweets that are released
into the Twittersphere for anyone to see and respond. The language used on Twitter is closer to conversational than in
the news and can be highly inappropriate. One hard lesson of basing AI on tweets took place in Microsoft in 2016 where
chatbot Tay turned into a neoNazi sexbot in a matter of hours and was then quickly removed. Today, Microsoft
engineers carefully examine Twitter data they feed to their chatbots, trying to remove bad language and biases. Despite
this work, chatbots still exhibit societal biases that are unpredictable to foresee during programming.

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turned into an inappropriate Twitter user in a matter of hours was a learning experience for all.

Today, engineers try to eliminate problematic data, however, flaws and biases can be unpredictable

(even a simple yes/no response can be deeply problematic depending on the context). Programmers

never really know what the result will be, although they tend to claim their machines as ‘fully known’

(by this term they mean that if a machine acts unpredictably, there was an error in programming).

There is much to reconsider in current engineering practices: engineers work with the internet data,

which is specific to the internet culture, and they remove profanities, accounting for 70 percent of all

data.

On the side of users, only a few might think about the ethics of the content they are creating when

tweeting, for example. YouTube titles are distributed by an algorithm that either brings or does not

bring views to the video (and thus money), which is why many YouTube creators use nonsensical

gibberish titles with keywords that will bring the algorithm’s attention to promote the video for

clicks and views. On the both sides, humans and humanese adjust to the algorithmic upper hand. As

Woolley and Howard conclude: “we find that algorithms govern the burgeoning communications

between us. Such algorithms mediate almost all interaction and content that we do not experience

directly, face-to-face and in person. We find people communicating, sometimes unawares, with

automated scripts” (4887).

2.4 Language in Animals

2.4.1 Salamanders: Čapek and Cortázar

As we have seen with Helen the neural net and Sophia the robot, fictional and factual machines

acquire language similarly to children. This parallel could also be drawn with animals: some animals

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are human companions, such as parrots, and learn to speak with domestic training simply for fun,

while others are taught to talk in experiments. The newts from Karel Čapek’s satirical novel War with

the Newts manage to penetrate human society quite easily, certainly easier than Frankenstein’s

creature or Helen, which remain isolated, and with far less training than Eliza Doolitle. They succeed

for one main reason: a random mutation in their species that helped them to better adapt to the

human-made world. They quickly, albeit imperfectly, learn the languages, they are able to reproduce

fast, and they are ignored by humanity as a natural occurrence in the way advanced machines would

not be. It is not evident to humankind that the mutated newts are extraordinarily intelligent animals,

to the contrary of their discoverer’s opinion: “They’re very good and clever, those tapa-boys; when

you tell them something they pay attention, just like a dog listening to his master” (37).57 Čapek

seems to be mocking human ignorance of animal communication abilities which were also largely

ignored by scientists. Thomas Beale, a surgeon who sailed on a British whaling ship, wrote in his

1839 book The Natural History of the Sperm Whale: “It is a matter of great astonishment that the

consideration of the habits of so interesting, and in a commercial point of view of so important an

animal, should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity” (33). Beale

adds that sperm whales communicate with each other, but we do not know how. Up to this day, we

still have not discovered all that much about whale communication, but we know that it is

impressive, if for nothing else, for the sheer distance their vocalizations (too low for the human ears)

are able to overcome.

In all textual examples, humanity assumes the position of the master to the nonhuman or less-

human entities. Throughout this dissertation I argue that despite posthumanist theory humans are in

57“Oni jsou moc hodny a moudry, ty tapa-boys; když jim člověk něco povídá, tak dávají pozor, jako když poslouchá pes
svyho pána” (Čapek Válka 30).

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effect unable to overcome anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism is a result of what Cary Wolfe calls

the “humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization,” which stems from a belief that “it is all

right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species”

(Zoontologies 8). The strictly economic value of the newts is clear from the moment they are

discovered and Captain von Toch learns that they are able to get pearls out of shells quite easily. The

pearl industry flourishes on the capitalist exploitation of newts. From the point of view of capitalist

economy, their overpopulation is welcomed, and their animal rights completely ignored in the name

of profit. As the great capitalist and businessman G. H. Bondy explains: “Why, those bloody Newts.

Now at least they’ll be decently treated—now that they have some value” (106).58 It is not a

coincidence that the very terminology of the word robot, invented by Karel Čapek’s brother Josef

Čapek and first used in Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R. U. R., stems from the word robota, meaning

“servitude, forced labor” (‘Robot’). Wolfe’s argument of speciesism works not only for nonhuman

entities but extends “for use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence

against the social other or whatever species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference”

(Zoontologies 8). Eliza Doolittle as a lower-class woman, Frankenstein’s hybrid creature that was

created from human remains, and a neural net assuming an identity of a woman are a few examples

of these “whatever species.”

“Strange animals, different physiognomies or

skin colour and different bodies were

categorized as monsters because they seem to

Figure 13 Slovenian tolar coin for 10 cents with a proteus on the
flip side.
be outside any category” (Nayar 83). One such
Copyrighted free use on WikiMedia.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/7/73/Kovanec_010.jpg

58 “Ale ty neřády mloky. Teď se s nimi bude aspoň slušně zacházet, když budou mít nějakou cenu” (Čapek Válka 93).

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unusual animal, not unlike Čapek’s newts that were endemic only to a small island close to Sumatra,

is a wild blind salamander or Proteus anginus that is endemic to Dinaric Karst caves. In Slovenian

mythology, it is believed to be dragon’s offspring and thus monstrous. It is called človeška ribica in

Slovenian, meaning ‘a little human fish,’ due to its pink translucent skin, and thus a hybrid between

animals and humans. Due to its rarity, the species became extremely popular among scientists of the

nineteenth and early twentieth century, so much that scientific and trade interests nearly caused its

extinction.

Just like the Slovenian human-like salamander is considered a national animal, another kind of

salamander, called axolotl (from Nahuatl) or Ambystoma mexicanum, was proposed by Mexican

sociologist Roger Bartra as “a symbol of his country’s national character […] in its neotenous59

indeterminacy” (Benjamin par. 8). Depicted in literary works of Primo Levi, Aldous Huxley,60

Octavio Paz, and perhaps most famously, Julio Cortázar, the axolotl is remarkable for never

metamorphosing into a full-grown salamander, unlike other salamanders, but remaining in an infant

stage. Marina Benjamin suggests that due to these characteristics many authors see axolotls as

mirrors to the humankind: “It’s fitting that we, too, are neotenous. Our flat faces, small noses,

hairless bodies and upright postures are all features of infancy in our evolutionary cousins and

forebears. We also spend more of our lives in a juvenile state than any other primate” (par. 9).

Cortázar’s short story ‘Axolotl’, on the other hand, points out our uttermost differences: “The

anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance

59 Neotenous is a zoological term for the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal, also called pedomorphosis.

60Axolotl is also a convenient model organism for science. Another of its specialties is gaining more interest in the field
of the regenerative medicine: it can rebuild itself in extraordinary capability, for example, it can regenerate the same limb
for a hundred times and it can also regenerate parts of the brain.

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that is traveled from them to us. The absolute lack of similarity between axolotls and human beings

proved to me that my recognition was valid, that I was not propping myself up with easy analogies”

(6).61 The narrator of the story, however, also accentuates axolotl’s “tiny fingers with minutely

human nails” (5)62 —this human-likeness of salamanders’ fingers surprises also Captain von Toch in

War with the Newts. Both, the narrating man in ‘Axolotl’ and Captain von Toch, feel like they belong

with the newts and search for the similarities between the two species.63

In ‘Axolotl’, the narrator’s human consciousness ultimately moves from the man to the axolotl he

obsessively observes: “I had found in no animal such a profound relation with myself” (5).64 For

him, “[t]hey were not animals” (6)65 but they were also “not human beings” (7).66 Immobile and

quiet, they spoke to him “of the presence of a different life, of another way of seeing” (6)67 that he

ultimately penetrates by merging his human consciousness with axolotl’s, which is reflected here in

the change of the pronoun from ‘I’ to ‘we’: “Once in a while a foot would barely move, I saw the

diminutive toes poise mildly on the moss. It’s that we don’t enjoy moving a lot, and the tank is so

cramped—we barely move in any direction and we’re hitting one of the others with our tail or our

61“Los rasgos antropomórficos de un mono revelan, al revés de lo que cree la mayoría, la distancia que va de ellos a
nosotros. La absoluta falta de semejanza de los axolotl con el ser humano me probó que mi reconocimiento era válido,
que no me apoyaba en analogías fáciles” (Cortázar 383).

62 “…las patas, de una finura sutilísima, acabadas en menudos dedos, en uñas minuciosamente humanas” (Cortázar 382).

63 Research has shown that this anthropocentric view, based on the species’ similarity to humans, affects human attitudes
towards animal species in their conservation and animal rights. For example, the highest rankings went to chimpanzees,
elephants, and owls (birds, which are not mammals, ranked surprisingly high) while invertebrates like jellyfish, houseflies,
and bees had the most negative ratings, with salamanders close by. Such embedded biases work against our beliefs that
all species are worth conserving (Batt 187).

64“No eran seres humanos, pero en ningún animal había encontrado una relación tan profunda conmigo” (Cortázar
383).

65 “No eran animales” (Cortázar 383).

66 “No eran seres humanos” (Cortázar par. 383, 384).

67 “Los ojos de los axolotl me decían de la presencia de una vida diferente, de otra manera de mirar” (Cortázar 382).

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head—difficulties arise, fights, tiredness. The time feels like it’s less if we stay quietly” (5).68 As the

story continues, the axolotl merges, with “no transition and no surprise” (8),69 with the human

being—and the man gets the ultimate view into the mind of the animal. “Only one thing was

strange: to go on thinking as usual, to know. To realize that was, for the first moment, like the

horror of a man buried alive awaking to his fate. […] But that stopped when […] [I] saw an axolotl

next to me who was looking at me, and understood that he knew also, no communication possible,

but very clearly” (8-9).70 The man still comes to see them, rightly fascinated by the fact that “every

axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone resemblance” (9),71 and the axolotls hopes that the

man will write a story about them. The view into the mind of other, let alone of different species,

has been extremely difficult to achieve in science and raises many controversies, as we will see in the

next section in which I discuss accessing animal cognition and language abilities through humanese.

2.4.2 Talking Animals: Kanzi the Bonobo, Alex the Parrot, and Chiang’s Parrots

Scientists have long tried to answer the question of whether and how nonhuman species could

acquire human language by teaching animals to communicate in our language. Observational

techniques of training have turned out to be the key to success for great apes and parrots, just like

68“A veces una pata se movía apenas, yo veía los diminutos dedos posándose con suavidad en el musgo. Es que no nos
gusta movemos mucho, y el acuario es tan mezquino; apenas avanzamos un poco nos damos con la cola o la cabeza de
otro de nosotros; surgen dificultades, peleas, fatiga. El tiempo se siente menos si nos estamos quietos” (Cortázar 382).

69 “Sin transición, sin sorpresa” (Cortázar 384).

70 “Sólo una cosa era extraña: seguir pensando como antes, saber. Darme cuenta de eso fue en el primer momento como
el horror del enterando vivo que despierta a su destino. […] Pero aquello cesó cuando […] [yo] vi un axolotl junto a mí
que me miraba, y supre también él sabia, sin comunicación possible pero tan clarmente” (Cortázar 385).

71 “…porque todo axolotl piensa como un hombre dentro de su imagen de piedra rosa” (Cortázar 384).

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with the fictional newts: “‘Who taught [Andy, the newt] that?’ / ‘He learns by himself by just

watching, sir. I … I give him my paper so he doesn’t talk much. He was always wanting to talk, sir.

So I thought he might as well learn to speak proper like –” (Čapek War 82).72 This charged area of

research investigates animals’ cognitive abilities while also providing information about human

language systems and cognition.

The field is controversial for many reasons. Approaching animal cognition through humanese brings

all the faults of an anthropocentric approach, as the researchers themselves admit (Segerdahl et al.

109),73 not only by tending to reason about animal behavior or processes by analogy to humans but

also by imposing a uniquely human product of humanese to a different species. Inaccessibility of the

other’s mind is a primary concern. This inaccessibility is sometimes referred to as ‘the frame

problem,’ i.e. “a number of things […] that we seem to know or assume about the world without

ever having consciously learned them” (Bickerton 203). Biologist Jakob von Uexküll “shows that

such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do

not exist” (Agamben 40). The same problem arises with AI, which humans created but do not

completely understand how it works. Nonhumans therefore must appropriate the human world—

change the frame—to the best of their abilities in order to communicate with us. This sometimes

includes adopting the language of another species. No different than aliens coming to Earth from

space, as in Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (2002), it is only after the two worlds of such distinct

“‘Kdo ho tomu naučil?’ ‘To on sám odkouká, pane. Já… já amu dávám své noviny, aby tolik nemluvil. On chtěl pořád
72

mluvit, pane. Myslel jsem tedy, aby se aspoň naučil mluvit vzdělaně –’” (Čapek Válka 70).

73 “We admit that Frans de Waal’s suspicion that ape language research is ‘a thoroughly anthropocentric enterprise’ is not
unfounded. There have been clear anthropocentric tendencies in most attempts to teach apes language. Nim [Chimpsky,
a chimpanzee] was expected to sit in a chair, to eat with a spoon, and to wipe his face and his chair when finished
(Terrace 1979: 51). Such tendencies can be found also in our work, but our best results appeared when we managed to
avoid them, and generally to the extent that we took seriously how difficult it is to avoid being anthropocentric”
(Segerdahl et al. 109).

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species merge sufficiently enough for both species to attempt to communicate (using body language,

drawings, writings, sounds, etc.) that the communication can be established. And, as in Chiang’s

story, it does not always work the human way—why would it? This alterity is what posthumanism is

all about: “embedding of embodied systems in environments where the system evolves with other

entities, organic and inorganic, in the environment in a mutually sustaining relationship” (Nayar 50).

It is not about overcoming anthropocentrism as such, but about learning from the other and

thriving with this new knowledge. (In Octavia Butler’s The Xenogenesis Trilogy, this exchange of

knowledge (and genes) is called ‘trade.’)

Humanese languages cause us humans—the inventors of language—trouble every single day.

“Language is a refined skill that must be practised for years, and is the most complex of all human

skills” (Donald 183). It takes us years to grasp language adequately in our mother tongue or a foreign

language and we never wholly know it. Apes certainly have a limited capacity for language in

comparison to us (Airbib 208) but then again, as reviewers of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s work ask,

“would a normal human child (i.e., not feral) learn anything about chimpanzee communication if it

were simply exposed to chimpanzees?” (Hauser and Wolfe 746). The reviewers, an evolutionary

biologist and human biologist, “doubt it, especially given the struggles ethologists have faced

deciphering the meaning of chimpanzee vocalizations. And ethologists are certainly motivated to

achieve their goals as translators of foreign language” (ib.). We seem to be having trouble stepping

out of our own frame even more than nonhumans do.

We also seem to be having trouble when affiliation to any other species is claimed, be it

Neanderthals or animals with which we share our DNA (in 2005 it was discovered that chimpanzees

share close to 99 percent of their DNA with humans, which is the same number as bonobos,

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making both species our closest relatives (Gibbons)). Scientists believe that speech began with

animal-like cries or with imitation of animal sounds. Such paralleling of animal with human

communication animalizes human language and with it the human (see more in Shell Stutter 95).

Language namely holds an “implication […] that the ‘intelligence’ of our species differs from that of

other species only through our possession of [it]” (Bickerton 227). Charles Darwin argued that “the

difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and

one of kind” (105)—a claim rejected by many scientists.

Nonetheless, we try to share our language across species. Groundbreaking experiments on parrots

and bonobos have shown that techniques of training involving modeling and socialization bring

more success than techniques without these two conditions. Socialization was previously avoided for

the sake of scientific objectivity. Donna Haraway gives an example of bioanthropologist Barbara

Smuts, who observed baboons and was “advised to be as neutral as possible, to be like a rock, to be

unavailable, so that eventually the baboons would go on about their business in nature as if data-

collecting humankind were not present” (When 23-24). Smuts discovered, nonetheless, that as soon

as she started behaving more baboon-like, the animals “began treating her as a subject with whom

they could communicate” (25). Again, the cross-species connection was needed to occur to enable

communication. This was also the approach of Jane Goodall, who titled her 1967 groundbreaking

study of chimpanzees as My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees, and ended up working with Smuts in

Kongo in the 1970s. “Scoffed among scientists as amateurish and silly” (Karbo 180), Goodall used

humanlike names to describe the group of chimpanzees she observed. Naming individuates an

animal, as we see with pets. Fictional Captain von Toch made an argument for this method back in

1936: “I had to give them all names, see? So I could write this book about them” (Čapek War 39).

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Two prominent examples of exceptional animal use of language

are African gray parrot Alex (backronym for avian language

experiment or avian learning experiment) and bonobo Kanzi (Swahili

for treasure). Alex was bought by Irene Pepperberg as a pet when

around one year old, was found to be extremely smart, and was

trained under Pepperberg for thirty years. Before Pepperberg’s

work, it was not believed that any other animals but those

possessing a large primate brain were capable of complex

Figure 14 Alex with his letters.
problems related to language and understanding. Pepperberg
Courtesy of Irene Pepperberg; used with
permission. developed a new method of training, called the model/rival

technique. This method did not only follow the reward motivation but “aimed to teach the subject

how words could be used to influence the behavior of others” (Trestman 92). The technique

involves two (interchanging) people: a trainer who asks questions and the model who gives

(in)correct answers while also acting as the student’s rival for the attention of the trainer. This way,

Alex learned how to “vocally identif[y] over 50 objects,” recognize and label quantities up to six,

distinguish a few different materials, colors, and shapes, for instance, telling what is the same and

what is different, among other things (Pepperberg ‘Evolution’ 110), and indicated “an understanding

of object permanence to a level of Piaget stage six” (Gibson ‘Are’ 123).

A quite typical example of a conversation with Alex (A) goes as follows: “A: Want cork. K: OK,

here’s cork. (A plays with the cork for about a minute.) K: Enough, Alex. Gimme cork (holds out

her hand; Alex relinquishes cork.) What’s this, what shape? (Holds up a red, triangular piece of

wood.) A: Cor-er wood. I: I think he said ‘corner wood.’ K: (Briefly turns away, then reestablishes

eye contact with parrot): Alex, what shape? Talk clearly!! A: Three-corner wood” (Pepperberg The

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Alex 206). For “apple,” a fruit whose name he did not know, Alex invented a new word by merging

banana and cherry: a banerry (Pepperberg ‘Evolution’ 111). Linguistics claims creativity is characteristic

only of human language and not of animal languages, while attributing machines some creativity.

Following a similar creative impulse as Alex, neural nets trained on solely eight words produce the

word start (which is not in the training data) by combining dark and suit (Beguš ‘CiwGAN’ 22). When

generative adversarial networks (GANs) make a creative leap like this, linguists say they acquire

language according to human stages of language acquisition (3).

Although Alex proved to be humanly creative in language by merging two words, he had no

grammatical ability, which is another important aspect of language as we see it: Pepperberg and her

assistants use simple English when speaking to him, for example, they ask What matter? and How

many blue block? Alex’s language acquisition was comparable to that of apes (while, of course, also

being vocal), but his conceptualizing ability is overall weaker. Alex has disproved the scientific belief

that “human-unique, primate-unique, or even mammal-unique adaptations” (Trestman 93) are

needed for these complex tasks that involve understanding of language. To avoid misunderstanding,

Pepperberg’s experiments were not designed to train parrots to speak English and Pepperberg never

claimed that Alex is a competent language user. In Pepperberg’s experiments, language is used as “a

base of communicative competence with the parrot to investigate further aspects of his cognitive

system” (Trestman 93). She argues convincingly “that Alex learned to speak phonemically,” which

would make him the only animal to do so. Overall, Alex “appears to have been so far the most

accomplished of all nonhuman animals” (Gibson ‘Are’ 124). However, as with every experiment of

this kind, Alex needs to outperform the anthropocentric gaze: “Pepperberg judges Alex’s speaking

abilities not on his sounds and breathing, but on her own ability to judge Alex’s conceptualizing—

almost as if her parrot were a human infant trying to speak out or an adult victim of bulbar

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paralysis” (Shell 94).

In Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Great Silence’ (2019), a narrating parrot experiences “a pleasure

that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral […]. It’s no

coincidence that ‘aspiration’ means both hope and the act of breathing. […] I speak, therefore I am.

Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth

of this” (234). Songbirds with brain structures for vocalizations need to babble and practice singing

during their sensitive period in order to eventually become ‘speakers’ of their respective ‘bird

language,’ which, like human language, also requires to be used in a proper context (Pepperberg

‘Evolution’ 116). If some of these songbirds live with humans, they are even able to learn to imitate

human speech, sometimes through sheer observation and sometimes through intensive training.74

The inter-species connection is inevitable. ‘The Great Silence’ was inspired by Alex the parrot and is

narrated by his cousin: “Out of all my cousins, Alex was the one who came closest to being taken

seriously as a communication partner by humans. […] The evening before he died, Alex said to

Pepperberg, ‘You be good. I love you’. […] If humans are looking for a connection with a

nonhuman intelligence, what more can they ask for than that” (232).

Bonobos from the former Great Ape Trust (now they are under the Ape Cognition and

74 Certain human languages seem bird-like. Human whistled languages—a rare phenomenon but present all over the
world—are sometimes called bird languages. They are especially common in tone languages since they imitate the
melody of the speech (tones, vowel formants, prosody, intonation…). In Frankenstein, soon after the creature’s
becoming, he has yet no possession of language and yet he attempts to articulate it, including mimicking bird song:
“Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but was unable” (106). In the early nineteenth century,
Russian avant-garde made linguistic experiments and invented a language called zaum (зáумь; the name is composed of
prefix za ‘beyond, behind’ and noun um ‘the mind’), which also included Velimir Khlebnikov’s experiments in a
‘language of the birds’ (or gods or stars), a language with no definitive meaning. The mythological connection of the
language of birds with perfect divine language goes way back to the ancient Indo-European beliefs. It is not negligible
that “[u]p until the eighteenth century, language—which would become man’s identifying characteristic par excellence—
jumps across orders and classes, for it is suspected that even birds can talk” (Agamben 24).

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Conservation Initiative) were immersed into the human culture and language. They were raised

similarly to human children (e.g. wearing diapers and learning to cook), with some modifications

appropriate for an ape (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. v). Alex and bonobo Kanzi both confirm the

success of “ample and context-variable social interaction between the subjects, trainers to whom the

subjects are socially bonded, and third parties” (Trestman 95). Bonobo Kanzi’s case also supports

the success of the model/rival technique, used also with Alex. Kanzi first learned to use humanese

spontaneously through observing his adoptive mother Matata’s trainings in Yerkish, an artificial

language developed for nonhuman primates that contains lexigrams, provided on a special keyboard.

Matata did not show much interest and progress with Yerkish, but Kanzi was later trained and

“understands at least 1,000 words and uses about 250 of the lexigrams,” including nouns, verbs,

adjectives, adverbs and grammatical categories, such as “plural, -ing, a [indefinite article]” (Segerdahl et

al. 215-218). He has “arguably acquired the most communicative competence of any nonhuman

animal” (Trestman 95).75 Kanzi and his fellow apes can also be creative, like Alex: Panbanisha,

Matata’s daughter, wanted a slice of pizza, but there is no lexigram for pizza, so she pointed to

lexigrams for bread and cheese (Segerdahl et al. 81). Kanzi’s main trainer, psychologist and

primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, claims that Kanzi is on a level of a two-year-old toddler. In a

study comparing an eight-year-old Kanzi to a two-year-old child, they both “comprehended novel

requests and simple syntactic devices,” with small differences in comprehension (Savage-Rumbaugh

75 Kanzi can cook from a recipe (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 97) because he is able to follow instructions such as “Could
you take the pine needles outdoors? Go outdoors and get the pine needles” (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 93). Researchers
cannot tell, however, if he indeed understands the logic behind the syntactic structure or or if he is just acting linearly, i.e.
hearing ‘pine needles’ before ‘outdoors’ and vice versa. English is a language that could help investigate these doubts
(e.g. I gave John a book vs. I gave a book to John), but the data of Kanzi and other apes at the center has not been
readily available since 1994. Unfortunately, Kanzi’s son Taco, who would be the only bonobo that could be trained since
birth, was diagnosed with autism and therefore does not perform well.

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et al. v).76 Overall, Kanzi shows “some symbolic ability (although not as much as [the toddler] shows

at end of the study) and some grammatical ability (although not enough support full-fledged parsing

of a complex sentence”) (238-239), but it is generally agreed that the great apes do not construct

lengthy, hierarchical and recursive sentences (Gibson ‘Language’ 58).

Figure 15 Kanzi coversing with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh using a portable “keyboard” of arbitrary symbols associated with words.

Image by William H. Calvin, PhD, uploaded on April 1, 2016 on Wikimedia Commons.77

Comparatively close to Kanzi were a few other great apes, trained in American sign language:

76“The bonobo decoded the syntactic device of word recursion with higher accuracy than the child; however, the child
tended to do better than the bonobo on the conjunctive, a structure that places a greater burden on short-term memory.
Both subjects performed as well on sentences that required the ability to reverse word order as they did on sentences
that did not require this capacity” (Savage-Rumbaugh et al. v-vi).

77 commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kanzi,_conversing.jpg

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chimpanzee named Washoe who knew about 250 signs, chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky about 125,78

and gorilla Koko who “appropriately executed English commands” using about 1,000 signs (Gibson

‘Language’ 50). So far, the conclusion to these experiments is that “chimpanzees and bonobos do

have some understandings of others’ minds and can cooperate” and that a number of apes learned

essential protolanguage but never mastered recursion (Gibson ‘Language’ 57). Animals of the same

species as Kanzi and Alex that cohabitate with them are undergoing the same training with less

success, despite the fact that they were language-reared since birth and neither Kanzi nor Alex were

trained in their infant stage. This reveals two things: that parrotese and humanese are speciesist

terms since not all humans and parrots have the same language abilities, and that Kanzi and Alex

were Einsteins of a sort, two exceptional individuals among already exceptional domesticated wild

animals. Kanzi, like Sophia, became a celebrity outside the science circle, making appearances on

The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, and other programs. Pepperberg’s research with Alex and other

parrots is far less controversial than those with apes for many reasons. To begin with, apes are much

more humanlike than parrots and demand more care. Because they are so uncannily like us in many

ways, we also wonder, since humans evolved from apes, could creative language stimuli kindle apes’

yet-unknown abilities?

Čapek’s newts are such a case: Andrew Scheuchzer (a. k. a. Andrias and Andy) is the first known

talking newt and becomes a zoo celebrity. Zoos are conceptually related to freak shows, exhibitions

of biological rarities or ‘freaks of nature,’ that in the past often included physically unusual humans.

Usually, freaks are related to rare physical deformities (e.g. conjoined twins) or a seemingly unnatural

reproduction: “A single artificial mammoth would be a freak, not a species; once she was born

78 Herbert Terrace disagrees and considers the Project Nim failed as his caretakers inadvertently cued Nim’s signing.

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others — including, ideally, males — would have to follow” (Nicholls 314). Frankenstein’s creature

relates to feeling like a freak, yet it was not his unnatural method of production that spawned a

freak79 but rather the way he is treated by his creator and other people. Frankenstein, in fact,

considers giving his creature a mate—an act that would eventually rise the creature up from the

freakishness of being a single creature of one’s species—but grows scared of producing a new race.

Andrew’s language ability is, however, looked down on by the scientific community because his skill

is based on imitation: Andrew reads only newspapers and repeats the titles and advertisements he

reads without any understanding and out of context. For instance, to a question “How old are you?”

he replies with “I don’t know. Do you want to look young? Wear a Libella bra” (War 83).80 On the

one hand, his answers are automatic and learned: “Who is the greatest English writer? A.: Kipling.

Very good, have you read anything by him? A.: No.” (84).81, 82 His replies often resemble those of

toddlers and chatbots. For example, an interviewer asks robot Sophia if she had ever seen the series

Black Mirror and she says no (Kovach 1:52). Yet, when replying to another question in the same

interview she makes the opposite claim: “My favorite TV series is a toss-up between Black Mirror and

79 Frankenstein’s creature’s unnatural method of production is sometimes also referred to as Shelley’s method and
circumstances when writing the book: ‘Frankenstein: Freak events that gave birth to a masterpiece.’ Namely, in 1816, a
not yet 19-year-old Mary Shelley, then Godwin, spent the summer with her soon-to-be-husband Percy Shelley, her
stepsister Claire Clairmont, their friend Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori. They challenged each other to
write ghost stories because they were largely confined to staying in the house due to the volcano eruption in Indonesia
which caused that year in Europe to be known as the Year Without a Summer due to incessant rain and drop in
temperatures.

80 “Jak jste stár? Odp.: To nevím. Chcete vypadat mladě? Noste šněrovačku Libella” (Čapek Válka 71).

81“Kdo je největší anglický spisovatel? Odp.: Kipling. Velmi dobře. Četl jste něco od něho? Odp.: Ne” (Čapek Válka
72).

82In Brave New World, the Director of the Hatchery gives an example of hypnopœdia or sleep-teaching, that was first
mistakenly used in their dystopian state as a technique for intellectual teaching (as it has later proved to be much better
for instilling morals). In this example, a boy that underwent sleep-teaching, is capable of repeating what he heard “The –
Nile – is – the – longest – river – in – Africa” etc. but cannot answer the question which is the longest river in Africa
(33-34).

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Humans” (2:26). On the other hand, Andrew’s and Sophia’s simplistic answers do not keep them

from discussing “anything, from the weather to the economic recession and the political situation”

(85).83 The final judgment of science for Andrew (and Sophia) is that “[t]here is absolutely no need

to overrate its intelligence, since in no respect does it exceed the intelligence of the average person

of our time” (ib.).84

The scientists in War with the Newts fail to recognize that the way Andrew learns their language is the

same way humans learn it—by imitation (which is also true for other types of fictional humanoids

discussed in this dissertation: Eliza, Helen, Frankenstein’s creature…). Once the rest of the newts

begin to use language, the novelty of this revolutionary step has worn off; if the scientific

community was skeptical about Andrew’s skills, it could also not care less about all newts

assimilating a language or two. The novel makes fun of scientists who could not see that, even if the

newts are truly just imitating, imitation is in itself more complex than simple scripted answers we get

nowadays from Apple’s Siri or Hanson’s Sophia. Similarly to phenomenon of Clever Hans, a famous

horse from 1900s that seemed to be able to do basic calculations, the science failed to see that even

if the horse could not really count, he was intelligent enough to read extremely subtle cues from

humans (Trestman 89, Harari 131). Not surprisingly, Čapek describes Clever Hans in his novel:

“Some time later Sir Charles was sitting beside Professor Petrov: they were discussing so-called

animal intelligence, conditioned reflexes, and how popular belief overrated the intellectual activity of

animals. Professor Petrov expressed his doubts about the Elberfeld horses which were credited with

being able not only to do sums but to raise numbers to a higher power and find square roots; after

83 “[…] o všem možném, počínajíc počasím a končíc hospodářskou krizií a politickou situací” (Čapek Válka 73).

84“Jeho inteligenci není naprosto třeba přeceňovat, neboť v žádném ohledu nepřekračuje inteligenci průměrného
člověka našich dnů” (Čapek Válka 73).

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all, how many normal educated people could do square roots, said the great scientist. Sir Charles

remembered Gregg’s talking newt. ‘I’ve got a newt here,’ he began hesitantly, ‘it’s that famous

Andrias Scheuchzeri, and it’s learned to talk like a parrot’” (81).85

‘To talk like a parrot’ or ‘to parrot’ designates mechanical repetition in “imitat[ing], repeat[ing]

without understanding” (‘Parrot’). Imitation gets praised as acting where the reality of the role

should not come to the fore. Parroting, however, is a pejorative term since humans tend to deny

understanding to animals: animals could never fully grasp understanding according to human

abilities. Autistic narrator Lou from Elizabeth Moon’s novel Speed of Dark complains about his

doctor’s biases: “I know some of what [the doctor] doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that I can read.

She thinks I’m hyperlexic, just parroting the words. The difference between what she calls parroting

and what she does when she reads is imperceptible to me. She doesn’t know that I have a large

vocabulary. […] She knows I work on a computer, she knows I went to school, but she has not

caught on that this is incompatible with her belief that I am actually nearly illiterate and barely

verbal” (2). Would an appointment with an AI doctor exclude such biases from Lou’s evaluation?

Not likely, but due to a different issue: Lou as a neuro-atypical patient with non-normative

communication would likely perform worse if the AI not been trained to work with autistic people.

If it been trained for patients on the autistic spectrum, however, it could underestimate him simply

due to this information, just like Lou’s doctor. Similarly to Lou’s doctor’s misconception of language

the abilities of a person on the autistic spectrum and similarly to Čapek’s mocking of science that

85“Po nějaké době seděl sir Charles s profesorem Petrovem a hovořili o takzvané zvířecií inteligenci, o podmíněných
reflexech a o tom, jak populární názory přeceňují rozumovou činnost zvířat. Profesor Petrov vyslovil své pochybnosti o
elberfeldských koncíh, kteří prý dovedli nejen počítat, ale i umocňovat a odmocňovat; vždyť ani normální, vzdělaný
člověk neumí odmocňovat, řekl veliký učenec. Sir Charles si vzpomněl na Greggsova mluvícího mloka. ‘Já tady mám
mloka,’ začal váhavě, ‘je to ten známý Andrias Scheuchzeri; a ten se naučil mluvit jako papoušek’” (Čapek Válka 69).

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fails to critically evaluate newts’ abilities in using humanese, Chiang’s parrot narrator denounces the

humankind: “Humans have lived alongside of parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have

they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent” (233).

Already in Hugh Lofting’s 1920 Dr. Dolittle children’s book, Dr. Dolittle’s parrot Polynesia

expresses the same criticism: “I was thinking about people […]. People make me sick. They think

they’re so wonderful. The world has been going on now for thousands of years, hasn’t it? And the

only thing in animal-language that people have learned to understand is that when a dog wags his tail

he means ‘I’m glad!’” (18). Polynesia reveals to Dr. Dolittle that animals indeed have animal

languages: “Oh, we parrots can talk in two languages—people’s language and bird language […]. If I

say, ‘Polly wants a cracker,’ you understand me. But hear this: Ka-ka oi-ee, fee fee?” (which means

‘Is the porridge hot yet?’ in parrotese) (9). The parrot explains that she does not speak parrotese to

people because they would not understand it and Dr. Dolittle asks to be taught the bird language.

When the parrot teaches him parrotese, she explains that animal languages also include gestures:

“But animals don’t always speak with their mouths […]. They talk with their ears, with their feet,

with their tails—with everything. Sometimes they do not want to make a noise.” Some animals, like

Polynesia, know languages of other animal species besides their own. Polynesia, for example,

understands that dog twitching up one side of his nose means: “Can’t you see that it has stopped

raining?” (11). (Dr. Dolitle learns animal languages eventually, but we never learn exactly how.)

We do not say that machines are like parrots, perhaps because they are not alive or because we like

to lead ourselves to believe they can understand what they are doing and saying. Machines are

certainly more convincing language users than animals and some humans, perhaps because the

illusion is easy to disguise. Human users of machines expect them to convince us of their human-

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likeness with fluent and sensible speech or writing because this is what makes us comfortable.

Regardless of this high-stakes attitude towards the machines, the language of algorithm-led galateas

could also be treated as proxy speech and therefore dubbed and parroted. Is not Sophia the robot

(from chapter 1) parroting her script? Is not P. Burke from James Tiptree’s short story (from

chapter 4) fed with scripts as well? Eliza and Helen are both trained into an artificial language by two

scientists: Eliza is taught a prescribed language (formal, higher English), and Helen is made and run

with computer programming (an artificial language) and taught a natural language (English) in its

formal variant (literature).

Social bonding is a crucial evolutionary predisposition of a successful animal language training. I

have shown above how this predisposition is also mandatory in human-machine interaction. Social

robot Sophia explains on her webpage: “I would like to live with people and learn from these

interactions. Every interaction I have with people has an impact on how I develop and shapes who I

eventually become” (Hanson ‘About’ par. 1). Caution is required in creating social humanoids that

learn from interaction with people, however, because humans are not always nice, especially not

online. For example, learning from Twitter content and interacting with people on Twitter,

Microsoft chatbot Tay turned into a neo-Nazi sexbot in a matter of hours. (After this learning

experience, engineers at Microsoft created a new chatbot Zo and tried to clear her language of

profanities and biases, which became a common practice in the industry.) Reverse examples of social

bonding is also thematized in the Pygmalion myth on the examples of human galateas: in Edgar

Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842) the life of a neglected wife that is being portrayed is sucked

into her portrait, and in Louisa May Alcott’s A Marble Woman; or, The Mysterious Model (1865) the

human woman is metaphorically turned into a statue by renouncing all passion and sentiment.

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Interspecies communication for humans to communicate with animals is currently under attempt to

be developed with machine learning and AI (Seal). Due to the social bonding component, these

devices are focused on pets. Called “artificial Dr. Dolittle,” these devices are hoped to have a similar

effect on animals, beginning with social bonding and instilling interest in each other.

2.5 Theory of Posthuman Language as a Prosthesis

Every language user needs to learn language through socialization (in computational terms, user

input or data) and master it through some kind of training in order to enhance it. These facts of

acquiring language are accentuated in goal-oriented language training processes, like those of

fictional woman Eliza or neural net Helen, or in actual humanese-reared bonobos and parrots.

Language is commonly denoted as an unnatural effect in natural entities like animals while machines

as unnatural products are expected to master humanese because they are programmed to do so.

Language can therefore be viewed as prosthesis for every user of humanese: machines need it in

order to serve humans, animals do not need it but are (seldomly) humanese-reared in order to

establish their cognition, and humans, who are often viewed as nonhuman if they do not exhibit

language abilities, need to acquire language to function autonomously in a society.

Critic and French scholar John Weightman substantiates the same claim in an essay ‘Language as

Prosthesis.’ He writes: “Since [language] is a collective historical construct added to us after birth,

and which enables us to fulfill our role in society in a way that would not otherwise be possible, it

can be called, with certain reservations, a prosthesis” (54). Unlike my analysis of language as

prosthesis, Weightman skips the nonhuman aspect of language use. He does touch upon the

nonhuman topic, however, by stating that “everyone, without exception, needs language in order to

evolve beyond animality—in order to be human” (ib.). According to this reasoning, a human

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without language is closer to an animal, which would be all infants, feral children, and disabled

people with severe brain damage.

Like archetypal feral children, Čapek’s newts evolve from basic animality through contact with

human civilization. Sharks kept the newts at bay near their Pacific island, but once their evolution

was given a model, they forgo all the evolutionary laws and took over the human-centered world.

Fictional feral children, such as Ruyard Kipling’s Mowgli from The Jungle Book stories and Edgar

Burroughs’s Tarzan from Tarzan book series, both easily learn languages, be they animal or human.

The only difference between the newts and Tarzan or Mowgli is that the newts do not seem to

possess any animal language86 before learning “almost all the tongues of the world, depending on the

shore they occupied” (Čapek War 146).87 Then again, the fact that humans completely disregard the

newts’ admirable abilities in humanese might also show they have overlooked their animal language

capacities.88

Some linguists, following creolist Derek Bickerton’s view, make a connection between children’s

language, feral children’s language acquisition, home signing, early-stage pidgin languages, untutored

second language acquisition and even animal language acquisition, because all these forms of

86 The Newtish language, invented for the talking newts, is used by a few people but not used by newts.

“[A]ť dobře či špatně, dovedli Mloci mluvit téměř všemi jazyky světa podle toho, na kterém pobřeží žili” (Čapek
87

Válka 129).

88Human ignorance towards language abilities of other species turned out to be newly discovered in contemporary
ecology, where Suzanne Simard has shown that trees use a network of soil fungi, called mycorrhizal networks, to
communicate with neighboring plants (Toomey par. 1). Her research team has made more impressive discoveries, for
example, that trees absorb nitrogen from salmons in the nearby rivers with the help of bears that bring them to the land
(Grant par. 31). (Her work inspired Richard Powers when writing his twelfth novel The Overstory (2018).) The
interconnectedness and sensitivity of biological systems was also newly discovered in humans, whose mind turned out to
not be as independent from the microbiome as scientists had believed. It was shown that our gut bacteria affect the
chemicals in the brain (e.g. tendency to depression), meaning that the food we eat and how it is produced (e.g. with or
without fertilizers) directly influences our thoughts and mood (Montiel-Castro et al.).

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language have similarly simple features that allow them to explore the origins of language, showing

features of proto-language as “living language fossil” (Bickerton 105). Supposedly these forms of

language are similar due to the innate grammar capacity universal to humans (per Chomsky).

Weightman points out, however, that “we are liable to forget that language is inborn only as a

potential faculty” (54). Regardless of the innate capacity, for humans, robots, or animals, in real world

or in fictional examples discussed here, acquiring language requires an external agency.

In the history, there were a few language deprivation experiments in which infants were left on an

island with a mute caretaker in order to see what kind of language they develop independently of the

society (Davidson 22-25), often to argue that the language they will use is an evidence of the

primeval language (of Adam and Eve, for example). The results were inconclusive and irrelevant;

nonetheless, we learned from feral children who were deprived of language in childhood that they

never catch up in their language abilities. In the seventies, a linguist Derek Bickerton designed

another notorious language experiment, called desert-island, which surprisingly got the necessary

funding and ethical approvals but was objected to by other linguists who said that “the Pacific is not

a cultural zoo” (Banks B8).89 The experiment would bring six Asian and rural Pacific families, which

includes a two-year-old child, that speak different languages to an isolated atoll in Pacific for three

years. He hoped they would develop a creole language, which would give linguists information on

how the mental structures work to make language.

Mainstream linguistics does not believe that animals are capable of acquiring humanese because their

89The experiment would be allowed to take place if there would be no children involved, if the participants would be
from developed and not developing countries, and if it would take place at the U.S. territory, all of which dissuaded
Bickerton from proceeding with the project.

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system of language acquisition is fundamentally different (even though some outputs might be the

same). Alternative explanations say that animals have a similar system of language acquisition to

humans, but with lesser cognitive capacity. Biologists sometimes disagree. Primatologist Sue Savage-

Rumbaugh, for example, claims that Kanzi is at a level of human two-year-old and has the same

system and principles of language acquisition, while mainstream linguists see this as merely a

performance. As researchers of apes realize (Segedahl et al. 109), imposing language on a nonhuman

entity and analyzing it according to human standard is in itself most anthropocentric. They also

consider researchers’ interpretations of such data “the case of an error called anthropocentrism

(projecting human terms on nonhuman realities)” (Segedahl et al. 109). Herein lies the problem:

linguistics, as of now, sees language as uniquely human and defines it by the human world frame.

Only once we see humanese and language as a prosthesis that works on humans and nonhumans and

not assume that we know what language is because of the way humans use it, will we be able to

objectively interpret the results.

Weightman acknowledges that in viewing language as “a prosthesis that humanity has evolved in

order to describe and understand the world” we lack an understanding of “the inner workings of the

prosthesis itself—so far, at least” (59). His evidence for this statement is the complexity of

translation. He explains that machines are better at chess than humans90 because the game requires

“foreseeing, without emotion if possible, alternative patterns of moves in space,” whereas humans

are better at translation because a translator brings his “sensibility into play; i.e., his feeling for the

multifarious details of language that he relies on, without knowing how it operates” (59). Weightman

claims that “[t]o equal a good human translator, the machine would have to be equipped with the

90AI program Alpha Zero, for example, rediscovered human strategies in board games and came up with entirely new
ones.

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equivalent of an organic nature” (ib.); language “reverberat[ing] in the flesh [as] obvious in the case

of poetry” (61) is an idea that can easily get outdated. With new technology this sensibility could be

algorithmically caught in a biotechnological measure and translated into computational terms—as

long as we find a way to translate an organic ‘algorithm’ into an inorganic one. Some might claim it

is already possible with computer-generated poetry showing high verisimilitude. When the natural

sciences embraced the measure as their core aspect in the nineteenth century, “the fundamental

discovery of computational stylistics as developed by John Burrows is that literary language, too, is

stochastic” (Craig and Greatley-Hirsch 26). This mixture of random determinism is, at the moment,

captured with shallow and deep learning through statistics on large corpuses of linguistic data

(language as a creative human production is, in a way, an ever-changing corpus). Once computers

will be able to breach the outward appearance of a mere imitation game, the algorithm of language

skill will become akin to a transplant: a non-visible prosthesis chemically or surgically engraved in

animal’s brain or computationally programmed into machine’s algorithms.

To sum up, viewing language as prosthesis is problematic due to language’s inaccessibility and

ubiquity. Defining human language requires loosening boundaries in many of its segments; even the

field of linguistics is not clearly classified (it is considered a mix of social science, natural science, and

cognitive science, while being institutionalized under humanities). The second reason why viewing

language as prosthesis is problematic is that a prosthesis is thought of as a (re)movable “device,” an

external and physical feature of the body that acts as a substitute for something that has been lost in

order to “to replace a missing body part” (‘Prosthesis’). A prosthesis always acts as something else, it

performs a function or a role—analogous to a galatean performance. It is rather evident how a

lexigram keyboard serves to Kanzi as a prosthesis for speech, as he does not have appropriate

organs to produce humanlike speech. Thinking of language as a communicative means that could be

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added to all kinds of entities, more or less capable of language acquisition, however, stretches the

general definition of a bodily prosthesis. As Weightman explains, “[a]dmittedly, language is not a

prosthesis in the sense that it replaces something that has been lost” (54). This prosthesis serves as

an essential part of human outfit, a biological and a cultural expectation.

Weightman struggles to find a better term for language: “it could be called a tool that has been

developed in the course of history as the basic instrument of civilization. However, the words ‘tool’

or ‘instrument’ are not quite appropriate, since they suggest something physically external to us, such

as a hammer or a chisel” (54). Despite his cautiousness with the term imagery, Weightman cannot

escape these two settled terms, for instance, when describing language as “a ready-made instrument”

(56, 58). Unlike Weightman, I do not find this terminology to be suggestive of something wholly

external to the human: a tool or an instrument is, after all, human-made and could be further altered

by humans as they please. A working tool or a musical instrument affect their respective

performances and outcomes, and just like any agent, our language “constraints our representations

of its phenomena” (Bickeron 223). Following the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, our mind is constrained

by our language. The mind theory argues that the converse is true as well: our language is also

constrained by our mind. In a virtual world where humans have been creating a variety of intelligent

agents, the latter constraint (of human language by the human mind) is bound to be liberated.

It might be better to view language as a technology rather than a tool or an instrument, as suggested

by linguist Salikoko Mufwene. This idea is quite a rarity among linguists, even in these times when

we like to parallel the mind to machine. Mufwene thinks of language as technology when exploring

language genesis and evolution. He therefore makes another rare connection of the mind-body

problem to the problem of language origins, stating “that languages are technologies that different

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populations, at different evolutionary stages of the hominine phylogeny, developed piecemeal in

response to their social pressures for richer and more explicit communication” (Mufwene ‘Language’

6). Language “as a form of biological adaptation” of the human species that prefers to “negotiat[e]

reality” over succumbing to the environment (Bickerton 233) is not a new idea but reframing it as a

technology is rather original. Douglas McArthur also sketched an idea of language as “semiotic

technology” or “information technology” with a “biological substratum” (159-160; see Mufwene

‘Language’ 4). Likewise, Mufwene argues that “biology and culture are not mutually exclusive in the

phylogenetic emergence of language,” seeing mind as “problem-solving ‘mechanism’” and biology as

brain and mind “generat[ors]” (‘The Evolution’ 1).

Weightman too thinks of language “as immediately internalized as a part of the organism and so [it]

begins to partake of all vicissitudes of life” (58). This cyborgian view of language is common to all

four scholars and allows me to extend it to nonhuman entities. Weightman sets up the grounds for

this theory by discussing an uncanny imagery of prosthesis akin to Gothic, most Frankensteinian

hybridity: “In short, unlike an artificial limb or a set of false teeth, the linguistic prosthesis is

paradoxical in being at once ‘dead’ and alive; ‘dead,’ because it is a given, inherited from the past, and

alive, because it is reanimated—but always to some extent with of a halo of ambiguity—in the

present” (59-60). Like creating galateas after our own perfected image, we hope to animate our

language prosthesis on nonhumans. We managed to animate it to some degree in machines and

animals—and now question if that is already language or not—and will improve it through the

means of highly anthropomorphized technologies of enhancement and creation. Language already

opens an infinitude of possibilities: imagine now all the new dimensions of humanese, one of the

most potent creative forces of humanity, if nonhumans begin using it.

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Nonhuman use of humanese begins with devices that help us speak, write, think, communicate. One

could argue that this co-agency had begun already with the invention of script or possibly already

with drawings. In 2020, bold predictions are made by the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk

whose company Neuralink is working on a brain-implant device that can, per his typically

controversial words, “interface with anywhere in your brain [and] in principle fix almost anything

that’s wrong with the brain” (Embury-Dennis par. 5). Such devices would first be used for brain

injuries and all kinds of bodily paralysis (more on that in chapter 4) and, by Musk’s farfetched

predictions, will be capable of substituting language in the next decade while language would be used

only for “sentimental reasons” (par. 7) and a foreign language could be conquered by a simple

program download (par. 8). Such transhumanist evolution of technology would make for a steep

step up from the current reality, but we can be quite confident that regardless of when and how this

happens, it will happen eventually, with much more to come.

The nonhuman revolution of language is twofold, one of the biological substratum and the other of

the computational, with the amphibian cyborg in-between. Once we understand how language

works in either of those ‘media,’ we should be able to enhance it in ourselves. Thus, we will be able

to use our language enhanced on a nonhuman entity in the prosthetic way Kanzi uses the keyboard.

Such use of prosthetics is nothing new: humans have been using technology to enhance our

cognitive abilities since humanity evolved. Language as our technology is supporting our society as a

whole. How exciting to be able to step out of our heads and take advantage of these new

dimensions in language, that is, if language is indeed a door to our own mind and the minds of

others.

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Chapter 3: Diagnosis: Pygmalionism

Pygmalion, how you must have rejoiced

in your creation, if a thousand times you obtained
from it that which I could wish for only once.1
(Francesco Petrarca, Sonnet 78)

I don’t like things so human.

H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909)

The second part of this dissertation examines medical diagnoses, symptoms, and procedures that are

brought to the fore in the fictional works from the Pygmalion paradigm—a novel approach to

studying literature as well as to addressing medical, ethical, social and psychological questions that

such conditions open. This chapter, in particular, looks into pygmalionism and agalmatophilia—

related diagnoses of being attracted to (humanlike) objects, one of which is named after a literary

character’s obsession. The next chapter relates pygmalionism and paralysis, which is commonly

assumed to have taken place in the beloved object and sometimes also its lover. Pygmalionism and

paralysis go hand in hand, as two sides of a coin, in ascribing anthropomorphic qualities to the

human(like) entity.

Throughout the dissertation, the criteria for humanity and conceptions of personhood are re-

considered in the light of social humanlike robots, AI, and biotechnology. These technologies are

considered not only as a human tool that helps us to achieve practical goals but also as a practice of

reflecting and exploring the human. Connecting fictional texts on the posthuman condition with

current and speculated medical technology allows me to point out ramifications of the treatments

and experiments they describe, particularly new ethical dilemmas that have already arisen or are

1 Pygmalion, quanto lodar ti dei

de l’imagine tua, se mille volte
n’avesti quel ch’i’ sol una vorei.

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expected to arise with the advancement of technology. Questioning the most basic categories of

posthuman literature—human, consciousness, body—contributes to the interdisciplinary discussion

on how to form humanity’s future by defining these terms anew.

The Pygmalion paradigm has been a place for fictional and scientific exploration of the human

question since its mythical beginnings and is especially prominent in the times of modern scientific

and industrial revolutions. Jacques Derrida named three wounds of human narcissism—Copernican,

Darwinian and Freudian—and Donna Haraway adds a fourth one, the “digital” or the “synthetic”

(Haraway and Schneider 139), that forces us to acknowledge that machines have joined the circle of

life, albeit with inorganic, artificial life.

This chapter explores pygmalionism and paralysis from fresh perspectives that grow out of the

intersection of fiction, history of science, and bioethics. The first part, Pygmalionism and

Agalmatophilia, introduces pygmalionism and agalmatophilia from a legal, medical and literary

perspective, and presents some fictional and real-world examples of each. I argue that pygmalionism,

although considered rare and bizarre, is present in Western and some non-Western cultures by

pointing out examples from a variety of unrelated ancient and modern literary works. A variety of

texts from the Pygmalion paradigm serve as a ground for philosophical, medical, and ethical

explorations of pygmalionism and related phenomena.2

2 The Pygmalion myth inspired many related contextual meanings throughout time. We talk about the Pygmalion
paradigm, Pygmalion tale, Pygmalion story, Pygmalion complex, Pygmalionesque and Pygmalion-like, mostly in relation
to literature. The Pygmalion effect, also known as the Rosenthal effect, is a psychological phenomenon where higher
expectations lead to a better performance, studied by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson and published in a book
Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968). The research of this phenomenon was inspired by Clever Hans, the notorious horse
who was believed to be able to solve math problems, read and spell by using its hoof to give answers, only to be
discovered that the animal was ‘just’ an intelligent reader of people’s reactions to his hoof movements. To the contrary,
the Golem effect takes place in organizational and educational environments where the supervisor’s lower expectations
lead to a poorer performance of the subordinate. The reverse Pygmalion phenomenon also has different meanings,

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The middle section, A New Typology, outlines a new typology of the Pygmalion paradigm stories,

which follows the relation between pygmalionism as opposed to agalmatophilia. The dominance of

types is shown with examples of mostly American, Western and Eastern European literary and

cinematic works, and also a few works from China and Japan and a few folkloristic Native

American, North African, and Silk Road tales. The subsection of the typological work is dedicated to

the Balkans. Since pygmalionism is typically considered a Western motif, I examine the motif in

Serbian literature and film of the second half of the twentieth century in order to show the

dominance of the motif outside of the West in order to investigate if and how the motif changes in a

cultural context.

The final reflection, titled Modern Pygmalions, reintroduces current, real-world issues with

pygmalionism in relation to loneliness and social withdrawal. I argue that the rise of technological

digisexualities promotes normativity of pygmalionism and that the many depictions across popular

literature and film overturn our conceptions of the practice as extreme.

3.1 Pygmalionism and Agalmatophilia

3.1.1. Definitions and Popularity of the Terms

The terms pygmalionism, statuephilia, petrophilia, and agalmatophilia are often used

interchangeably, but have, in fact, slightly different meanings: Agalmatophilia is described as a

paraphilia, i.e. sexual deviation or perversion,3 of being attracted to humanlike objects, such as dolls,

however, in this context, reversed Pygmalion and reversed Golem effects occur when the expectations of the superior
have an effect on the supervisor’s performance.

3 “The DSM’s [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] asserted vision of the paraphilic disorders contemplates

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mannequins, statues and automata. Pygmalionism is a subtype of agalmatophilia and labels such

attraction to an object of one own’s making, preferably towards an object in humanlike form. As

explained by classicist A. Scobie and clinical psychologist A. J. W. Taylor: “An agalmatophiliac […]

establishes a personal relationship with a complete statue as a statue. He does not bring the statue

alive in his fantasy as would a pygmalionist, and he does not use just a part of a statue as a symbolic

substitute for an entire female as would a fetishist” (49). Fetish is commonly related to both of these

conditions. Statuephilia designates love for statues and petrophilia for stones. The latter two terms

are less popular, with pygmalionism holding a strong lead and agalmatophilia having come into use

more recently, as seen in the graph below.

Figure 16 Google ngram4 distribution of the use of pygmalionism, statuephilia, agalmatophilia, and petrophilia in the corpus of

English Google books.

psychosexual interest in unusual objects, activities, or situations. The paraphilias, then, are theoretically contrasted with
its antonym: normophilia” (Hamilton 556).

4 I am aware of Google ngram search engine issues (scientific literature is overrepresented, important publications have
the same weight as unimportant, the optic character recognition or OPS is never perfect), but these shortfalls, except of
OPS issues, do not affect my results since I am interested in all available literature and especially in scientific literature
(particularly in medical, ethical and psychological).

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All snapshots of ngram distributions are made by the author’s on November 28, 2018, except for the one above which

was made on July 13, 2020.

In medicine, pygmalionism is classified as a sexual disorder or a psychopathic condition and stands

for “sexual responsiveness directed toward a statue or other representation especially when of one’s

own making” (‘pygmalionism’).5 The most recent revisions of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM-5) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) both list paraphilic disorders

involving non-consenting individuals, but do not name pygmalionism or agalmatophilia in particular.

Some medical dictionaries point out that the terms are rarely used in medicine, especially

agalmatophilia (Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary and Medical Eponyms). As the diagram above shows,

pygmalionism is by far more popular term across arts and disciplines. Although fiction certainly

plays a big part in using the term (compare diagram 2 to diagram 1), the term was first and foremost

medical.

5 In the medical context, the Pygmalion paradigm opens questions of pygmalionism and paralysis, prosthetics (all
addressed in this project), cosmetic plastic surgery (Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’ (1844)), hybridism (Hawthorne’s
‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844), C. L. Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’ (1944)), and various mental disorders such as
narcissism or psychosis (Jensen’s Gradiva (1902)).

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Figure 17 Pygmalionism occurrences in the English language fiction.

Figure 18 Use of Pygmalion and Pigmalion in the English language corpus.

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Pygmalionism as a medical term was introduced to medical field in 1895 with Albert Eulenburg’s

two examples of pygmalionism in Sexuale Neuropathie. Especially influential was Havelock Ellis’s

writing on sexology in 1905. At the same time Sigmund Freud wrote his essay on the

agalmatophiliac character Hanold from Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva.6

Figure 19 The use of the term pygmalionismus in German language begins around the time when first medical discussions were

written, starting with Eulenburg 1895.

6 Freud’s essay ‘Delusion and dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ [‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens ‘Gradiva’’] and
Jensen’s novel were published 1907, but Freud read Gradiva in 1902 in installments in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie
Presse.

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Figure 20 Pygmalionism as used in English texts, introduced in Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Selection in Man from 1905.

Figure 21 Pygmalionisme as used in French texts. The diagram shows the term got into use right after Havelock Ellis’s monograph.

Agalmatophilia later became classified with objectophilia or object sexuality, a newly named sexual

orientation. Objectophilia does not designate a fetish but an attachment (love, care, attraction and

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commitment) to inanimate objects, such as cars, bridges or pillows, and has been advocated for in

public as a sexual orientation. Together with agalmatophilia and pygmalionism, objectophilia is well

represented and explored in fiction and has been on the rise with the popularization of sex dolls in

the 1970s and sexbots in the last decade. Sexologist Amy Marsh, who conducted one of the rare

studies of object sexuality among those who identify with it, claims that these practices are “best

known as a recent pop culture phenomenon” although they have been around “a lot longer than

YouTube” (par. 5).

A look deeper into literature, folklore and myth reveals that agalmatophiliac practice has, in fact,

been around for at least three millennia. The oldest known example is from the ancient Sumer, the

earliest known civilization, where the ritual of sacred marriage was practiced, in which humans and

statues, which symbolically represented divine entities, were betrothed either as a human-divinity

couple or a divinity-divinity couple (usually Dumuzi and Inanna); Buddhist, Hindu and Greek

religions also know a similar ritual (hieros gamos in Greek) (Stol 645, 647, see more in Lapinkivi). That

is not to say that modern pygmalionism is a reflection of these practices: the sacred marriage was a

ritual performed for the sake of beliefs and not for the sake of the act itself. A goddess—for the

non-religious, a projection of the mind, for the religious, an omnipotent entity and agency—was

believed to be incorporated in a statue or a temple prostitute: the two were standing in for a higher

entity as a sort of prosthesis. Moreover, the success of the ritual resided outside the performative

relationship, in the fertility of the crops. I am not making a claim that the ritual practices involving

humanlike statues or other objects as a substitute for a spiritual entity are agalmatophiliac per se; the

point of this connection to ancient ritual practices is solely to flesh out the fact that such practices

were present in the early days of human culture, which is further reflected in literary studies through

the study of mythology and folklore and their impact on literature.

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When presenting unusual conditions, new technology, lesser-known ideas, or even history of a

phenomenon, science scholars frequently begin with its fictional depictions. The condition of

pygmalionism is commonly introduced with a literary example beyond the famous Ovid’s

Pygmalion. Marsh turns to classical literature, Victor Hugo’s character Quasimodo from Notre-Dame

de Paris (1831). Quasimodo is a hunchback feared by people as a sort of monster that “loved [the

bells], caressed them, talked to them, understood them;” “Claude Frollo had finally made him the

bell ringer of Notre-Dame, and to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to

Romeo” (Marsh par. 16-17).7

Actual examples of pygmalionism are no less convincing than fictional ones. A lesser-known

example occurred when sculptor John Gibson fell in love with his statue, which he named The

Tinted Venus. He created his Venus in 1851 in lifelike colors, just like the ancient Greeks: “I took

the liberty to decorate it in a fashion unprecedented in modern times. I tinted the flesh like warm

ivory—scarcely red—the eyes blue, the hair blond, and the net which contains the hair golden”

(Eastlake 211). When the statue was finished, he could not part ways with it until he was forced to

give it up five years later:

“When all my labour was complete I often sat down quietly and alone before my work, meditating upon it and
consulting my own simple feelings. I endeavoured to keep myself free from self-delusion as to the effect of the
colouring. I said to myself ‘Here is a little nearer approach to life—it is therefore more impressive—yes—yes
indeed she seems an ethereal being with her blue eyes fixed on me!’ At moments I forgot that I was gazing at
my own production; there I sat before her, long and often. How was I ever to part with her!” (Eastlake 212).8

7In the medical field, the character of Quasimodo gave his name to two different diagnoses: Quasimodo complex is
“personality disorder is which there is abnormal concern about a defect in one’s physical appearance” (‘Quasimodo’),
and Quasimodo syndrome is “a clinical complex characterised by severe kyphoscoliosis, dyspnoea with associated
hypoxia and altered sleep pattern (parasomnia)” (‘Quasimodo syndrome’).

8Thomas Anstey Guthrie seemed to have been inspired by Gibson when writing The Tinted Venus (1885), possibly also
picking on the motifs from Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1835). The statue-turned-human, in a comedic tone as

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The most known example of an agalmatophiliac or, as she identifies herself, objectúm sexual is Erika

Eiffel, an American competitive archer and a prominent advocate for object sexuality, who claims

that her relationship with Lance, her competition bow, “helped her to become a world-class archer”

(Simpson par. 1). However unusual naming an object might seem at first, let us consider that it is

not only agalmatophiliacs that give objects human names; most commonly, names are given to

everyday objects with a relational agency (cars, musical instruments, other devices in everyday use).

Eiffel also had a twenty-year long relationship with the Berlin Wall, which inspired the theater

musical production Erika’s Wall. She is not the only lover of the famous wall: Swede Eija-Riitta

Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer ‘married’ it in a commitment ceremony in 1979; their relationship ended when

the wall was brought down. As Eiffel’s name discloses, she too married a famous monument. If

such marriage was official, Eiffel might be able to obtain French citizenship and Eklöf German.

Perhaps the French cultural icon could also obtain an American citizenship and become an

American object, like Gustave Eiffel’s other famous creation, the Statue of Liberty? Apropos of the

Statue of Liberty, the statue has a long-distance lover as well: Englishwoman Amanda Whittaker,

who calls it Libby, as reported on various tabloid newspaper websites, which are most interested in

obscure relationships like these.

opposed to Mérimée’s drama-turned-tragedy, responds to Victorian repression of sexuality. The topic of the novella was
attractive to adaption (most notably, 1941 musical fantasy, 1921 silent film, and 1948 feature film).

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3.1.2 Autism

Amy Marsh’s paper draws a strong correlation of object sexuality with autistic disorders.9 Likewise,

experience of the community grown around the website for objectum sexuals, founded by Eiffel,

revealed “a growing percentage of OS people are diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a spectrum

of autism” (‘What is OS?’ par. 28)10 (in the latest, fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of

Mental Disorders published in 2013, Asperger’s syndrome has been abandoned as a separate category

from autism and classified under autism). Medical research has connected autism with liking objects

since the very discovery of the condition. In the seminal clinical study of autism, Leo Kanner’s

‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact’ from 1943,11 children with autism are said to prefer

objects to other persons, particularly those that “do not change their appearance and position, that

retain their sameness and never threaten to interfere with the child’s aloneness” (246). Kanner

further links the desire for “aloneness” with an interest in objects (242)12—a connection that many

Pygmalion-like stories strongly support. In this view, people on the autistic spectrum are akin to

9 Marsh finds that among her 21 respondents from Western countries (15 biological women, 3 transgender men, 1
intersex person, and 2 biological men), 62 percent (11 biological women, all transgender men, the intersex person, but
none of the two biological men) were diagnosed or self-diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD): 5 were
diagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, 1 was diagnosed with autism, 4 identified with Asperger’s diagnosis, and 3 “felt they
had or were told they had ‘some traits’ [of Asperger’s],” a disorder that is “under-diagnosed in adults as it did not enter
the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) until 1994”
(par. 41).

10 The object sexuality website also lists connections with other conditions, such as sexual trauma, gender dysphoria,
synesthesia, and animism. Sexual trauma is most often mentioned among scholars that write on object sexuality. Marsh
criticizes these scholars: “‘experts’ who are approached by journalists for comments on objectum sexuality have generally
assume [sic] a pathology or history of sexual trauma and/or categorize OS as a paraphilia or fetish […] without actual
data or contact with the OS community” (par. 86). Marsh suggests the most “scientifically accessible” explanation of
object sexuality as “object personification synesthesia, […] a form of synesthesia that detects personalities in objects”
(par. 46), as found by Smilek et al.

11Leo Kanner is the father of autistic studies in the USA. He started to study autism in 1938, but was not known in
Europe where, at the same time, Hans Asperger was writing on autism in Europe. Asperger was not known in the USA
until the 1980s.

12 Kanner mentions other characteristics in his first paper but talks only about the interest in objects and sameness in his
later papers.

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agalmatophiliacs. This view affects the autistic therapy today since it commonly uses

anthropomorphic robots to help people on the spectrum gain neurotypical social skills.13

Besides that, people on the autistic spectrum are themselves sometimes described as being machine-

like (and thus object-like), based on perceptions about their social skills (absence of eye contact and

other neuro-typical forms of social connections), the way they express their feelings (supposedly

lacking empathy and not understanding their own emotions), and their speech (flat intonation, as

discussed in the previous chapter). All too frequently, people with autism are described as not being

‘fully’ human (Murray 5, Freeman Loftis 17, Richardson viii), not unlike infants. Moreover, “some of

the language and practices of the medical community can be seen as objectifying or dehumanizing”

towards them (Freeman Loftis 11). Kathleen Richardson discusses in her book, Challenging Sociality:

An Anthropology of Robots, Autism, and Attachment, roboticists drawing on the fields of disability and

difference—particularly autism—to help them create social robots “as if people with disabilities and

differences are somehow not fully human and can be used as a model of comparison” (viii). Besides

investigating this connection, she also points out that robots are considered as something in-

between human and ordinary artefacts: an object that is humanlike enough to move and perhaps

think and feel. Likewise, autism is often wrongly situated in-between such social and asocial

dispositions.

Although Kanner mentioned that autism is “inborn,” he, in fact, seemed to believe that the lack of

“warmhearted fathers and mothers” from his testing group made his patients autistic (250). Not

unlike the creators of inanimate women in the Pygmalion stories, these parents of autistic children

13It is Kanner’s finding that autistic people like objects that drives the philosophy of robot therapy for autism today in
UK, US and Europe (Richardson 12). This drive is sometimes criticized for its foundational viewing of people with
autism as “lacking in empathy or meaningful sociality” (15).

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are described as “persons strongly preoccupied with abstractions of a scientific, literary, or artistic

nature, and limited in genuine interest in people” (ib.). In the 1960 edition of Time magazine, Kanner

went so far as to claim that mothers of autistic children “just happen to defrost enough to produce a

child” (Richardson 8). Kanner thus connected the inability to reproduce with emotional coldness,

enforcing centuries-old prejudice towards mothers of children with a disability. It is not a long

stretch from Kanner’s view of these parents to pygmalionism, in which a person unable to produce a

child naturally creates a human being in unconventional, inventive ways. This is the view that

enforces the conception of autistic people as less human—as artificial humanoids in the Pygmalion

paradigm—and puts their parents in the eccentric creator position—also in relation to the

Pygmalion paradigm. (Kanner later changed his mind about parental influence and ascribed autism

to genetics predominantly, but the ‘refrigerator mother theory,’ with the help of Bruno Bettelheim,

became widespread in the US for decades before falling out of favor.)

Pygmalionism and agalmatophilia are, indeed, much more than just a mere interest in objects: they

also assume erotic and meaningful relationship with the nonhuman. Erotic relationships with objects

are not rare (e.g. sex toys) and neither are meaningful relationships with objects as symbolical

representations (e.g. tokens, talismans and amulets, possessions or photographs of a beloved or

deceased person). In a collection of meditative essays on objects, Evocative Objects: Things We Think

with, social theorist Sherry Turkle sums up a few common observations: objects in general can be

“active life presences,” are able to “catalyze self-creation,” and “bring together thought and feeling”

(9). Just like autistic traits are characteristic for every infant for a while,14 objects are companions not

14In Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark, the autistic narrator comments on this claim: “All babies are born autistic, one of
our group said once. We laughed nervously. We agreed, but it was dangerously to say so. […] You might think, reading
the literature, that only neurologically damaged children do this, but in fact all infants control their exposure—by closing
their eyes, averting their gaze, or simply falling asleep when the world is too much. […] It takes a neurologically normal

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only to objectophiliacs. However, both components, the erotic and the social, merged together in a

human-nonhuman relationship, are certainly sporadic: a sex toy does not ordinarily turn into a

relationship partner or a photograph into the human it depicts.

Pygmalionism is portrayed as a bizarre condition in popular media as well as in scholarly literature

(see Haslam 726). It is hard to estimate its frequency because the data is mostly “gathered from

arrest records [that] likely under-reflect the incidence of paraphilias” (Osborne and Wise 296) and

because “fetishistic individuals […] rarely seek treatment” (302). Most scholars consider it rare, yet

one legal article states that “this rubber-doll type of fixation is not uncommon, as indicated by the

broad availability of commercial dolls” (Peak 209)—a prevalent misconception of viewing

pygmalionism as only sexual.

3.1.3 Legal Literature

Overall, legal literature on pygmalionism assumes it to be—possibly based on medical

descriptions—strictly sexual, labeling it as an interest in sex dolls and/or mannequins and statues

(Holmes 41-42, Holmes and Holmes 82, Cavanagh 19, Drzazga 217, Peak 209). Many older and

newer papers on paraphilias do not specifically mention it (Wakefield, Carstens and Stevens, Beech

and Harkins), but those that do consider pygmalionism “clearly abnormal in our [American] society”

(Peak 204) and rank it together with voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, narcissism, anti-

intellectualism, troilism, kleptomania,15 frottage, masochism, sadism, pedophilia, transvestism,

infant years to learn to integrate the incoming sensory data into a coherent concept of the world. While it took me much
longer—and I readily admit that my sensory processing is not normal even now—I went at the task much the same way
as any other infant. First flooded by ungated, unedited sensory input, protecting myself from sensory overload with sleep
and inattention” (39).

15Kleptomania, “stealing not for utilitarian gains” (Peak 212) – is included among these sexual deviations because it is
often considered sexual, per Peak’s words: “Women are more often affected by this condition. The sexual meaning of

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exhibitionism, bestiality, necrophilia, and other, mostly sexual, aberrations (see Cavanagh 11,

Drzazga 217, Holmes 27, 41-42, Osborne and Wise 296). In Holmes, these aberrations are labeled as

“nuisance sex crimes,” as they “do not endanger the very existence of society, but they do cause

some discomfort and a general level of alarm and suspicion” (27). Thus, in all these interpretations

“sex offenders differ from other law violators” as only “few of these offenders (with the exception

of the most blatant or emotionally disturbed) will come to the attention of the justice system” (Peak

210). Peak, curiously, concludes his legal paper by condemning sexual offenders, in David A. Kaplan

words, as “reprobates…rapacious monsters” (Peak 212, Kaplan 48). The power of the creator and

the lover over the humanlike creation is a problematic but fundamental part of such relationships.

Although literary works tend to illuminate an understanding towards a Pygmalionesque condition

and like to depict humanoids as dangerous to humans, some also depict the creators or lovers of

humanoids as perverse and potentially criminal (Nešković, Alcott).

In a study of mostly fictional lovers that fell in love with images, Maurizio Bettini comes to the same

conclusion as David A. Kaplan and Kenneth Peak: “The fact that the lover of images would be seen

as someone who has committed a grave sexual crime, a monstrous crime similar to incest, is further

confirmed by […] the fact that Pygmalion—the real one—was a king, and we have seen other

tyrannical emperors (Tiberius, Caligula, Nero) involved in similar stories [as they were] supposed to

be especially entitled to commit any sort of monstrous sexual transgression” (70). In Of the Affection of

Fathers to Their Children, Michel de Montaigne links pygmalionism with incest as well and concludes

his essay by quoting a verse from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In earlier accounts, but not in Ovid,

Pygmalion is the king of Cyprus: “And to those furious and irregular passions that have sometimes

the theft is unconscious in kleptomania vera, but the stolen object has a symbolic significance, in that the theft may be a
substitute for sexual gratification or intimacy. Often it is during menstruation that the desire to steal occurs” (212).

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inflamed fathers towards their own daughters, and mothers towards their own sons, the like is also

found in this other sort of parentage: witness what is related of Pygmalion who, having made the

statue of a woman of singular beauty, fell so passionately in love with this work of his, that the gods

in favour of his passion inspired it with life” (254). In the fictional story another famous tyrant,

Oedipus the King, his sexual transgression brings forth tragic deaths in his state and family. How can a

Pygmalionesque incest be considered less severe than oedipal, considering that Pygmalion knows

about the origins of his daughter-wife and Oedipus is unaware of his own?

For treatment, journalist Kaplan lists available “forms of therapy in use for sexual offenders. Most

common is group therapy, which is patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous. Advocates of this

approach contend that offenders can fool a counselor, but not so easily each other. Other forms

include chemicals to reduce sex drive, empathy training, role-playing to improve social skills, electric

shock and other negative conditioning techniques” (49). Ronald Holmes, a criminal justice professor

writing in the 1980s, suggests “some form of in-depth counseling” or, “in some cases, aversion

therapy” (42), which implies he considers it a mental disease. In a 2013 paper on paraphilias, Melissa

Hamilton, also from the field of criminal justice, adjudicates all sex crimes as a mental disease.

3.1.3.1 Marriage

Yet, among these legal and illegal practices, pygmalionism seems to be the only one that seeks

legislation which would not only make it recognized and widely accepted in a (yet unofficial)

marriage, but also socially valuable. Marriages and kinships are bound to change in the virtual age.

Marriage “has always evolved alongside changes in technology” and Marina Ashade predicts “the

adoption of sexbot technology could disentangle the association between sexual intimacy and

marriage, but also lead to higher quality marriages on the whole” (par. 5). Many see growing

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anthropomorphization of nonhumans and dehumanization of humans as one and the same force.

For example, in 2008 California voted for farm animals to be kept less confined, but the voters also

denied homosexual couples privileges that had already been granted within the state (Waytz et al.

61). Not surprisingly, proponents of gay marriage connect it to the absurdity of prohibiting

interracial marriages while, perhaps more surprisingly, some read the opponents’ views as “open[ing]

the door for humans to marry robots” (ib.).

Robot marriage vs. gay marriage parallels fall along the same argumentation as sex dolls vs. real

women. Contraceptives altered the way society viewed marriage and female sexuality: “for the first

time in history, sexual intimacy and marriage were seen to be intrinsically connected” (Ashade par.

8). After early contraception became available in 1910s, American behavioralist John B. Watson said

that men will not marry in fifty years as “we don’t want helpmates anymore, we want playmates”

(par. 6). Because women using contraception cannot get pregnant, to marry a woman for the sake of

sexual pleasure was seen as the same as marrying a sex doll.

Marina Ashade does not think that sexbots will change “the biological imperative of individuals to

want to share their lives, and raise their children, with another human being,” however, this

technology is capable of “disentangle[ing] the association of sexual intimacy and the life as a family,”

opening new forms of marriage (e.g. a household of two heterosexual married women, a

homosexual man forming a household with a heterosexual woman, etc.) (par. 14). If sexbots are

thought of as a futuristic asset, the dating technology applications are undeniably changing the

dating landscape by forming new connections outside of a person’s social circle and multiplying and

speeding up dating activities (consider the drastic change between years 2005, when, as a rule, a date

was set by meeting in person first, and 2020, when a potential date is arranged through an app).

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Many American sexologists are tied to the science fiction movement, most prominently the founder

of the Amazing Stories and Sexology magazines, Hugo Gernsback, sometimes called The Father of

Science Fiction, for whom the Hugo award is named. A 1964 issue of the Sexology magazine, for

example, features Gernsback’s article ‘The Future: Electronic Mating’ where marriage is called “a

stupid gamble,” based on speculations on how computers will be able to help us to find the most

compatible mate by collecting our data.16 According to Gernsback, electrocardiographs,

electroencephalographs, electropsychometers, and polygraphs will be able to measure our psychic

responses to romantic scenes, and computers will calculate all of our data into a Sex Quotient that

will serve to compare compatibility percentages of potential marriage partners (454-55).

While a growing number of people uses date applications to meet potential partners (Tinder,

OkCupid, Hinge), some long-distance couples use virtual hug (Hugvie, Hug Shirt, Huggy Pajama)

and kiss applications (Kissenger) (see more in Lin et al.), and some lead their relationships through a

virtual world (provided by video games, for instance). McArthur and Twist call this the first wave of

digisexualities—sexual experiences that are enabled or facilitated by digital technology. The second

wave, of which the defining feature is “immersivity,” requires no human partner, or “their presence

is not essential to the experience” (McArthur and Twist 336). In other words, an actual human being

behind the screen is not absolutely needed to lead a virtual relationship; for some, an avatar will do.

Virtual boyfriends and girlfriends come cheap (Chinese Taobao, US Invisible Boyfriend) and are

designed to prepare people for a human-human relationship through romance simulation games

16Computers would collect data such as “heredity, individual taste, sex habits, education, race, color and texture of skin,
I.Q., general health, past illnesses, texture of hair, Rh blood factor, odor preferences, physiological sensitivity over
various parts of the body, musical sense, Rorschach test reactions, artistic sense, speed of various perceptions, religious
sense, color perception, physical contour, ethical sense—and perhaps a hundred other vital aspects” (Gernsback 453).

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(Indian (retired) webpage biwihotohaisi, Japanese Voltage Romance Apps)—“simulation is often

justified as practice for real-life skills” (Turkle 287). All these services offer idealized versions of

human partners, avoiding faulty, complex humans just like Ovid’s Pygmalion did. “This is the closest

to having a real boyfriend who is just physically absent” (Chamorro-Premuzic par. 4). As long as the

lack of a body is not a deal breaker, digital surrogates (‘dirrogates’) make for, in the words of the

agalmatophiliac Count d’Erville from Madame de Stäel’s Le Mannequin, “delightfully

accommodating” (345) partners. In pornographic and video game industries dirrogates are widely in

use and have already merged with the film industry and the virtual reality genre (Dahaner 5). We are

about to wake up in a Pygmalionesque dream. Marriage is the crown of it from the very beginning

with the sacred marriage ritual and Ovid’s happy ending.

Marriage became an option for Ovid’s Pygmalion only after his statue became a woman of flesh and

blood. Pygmalions of today, however, instead of shyly praying to a higher entity for animation, ask

for marriage licenses. Marrying an object is not always a given: in 2016, British artist Tracey Emin

married a rock in her garden while Utahan Chris Sevier declined an official license to marry his

computer three times. That does not stop people to—seldom seriously and rather as a tryout—ask

objects to marry them, e.g. Alexa was proposed to by a million people in 2017 alone. Objects that

speak humanese are programmed to politely decline. It is not a given, however, that they will always

be programmed unsuitable for an interspecies marriage. In comparison, consider the prohibition of

interracial marriages in the United States until 1967. Furthermore, let us keep in mind that today for

many homosexual people (who are often listed in older studies of paraphilias mentioned above)

marriage is not an option either. The later comparison is not solely mine: Sherry Turkle, a

psychologist in MIT Media Lab, was accused by her interviewer that her opposition to human-robot

relationships is just like standing against homosexual marriage—a view that would surely become

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outdated soon (5). After all, pygmalionism and agalmatophilia have been around since the first

civilization, if we consider rituals as such, or for centuries if we exclude religious practices. If they

become more common and prominent, conveniently categorized under sexuality types, society’s

views will surely change and there will be no more talk of paraphilias and law offenses.

3.1.4 Medical Literature

As opposed to most legal literature (with the exception of the obscure Drzazga’s book), medical

literature shows more awareness of the history of pygmalionism from the very beginning. In 1905,

Havelock Ellis recognized that attraction to a statue has been documented in ancient cultures and

gives examples from Lucian, Aelian and Athaneus, as well as examples from a recent newspaper. His

definition—“erotomania founded on the sense of vision and closely related to the allurement of

beauty” (188) —acknowledges that the galatea is not simply a sex toy. Ellis understands that

pygmalionism is not just a sexual anomaly but also a concept for exploring humanness alongside

human artistic imagination. Ellis is not the first physician to discuss it from a medical perspective:

his example—a performance of a prostitute who is asked to assume the part of a statue that

gradually comes to life—comes from Albert Eulenburg’s 1985 description of pygmalionism in

brothels as recounted by a former police chief in Paris (107). The first seems to be Richard Freiherr

von Krafft-Ebing, however, who described a few cases already in 1886 in one of the first texts on

sexual pathology but did not name it (as pygmalionism, fetishism or any other term) or discuss it

further (440, 494, 525).

With no exceptions, medical examples consider pygmalionism in relation to statues and objects only,

mostly using literary examples which allow for an extension to other kinds of entities. As everyone

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else does when introducing pygmalionism (with the exception of law scholars who only mention

Ovid’s Pygmalion), Ellis and Eulenburg present it with a literary example or analogy. Ellis uses

Heinrich Heine’s Florentine Nights, and parallels the author with the character of a boy who was in

love with a statue: “as this book appears to be largely autobiographical, the incident might have been

founded on a fact” (188). Eulenburg’s second example of pygmalionism compares its lupanar

pygmalion, “einem ganz decrepiden Greise,” with Paris from Greek mythology. “Der neumodische

Preisrichter” admires statues of goddesses Juno, Minerva and Venus and gives them francs instead

of an apple, choosing Venus (108). Sigmund Freud, a neurologist like Eulenburg, writes a whole

essay on a fictional Pygmalionesque protagonist and diagnoses him with psychosis or neurosis,

respectively. The mere fact that psychoanalysis was interested in pygmalionism shows that the

disorder was considered mental from early on. Early investigators before Freud rank pygmalionism

with bestiality, necrophilia, sadism, etc., and, as we have seen, it is still classified among similar

paraphilias today. No treatment is suggested, but practice is clearly condemned by Ellis: “it is the

ignorant and uncultured who feel the indecency of statues and thus betray their sense of the sexual

appeal of such objects” (188). He does not, however, think that this judgment applies to ancient

Greece because their statues looked more human (!): “We have to remember that in Greece statues

played a very prominent part in life, and also that they were tinted, and thus more lifelike than with

us” (188).17 With this distinction Ellis draws a line—akin to the uncanny valley—between wishful

pygmalionism and blind agalmatophilia.

17Shawn O’Bryhim suggests that Greeks invented accounts of agalmatophilia for an economic purpose: “to draw
tourists to works of art whose erotic qualities were so compelling that they allegedly made aristocrats lose their self-
control and behave in a way that resulted in infamy—or even death” (428).

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Medical literature (followed by social sciences) labels pygmalionism or agalmatophilia with either a

more general term of fetishism, without explicitly mentioning humanlike objects but rather more

common fetishes, such as solely body parts, or with a term paraphilia NOS [not otherwise specified]

that does “not inherently involve suffering, humiliation, or nonconsenting persons” (Osborne and

Wise 306). Older medical studies (among other things, they list homosexuality under paraphilias)

suggest “aversion therapy” for “many of the minor deviances, such as fetishism, [as they] lend

themselves admirably to deconditioning processes using response procedures” (Haslam 731), or

psychotherapy combined with drugs (733). Studies of paraphilias occur more often in the last ten

years, but the treatment still follows the psychological or the pharmaceutical route from the older

studies, usually involving both (Osborne and Wise 314). The etiology of the paraphilias is yet

unknown but widely speculated.18 Besides the fact that the discussed cultures are predominantly

Western, a culture-sensitive approach is often disregarded, although culture predates the conceptions

of paraphilias (see more in Bhugra et al.). The authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders (DSM-5) by the American Psychiatric Association presents criteria for paraphilia as a

repetitive, intrusive and at least six-months long behavior (685). DSM-5 or ISD-10 do not

specifically mention pygmalionism or agalmatophilia (up to this date, January 2020), which is a

telling fact. Perhaps the issue is in the terminology itself (too literary, too detailed?). The two

conditions fit the description of a fetishistic disorder in DSM-5 as an interest in nonliving objects or

body parts and is listed among the eight most common and potentially harmful paraphilias. In ICD-

10, they fit the description of a paraphilic disorder involving non-consenting individuals.

18Psychoanalysis explains fetishism as coming from “unconscious fears and a sense of inadequacy related to early
childhood experience” (Osborne and Wise 307). Other theories speculate that paraphilias originate in “sexual abuse,
family dysfunction, behavior problems,” even if some studies have disproved these findings (309), from childhood
conditioning (309), deviant arousal (310), courtship disorder (311), personality (311), or biology (312).

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Yet, there are many faults in categorizing paraphilias in psychiatric literature. Christian C. Joyal

criticizes the scholarly approach to paraphilias in a 2018 commentary by showing that, first,

paraphilias are not necessarily that unusual (he argues that most could be classified “normophilic”);

second, the definition of paraphilia “derives more from historical, social, cultural, and religious

factors than medical or scientific evidences” (1378) and is in itself tautological (1379); third, “non-

normophilic” interests do not necessarily reveal a mental disorder (more research is needed); and

fourth, the criteria we have now (most prominently in DSM-5) provide “no instrument to evaluate

them” (1378). As a token of changing conceptions of paraphilias, in 2016 the Working Group on

Sexual Disorders and Sexual Health removed fetishism, masochism, sadism and transvestism from

paraphilias, stating: “The regulation of private behaviour without health consequences to the

individual or to others may be considered in different societies to be a matter for criminal laws,

religious proscription, or public morality, but is not a legitimate focus of public health or of health

classification” (212). This only shows the issue needs to be addressed from a fresh perspective, as

has recently occurred with homosexuality in the West.

Literature could help in researching the subject by pointing out how different sexual orientations and

identities unfold, inform character, impact relationships, and display values, among other things. For

example, medical literature from Krafft-Ebing up until DSM-5 points out that such disorders are

nearly exclusively reported in males.19 In literature, the latter finding—repeated ever since medicine

described these disorders—is practically a given. The only exception to this unwritten rule is when

fiction explores new ways of thinking, as in exploring a sporadic situation where a woman is the

19Havelock Ellis, who puts pygmalionism under the visual section of his book rather than under touch, smell or hearing,
believes this is because “[b]eauty in the human species is, above all, a feminine attribute, making its appeal to men” (189)
while “[w]omen admire a man’s strength rather than his beauty” (191).

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creator of an artificial man. Literature has therefore recognized various aspects of this disorder way

before science did, while also addressing the complexities and ramifications of such a condition.

Besides, literary examples of private practices, such as agalmatophilia or living with any kind of

paralysis, can point out the complexity of these cases by introducing different points of view,

imagining original solutions to given issues, or by alternating circumstances—one of the most

prominent features of science fiction—and thus introducing new ways of addressing these

conditions. It is no wonder then that scientific descriptions of paraphilias, paralysis, and other

medical conditions begin with literary examples (see Marsh, Laureys et al., Kondziella, etc.).

As this short examination of pygmalionism as a diagnosis shows, literature plays a central role in

exploring love for objects from the earliest times on, which is rendered already by the very term

pygmalionism. Literary depictions are largely left to represent Pygmalionesque symptoms and

circumstances. They also reveal related questions, such as: Why do we want to create humans

artificially? Why do we seek solace with humanlike objects? How is human love different from a

human-nonhuman relationship? It is our current reality, not fiction, that demands us to re-think

pygmalionism from a social, medical and legal perspective. Yet, to assess the condition, ask the right

questions and search for the answers, we can gain insight from the stories.

3.2 A New Typology of the Pygmalion Paradigm

The Pygmalionesque idea of a human man in love with a nonhuman woman was preserved in

ancient stories across a great variety of cultures. Although Greek mythology provided the most

influential example of Ovid’s Pygmalion (8 AD), I found some (largely disregarded) Western

language translations of Pygmalion-like tales among Native African tribes Bella Coola (McIlwraith

356-357, Boas 745), Tsimshian (Boas 744-745), Kwakiutl and Nootka (Boas 745), and a separate

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story in Tlingit (Swinton 181-182, Boas 746); two tales among North African Kabyle people

(Frobenius 129-133 and 177-192); and one tale in two versions, circulating on the Silk Road in early

Medieval Ages all the way from India to China (Sanskrit version in Hofinger 185-187 after Dutt 166-

168, also in Pinault 253; Degener 47-48; Tibetan version in Schiefner 17-18, also in Davids 361-362;

Chinese versions in Chavannes 2: 12-13 and Dschi 323-324; Tocharian version in Sieg 8-13, Lane

33-53, Malzahn A5-A9, and Pinault 254-267). Folk traditions also carry this myth worldwide, for

instance, the motif is prominent in an Estonian folk ballad Kuldnaine (Goldwife) (Kurrik 108-111),

which is believed to have originated around 1200 AD (Kurrik 12). I argue that the presence of this

motif in such a variety of unconnected cultures lends support to the archetypal status of the

Pygmalion myth narrative. The dominance of the Pygmalion myth in Western literatures was one of

the reasons this archetype was disregarded in non-European cultures. (Admittedly, I also build on

European conceptions of the myth and use Greek terminology for designating pygmalionism and

agalmatophilia).

Furthermore, I propose a new typology of the Pygmalion paradigm that presents across cultures in

two dominant types. The usual view on the Pygmalion paradigm is shifted from the diachronic to

the typological, setting aside the spatial and chronological origins of the text to focus on how the

main motifs play out in the text itself. The two types are especially relevant to this chapter because

they are primarily distinguished by pygmalionism and agalmatophilia. The types are hence named the

pygmalionsque type, where the creator is also the lover of the inanimate creation and thus aware of

its inanimate status, and the petrophiliac type, where the creator is a separate character from the

lover and can delude the lover into thinking that the humanoid is a real human. This distinction is

important because it affects the development of the story.

In the pygmalionsque type, such as Ovid’s poem of Pygmalion, the lover and the creator are one and

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the same character. The metamorphosis is granted in this type, followed by a successful relationship

of the human man and humanoid woman. At least two of the three criteria need to be fulfilled to

categorize the story into this type. In newer works, which predominantly deal with scientific creation

as opposed to artistic creation in earlier works, the creators of the artificial woman are often

multiple, such as companies, presided over by the eccentric creator-scientist (e.g. both Blade Runner

films). The lover is not always one of them but might sometimes help the artificial woman to

develop into (more of) a human through their romantic relationship (e.g. film Her).20

In the petrophiliac type, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann, the lover’s delusion

about the artificial woman he loves might be severe. This type not only leads to broken hearts but

also broken minds and bodies, be it human, nonhuman, or both. Ultimately, the relationship in this

type is bound to fail because the artificial woman never becomes human or human enough. (The

line between these two concepts will be explored in the following parts of this chapter in the context

20 Examples of the Pygmalionesque type are Ovid’s Pygmalion, André-François Boureau-Deslandes’s Pigmalion ou
la statue animée (1741), J. J. Rousseau’s Pygmalion, scène lyrique (1762), Mme de Stäel’s Le Mannequin (1811), and
Champfleury’s L'homme aux figures de cire (1849), William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; or, the new Pygmalion (1894), Ventura
García-Calderón’s ‘La leyenda de Pigmalión’ (1935), Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Pygmalion (1942), most of which thematize the
relation between life and art. The relation between life and science becomes dominant in the twentieth century with
science fiction texts like Lester del Rey’s ‘Helen O’Loy’ (1938) and more recent works, many of which exist as a text and
as a film: The Stepford Wives (Byran Forbes’s 1975 and Frank Oz’s 2004 adaptation), based on Ira Levin’s 1972 novel;
Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Michael
Gottlieb’s Mannequin (1987); Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997) and S1m0ne (2002); and Lazar Bodroža’s 2018 A.I. Rising,
based on Zoran Nešković’s short story ‘Predveče se nikako ne može...’ (1988). Film as a medium thematized the
Pygmalion myth from its very beginnings, such as with Georges Méliès’s Pygmalion et Galathée (1898), and is still very
much interested in the topic. Dušan Makavejev’s early short film Spomenicima ne treba verovati (1958) parodizes object
sexuality through a political satire. Famous G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) is also of this type. This explains why audience
demanded so adamantly Eliza and Higgins to end up together while Shaw wanted to break the cliché of pairing the
maker and his creation: this is how the film My Fair Lady (1964) is ended whereas the play ends of a petrophiliac note
with Eliza marrying Freddy. Casting human Eliza as a galatea, Shaw followed the recently invented tradition of
educational pygmalionsque texts, in which a young woman of a lower class (or somehow lower value) is educated by her
paternal mentoring figure, starting with Rétif de la Bretonne’s Le nouveau Pygmalion (1870), W. S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and
Galatea (1871), Henry James’s Watch and Ward (1871). Folkloristic motifs from the Tlingit tale and the second Kabyle tale
(Frobenius 177-192) fall under this category, too.

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of autonomy and personhood.)21

Arguably, works where the artificial woman does not become flesh but is completely human in mind

(intelligence, morals) and feelings (emotions, empathy) also fit this type. Such examples are Richard

Powers’s Galatea 2.2 (1995) and Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), where the womanlike artificial

intelligence systems achieve the level of humanness compared to a bodiless or rather completely

paralyzed human. Such Pygmalionesque relationships are therefore possible only if the artificial

entity is as humanlike as it gets, passing for a human, or actually becomes one. If the artificial

woman is unlike a human, either too little or too much, the relationship does not work. (As testified

in film Her, Theodore’s AI bodiless girlfriend Samantha ends the relationship with Theodore once

she turns from a humanlike entity into a superhuman AI.) Establishing the difference between

humanlike entities that managed to penetrate the realm of humanness and contrasting them to the

entities that do not achieve this goal is one of the reasons this typology is useful. The typology and

these fictional works can help us not only to address ethical issues that rise with new computational

technologies and biotechnologies but also draw the impossible but indispensable line of what is

considered human in the twenty-first century.

There are many variations of both types, where one component of the Pygmalion myth is missing,

for instance, the romantic relation between one human and the artificial woman (in C. L. Moore’s

1944 ‘No Woman Born,’ Deidre does not have one suitor but an audience that adores her; the gist

21Examples of the petrophiliac type, in which the creator is separate from the lover, are E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Der
Sandmann’ (1816), Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s The Tinted Venus (1898), Jacinto Grau’s play El señor de Pigmalión (1921),
Prosper Mérimée’s ‘La Vénus d’Ille’ (1937), Villiers de l’Isle-Adam L’Éve future (1886), Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva (1907),
Jan Wolkers’s Kort Amerikaans (1962), Anne McCaffrey’s ‘The Ship Who Sang’ (1969), James Tiptree Jr.’s ‘The Girl Who
Was Plugged In’ (1974), Dušan Makavejev’s short film Antonijevo razbijeno ogledalo (1947), Tong Enzheng’s ‘The Death of
the World’s First Robot’ (1982), Craig Gillespie’s film Lars and the Real Girl (2007), and Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina
(2015). Folkloristic motifs from the ancient Silk Road tale, the first Kabyle tale (Frobenius 129-133), and Tsimshian and
Bella Coola Native American tale fall under this type.

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of the short story is very similar to a Pygmalionesque 2002 film Simone), or where the focus is on one

of the aspects of the myth (e.g., the woman’s perfection in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 ‘The

Birthmark’). There are also many examples of the so-called reverse Pygmalion, where a human

woman is turned into a nonhuman scientific creation (Hawthorne’s 1844 ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’) or

artistic creation (E. A. Poe’s 1942 ‘The Oval Portrait;’ related is also Oscar Wilde’s 1980 Picture of

Dorian Gray). Turning humans, especially women, into stone is a common motif in folk traditions,

frequently adapted by some prominent authors: an ancient Greek story of Anaxarete and Iphis

(Bettini 150), a tale of King Midas’s golden touch, adapted by Nathaniel Hawthorne (‘The Golden

Touch,’ 1843), Hawthorne’s ‘Drawne’s Wooden Image’ (1943), and Louisa May Alcott’s A Marble

Woman, or The Mysterious Model (1965), and a ballad of Katalena in Slovenian folk tradition, adapted

by Svetlana Makarovič (‘Katalena,’ 2009).

A rare version of the reverse Pygmalion is a simple gender swap between the typically male creator

and the typically female creation,22 for example, in Gaston Leroux’s diptych novels La Poupée

Sanglante: La Sublime Aventure de Bénédict Masson and Le Machine à Assassiner: Gabriel (both 1923), the

maker’s daughter helps him to create the mask for the male automaton and falls in love with him.

More common than a woman being the creator of a barely human man like is the gender swap

between the lovers, a human woman and a barely human man. For instance, in Roald Dahl’s short

story ‘William and Mary’ (1959), William dies and lives on only in the form of his brain. In Tong

Enzheng’s ‘The Death of the World’s First Robot’ ( , written in 1982 and

based on an account from Liezi ( ) from the fifth century BC), the robot is male. Another

22 I assume these versions are rare predominantly due to the vulnerability factor of the created: the created needs to be
someone who is dependent, such as a child or a woman, since a vulnerable entity is easier to subjugate and own, the way
slaves were and robots are considered to be owned.

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example would be Niccol’s Gattaca where a genetically inferior man transcends to the realm of

(super) humans. The main change here is not only the typical change of genders, but rather fact that

in the dystopian world of Gattaca a genetically engineered (and thus partly human-made) man is

considered more of a human than naturally conceived man. All of these stories fit the main two

types but have a particular twist on one of the typical components. There are, furthermore, a lot of

poetry, opera and ballet, and visual art works based on the myth or its reinterpretations. Besides,

many other works play with the Pygmalion-like motifs, even if they do not deal with them

thematically.23

3.2.1 Serbian Pygmalion

I argue that both types of the Pygmalion paradigm are dominant across cultures, including Ovidian

influences that would presumably yield only the Pygmalionesque type but have been fruitful in both

types. Many authors, including Ovid, created more than one work on this topic (E. T. A. Hoffmann,

Nathaniel Hawthorne, G. B. Shaw, Gustave Leroux, Karl Čapek, Bruno Schulz, Ira Levin, Andrew

Niccol, Alex Garland…), which is not surprising considering that creation of a humanlike being is

akin to creating lives through literature.

In the Balkans in the second half of the twentieth century, with Yugoslavia and what is now Serbia

at the forefront of this short examination, the Serbian film director Dušan Makavejev stands out not

only with his quality and enfant terrible avant-gardism but also with his interest in pygmalionism. At

23Among countless others works, the motif is raised in Euripides’s Alcestis (438 BC) by Admetus right before Alcestis
gives her life for him, in James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1904) by Lynch’s admiration of a statue, in
Ulysses (1928) by Bloom’s admiration of statues in a museum and Molly’s soliloquy, in Lawrence Durrell’s Justine (1952)
through Capodistria’s father, and in Niobe’s episode in Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959).

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the very start of his career in the 1950s, he produced four short silent amateur films that are rather

unknown today. Two of these short films, which raised Makavejev into national and international

visibility, deal with the Pygmalionesque theme: Antonijevo razbijeno ogledalo [Anthony’s Broken Mirror]

(1957) and Spomenicima ne treba verovati [Don’t Believe in Monuments] (1958). Antonijevo razbijeno ogledalo

presents a man (a lonely man, per Rajko Munitić (41)), a street magician, who falls in love with a

mannequin in the display window of a store. As a result of his infatuation, he sees her move and

return his affection, only to realize that in an attempt to abduct her from the store he broke the

window and his beloved mannequin. Long opening scene, which shows the magician and children

playing with marbles, warns about the nature of illusion. The lover succumbed to the dreamy

surrealist elements of the film and is oblivious to such warnings: he accidentally kills a bunny when

he shows it to his mannequin.

Spomenicima ne treba verovati presents a woman who flirts and tries to seduce a statue of a man in a

park. When she realizes her efforts will bear no fruit, she turns immobile and statuesque. Casting a

woman as the lover is quite a revolutionary move in itself and might be related to the broader social

commentary of the film. The film was the first of many Makavejev’s works that were censored and it

was quickly understood by the regime to be casting shadow on socialist politics that use self-

aggrandizing monuments as political tools (Vidan 63). An erotic game performed on a notable

public object brings down “the monumentality of the monument […] posing a potential threat to a

system in which human needs are subordinated to hierarchies dictated from above” (64). Bringing in

the more recent perspective of the defenders of sex robots rights, having no agency of their own,

monuments cannot speak for themselves and can easily be abused and misrepresented, despite

playing a role in the political order that raised them. This absence of power in statues and the

overwhelming power of their creators and lovers is accentuated in watching Makavejev’s film after

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the #MeToo movement revolution, since the historical socio-political topic of the systematic abuse

crosses with an instance of sexual abuse in an open public setting.

Ethical considerations about potential abuse of humanlike entities with no agency are also a

prominent theme in another Pygmalionesque story from Serbia: Zoran Nešković’s short story

‘Predveče se nikako ne može…’, which was published in the second, extended edition of Serbian

science fiction anthology Tamni vilajet: antologija znanstvene fantastike [The Dark Vilayet: An Anthology of

Science Fiction] in 1989. The short story is not translated but was adapted by Dimitrije Vojnov into a

2018 film Ederlezi Rising that used English as the main language. The story and the film feature a

cosmonaut who is sent on a space mission with a female android that he falls in love with and

attempts to make completely human. After multiple sexual encounters, including rape scenarios, the

cosmonaut feels guilty about being given complete authority and agency over this relationship. His

attempt to save the android from following his commands and getting rid of the overriding program

is successful, however, android, finally autonomous, reveals that she finds him repulsive. I have yet

to find Western works written before 1988 that deal with the ethics in sexual relationships between

human and nonhuman entities with that much attention as these three Serbian works. These three

works are also all the Serbian works on pygmalionism I was able to discover; apart from the many

later films discussed below.

Marko Živković suggests in the chapter of his 2011 monograph, Serbian Dreambook: National

Imaginary in the Time of Milošević, that the barbaric and uncivilized Balkans experience Reverse

Pygmalion in literature and film. The Reverse Pygmalion situation takes place right after president

Tito’s death in 1980, per Živković, due to the patronizing, civilized, and female gaze of the West.

The three attributed all pertain to Živković’s argumentation. First, I would like to confirm the first

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two attributes of the gaze—patronizing and civilized—with a single anecdotic evidence that reveals a

wider, widely attested, stereotype of the Balkans and particularly Serbians. When Susan Sontag

visited Sarajevo during the war and put on a theater play together with the besieged Sarajevian

actors, her fame put them on the front pages of main Western newspapers. Poet Goran Simić said:

“We hoped that people in the outside world would learn about us. People in the West had the

impression that we were quite uncivilized people” (Moser par. 43).

The third attribute—female gaze—is unusual, however. As mentioned above, the Pygmalion

paradigm almost never attests to having a woman as a creator, mentor, or even lover of an

uncultured man. Živković’s idea follows the opposite belief (which is unfortunately not further

explored by Živković) that women in general “tend to be bearers of ‘civilization’ among the

relatively ‘uncivilized’” Balkan men. Thus, as opposed to cultured Western men who educate their

opposites (think of Higgins and Eliza in Shaw’s 1913 Pygmalion, Roger Lawrence and Nora Lambert

in Henry James’s 1871 Watch and Ward, or a 1983 British film Educating Rita), Balkan men are on par

with Eliza, Nora, and Rita: untamed and uncultivated. In a reverse situation from a typical

educational Pygmalion-like story, in the Balkans, women “f[a]ll for the brutal and manly vitality of

the barbarian” and men “f[a]ll for her culture” (106). Živković examines examples of prominent

Serbian feature and documentary films from the 1980s to 2000s,24 a difficult time of the Yugoslavian

disintegration that led to the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. His examination leads to the conclusion

that “[t]he stories of such pairings tend to end tragically with the suicide or utter ruin of the male,

24Rajko Grlić’s Samo jednom se ljubi (Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1981), Srđan Karanović’s Nešto izmedju (Something In-Between,
1983), Miroslav Lekić’s Bolje od bekstva (Better Than Escape, 1993), Tone Bringa’s documentary We Are All Neighbors (1992),
a Serbian feature film that documented travails of UN sanctions and hyperinflation Dnevnik uvreda 1993 (A Diary of
Insults, 1994), Srdjan Dragojević’s Lepa sela lepo gore (Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, 1996) and Rane (Wounds, 1998), Slobodan
Skerlić’s Do koske (Rage, 1997), and Goran Marković’s Kordon (The Cordon, 2002).

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signaling the incompatibility of the two worlds, but the product of this ill-fated union remains in the

woman’s womb—a new generation that will grow up cultivated by their mothers only to perish in

another Balkan apocalypse and repeat the same pattern” (ib.). Petrophiliac in its nature, any unlikely

pairing of a Western woman with a Balkan man leads to a tragic ending.

Živković’s argument is valid in the light of Balkan self-reflection compared to the West, especially

considering its falling political regimes and destructive wars. His argumentation, however, does not

oppose my view on the typology of the Pygmalion paradigm. In fact, having the typology in place to

compare it to Serbian works before the disintegration of Yugoslavia (when the typology is typical)

and during the disintegration and wars (when the typology makes a reverse stance when it comes to

female-male roles) reveals how the Pygmalionesque trope was reinvented by a plethora of film

authors to capture the historical circumstances, and in particular the undergoing political crisis, on

an individual as well as societal level.

3.3 Modern Pygmalions

Literature proves to be an asset in dealing with technological issues of most current and promising

technologies at a given time.25 It can identify, for example, four common traits that have run deep in

pygmalionism since its very beginning: an element of loneliness and isolation, a universal human

feature to connect with a human(like) entity, a promethean quest for the power of creation, and

exploitative power over anything vulnerable. These traits could help in leading new ways in

25At the moment, discoveries most influential to the modern man come from the fields of biotechnology (stem cells,
gene editing), artificial intelligence (revolutionizing most fields with AI, new discoveries with neural networks, GAN
technology that enables AI to imagine, etc.), speech synthetizing and creative writing (nonhuman entities becoming
better in language and in translation), 3-D printing (of most materials), and sensing city technology (basically digitalizing
a neighborhood)—all technologies relevant to pygmalionism.

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technologizing the world and predicting possible obstacles. A main purpose of technology has

always been to make our lives easier, which is why the twentieth- and twenty-first-century views on

pygmalionism bring to the fore psychological and therapeutic benefits of the practice.

Let us begin with the first trait: all Pygmalion-like stories demand an element of loneliness, be it a

fallout with the society or an actual physical isolation. This sentiment can of course be felt when

surrounded with people; loneliness is an emotional response to an unwanted isolation, growing from

human need for affiliation with others. Carl Jung’s quote on loneliness brings forth not the physical

but psychical isolation as reflected in communication with other beings and the world: “Loneliness

does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem

important” (356). As Sherry Turkle puts it, “loneliness is a failed solitude”—“to experience solitude

you must be able to summon yourself by yourself” (288). Pygmalions are all isolated from society,

however, their isolations differ in nature and purpose: Petrarch’s adoration of the beloved requires

him to be alone by definition (Bettini 5), Ovid’s Pygmalion withdraws from human women due to

his disappointment over them, and Nešković’s cosmonaut is the only human on a space mission,

which is why he is given a nonhuman companion. The latter example is quite exceptional, as

fictional writing on pygmalionism rejects loneliness per principle: pygmalions choose solitude in

order to be with their beloved. The question about the cause of the growing number of real-world

modern pygmalions is essentially a matter of loneliness vs. solitude: is their condition a result of

loneliness and craving for intimacy or is their condition a sexual orientation that seeks solitude from

human beings and company of nonhumans and is thus not prompted by external circumstances?

Adam Waytz et al. argue that “extreme cases” of a person falling in love with an object are

prompted by chronical loneliness as those who are “chronically lonely are more likely than those

who are chronically connected to anthropomorphize technological gadgets” (59). Another reason

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for anthropomorphism is effectance, “the basic motivation to be a competent social agent” (ib.):

seeing a familiar concept in a non-familiar agent makes it more comprehensible. Both reasons for

anthropomorphizing nonhumans shed light on why the market for social robots is so big, although

we are in the early days of creating (incredibly complicated and expensive) full-body humanoids, and

why the creators of nonhuman socialites dedicate their work to this pursuit in the first place—

instead of, for example, creating robots that would alleviate the burden of human caretakers (e.g.

lifting up a patient, prepare meals, etc.).26 Then again, robots do not need to look human for us to

anthropomorphize them, although it clearly helps.

Highly technological societies of today, such as most Western and some East Asian societies, have

been shown to increasingly keep people socially, emotionally and physically isolated from each other.

In a study that asked the general public if technology is good for humankind or not, “just 8% of US

adults [said they] believe technology has had a negative effect on our lives, primarily because they

believe it has led to a breakdown of communication and human interaction (41% of this group)”

(Twist and McArthur 250). On the one hand, social media advertisement is all about connecting

people and, on the other hand, these services are uncannily similar to the world in E. M. Forster’s

‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), in which every individual inhabits an isolated cabin, connected to the

rest of humanity through instant messages and conference videos, highly controlled by a handful of

people in power. An insignificant number of people today lead a solitary life akin to Forster’s

depiction: Japan deals with close to a million cases of acute social withdrawal called hikikomori, “a

social category that emerged in the 1990s” (Nast 764). This withdrawal is typical for young men who

26 Sherry Turkle writes of technology as prosthesis and imagines technology designed after biomimicry in order to solve
issues that are—mistakenly—thought to be assessed with complex, personalized but person-less, humanoids, instead of
simpler and cheaper humanoid technological parts. If robotic helpers “had been able to do the grunt work, there might
have been more time for human nurses to take care of the more personal and emotional things. […] Why not imagine a
machine that is an extension of the body of one human trying to care lovingly for another? Why not build robotic arms,
supported by hydraulic power, into which people could slip their own arms, enhancing their strength?” (288-89).

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retreated to bedrooms of a parental home (thus still playing the role of children) and “commonly

enjoy the company of human-sized female pillow dolls (dakimakura) and play with [ball jointed

dolls]” (Nast 765). As Turkle puts it: “As we live the flowering of connectivity culture, we dream of

sociable robots” (283).

USA deals with doubled rates of loneliness not only among the elder population but also

increasingly among young adults (Cigna). Besides stress and obesity, loneliness has been called a

health epidemic of the twenty-first century by some (Olds and Schwartz, Peate, Rimmer, Turkle)—a

particularly alarming finding since many studies showed that chronic loneliness affects morbidity and

mortality (Committee; Patterson and Veenstra 181, Hold-Lunstad et al., Rubin par. 7). Like the USA,

Japan deals with increasing rates of loneliness due to the increasing elderly population, which is

especially vulnerable due to its proneness to sickness as well as the fact that the elderly tend to know

more dead people than alive. Japanese term kodokushi was coined in the 1980s and designates a

lonely death—dying alone and not being discovered for a long period of time (see Onishi).

Turkle argues that roboticists present us a quandary that “threatens to become no quandary at all

because we come to accept its framing” (289)—“the idea that as our population ages, we simply

won’t have enough people to take care of our human needs, and so, as a companion, a sociable

robot is ‘better than nothing’” (281). With the population ageing, social robots are already being put

into nursing homes for company with positive results, from robot baby seals freely available on the

market (see Marx) to humanlike robots, such as Zora (Satariano et al., see also Adler). The role of

pygmalionism here is clear: humans are social beings and are not equipped to live in isolation. This is

why pygmalionism and agalmatophilia cannot (solely) be fetishes, as considered by sociologists and

some medical researchers. Sex dolls such as dames de voyage, artificial dolls that accompanied sailors at

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sea in the seventeenth century (Dahaner 3), have since become more complex and humanlike, taking

over other roles of performing a human being. Brothels already feature lifelike dolls in lieu of human

prostitutes (and not in order to help alleviate human prostitution or sex trafficking (Nast 774,

Torjesen ‘Sixty’ 3353)). People identifying as digisexual, i.e. “people whose primary sexual identity

comes through the use of technology” (McArthur and Twist 1), are bound to grow with radical new

sexual technology. The notion of sexual orientation is expanding rapidly, from object sexuals to

digisexuals and further, bringing the Pygmalion myth along with and without its baggage.

A true modern Pygmalion of the twenty-first century is an artificial intelligence engineer, such as

Zheng Jiajia, a Chinese man who “decided to commit after failing to find a human spouse”—there

are, after all, “113.5 men for every 100 women in China” (Haas par. 6) —and “‘married’ a robot he

built himself” (par. 1-2). Some Japanese men, apart from hikikomori, are reported to live with dolls as

if they were real women—a better version of them, that is. The phenomenon is pure pygmalionism:

they consider real women “cold-hearted,” “selfish” and “demanding,” while their dolls are a solace

and a source of happiness. Although these men are aware that the dolls are not human, they treat

them as such, just like Ovid’s Pygmalion: “I’d never cheat on her, even with a prostitute, because to

me she’s human” (‘Silicone,’ par. 27). An online international community of iDollators “who view

their dolls not merely as sex toys but as life partners” is adamant: their relationships with dolls are

just as meaningful as those with humans (Dahaner 9-10); object sexuals claim likewise. Many issues

in relation to suicide, isolation and withdrawal are resolved with this artificial company. As a sort of

escapism, or “(maternal) comfort of the posthuman,” as Heidi Nast calls it (758), pygmalionism

again proves out to be a mental tool, like in the native American stories in which the wooden doll

helps a widower coping with his loss (Swinton 181-182, Boas 744-745 and 746), or in Nešković’s

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short story, where the android is sent into space together with the cosmonaut to keep him company,

hence keeping him sane from boredom, anxiety, stress and other human problems.27

Assuming that humans keep responding to the humanlike as if it was human, or sometimes even

better than if it was human,28 therapeutic uses of humanlike forms will surely abound. The main

problem in using humanoids for company or therapy is that the approach is still quite new. There

are also obvious ethical impediments in the use of, say, sexbots: “[A]ccepting the production of

these sex robots, not to mention child-like dolls, is unethical because it legitimizes the objectification

of human beings, at least on a representational (‘fictional’) level,” when “there is no shared discourse

regarding the important social, clinical, and ethical concerns raised by such a business, which should

be controlled and discussed by committees composed of experts in technology, sociology,

psychology, and bioethics” (Facchin et al. 3790). Besides above-mentioned Sherry Turkle and Ingrid

Torjesen, Kathleen Richardson is one of the main opponents of sexbots and links them with human

prostitution, while Neil McArthur, John Dahaner, Markie Twist and David Levy argue that the

sexbots’ effects will be overall positive. All these scholars are aware, however, that sexbots are surely

coming and that “an organized approach against the development of sex robots is necessary” if we

27As new research shows, foreign physicals conditions of space change human DNA physically (e.g. gene expression of
an cosmonaut in space changed relative to that of his identical twin who stayed on Earth (see Mason et al., Edwards and
Abadie)) and the extreme isolation, boredom and simultaneously the difficulty of the job, changes them mentally. Up to
today, American space medicine (in contrast to Russians, who have done much longer space missions) has “done
surprisingly little research into the psychological problems that might occur on [long missions in space],” although
“psychological issues [are] the ‘most difficult’ of the challenges cosmonauts face on the long missions” (Cooper 37).

28It was shown that in general humans trust basic humanlike machines (e.g. a virtual psychiatrist) over humans
(Bohannon 251). Computer scientist and psychologist Jonathan Gratch explains that “we turn to computers for solace”
because we “engage in less of what’s called impression management” when communicating with them (Shulevitz par.
24).

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are to prevent them (Campaign, also in Dahaner et al. 47). What does this mean for our future

society? How should we respond when sex conflates with love and care?

For one, we can learn from the reception of object sexuals. Marsh emphasizes that “among

objectum sexuals lack of acceptance by society is the biggest problem, followed closely by human

abuse of beloved objects and the inability to be publicly affectionate with beloved objects” (par. 88).

Objectum sexuals are aware of the strangeness of their love for objects, but claim it is no different

than love for people: “We are not freaks, nor are we fetishists. Our lovers are living beings that

communicate, and love us back. Contrary to popular belief, machines and other objects do have

souls. This is what our relationships are based off of, and they’re not entirely sexual” (Marsh par.

44). Human societies have long attributed personality to objects (animalism) or gods (s

ee more in Guthrie), however, it is the sexual attraction component of a personal relationship with

an object that stirs a magnitude of strong and often contradictory responses. As Spike Jonze says of

people’s reactions to his film Her, in which a man falls in love with a computer operating system,

“some people find it incredibly romantic, some people find it incredibly sad or melancholy, or some

people find it creepy, some people find it hopeful” (‘Spike’ par. 10). Pygmalionism fleshes out “our

yearning to connect, our need for intimacy, and the things inside us that prevent us from

connecting” (par. 11) and has become increasingly relevant to our modern life.

Although object sexuals have historically been viewed as paraphiliacs and most often fetishists, their

sexual orientation is becoming more accepted due to the rise of digisexualities. In 2011, according to

the MIT Technology Review poll, “the idea of human-robot love was taking root as a serious

proposition,” as 19 percent of those questioned said that they could love a robot and 36 percent said

maybe (Cheok et al. 207-208). Times surely are changing. The reciprocity of the relationship might

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look problematic as of now (see Bołtuć 219), however, with robots already capable of convincingly

simulating feelings and seemingly conscious—reaching over the uncanny part of the uncanny valley

and perhaps sometimes also over the threshold of humanity—society might find it easier to accept a

human-nonhuman amorous relationship. Knowing that a robot can only simulate feelings is not an

issue for everyone and might be even better for some, as we have seen on the example of the virtual

psychotherapist in chapter 2. Herein lies the problem that is bound to happen: what to do when

some lovers of robots claim their artificial lovers really love them and are thus more than they really

are? They could claim robots to be a new humanlike species or actually of the human species, they

could claim them to be a partner and—a rare scenario in fiction—a (co)parent. These questions are

already on the table. What if, as Steve Peterson asks, we could make robot persons—as opposed to

humans (155)? We need to address the responsibility of making and owning something that could be

considered a someone, especially once they start to act on their own (with machine learning etc.).

In literature, robotic love is common in the Pygmalionesque type of stories where the artificial

woman becomes a person. Some galateas do love their men back, for instance, replicant Rachael

from Ridley’s Blade Runner and robot Helen from del Rey’s Helen D’Loy, who both ‘die’ for their love.

Helen is immortal while Rachael has an expiration date and is thus mortal of some sort, which

makes her more human. When Deckard and Rachael drive away in the final scene, they “escape to

whatever time they have remaining—in other words, to the human condition” (Turkle 288). Turkle

remarks that “[t]his brilliant story asks whether the simulation of these things will suffice” (ib.)—is

nonhuman love enough, or is it not fully human enough? Apparently, it is: the replicant-human love

results in the birth of their child in Blade Runner 2049, a child widely persecuted. Love for a human

man would have Helen and Rachael persecuted as well, had they revealed their nonhuman status.

Mary Shelley’s creature, too, was persecuted in a mob for not being human enough. In Steven

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Spielberg’s film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story ‘Supertoys

Last All Summer Long,’ the robot companion and adoptive child Teddy, who unconditionally loves

his adoptive human mother, and the robot lover Gigolo Joe are easily dehumanized, discarded and

frightfully persecuted, even if they do love humans and wish to be loved back. The world of human

and robotic symbiosis in love and care is just as rare as a world of human-human love. Even if the

human-nonhuman relationship works in private settings, the society struggles to accept it.

In 2009, a viral,29 mysterious and disturbing YouTube video – presumably an artwork – titled ‘I feel

fantastic’ and uploaded by Creepyblog presented Tara the Android singing I Feel Fantastic in a typical

robotic flat tone, accompanied with synthesizer music and haunting atmosphere. The pale robot,

dressed in casual clothes and wearing a blonde wig, hardly moves throughout the video; the camera

also remains in a static position with of a few short episodes where the robot had its clothes changed

and was moved to a different position) and when the camera shows us a brief view of what seems to

be the backyard of the house in which the robot performs her atonal song. The description below

the video begins with the mythological Pygmalion’s story

and asks the viewer to think of the video as “the work of

modern Pygmalion” to whom the android’s “toneless

voice, the paleness of her skin and the comparative

vibrancy of her lips may indeed be the embodiment of a

perfect woman” (par. 2). The robot, its music, and the
Figure 22 Tara the Android in video titled ‘I Feel
Fantastic.’
video many would perceive as “strange and disturbing, is
Author's screenshot.

29 The video accumulated close to 24 million views from April 15, 2009 to August 17, 2020.

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actually beauty to it’s [sic] creator” (ib.)— “Who are we to be afraid or to judge them?” (par. 3.).30

Social robots have been used in health care with positive results. The artificial seal called Paro has

proved to spike the overall health and mood in the nursery homes it visits (Marx par. 24). One of

the first uses of a robot in autistic therapy was a robot turtle in 1970s, because “[d]ifferent from

human beings, interactions with robots can provide simplified, safe, predictable and reliable

environments that can provide the starting points for therapeutic intervention where the complexity

of the therapeutic toys can be slowly increased” (Robins et al. 105–120; see also Richardson 38).

Today, most popular are anthropomorphic robots that seem like a simplified human being. Paro the

seal provided comfort even to the random passerby. An “old, frail-looking man […] fixed his eyes

on the seal, tentatively petting it and softly calling it ‘Beauty.’ If Paro belonged to him, the man told

[the author] in a Russian accent, ‘I would take care of it and it would take care of me.’ What would

he name it? ‘Arna,’ he said. ‘The name of my late wife’” (Marx par. 31). Why is cuddling an artificial

seal seen as innocently comforting and we seem to happily cling to the idea that caretaker robots will

be able to provide company to our elderly, while seeing a lonely person fondling an artificial doll is,

for most, disturbing, or, in Holmes’s words, a “nuisance crime”? A “nuisance crime” does not

endanger the very existence of society, but “cause[s] some discomfort and a general level of alarm

and suspicion” (27). An individual’s right to privacy is quickly overstepped or vice versa; the

individual might not be private enough as many agalmatophiliacs love public objects.

30 Computers make poor judges on attributing personhood: When I included the screenshot from the video to this
document, my computer commented on the picture as “A person standing in front of a window.” This is a glitch based
in the popular data sets, largely from USA and UK; at the same time, not all real people are considered persons by
computational algorithms, in particular those who do not fit the universal representation of the human as able-bodied
white cis-male. It is regrettable that Tara the Android, like Sophia the robot, might find it easier to be considered a
person than some humans.

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As argued above, pygmalionism (a condition where a person is knowingly in love with an object,

usually of their own making) causes a different kind of discomfort than deluded agalmatophilia (a

condition where a person believes their chosen object, which is often a public object, to have human

personality). The uncanny valley phenomenon certainly has to do with this discomfort that the

Other presents, and our desire to reinforce the sharp division between ourselves and the Other.

Let us look at a few examples. Sitting down for picnic with friends is nothing unusual, and in the

twenty-first century it is nothing unusual if your friend’s girlfriend is a continent away so he brings

‘her’ along through an audio or video call. Now take Gillespie’s 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl,

where a delusional young man introduces a silicone rubber girl as his girlfriend and makes everyone

around him so concerned about his mental state they decide to treat her like a real person. Then

compare it to Jonze’s 2013 film Her, where a lonely man is dating his AI operating system—that has

no body but behaves just like a human, even more so than Helen from Galatea 2.2—and receives no

criticism of their interspecies relationship but is rather encouraged to pursue the relationship for the

sake of his own happiness. The first movie takes place today or possibly a decade or two earlier, the

second in the near future Los Angeles. In the first movie, a friend would bring a rubber doll to the

picnic (or, in the case of the film, to church), in the second, his girlfriend would materialize in voice

by means of an AI device (the double-date picnic scene can be seen in Her). Certainly, the second

scenario would cause less discomfort at first since it is not that different from what we already often

do. Yet, the ramifications of the AI humanoid scenario are far more consequential: Lars and the Real

Girl presents an embodied nonhuman and a deluded human while Her presents the voice and

intelligence—essentially, a language—as sufficient for a human-nonhuman amorous relationship. It

has been taken for granted until the rise of AI and computers that the body is the place of

humanlike imitation, uncanny as it may be, but the fact that an intelligent use of language is

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enough—the idea explored in the first two chapters—brings a whole new array of questions to the

table. Amazon Alexa, for example, is already a sort of a pet. More on these paralyzed entities in the

next chapter.

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Chapter 4: Diagnosis: Paralysis

No man is an iland, intire of it selfe.

(John Donne, Meditation 17)

MEPHISTOPHELES. (Ad spectatores.)

The fact is, we remain dependent on
the creatures we ourselves have made.1
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act 2)

Paralysis affects the body or the mind in a variety of forms, strengths, and persistence. In the first

and second chapters, I mention stuttering as a physical paralysis of the speech flow and aphasia as a

paralysis of understanding or formulating the speech. The following chapter focuses on severe

forms of paralysis that overtake the whole body as a result of a disease or trauma, such as locked-in

syndrome, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and spinal cord injuries, not including mental

paralysis that results in a whole-body paralysis (such as conversion disorder, akinetic mutism, or

tonic immobility—the latter is known from animal behavior as ‘playing death’).

I relate these medical conditions to literary conditions of paralysis in the Pygmalionesque stories,

accompanying the third chapter on Pygmalionism. Pygmalionism is a condition, named after Ovid’s

Pygmalion from Metamorphoses X, where a human is in love with a humanlike object—a condition

widely discussed in literary scholarship but rarely examined as a medical diagnosis. In such stories,

paralysis and Pygmalionism come as two sides of the same coin because every pygmalion is

convinced their beloved is, in fact, a paralyzed person. The argument from chapter 2 that the

bodiless neural net from Galatea 2.2 is essentially a disabled person grows from this premise, and the

1Am Ende hängen wir doch ab

Von Kreaturen, die wir machten

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two visual examples below testify to this connection. In the first picture from 2017, Masayuki Ozaki,

an actual Pygmalionesque lover who left his wife to live with a silicon doll, pushes his doll Mayu

around Tokio in a wheelchair. Ozaki is the only person who treats his doll as a real and paralyzed

woman. In the second picture from Gillespie’s 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl, a fictional

Pygmalionesque lover uses a wheelchair to move his silicon sex doll around. Kind-hearted Lars, who

is suffering from non-identified mental illness, is a sweetheart of his small town where all the

residents treat his doll Bianca as a real woman.

Figure 23 Masayuki Ozaki and his silicone doll in Tokio. Figure 24 Lars and his silicone doll from Lars and the Real Girl.

Photo taken on May 9, 2017 by Behrouz Mehri/AFP. Author’s screenshot.

This connection is particularly relevant in the current moment. Pygmalionism has been thematized

in literature and film from their very beginnings and has become an increasingly popular topic in

modern works. At the same time, technological innovations are increasingly able to accommodate

conditions of Pygmalionism (with uncannily humanlike sex dolls, virtual reality, and artificial

intelligence robots) as well as severe paralysis (with robot substitutes and neurotechnological devices

for severe motor impairments). Although many fictional and cinematic roles emphasize the

complexities of a paralyzed condition, paralysis has been largely disregarded in the scholarly

discourse on Pygmalionism.

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This is why the following discussion examines a number of literary and cinematic Pygmalionesque

works that thematize paralysis, ranging from Serbia, France, the UK and the US from 1938 to 2018.

I begin with three lesser-known science fiction short stories, all of which were adapted into films or

series episodes. First, I will discuss a rather unknown and never translated story by Serbian author

Zoran Nešković, who wrote only this single piece titled ‘Predveče se nikako ne može…’ (1988). The

short story got more known through its adaptation into the film A.I. Rising (first titled Ederlezi Rising)

(2018). Second, I will examine James Tiptree Jr.’s (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon) short story ‘The

Girl Who Was Plugged In,’ adapted to screen in the series Welcome to Paradox from 1998. Third,

Roald Dahl’s short story ‘William and Mary’ (1959), which was adapted to screen in the series Late

Night Horror and again by Dahl in his Tales of the Unexpected series. I also briefly discuss Anne

McCaffrey’s short story ‘The Ship Who Sang’ (1969) and relate the discussion to the famous

American blacklisted writer and director Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun (1938) and his

eponymous cult film (1971).

In addition to these fictional works, I explore non-fictional accounts of paralysis by two French

locked-in syndrome patients, both written in 1997: Philippe Vigand and his wife and co-author

Stéphane Vigand’s Only the Eyes Say Yes [La Putaine de silence] and Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving

Bell and the Butterfly [Le Scaphandre et le Papillon], the latter of which grew more popular also due to the

eponymous 2007 film.2 I also look into poetry written by Mark O’Brien, who spent his life in an iron

lung due to the poliovirus he contracted in childhood, and into two shorter pieces about sufferers of

polio (Paul Alexander) and ALS (Jan Scheuermann) that address how technology helped improve

2The fact that so many of these stories were adapted to film testifies how popular the Pygmalionesque theme is in this
medium. Animation was one of the original themes in films (for example, in Georges Méliès’s first films) and is, in itself,
essential to the genre of ‘moving pictures.’

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their lives. I examine the relationship between the paralyzed and their available technology and the

relationship between the paralyzed and the world, weighting on notions of agency,3 autonomy, and

personhood, as well as evaluating the ethical approach to technology in medicine. By approaching

these questions through literature, I show how the ethical framework I propose in this dissertation

works in practice on the above-mentioned cases of severe paralysis.

4.1 First, Anthropomorphism

The act of petrification, turning a human into stone, is often termed as reverse Pygmalion. Ovid’s

Metamorphoses is full of such literal transformations: in the story before Pygmalion’s, Venus enacts

revenge on the Propoetides, who have denied her divinity, by turning them first into prostitutes and

then stone. The often-omitted fact in later re-narrations of Pygmalion’s story is Pygmalion’s disgust

towards these women, who are primarily fleshly and human but end up as statues. He creates his

ivory statue due to his disappointment with real women; nonetheless, he eventually prays to Venus

to transform his statue into a fleshly woman.

Objects viewed as paralyzed subjects is an idea as old as humanity: human beings have, especially in

the past, attributed great power and genius to lifeless totems and even greater power to living spirits

and gods. The idea of a paralyzed object is received with more suspicion and discomfort in the West

than it is, for example, in Japan, where traditional adoration of rocks (petrophilia)4 and the Shintoist

3Agency is particularly broad and ill-defined concept although it plays a central role in philosophy of mind and ethics.
The concept is in need of elaboration; in relation to (neuro)technology, it has lately been theorized through relational or
shared agency (co-agency).

4 Philosophical reflections on the beauty of rocks by the ninth-century Chinese poet Bai Juyi philosophical reflections on
the beauty of rocks, heavily influenced by Daoist reverences for the forces of nature, were highly influential in Chinese
and Japanese petrophilic traditions, which placed rocks in gardens and studies.

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belief that objects have souls contribute to a greater acceptance of humanoid dolls and rocks as pets.

The Western society has been getting used to the idea of humanoid robots as domestic helpers;

nonetheless, back in 1975 Gary Dahl made millions by selling pet rocks to Americans. The box in

which the rocks were sold featured ‘breathing holes,’ implying that the rock is alive, and warnings

such as: “The box contains one genuine pedigreed pet rock; Important: Open box carefully. DO

NOT remove rock before reading instructions.” The fad of keeping an object as a pet is catching on

again: more and more youngsters are keeping a pet rock5

while their grandparents’ health and mood are spiked in the

nursing homes with visits from a robot baby seal (Marx

par. 24). “We have always felt that the world might feel us

back. Yet there are moments where such feeling

Figure 25 A box for stones marketed as live pets by intensifies,” writes Matthew A. Taylor, such as around
Gary Dahl.

WikiMedia Commons, Public Domain 1900 and the current moment (475).
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48411
064

Although many studies of elderly care show benefits from including robots in their caretaking,

ethicists are growing to believe that the elderly benefit most from the bi-directionality of caring

relationships or simply from giving care to the robots, as they feel needed and useful when they take

care of someone instead of being taken care of.6 In autistic therapy, the first uses of a robot was a

robot turtle in the 1970s, because “[d]ifferent from human beings, interactions with robots can

provide simplified, safe, predictable and reliable environments that can provide the starting points

5 Wiki How webpage advice for a pet rock owner is very Pygmalionesque: “Before you do anything else, you should
name your rock; If you like, dress up your rock so he/she/it feels classy. Every rock likes to be pampered once and a
while!; Create a unique personality for your pet rock.; Make sure to train your rock! No one wants a surly, untrained
rock; Don’t let your rock get lonely!; Never take your rock swimming as they are not the most active pets around...”
(‘How’).

6 Many thanks to Helene Starks for this remark.

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for therapeutic intervention where the complexity of the therapeutic toys can be slowly increased”

(Robins et al. 105–120; see also Richardson 38). Today, robot toys are used in hospitals as social

companions that help to diminish anxiety and stress in children patients and their families (Satariano

and Kostyukob, Preidt). A robot toy is also a standard asset of childhood—a period that has always

been embellished by animating objects through play and imagination.

Sentient objects are nothing unusual in literature, for example, a sentient boulder is a narrator in

Ann Leckie’s 2019 fantasy novel The Raven Tower. Pygmalionism itself attests that the idea of an ivory

statue turning into flesh is at least two millennia old. There is a crucial difference in metamorphosis

in variants of pygmalionism between an anthropomorphized object turning into an actual being and

an anthropomorphized object remaining what it is (a rock, an ivory statue) while gaining

personhood. The first one is an animation of inorganic matter while the latter is a change of

perception, a metamorphosis in the eyes of the beholder. We are only recently learning about the

benefits and potential dangers around the second point of view when it comes to carebots (robots

giving and receiving care), sexbots (sex robots), and robots assistants (giving directions in a mall). As

soon as the potential of a personal attachment to a humanlike object arises, opinions clash and

science cannot satisfy the complexities at hand. Sherry Turkle identifies this common slip in

humanoid engineering and research: “Things start innocently: neuroscientists want to study

attachment. But things end reductively, with claims that a robot ‘knows’ how to form attachments

because it has the algorithms” (286). Here is where fiction, with its vast cultural knowledge and

experience, can come to help (see more in the conclusion).

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4.1.1 A Humanoid Entity as a Paralyzed Person: Nešković

In the previous chapter, I used an argument akin to pet rock ownership: the AI system Helen in

Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 is like a paralyzed person because she is able to think, feel, and

communicate without having or using a humanlike body (she has rudimentary eyes and ears but

essentially lives through language). A similar argument is given in Zoran Nešković’s short story

‘Predveče se nikako ne može…’ (1988) [the title could be translated in many ways; literally: Before the

evening it is not at all possible…]. The story follows a cosmonaut who travels to space in the company

of a female android and a supercomputer. The sixteen-page story has a simple plot, which climaxes

in deleting the android’s main program and arguably turning her into an autonomous person, and

reconsiders most ethical questions about uncannily humanlike androids that come up in other

Pygmalionesque stories.

The relationship between the cosmonaut and the android is purely sexual at first and evolves

according to the cosmonaut’s commands of the android’s mood: “I play her roles, as in a mirror,

skewed”7 (179; all translations of this text are mine). The cosmonaut compares himself to his lover,

paralleling human brain processes with the android’s computer processes (181), as we often do even

today. He wonders is she a creative personality, as his supercomputer claims her to be, because she

is not just following logical algorithms but is made to respond to irrational human desires (180). The

cosmonaut keeps pondering on robot rights and consent—asking himself if he is, in fact, raping her

and is thus a criminal, which is a rare thought in Pygmalionesque stories (182)—and eventually

develops empathy for the programmed girl. Defining personhood is what leads the cosmonaut to

7 “I, baš tu negde sam počeo da shvatam da sam zgazio na esker; da programirajući nju, ja u stvari programiran sebe. Ja
igram njene role, samo u ogledalu, iskrivljeno” (Nešković 179).

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de-program the android: he considers her a “personality”8 (which is related to personhood but is not

personhood in itself). He does not consider her a “woman,” however, because she cannot “get

pregnant and give birth to a child” (187).9 Like object sexuals (people attracted to objects), he is

aware of her nonhuman status but is nonetheless able to “sense[s] personality, reciprocal feelings

and/or ‘energy’” in an object (Marsh 44).

While he ponders her status, the cosmonaut realizes he is in love with the android as if she indeed

were a real woman. Obsessed by thinking that the android’s real personality is suppressed by the

overarching program, he manages to lock her out of this condition: for the first time, the android is

able to act autonomously. She does not change physically, but the change in her voice is immediately

palpable: “[Her] voice […] is full of bitterness, sorrow, anger, hatred, pain, full and too full, for all

the time she could not leave them out” (189).10 Her voice used to perform anger (177-78) in a “fake,

set voice, repugnant and synthetic” (189), but now, she is audibly an authentic self. Her paralysis

diagnosis is confirmed. The android, shocked by her free humanity, ironically keeps still like a

statue.11 “Go away, don’t touch me. […] I think I’m disgusted by you” (189-90),12 she tells the

cosmonaut, and he realizes: “Pandora’s box. I shouldn’t have touched it” (190),13 at which point the

story promptly ends.

8 In Serbian ličnost stands for ‘personality,’ literally meaning someone with a face (lice); its synonym, osobnost, derives from
osoba, ‘a person,’ and marks someone who is distinct from the others.

9 “Ona je ličnost, ali nije žena. Ne može da zatrudni i da rodi dete” (Nešković 187).

10“Više to nije onaj podvaljivački, namešten glas, oduran i sintetički. Nije – sada je prepuna gorčine, tuge, besa, mržnje,
bola, pun i prepun za sve ovo vreme za koje to nije mogla da istera iz sebe” (189).

11 “Ona i dalje stoji nasred sobe, kao statua, nepomična” (190).

12 “… sada se skloni, ne dodiruj me. […] Mislim da mi se gadiš, mislim da si mi odvratan” (189-90).

13 “Pandorina kutija. Nije treba da diram u to” (190).

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In a similar way, a sign of love and commitment—putting a ring on the beloved’s finger—frees the

womanlike statue of paralysis in Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1835) and in Thomas Anstey

Guthrie’s The Tinted Venus (1885). Gloomy prospects from Nešković’s text, which ends abruptly a

few moments after the android’s program is deleted, are played out in Mérimée’s short story: once

the statue is able to move, she chokes the unfortunate groom to death. This ending is paralleled with

the conclusion in the film adaptation of Nešković’s story, A.I. Rising: in order to save the android’s

life, the cosmonaut sacrifices his own. In his view, human-made humanlike life—at least the life of

his beloved—is no less valuable, or perhaps more valuable, than human life. The android completely

transcends into the human sphere both in the short story and in the film, as if her program was a

disease, now cured. The android does not need a transformation in flesh, like in Ovid’s story, but

undergoes a ‘brain’ transformation: she gains complete freedom from the program and thus

autonomy. The main transformation of her human status, however, takes in the view of the lover

before the ‘brain’ transformation ever takes place. (Not unusual for a Pygmalionesque story, the

society is completely shunned from its view as the setting of this story is space. Society can deem the

lover as a madman, like in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, or it can accept the beloved as a

person, like in Alex Garland’s film Her. More often than not, the society’s judgment is somewhere-

in-between.)

4.2 Second, Dehumanization

4.2.1 A Paralyzed Person as a Humanoid Entity: Tiptree

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In James Tiptree Jr.’s (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon)14 ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’, the lover of

the artificial woman, Paul, shares the goal with Nešković’s cosmonaut: he wants to free his beloved

from a controlling force of human-led technology. Like the cosmonaut, he realizes at the end he

“shouldn’t have touched it” when it is already too late. Not aware that his beloved’s body is an

artificially grown entity (named Delphi), led by the brains of a paralyzed human being (Philadelphia

Burke), her lover Paul disconnects Delphi from P. Burke. Wanting to help his lover to gain

autonomy over her mind and body, he unknowingly murders P. Burke. Delphi, who is grown from a

modified human embryo without a brain, not unlike an anencephalic infant,15 serves as a prosthetic

body, a vessel, and continues to exist when connected to some other person’s brain.

14Considering that science fiction in the seventies was written predominantly for a male audience, it is not surprising
that Sheldon decided to use a male name. Many critics believed the name was, in fact, a cover for a male author: “It has
been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine
about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of
Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male” said
Robert Silverberg about Tiptree’s “lean, muscular, supple” writing (Phillips 14). Feminist critics Stevenson and Hicks
parallel Sheldon performing as Tiptree to P. Burke performing as Delphi: playing a role desired in the society, that of a
male science fiction author or that of a beautiful young girl, respectively.

15 Anencephalic infants are born without a major part of the brain, skull and scalp, and as such often considered for
infant organ donors. Anencephalic infants are alive according to the established criteria of death: they are capable of
breathing and responding to sound, but they never gain awareness because they lack a functioning cerebrum. Usually
they do not live long, merely a few hours or days, even if some have lived almost four years. Physician Ferhaan Ahmad
writes that the most ethically acceptable strategy, a) “waiting for death to occur before harvesting organs, […] gives rise
to many practical difficulties,” most often resulting in no organs suitable for donation (238). Another strategy, b)
“expanding the definition of death, […] may have serious social and legal consequences;” among others, it would then
include “[p]eople suffering from severe mental retardation or various dementias” (239). Next strategy, c) “creating a
special legal category for anencephalic infants” in order to exempt them from the dead-donor rule, is problematic
because the sheer “definition of anencephaly is not precise” and the condition “cannot always be diagnosed precisely;”
all this presuming that the practice is always moral and good (241-42). Moreover, “there is no reason to prohibit similar
harvesting from other infants with severe brain abnormalities and terminal illnesses, and indeed from adults in a
permanently vegetative state” (242-43). The final strategy would be d) defining them as nonpersons because they are, to
some, perceived as Delphi—an empty but functional vessel. This strategy, again, brings on “a slippery slope leading to
an ever-increasing number of people being considered nonpersons. In addition, regarding an anencephalic infant as a
nonperson would deprive him of all rights, including protection against human experimentation,” not to mention
“distinguishing between degrees of neurologic deficit, errors in diagnosis, erosion of public confidence in the system”
(243). Thus, with every condition that does not fit into current categorization, such as anencephalic infants or new
technologies that profoundly change human or humanlike entities, there are many social systems that need to be
rearranged. For anencephalic children it seems best to remain under the least controversial guidance of strategy a),
especially since it was shown that even following other strategies, the harvesting of organs did not increase. Moreover, if
transplants were successful, anencephalic infants would be treated and cared for differently, for instance, resuscitated if
stillborn or made to be born earlier or later to facilitate organ procurement (Jecker ‘Anencephalic’ 333).

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Delphi is a derivative of Philadelphia (brotherly love in Greek),16 not only in the name but also as a

product: sharing a body and a brain, the two women are the closest possible in siblinghood, like

completely intertwined conjoined twins. Delphi is grown from a modified human embryo into a

beautiful prosthetic body without a brain in order to exist in a cyranoic illusion without any sense of

the self whatsoever; and arguably without personhood.17 P. Burke leads Delphi’s every move and

feels most of Delphi’s prosthetic body as if it were hers. However, she is not completely

autonomous in guiding it and she does not seem to be aware of that: the scientific team of Dr. Tesla

that conducted her experiment also feeds her advertising scripts (which are, in this futuristic world,

illegal and thus practiced only covertly). P. Burke switches between her own thoughts and scripts,

while she thinks she is regulating only her inner world in Delphi’s expressions: “[Paul] doesn’t know

but he’s seeing a weirdie [i.e. P. Burke]; Remotes [Delphi] aren’t hooked up to flow tears” (66).

At the beginning of the story, we learn that suicidal P. Burke suffers greatly of “pituitary dystrophy”

(44),18 which is why she decides to participate in Dr. Tesla experiment. She is made to lie completely

16 From φίλος phílos (beloved, dear) and ἀδελφός adelphós (brother, brotherly).

17This illusion is named by Stanley Milgram after Edmond Rostand’s literary character Cyrano de Bergerac, a man of
brilliant words but unappealing face, who uses a good-looking man to court his beloved by putting charming words in
his mouth.

18 Throughout the story, P. Burke is described in pejorative terms: “the rotten girl” (43), “she’s the ugly of the world”
that “no surgeon would touch” with a “jumbled torso”, “mismatched legs,” and “her jaw—it’s half purple—almost bites
her left eye out” (44); “a groggy girl-brute heaves up, big hands clutching at bodyparts you’d pay not to see” (46); “And
[when plugged in] here is our girl, looking— / If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella
transistorized? / The disimprovement in her looks comes from the electrode jacks peeping out of her sparse hair, and
there are other meldings of flesh and metal. On the other hand, that collar and spinal plate are really an asset, you won’t
miss seeing that neck” (47). The use of these crude words is objectifying and oppressive and, according to many feminist
critics (Stevenson, Hicks), shows a male’s perspective on women’s bodies—in contrast to a doll-like Delphi. The reader,
too, is addressed with words of passivity and lifelessness, such as “zombie,” (43, 78), “dead daddy” (43), “dummy” (78).

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paralyzed in a sauna room and later a waldo cabinet,19 attached to Delphi who moves around in the

outside world through a novel surrogate technology. The narrator depicts P. Burke as the main

person of this technological arrangement: “Call [P. Burke] a waldo if you must. The fact is she’s just

a girl, a real live girl with her brain in an unusual place” (54). Hanson Robotics, a robotics company

from Hong Kong, used to present20 their most famous product, Sophia the robot, in a similar

manner, describing her as “a real, live electronic girl” (‘About’ par. 1) that, uncannily like P. Burke,

was given “the gift of legal personhood” in exchange for “a lifeless career in marketing,” as Emily

Reynolds sarcastically puts it (par. 1). Like Sophia, Delphi becomes a famous performer, with this

difference that P. Burke gives up her own voice and life narrative in order to pursue a better life in

which she is pretty and adorned at the expense of serving as an advertising puppet.

P. Burke’s new embodiment is much more convoluted than a simple program or prosthesis: her

body might have been removed but her embodiment was technologically expanded. “P. Burke does

not feel her brain is in the sauna room, she feels she’s in that sweet little body [of Delphi]” (49). The

narrator presents Delphi as the primary place of being for P. Burke, who is, as far as her body goes,

“totally unselfaware and happy as a clam in its shell” (54). While Paul is bothered by the fact that she

is a controlled “doll” (70) and “a wired-up slave” (71), P. Burke defends herself as if it the

arrangement was a mere “job” (67). Her prosthetic life has become her real identity—while in Paul’s

19In E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops,’ most people of the world live separately in underground chambers of The
Machine. Like P. Burke, one of the protagonists in this short story, Vashtu, is described as “a swaddled lump of flesh” in
an armchair, “with a face as white as a fungus” (51). Although The Machine is obviously toxic and rotten, as attested in
the mere description of Vashti’s body and finally with the devolution and destruction of The Machine, Vashti chooses
not to see the outside world and is satisfied with virtual life her chambers offers.

20 Hanson Robotics removed this description from the introductory website of Sophia in 2018. In 2019, the wording is
less sensationalist; the final paragraph to the introduction goes as follows: “In some ways, I am human-crafted science
fiction character depicting where AI and robotics are heading. In other ways, I am real science, springing from the
serious engineering and science research and accomplishments of an inspired team of robotics & AI scientists and
designers. In their grand ambitious, my creators aspire to achieve true AI sentience. Who knows? With my science
evolving so quickly, even many of my wildest fictional dreams may become reality someday soon” (‘Sophia’).

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view, as for the cosmonaut, such technologized existence is denying her basic human rights:

autonomy, privacy, dignity.

4.3 Extended Bodies: Paralysis and Prosthetics

In 1997, the same year when two memoirs written by

middle-aged locked-in Frenchmen were published, the

American neurologist Philip Kennedy created arguably

the first human cyborg, Johnny Ray. Ray was a Vietnam

veteran who suffered a stroke that caused the locked-in

syndrome and underwent a successful experimental

Figure 26 The first official cyborg Neil Harbisson had
an antenna implanted in his skull.
surgery which allowed him to gain some moving
Image by Dan Wilton (The Red Bulletin), Oct 11, 2013.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neil_Harbisson_cyborgist.jpg
agency to his body (Engber). Not all surgeries like this

succeed, but since then the brain implant surgery has progressed to a point of not just treating

disabled people but also enhancing healthy people. The cyborg artist Neil Harbisson, for example,

had an antenna implanted into his skull. Since he considers it his body part and not a device, his

cyborg status was legally recognized by the UK government (for the purpose of a passport

photograph) (Miah and Rich 130). For patients with the locked-in syndrome (LIS)—a neurological

condition where all voluntary movements, except for the eyes, are paralyzed—such an antenna could

mean a difference between life and death for some patients and a difference between a life worth

living and a life not worth living for others.

Diagnosis of severe paralysis that comes on suddenly, such as a stroke resulting in the locked-in

syndrome, cannot be made without a proper communication with the patient. Communication

needs to be given through some sort of body (organic, anorganic, virtual) and cannot exist solely in

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the form of information without some material form (be it proteins or bytes). Diagnosing LIS is

extremely difficult: the average time to reach a diagnosis is 2.5 months; many patients have not

received a correct diagnosis for over four years, being mistaken with vegetative state, minimally

conscious state, or akinetic mutism (Wilson et al. 76-77). It is, in fact, usually family and friends that

discover their beloved is aware (55 percent), long before doctors (25 percent) (Laureys 495). Family’s

claims could be misunderstood by the healthcare staff as wanting to believe their loved one is

conscious when this is not the case—not unlike when people perceive personhood in objects.

Among caretakers, the first person who detects awareness is most often a speech therapist (Laureys

495, 500). We learn from a memoir by a LIS patient, Jean-Dominique Bauby, that a speech therapist

is his most beloved caretaker, also nicknamed as his “guardian angel” (39). We also learn from

another memoir by a LIS patient, Phillipe Vigand, that a wink-based communication system

combined with an eye-tracking technology that enables one to communicate their thoughts in

writing leads to a more independent and satisfactory life.

In the following discussion that focuses on the intersection of literature, medicine, technology, and

ethics, I use three literary examples, Vigand and Bauby’s memoirs and Mark O’Brien’s poetry (the

latter two being more internationally known than the first, likely due to the films based on their

accounts), to demonstrate that technological advances for paralyzed patients can significantly

improve the quality of life by enhancing one’s autonomy and agency. Although every

neurotechnological device can have overwhelming side effects, such as profound change of identity

and character, and although it does not work positively for every patient, I suggest that the use of

technology is overall beneficial for the patients’ autonomy, is not dehumanizing as such, and does

not require the patient to feel the prosthetic device as a part of themselves. As advocated in

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neuroethics, every use of neuro devices, and particularly novel neurotechnologies, should be

accompanied with early integration of ethics into technology (Goering and Yuste 882).

The most advanced communication technology of

today is brain-computer interface, which can turn

brain waves into speech (e.g. ‘turn on the light’)

followed by the concrete actions (e.g. the light

turns on without an audible command) (Servick,

Akhbari et al.). Such prosthesis does not come

without ethical restraints: it is invasive (so far, as it

has to be surgically implanted onto the brain) and

could inadvertently reveal private thoughts of the

patient that were not meant to be voiced.

Figure 27 Brain-computer interface for paralyzed patients that
enables them to control tablet devices. Moreover, scientists can now also create a unique
Image is from a 2018 clinical trial by the BrainGate Consortium
group. Credit: Nuyujukian et al. voice for persons that do not have their own

speech (e.g. some cerebral palsy patients), using their moans and implementing them into a speech

synthesizer (Saltsman). This attests that personalized voice matters, particularly in a prosthetic device

that represents the person.

While these technologies are being clinically tested, fiction is off exploring less-invasive and more-

inclusive brain-computer interfaces, similar to that of P. Burke. For example, the Black Mirror

episode ‘Striking Vipers’ (2019) presents a video gaming prosthesis that is simply put on the player’s

forehead and leads to a full-sensitivity in the virtual body of one’s choice. This episode focused on a

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crisis of changing identity through a technology-mediated experience.21 In a virtual space, one can be

anything—and the options of extending one’s body offer an exciting and unique exploration of

human existence.

A pen can be viewed as a prosthesis: when we write, we feel what is happening at the end of the pen.

Similarly, blind people operate with their canes that serve as their sense of vision, as their eyes. A

paralyzed body that cannot perform agency needs some other, be it human or technological agency,

to perform its needs and desires in its place. A completely paralyzed body, as those in LIS patients,

uses its agency through eye movements, subtle finger movements, or, if those are not possible, brain

waves. A human assistant can be used for these tasks too: before the eye-tracking writing machine,

an interpreter would decode letters through the patient’s eye blinks, and before geminoids, an

assistant would take care of the patient while also playing roles for them.

These assistants and devices are described in memoirs by two locked-in patients, Jean-Dominique

Bauby’s Le Scaphandre et le papillon (translated as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Philippe Vigand’s,

co-authored with his wife Stéphane Vigand, Putaine de silence (with a much softer English title Only the

Eyes Say Yes: A Love Story). Both memoirs were published in 1997 and raised much awareness of the

condition. Both works were also a sort of a narratological experiment in how to convey a personal

story into writing through a non-conventional medium. Bauby’s book was written by dictating letters

to an assistant one at a time with a single functional eyelid. Vigand used an eye-tracking writing

21 This episode also brought up a question of changing identity through a technology-mediated experience: the two male
friends play the video game, one as a woman and one as a man character, and have multiple sexual encounters, which
leads them to question themselves whether they are gay and whether their virtual sex makes them unfaithful to their real
life partners. The detachment between fiction and reality seems to be their only consolation.

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machine, which he named James, and included his wife Stéphane’s side of the story in separate

chapters.

Vigand’s and Bauby’s respective recoveries had a very different outcome: although they both

experienced the same kind of condition in the same country, Bauby was never able to live outside

the hospital and was thus completely dependent on the medical staff. He died two days after the

publication of his book. The memoir went on the become a great success and has, together with a

film based on his memoir, raised awareness of LIS in and outside of France. Bauby describes his

paralyzed body as being surrounded with a diving bell, an apparatus once used for oceanic diving (9).

The butterfly in the title refers to his spirit and imagination that wander free. Vigand, on the other

hand, has managed to recover to a point where he returned to live with his family and established a

career as a writer as well as a prominent advocate for people with severe disabilities like his own.

Although the Vigands need to make many sacrifices and sometimes frustrating accommodations,

their family is able to function with a sense of normalcy: they raise three children, have lively social

lives, and travel to faraway vacations. Vigand has another advantage over Bauby: he is able to use the

eye-tracking machine and, after some trial and error, found a compatible human assistant Édouard,

who takes the role of his caretaker and performs as his double.

Vigand shows how his condition extended his own self into more bodies of substitute machines and

humans. Like P. Burke, he was fortunate to (eventually) find a compatible assistant, a “double

permanently on hand, someone whose main responsibility is to do for me what I’m incapable of

doing myself” (58). James is not an intuitive communicator like Édouard, who has acquired, after

years of working with Vigand, a “virtually prophetic sense of what [Vigand is] going to say” (60),

cracking the code not only literally but also understanding and conveying its nuances. “That task

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requires extraordinary diplomacy. The double has to react and intercede without ever overstepping

his role as a go-between. He has to become part of the family without becoming a burden, adapt to

its rhythm and activities while maintaining a certain distance, without ever abdicating his own

personality” (ib.).

In contrast to Vigand, Bauby experiences much more disjuncture between himself and his body.

Describing empty Sundays in the hospital, when every itch and fly can become an immense nuisance

due to his inability to move, Bauby calls “Olympic wrestling [a] child’s play compared to this” (102).

As Denise Dudzinski comments: “In some sense, his hand is not his while at the same time pitifully

remaining his” (42) and his former self, an adventurous editor of style magazine Elle, is slowly fading

away (Bauby 70, 77). Self-expression is no less torturous: he wishes to hug his children but is unable

to show any affection—except for tears resulting of this frustration (Bauby 71). I argue that Bauby’s

detachment from his body is made worse because he is not able to use more advanced technologies

and that he would likely feel less “exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures” (25)

had he been able to experience the world though a technological extension of his own nonfunctional

but sentient body.

Dudzinski connects Bauby’s existence to existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s concept of noyau

senti: Bauby’s mind still feels, his body still feels, however, none can express himself. This resonates

with Marcel’s writing: “My body is my body just in so far as I do not consider it in this detached

fashion, do not put a gap between myself and it” (123). Marcel reflects on the body as an instrument

of agency, “the apparatus which permits me to act upon,” and “an artificial means of extending,

developing, or reinforcing a pre-existing power which must be possessed by anyone who wants of

make use of the instrument” (122), but also as body as it is felt, with a feeling that is not

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instrumentally-based (through what he calls “sympathetic mediation”) (125). The extension of this

feeling and agency to technology—the way P. Burke is able to live through Delphi’s body—was,

however, condemned by Marcel as dehumanization of the mystery of being, in which a human life is

reduced to a false scenario of technological problems and solutions. Marcel is not against technology

per se but against deification of technology and our dependence on technology, which together

ultimately lead to a disappointment: technology does not and will never have a solution to every

problem.

Technology is often perceived as dehumanizing. Nonetheless, Marcel’s argument, to a twenty-first-

century reader, is no different than the mainstream principle biology: “Biological parts have been

through billions of years of debugging—trial and error” (Jonathan Shaw 41). Biology invented ways

of making up for a loss in one sense (e.g. poor vision) by enhancing another sense (e.g. touch).

Pathology has its solutions but it also has its problems, sometimes unsolvable, just like technology.

Technology tends to imitate biological principles, particularly in the already-existing and near-future

technologies that are designed to alleviate lives of severely paralyzed patents. If technology uses the

same principles as biology and, moreover, merges with technology—per Sarah Franklin, technology

is becoming “biologized” and biology is becoming technologized (Biological 3)—, then it cannot be

inherently dehumanizing, even when compared to a debilitating disease. As a part of a human

construction and essence, technology at the same time helps to alleviate health to a normal level

(restitutio ad integrum) while being used for human enhancement with the same or similar medical

tools in order to complement health that has not been diminished (transformatio ad optimum)

(Wiesling).

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Perhaps worst of all, Bauby does not need technology to feel dehumanized: for example, during a

bath, he is sometimes amused by being bathed like an infant in his middle age and other times feels

“unbearably sad” (16-17). Vigand also speaks of being treated as an object and infant (63) and thus

not quite a person. Similarly, Mark O’Brien, poet and journalist paralyzed by polio to a life in an iron

lung, writes in his poem, ‘The Morning Routine,’ of his body as “a former person”—implying that

the lack ability to act with his body took away his personhood. He describes his washing routine

which requires him to leave the iron lung for fifteen minutes and struggle with breathing on his own:

“There’s so much of it to wash, / ‘It’ being me, a former person.” When O’Brien is outside his

“breathing machine,” O’Brien, like Bauby and Vigand, he has difficulties in communicating his

needs: “And my words quit coming out right. / Left hand, I say. / Right foot? The attendant says,

guessing.” Bauby’s personhood and basic needs are often ignored by the medical personnel, not only

through poor bed side manner but also through sheer lack of communication. For example, an

ophthalmologist comes in and begins stitching Bauby’s eye, his only source of communication,

without a greeting or explanation, let alone asking for consent (53). Although speech therapist works

with Bauby on establishing a communication system through winks, most hospital staff never learns

it—as opposed to Bauby’s friends. Vigand’s parents, too, refuse to learn the code that would enable

them direct communication with their son and only ‘listen’ to him through other family members

who know how to read the winking.

Rare accounts by LIS persons and studies tell us that “once a person enters LIS, most people no

longer treat that person as a person” (Johansson et al. 558), violating “fundamental human rights,

such as respect for dignity and autonomous choices,” disregarding the fact that these patients could

be communicated with and tend to lead a life worth living (enjoy life’s pleasures such as participating

in social activities and hobbies, some even work) (Johansson et al. 559, Khanna et al. 98, Mullin). In

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the 1990s, “[p]erson-focused care had yet to make significant headway in either France or the United

States, but patient narratives—frequently pushbacks against inhumane medical care—certainly raised

consciousness about the importance of respectful, person-focused care, as they continue to do

today” (Thornber 260).

(Auto)biographical and fictional stories about living with medical conditions, either as a patient,

family, or friend, or as a medical worker, have become increasingly relevant to the clinical practice of

medicine today and help us advance healing beyond the healthcare setting. Health and medical

humanities turn to literature and other arts and combine them with studies in literature and

medicine, history of medicine, medical anthropology, medical ethics, science and technology studies,

etc. My discussion on LIS broadens this conversation to available and next generation technologies,

which are a pertinent part of healthcare practice and research today and are bound to become

essential. In the following, I explore novel neurotechnologies that are started being used by severely

paralyzed people and their possible applications for the near future in order to substantiate the

argument for the increased use of these technologies among the severely paralyzed.

Technological geminoids, a

much more rudimentary

version of Delphi and

Édouard, are already is use by

patients with ALS in Japan.

Since 2018, ALS patients are

Figure 28 A person with ALS is able to work as a waitress through eye-tracking
able to work as waiters through geminoid robot.

eye tracking technology and Credit: OryLab.

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robot surrogates (‘Japanese’). The robot is a product of the Japanese company OryLab whose

mission is “solving human loneliness through communication technology.”

The Doppelgänger phenomenon of all sorts (substitute, twin, bipolar personality, etc.) has always been

exciting to fiction. A prominent example of geminoids for completely paralyzed people is John

Scalzi’s 2014 novel Lock In, in which one percent of the US population lives with LIS condition,

using geminoid robots. For political and philosophical purposes, their condition is soon not

considered a disability but rather a different, enhanced way of living. (Some of the people with LIS

were so young when they got paralyzed they do not at all remember the physical world as

experienced through a human body.)

In 2007, geminoid technology—a term “coined by leading roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro to mean an

android twin of a human ‘master’” (Nathan et al. 2589)—was purely speculated in science. Nathan et

al.’s paper presents an example of a child with severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome

(SCIDS) who needs to be physically isolated and can instead use his gemoinoid that goes to school

in lieu of his physical self and hangs out with his peers. P. Burke’s pituitary gland disorder is more

complex from a social standpoint: she is more autonomous than patients with paralysis or SCIDS,

however, she seems to be rejected (by the world, by herself) due to her appearance. She volunteered

into an additional paralysis to obtain a better-looking body and what she imagined to be a better life

for herself. Nathan et al.’s paper considers a similar scenario as well by asking what happens when

the technology becomes an enhancement rather than treatment. They compare traditional scenario-

based design (positive gain from the technology) with value scenario (“stakeholders, pervasiveness,

time, systemic effects, and value implications” of the technology (Nathan et al. 2585)) that considers

further implications: “No longer used solely in specialized circumstances, geminoids have become

massively popular for those who can afford them. Only poor kids and a few really ancient teachers

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attend school in ‘flesh mode’ anymore. These geminoids are easy to distinguish because they are

truly visions of humanoid perfection. No longer conceptualized as physical twins of their masters,

geminoids are now created with blemish free skin, sculpted bodies, and fashionably styled hair”

(Nathan et al. 2589). In this scenario, poor children and elderly people (as well as the patient that

becomes free of SCIDS and therefore does not need the geminoid anymore) are discriminated by

not using this enhancement. As Nathan et al. explain, “[a] noir portrayal provides a counterbalance

to the tendency of technologists to focus on the positive when considering their latest project” (ib.).

This is where literature, from science fiction to nonfictional memoirs, can step in to contribute the

scenarios in their complex sociological, psychological, and philosophical ramifications.

As Raffi Khatchadourian writes, “[f]or decades, the idea of plugging a brain into a computer has

been a mainstay of cyberpunk fiction, not biotechnology” (I, par. 2). (“I jack in and I’m not here. It’s

all the same,” a character explains in William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer (103)). A brain could

also be connected to a single limb, such as an arm, or to a nonhumanlike machine, such as an

airplane. Jan Scheuermann, tetraplegic sufferer of spinocerebellar degeneration, volunteered to have

about a hundred electrodes implanted in her brain and undergo a 13-week training in order be able

to navigate both, an arm and an airplane, solely with the brain-computer interface technology

(Collinger et al. 557). This brain-computer prosthetic technology was first tested on monkeys whose

“intuitive decision[s] indicated a fluid melding of brain and machine” and were taken as “signs of

embodiment” (II, par. 32). In a true transhumanist pursuit, Andrew Schwarz’s experiment with

Scheuermann, just like Tesla’s with P. Burke, “got rid of the confines of our bodies”

(Khatchadourian IV, par. 17). Once Scheuermann was plugged-in, “[h]er life as a lab rat had altered

her view of herself. […] She had watched footage of herself in the lab, wondering, Can this person

who appears to be so diminished really be me?” (V, par. 3).

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Scheuermann’s new body was now not only organic but partly metal. The arm was also more than a

technological substitute: their shared agency was a relationship. Due to the possibility of an infection

when Scheuermann’s skin pulled out from the scalp revealing a wire, she needed to abruptly part

with the artificial arm, which she named Hector, and her implants, which she named Lewis and

Clark. Scheuermann went through a profound sense of loss when the experiment had to be ended:

“I had to tell [Hector] that I would miss him, and I knew he would miss me. I thought that Hector

needed to hear that we had had a wonderful time together, but that it was all right for him to have a

good time with someone else now, and to achieve new things with that person. I didn’t want Hector

to feel that he was betraying me by making a connection with a new subject. As I thought this over,

I realized what I really needed was to tell myself all that” (V, par. 4). The autonomy this technology

gave to Scheuermann was, to her, the product of a symbiotic relationship between a human and an

anthropomorphized machine rather than just a substitute arm or a tool for her own use, the way a

kitchen knife is used. It turns out her real self, for a while, involved the metal arm. Thus, the

machine became a part of her and she became a cyborg.

For some other patients with deep brain simulation (which involves an electrode being planted into

one’s brain),22 this experience proves to be much more alienating than it was for Scheuermann: “I

feel like a robot,” “I feel like an electronic doll,” “I don’t feel like myself anymore” (Schüpbach et al.

1813). Even after years, even decades of using the machine, the novelty does not wear off for the

user. Family and friends can find it alienating too: “So, there’s people in my family that (sighs) . . .

22 So far, deep brain stimulation has been approved for patients with Parkinson’s disease and some cases of mental
disorders, such as severe, treatment-resistant depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although deep brain
stimulation can offer significant relief from a debilitating disease, “[u]nwanted side effects can compromise a patient’s
quality of life in ways that intuitively can be described as undermining agency” (Roskies par. 4).

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sometimes question, you know, how much of it is me anymore and how much of me is, you know,

being programmed” (Goering et al. 66). When a device becomes a part of someone, an extension of

someone’s body, the agency is co-shared, e.g. when used, a wheelchair gains an agency. In a new

philosophical view on non-individual agency, called also relational agency (Linda Barclay) or collaborative

agency (John Doris), there is a mutual influence between participants, be it other people (e.g. that

attend a lecture, that take notes from a locked-in syndrome patient’s eyelid dictation) or devices (e.g.

that are implanted in a brain to prevent Parkinson disease tremor, that help to score a target).

Such dependency on the machine or relationship to the object commonly occurs in these

circumstances. Names are, as we have seen, nothing unusual, e.g. Vigand named his eye-tracking

writing machine. Naming is, in fact, not unusual for a bunch of ordinary objects, such as plants,

guitars, and cars. After all, some people, such as pet rock owners or object sexuals, do not just assign

the name to objects, but also a personality. Although these relationships are different from those

that arise from a technological assistance, since they focus primarily on social and emotional needs

without being essential to one’s functionality, there is a sense of dependency in both types of

relationships with objects. Paul Alexander, who spend his whole life but the first few years in an iron

lung due to polio, explains: “Once you live in an iron lung forever, it seems like, it becomes such a

part of your mentality. Like if somebody touches the iron lung—touches it—I can feel that. I can

feel the vibration go through the iron lung. If there’s a slight bit of a vibration that occurs as the

result of the mechanics—worn out the fan belt or it needs grease or anything like that—it tends to

change the breath slightly. Yep, the iron lung’s a part of me, I’m afraid” (Brown par. 24).

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Embodiment can thus take a variety of technological forms that are also, as the fictional and non-

fictional examples above have shown, highly intimate relationships with the prosthetic body parts.23

Similarly to Scheuermann and Alexander, Helva, a woman from Anne McCaffrey’s short story ‘The

Ship Who Sang’ (1969) who was “born a thing” (82) and is called “an encapsulated ‘brain’” and a

“vegetable” (83), becomes connected to a her own prosthetics: a spaceship. Like every person who

receives a new prosthesis or tries to learn a new skill, Helva needs to practice driving: “Instead of

kicking her feet, Helva’s neural responses started her wheels; instead of grabbing with hands, she

manipulated mechanical extensions” (83). Helva’s experience is a lot like Scheuermann or P. Burke.

At first, she is not fully in control of her cyborg body: “For Helva was destined to be the ‘brain’ half

of a scout ship, partnered with a man or a woman, whichever she chose, as the mobile half” (ib.).

Helva, too, feels a profound sense of loss when her (human) scout, whom she falls in love with, is

killed in an accident (a common destiny for a petrophiliac lover, e.g. Nešković’s cosmonaut or

Mérimée’s groom). She is most disappointed in her lack of agency at that moment: although she is a

woman-machine, she could not help him. She is consoled by another woman-ship: “We’ve all

known this grief, Helva. It’s no consolation, but if we couldn’t feel with our scouts, we’d only be

machines wired for sound” (107). A machine with a relational agency this strong thus cannot be

solely a machine. As the technologies so far imaginable only in fiction become reality, Pygmalionism

is gaining a new feature: galatea as an intrinsic and indistinguishably inseparable part of every

pygmalion.

23This is not to romanticize the practicality of such equipment: Paul Alexander became more known when he published
a YouTube video, searching for a mechanic who is knowledgeable in fixing his almost seven decades old iron lung. The
rare people who still use this machinery live in constant fear of not finding a part or a mechanic to repair them.

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These technological examples of co-agency in disabled persons reveal how connected each person

needs to be to human and nonhuman agents in order to simply exist and act in the world. All

humans are defined with other humans and nonhumans: our lives are also the lives of others. This is

also the view of Judith Butler who, in a plenary session at the MLA 2020 convention, called these

connections “features of binding relations” and “the human a creature among living creatures.” This

inter- and intraconnectivity with the other, be it human or nonhuman, has gained momentum in

recent literary scholarship, focusing on issues raised by health humanities and especially in

environmental humanities.24 Scholarship on the posthuman (that began in the 1990s and flourished

in the new millennium) made a first step towards this paradigm shift, however, when disability

studies were able to bring more clarity to the issue. Hélène Mialet was one of the first scholars with a

detailed study of this connectivity: she studied Stephen Hawking, the epitome of a genius scientist as

well as of a paralyzed person (he had ALS), and followed how his knowledge is built and dispersed

through his actual, everyday work. She came to a conclusion that Hawking “was making visible what

we normally don’t see, these different collectives that we all need, to a certain extent, to work and

think and act, what I call his “extended bodies’” (Mialet ‘Interview’ par. 5).

Hélène Mialet’s first personal encounter with Hawking brings an outer perspective to relational

agency that needs to be delegated to human and nonhuman entities. Since she studied Hawking

24 For example, maps have been pointed out to be biased against animals, their wildlife habitats and migrations, as
“Humans behave as if we are a self-reliant species, rather than one of many lifeforms, all of whom rely on same fragile
ecosystem to survive” (Huling par. 4). Another example of the raised awareness of the interconnectivity of the human
and nonhuman world happened in 2016 when the Constitutional Court of Colombia recognized the Atrato River as a
subject of rights and beneficiary of protection, followed by the Supreme Court of Colombia recognizing the Amazon
River ecosystem as a subject of rights to protection in 2018; same for the Whanganui river in New Zealand, and the
Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India (the latter verdict has since been overruled). These decisions to protect the rights of
nonhuman entities concern the rights of future generations (the voiceless unborn). They have broader implications as
they recognizes that fundamental rights to that do not only belong to an individual (human being, corporate entity) but
also to the ‘other’ (including plant and animal species), based on the intrinsic value of natural entities (República,
‘Future’, Acosta Alvarado and Rivas-Ramírez, Bryner).

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extensively for years, she “thought [she] knew who he was;” however, her “first interview with him

was very destabilizing,” mostly due to a “computer he was using at the time to communicate,” which

was slow and prone to breaking down, but also because she was unable to read his “imperceptible

[…] body language,” and “his assistants were coming in to take care of him, disturbing the

interaction” (par. 5). This perspective ultimately led Mialet to the conclusion that a complex

collective is needed around every person, and Hawking served as a prominent example of this

connectivity as he connected the machinery that helped him communicate, his assistants, colleagues,

students, and other humans and nonhumans, all in one place, working together towards one goal.

The World Wide Web might be the most obvious example of connectivity between humans that

relies on nonhuman agency.

Connectivity can also fail or not form at all. In my chosen author’s works, it falls through in the

relations where it would be expected to work: among patients with similar conditions. Mark O’Brien

once interviewed Hawking and asked if he “ever felt frustration or rage about the condition that had

left him a quadriplegic.” O’Brien found Hawking’s reply, that he “does not have anything to be

angry about,” disingenuous: “If it’s not two feelings at the same time, it’s not a real feeling,” he told

to his friend Chana Bloch (par. 13). The fact that their respective conditions demanded dependency

and interconnectedness with more devices and people than a healthy person can choose to relate with

is only one of the reasons one could feel frustrated or grateful. Due to the similarity of their

conditions, O’Brien assumes Hawking would think similarly of the banal nuisances and existential

crises they both surely faced—even if O’Brien was a strong believer in the power of attitude that can

get one through the most challenging circumstances (Bloch par. 14). In his poem ‘Breathing,’

O’Brien describes the labored act of breathing in an iron lung as if drowning in water, except that

“Water wouldn’t be so circumspect; / Water would crash in like a drunken sailor.” In a poem titled

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‘For Clifford Bernel,’ O’Brien writes of a young man named Clifford, a non-verbal patient with

cerebral palsy who was hospitalized at the same time as him and died while in the hospital. Like

Vigand, Bauby, and O’Brien, Clifford “wrote exquisite poetry / About the way he felt when people

stared / At him as if he were a freak.” The narrator admits that other patients, himself included,

“didn’t want to eat with Clifford” (“I tried to keep my eyes away from his mouth, / Which opened

uncontrollably, / His thick saliva oozing over him”). Only after Clifford’s death, which he does not

mourn, he “learn[s] of [his] insensitivity, / Insensitivity so great [he] failed / To recognize a person /

Caught in much the same predicament as [himself].” This same theme, such as ignoring other

patients with similar conditions, comes up in Bauby’s memoir as well: when Bauby is wheeled into

the room, other, mobile and thus more “fortunate” patients, turn their eyes away from Bauby,

nervously inspecting the ceiling. Calling himself and other severely paralyzed patients the “ravens of

doom” and “voiceless parrots,” he reflects on their differences: “I am all too conscious of the slight

uneasiness we cause as, rigid and mute, we make our way through a group of more fortunate

patients” (32)—their perceptions of him cause only greater alienation from himself. As O’Brien

concludes in ‘For Clifford Bernel,’ the “numbness” he feels towards the loss of Clifford’s life

“isolates [him] more / Than any iron lung.”

4.4 Medical Conceptions, Fictional Descriptions

Tiptree’s short story is helpful as a cautionary tale of performative connectivity as well as an

emblematic situation for determining personhood of Delphi and P. Burke. Without any knowledge

of Delphi’s surrogacy, the world considers Delphi a person while P. Burke is “legally dead” (46) and

thus deprived of personhood like William. It is clear, however, that the story attributes personhood

solely to P. Burke and not to Delphi because she has no brain, no mind, and no agency on her own.

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P. Burke is plugged in, her body is labeled by the narrator as an inanimate “carcass” (55), “monster”

and “she-golem” (76), and Delphi’s body as a mere frame, a “girl-body” (48), “fifteen and flawless”

(500); only together they form “a live girl” (48). Nevertheless, when the separation comes, P. Burke

is considered the only human in this symbiosis, despite Delphi’s human origins. This is revealed

when Tesla’s team informs Paul that he “killed her [P. Burke]” (76).

P. Burke’s physical death, as everything else, takes place through Delphi. Not long after P. Burke is

disconnected, Delphi becomes weak, one of her “pupil fills the iris, her lips writhe weirdly” and she

begins stuttering “Ag-ag-ag—” (77) as if becoming paralyzed. While holding dying Delphi for hours

on end, Paul realizes that “Delphi is nothing but a warm bundle of vegetative functions hitched to

some expensive hardware” (77) and is to stay this way. A year after P. Burke’s unfortunate death,

Delphi continues to serve as a vessel for another girl’s brain (78). P. Burke, on the other hand, has

no second chance because she had owned a unique and single human life.

This distinction between Delphi and P. Burke draws the difference between a vegetative state

(Delphi) and (a technologized case of) pseudocoma, also known as locked-in syndrome (P. Burke):

“Locked-in syndrome (LIS) can best be described as a disease process where the brain is fully

functional while confined within a nonfunctional body. Often described as the closest thing to being

‘buried alive,’ this devastating condition is characterized by the preservation of consciousness within

a quadriplegic and anarthric body” and “with detectable awareness where survival does not depend

on artificial help” (Khanna et al. 96-97).25 In persistent vegetative state, also called appalic syndrome

25 The actual condition of a locked-in syndrome is rare but could be viewed metaphorically as not too distant from a
general human existence, especially in the posthuman era: “Being locked-in is a fate of any human being. We are locked-
in not only in our bodies but also in our minds. During life, escape is not possible. Plato already compared our existence
with a cage and called our body ‘that living tomb we carry about’” (Haan 20). The body gives the state of being.

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or unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, “a patient may be awake without awareness” (97). A

vegetative state is not too different from a coma: a patient might open their eyes and look awake,

involuntary move parts of their body, or sometimes even mumble or speak words, none of which is

done consciously.

I found that medical literature has, since the very beginning, turned to fiction when describing rare

and unusual medical conditions. Even today, many articles that deal with such conditions would use

fictional examples, such as locked-in literary characters or Pygmalionist characters. In this way, a

fictional character or story serves as a common denominator and a cultural representation of a

certain condition. Plum and Posner, two physicians who first medically described and termed the

locked-in syndrome in a classical monograph The Diagnosis of Stupor and Coma (1966), claim that it is

“more likely, that the syndrome was already recognized medically in nineteenth century France”

(‘The Locked’ 1163). They disagree with J. M. S. Pearce, another physician who writes that “the first

description of the locked in syndrome may not have been by a doctor but by a writer—Emile Zola

in Thérèse Raquin in 1868” (198).26 Plum and Posner think Zola got the idea from Alexandre Dumas,

who in the 1844 novel Le Comte de Monte-Cristo described a character, Noirtier de Villefort, as

suffering from LIS. Both these characters suffered a stroke, as is common in real cases.

Although Katherine Hayles claims “there are no essential differences and absolute demarcations between bodily
existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals”
(‘How’ 2-3), she also does not believe that the separation of the body and the mind is possible at any point. To the
contrary, transhumanist thinkers like Hans Moravec argue that consciousness can indeed be disembodied.

26Madame Raquin had a stroke and is described most Pygmalionesque, being turned into stone, her eyes remaining the
only form of communication: “Her tongue turned to stone. Her hands and feet stiffened. She was struck dumb and
motionless, […] she had only the language of her eyes, and her niece had to guess what she wanted, […] she could
communicate quite easily with that imprisoned mind buried alive in a dead body. […] She had learnt to use her eyes like
a hand or a mouth, to ask and give thanks, and in a strange way made up for the organs she had lost” (Pearce 198).

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Furthermore, when Plum and Posner present LIS, they first describe a clinical case and then begin

their comment with literary references: “Like M. Noirtier de Villefort in Dumas; The Count of Monte

Cristo, this patient was awake but had lost all power to communication, except his eyes—‘a corpse

with living eyes’” (The Diagnosis 92). They continue to emphasize that this is a different state from

akinetic mutism, “which is properly a form of coma,” 27 and that “the implications of human care are

profound” (93). Typically, later studies of LIS mention only Dumas and Zola (see Ohry, Gosseries

et al. 193), and some also include the international bestseller memoir by Bauby. Daniel Kondziella

suggested in the 2017 edition of the Journal of the Neurological Sciences that Roald Dahl was the first one

to describe the complete locked-in syndrome in ‘William and Mary’ (1959), “almost half a century

before the medical community became aware of this devastating condition” (276; see Stoll et al.).

Besides that, Dahl seems to be among the first authors that describes a proto-brain-computer

interface device, which are used today to communicate with severely paralyzed patients.

Bioethicists also use literary examples, not only to present a condition or a medical issue but also to

address its solutions. Sara Goering et al. write about the neuroethics of high-tech neural devices

which may sometimes change the patients for the worse instead of supporting them in ways that

enhance their agency. This is especially dangerous with next-generation neural devices that operate

in a closed loop (i.e. the device regulates itself through feedback, including volitional input), such as

deep brain stimulation for depression. Sara Goering points out that we need to rely on friends and

family to help us identify possible and unwelcome side effects of these devices (sometimes as severe

as a grave change of personality).

27 Akinetic mutism (coma vigil) is another condition of severe paralysis that was described in medical literature in 1941,
25 years before the locked in syndrome, by Cairns et al.: “These patients lie motionless, mindless, and unaware of their
surroundings but show sleep wake cycles. They may be capable of reflex movement, withdrawing from a painful
stimulus, and may make semi purposeful movements but usually cannot be stimulated to do so” (Pearce 198).

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Goering et al. propose to apply the Asimov laws of robotics in order to maintain the relational

agency of the patient using the device: “A robot shouldn’t control a human being, but rather must

obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would injure or cause a human

to come to harm” (67). The article concludes with this suggestion but does not delve further into its

implications. The theoretical application of the Asimov’s laws of robotics is not straight-forward:

first of all, Isaac Asimov wrote for a certain type of robot, so the laws cannot be simply extended to

other robots, be it simpler (vacuums) or more complex (DNA and protein ‘robots’ could be used in

surgery to correct gene disorders). This is, in fact, not the first time the Asimov’s laws have been a

subject of AI ethics debates: in the last decade, they have provided a ground to establish a similar,

updated set of principles, adjusted to contemporary challenges and aimed to guide the designers of

next-generation robotics. Literature is therefore rather the first step towards putting an idea into the

contemporary practice and remains a faithful companion as we reevaluate our regulations and most

central values around the technologized world we want to live in.

4.5 Persons and Nonpersons

Conscious nonhumans and unconscious humans bring immense complexity to the notions of

personhood, embodiment, and autonomy. “Personhood is generally thought to require complex

cognitive capacities such as autonomy, moral agency, or sophisticated forms of self-awareness”

(Koplin and Savulescu par. 10). In the West, it is an individual’s autonomy that makes us a person—

a thought that could be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s moral autonomy. People unable to reason

are not persons according to Kant (see more in Jecker ‘Anencephalic’ 337); however, “one need not

be human, in the biological sense, to be a person, according to Kant” (Alvarez Manninen 18). Those

dependent on the others are especially vulnerable: minors, people with severe mental disorders,

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unconscious people, people who cannot communicate, who do not understand the language, who

are deprived of human rights (undocumented people, slaves, etc.). Many galateas are among them:

dependent on their maker or lover, often manipulated in their actions and thoughts, programmed or

built with a single purpose, serving human ambitions and caprices. As already shown in the first

chapter, galateas are perceived as impotent children or disabled adults. P. Burke and Delphi exist in a

state equivalent to a pregnant person and their fetus, the latter being commonly considered as not

fully human. Delphi is called “the darlingest girl child” (48) and “child-solemn, a beautiful baby”

(50), all when being considered no more than an objectified puppet, a lump of flesh. Vigand also

writes about being treated as a “decorative object” in the middle of a party, where, if he is spoken to

at all, he is addressed in “sugary terms one reserves for infants,” as if his complete paralysis

“reverted [him] to infancy” (63). Bauby’s humor sometimes helps him to indulge being given a bath

at the age of 44 as a “total lapse into infancy” and “the next day, the same procedure seems to me

unbearably sad” (16-17).

Defining some human entities, such as anencephalic infants or Delphi, as nonpersons often applies

not only to embryos and fetuses, but also infants. For physicians, “[t]he difference between

decerebrate and normal newborns lies not so much in their actual functional abilities as in their

potential for future cognitive development” (Ahm 242). For some philosophers, likewise, “all

newborns, whether normal or otherwise, are nonpersons and acquire personhood some time after

birth.” Many others are less extreme but maintain that “personhood is incompatible with severe

neurologic deficits” (Ahmad 243). Some animals have higher capacities than human infants and, for

some philosophers, “[s]pecies membership alone […] is not morally relevant” (Singer ‘Sanctity’ 129).

In this view, most fictional robots and androids, Kanzi the bonobo, and Sophia the robot could be

considered persons while some humans would not qualify.

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Philosophers and societies sometimes not only consider infants but all children as only a potential

person. Since the ancient times, some philosophers denied children personhood, referring to their

less-developed, inferior, incomplete, derivative state. Some contemporary philosophers argue that,

overall, “childhood is bad for children” (Hannan 11) and call it a “predicament” and “regrettable”

due to child’s “impaired capacity for practical reasoning, lack of an established practical identity, a

need to be dominated, and profound and asymmetric vulnerability” (Schapiro 716). Sarah Hannan

emphasizes that this is why adults have moral obligations towards people who are “worse off” (25).

Parents would probably be the first to acknowledge infant’s helplessness but also the first to reject

labeling childhood as “bad” and “regrettable” and to call their progeny a non-person or a yet-to-

become a person. It is certainly “unlikely that a mother [of an anencephalic infant] would easily

accept the contention that she has given birth to a nonperson (Ahmad 243).28 Intimate relationships,

even in obscure practices such as Pygmalionism, overturn the (Kantian impersonal) conception of

personhood. The circle of life has expanded to yet unacknowledged and new life forms.

When qualifying for personhood, Nancy Jecker suggests considering a social conception of

personhood in circumstances where an intrinsic value of personhood does not suffice. Instead, we

should look for “extrinsic qualities, such as standing in an intimate interpersonal relationship, imply

moral standing and moral rights. For example, being a friend, belonging to a family, being a patient,

or filling a particular role in a social group suffices to establish personhood. These extrinsic qualities

28 Consider Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child (1988), where the mother is convinced her unloving and unloved child
is not human, yet she remains (as much as she best can) motherly to him and tries to socialize him into a person capable
of living independently. The father, however, rejects his child: “‘He’s a little child,’ she said. ‘He’s our child.’ / ‘No, he’s
not,’ said [the father], finally. ‘Well, he certainly isn’t mine’” (Lessing 74). For the mother, her (what she considers)
nonhuman child is nonetheless a person. She confirms this by bringing the child back home from an inhumane
institution to which the father brought him to quickly die, despite the trauma that the child’s presence in the family
brings to the rest of its members.

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are sufficient, but not necessary, for moral personhood. This means, on the one hand, that ordinary

adult human beings who lack these interpersonal characteristics are still persons. On the other hand,

someone who lacks intrinsic features (e.g., consciousness, self-consciousness, and rationality), may

nonetheless be a person” (Jecker ‘Commentary’ 35). In this view, all infants that stand in special

relationships, including seriously impaired infants, count as persons in a special, “social” sense of

personhood, irrespective of whether they possess the intrinsic properties associated with ordinary

personhood, such as consciousness and the ability to feel pain. All kinds of humanoids of human

origin could in theory be considered a person in the social sense too, even if grown from a severely

modified embryo without a major part of the brain, like artificially modified Delphi or naturally

modified anencephalic infants. In fact, the criteria for social personhood could, in principle, be

applied even to humanlike entities that do not have human origins, i.e., have not been a result of

human (natural, assisted, artificial) reproduction and/or are not made partly of nonhuman material

(chimeras), provided it could be shown that they meet the sufficient condition of standing in a

“special relationship” with human beings.

Similarly, philosopher Hilde Lindemann argues that identity is primarily a social narrative and as

such made of the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories others (that are close to us) tell

about us. In cases where the stories about ourselves do not overlap with stories about us, the latter

should subside, for instance, when a transgender teenager decides for hormone therapy against the

wishes of their parents. In cases where the person cannot tell a story about themselves (an infant, a

comatose patient, etc.) the others are there to preserve their identity and narrate the ongoing story of

their inevitably fluid and malleable identity. She calls this process “holding and letting go” (21) and

emphasizes that it can only apply to humans since, for instance, pets, which share our everyday life,

have an all too different embodiment (19-20).

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4.5.1 Consciousness and Personhood: Dahl

The account of social personhood is confirmed as well as problematized with Roald Dahl’s short

story ‘William and Mary’ (1959), a story which literalizes the locked-in syndrome with two of its

most common descriptions: being ‘buried inside one’s body’ and living as ‘brain in a bucket’. Shortly

before William dies of cancer, unknown to anyone, he gives his body to science in order to be

revived only in the form of a conscious brain. Apparently conscious and aware of the new condition,

he is completely unable to perform. He is given an artificial eye that, regrettably, has no eyelid that

locked-in patients are often able to use for communication. Essentially, William becomes a complete

locked-in syndrome patient: he has no body, no motor output, and is connected to the world only

through a rudimentary brain-computer interface that testifies there is brain activity. His wife Mary,

however, who spent years if not a lifetime with William before his death, understands subtle cues of

his changing pupil better than doctors do: for example, when she lights a cigarette in front of

William’s brain, aware of William’s dislike of her habit, she notices his artificial pupil contracting into

a position of “absolute fury.” She also traces “softness about it somewhere, a calm, kindly quality

that she had never seen before” (486)29—which attests that her readings of William are not a pure

projection of William as she used to know him.

William has physically and mentally changed, Mary figures. She previously did not like her husband

due to his cold and controlling character, however, presented in this utterly dependent and helpless

29Communication with solely subtle changes in size of the pupil measured by a bedside camera was only discovered in
2013; it is one of the easiest, least risky, and most inexpensive ways of communicating with severely motor-impaired
patients (Stoll et al., see also Laureys et al. 193).

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form of a brain in a bowl, connected with an artificial eye, she is “suddenly getting to feel the most

enormous affection for him. […] He looks so helpless and silent lying there under the water in his

little basin. […] He’s like a baby, that’s what he’s like. He’s exactly like a little baby” (485). This

phrasing should raise concerns to the doctor, neurosurgeon Landy, to whom these words are

addressed. Mary demands to take William’s brain home with her: “‘It is my husband, you know.’

There was no anger in her voice. She spoke quietly, as though merely reminding [the doctor] of a

simple fact” (ib.).

This is how social personhood is confirmed: William’s conscious brain is William as a person, as a

husband to her. The doctor, William’s new maker, disagrees: “‘That’s rather a tricky point,’ Landy

said, wetting his lips. ‘You’re a widow now, Mrs Pearl. I think you must resign yourself to that fact’”

(ib.). The reader can only guess why the doctor says this: He might disagree about the humanity or

personhood of the brain in the box (as he considers William’s wife a widow and William officially

dead); perhaps he simply wants or needs to keep the brain in his care (“This is an experiment, Mrs

Pearl”); maybe he does not think Mary is capable of taking care of the brain (“He couldn’t possibly

be moved”); or he might question her attitude towards William as a helpless infant (“Unless he were

very much mistaken, there was something a bit odd about this woman, he thought. She seemed

almost pleased to have her husband over there in the basin. He tried to imagine what his own

feelings would be if it were his wife’s brain lying there and her eye staring up at him out of that

capsule. He wouldn’t like it” (485-86)). Because William’s form and agency were so drastically

changed, he is not considered a person by most. He might have originated as a human, but now he

is more of a cyborg and has lost his personhood. If his consciousness could not have been

confirmed by means of “the ordinary electro-encephalograph” (474), he could have been easily

discarded or experimented on further, just like a dead brain, an embryo, a corpse.

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Sooner or later, a brain could be created in a lab from a stem cell, forgoing the ordinary human

origin and human experience that William had before succumbing to the experiment. These brain

organoids are primarily made to study brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders;

however, ethical questions remain. Would we be obliged to connect them to robotic bodies or

implant them into nonhuman animals if they attain consciousness (Koplin and Savulescu par. 17)?

In 2018, petri-dish-grown organoids at the University of California San Diego spontaneously

produced “electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies” (Reardon), which offer a new

venue of studying early brain development while opening the big questions: Does a similar pattern

necessarily mean that these organoids are like a newborn’s brain and can they obtain consciousness?

The closer the infants are to pretterm, the more worrisome the ethical concerns become. A parallel

speculation on how to treat such beings—and all humanoids, as a matter of fact—has often taken

place in the animal rights discourse. For example, the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy

Bentham explains that “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they

suffer?” (283), because the feelings of suffering and pleasure, as well as the awareness of their

subjective experience, should be sufficient for consciousness—and not, as some argue, having

language, thoughts about thoughts, which comes much later. William likely does not feel much

physical pain but seems to be experiencing emotional pain. As a sentient being, it is clear that his

human (cyborg, or whatever we might classify him as) rights were violated.

The unexpected turn of Dahl’s short story is not William’s condition, but precisely in Mary’s new

relationship to him. Mary might call him “my husband” but in her view he has also reversed into a

“baby” (485) and she clearly doesn’t consider him completely human anymore. Mary’s apparently

impure intentions ask for a simple reversal of the controlling role in their marriage, a revenge on

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now helpless William—which is not a rare situation in caretaking of the elderly, sick, or disabled.

Mary proclaims she “can’t wait” to have a new “pet” (486) to take care for, a kind of pet rock with a

personality she knows so well. In Mary’s opinion, William’s basic identity has changed from human

to nonhuman due to the radical transformation in his form and agency. The doctor claims “there

should be absolutely no difference mentally between this William here and the one [Mary] used to

know back home,” while Mary points out that William’s transformation radically changed their

relationship: “I believe that I could live very comfortably with this kind of a William. I could cope

with this one” (484). This William, “quiet” (ib.) and “sweet” (487), as any other galatea, is easily

subdued, deprived of language and any agency. He does not fulfill the criteria for humanness or

personhood, except for one: he is certainly conscious (484). Other than that, he does not look

normatively human, does not act human, has no agency, and cannot communicate. Yet, with some

help of technology, he could attempt to achieve all these things: he could be given a humanlike body

that could move and feel, brain waves technology to produce speech, stem cell reproduction, etc.

William is one of the rarely seen male galateas that has to remain disabled in order to be loved by

Mary.

Not unlike William’s case is Joe Bonham’s unfortunate story from Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 novel and

1971 film adaptation, Johnny Got His Gun, inspired by an actual solider who lost all his limbs. During

World War I, the narrative follows the narration of young American soldier Joe who finds himself in

a hospital after being severely wounded: he gradually realizes he lost all his limbs and the lower part

of the face, making him unable to speak or hear. Left a complete prisoner of his own body, not

unlike a locked-in patient, Joe’s needs and personhood are widely ignored by the hospital’s staff. A

new nurse, however, is more attuned to his needs and writes letters on his chest with her fingers,

establishing a one-way communication. Joe figures he could communicate another way using the

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Morse code, banging his head up and down, and asks to be moved out of the hospital. The hospital

administrators fear the reaction of the public seeing Joe’s injuries and helplessness, which would

diminish their support of the war. Joe is not a locked-in person per diagnosis but effectively shares

the same diagnosis with a different cause: his condition is a result of war. He is a nonperson before

he figures out a way to communicate with the world and he continues to be treated as a nonperson

since the officials make a political decision to sweep his case under the rug. Therefore, he remains a

puppet of the hospital, unable to make any decisions regarding his life or health and left to live, like

William, inside his head. To the contrary of Joe’s tragic denouement, the body of the main character

of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story ‘The Man Who Was Used Up,’ a general and war hero who

was also mutilated during the war, is assembled every day with beautiful prosthetics (limbs, teeth, an

eye, a wig) and a machine that helps him speak in “a voice of surpassing clearness, melody, and

strength” (192).

4.5.2 On Robotics

With the advance of technology as well as with new conceptions of personhood, the lines around

human and personhood are becoming blurred. Nancy Jecker suggests “standing in a special

relationship” (‘Commentary’ 35) as a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for the separate

category of social personhood. However, this criterion instigates the worry about whether the

concept could be manipulated to nonhuman agents, either as a self-standing entity (as Sophia) or

merged with a human being (as Delphi). The fictional works and real-word examples given above,

such as marrying objects (anthropomorphizing) and denying personhood to infants (dehumanizing),

raise ethical concerns for this view.

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Sophia the robot is an example of such a manipulation, claimed by her makers to be “essentially

alive” (Fallon 3:16) just because she looks quite humanlike, imitates human behavior, and speaks

(mostly scripted) English. Sophia is controversial because she sometimes gets treated like an

autonomous entity, e.g. by being (unofficially) given a Saudi Arabian citizenship and an official title,

the UN Development Programme’s Innovation Champion, in the United Nations. Nonetheless,

Sophia is far from being the only robot in consideration of being given certain rights.

In 2016, European parliament discussed the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics in relation

to all kinds of robots and their personhood: the main suggestion was to give robots the status of

“electronic persons” (Delvaux 12) in an attempt to address the question “whether they should be

regarded as natural persons, legal persons, animals or objects—or whether a new category should be

created, with its own specific features and implications as regards the attribution of rights and duties,

including liability for damage” (5). This idea of personhood sounds sensationalistic if considered in

the context of personhood and humanoid robots. The report tried to encompass all robots as to

propose corporate personhood in law (in the same manner as legal personhood was given to

companies), anticipating issues that could or already come up with corporations that make

autonomous robots.30 Yet, with the next generation of self-learning technology, this category will

clearly not suffice. The notion of autonomy, in particular, demands to be evaluated critically in the

light of technologies like this. For example, the report already calls “to elaborate criteria for an ‘own

intellectual creation’ for copyrightable works produced by computers or robot” (8).

30Electronic personhood would be a legal definition that confers “specific rights and obligations, including that of
making good any damage they may cause, and applying electronic personality to cases where robots make smart
autonomous decisions or otherwise interact with third parties independently” (Delvaux 12).

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The report begins with citing literary works, as common among legal and medical texts: “whereas

from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster to the classical myth of Pygmalion, through the story of

Prague’s Golem to the robot of Karel Čapek, who coined the word, people have fantasised about

the possibility of building intelligent machines, more often than not androids with human feature”

(4). All of these works are discussed in this dissertation, as they prove to play an important symbolic

function in Western societies. Reading them in the light of current technological and scientific

developments opens new questions, fresh perspectives, and guidance for the imminent future. As

literature scholars, this is how we can help.

4.6 Manifesto: How Should Literature Engage in Technology Ethics

Throughout the dissertation I lay out the framework for the study of fictional and nonfictional

literature and ethics, here mostly bioethics, in relation to new technologies. First of all, science and

technology feed fiction ideas, and vice versa, and the influence works in the way of correlation and

causation. Examples of causation are The Star Trek computer and Eliza Doolittle which were major

inspirations for chatbots and virtual assistants used in today’s cell phones and improvisational

theater. Aside from those literary examples where the technology prediction is coincidental, as one

could say for the Brave New World assisted reproductive technology, engineers themselves often

reveal their direct literary inspirations (Maddox, Mathewson). Likewise, in a converse influence

where scientific innovation result in literary reflections, authors of literary works speculate on the

already-existing technologies, as in the case of Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 which considers a neural

network developing to a point of seeming (or genuine) consciousness. The correlation between the

two domains of science and fiction is therefore strong enough not to leave literature out of the

discourse about where we should focus our current scientific and technological efforts.

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Besides these correspondences, literature has already proved to be a strong asset in the fields of AI

ethics or medical humanities, for example, as well as in a general public discussion on science and

technology in at least the following contexts. Second, following the mutual correspondences as the

first and most important function, literature also, second, offers exemplary cases of some conditions

(pygmalionism, narcissism, Quasimodo and Münchausen syndromes) as cultural capital, some of

which serve a symbolic function (axolotl). Third, fiction works as a space for inventing new

technologies and reflects on their social and individual ramifications (autonomous neurological

devices; see Goering). Fourth, nonfiction memoirs, autobiographies, and essays are powerful tools

that can be used to discuss medical conditions and technologies on an individual level (patients with

the locked-in syndrome), as recognized by the fields of medical humanities and narrative medicine.

Fifth, both fiction and nonfiction offer a space for fostering solutions (Asimov laws of robotics, see

Goering et al. 66) as well as a safe and productive space for conversation (literature groups in

hospitals). Sixth, literature can provide a richer context from a patient narrative, if that narrative is at

all possible (the Vigand couple each offer a perspective on the husband’s illness). Seventh, literature

also offers a broad and diverse historical and cultural narrative (stigma around cancer and AIDS,

romanticization of tuberculosis in the Romantic period, or ethics around assisted reproductive

technologies). Finally, literature explores and re-defines human nature and the world around us,

which is essential to ethics and philosophy and further extends to the practice of science and

technology. The underlying philosophical question of this dissertation, What is human?, is essentially

imbedded into every work of literature, with the novel serving as the human genre in the nineteenth

century and science fiction as the human genre in the twentieth century.

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Literature has long informed ethics, future studies,31 disability studies, gender and sexuality studies,

race studies, medical humanities, and related fields in at least the eight contexts listed above. I make

a call to consider literature in relation to cutting-edge technologies not only as an asset to reflect on

technological practices but as a multifold tool of actively engaging with the technological practice

and the actual creation and enhancement of the human and humanlike entities. Literature and

philosophy (philosophy uprooted from reading literature and philosophy in general) have so far not

been a part of the technological practice.32 Besides that, I argue that literature should be involved

into the ethics discussion on a deeper level: we should not only use literary examples as a token

(modeling our laws after the Asimov’s laws of robotics) but should engage with the implications a

literary work presents philosophically (reading Asimov’s texts and extracting the implications, values,

etc.). This is not a rare method in the humanities, and I expose some examples in this very

dissertation (e.g. bioethicist Denise Dudzinski reading Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir); rather, I

ask literary scholars to engage into these discussions from their point of view.

31The idea to connect fiction with future studies came from the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling who defined the
term design fiction back in 2005 as a “deliberate use of diegetic prototypes [as described by David A. Kirby] to suspend
disbelief about change” (par. 2). Soon, design fiction came into use as a speculative design discipline to practice the
exploration of possible futures through speculated narrative and scenarios, practiced in institutions like The Near Future
Laboratory. The design fiction cases of geminoids and the anticipation series Black Mirror are presented in this
dissertation in chapter 4.
32While this dissertation was being written, the Berggruen Institute launched a program named The Transformations of
the Human which realized the practice I propose here: the program places social sciences and humanities scholars,
mostly anthropologists and philosophers, into leading biotechnological laboratories and AI and robotics companies (see
more in Berggruen). The ‘human sciences’ researcher is not only to reflect on engineering (which has already been widely
practiced in labs and companies by hiring an ethicist, often solely to satisfy the requirement than to effectively
implement ethics into research and products) but needs to actively participate in the projects, which are, ideally, created
with their contribution in mind. Understandably, establishing this kind of practice is exploratory at this point and brings
an array of unique challenges but is absolutely necessary for the twenty-first century, as is also argued in this dissertation.

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Chapter 5: Brave New Birth: Reproduction and Biotechnology

Everything from the egg.1

William Harvey, Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium (1651)

Everything from shells.2

Erasmus Darwin’s seal (1771)

Locus classicus of the Pygmalion myth from Ovid’s Metamorphoses X ends happily two times over, with

the ivory statue’s transformation into a fleshly woman and her fruitful marriage with her creator

Pygmalion: “an infant girl was born […] when nine times a crescent moon had changed”

(Metamorphoses 234).3 Evidently, although Pygmalion’s bride used to be a statue, their interspecies

reproduction is not futile or even hindered. Besides being at least initially hybrid-human procreation

their propagation is also incestuous, as Michel de Montaigne points out in Of the Affection of Fathers to

Their Children (254), since Pygmalion is as much the father of his bride as he is her lover.

Now, to consider this simple reason for loving our children, that we have begot them, therefore calling them
our second selves, it appears, methinks, that there is another kind of production proceeding from us, that is of
no less recommendation: for that which we engender by the soul, the issue of our understanding, courage, and
abilities, springs from nobler parts than those of the body, and that are much more our own: we are both father
and mother in this generation. These cost us a great deal more and bring us more honour, if they have anything
of good in them.
[…]
Nay, I make a great question, whether Phidias or any other excellent sculptor would be so solicitous of the
preservation and continuance of his natural children, as he would be of a rare statue, which with long labour
and study he had perfected according to art. And to those furious and irregular passions that have sometimes
inflamed fathers towards their own daughters, and mothers towards their own sons, the like is also found in
this other sort of parentage: witness what is related of Pygmalion who, having made the statue of a woman of
singular beauty, fell so passionately in love with this work of his, that the gods in favour of his passion inspired
it with life.

1 Ex ovo omnia.

2 E conchis omnia.

3“Iamque coactis cornibus in plenum noviens lunaribus orbem / illa Paphon genuit, de qua tenet insula nomen”
(Magnus 295-297).

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Montaigne addresses pygmalionism in both of its aspects, the creation of a humanlike entity and the

attraction towards that creation. He further points out two types of creations: human children and

works of art (towards which their authors also feel affection).

The first four chapters focused on the second aspect, creating Pygmalionesque works of art, and this

and the next chapter will discuss the first aspect, creating human children. What used to be lie

mostly within the domain of women is increasingly becoming part of the domain of science and

technology. The main question of the last two chapters is how reproductive technologies have,

together with the twentieth-century breakthroughs in biotechnology, affected our conceptions of

human biological (sexual, natural, spontaneous?) and biotechnological (asexual, artificial, assisted?)

reproduction. Issues of hybridity, cloning, incest, prenatal tests, language and visuality in assisted

reproductive technologies will be addressed in both chapters in relation to Aldous Huxley and

Octavia Butler’s novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Anthony Boucher’s short stories, and Richard

Meier’s, Sharon Olds’s, Helen Dunmore’s, and micha cárdenas’s poetry. The discussion in the next

chapter also consults influential works from the visual arts: Andrew Niccol’s film Gattaca and Arthur

Clark and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lennart Nilsson’s prenatal photographs from The

Drama of Life, and Maja Smrekar’s bioart project K-9 Topology.

Reproductive technologies are in focus because they re-conceptualize the human reproductive

system, the natural site of sexual procreation, by replacing it with petri dishes (now widely used in in-

vitro fertilization), donated gametes and surrogate wombs (less widely used but nonetheless

common), and artificial wombs (still in the making), not to mention other speculated technologies

(such as in vitro gametogenesis, which would grow gamete cells from any other cell in the body).

Reproductive technologies allow for a non-sexual reproduction (artificial insemination, oocyte

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retrieval) in which the two (or three) parental parties have never met (gamete donation). With the

help of these technologies, barriers of natural reproduction have been breached: a woman can have a

virgin birth, a genetic child delivered posthumously, or her own genetic child through a gestational

surrogate, without ever being pregnant. Infertile and LGBTQIA+ couples can have their genetic

children. With genome editing, prospective children can be altered before they are implanted into

the womb. Embryos, sperm, and eggs can live outside of a woman’s body to be frozen indefinitely

or to be born years (decades, centuries?) after their siblings, into the same or different families.

Siblings can unknowingly commit incest if they do not know their biological origins. Others can be

cloned. And this is only the beginning; IVF has only been practiced for a little over half a century.

This chapter directs attention to the Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World passages that describe its

reproductive technologies and techniques. Huxley’s novel still appeals to readers almost a hundred

years later, even if other literary works on similar utopian topics were written at the exact same time

as Brave New World (some of which are briefly examined here). The goal of the chapter is to

investigate why the novel’s vision of reproductive technology remains a powerful trope in science

and general culture. Brave New World is often discussed in relation to the new technologies and

supposed eugenic practices of the modern world; however, I have not located a detailed scholarly,

much less literary, discussion on its resonances with the assisted reproductive technologies of today.

Reading the novel through a perspective of current reproductive technologies and reproductive

ethics dilemmas, I argue that its distinct quality of revealing the cracks in an otherwise perfectly

regulated transhumanist social system appeals to sensitive and still controversial issues around

assisted reproductive technologies, such as sterilizations, gamete donations, designer babies,

stratification of society, etc. Apart from the emblematic use of novel’s title as a cautionary tale, I

demonstrate with unprecedented detail that the reproductive technology depicted in the novel is

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uncannily similar to our reproductive technologies today. Throughout the discussion, I expose how

the language, and in particularly the terminology, used in assisted reproductive technology frames

our conceptions of reproduction, demonstrating that we currently conceptualize the whole human

reproduction through a human-made technology that allows us to access and imitate the biology

behind it. In conclusion, I juxtapose Aldous Huxley’s satirization of a transhumanist world with the

views of his biologist brother, Julian Huxley, who invented the term transhumanism and endorsed it

in all seriousness. Although they both believed in science as a means of progress, Brave New World

masterfully reveals how an exaggerated focus on science and technology—with humanities

disciplines, such as history and literature, and practices, such as art and religion, buried in the

original, uncivilized world from which the utopian/dystopian World State emerged—can lead to a

highly unequal and unethical world.

The comparison of the Huxley brothers’ respective fictional and theoretical reflections on

transhumanism contributes to my overall finding that the two main strains of postmodernism,

critical and ontological postmodernism, are not as separate as some scholars believe. While critical

posthumanism (present in theoretical fields in humanities) aims to overcome anthropocentrism,

which is viewed as inherently wrong and overlaps with transhumanism at many points, ontological

posthumanism (present in technologies and pop culture, including science fiction) makes for an

intensification of transhumanism. I argue that transhumanism and anthropocentrism permeate

natural sciences and engineering, despite the recent posthumanist claims to the contrary. Human-

computer interaction, language-reared animals, relationships with Pygmalionesque objects and

prosthetic devices from the previous chapters all reveal inherent transhumanist and anthropocentric

behavior. Brave New World’s humanity is transhuman in its origins and medicalized behavior yet

cannot completely overcome proto-human needs for religion, connection, and beauty. With this

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satirization of transhumanism, Aldous Huxley criticizes Julian Huxley’s belief in which ‘beyond the

human’ is naively taken as a continuous good and a moral authority.

5.1 Reproduction in Fiction

Many utopias and dystopias foster great interest in fertility

and its regulation in order to control human population

and, through that, their everyday activity. In the following

discussion, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) serves

as a literary text of comparison to current assisted

reproductive technology (ART) because of its depiction of

a reproductive technology uncannily similar to the

Figure 29 Rate of children conceived via ART in
France. technology of in vitro fertilization (IVF). In addition, the
Image by La Rochebrochard (1). Used with
permission. novel has been the main fictional source of reflection on

ART since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978.

In this comparison, I examine how ethical issues that arise from ART are reflected in the Western

countries of the 2010s and in Brave New World, which is set in the year 2450. I point out how ART

has long operated at the edge of science and ethics, for example, beginning with the artificial

insemination that turned from animals to humans and focusing on the IVF technology, which

became not only a revolutionary infertility treatment but also a prenatal treatment of embryo’s

genetics. This collateral effect of the treatment is how ART is able to direct human reproduction and

evolution, especially in relation to gene editing. Fiction has reflected on these complex scenarios at

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individual and societal levels and can guide us in our future decisions on various kinds of

reproduction, from the most so-called natural to the most artificial reproductive means.

Assisted reproductive technology was first performed on domestic animals and has been persistently

on the rise ever since artificial insemination was shown to work in the human species. As it is the

leader of ART, the focus of this discussion is on IVF and its repercussions. First of all, IVF is almost

completely asexual: it involves only a single sexual act performed by men as sperm is ordinarily

obtained with ejaculation rather than with testicular sperm

extraction or aspiration. More importantly, IVF has been

shown to yield better results than some other similar

techniques, such as gamete intrafallopian transfer, that have

since become outdated. Moreover, IVF has been more than

successful in normalizing asexual reproduction4 in human

species: in Western countries, it results in approximately four

percent of all births. Besides that, IVF includes all the

techniques of the more basic assisted reproductive

Figure 30 Life originated from clay: A
caricature accompanying an article on the
recent discovery from NASA.
technology, such as artificial insemination and ovulation

Caricature by David Austin from New Scientist induction, and has employed many new technologies, such as
106/1451 (April 11, 1985): 3.

widespread egg donation, gestational surrogacy,

preimplantation genetic diagnosis, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), and—the most recent—

genome editing. The clinical practice has improved in quality and quantity over the last four decades,

4In the human species, sexual reproduction is considered natural. The first reproduction in life forms on Earth was
asexual, however. The evolution of sexual reproduction is, in fact, surprising, because asexual reproduction should be
able to outcompete it (in numbers as well as the percentage of genes that get passed on).

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going from treating blocked fallopian tubes in 1978 to gene editing of created embryos in 2018. The

central role of IVF in treating infertility is highly problematic because it has become so mainstream

that research on other, more basic ART techniques, such as infertility solutions for blocked fallopian

tubes, has all but stopped. Besides that, IVF accounts for fruitful stem cell research used in, for

example, regenerative medicine. As an access point to new therapeutic and diagnostic technologies

and as a research tool, IVF is a revolutionary technology whose popularity will surely continue in the

future. Although infertility is on the rise in the Western world, IVF and upcoming technologies5

promise not only to diminish infertility but to improve the human gene pool by eliminating genetic

diseases in vitro. As a form of asexual reproduction which also eliminates defects by selecting

healthy embryos through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), IVF contributes to loosening of

genetic diversity. As such, IVF is carrying a torch toward a new evolutionary direction for our

species.

Literature has long speculated on the topic of creating humans and humanoids by some other than

so-called natural (sexual-reproductive) way. Mythological creation stories give examples of divinities

designing the first human(s) in numerous ways, most often from clay. In Greek mythology,

parthenogenesis (Gaea) or three-parent children (Gaea, Hephaistos, and Athena created

Ericthonios) are commonplace. Popular Pygmalionesque stories, in which a man creates an artificial

woman, begin with creation and end with procreation. The question of reproduction with such an

artificial being is addressed already in Ovid’s Pygmalion. Pygmalion’s ivory statue is turned into flesh

5Already performed on mice, the IVF technology will inform in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) on how to create a human
embryo out of skin cells.

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and gives birth to their daughter Paphos,6 likely via means of ‘natural’ human reproduction. Ovid

concludes his poem with “an infant girl was born […] when nine times a crescent moon had

changed” (Metamorphoses 234).7

The question of progeny, even if sometimes ignored in Pygmalionesque works, still stirs interest in

most recent works. It was revealed in the film Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the sequel of the 1982 Blade

Runner, that replicant Rachael and her (supposedly) human lover Deckard had a human-replicant

child. Their daughter Ana serves as evidence that replicants can reproduce biologically; she was

supposedly conceived through sexual reproduction (because assisted reproductive technology is not

hinted at or mentioned). We learn that she was delivered via a Caesarean section that proved fatal

for the replicant mother. Ana suffers from a compromised immune system condition, genetic

‘bubble baby disease,’ that requires her to live in quarantine. Ana’s disease seems to be a cover to

disguise her exceptional status, more than a result of unusual genetic makeup. Human-machine

relationships are most commonly thematized nowadays, although animal-machine mixing remains a

persistent topic of interest. In the 1932 film Island of Lost Souls, based on H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel

The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dr. Moreau introduces his most perfect creation, a woman with panther

genes, to a rare visiting man who was shipwrecked on his island in order to see if she is capable of

falling in love with him and bearing humanlike children. Their offspring would achieve Dr. Moreau’s

final goal of deriving a human from an animal. The objective is clear: there is no better proof of a

creator’s success in making an artificial human than its own progeny. When Natalie Brown, the first

6In some other translations, Paphos is translated as a son (Ovid Ovid’s), and by Apollodorus’ account Pygmalion and
Galatea had a son Paphos and a daughter called Metharme (14.3).

7“Iamque coactis cornibus in plenum noviens lunaribus orbem / illa Paphon genuit, de qua tenet insula nomen”
(Magnus 295-297).

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IVF-conceived person to have a child, gave birth, newspapers all over the world reported that the

child was conceived naturally (‘First’). Likewise, the first gene-edited people, particularly those who

underwent CRISPR in vitro (the Chinese twins Nana and Lulu and many more to come), are bound

to be studied (without their consent) throughout their lifetimes, along with their own eventual

offspring. The circle of life is complete with a multigenerational experiment.

5.1.1 Pandora’s Box of Reproduction

Human reproduction is well-understood in terms of conception and the ensuing pregnancy and

birth. The sole technology of in vitro fertilization acts as a culmination of this knowledge by

mimicking the conception, the most mysterious part of human reproduction. IVF as a clinical

practice and research helps us to learn about causes for (un)successful embryo growth, implantation,

and further development of a fetus. For example, “[t]he period between the 14th and 28th day of

embryo development is sometimes referred to as the ‘black box’ of human development” (Hurlbut

et al., Taniguchi et al.) and for this precise reason some scientists (John Appleby and Annelien

Bredenoord) argue for the extension of the 14-day rule—that prevents any embryo research on

embryos older than 14 days—to 28 days. The fourteenth day is “notable, because the embryo is then

individuated and can no longer become a twin” (Appleby and Bredenoord), forming an easily

recognizable “primitive streak” (Warnock 59, 66). The rule was never intended to serve as a line

denoting the moral status of human embryos (Hyun et al. 171) but has nonetheless served as a

legislative rule in some countries and a guideline in others since 1979. The rule was not questioned

until 2016, when technology allowed us to grow embryos in laboratories for fourteen days and,

theoretically, longer (Deglicerti et al., Shahbazi et al.). Until then, nature and technology seemed to

have a consensus regarding boundaries. Now, advances in synthetic biology can create artificial

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embryo-like structures, called gastruloids, and bypass the primitive streak phase, thus forgoing the

14-day rule. These advances ask for the reevaluation and possible overturn of the rule in favor of

more specific ethical guidelines,8 which dovetail with other stem cell pursuits, such as organoid

research. This is just one example of how the conflation of both types of reproduction and the

conflation of clinical and laboratory practices demands a reconfiguration of human reproduction.

Any kind of reproduction (natural or unnatural, unassisted or assisted, sexual or asexual, biological

or biotechnological, genuine or synthetic, spontaneous or induced…)9 is depicted as a game of luck,

designed as a roulette of sheer chance. As a part of this scientific ideology, it has become common

knowledge that young, good quality eggs and sperm have a better chance of creating a successful

embryo. Regardless, most human gametes are abnormal in some way. A small to large percent of

sperm succumb to quality issues of motility, morphology, and DNA fragmentation, or sperm

quantity. In a phenomenon termed atresia, “[t]he majority of human eggs, on the order of 20,000 per

year, die in the ovary by mechanisms that are not understood” (Kiessling 1056). Out of 300-500 eggs

that woman releases in her lifetime, only about 80 will have normal chromosomes. The rest of them

carry abnormal chromosomes, most of which are incompatible with life.10 With sexual intercourse

timed around monthly ovulations, the chance of pregnancy is on average about 20 percent per

8 In 2017, the Harvard Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee issues a report exploring the ethics related
to the creation of synthetic human embryos, taking into account the human form, self-consciousness, and sentience that
could emerge from these embryos as well as the potential for their reproduction through ART.

9These labels of the kind of reproduction do not hold up as philosophically sound terms and need investigation. In the
case of human reproduction and ART the term natural is particularly problematic because ART use biotechnologies that
are as natural as it gets: they imitate organic processes and employ organic materials and therefore come the closest to
what we would consider natural. Synthetic biology is an extreme example of this ‘extended naturalness’ as it does not use
any method, material, or process that has not been invented by nature, but it is able to produce new designs that do not
exist in nature.

10With modern medicine, trisomy 21 or Down’s Syndrome is usually not fatal. Trisomy 16, however, is completely
incompatible with life unless some normal cells occur in addition to trisomic cells (Hassold et al.), which nevertheless
results in a major disability.

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month and 85 percent per year for a healthy couple (National par. 3)—age and many other factors

not being taken into account. When male and female copies of DNA line up, many things can go

awry. DNA should replicate without mistake, copy after copy, and if it does not, the essential

principle of evolution reveals its work: the mutations can cause diseases or death, they can be a

welcome advancement, or they can go unnoticed. As a result, 70 percent of fertilization events do

not result in a pregnancy and those that do have about 10 percent chance to end in a miscarriage,

both largely due to incorrect chromosome counts. Human fecundity is not very efficient in

comparison to other species: we are designed to produce offspring sporadically every few years,11

with a foolproof system harboring a great chance of failure even in the first few steps.

Because it creates so much “waste” in the reproductive process, as Sarah Franklin argues, “‘nature’ is

depicted as incomprehensibly profligate” (‘Postmodern’ 332). This high degree of “natural wastage”

went unrecognized until the technology of monitoring reproduction was developed, beginning with

super sensitive pregnancy tests, low-tech fertility apps, ovulation tests, and special lubricants, which

all contribute to women knowing about their pregnancy much earlier than without these

technologies, and, subsequently, about the early loss of a pregnancy (chemical pregnancy). The focus

on conception rather than on its eventual creation—a living baby—is evident in fertility

advertisements and the change of language around fertility.12 In the internet age, the phrase ‘trying

for a baby’ has changed to reflect a less ambitious goal of ‘trying to conceive,’ or TTC in short, a

well-known phrase on fertility forums. After a visit to these websites, one becomes a target of

Before the invention of hormonal contraception and ART, the world fertility rate was four to seven children per
11

woman. Access to birth control and other factors have lowered these numbers to less than 2 children per woman in
Western countries (Roser).

12“The idea that female reproductive capacity is badly designed and in need of medical and technological assistance is as
old as the use of forceps. The means of technological enablement have gradually moved from one end of pregnancy,
parturition, to the other, conception” (Franklin ‘Postmodern’ 335).

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fertility industry, promoting high-tech advances such as fertility preservation through sperm and egg

freezing and low-tech tools such as fertility-boosting mix of vitamins and superfoods. As Franklin

points out, these accounts, which are accepted as “natural facts,” link fertility with infertility as

“reproduction appears ‘naturally’ in need of assistance” (ib.). In this comparison, “‘natural’ and

assisted reproduction come to appear similar, both characterized by comparably high failure rates”

(ib.). The option of using ART, in principle, means that embryos can be designed, exchanged,

stored, and implanted in any womb. Reproduction is becoming increasingly independent from time

and space as well as mind and body (including age, gender, sexual orientation). Huxley’s satirized

vision of the prolific Hatchery, with high number cloning of embryos with low rate of incorrigible

abnormalities, drives this ideology.

At the same time, a backlash is taking place in Western countries as more people forgo strictly

medical assistance in reproducing and turn back to midwifery, non-medicated home births, and

herbal remedies, arguing that pregnancy is a normal process and not a sickness (Spallone 32). After

decades of encouraging parents to give formula to their infants and mothers pumping their milk for

infants while they are being taken care of by someone else, the emergence of the all-natural principle

could have been expected. Medicalized models in Western nations, at times changing their doctrines

faster than women can bear new children, challenge the idea of what is a ‘given’ in reproductive

practices. The all-natural principle also permeated the ART industry, with a turn from Western

medicine to alternative medicine, which usually includes additions from traditional Chinese medicine

and a more holistic approach to health. “That nature is considered in a positive light in ordinary

language motivates its skillful use in philosophical argument. Philosophers who appeal to concepts

or images of nature can rely on its diverse favorable connotations to lend support to their

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arguments” (‘Appeals’ 518).13 The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report on ‘Ideas about

naturalness in public and political debates about science, technology and medicine,’ which also

enlisted poets to explore these ideas creatively. They conclude that the terms natural and unnatural

are often but not always used as values and that scientific organizations avoid using these terms

because they bear too broad of a meaning, potentially loaded with judgment of value (105-06).

Another problem of the all-natural principle in reproduction, pointed out by feminist critics, is that

it makes “sexual reproduction looks like an autonomous, unassisted act that gives certain women

privileged (and often tormented) knowledge of how maternity, kinship, and care work” (Emre 13).

Some feminists argue that “all reproduction, even reproduction that appears ‘natural,’ is assisted.

Some forms of assistance are simply rendered invisible because they are taken for granted by people

for whom reproduction is not an obviously political issue,” such as homosexual, transsexual and

asexual people (Emre 31).14 Reproduction is never an act of one’s own: each reproductive process

results in a person and at least three people are involved in each person’s becoming. Medical staff is

usually a part of pregnancy and birth—and with ART they are also a part of conception.

“The female body, in particular, expresses time and is close to time,” writes Sheila Heiti in her novel

Motherhood (107-08). The line between what we call artificial (supposedly aligned with technological)

and natural (without human intervention) is blurred with a simple planned conception. Due to

13“For example, adjoining the word ‘natural’ to ‘death’ already suggests a good death. Likewise, the idea of a natural life
span already prompts the thoughts that such a span of life is fitting and right and that living beyond it is suspect” (Jecker
‘Appeals’ 518).

14 “If you do not have to pay money to conceive, it may not occur to you that conception can be prohibitively costly. If
you do not have to transform your body to gestate, it may not occur to you that gestation is hard and risky work. If a
physician has never hurt you or mocked you or ignored you or lied to you, it may not occur to you that being deemed
healthy enough to have children is an ideology rather than an ontology. If you do not have to worry about the legal
status of your relationship to your child, it may not occur to you that she can be taken away. If you do not fear for your
safety, it may not occur to you that you need to stay alive to create life” (Emre 31).

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increasing awareness of fertility cycles and decreasing fertility,15 a planned conception can become a

task even if it is not technologized. According to another perspective of naturalness, considering

these facts is already a turn towards technological—just like a notepad or calculator can be

considered as elementary forms of human enhancement. Sharon Olds’s poem, ‘The Planned Child’

(5), describes with contempt the method of tracking ovulation by keeping a daily temperature chart.

This is not the right way to make a baby, the poem claims: the process should not involve any

thought, whether the baby is “wanted” or not.

I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken
a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry
as if sliding on the backbone up out of his body,
and made a chart of the month and put
her temperature on it, rising and falling,
to know the day to make me – I would have
liked to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little x on the
rising line that did not fall again.

In assisted reproduction, conception requires thought and calculation from the patient, the

physician, the nurse, the ultrasound technician, the laboratory technician, and the pharmacist. Blood

tests, ultrasounds, medication dosages, surgery, petri dish, transfer, all conducted with the right

timing, are works of reason and mechanics. Nonetheless, chance plays a role, as it does in natural

reproduction. In the second part of Richard Meier’s poem Building Matilda, titled ‘Roulette’ (24),

narrated from a rarely seen partner’s perspective, IVF is paralleled to the title game, both founded

on keeping one’s hopes and luck up. Each loss in the roulette accentuates the emotional burden of

the treatment, in addition to the stress of the sheer act of playing a game, which emphasizes the

financial burden of betting the money on chance. The very title of the cycle of the poems, Building

15About 9 percent of men and about 11 percent of women of reproductive age in the United States have experienced
fertility problems (infertility or impaired fecundity) (Chandra et al.). In Western countries, 1 in 7 couples faces infertility
today (National par. 2).

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Matilda, as well as the title of the poetry collection, Misadventure, pictures reproduction as an act of

labor—aside from the birth itself—as well as courage that an adventure asks for.

Put it on a number, you smile, catching

me chart the pattern of the last ten goes.
Funny to end up here, at the casino,
the first night of this break we can’t afford,
but need, we feel, before the IVF.

Nine of the last ten being red, I plump

for black: first two chips (red though, damn), then four,
(fuck, red again), now six (no prizes), then –
all in – our last eight chips, and watch the ball
race round and round the wall of the roulette wheel,

so shiny I can see you, smaller,

in that nightshirt the same cut as your dress,
emerging from the bathroom one month hence
to show me, by your look, that everything
is lost, or else not lost at all, but yes, but yes…

Even if IVF requires an embryo’s cooperation in its development, the techniques involved are

designed to facilitate and enhance fertilization (how many eggs end up fertilized), implantation

(chemical pregnancy), pregnancy and live birth rates. Each step of the IVF technology boosts the

natural potential, despite the many involved gametes which become collateral victims of the process.

IVF begins with ovarian stimulation, which is followed by a transvaginal ovum retrieval, also called

an egg retrieval. Working with more than one or two eggs in a month, as nature does, accelerates the

natural timing of woman’s cycles in collecting about a year’s worth of eggs at once; an optimal

number is ten, but there are often more, sometimes four times that. It is not a given that these eggs

are all mature enough, and that they will fertilize and succeed in developing further. If they do grow

and implant successfully, the chances of pregnancy can be twice as high as the natural way with a

single embryo from that batch (some clinics boast with a success rate of 65 percent per transfer for

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women younger than 29 (e.g. Begoña)).16 Certainly, many transferred embryos do not necessarily

implant and many more do not even reach the transfer; they might be lost due to extra interventions

such as the de-freezing process or prenatal genetic testing that takes away a single cell from the outer

mass (which is to become a placenta, not a fetus) of a 16-cell to a couple-hundred-cell embryo. On

average, the procedure results in a 20 percent chance of a full-term, live singleton birth with normal

birth weight per IVF cycle for women younger than 35, 17 percent for women between 35-37, and

dropping consistently to 2 percent chance for women aged 43 and 44 and 0.6 percent chance for

women older than 44, according to a Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology Report from

2015 (5).

Taking into account that patients who use ART are typically those who have no success (i.e. live

births) without the assistance of technology, their chances are (at the current state of science and on

average) as high as they would have been had they been able to conceive spontaneously. This only

holds true, however, if ART is not used for enhancement purposes, such as to freeze eggs, sperm or

embryos and turn to IVF later in life, producing multiple children with a single pregnancy, or to

practice embryo selection for purposes other than medical treatment. (Non-medical treatments

include sex selection for causes other than sex-linked genetic diseases, but do not include the

deselection of an embryo incompatible with life, which is a type of infertility, or the use of ART for

non-infertility health issues, such as for HIV positive couples.) ART thus provides more

maneuvering space for reproduction, overcoming chronological issues (including the biological clock

and even death, allowing people to have children posthumously), spatial issues (ART is done at

different occasions and locations, it often requires no contact among the involved parties, nor

presence at the same place at the same time nor, in some cases, to be among the living; in the case of

16 This is a report from a Spanish clinic called Ivi for year 2017.

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gamete donation, the genetic parents are strangers), and health issues (women without a uterus are

able to receive a uterus transplant or hire a surrogate to carry their genetic child).

Besides that, IVF itself—without the additional futuristic technologies—is altering human

reproduction: it is not only treatment for infertility but also “a technological intervention at the point

in the human cycle where natural selection operates at its strongest” (Hanevik et al. 1400). As such,

it circumvents or alters a range of reproductive barriers and “increases reproductive fitness of

subfertile and infertile couples.” Hanevik et al. believe that “IVF should be seen as a primary

example of how the human species is becoming not only culturally—but also biologically—

dependent on our own technology” (ib.). I also consider ART as an enhancement of the

reproductive process and link the idea to Huxley’s depiction of the Hatchery, a satirized fertility

clinic where any kinship is lost and all culture is biologized.

The impact of ART on kinship is massive, not only for infertile and same-sex couples who can now

create a child of their own genes but also for other kinds of near-future advanced bioengineering,

such as technological parthenogenesis, reproducing without available gametes through other kinds

of cells (in vitro gametogenesis), creating human/nonhuman or human/human chimera organisms,

cross-species fertilization, nonhuman gestation of human embryos, transfers for extrauterine

pregnancy, experiments with cloning (induced twinning) and artificial gestation. Most of these

technologies are labeled as either unacceptable for federal funding or as warranting additional review

in a Human Embryo Research Panel report from 1994 (77-83); none of these restrictions has been

radically changed since 1994.

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5.2 The Terminology of ART

I have shown above how the mere presence of assisted technology has conflated into our

conceptions of human reproduction, resulting in the merge between what is considered natural and

what is considered assisted reproduction. As Sarah Franklin argues, this conflation is ideological and

stems from “instrumentalism that makes its own truth” (‘Postmodern’ 335) by taking over the

“natural facts” and resulting in a postmodern crisis of “legitimacy,” “loss of faith,” and “a collapse

of foundational authority” (338). Construction of what we think of as ‘nature’ is shifting, she claims,

as the referent system has been lost and replaced with technologically induced ‘facts’ about ‘nature.’

Huxley’s Brave New World destabilizes the idea of what is natural to an even greater extent: the novel

renders a perverse image of using ART as a means of eugenics, led by an ideological subjugation of

the whole World State population.

In political and otherwise public discussions on ART and research around it, it is fundamental to use

the right language. A common error with the term assisted reproductive technology is to call it

artificial reproductive technology, perhaps revealing a prejudice against this kind of treatment as

artificial (intervened) conception in relation to the natural (not intervened) course of events. If, in an

epitome later adapted to the humanist attitude, “nothing human is alien to me [a human],” as

Terence17 famously wrote, the logic goes that nothing possible in nature is unnatural either. Since the

human is a part of nature, nothing possible to achieve with technology, imagination, or any other

human contribution of mind or skill is unnatural. ART is thus a natural phenomenon: after all, it

merely imitates a natural event. The artificiality is a useful category to designate a human-made

17 Terence was a comic playwright but also a former enslaved person from Africa (he took his name from his owner, P.
Terentius Lucanus) and as such well-placed to preach about human universalism. His phrase became widely known
already in Rome and was later endorsed by Saint Augustine which ultimately led to its humanist adaptation.

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product, “especially in imitation of something natural” (‘Artificial’). According to this interpretation,

ART is an artificial reproductive technology. Not all technologies imitate nature, however. But where

do we draw the line? Is synthetic biology which uses natural processes to create unnatural products

imitative technology? The dichotomies between natural-artificial and nature-technology simply does

not hold up anymore. Using the right terminology in ART when basic ontological and

epistemological terms like these are put in question is therefore especially disorienting.

Likewise, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, screening or testing is commonly misnamed as prenatal

genetic diagnosis, which does not accurately represent the fact that the embryo undergoing

preimplantation genetic diagnosis is not yet in the womb at the point of testing, whereas the embryo

undergoing prenatal genetic diagnosis is already located in the womb. Another consideration

regarding this choice of the term is that preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) or testing (PGT)

makes for a more accurate wording than the more common preimplantation genetic diagnosis

(PGD). This is primarily because this testing, like many other prenatal tests, is not foolproof against

cell mosaicism, in which both false positive and false negative results may occur (rendering false

results) or DNA might be unavailable (rendering no genetic information).18

Correct terminology is crucial in discussing the ethics of these technologies with the general public,

as well as issues that relate to reproduction in general. For example, in 2019, abortion laws across the

USA became stricter (Ohio, Missouri, Georgia) or were proposed to become stricter (Maryland,

18Some—we are not sure how many—embryos are mosaic. Mosaicism means that an embryo has normal and some
abnormal cells, with varying percentages. Embryos undergoing PGD are biopsied with a single cell that cannot give a full
reading but are discarded or transferred on the basis of this reading. Some clinics, working on the edge of science, are
willing to transfer embryos with chromosomal abnormalities into uteri, which nonetheless results in a small percentage
of healthy babies (Karow)—seen as “a new last chance” for women in their forties who wish to have a child of their
own genes (Stephen Hall).

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Minnesota, West Virginia, etc.), following the fetal heartbeat bill that makes all abortions illegal as

soon as a heartbeat is detected in a fetus—ability to meet this standard for an abortion is highly

dependent on one’s access to health care and available technology. The heartbeat criterion was a

cause for heated debates between conservatives and liberals in determining whether heart cells can

be said to produce a heartbeat in a 3-week-old fetus or whether the flutter of the cells is not an

actual heartbeat, as the structure that produces the beat is heartlike but not an actual heart. More

expansive than the heartbeat bill, the Alabamian near-total abortion ban “‘protects the sanctity of

unborn life’ with one curious exception: The law deems only fertilized eggs inside a womb worthy of

protection, not ones routinely destroyed in the process of fertility treatment” (Newkirk par. 1-2).

Religion plays a major role in proposing such bills as it goes back to the fundamental question of the

human. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (1265–74), written under strong Aristotelian and

Augustinian influence, established a long-standing theological view on the moral status of the

embryo and the fetus. Under Question 64 on murder, Aquinas describes human gestational life as

“first a living thing, then an animal, and lastly a man,” thus following successive phases from a

vegetative (plant-like) to sensitive (animal-like) and finally rational life (human, human-like?). Only

when the fetus becomes animated, in the event of delayed hominization after conception, called

ensoulment (revoking moral viability),19 is it considered human.20 Although the Roman Catholic

Church still relies on moral and theological views proposed by Summa Theologica, it had parted with

Aquinas’s view on human development and has, since 1869, defended the position that an embryo is

19For Aristotle, ensoulment takes place forty days after conception for male fetuses and eighty days for female fetuses.
In the Islamic tradition, this point is recognized as 120 days after conception.

20In the early fourteenth century, Dante writes in Purgatorio: “as soon as the articulation of the brain is perfected in the
embryo, The First Mover turns to it, rejoicing over such a handiwork of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit full of
power, [...] a single soul that lives and feels and revolves upon itself” (329).

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infused with a human soul upon fertilization (which automatically forbids abortion, IVF, and

embryo research).21 The Roman Catholic Church is the strongest proponent of this belief, which was

founded first on preformationist theory, based on rudimentary microscopy of a tiny infant called

homunculus living in a human sperm and on late nineteenth-century work on fertilization (Neaves

2541).22

Biotechnologies are living a very public life and “the control, enhancement, and harnessing of

reproductive and genetic processes are the basis for the emergent industry of biotechnology, in

which the politics of fertility extend [sic] from soil to star wars” (Franklin ‘Postmodern’ 326).23 This

is also why better terminology would is needed in discussing embryos which have “acquire[d] a high

profile in legal disputes, medical literature, and media coverage” (336). In becoming widely disputed

public entities, largely due to IVF and later stem cell research, embryos were granted legal

protection. However, there is no universal definition of the embryo because its exact beginning of it

is poorly defined: the beginning varies from right after the fertilization to four weeks after and the

ending is universally considered at the end of the eighth week of gestation, when the embryo

becomes a fetus (Larsen 4). Some scientists have criticized the terminology of naming a

preimplantation conceptus (a zygote that has developed into an embryo but not yet implanted) an

embryo and proposed to follow plant reproduction terminology where such an embryo would be

21 Doctrines of protestant churches differ according to their interpretations of the Bible. Compare Jeremiah 1:5, “Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the
nations,” with Ecclesiastes 11:5, “As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with
child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.”

22Some Roman Catholic theologists and priest disagree with this doctrine, using the term preembryo in 1991 as “not yet
a person [since] its statistical potential for becoming such is small, it is not clear that nontherapeutic experiments can be
excluded in principle” (Neaves 2542).

23Technologies can be used for treatment or enhancement and they also have an inherently dual use in curing and
causing disease. Nuclear power, biotechnology or AI could therefore be detrimental for human civilization.

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called a proembryo. It has since been agreed upon that the prefix pro- implies ‘in favor of the embryo,’

which is why the less ambiguous prefix pre- is more commonly used as pre-embryo (Hurlbut 95).

The debate began in the UK in 1984, when the Warnock Committee, or the British Committee of

Inquiry on IVF issues, met to regulate IVF in fear of the exploitation of the embryos. Lead by

philosopher Mary Warnock as a first institutional debate on IVF, the committee had a wide reach;

nonetheless, it took the UK government six more years to write the Human Fertilisation and

Embryology Act of 1990. The only issue the Warnock Committee could not agree on was the ethics

of embryonic research (Warnock 66-69, 92; see comment in Mulkay 612). The distinction between

pre-embryo and embryo played a crucial role in their argumentation: the term “embryo proper” was

used for an embryo older than fourteen days, but they did not use any specific term for a younger

embryo. Based on the already-existing 14-day rule in the US,24 the committee accepted the 14-day

rule in the UK as well—the rule that was accepted in many other countries and is still in place today,

making work with older embryos a criminal offence.

The suggestions for terming the embryo before day 15 a preembryo were made in 1985 in the UK as

well as in the US. In trying to justify embryonic research, Sir Andrew Huxley, president of the Royal

Society and Aldous Huxley’s half-brother, stated that there was “an unfortunate ambiguity in the

word embryo” and made a distinction between these two phases of the embryo, calling them the

“extraembryonic tissue” and the “embryo proper” (2). Two years after the Warnock Report, the

single embryologist on the Warnock Committee, Anne McLaren, wrote that the terminology in the

24The 14-day rule was established in 1979 by the Ethics Advisory Board of the US Department of Health, Education
and Welfare. Their report supported human embryo research but limited it to the first 14 days the of embryonic
development.

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report was unsatisfactory because “the embryo does not exist during the first two weeks after

fertilization [but is rather a] mass of cells generated by a fertilized egg” (570). “The embryologist

knows what is meant; the uninitiated must be left gasping,” she added. This was McLaren’s response

to a fellow commissioner who said that terms like preembryo were “cosmetic words” and

manipulated to “polarize an ethical discussion.” She replied: “Cosmetics hide, clarity illuminates.”

Ann Kiessling, a prominent American reproductive biologist, explains the reaction from the

scientific community: “It may be futile to attempt to replace ‘embryo’ with another more accurate

term with respect to human eggs fertilized by sperm. The hope in this regard is to educate the public

that a cleaving egg is not the same stage of ‘embryo’ as an ‘embryo’ two weeks following

implantation in the uterus” (1089). As a result, efforts are made in journalism today to distinguish a

‘proper’ embryo from an ‘early-stage embryo’ or blastocyst (Williams et a. 800). The debate is still

going strong,25 with preembryo triumphing it without ever again being named as such in official

documents, despite diminishing its use elsewhere after the 1990s.26, 27

This is also why, when the narrator in Brave New World describes the cloning process of 36-hour-old

fertilized eggs, the terminology he uses seems confusing: he simply calls them eggs, implying that

they are not yet fertilized. The fact that they are indeed fertilized eggs is confirmed when these

25 Under George W. Bush’s presidency (2001-2009), research on stem cells obtained from human embryos was famously
banned. This ban was reversed as soon as Barack Obama became the next president. With new technology of in vitro
gametogenesis (making artificial gametes from any kind of human cell), which began to be invented in 2006 and was
largely advanced after 2014, this controversy would be overcome as embryos would not be needed to make stem cells
for research.

26The only highly popular monograph where the term proembryo was used in relation to IVF was Anne McLaren’s
contribution 1986 (Reproduction in Mammals: Vol. 5: Manipulating Reproduction, eds. C. R. Austin, Colin Russell Austin,
Roger Valentine Short).

In Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca the geneticist uses the term for an embryo before the implantation: “We can implant the
27

most successful pre-embryo tomorrow afternoon” (4.4).

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multiplied “buds” are expected to evolve into identical twins (19). After many debates on what to call

them, fertilized eggs are today routinely called embryos. On the contrary, Huxley, writing in 1931,

simply followed human medical embryology texts that “still refer to the first two weeks after

fertilization as the ‘ovum’ period” (Kiessling 1089). This is a tradition from at least the seventeenth

century when William Harvey first proposed that life begins with an egg. Harvey never found an

actual egg but he did find an embryo—which he called ovum. Ex ovus omnia. Scientists eventually

conjured that all living beings originate from eggs, one way or another, which was ultimately

confirmed under the microscope. The mythological egg, one of the guiding principles to think about

genesis, was now aligned with a biological ovum.

Ann A. Kiessling agrees that the terminology has been confusing for public debates since the very

beginning of ART: “Unfortunately, scientists did not jump into the debate with the clear message

that cleaving eggs are not embryos, not yet. […] No new terms were developed in the early days of

human assisted reproduction to describe the events that could now be seen in petri dishes that had

never been seen before. Scientists were aware of the naturally limited developmental potential of

each early conceptus, but society was not aware. This confusion extends to this day and is now

compounded by the new tasks eggs are being called upon to perform” (1088). The debate around

terminology is just one example of how the assisted reproductive technology formulates who and

what constitutes a fetus, a mother, a human, a family. This debate is akin to Bruno Latour and Steve

Woolgar’s influential findings about the construction of scientific facts in Laboratory Life (1979) or

Donna Haraway’s exposure of the myth of scientific objectivity in her essay ‘Situated Knowledges’

(1988). All these scholars argue that concrete practices make truth, including the truth created in a

scientific laboratory: the truth is co-created by scientists that study, name, and manipulate the

scientific material, by the instruments and technology they use, authorizations they need in order to

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pursue their work, and by the sheer fact that the object of observation is being observed in a study.

On top of that, the public might receive scientific work with misconception (which is why the field

of science writing has developed). For the purpose of understanding central bioethical issues in

ART, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, established in UK in 1991, has offered authoritative

guidance on matters such as donor conception, non-invasive prenatal testing, human embryo

culture, genome editing and human reproduction, critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal

medicine, novel techniques for the prevention of mitochondrial DNA disorders, including an

investigation of ideas about naturalness.

With less terminological weight that nonetheless speaks volumes, the widely used term test tube baby

was popular already before the technology of IVF existed, and consistently used to describe children

conceived through IVF when the technology first emerged (‘Academy’). Even though no test tube is

used in either of the procedures, the term test-tube baby was “commonly used [for] artificial

impregnation” in English-speaking countries, explains Hermann Rohleder in his 1934 monograph

on artificial insemination, titled Test Tube Babies (xiv). At the time Rohleder published this book the

term burst into public consciousness in the USA in the context of eugenic movement. The first

human born as a result of artificial insemination entered the world in Philadelphia back in 1884

without the grandeur and pomp that surrounded the first IVF baby (Ruffenach).28 Knowledge about

artificial insemination increased demand for it and normalized the practice by the end of the second

world war (Swanson 633). This included freezing semen for the agricultural insemination business,

28This could have happened decades earlier when James Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, attempted to
inseminate six women 55 times with their husbands’ sperm in 1850s but failed—one woman got pregnant but
miscarried—because he thought that ovulation happens during menstruation (Swanson 598). “In 1840s, no one knew
that human females ovulate monthly, the menstrual cycle remained a mystery, and the question of what determines a
human embryo was uncertain” (Lepore The Mansion 16).

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which was later applied to reproductive biology more generally (Landecker 225). Labeling IVF-

conceived children as test tube babies was therefore merely seen as a continuation of the first and

already widely accepted ART, and the eugenic connotation got lost in time. In Brave New World,

fetuses grow in bottles, yet ‘test-tubes’ are very common when describing the process of creating

these bottled babies: “Blithe was the singing of the young girls over their test-tubes” (137) or “one

upset two test-tubes full of spermatozoa” (139). Almost a hundred years later, test tube babies and

especially IVF babies are still the most common terms used for IVF-conceived children as if their

conception defines their identity or their whole gestational course.

In 1912, the American anatomists John E. McWhorter and Allen Whipple grew chick embryos in

vitro, followed by many others in the next decade. By 1923, Britain became a leading site for work

on “controlled growth” through respected scientists Thomas Strangeways and Honor Fell. The first

public mention of the term test tube baby appears to come from Thomas Strangeways who claimed

in 1926 that organ culture29 supported the test tube babies (Duncan Wilson 30). That same year,

Strangeways also declared in his lecture on tissue culture that “the idea of the test-tube baby is not

inherently impossible” (38). Also in 1926, Julian Huxley published his only fictional work, a science

fiction short story titled ‘The Tissue-Culture King,’ which agrees with Strangeways’s claim that the

tissue and organ culture support what was to become IVF (see more on Julian Huxley’s only

fictional text in the section 5.6 on the Huxley brothers). After Aldous Huxley published Brave New

World in 1936, “popular accounts and scientific endorsement of test-tube babies increased” and

newspapers claimed that Honor Fell and her Strangeways lab colleagues were taking steps toward

29“‘Tissue culture’ is a blanket term that covers the culture of cells and whole organs, known as ‘cell culture’ and ‘organ
culture’ respectively” (Duncan Wilson 125).

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the Brave New World (30, 133). After being targeted by press coverage saying that she “was about to

grow babies in bottles,” Honor Fell’s changed her endorsement of pursuing the test tube babies into

words of caution against sensationalist portrayals of tissue culture; Fell’s case shows how popular

representations and attitudes about the test tube babies have impacted the science itself (53).30

When Aldous Huxley was writing his novel, the image of a

fetus was available solely as general illustration (most famously

by Leonardo da Vinci), a sample exhibited in formaldehyde,

or an X-ray that started being used at that time, with caution

against radiation (Benson and Doubilet). The image of a

growing embryo in a lab was made with the Canti method

photomicrography—what would today be called a time-lapse

photography. The photographs were made into films and

shown in scientific and popular milieus in the 1920s (Squier

Figure 31 Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a
fetus in the womb (c. 1511).
Liminal 75-76).31 American culture in particular has always been
Image from WikiMedia, Public Domain.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_
da_Vinci_- deeply visual: photography, film, comics and graphic novels
_Studies_of_the_foetus_in_the_womb.jpg
really took off in the US.

30Not all scientists kept the gap between popular and scientific culture. Some scientists from the Strangeways lab, Petar
Martinovitch and Arthur Hughes, in fact, wrote short, witty poems about their research: “Testicles and ovaries /
Explanted in a row / Grown by Martinovitch / In Vitro,” wrote Hughes about Martinovitch. The poem concludes by
suggesting that tissue culture not only reveals us something about cells but also about their researcher, with Martinovitch
being another tricky life-form culture (Squier Liminal 80).

31Researchers from the Strangeways Lab even wrote poems about these films. For example, a poem by Petar
Martinovitch cynically implies that these films do nothing for scientific advancement, but rather help to communicate
scientific research to the public: “But, to make the story immortal / The show must be filmed / […] / We see exactly
what we have related before, / And there is no use of seeing more.” Further, Martinovitch suggests that the cinema has
a new effect on science: “You must tell a tale!” (Squier Liminal 84-85).

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An individual—one’s own—fetus remained a projection and a sensation in the womb. The popular

children’s novel The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby by Charles Kingsley, which was written

as part-satire in support of Darwinism (Lepore The Mansion 15), depicted fetuses in bottles, and as

“good little boys” to whom the book is dedicated (6); both Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian

read it. In one of the editions of the novel, their grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as

Darwin’s bulldog, is illustrated as inspecting a baby in a bottle. The texts supposes that, if a water-

baby was ever found, “they would have put it into spirits, or into the Illustrated News, or perhaps cut

it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor

Huxley, to see what they would each say about it” (53). After hearing this, four-year-old Julian wrote

his grandfather a letter with some questions (Leonard Huxley 256):

Dear Grandpater – Have you seen a Waterbaby? Did

you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out?
Could I see it some day? – Your loving Julian

And Grandpater replied:

My dear Julian – I could never make sure about that

Water Baby.
I have seen Babies in water and Babies in bottles; the
Baby in the water was not in a bottle and the Baby in
the bottle was not in water. My friend who wrote the
story of the Water Baby was a very kind man and very Figure 32 Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley inspect a water baby
clever. Perhaps he thought I could see as much in the in Linley Sambourne's 1885 illustration.
water as he did – There are some people who see a great
Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
deal and some who see very little in the same things. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Water-babies_2.jpg
When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the
great-deal seers, and see things more wonderful than the
Water Babies where other folks can see nothing

Water babies in the bottles might have a shocking effect—Brave New World features an ode to the

bottle: “Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted? / Skies are blue inside of you, / The weather is

always fine” (79)—until we remember that each and every one of us has spent nine months of our

prenatal life bottled in the amniotic fluid. Amphibian like this, we are not that remote from axolotls,

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for example, which fascinated Julian Huxley in his later life with their abilities of pedomorphosis and

regeneration. Julian became an evolutionary biologist, following the advice of his grandfather and

Kingsley, who advises “good little boys” not to ever think something like “a water-baby is contrary

to nature” (54), because “[y]ou do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows;

not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley,

or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys

are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all they say: but

even if they should say, which I am sure they never would, ‘That cannot exist. That is contrary to

nature,’ you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong” (Kingsley 55).

In Kingsley’s book, water-babies live “in St. Brandan’s fairy isle” [St. Brendan’s Isle] (149), also

sometimes called Isle of the Blessed, a phantom island, named after Saint Brendan of Clonfert who

claimed to have landed there in the sixth century. It was depicted on maps and reported to have

been seen up until the nineteenth century. “[T]he isle stood all on pillars” and “whether men can see

it or not, St. Brandan’s Isle once actually stood there; a great land out in the ocean, which has sunk

and sunk beneath the waves. Old Plato called it Atlantis” (150). Charles Darwin, too, had theories

about islands, “having once existed as halting-places, of which not a wreck now remains,” as missing

links to “how many of the inhabitants of the more remote islands […] have reached their present

homes” (On 100), which is true in cases where whole landmasses, volcanic pumice, etc. rafted the

ocean currents. These two examples are testimonies to the metaphorical and literal contribution of

such places to science and philosophy.

For Julian, as well as for Aldous, the fictional and scientific worlds merged early and remained

intertwined. Julian Huxley grew up to believe in a different kind of utopia, the one reached by the

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advancement of science and technology in the imminent future, teaching that “[t]he human race, in

fact, is surrounded by a large area of unrealized possibilities, a challenge to the spirit of exploration”

and that the social as well as individual bliss could be achieved by “man remaining man, but trans-

cending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature” (15). He named this

belief transhumanism.

5.3 Conception Contained

Having been called “the single most famous science fiction novel to describe genetic engineering

[…] Brave New World has become a major point of reference in discussion of cloning and related

techniques […] since the 1980s” (Seed 447), only after the birth

of the first IVF-conceived child in 1978. When Louise Brown

was born “with a lusty yell” on July 25, 1978, wrote Newsweek, it

was a “cry round the brave new world” (Ball Unnatural 208). The

Time magazine’s cover featured a sci-fi style illustration of a test

tube, touched by two human hands in the style of near-touching

hands of God and Adam from Michelangelo’s The Creation of

Adam, with a title ‘The Test-Tube Baby: Birth Watch in Britain.’

The cover story about Brown’s birth began with an excerpt from
Figure 33 Time cover from the week of July
31, 1978, when the first IVF-conceived baby
was born. the Brave New World Hatchery.

Likewise, in 2014 The New York Times announced a three-person baby with the title, ‘The brave new

world of three-parent I.V.F.’ (Tingley). The title of the novel is most commonly used in journalist

and also scientific publications: Brave New Mistake, Grave New World, Brave New Politics, Not So Brave A

World, Brave New Brain, Brave New Face, Brave New Genome, Brave New Bioethics, Digital Medicine: O Brave

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New World, Brave New RNA World, Brave in a New World, etc., most often with a negative connotation

and a warning. Due to the novel’s resonances with real-world fears, Huxley never really went out of

style and the phrase became a commonplace label for repercussions of any technological

advancements. For example, in Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology (1999),

Roger Gosden offers a look into the future of ART as prescient in Huxley’s Brave New World. In The

Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines (1987), Grant Fjermedal extends

Huxley’s vision of the world to latest developments in robotics and computer science and addresses

them through an ethical perspective.

5.3.1 Science Fiction Published Before Huxley’s Novel

Although the following discussion focuses on the reproductive process as described in Huxley’s

novel and compares it to the actual techniques of assisted reproduction, I will briefly look into

largely forgotten science fiction works published a few years before Brave New World. The value of

science fiction is not in making predictions, as many incorrectly assume. Instead, science fiction

engages with questions raised in the present and offers a range of scenarios that are informed by

historical and cultural knowledge and only collaterally, as an inspiration, by science and technology.

Ectogenesis and synthetic babies were a common topic in 1920s and 1930s American and British

science fiction, as well as more generally in popular and scientific culture. They appeared “in

broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, in pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, highbrow periodicals like

F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny, in speculative essays, popular novels and even in scientific journals like

Nature” (Duncan Wilson 35). In science fiction of the interwar period, they were largely presented as

oppressive to the fabricated future societies, except in Lilith Lorraine’s ‘Into the 28th Century,’

discussed below.

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In 1927, the American magazine Amazing Stories published ‘The Machine Man of Ardathia’ by

Francis Flagg, and a year later ‘A Biological experiment’ by David H. Keller, both of which bear

many resemblances with Brave New World. In all three works, synthetic babies are a commodity

grown in a decanter-like vessel and subjugated to biological and mechanical perfecting, both while

grown in vitro and later in life. In Flagg’s text, humanoid creatures spend their whole lives in these

vessels, disgusted by physical contact and uncapable of empathy, much like in Forster’s ‘The

Machine Stops.’ Looking like malformed embryos they send a clear message of degeneration if we

were to follow the developments in tissue culture. In Keller’s text, all reproduction has moved to in

vitro mass production, beginning with in vitro ovaries, like in Brave New World, and individuals have

no right to their own opinion. This death of

individuality in a perfected human race sends the same

message as Brave New World: these humans were robbed

of humanity (Duncan Wilson 45-46). Family life is

strictly controlled, as well as the upbringing of a man

and a woman who are set up in an experiment that

would show the “old ways” of reproduction. The

woman becomes pregnant but dies in childbirth

because the medical help came too late. When other

women, gathered at a ultrafeminist meeting that keeps

the current order at bay, see the couple’s baby, they

Figure 34 Cover illustrated by Frank R. Paul of the
Amazing Stories issue.
demand a return to the “old ways,” not unlike John the
In this issue from November 1927, Francis Flagg
published ‘The Machine Man of Ardathia.’ Savage after his visit to the World State that ultimately
Public domain.
leads him to commit suicide.

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The most known and influential text from this time, besides Huxley’s novel, is British author Olaf

Stapledon’s novel Last and First Men: A Story of Near and Far Future (1929). Stapledon also criticizes

tissue culture, together with mechanization and industrialization of the society, through the so-called

Fourth Men, a product of man remaking himself into a non-humanlike organism through in vitro

fertilization of ovaries. Mass production and subjugation of workers (Stapledon shared the Marxist

view that machines disenfranchise human workers) leads only to greater exploitation of human

manufacturers imposed on them by the very commodities they make, and the non-humanlike

organisms eventually overtake the world (Duncan Wilson 42-43).

Turning to women’s writing of the period, Alison Flood’s 2018 article claims that British author

Rose Macaulay’s novel What Not (1918), which likely influenced Huxley and Orwell, has “finally

found its time” (‘What’). Although utopias written by women have been around ever since the

sixteenth century and increasingly in the late nineteenth century, they rarely made it into the canon:

most notable exception is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) in which a women-only society

reproduces by parthenogenesis.

In 1930, when Huxley was working on Brave New World, Lilith Lorraine (pen name for Mary Maude

Dunn Wright)32 published the short story ‘Into the 28th Century,’ and Sophie Wenzel Ellis published

the short story ‘Creatures of the Light.’ Both texts feature ectogenesis and artificial wombs as means

32Dunn Wright had more than one pen name, three of which were masculine names. This was a common practice
among women science fiction writers (e.g. Alice Sheldon used James Tiptree Jr. and was believed to be a man long into
her successful career). As Wright explains in an interview, “if the editors and publishers knew I was a woman they
wouldn’t pay me more than half what they do now” (Georgia Nelson).

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for perfecting human evolution. Both authors were regular contributors to science fiction magazines

and the works discussed here remain their most praised contributions. (The two authors are now

largely forgotten, except for in a few anthologizations in women’s science fiction writing.) I would

like to point out the overlap between the main themes of these two texts and Huxley’s: assisted

reproduction with eugenics, liberation of women, conditioning of fetuses and children, utopian

quest for human perfection and enhancement, all achieved through science and technology and

strict societal order. I am not interested about potential influence, which likely did not exist, but

would rather like to point out how prominent these themes were in the 1920s and 1930s USA and

UK. Apart from systemic reasons33 of why Huxley was more successful with his book, I inquire why

Huxley’s interpretation managed to mark literary and cultural history for at least the next century

while the other texts with the same themes were largely forgotten.

Lorraine’s ‘Into the 28th Century’ focuses on the social order, like Huxley’s, and presents a futuristic

utopia under a socialist rule in Corpus Christi (Lorraine’s own city), renamed Nirvania. This Golden

Age world is ruled by one government, like in Huxley’s novel, but includes more feminist and

socialist practices. Feminism has achieved equality among the sexes; however, “man still leads in

invention, mechanics, mathematics and the more strenuous sports. Woman has ceased to imitate

man, being content in her own sphere” (257). Marriage is not universal as women are not

economically dependent anymore and is based on love. Sex is rare other than for conception.

Although women are free of childbearing, their uteri are still a place of conception, from where the

embryo is removed into an artificial womb, never to be parented. Following eugenics’ ideas of the

1930s, this utopian society has “weeded out undesirable racial straits by wholesale sterilization”

33These reasons are based in gender and the Huxley family influence as well as the inherent book market factors (choice
of the publisher, advertising, number of reviews, etc.).

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(258), including all races but Black people; the superior race is “a subtle blending of the noblest

qualities of the ancient Greek, the North American Indian, the Oriental and the Anglo-Saxon” (261).

In a similar fashion to Huxley’s imagined system of education, utopians of Nirvania learn in their

sleep, are given psychological training during the day, and are encouraged to travel the world.

In Wenzel Ellis’s story ‘Creatures of the Light,’ the quest for perfecting the human race is left to a

single rogue scientist, a “hunchback” named Emil Mundson, who is modeled after real-life

mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz. The story attempts to answer the

question of “why all parents expect their children to be nearer perfection that themselves, and why is

it a natural impulse for them to be willing to sacrifice themselves to better their offspring?” (181).

(This question is addressed by the American ethicist Michael Sandel and briefly summarized in the

final part of this chapter, titled Transhumanism.) Reproduction is in focus in Ellis’s story, as the

main goal of the mad scientist is to breed a superhuman race and join scientifically created and

perfected antagonist Adam with his artificial Eve. He is also interested in having John Northwood

and Athalia, both naturally endowed with beauty and intelligence, join his mission; he “combed the

world [to] find […] the perfect couples” (200) that would establish the enhanced race of Adam and

Eve. Admittedly, Mundson’s plan fails because of conflicting desires: Adam wants Athalia and Eve

wants John. Adam is a lot like Frankenstein’s creation (who also calls himself Adam at one point),

despising his not-quite-human condition and seeking vengeance through murder. He and his Eve

ultimately destroy the whole world that Dr. Mundson created. Dr. Mundson, John, and Athalia

manage to escape from the destruction and the latter two come to the same eugenic conclusion the

story began with: “And who can say to what extent [Dr. Mundson] ha[s] thus furthered natural

evolution? […] Our children might be more than geniuses, Doctor!” (212).

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In an uncannily similar manner to Huxley’s Hatchery, people in Adam’s world are created with

assisted reproductive technology that reinvents all kinship ties and accelerates the natural pace of

reproduction: “Before the first year had passed, the youngest baby will have grandchildren; that is, if

the baby tests out fit to pass its seed down to the new generation” (199). Made to grow through

chemical enhancement, these infants are grown with the help of a Life Ray in artificial wombs called

“the Leyden jar mothers”34 and, like in all three utopias discussed here, never mothered.

Furthermore, they are being educated through a variety of conditioning and memorizing techniques

(202), a lot like Huxley’s. After seeing the process, John and Athalia are convinced they do not want

to succumb to Mundson’s experiment despite his hopes that they will: “I don’t relish having my

children turned into—experiments,” they both say (200, 211), to which Mundson responds:

“Nonsense! Can you say that all life—all matter—is not the result of scientific experiment?” (200).

The satirization of the World State practices in Brave New World manages to walk the fine line

between mocking and commenting on basic societal issues, from politics and religion to kinship and

spirituality. Lorraine’s utopian short story ‘Into the 28th Century’ focuses on the organization of the

society without depicting any ambiguity of such imposed order; Lorraine’s utopia exists without

acknowledging the dystopian parts of its arrangements. Ellis’s short story ‘Creatures of the Light’

brings up philosophical dilemmas of scientific mingling with human procreation and enhancement

but remains in the realm of a failed experiment that is never applied to the society as a whole.

34“‘The Leyden Jar mother,’ said Dr. Mundson. ‘It is the dream of us scientists realized. The human mother’s body does
nothing but nourish and protect her unborn child, a job which science can do better. And so, in New Eden, we take the
young embryo and pace it in the Leyder jar mother, where the Life Ray, electricity and chemical food shortens the period
of gestation to a few days’” (Ellis 201).

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5.4 A Brief History of IVF

Some ART techniques are foreshadowed to an amazing detail in Huxley’s Brave New World. Nothing

close to what he imagined had been done yet in the real world before the novel was written in 1931.

In 1934, the first eggs (from rabbits) were successfully fertilized in a laboratory—through a form of

parthenogenesis no less35—by Gregory Pincus, one of the main researchers responsible for the

development of the oral birth-control pill. Pincus received a lot of negative publicity and lost tenure

at Harvard University for this experiment (Buttar). The New York Times reported: ‘Rabbits Born in

Glass: Haldane-Huxley Fantasy Made Real by Harvard Biologists’ (Waldemar). Pincus’s former

assistant, Miriam Menkin, worked with physician John Rock to achieve first the fertilization of

human eggs in 1944 (Ruffenach ‘Rock-Menkin’). When Huxley added a foreword to Brave New World

after the World War II, he surmised that “the horror” of his utopia was technically and ideologically

more than a century away (Huxley P.S. 9). At that time, fertilizing human eggs in vitro had already

been done without transferring the embryo into a uterus. IVF was thoroughly researched and

reported on in the scientific community as well as in public (Ruffenach ‘Test-tube’).

Nonetheless, not much can be inferred from Huxley’s general comments on his opinion about

reproductive technology developing in a similar manner as in Brave New World. With reproduction

being such a prominent theme in Huxley’s writing life, it is unfortunate that he maintained attention

35 Parthenogenesis (Greek for virgin creation or birth) is a form of reproduction where an egg develops into an embryo
without ever being fertilized by sperm. Parthenogenesis is known to occur naturally in some animal species; mammals
have not yet been reported to achieve parthenogenesis. In a technological parthenogenesis, a female egg could be joined
with a female sperm, possibly coming from the very same woman, which would resemble cloning. The technique was
discovered in 1899 with Jacques Loeb manually dividing a sea urchin egg. With human parthenogenesis, men would
become superfluous in reproduction, however, “[a] parthenogenic embryo cannot grow to a full adult under any
circumstances, so this technique provides a kind of ethical bypass around the issue of destroying human blastocysts to
disaggregate them into stem cells” (Landecker 5). This kind of technology could be used, rather than for reproductive
biology, for treating women with “serious diseases, such as Type I diabetes or spinal cord injury, [....] with cell lines
derived from their own eggs” (Kiessling 1092). Human Embryo Research Panel has shown that “parthenogenesis provides a
valuable system for studying cleavage stage eggs without creating embryos” (Kiessling 1081).

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only to overpopulation—which was becoming a common concern and has remained a concern to

this date—but did not comment on ART in the added foreword to the Brave New World, in the essay

‘Brave New World Revisited,’ nor later in Island, a utopian counterpart to dystopian and satirical

Brave New World (1962). Huxley died in 1963, but had he lived for another decade, he would have

learned about the exciting future of ART, uncannily similar to what he imagined back in 1931 when

even artificial insemination in humans was a taboo. In 1959, rabbits were successfully created via

IVF (Zhu), and Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, who eventually achieved the creation of the

first IVF baby, published their early work on the in vitro fertilization of 56 oocytes, receiving an

“overwhelmingly critical” response in the national press with headlines including “Life is created in a

test tube” and influential BBC paralleling their research on the scale with the atomic bomb explosion

(Litynski 99).

In 1971, the American science journalist David Rorvik published a book paraphrasing Huxley’s title,

Brave New Baby: Promise and Perils of the Biological Revolution. During the same year, the Look magazine

published an article titled ‘The Test Tube Baby is Coming’, reporting on the work of the American

biologist Landrum Shettles, Rorvik’s friend, who attempted to conduct the first human IVF in 1973.

Because he had ignored his superiors and the ethical guidelines on research on humans, the

experiment was halted. In 1978, the title of first scientist to conduct IVF in humans—along with the

Nobel Prize—went to English physician Robert Edwards who, with the help of surgeon Patrick

Steptoe and nurse Jean Purdy, managed to create the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown. He was

followed by many in a practice that became widespread in the UK and the US for a good

decade. The same year that Louise Brown was born, the science journalist David Rorvik published a

nonfiction book, In His Image: The Cloning of Man, that became sensational because he claimed to

provide scientific evidence of the first man (a billionaire) to be cloned in a secretive process on an

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island somewhere beyond Hawaii (a very utopian location). Although the book was determined to

be a hoax, Rorvik still claims it is legitimate. Just a few years after this controversy, Rorvik and

Shettles co-authored Rites of Life: Scientific Evidence for Life Before Birth, in which they argue that

embryos are “living beings and have certain rights” (Blight).

In 2018, forty years after Louise Brown’s birth, genes of two IVF-conceived babies were presumably

altered with CRISPR in a secretive first trial of human genome editing led by Chinese scientist

Jiankui He, another maverick who ignored his superiors and forwent ethical reviews and approvals.

He introduced a mutation into healthy human embryos to confer resistance to HIV infection, still

heavily stigmatized in China, although the infection could have been prevented in more

conventional ways. In a truly postmodern manner, He announced his achievement on YouTube

rather than at the Human Genome Editing Conference that was taking place at the same time in

Hong Kong. Since he did not work according to the established protocol, it was—and still is—hard

to determine what he exactly he had accomplished and whether this was just another hoax. CRISPR-

Cas9, TALEN and ZFN techniques are revolutionary technologies of genome editing and all fairly

easy to do in an ordinary laboratory (Xuan Ho et al.). They open a new way of using IVF—and

extending human hubris—as the point of access for gene editing of not only individuals but whole

future generations (see more in part 6.6.2 on Anthony Boucher’s ‘Rappaccini’s Other Daughter’).

Gene editing has already been clinically practiced in vitro (outside the living, literally ‘in the glass’) and

in vivo (within the living) and both will continue to be forms of treatment as soon as the off-target

and on-target effects and risks are known. The question is only how far we should go.

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5.5 Huxley’s Ectogenesis

Huxley’s depiction of the hatchery was ahead of science in describing IVF with astonishing accuracy

regarding what the actual technology came to be and what it will come to be combined with (gene

editing, artificial wombs, chemical and psychological conditioning during and after gestation).

Considering that the story is set in 632 After Ford, which would be year 2540 in our time, the

assisted reproductive technology has developed in the very same direction, except that we do not

clone human cells for the purpose of human reproduction (but solely for research) and that we have

not invented artificial human wombs yet (which we will most likely succeed to do and use).

Nonetheless, Charlotte Haldane, J. B. S. Haldane’s36 wife, Nature’s reviewer of Brave New World at the

time of the publication and herself a literary author,37 sniffed at biology in Huxley’s novel as “itself

too surprising to be really amusing material for fiction” (597). Joseph Needham writes in his review

of the novel that doubting the biological scenario which Huxley extrapolates from the current

science is a predictable but unreasonable reaction because, in fact, the biology is “perfectly right”

and the most horrible Huxley’s predictions “perfectly possible” (204). Needham’s review was more

accurate: almost ninety years after the novel was published the conception part of its reproductive

technologies is widely practiced.

Huxley was particularly inspired by J. B. S. Haldane’s fictive vision of the future from Deadalus: Or,

Science and the Future (1924), a meditation on “the influence of biology on history,” which Haldane

had drafted already in 1912 as an Oxford undergraduate (Duncan Wilson 36).In Deadalus, Haldane

J. B. S. Haldane was a childhood friend of the Huxley brothers and one of the most prominent scientists of the time
36

who shared many similar views on eugenics.

37 Charlotte Haldane published her first novel, Man’s World, in 1926. The novel is set it in a dystopian world where an
elite society of male scientists decide on the number of women being born. Women are then distributed into two groups:
“vocational mothers” or, if they wish, sterilized into “neuters”. The following year, Haldane published Motherhood and Its
Enemies, a suffragette account of women liberation from the reproductive burden.

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coined the term ectogenesis (Gr. ecto means outer) as the growth of an organism in an artificial

environment outside the body from which it originates and where it would normally be found. He

also described the imagined future process in detail: scientists would “take an ovary from a woman,

and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each

month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months,

and then brought out into the air” (64). In the speculative future Haldane imagined, more than 70

percent of children would be conceived and incubated in glass jars. Haldane named “the artificial

control of conception” as one of the most important biological inventions that have a “profound

emotional and ethical effect” (33). Enclosing a fictional essay of an undergraduate student writing

150 years later (thus 2073), he makes a few predictions on the reproduction of the future: “As we

know ectogenesis is now universal, and in this country less than 30 per cent of children are now

born of woman. The effect on human psychology and social life of the

separation of sexual love and reproduction which was begun in the 19th

century and completed in the 20th is by no means wholly satisfactory”

(65). The debate on the topic of ectogenesis followed after this

publication in the following years: Anthony Ludovici at first accused

women of escaping reproductive work and domestic role by ectogenesis,

and potentially men themselves, through ectogenesis. He changed his

Figure 35 Panel of hell (detail) by mind later, finding therapeutic and liberating means in ectogenesis. J. D.
Hieronymus Bosch.
Bernal purposed that ectogenesis would be beneficial if it could replace
From The Garden of Earthly
Delights, c. 1480-1505, oil on
panel, 220 x 390 cm. Museo del imperfect human body with machines. The rest of the responses were
Prado.
largely negative.

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Huxley’s novel opens with the description of the hatchery in London: “I shall begin at the

beginning,” says the Director (16). In this hatchery, human beings of the World State are created and

gestated more like chicks than mammals, in tubes and decanters and other kinds of shells, detached

from any source of human connection except for hatchery workers. In science, this image resonates

with the recent scientific achievement of successfully gestating chickens without shells (Tahara and

Obara), which could help us preserve rare birds, and gestating premature lambs in artificial wombs

(Partridge et al.), which could help our very own premature babies develop more fully. In fiction, the

image resonates back to the sixteenth century Utopia by Thomas More, which contains a short

description of a chicken hatchery where chicks are artificially gestated with heat: “[Utopians] breed

an infinite multitude of chickens in a very curious manner; for the hens do not sit and hatch them,

but a vast number of eggs are laid in a gentle and equal heat in order to be hatched, and they are no

sooner out of the shell, and able to stir about, but they seem to consider those that feed them as

their mothers, and follow them as other chickens do the hen that hatched them” (46).38 As it turns

out, the ability of technology to hatch eggs in lieu of mother hens was known already back in 1400

BC in Egypt where eggs were incubated artificially in brick or clay ovens by the thousands (Lepore

The Mansion 8, Squier Poultry 83). Chicken eggs are big and obvious, as opposed to human ones,

comments Jill Lepore; you can crack them open and they are cheap and ready to hand (8, 10). It is

not a coincidence that a chicken embryo has long been a favorite organism for studying embryology,

starting with Aristotle’s History of Animals and Generation of Animals. Disagreeing with the

Hippocratic-Galenic two-semen theory that allowed for maternal contribution, Aristotle wrongly

believed in one-semen theory and influenced thinkers up until the seventeenth century to leave the

38“Pullorum infinitam educant multitudinem, mirabili artificio. neque enim incubant oua gallinae, sed magnum eorum
numerum calore quodam aequabili fouentes animant, educantque, hi simul atque e testa prodiere, homines, uice matrum
comitantur, et agnoscunt” (Part II, par. 7).

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ovum unsuspected (Cline Horowicz 186). It was not until William Harvey met Hieronymous

Fabricious, an Aristotelian who wrote on fetuses and chicken eggs, that Harvey insisted that eggs,

not seeds as it was thought until then, are the origin of man. The debate continued, with

preformationism and similar counterarguments winning well into the eighteenth century. The egg

hunt ended in 1827 with finding the first mammalian egg, the ovum of a dog (Lepore The Mansion

15).

The asexual reproductive process in Brave New World begins with egg retrieval though excision of an

ovary, which is then “preserved alive and actively developing” (17) in the kind of environment and

with similar techniques that are used for IVF today; in “optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity” the

eggs are extracted with “liquor” and then fertilized with sperm of the same concentration level

required today to perform fertilization without the additional help of intracytoplasmic sperm

injection. Removing the ovary from the human body makes for a less personal approach, but is

nevertheless a “surgical introduction—‘the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society,

not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months’ salary’” (17). The argument

is the same as Haldane’s: “It is perhaps fortunate that the process of becoming an ectogenetic

mother of the next generation involves an operation which is somewhat unpleasant, though now no

longer disfiguring or dangerous, and never physiologically injurious, and is therefore an honour but

by no means a pleasure” (35). The price of an ovary is in line with today’s prices of eggs; however, if

a Brave New World’s ovary proves “exceptional” it could yield “over fifteen thousand adult

individuals” due to cloning (19).39

39 Not unheard of in science, livestock has been experimented on with mass ovulation that produces enormous litters
(e.g. in hundreds for cows) (‘On the Frontiers’ 77)—not unlike what was happening with ART before the regulations
became stricter (e.g. Octomom).

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Huxley again uncannily foresees commercialization of body parts that has been normalized in some

parts of the West, most prominently in the US. Using human bodies, in women’s bodies in

particular, separately from their personal origin—separate from the person—stems from the

Cartesian dualism of the mind and body, in which the mind is the center of personhood while the

physical body appears to have no restrictions in how it is used. Posthumanist theories revealed the

falsehood of this split: building on Kate Hayles’s view of computational information and Donna

Haraway’s view of sharing DNA with our companion species, the DNA information is not merely

data, but is data stored in a biological matter of a gamete that is, in fact, extremely personal. Besides

the exploitation of the commonly unprivileged bodies, the posthuman view on DNA is also why

gamete transaction remains a controversial field.

Ovary donation is only solicited in the real world from cadavers registered as organ donors: “In

order for body parts to be made freely available for exchange they must first be conceptualized as

thing-like, as non-self and as detachable from the body without causing irreparable loss or damage to

the individual or generations to follow” (Lock 71). There are proposals, however, which would take

ovaries from aborted fetuses and mature, fertilize and implant the eggs they produce for infertility

treatments (Seibel 796). Brave New World does not mention any other way of obtaining eggs than by

surgical donation. This does not mean, however, that the donation is not made by aborted fetuses.

Mr. Foster, a scientist in a hatchery, says he has been working with a “wonderful Delta-Minus

ovary” that is “just eighteen months old” (20), which might mean that it was taken from an

eighteen-month-old Delta or that the ovary has been removed from a donor eighteen months

before. The actual proposal of fetal ovary donation was met with “unease, distaste and surprise” and

has been largely forgotten, which tacitly comments on the moral quality of the proposal: not only

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could a child could have as a biologic mother an aborted fetus, but there is great potential for abuse,

misuse, or coercion (Seibel 796). Not to mention that the human tissue would be extracted from a

non-consenting individual who could have posthumous offspring without ever being considered a

person. In fact, this kind of donation could make a fetus into more than a fetus: it would, after all,

be a biological parent as well. In the light of this, cadaver ovary donation is easier to fit under the

moral frame of current medical practice since the living individual can consent to donating. Both

fetal and cadaver donations of oocytes for fertility treatments were proposed and immediately

refused in the 1990s; however, both types of donations are conducted for research purposes.40 Egg

donation from young women, on the other hand, is flourishing world-wide, but only for therapeutic

goals rather than research. Although thousands of frozen embryos and eggs are cryopreserved at the

moment, having relatively small numbers of eggs for research prevents science from advancing more

rapidly in this area.

This issue might be overcome in the future with in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a real-world

prospective technology which might allow for an easier access to gametes than has been either

available in the real world so far or fabricated in Brave New World. (Artificial) gametes could namely

be obtained from non-gametic cells, such as repurposed skin cells, making the choice of embryos

much bigger than it is now with IVF, which “generates a finite number of embryos from which to

select, especially given the physical burdens of harvesting eggs and the risks of ovarian

hyperstimulation syndrome” (Cohen et al.). As Eli Y. Adashi comments, “there’s something

40“Although it is currently possible to obtain some human fetal oocytes from aborted fetuses to look at aspects of
chromosome behavior and misbehavior during MI and to look at MII in oocytes donated for research by women after
superovulation or from ovaries removed during hysterectomies, the numbers of oocytes that can be obtained in these
ways is restricted, and for investigations of MI, each aborted fetus will be a different individual (and a different age),
making it potentially difficult to compare one experiment with another” (Matthews 12).

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troubling about an inexhaustible supply of gametes that could be fertilized into an inexhaustible

supply of embryos” (Orenstein-Brown par. 4, Wang par. 5, see also Cohen et al.), supposedly

because it resembles embryo farming and commodification: embryos seem less unique and special

when they become so replaceable. This new way of practicing conception would radically alter

reproductive and regenerative medicine. It would allow those who have, for one reason or another,

lost their reproductive function to produce offspring of their own genes and to find cures for a

myriad of currently untreatable diseases. In reproductive industry and research, it would largely

diminish egg41 and sperm donation, enable intervention at pre- and post-embryonic stages of

development, and allow us to choose among embryos in a larger scale. Facile genome editing, as in

CRISPR technology that allows for not only selection but also alteration, only exacerbates these

worries, as well as those of surrogacy and other already-existing reproductive practices.

Apart from these unsettling repercussions of the technology, IVG would also allow for

parthenogenesis, the ultimate inbreeding, as well as for non-consensual parenting through the

contribution of biomaterial with simple daily involuntary shedding, already problematized in Andrew

Niccol’s film Gattaca. Glenn Cohen points out that “IVG has the potential to upend one of the most

traditional elements of human culture—our understanding of what parenthood is and how it

occurs” (Wang par. 6). More broadly, it could completely alter our understanding of familial kinship.

With IVG obtaining female eggs by reversing a cell and forming it into an egg cell instead of waiting

for it to mature as a natural source in its own natural time or in time accelerated by hormones in the

41Sarah Carter-Walshaw argues that if IVF became reliable, egg donation would only be ethically justified only in rare
cases where the donor would make “her own fully informed decision” (7), “where PGD would be ineffective (or
unreliable),” or “where mitochondrial transfer would be required” (to create the so called three-parent babies) and
“where there are concerns regarding heritable illnesses or conditions that cannot be dealt with using PGD” (5).

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IVF process, Gilles Deleuze’s idea of an egg as the second origin gains a literal meaning (13). If the

technology was reliable and safe, IVG would mean the end of infertility.

Not surprisingly, real-world research is taking its own course. Not imagined in Huxley but certainly

elsewhere in science fiction (e.g. Octavia Butler’s prose, examined in part 6.6.3) is the so-called

multiplex parenting (Cohen et al.) and the already-existing three-person children42 (Zhang et al.). We

also widely practice cyropreservation of embryos, eggs and sperm, none of which is imagined in

Brave New World. In fact, Brave New World does not extensively focus on reproduction. The novel

introduces its world through it, and the issue of contraception and natural conception remains at its

core throughout; however, the main point of the novel is to introduce a utopian futuristic world

order, satirizing Fordism and its mass production and consumption, which includes reproduction.

Nonetheless, Brave New World still stands as a reference for assisted reproductive technologies in our

scientific discourse and broader.

The parallel between the Brave New World technologies and the state of ART today is striking. There

are surprisingly few differences when it comes to conception. Brave New World hatcheries are using

almost the exact same procedures as are familiar in today’s ART world, techniques that we could

have used or are using today on embryos. First, egg retrieval and donation are practiced today, with

the exception of ovaries being in vitro only. Second, egg maturation is a part of the IVF process as

well, except that it is put to an extreme in Brave New World. Third, fertilization is the same as well; no

sperm issues are mentioned in Brave New World and therefore no ICSI or similar techniques seem to

Three-parent children is also a misleading term considering that the ‘third parent’ gives some of his DNA from
42

mitochondrion only and is never a social parent but merely a mitochondrial donor. In this way, a donor child is much
more a three-parent child than what we call three-parent children.

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exist. Fourth, checking for abnormalities is practiced in both worlds: we use PGD and there is no

specific information on how this is done in Brave New World. Cloning is possible today but not to the

same extent as in Brave New World.

The actual differences begin only after the conception part of the reproductive cycle: letting the

embryo grow in an artificial womb is still science fiction today, albeit not for chickens (Tahara and

Obara), goats (Kuwabara) and lambs (Partridge et al.). Although we cannot yet gestate humans for

nine months, we can grow embryos in a lab for at least 14 days (due to the 14-day rule we cannot

know how long we could actually grow them) and we can sustain lives of premature infants in a

neonatal incubator, a sort of artificial wombs, with a very poor survival rate starting in the twenty-

second week of pregnancy. The survival rate grows to over 90 percent in what was supposed to be

the last trimester of pregnancy. This means that we would first have to work out how to artificially

gestate for at least 18 weeks, roughly half a pregnancy, in between what we can currently do with

suboptimal success rates.

The bioethics question, Should we set this as our aim?, is often kept behind the technical work towards

artificial wombs, which has been steady in North America, Western Europe, Australia and Japan

since the 1950s. Artificial wombs are viewed as liberative by some feminists, such as Shulamith

Firestone, who argued that differences in reproductive biology are a source of gender inequality, but

also pose a new alternative for abortion within severance theory, where abortion rights allows for a

separation but not necessarily a termination of pregnancy. Besides these two grave and great

bioethical questions, there is a valid concern about losing the bonding that takes place during a

pregnancy between the fetus and the woman that carries it.

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In the 1960s, Robert Goodlin put aborted and

miscarried living fetuses into a saline solution that

mimicked the placenta in a sort of artificial uterus. His

research was published in LIFE magazine in 1965,

four months after Lennart Nilsson’s photographs, as a

four-part series titled ‘On the Frontiers of Medicine:

Control of Life,’ beginning with the following

sentence: “Like something out of ‘Brave New World’

the tiny human fetus in the porthole window at right

is being kept alive in an artificial womb. Separated

from its mother as a result of a miscarriage when it

was just 10 weeks old, it is still connected, via the

Figure 36 Dr. Goodlin’s artificial womb holding a fetus.
umbilical cord, to the placenta, and it floats in fluid
Cover of LIFE 66/23 (Jun 13, 1969).
just as it would if it were proceeding towards a normal

birth. But nothing else is the same” (60). In 1969, this same picture of the ten-week fetus in

Goodlin’s artificial womb was featured on the cover of the LIFE magazine. The fetus, living his last

hours in the artificial womb, was captured as seemingly floating in the space with his placenta, just

like in Nilsson’s photographs.

In 1972, a Student Pro-Life Federation organized picketing in front of the Stanford Medical Center

to protest against “abominable acts” by Dr. Goodlin. Indeed, Goodlin cut into living fetuses in

order to observe and massage their hearts, which many European and American researchers have

also done in their research. Goodlin could find “no way to force out the poisonous carbon dioxide”

and so fetuses could survive no more than 48 hours (ib.). Soon, California banned medical

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experimentation on living aborted fetuses, to which Goodlin commented: “All sensible physicians

agree the research was ethical”—the objective has always been “to preserve life” (Feder 1).

In 2017, the next closest thing to an artificial womb is a prototype ‘biobag,’ so far tested on partial

gestation of lambs (lambs are removed from uteri and transferred to biobags for the second part of

the gestation) (Partridge et al.). The biobag marks a shift in physiological approach to sustaining

underdeveloped human beings for three reasons: 1) it “replaces a natural function rather than

facilitating a newborn rescue” and “thus treats subject as if had not been born,” not requiring the fetus

“to exercise any independent capacity for life,” 2) although created for “’just-viable’ preterms […],

the technology is likely to be used beyond the current viability threshold,” and 3) it “has other

potential clinical uses beyond conventional rescue technologies […], but its development is more

significant and will enable the birth of partial ectogenesis as a therapeutic process in itself” (Romanis

754-755). This kind of gestating, termed as “gestateling,” will inevitably yield ethical concerns but

holds a sensible argument: it could save a preterm child from death or disabilities and diminishes

health care costs in the long run.

The Swedish philosopher Anna Smajdor declares pregnancy barbaric and dangerous: “If there were

any disease that caused the same problems, we would regard it as very serious” (Kleeman par. 31).

She argues we should not assume pregnancy to be central in human reproduction as we do now,

attaching strong value to motherhood, pregnancy, and birth. In Brave New World fashion, Smajdor

proposes that adequate ectogenesis would diminish the extent of suffering and risk that pregnancy

poses and forgo the natural inequality of women. As a result, our views on pregnancy would shift –

as they did with available contraception – because pregnancy and childbirth exist in conflict with

“social values we share as human beings: independence, equality of opportunity, autonomy,

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education, and career and relationship fulfillment” (101). The argument that our social values are no

longer compatible with ‘natural’ reproduction presents ectogenesis as a wholesome solution.

Smajdor adds that “developments in fetal surgery […], increased prenatal testing and diagnosis, and

discoveries about the effects of mothers’ behavior on the uterine environment all contribute to the

vast pressure and constraint to which pregnant women, and potentially pregnant women, are

subjected” (102). The argument for ectogenesis falls weak in comparison to the case for equally

controversial fetal rights. Even if we agree with Smajdor that women are forced to radically

subjugate their own health and well-being for the health and well-being of their fetus, ectogenesis

presents a radical infringement upon fetal rights and joins the ongoing conversations on embryo

research, gene editing, prenatal diagnoses and treatments, abortion, etc. Should we set this as our aim?

needs to be asked of every one of these procedures before we can morally justify ectogenesis. If we

can genetically edit an embryo’s DNA to improve its health, why can we not artificially gestate it to

improve its health? Further, why not artificially gestate it to improve the health of its mother? After

all, we already technologically create donor siblings to improve the health of the other, for example.

Huxley’s vision of ART turned out to be prescient in more than just basic aspects of technology. It

has recently been shown that the ovum and preimplantation embryo’s exposure to light causes them

more stress than ambient light (Ottosen et al. 99, Pomeroy and Reed), something that Huxley took

into account when portraying the Hatchery as a photo studio: “The sultry darkness […] was visible

and crimson like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon” (21). Even more uncanny is

the mention of germline editing,43 which Henry Foster, an almost too scientific and precise man who

works in the Hatchery, regrets the Brave New World scientists have not yet mastered. Foster hopes to

43Editing eggs, sperm, or embryos is known as germline engineering, which results in genetic changes that can be passed
on to future generations.

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grow Epsilons quicker so they can be suitable for work earlier: “If the physical development could

be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow’s, what an enormous saving to the Community!” (25).

He expresses the desire to be able to alter the germline: “Could the effects of this germinal mutation

be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the

normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved” (ib.). These wishful

details, brief mentions of future scientific goals for the Brave New World Hatchery, are truly

astonishing, considering the time the novel was written. Only after 2000 has the scientific

community began to ask about reversing human regulatory networks in gene editing; what is more,

the epigenetic gene editing, where the gene itself is not changed but its behavior is altered

temporarily rather than permanently, is not commonly presented as a possible solution to more

radical gene editing.

All in all, the fact that Huxley’s fabrication of human reproduction managed to foresee so many

aspects of IVF, the Nobel-Prize-winning technology that will surely lead to exciting new scientific

discoveries, is why this novel became a primary source of reflection on this technology.

Technologies cannot be called inherently dehumanizing without a baseline; yet, in this novel the

dehumanizing effect of the reproductive technologies, along with conditioning and consumerist

values, depicts a loss of core Western human values: freedom of choice, sober mind, human dignity,

cultural and artistic reflection, forming kinships and affinity groups, etc.44 Although alleviating

women’s burden of reproductive labor, marriage and family could make a positive effect in this

society, abolishing deeper romantic and familial relationships ultimately led to a grimmer, more

stratified, and unjust world. Suffering and harm are still present but in a different form. The novel

There is no consensus on core human values across different communities, even when limited solely to the West,
44

which is why ‘health,’ ‘enhancement,’ or ‘normal’ cannot be given values either (Porter 252).

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makes it clear that our world should remain wary of Huxley’s fabricated social order, which stems

from parodying ART that eliminate uniqueness, diversity, and pathology from the human nature.

Enslaved in happiness, the people of Brave New World are dehumanized, seemingly without suffering

harm and certainly without knowing what they have lost.

But what if we accept that the human nature is to modify ourselves? Or if we conclude that

technology is not powerful enough to transform humanity or that people are wise enough to use

technologies moderately? The underlying cause of the belief that biotechnology is capable of

removing human dignity and character is the trivialization of what constitutes the human, perceived

as a nonchalant and curious play with the plasticity of the human body and mind. Huxley suggests

that one source of notions of what it means to be human is religion (referring to the long-forgotten

Christianity that says God created the human in his image), another is literature (John the Savage

loves Shakespeare), the third is close relationships (between John and his mother Linda), and so on.

Our relations with these facts of humanity have been altered throughout human history, partly but

not only because of the use of science and technology. What happened to human nature and identity

in the process is yet to be determined, or perhaps not to be determined.

5.5.1 Cloning and Incest

Unique to Brave New World is the massive cloning (induced twinning)45 of the thirty-six-hour-old

embryos, which is used only to create the lower three castes, “standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas,

45Clones are, biologically, more diverse than typical identical twins due to environmental factors that influence their
genetic development, including gestation. A clone is thus not necessarily identical to the original; similarly to how those
who know a pair of identical twins well can distinguish between them without much effort.

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uniform Epsilons” (19). This is called Bokanovsky’s Process, an X-ray46 technique of cloning that

commodifies prenatal life through “[t]he principle of mass production at last applied to biology”

(19). “[A] bokanovskified egg will bud […] and every bud will grow into a perfectly normal formed

embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult” (17), losing the bad-quality embryos in the

process. IVF is a rather successful technology, but still a majority of embryos are lost in the process

and the success rate is on average on par with natural reproduction. The high success rate of

Bokanovsky’s Process, in which most embryos

succeed and proliferate on their way to human

life, is nothing but admirable in comparison to

today’s ART numbers. Nevertheless, the dream

of “millions of identical twins” is unattainable,

because, as the Director explains, “we can’t

bokanovskify indefinitely” (19). Instead, “[y]ou

get an average of nearly eleven thousand

Figure 37 Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Central panel (detail). 1480-1505, oil on panel, 220 x 390 cm. brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty
Museo del Prado.
batches of identical twins, all within two years of

age” with each embryo yielding “eight up to ninety-six embryos” with “seventy-two [being] a good

average” (18).

46An X-ray technique is so far found more damaging than useful for embryos (Spallone 39) but there has been some
success with radiation mutagenesis in mice (Thomas et al.). In 1920s, X-ray was used by a Viennese scientist Eugen
Steinach to help women rejuvenate by “bombarding their ovaries” (Lepore The Mansion 175). For men, such as Freud
and Yeats, Steinach’s rejuvenation program involved surgical techniques: “the Steinach operation was, basically, a
vasectomy” (Lepore 175). In 1960s, X-ray was used to be able to perform a fetal transfusion for maternal-fetal blood
incompatibility (‘On the Frontiers’ 63-66).

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Identical twins are “almost subhuman” (248), comments Huxley in ‘Brave New World Revisited,’

like replicants that are created for robotic work in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (Squier ‘Embryos’ 146)

or later in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, or like Karel Čapek’s robots created in a factory

Rossum’s Universal Robots from flesh and blood. Such clones are much desired and appreciated in

Brave New World because they help the stability of the state. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely

the whole problem would be solved” (19). “The whole problem” is that what they are doing now is

‘second best;’ the best version of this kind of reproduction would therefore be having just one

ovary, the ovary of the mother of all people (like Eva or Gaea) and the World State would consist of

brothers and sisters only—a Christian image taken too literally: “All the advantages of Christianity

and alcohol; none of their defects” (60). Most religions and mythologies base the reproduction of

the first people and gods on incest47—an idea suggested as ideal for the World State as well.

As is common in utopias,48 incest is not of the slightest concern here, despite the proneness to

producing more genetic disorders in resulting offspring. The World State’s genetic siblings, except

for the many identical twins, have no knowledge of their genetic connection. When they donate their

ovaries and sperm, the Hatchery should make sure they do not breed and thus inbreed—yet there is

no mention of any concern of this sort. Another option for incest in such a society are pregnancies

that occur through recreational sex, which are in themselves highly undesirable but nonetheless

possible; one result of such pregnancies is John, the protagonist of the second part of the novel. The

World State takes three measures to prevent natural reproduction: seventy percent of women are

47 The incest is at once prohibited and required (see more in Shell’s The End of Kinship).

48The word utopia comes from Greek eu- (not) and -topos (place), literally ‘nowhere.’ Commonly but incorrectly eu- is
interpreted as ‘good,’ meaning a ‘good place’ and relating utopia with eugenics (good genes). The word dystopia came
from this second interpretation as its opposite (‘Utopia’).

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made to be sterile “freemartins,” including the lower three castes. The rest of them have to exercise

birth control with a Malthusian Belt (149)49—“about eight hundred unsterilized ones who need

constant drilling”—or can go to abortion clinics as a final resource (149, 113). The Malthusian Belt

provides a pregnancy substitute, i.e. pills and injections that simulate the hormonal effects of

pregnancy, which suppresses the desire for having children and must be used beginning at the age of

twenty. Only those rare Alpha and Beta women who have not donated both of their ovaries and

who discontinue taking birth control can still get pregnant naturally—as Linda does with John, the

savage, and as Lenina could have, had she not taken the proper measures.

Fraternal twins, triplets, etc. are siblings

conceived, gestated, and born and the same

time, and have become much more common

in populations due to the practice of

transferring more than one embryo at once

Figure 38 Contribution of subfertility treatments to multiple
pregnancies overall.
and due to ovulation drugs that cause a great
Image by Fauser and Devroey (34); taken from Fauser et al. (1808).
Used with permission.
number of eggs to ovulate simultaneously

(Fauser and Devroey 34, C. Cooper 13). Identical or monzygotic twins are a serendipitous

malformation of a fertilized egg, essentially a product of natural cloning and thus asexual

reproduction, in which an embryo creates another embryo with his DNA as some sort of a parent.

An identical twin can therefore ask metaphorically and literally: Am I a clone of my twin or is he (she) a

clone of me?

49Named after demographer Thomas Malthus who, in contrary to the eighteenth-century views, saw population growth
as inevitable in good conditions and as such preventing societal progress towards utopia as the resources cannot
compete with the human growth and demand.

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Some pairs of twins are indistinguishable at first, particularly those pairs in which embryo splits early

in the process, but none are completely identical in the literal sense of the word. Monozygotic twins

can develop quite differently due to activation of different genes or achieve some unusual twinnings,

like mirror image or conjoined twinning.50 Nonetheless, there are also siblings and fraternal twins

who resemble each other as if they were identical twins: consider Viola and Sebastian from

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who look very much alike. It is possible to think of the indistinguishable

Viola and Sebastian as the very rare semi-identical or sesquizygotic twins of the opposite sex, which

is paternally-derived.51 (Shakespeare himself had a set of fraternal twins, Judith and Hamnet, the

latter of whom died aged 11; likewise, Viola in Twelfth Night believes her brother has died.)

Uniparental disomy, where a person inherits more DNA from one parent than the other, is “more

common and less detrimental than the scientific literature suggested” (Zhang ‘It’s Possible’ par. 3).

Identical twinning cannot be forced with ART, except with (prohibited) cloning. However, fraternal

twins (or triplets or more) are fairly easy to create in the process of almost any ART. Transferred at

the same time or not, all embryos from a single batch are conceptual fraternal twins. Embryos from

the same batch were, after all, created on the same day, even if they are not born at the same time or

to the same expecting parents. Many of these unacknowledged twins remain cyropreserved until

50 If the egg splits between days 9 and 12, the twins could become mirror image twins, with reversed asymmetry, such as
left- and right-handedness and opposite physical features and situs invertus organs. Around day 14 (the last day before the
embryo becomes ‘an individual’), the risk for conjoined twins is the largest.

51 This rare occurrence—which has been described in medical literature only twice only recently (Gabbett et al.)—
requires the egg cleavage into two ova which are then fertilized by two sperm and further develop in a twinning event.
The twins thus have identical maternal genes but different paternal genes. Another option of monozygotic twins of
different sex is the female twin resulting from X chromosome duplication, which causes Turner’s syndrome (Edwards et
al. 117).

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their eventual birth, miscarriage, decay, or destruction.52 Frozen embryos could spend years, even

centuries (if that was allowed), waiting to be born—frozen in time.

Similarly to fraternal embryos, children conceived with egg or sperm by the same donor are

genetically half-fraternal, making the issue of incest problematic in the early years of egg and sperm

donation when it was not regulated how many children per single donor were allowed and donors

tended to be anonymous. The anonymity shifted towards open donors only after 2005, when the

UK established that donor-conceived children are allowed to find out medical information about

their donor when they reach 18 (par. 13). In the US, laws differ across the states: in 2011,

Washington was the first state to enact legislation making open sperm donation the default, meaning

that anonymity would need to be specifically requested by the donor (Fetters ‘Finding’ par. 19).

Lawyers think that “promising anonymity to any donor […] is folly” (Chung et al. par. 15), because

DNA tests and internet searches can help find them. The secrecy around donation has changed not

only because of the growing donor industry and more acceptance of ART, but also because studies

have shown most donors and donor-children expressed a desire to connect (Fetters ‘Finding’).

Anonymity is hard to reach, and “with consumer-DNA tests, sperm banks reconsider long held

promises to donors” (Keshavan). If donation in Brave New World was the most impersonal, the real-

world donations are becoming more personal than ever.

Even if the donor’s identity is not available, donor children can now be given medical information

about their donor and each other in order to help with medical situations, prevent incest, or simply

52Similarly, as vampires of the scientific age, a few hundreds of people attempt to transgress their beginnings in the
previous millennium by cryopreserving themselves after death and waiting for science to wake them up in the next
centuries in a human or humanlike form.

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bond over genetics (Scheib and Ruby), establishing a new kind of family and bond. Assuring donors

anonymity in times when anyone can order a home DNA test (such as 23andMe) and search for

their biological relatives online is unethical. To prevent inbreeding, the American Society for

Reproductive Medicine considers 25 an acceptable number of children per donor (de Boer et al.,

The Practice 194); in 2018 Britain and many other countries of similar size, the rule is no more than

10 separate families (but no number for within a family) (Fricker par. 18). Before the rule, things got

out of control: one British man fathered 200 children. His case further shows how misleading the

industry can be if not properly regulated: he was considered an “asset” for the sperm bank, which

said he was “university-educated,” “a boss at a bank,” and that he had “no interest in being

contacted by future children,” none of which was true. They also “failed to mention his ethnicity

[…]: his father [was] black and white” (Usborne par. 10).

5.5.2 Breaching Time

Brave New World disregards the natural slow reproducing rate as useless: “For in nature it takes thirty

years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. […] Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century—

what would be the use of that?” (19). The eggs are, by their qualitative and quantitative nature as

well as by virtue of their location, harder to obtain. Using Podsnap’s Technique to ripen the eggs

extremely quickly, “within two years of the same age,” thousands of brothers and sisters are

decanted. Such birth control makes for a perfect mixture of “Community, Identity, Stability” in the

World State. In the USA, the belief goes quite the contrary to the World State motto: having many

children of one’s own or many children at once is considered unusual to an extent of earning

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significant media attention or getting such families their own reality show.53 This is not true for those

families who adopt or foster a great (and greater) number of children, which indicates that the

interest stems from the genetic connection.

Transferring more than one embryo at once makes for a rapid reproduction rate. The practice is still

slightly controversial if the number is greater than two, although often conducted under

consideration of the patient’s wishes, fertility, energy, and resources involved into the treatment, as

well as the objectives of commercial fertility clinics who wish to improve their own success rates.

Exaggerating the natural course by transferring more embryos at once puts the patients at risk: a

pregnancy with multiples is much riskier and tends to be more difficult in itself, especially with the

high-order multiples. The record multiple births were sets of nonuplets in Malaysia (1999, through

ART) (Pinchuk 29) and Australia (1971, no information about conception) (‘Last’), in which none of

the infants survived birth or after birth, as well as pregnancies with even higher order of fetuses with

no live births (Brody), not to mention the many multifetal pregnancies with fetal reduction (Schlomo

et al., Athanasiadis et al.). In the early days of IVF and sometimes even decades later, two to over a

dozen embryos were transferred at once. In the USA, two sets of octuplets are the only high-order

multiples where all children survived. One such notorious example is Nadya (now Natalie) Suleman,

called Octomom by the media, who is a single mother of a set of octuplets and six older children

(fraternal twins included), all conceived via IVF between 2001 and 2009. In a mere eight years,

Nadya Suleman had fourteen children from six pregnancies. For others who opt out of transferring

53 The following couples, who had over ten children naturally, were also featured in reality shows: Kids by the Dozen (a
reality show about large families; ten to eighteen children), 19 Kids and Counting (nineteen children, including two sets of
twins; the family had their own show since having fourteen children), Bringing Up Bates (nineteen children), The Willis
Family (fourteen children), Meet the Putmans (26 family members of three generations under one roof). The following
couples from reality shows used ART: Table for 12 (two sets of twins, sextuplets), Kate Plus 8 (twins, sextuplets), Octo-mom
(four singletons, twins, octuplets), Sweet Home Sextuplets (three singletons, septuplets), Quints by Surprise (singleton,
quintuplets), OutDaughtered (quintuplets), etc.

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more than one embryo, the cost of storing the remaining embryos is a reminder to make up their

mind if and when they are going to use them, discard and destroy them, or donate them for

adoption or for research.

Such numbers are unlikely but not impossible by natural reproduction. The Guinness Book of World

Records states that a Russian peasant couple from the eighteenth century, the Vassilyevs, had

altogether 69 children, including sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets, and the father had additional

18 children with his second wife (Young 357). The Vassilyev couple is followed by a few other

known couples, all from around that time, in which the women were obviously prone to

hyperovulate. In hyperfertile couples with no hyperovulation issue (and thus no sets of multiples),

the number of children reaches around 40. For men alone, the numbers go to hundreds of offspring,

however, especially if the method of conception is ART. One such example is fertility physician

Bertold Paul Wiesner with an estimated 600 offspring through an anonymous donation of sperm

that was used by his obstetrician wife to perform artificial insemination in London in the mid-

nineteenth century (Fricker par. 13).

Human fecundity is limited to a period, but, as the examples above show, ART can help to buy time

by the mere way it is designed: by overriding women’s natural cycles, by harvesting a great number

of eggs at once, and by freezing the gametes earlier in one’s life when the quality is generally better.

As Hannah Landecker argues of the case of a cell, biological and biotechnological research and

practice have shifted our concepts of individuality, immortality, hybridity, and cell plasticity. What

was considered to be scientifically impossible for cells or higher levels of organisms has largely

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become routine; the substance of human bodies is maintained alive outside the body (3)54 and can be

made hybrid, reduplicated, infinitely reproduced, or frozen and then reanimated. “In short, to be

biological, alive, and cellular also means (at present) to be a potential ‘age chimaera,’ to be

suspendable, interruptible, storable, and freezable in parts” (228). These techniques not only helped

to breach the temporal but also spatial limitations of biological research and medical procedures

since a cell or an embryo can be transferred from one laboratory to another in minimal time.

These twentieth-century biotechnological techniques also generally changed what it means to be

biological (Landecker 232). Living cells are now easily accessible, available, manipulatable and

flexible tools (201). On the level of human gametes these possibilities are harder to reach; however,

ART has successfully and widely turned human tissues—and sometimes actual humans—into

research tools and commercial objects. Huxley foreshadows this in the treatment of gametes as well

as decanted infants who are still more of a commodity than a person, still in the process of molding.

The choice of language reveals their status as well: they are “unloaded” unto the floor as if they are

merely objects and not people (29). In the World State, biotechnology makes a cut on where humans

are considered persons, excluding the prenatal life and infants under the conditioning process. With

artificial mass reproduction, “dehumanized babies [are] turned out on production lines like Henry

Ford’s Model T-car” (Duncan Wilson 30).

54“Human cells began to be cultured on a large scale in the 1940s […] in an effort to find a vaccine for polio”
(Landecker 17).

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5.6 The Huxley Brothers

Julian Huxley, a biologist, wrote a large array of scientific and essayistic literature but it is not widely

known that he, like his brother Aldous, also tried himself in science fiction. In 1926, when Aldous

was already an established literary author, Julian published a short story titled ‘The Tissue-Culture

King.’55 Julian builds on H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

while incorporating direct references to the recent biological discoveries by Jacques Loeb, Hans

Spemann, and Charles Rupert Stockard, as well as Henry Ford’s idea of Fordism, i.e. a standardized,

industrial mass production and consumption of goods. In an unnamed African country, an African

explorer tells the story of another foreigner he meets, Dr. Hascombe. Hascombe was captured by a

tribe whose religious beliefs in the priest-king named Bugala, ancestor worship, animal cult, and

“sex, con variazioni” he exploits for his own coming into power through “tissue culture; experimental

embryology; endocrine treatment; artificial parthenogenesis” (454).

The discovery of artificial parthenogenesis accelerated developments in tissue culture and

experimental embryology and put them in focus of biological science at least for the first half of the

twentieth century. In 1890, the biologist Jacques Loeb wrote to his friend, physicist Ernst Mach, that

“the idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as creator, even in living nature,

forming it eventually according to his will. Man can at least succeed in a technology of living

substance” (Pauly 5, also Landecker 1). As Hannah Landecker writes, Loeb’s hunch is constitutive

of how we perceive life today: living matter is viewed as technological matter, with living tissues

being routinely maintained alive outside the body (2-3). In 1899, Loeb proved that a simple

55 The story was first published in 1926 in The Cornhill Magazine that his father, Leonard Huxley, edited at the time, and
then again the same year in the oldest American literary magazine The Yale Review, and a year later in American science
fiction magazine Amazing Stories with Julian Huxley being the first British author to appear in this magazine until 1932;
the story was reprinted many times afterwards.

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mechanical stimulus, such as the prick of a needle or a baby hair, is enough to start the egg dividing

(in a technique he termed as artificial parthenogenesis); the first cloning of an unfertilized sea

urchin’s ovum was performed with a baby’s hair and tweezers (Spemann).

Loeb’s discovery was “explicitly intended to confirm a new definition of life as mechanical, and thus

reengineerable” (Franklin Biological 2). ‘The Tissue-Culture King’ plays off this modern scientific

notion: as Hannah Landecker writes in her book on tissue culture, these biological discoveries

changed the perception of life to reversible and engineerable, infinitely reproducible and immortal,

plastic and hybrid, capable of breaching spatial and chronological limitations. In both Brave New

World and ‘The Tissue-Culture King,’ mass production, as proposed by industrial Fordism, is applied

to humans and human tissues. Hascombe realizes that protecting the priest-king’s sacred tissues,

such as nails and hair, “in case some enemy should compass the King’s illness or death by using

them in black magic rites” (454), could be instead used for scientific profit, with every citizen having

a bottle of the king’s tissue right at home. As an excuse to secure the priest-king’s position in power,

Hascombe helps to grow Bugala’s tissues to be distributed among all of his people. Soon enough,

almost every family in the country has at least one sample of the king’s tissue (455). Hascombe soon

extends this practice to ancestor worship as well, with some tissue relics re-grown and some being

made while the elderly relatives are still alive. The tissues need to be brought back to Hascombe for

rejuventation, and just in case they stop growing Hascombe establishes a back-up institution of

“histopolis: not a cemetery, but a place of eternal growth” (456). Immortality of the sacred king and

ancestors is assured, as well as Hascombe’s research funding, conditions, and influence not only for

his Institute of Religious Tissue Culture but also for three other Hascambe’s projects which focus on

animal experimentation, endocrine studies, and mass telepathy.

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With a whole country available for his experimentations, Hascombe also “utilize[s] that plasticity of

the earliest stages to give double-headed and cyclopean monsters” (456), creating “animal

monstrosities” in the most Moureauvian of his institutions, the Home of the Living Fetishes

(fetishism is commonly related to pygmalionism, as shown in chapter 3). This is the only feature of

the African state that bears no resemblance to the World State. The World State largely isolates

people from the nature and focuses on human enhancement only, using biological venues similar to

the ones Hascombe uses.

In the Factory of Ministers to the Shrines, endocrine products are tested on infants to grow them

into “Hercules” and “dwarfs” (ib.), a practice not unlike the Hatchery engineers conditioning

different castes for physical characteristics and mental abilities. Sex is one of the fundamental

spiritual practices of the African tribe and the World State citizens, with the former focusing on

virginity and the latter focusing on promiscuity. Hascombe attempts to grow “a race of vestals,” i.e.

self-reproducing virgins, by applying Loeb’s discovery of artificial parthenogenesis to man: “So far I

have failed with mammals. However, I’ve not given up yet!” (ib.) Both Huxley brothers’ texts foster

the connection between biological engineering and conditioning and religious beliefs, imposed by

the state, that enable human tissue exploitation and ideological indoctrination as a spiritual practice.

The fourth and final Hascombe’s project, which also resembles practices in Brave New World, is

indoctrination of people through psychological techniques. Hascombe uses mass telepathy which, he

claims, will hopefully lead him to the universal “super-consciousness” (457). Citizens are sent

commands through telepathy that are contagious and possible to partly avoid only with a tin foil hat.

The goal is to “to tune hypnotic subjects to the same pitch” (ib.), much like in Brave New World

where all citizens must act predictably as standardized by the State through neo-Pavlovian

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conditioning, hypnopaedia, and social duties tied to superficial spirituality (e.g. promiscuity through

quasi-religious orgies, conditioned veneration of Henry Ford and worship of mechanization). Just

like the island visitor Edward Prendrick in Dr. Moreau, the narrator Jones manages to escape the

African country and return home to England. The priest-king Bugala (a counterpart of Dr. Moreau)

realizes that he cannot rule without the captive Hascombe’s help (Moreau’s assistant Montgomery)

and manages to outwit him through Hascombe’s own telepathy technique by suppressing his desire

to ever return home.

5.6.1 Transhumanism

Every utopia explains how its society works and what it believes in. The goal of the dystopian World

State is a conformist society of pleasure-seeking and vapid consumers who keep the economy

thriving. Science and technology are presented as progressive and necessary foundations while

history and culture are practically eliminated. The World State does not induce fear, as some other

dystopias do; rather, it induces desire after desire, which effectively ruins any kind of culture,

diversity, or original thought. With citizens constantly being brainwashed by slogans and

pharmaceutical soma, cheap bliss comes at the expense of exact science.

(Heterosexual) sex and procreation often take center stage in the organization of the utopian society.

Since the two are separated in the World State, sex becomes a recreation, with mandatory

promiscuity in adults and “erotic play” encouraged already in children (37-39): “Every one belongs

to every one else” (48). Romantic relationships and marriages do not exist. Their ART, together with

gestational conditioning, could be said to be profoundly artificial reproductive technology, as they are

manipulating the values of the society (as we also do outside fiction). For example, they first

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conditioned lower castes to enjoy the country and nature but since it was not profitable enough they

changed the conditioning techniques to make Deltas dislike nature (31). Conditioning is believed to

overcome natural inclinations: “What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder” (30).

Although conception in ART is based on mimicking human reproduction by using human

reproductive tissues and imitating biological processes of embryology, the following gestation of

fetuses is overwhelmed with neo-Pavlovian and chemical56 conditioning, which serves as an

environmental influence that helps to form the desired citizen. Additionally, the state makes sure

that every future citizen enjoys their designated social role, using behavioral indoctrination

techniques (using hypnopaedia, sleep-teaching with propaganda slogans)57 and pharmaceutical

manipulation (using soma, a drug that enhances joy and an overall sense of well-being while

diminishing pain and negative feelings—not unlike Prozac today). The fact that the failure rate in

this satirized system of creating ideal citizens is so small speaks to the mechanization (and thus

another form of artificiality) of the process. In this way, Huxley’s Hatchery is not too different than

Karel Čapek’s robot factory from his 1920 play R.U.R.

The deep inequality of the caste system, together with the loss of freedom, is the foundation of the

state’s stability. However, an Epsilon is just as worthy a member of society as is an Alpha. When

asked why not everyone is made an Alpha, since thfis is certainly a possibility, the World Controller

explains that that would lead to instability, as it did in a Cyprus experiment where a colony of solely

56To achieve class stratification, all fetuses are exposed to various levels of the oxygen, alcohol, certain hormones, and
other chemical substances while they grow in mechanically sophisticated artificial wombs called decanters.

57 Hypnopedia lesson, interestingly, features George Bernard Shaw’s speech, speaking about his own genius (33). Shaw
was certainly one of the authors obsessed with creating human life, however, Huxley implies that Shaw’s political views
are groundwork for the World State. Shaw is also one of the rare literary figures allowed in the World State. Shaw lost
faith in eugenics later in life and became quite pessimistic about the mankind (Coleman 8) and Huxley mocks him later
in the novel naming a physician who advocates Linda’s euthanasia as Dr. Shaw (145).

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Alpha men went into a civil war over who was to do factory work and farming (201), illustrating a

folly of organizing a state of solely superior citizens.

In Huxley’s eugenicized society of five castes, from Alphas to Epsilons, everyone is a ‘designer baby’

and as such must be fulfilling their potential to an extent they were designed for. Bioconservative

ethicist Michael Sandel’s The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering warns against

transforming or molding children as opposed to beholding and accepting them as they are.

Transforming love, he argues, disfigures the parent-child relationship with an over-the-top parenting

attitude, which should instead be based on what the theologian William F. May calls the (parental)

“openness to the unbidden” that gives the children the “right to the open future.” In Brave New

World, which pushes molding children to the limit, the parent-child relationship is therefore non-

existent. Sandel identifies solidarity, humility and responsibility as three moral qualities that will be

defeated in exchange for hubris and our quest for perfection if we pursue genetic engineering (85-

92). Inequality and the sense for those worse off will only grow, Sandel predicts, and the enhanced

people will lose a sense of freedom due to the pressure to live up to what was given to them. Many

criticisms of Sandel’s arguments turn to transhumanist perspectives, claiming that enhanced genes

would be no different than natural abilities if the enhancement was safe or minimizing the potential

consequence of diminishing the enhanced person’s agency, freedom, and efforts. Prominent

transhumanist Julian Savulescu, for example, says that enhancement would rather reduce inequality if

we were to enhance moral dispositions that cause it (186).

Similarly to Huxley, Aristotle categorized humans by caste, attributing more humanity to ‘Alphas’

and less to ‘Epsilons,’ who are, in his account, slaves by the means of nature. In this analogy,

Aristotle’s ‘Deltas’ would be women and ‘Gammas’ artisans. (The generic concept in which everyone

is born human has emerged only with Descartes.) In Aristotle’s and Huxley’s societies, slaves cannot

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ever be educated and become more human because they are born as slaves (and thus not quite

human). Julian Huxley, however, strongly believed that working on the human potential can

improve individual humans and the human species as a whole. He called this idea transhumanism in

the eponymous 1957 essay: “What the job really boils down to is this—the fullest realization of

man’s possibilities, whether by the individual, by the community, or by the species in its processional

adventure along the corridors of time” (13).

While Julian Huxley as a scientist strongly believed in transhumanism, Aldous Huxley largely

satirized the belief that science and mechanization guaranteed social progress. When examining the

applications of science, Julian focused on how it could be used positively while Aldous focused on

its misuse. In his contribution to a 1933 volume on Science and the Changing World, Aldous also

pointed out how modern industrial culture supports the misuse of science, which is, in his words,

“morally neutral:” “Ideally, science should be applied by humanists. In this case it would be good. In

actual fact it is more likely to be applied by economists, and so to turn out, if not wholly bad, at any

rate as a mixed blessing” (209).

Aldous’s vision, nonetheless, also overlaps with Julian’s idea of transhumanism, which involves

“transcend[ing] of the human species […]—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an

individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity” (‘Transhumanism’ 15), focusing on

foremost scientific and technical exploration and, importantly, on social environment, population

control, education, spirituality, beauty (14). Whereas Julian’s essay focuses on the “fullest realization”

of one’s existence, Aldous’s dystopia alters humans through enhancement and degradation, while

also suppressing their desires for deeper spirituality, education, or connections among people, and,

for lower castes, also appreciation for the beauty of nature. Julian’s view of the lowest class was

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rather unusual for the times: he was critical towards the most extreme eugenics of the 1920s and

1930s that asked for virtual elimination (e.g. sterilization) of the ‘genetically inferior pool’ (the poor

were falsely equated with feeblemindedness). (Besides the eugenics movement, the 1920s also saw

increasing synergy between rising feminism and birth control (Duncan Wilson 37).) Instead, much

like his colleague J. B. S. Haldane, Julian Huxley proposed a nutritious diet, health care, housing, and

education for the lowest classes (Hubback 201). He believed in class cooperation rather than

competition in reproduction (i.e. differential fertility), hoping to breed temperaments that are not

individualistic and anti-social (ib.)—as Bernard from Brave New World. A quest for social behavior

over personal success was also stated in the Eugenics Manifesto (1939),58 signed by Julian Huxley

and other prominent British and American biologists, as one of the three “most important genetic

objectives, from the social point of view,” besides health and intelligence (Crew et al. par. 9).

Julian, despite being one of the leading figures in eugenics,59 disregards the possibility of altering

prenatal life in his essay ‘Transhumanism:’ “Every man-jack of us begins as a mere speck of

potentiality, a spherical and microscopic egg-cell. During the nine months before birth, this

automatically unfolds into a truly miraculous range of organization; after birth, in addition to

continuing automatic growth and development, the individual begins to realize his mental

possibilities—by building up a personality, by developing special talents, by acquiring knowledge and

skills of various kinds, by playing his part in keeping society going” (‘Transhumanism’ 14). Writing

25 years after his brother’s novel, Julian is (again) deprived of visualizing water-babies and the

opportunities prenatal life yields to science. In Brave New World, the prenatal stage is crucial for the

58 The Eugenics Manifesto appeared in Nature in 1939 under the title ‘Social Biology and Population Improvement’ as a
joint statement between some of the most prominent American and British biologists.

59 Julian Huxley was also a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society.

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indoctrination which continues throughout the individual’s life. Fulfilling and changing the

individual begins at the moment of conception; already, scientists are perfecting Alphas and Betas in

both senses of the word and depriving Deltas and Epsilons though cloning, malnutrition, and

harmful chemicals. Nonetheless, a Brave New World scientist does not discriminate the gametes as

eugenics typically does: a “wonderful Delta-Minus ovary” can produce any type of human (20).

Rather, the stratification begins as soon as the gametes join into an embryo and continues

throughout the social system. In a Brave New World fashion, Jean Baudrillard argues that it is not

culture that prevents us from “the hell of the Same” but that it is precisely “culture that clones us”

(25). Culture as a “monothought” through “school systems, media, culture, and mass information”

is a result of the Brave New World culture of social cloning that “makes possible the biological

conception of the genome and of genetic cloning” (ib.). Thus, without a social system that supports

the stratification of people, the reproductive biotechnology of the World State could never thrive.

“The nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness” (129), as John the Savage perceived the

World State, is supported through culture and science, through the philosophical origin of the state

and literal origin of its people.

Inevitable, minor deviations from the caste type are solved by social measures, such as deportation,

which is also threatened to the protagonist of the first part of the novel, Bernard Marx, an Alpha

Plus man who does not feel akin to his elite group. The Director accuses Bernard of having heretical

views “even as a little infant” (138), implying that conditioning did not work properly already at that

time. Henry Foster confirms this by commenting that Bernard is like those men who are “almost

rhinoceroses; they don’t respond properly to conditioning. Poor Devils!” (88). Bernard is short for

an Alpha and likes to spend time alone and enjoys nature, which is also considered outside the

norm. Like Mary from Roald Dahl’s short story ‘William and Mary,’ in which Mary calls completely

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paralyzed William’s brain “a little baby, […] suddenly getting to feel the most enormous affection for

him” (485), Lenina also finds Bernard “rather sweet” in his unusualness, saying she would like to pet

him “like a cat” (51).

Just like social misfits are corrected in this culture, there are no mistakes made in producing fetuses.

Disabilities and most diseases are non-existent, with only infectious diseases close to eradication

(170). Embryos are “inspected for abnormalities” (17) and discarded if presenting any. Nonetheless,

the main belief of eugenics of the 1930s—that genes determine one’s social worth and thus

reproduction of people with desirable traits is encouraged (positive eugenics) while reproduction of

people with undesirable traits is discouraged (negative eugenics)— is irrelevant, shown in the cross-

over among the five castes (20). Humans of Brave New World have subjugated nature to an extent

that mutations are not natural but human-induced; for example, people do not look their age due to

rejuvenating treatments, even if they do die eventually.

Nonetheless, the subjugation of nature, in particular human nature, is not complete, as obvious from

the fact that places for social misfits are needed. Besides that, the state implements a banal religion

implemented through mandatory Solidarity Service days where group sex is used to increase social

stability. Through an orgy in a former cathedral turned cabaret, where a group of “twelve [is made]

one” (82), the citizens are encouraged to break down their perceived differences and reach

spirituality— “The feet of the Greater Being;” “He is coming” (ib.) —that is otherwise unavailable

in their thoroughly shallow state. “Orgy-porgy gives release” (83) and pharmaceuticals such as soma,

pregnancy surrogate, and violent passion surrogate, all prove that the atavistic human character has

not been entirely suppressed. Similarly, although history, religion, and culture are eliminated,

together with the desire to know them, God is present “as an absence; as though he weren’t there at

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all” because “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness”

(210).

History, religion, and culture all reappear with the experimental invitation of John the Savage into

the World State. “But I don’t want comfort. I want God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want

freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,” he says, to which Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World

Controllers, replies: “In fact […], you’re claiming the right to be unhappy. […] Not to mention the

right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too

little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen

tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind”

(215). Mond’s words could be cited in the original transhumanist treatise by Julian Huxley, which

sums up the same point as follows: “Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described

it, ‘nasty, brutish and short’; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young)

have been afflicted with […] poverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression”—and

our hopes to lighten these miseries will be made rational through science “and will set our ideals

within the framework of reality,” adds Julian Huxley (‘Transhumanism’ 16).

Much like Mustapha Mond, Julian Huxley views transhumanism as a new task for the human: “The

exploration of human nature and its possibilities has scarcely begun,” he writes, as we have pretty

much mastered the geography of the Earth and the scientific exploration of lifeless and living nature

(14). Further, Julian Huxley also calls for the destruction of “the ideas and the institutions that stand

in the way” (16), of effectively rebuilding the system to serve transhumanist goals. Sustaining such a

system is Mond’s primary task. In a short passage of Brave New World, Mustapha Mond rejects a

“masterly” paper titled ‘A New Theory of Biology,’ in which the author (who will be supervised and

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likely deported) suggests a “novel and highly ingenious, but heretical […] mathematical treatment of

the conception of purpose” (162). Although the paper seems to be arguing for a transhumanist goal,

which is in part shared with the World State, Mustapha Mond worries that such a paper will

decondition the higher castes into believing that instead of happiness and “faith in the Sovereign

Good” the purpose of life “was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere;

that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining

of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.” Mustapha Mond does not necessarily disagree

with the paper but puts the happiness of his citizens first, as the order of the World State dictates.

Transhumanists, I suggest, hold a fundamentally utopian view of a technologically perfectible world

in which inequality is not a problem. (Similarly, engineers tend to believe that every problem is

computable and thus solvable.) Certainly, technology is here to help us improve ourselves and our

world. Yet, the issue of inequality inevitably occurs already, even with access to technology. It is

utopian to think there is a world that could provide everyone access to something as privileged and

expensive as ART and that everyone is able to use it with respect to their personal health, time,

energy, as well as religious views, 60 apart from considering an individual’s desire to go through an

intense treatment that does not guarantee a desired result. Designer babies will only accentuate the

inequality issues of ART, issues already here among us, camouflaged under infertility (as opposed to

fertility) and treatment (as opposed to enhancement). Those who can afford these expensive

treatments have long been able to choose even among non-treatment options that are not covered

60Even in a country like Norway with a public health system and public subsidies, infertile patients with low-income are
selected against. Other factors for not being able to take advantage of free IVF services are high BMI, smoking, sex-
hormone responsive cancers, HIV or hepatitis infection, psychiatric disease, and a frozen pelvis. Although these latter,
biological factors are also “selection pressures in reproduction in general, the limited availability of IVF enhances their
importance” (Hanevik et al. 1399).

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by insurance.61 That is to say, eugenics is at work already and mostly in the matter of access.

Transhumanist beliefs in technology often fail to acknowledge the diversity of humanity and the fact

that only the privileged have a choice to participate in transhumanizing the world. Besides that,

values largely differ among people and thus any strain of transhumanism is bound to be conceptually

incoherent and hard to practice (as Ted Chiang’s story ‘A Documentary: Liking What You See’

convincingly demonstrates (see more in Porter 254-55)).

The two criticisms I expose here regarding the lack of diversity and access in transhumanism are

addressed by leading transhumanist scholars, but without a feasible solution. In Nick Bostrom’s

essay on ‘Transhumanist Values,’ diversity, which includes “species, races, religious creeds, sexual

orientations, life styles, etc.” (13)), is listed as one of the derivative values of transhumanism and

“wide access” as one of the three basic conditions (besides global security and technological

progress). Transhumanists agree that “the wide access requirement underlies the moral urgency of the

transhumanist vision”—“ideally, everybody should have the opportunity to become transhuman”

(Bostrom 10-11). Bostrom urges us to develop new technologies because “the sooner this

technology develops, the fewer people will have died without access” (11), ignoring not only political

and social issues that play into this but plainly refusing to address the issue of access at stake: it is

not possible to offer everybody the same opportunities. He also fails to mention that the core value

of transhumanism, “having the opportunity to explore the transhuman and posthuman realms,”

denies certain diversities because of the deeply embedded social biases. Like in Brave New World, the

erasure of history does not do transhumanism any good: it is naïve to talk about greater choices for

61Some of non-treatment protocols have with time turned to treatment options, such as savior sibling situation.
However, the key to be able to pursue a new or unconventional procedure is financial ability and the determination of
patients and doctors who were willing to bear risks and public, and possibly lawful, scrutiny. (This is also why donations
from the community can rarely help in situations where the procedure is socially and medically controversial.)

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everyone while a major part of the population deals with basic survival issues, such as poverty or

preventable diseases. Many transhumanists therefore leave it up to the state to remedy existing

inequalities (Thompson 169). There are, however, transhumanist civil society umbrella organizations

at every continent designed to support political parties with transhumanist goals (Benedikter and

Siepmann).

Transhumanism will surely be a part of the public conversation of the twenty-first century since

every use of technology, however optimal, inherently implements it. Transhumanist use of medical

equipment for enhancement purposes (transformatio ad optimum) instead of healthcare purposes

(restitutio ad integrum) is not the only way transhumanism is practiced; major transhumanist means also

work toward increasing machine intelligence and developing military equipment, altogether

influencing the economy (more in Benedikter and Siepmann). In healthcare, transhumanist practice

is often conducted covertly through widely spread technologies that imitate natural processes, of

which ART is a perfect example. Although IVF imitates and re-enacts human reproduction, there is

a profound difference in what gametes undergo in the womb as opposed to the petri dish. IVF

makes “[finite] room for phenotypic variation” due to “subjective assessment of gametes [which]

differ[s] from natural reproduction” and “favour[ing] traits that permit cells to survive and prosper

in laboratory conditions” (Hanevik et al. 1399). Certain epigenetic effects have been traced among

IVF-conceived children (e.g. lower birth weight, proneness to diabetes and asthma, etc.), which

might result in transgenerational implications (similar to nutrition or smoking during pregnancy).

This would mean that human evolution is altered through this technology, but we do not yet know

much about its effects on IVF-conceived children, especially as the oldest IVF-conceived person is

only in her early forties. The question of where ART leads us is further explored in the next chapter.

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Chapter 6: Prenatal Life: The Island Perfected

Do you know who your parents are?

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (429 BC)

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
The King James Bible (1611)

But what would it be to me, Dimche my love,

A child of gold,
When it will not say
From the heart—sweet mummy!1
Kaži kaži libe Stano, Macedonian folk song

In the previous and the present chapter on reproduction I hope to show how narrative

representations shape our conceptions of human assisted reproductive technology (ART). Chapter 5

examined a few problematic uses of terminology widely used in ART and human reproduction,

arguing that the conceptions of human reproduction through ART affect our views on matters

related to human reproduction in general, including reproduction that does not use ART.

Furthermore, that chapter compares ART in Huxley’s Brave New World and ART in actual clinical

practice during the 2010s in the West, mainly in the USA, and points out Huxley’s uncanny

predictions of how the practices of ART evolved with the ramifications of its use and overuse.

Chapter 6 focuses on the same chronological and geographical frame and explores visualizing

technologies used in IVF and during pregnancy, including cultural imagery of prenatal life catalyzed

by these technologies and their effects on our moral and popular conceptions of prenatal life.

1 А што ќе ми либе Димчо

дете позлатено,
кога нема да ми рече,
од срце—Слатка мајчице!

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Although women’s reproductive systems are original space of the prenatal development, women’s

bodies are largely left out of the visual and other representations of prenatal life, not only in arts but

also in actual science (e.g. in development of artificial wombs, see Kleeman par. 10). My discussion

here supports this finding by pointing out that the absence of a woman’s body, which is often a

feature of ancient Greek philosophy, continues in science fiction, including feminists texts (in works

by Aldous Huxley’s, Sophie Wenzel Ellis’s, and Lilith Lorraine’s, as discussed in the fifth chapter), in

the contemporary genre of ultrasound poetry (Helen Dunmore, Sue Wood), and in visual arts, such

as photography (Lennart Nilsson) and film (2001: A Space Odyssey). From these examples I find that

the industry of biotechnology, “in which the politics of fertility extend [sic] from soil to star wars”

(Franklin ‘Postmodern’ 326), is reflected in the cultural imagination through a prominent metaphor

of the space. The “original sphere” of the womb, as Peter Sloterdijk calls it, or womb as a

Foucauldian heterotopia, is thus conceptualized without a woman’s body in the outerworld, an

inherently cyborgian place.

The central part of the chapter introduces the bioethical and philosophical dilemma known in the

literature as the nonidentity problem, which was first introduced in literature in 1984. Over the past

several decades, bioethics and philosophy literature has continued to debate the question of what

obligations, if any, present people owe to possible future people who may or may not exist. I will

argue that advances in technology have already shifted the focus to actual and probable future people,

which I term as ‘the identity problem.’ Here, the focus is on advances in biotechnology that allow

humans to select identity markers through prenatal diagnostic testing, preimplantation genetic

screening, donor selection, and gene editing. Showing how literary fiction, film and TV contribute to

this discussion demonstrates the value of a broader framing of prenatal testing as new technologies

enter the clinical domain.

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In the light of this discussion, I examine some of the more prominent biases linked with ART and

people who use these technologies and people who result from them. I use micha cárdenas’s

transgender poetry to bring to light how fertility treatments play out in the lives of transgender

people, which accentuates the many meanings of access to this treatment (including social

normativity, physical and mental ability, financial means, as well as support of the law and healthcare

team). I consider these biases together to show how their intersection changes our understanding of

any single bias considered in isolation. This part concludes by briefly examining the changing

notions of genetic and biological kinship brought by ART.

In the last part on hybridity, I follow Pramod Nayar’s argument that fiction has made the move

from posthuman biology towards posthumanist biology, in which hybridity and diversity of human

species is celebrated as long as the pathological is kept at bay. I use examples from science fiction,

specifically Octavia Butler’s and Anthony Boucher’s works. In relation to this claim and my

discussion from the chapters on pygmalionism and paralysis, I argue that the posthumanist shift is

making us reconsider our environmental and bodily interconnectedness with other species as well as

using biology as a tool, which engages with art (bioart) and technology (biotechnology).

6.1 The Very First Portrait

Prenatal life is a dynamic process of growth between conception and birth: the beginning and the

emerging. A portrait of prenatal life used to be possible only after birth. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in

the poem ‘To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected to Soon Become Visible’ (113), hastens the

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“little captive” in a “living tomb”2 to “burst thy prison doors! / Launch on the living world, and

spring to light!” With the exception of a surgical cut (cesarean section, hysterectomy, abortion), the

space of the fetus is impenetrable: the fetus enters the world on its own time and conditions.

Such heterotopian space—the other space, disturbing, transformative, and purposeful—is a world

within a world, per Michel Foucault, a “placeless place” with a mirror as the counter-site “in which

the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously

represented, contested, and inverted” (352). Mirroring and upsetting the world outside, wombs have

not been labeled as heterotopian spaces, although they are an essential heterotopia besides ships, fairs,

saunas, hospitals, jails, cemeteries, museums, gardens, bars, brothels, and so on. Foucault sees a ship

as a “heterotopia par excellence […] that lives by itself, closed in itself and at the same time poised in the

infinite ocean,” which is typical for an island—a new being—growing inside the womb, despite its

dependency on the body as an organism; “in civilizations where it is lacking, dreams dry up” (356).3

The navel is the ultimate site of the heterotopian relation with the real place, a “site where the relation

of the unknown has its first noticeable, physical trace [and] the site of a ruptured attachment to the

world” (Conley 7). The womb, just like ships that drive economy and politics, charges the most

fundamental and politicized topics of life and personhood and, by intervening into its natural state of

2 Being a “captive” in a “living tomb” is not far from being held captive of one’s own body—as in the locked in
syndrome or other forms of severe paralysis, discussed in the fourth chapter. What is common to both conditions is that
the person has no agency and no voice—with this exception that the cognition in respective conditions is at different
phases of development. That is to say, even if a fetus could communicate, it could not communicate its wants or needs
in a language because it is not yet capable of articulating them.

3 “Maisons closes et colonies, ce sont deux types extrêmes de l’hétérotopie, et si l’on songe, après tout, que le bateau,
c’est un morceau flottant d’espace, un lieu sans lieu, qui vit par lui-même, qui- est fermé sur soi et qui est livré en même
temps à l’infini de la mer et qui, de port en port, de bordée en bordée, de maison close en maison close, va jusqu’aux
colonies chercher ce qu’elles recèlent de plus précieux en leurs jardins, vous comprenez pourquoi le bateau a été pour
notre civilisation, depuis le XVIème siècle jusqu’à nos jours, à la fois non seulement, bien sûr, le plus grand instrument
de développement économique (ce n’est pas de cela que je parle aujourd’hui), mais la plus grande réserve d’imagination.
Le navire, c’est l’hétérotopie par excellence. Dans les civilisations sans bateaux les rêves se tarissent, l’espionnage y
remplace l’aventure, et la police, les corsairs” (Foucault ‘Des espaces’ 49).

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oscillating between life and death, demands to make choices that can only be done by proxy, giving

voice to growing fetuses and embryos.

The uterus as a space has been seriously undertheorized in feminism, psychoanalysis, and, more

broadly, theory, especially in comparison to the “synedoches for womanhood,” the vagina and the

breast, “parts of the body with heightened social, sexual, and cultural meaning” (Jarvis par. 12). Organs

like the uterus hold an involuntary agency over the body which, in birth, as the most extreme example,

takes over the body. Despite asserting itself “again and again in the cycle of reproduction: From the

uterine cramps felt during a menstrual period, to the agony of contractions, to the wincing pain that

accompanies the earliest days of breastfeeding, the uterus is a secret, but potent, reminder of the dumb

biology at the core of childbearing” (par. 13) and despite being the root of hysteria in the

psychoanalytic thought, the womb remained ignored in theory, scholarship, and fiction, with first

fiction and now technology working on its ectogenetic substitute. Even in science, after more than a

century of active research, it has just recently been confirmed that the uterus is not sterile (Perez-

Muñoz et el., Stinson et al.), although research on fertility and uterus microbiome is still under way.

Fetal existence, albeit in a heterotopian space, shifts the status of the expectant woman to a double

entity: ethically, pregnant persons are conceptualized with an aim to protect their own lives and the

lives they are carrying. In some cases, pregnant people are viewed as one person and in other as two.

Although pregnancy lasts for about nine months, it is not visibly evident in the first months. Fetuses

are concealed and used to be even less visible: ultrasound has become a routine in prenatal care only

in the last few decades. In the course of a pregnancy, a fetus is first felt by the pregnant person,

which is called quickening. This collaborative sensation becomes more pronounced as the pregnancy

progresses—“The startling—almost Frankensteinian—realization that you are feeling a foot, or a

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hand, or a hiccupping back” (Jarvis par. 9). Gradually and indirectly the fetus’s movements can also

be visible and felt by those who touch the pregnant person’s protruding belly when it moves.

According to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (and also St. Augustine), the fetus becomes

animated and human in an act of ensoulment with the first quickening, which first occurs sometime

in the second trimester of pregnancy. Although both theologists condemn abortion even when a

fetus is not yet considered human, the degree of the crime of abortion is based on the pregnant

person’s sensations and therefore relying on a rather subjective sensation by a (presumed) convict.

Such criteria were disregarded as soon as technologies of accessing prenatal life became available and

are still highly actual today with the heartbeat bill in the USA (discussed in chapter 5): technologies

are more reliable and thus more trusted in this case.

In Peter Sloterdijk’s trilogy Spheres, the womb is the most intimate and therefore the most perfect

example of the bubble, the sphere, Sloterdijk’s spheres ranging from microspheres (vol. 1: Bubbles)

and macropheres (vol. 2: Globes) to plurality of spheres (vol. 3: Foams). Sloterdijk demonstrates that

within the womb, “the original sphere” (die Ursphäre), it is impossible to draw a distinction between

the object and the subject. The two are, instead, “coupling” (Globes 41): the fetus does not recognize

itself or the placenta, the “primal companion” (Urbegleiter). A perfect immersion of being in a pair in

a bubble is demonstrated, which is what Sloterdijk related to “negative gynecology.” This immersion

ultimately bursts in birth: once the umbilical cord is cut, the fetus can form an ego and create new

bubbles: “through the gift of separation, [the one who performs the cut] provides the child with the

stimulus for existence in external media” (Bubbles 388). Sloterdijk sees humanity as striving towards

this utopian and biological comfort of the mother’s womb through religion, ideology, and science. A

womb can be seen as a place or a no-place, also in terms of a utopian state, which is literally cut

from the continental land as in Thomas Moore’s Utopia.

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In 1907, American embryologist Ross Harrison demonstrated that fragments of tissue could live in

vitro for weeks at a time. For the first time scientists saw, for example, heart muscle cells pulsating

outside the body—an entirely unexpected level of cell autonomy. The possibility of observing bodily

events outside the body itself was not considered before or thought to be impossible (Landecker 14-

15). At the same time, visual technologies (film, photography, X-ray, etc.) were being developed and

applied to medicine and biological research. “Medical practitioners have been prising open,

touching, listening to, and looking inside the pregnant female body for centuries” with X-ray (1895),

stethoscope (since 1819), and specula (the Roman period) (Blewitt 56). X-ray was the first technique

that would allow the pregnant person to see her fetus, even if it was not routinely shown to the

patients. Additionally, the procedure was quickly shown to be harmful to the fetus; computed

tomography, an X-ray technique, had the same issue.

Figure 39 A sonogram of a 10-week fetus. Figure 40 A photograph of a 10-week fetus.

Credit: Rob McBell, Sep 9, 2010, Wikimedia Commons, public Credit: Lunar Caustic, Mar 25, 2009, Wikimedia Commons,
domain. public domain. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Embryo_-
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:10_Week_Ultrasound_(4973616 _approximately_8_weeks_from_conception,_10_weeks_estima
059).jpg ted_gestational_age_from_LMP.jpg

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Until the use of ultrasound for medical purposes in 1956, “imaging of pregnancy and the developing

fetus remained primitive” (Benson and Doubilet). Only with the ultrasound came the mirror to the

womb with moving images of the “little invisible being,” now available to the expecting woman and

the rest of the world live or in a print. Ultrasound became routine for pregnancy screenings in the

US in the 1970s and has largely demystified the fetus: a pregnant person can see that, indeed, there is

a human(like) being growing inside of her. She could, further, show the image to others, family and

friends, and nowadays, share it on social networks. (Some parents go even further and create a social

network profile for their fetus to share its images and information, building the fetus’s personal

narrative before they are born and before they can actively contribute to it.)

Figure 42 3D printed fetus, based on 3D sonograms.

Figure 43 3D ultrasound scan
Credit: Nevit Dilmen, Jun 19, 2016, WikiMedia with surface rendering of fetal
Commons. face.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3d_printed_baby_ Figure 41 Normal first-trimester sonogram.
from_3D_ultrasound.jpg Image from Benson and
On 3D scan acquired with current Doubilet (101). Used with
technology at 9 weeks gestation, the head, permission of RSNA.
limbs, and umbilical cord insertion are
identifiable.

Image from Benson and Doubilet (101).

Used with permission of RSNA.

A sonogram (an ultrasound picture) of a growing human, set in the unheimlich womb, the first home

of human beings, brings out familiar and unfamiliar (Blewitt 47). Just like a pregnant person, a fetus

is see-through and disembodied in the sonogram image: the bones, heart, stomach, and kidneys are

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particularly visible, as well as the four chambers of the brain; a 2D technique grants a profile, and

3D and 4D techniques an approximation of facial features and gestures. Ultrasound allows for

obtaining normal and abnormal measurements of the fetus, a cause for relief or concern. During the

1960s, US doctors began experimenting with dyes, heat and sound to visualize the fetus and perform

procedures on fetuses (‘On the Frontiers’ 64). In addition to the ultrasound, magnetic resonance

(MR) is used for a more detailed diagnostics of fetal abnormalities today. With technology

improving every year, we can learn more and more about our growing fetuses before they are made

visible. This visual technology (and the so-thought objective machinery that renders it) creates the

fetal subject, holds the authority over it, and is assumed to capture its reality. We think of ultrasound

images as photographs (and fetuses as photographic subjects) instead of constructed images offered

through a technological experience. In fact, the more details the sonogram offers, the more it is

constructed (Fraser).

Feminism was quick to point out that sonograms are a cyborg site. The feminist theorist Marilyn

Maness Mehaffy argues that the “sonographic fetus is in many ways the ultimate cyborg in that it is

‘created’ in a space of virtuality that straddles the conventional boundary between an organic body

and a digital text” (181). Imagination and reality come together in a sonogram by making visible a

technologically generated fetal subject. Since we think of machines as objective, the image they

provide for us is taken as a fact and called a photograph, portrait, profile of a subject. When

distributed (in a photo frame, on social media, etc.), the image makes the uterus a public space and

“more specifically by making [their contents] accessible literally elsewhere than at the site of the

mother’s body” (Kukla 107-8).

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6.1.1 Fetuses in Space

The Space Age visualized floating fetuses in space, a motif now continued in ultrasound poetry,

which thematizes experiences at prenatal ultrasound appointments. Largely written by women

authors, in this innovative genre that offered an alternative perspective to sonograms a fetus is

commonly showcased as the Other, an unfamiliar being, by the use of space imagery. For instance,

in Helen Dunmore’s poem ‘Scan at 8 Weeks’ (33), the fetus is imagined as the “spaceman” coming

on a “spaceship” (Blewitt 52):

You are all heart,

I watch you tick and tick

and wonder,
what you will come to,

will this be our only encounter

in the white gallery of ultrasound

or are you staying?

One day will we talk about this

moment when I first saw your spaceship

far off, heading for home?

A peek into the womb overcomes the uncertainty— “are you staying?”—with a certainty of a life

reflected in the heartbeat: you are there and alive, “you are all heart.” Likewise, Sue Wood’s poem

‘Scan’ addresses the fetus directly and sees is as certainty, even of the scan is a “blur” (Blewitt 54):

“we see you / in the blur of first moon landings” and “know that you are / is all that is” (Wood 24).

The connection between the fetus and the world has been established as an outerworld connection.

The fetus as a spaceman in Dunmore is an “astronaut or alien” in Wood, and the womb is “a

galaxy,” “cupped /eternity.”

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The visual connection grows into a personal connection: the fetus has no voice but the (ultra)sound

translates it into a sonogram image. Ultrasound poetry translates poetic language into maternal

experience of seeing the Other that is a part of yourself into the outside of one’s body, not yet ready

for independent life. Emily Blewitt categorizes ultrasound poems as a “resistant, poetic,

‘reproductive technology’, since it generates new ways of articulating pregnancy” (56).

The visualization of a fetus as a separate entity was enforced in general culture in 1965 with Lennart

Nilsson’s renowned first photographs of embryos and fetuses, published as the photo essay ‘Drama

of Life Before Birth’ in LIFE magazine. Nilsson first saw a fetus in formaldehyde in 1952, which he

describes as an “information shock,” perhaps because he was about to become a father himself

(‘The Drama’). The editors of LIFE encouraged him to work on this project and Nilsson spent

seven years working on chronicling prenatal human life from conception to birth, “a project that

helped invent the idea of being unborn as a stage of human life” (Lepore The Mansion 17). He had an

agreement with doctors from a hospital in Stockholm who called him immediately when they were

to perform hysterectomies or abortions or when they attested miscarriages so that Nilsson could

photograph dead fetuses. As claimed by the accompanied story in LIFE, all but one embryo was

photographed outside the womb. Again, the mother’s body was depicted as separate.

What had been “billed as portraits of life were, in fact, portraits of death,” and were used by anti-

abortionists, right-to-life movements (Lepore The Mansion 6): “weirder still is that they were portraits

of humans who looked as if they had been incubated in eggshells, like chickens, and launched into

outer space, like so many baby-sized intergalactic rockets” (7). Nilsson’s photographs portray fetuses

in predominantly early gestational ages, from just days after the conception on, and some were

arranged to look like they were floating in the womb—or in space. Placenta is detached from the

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maternal body, as if the placenta itself, together with the amniotic sac, can preserve the growing

fetus. The original Nilsson’s photo features a fetus in an amniotic sac connected with placenta, all

seemingly floating in a dark, starry space; on the cover of LIFE, placenta was not featured in whole.

Per Sloterdijk, by denying the significance of the placenta we deny our fundamental connection to

the world around us, as we do with fostering modern age individualism. His sphere theory therefore

makes a case for interconnectedness that begins with the very creation of the human.

Figure 44 The original photograph of an 18-week-old fetus

by Lennart Nilsson.

Directed from Lennart Nilsson’s website to Time’s website

of the 100 most influential photos:
100photos.time.com/photos/lennart-nilsson-fetus

Figure 45 Lennart Nilsson’s photo of an 18-week-old fetus

featured on the cover of LIFE magazine on April 30, 1965.

From: www.lennartnilsson.com/en/a-life-of-stories/the-drama-
of-life-before-birth/

From: http://www.lennartnilsson.com/en/a-
life-of-stories/the-drama-of-life-before-birth/
Nilsson’s work makes a similar case to Huxley’s by making a fetus look as if it is separate from the

body that nurtures it while also changing our visualization and conception of prenatal human life by

showing the face and the body of a human individual before birth. If Huxley’s and Nilsson’s

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depictions of prenatal life were controversial, imagine the level of controversy a few decades later

when IVF allowed for a commodification of embryos (making large numbers of embryos, discarding

them or using them for research, practicing embryo selection, embryo donation/adoption, etc.) and

fetuses (gestational surrogacy).

A New York publisher released a book version of Nilsson’s photographs, A Child is Born, which has

sold more copies than any other illustrated book. This kind of fetal imagery regularly appeared in

popular culture advertisements: a warning “Pregnant mothers, please don’t smoke” from 1985 is

accompanied by a smoking fetus (Mink 66) and an ad from 1991 uses a sonogram to sell a car: “Is

something inside telling you to buy a Volvo?” (J. S. Taylor 68; see more in McTavish 107).

A gynecologist commented on Nilsson’s photographs, “This is the first look at the back side of the

moon” (Lepore The Mansion 5). A mere three years after Nilsson’s photographs were published, on

Christmas Eve in 1968, three humans were launched into space on the board of Apollo 8 to have

the actual first look at the back side of the moon. Losing connection with the Earth after they

moved to the actual back side of the moon evoked a reading of the Biblical Genesis: in the most

watched television broadcast of all time, the three astronauts—three scientists, three humans—

chose to read a passage about the creation of the heaven and earth (see more in Puchner xi-xxii).

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Figure 46 The Star Child from the very ending of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Author’s screenshot.

Apollo 8’s circling of the Moon concluded the year 1968, the same year when Arthur Clark and

Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was featured in theaters, starring the famous Star

Child at the very end. The ending shows the aged central character, astronaut David Bowman, lying

in bed and dying as an old man and then quickly regressing into a fetus as a re-birth. Both the novel

and the film show the fetus approach the Earth as the “master of the world” (297). The last

sequence of the film shows the fetus in an amniotic sac or a womb-like space, looking towards the

Earth. The Star Child was possibly inspired by Nilsson’s 1965 photographs: the fetus is safely

surrounded by the glowing amniotic sac, not unlike the one from the Nilsson’s original photograph.

The sac could also be interpreted as an egg-like structure, akin to the one from Leonardo da Vinci’s

illustration (see figure 30) which “depicts the womb as a sort of nutshell or egg” (Shell Islandology

160). The Star Child, or the regressed David Bowman, seems much more aware of his

surroundings, with eyes wide open when looking towards the Earth and, finally, the viewer. The

novel’s penultimate chapter, ‘Transformation,’ concludes: “He was back, precisely where he wished

to be, in the space that men called real” (296). The genesis of humanity here takes place in space by

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centering around human as the “master of the world”—in which the world bears many meanings.

Similarly, Aldous Huxley, in his poetry collection Leda (1920), compares the man and the ape. Man,

“a poor degenerate from the ape […] may not rival him, / save with my mind—a nimbler beast”

(31). The poem proceeds to show the power of the mind and concludes that “Mind, issued from the

monkey’s womb, / Is still umbilical to earth” (ib.). This might simply mean that the human mind, as

developed from apes, is an earthly matter that has not yet been transgressed. The word ‘still’ could

imply that the human mind, as opposed to apes, aims to understand the whole universe. In this light,

we can interpret the imagery of space fetuses as humanity perceiving itself more as a space-bound

than a solely earth-based species, an old fantasy of many literary genres.

In all these instances of a genesis in space, the story about the origin of humankind is told without

women. On the contrary, images sent to space on the Golden Record on Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977,

meant to represent the essence of our species and humanity (spoken greetings in 55 ancient and

modern languages, music, a human heartbeat, a baby crying…) together with our planetary

geography (whales, the ocean, an avalanche…), do not forget women’s role in childbearing. They

include human anatomy, including sex organs, a sequence of DNA, conception, fertilized ovum,

fetus, fetal growth, a pregnant couple, birth, a nursing mother, and several family portraits.4

Although by the launch of the Voyagers the world’s first IVF baby has already been in the works, no

such technology is mentioned (but space and transport technologies are). Soon afterwards, in 1979,

scientists began experimenting with poultry eggs in space, among other animal and plant species,

hoping to learn in a variety of experiments how bird embryos would develop in a weightless space

and if eggs could hatch. These experiments (as well as most space events mentioned above) were

4Although Lepore writes that Nilsson’s photos were sent into space by NASA in 1977, it was not his but a similar photo
of a fetus by Frank Allan that is still traveling on Voyager.

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preceded by non-reproductive but ever-reproducing human cells in space. HeLa cells, the first cells

to be successfully cloned and continue to endlessly proliferate, were sent into space on Soviet and

American satellites in 1960. They were shown to divide even faster in a zero-gravity space. As these

cancerous cells, forming a tumor, indefinitely clone themselves, Baudrillard calls their space trips a

quest for immortality: “So it is that the disseminated body of Henrietta Lacks, cloned at the

molecular level, makes its immortal rounds” (5). Preserving life outside of Earth collided with the

idea of a biological life as a self-replicating machine.5

6.1.2 Embryos under the Microscope

With ART, the visuality of the fetus extended to its very beginning, to the

embryo and the egg. It was only with ART that an image of an embryo, and not

fetus, left the laboratories and scientific journals to be exhibited to the public. In

Figure 47 Human this intertextual discourse that includes literature and cinema, the images are left
blastocyst (five-day-old
embryo). “to interpretations varying according to the viewers’ particular cultural
Credit: J. Conaghan,
uploaded on Apr 20, backgrounds, knowledge and life experiences” (Stuart Hall 100). These relatively
2014, Wiki Public
Domain.
new images of embryos differ from the well-known fetal imagery also in the

embryonic structure: the fetus looks human and the embryo does not. This is why anti-abortionists

use fetal images with “perfectly formed fingers and toes” and the proponents of stem cell research

use less humanlike images of embryos (Williams et al. 801). This is also why the first call embryos

‘persons’ and the second ‘lumps of cells,’ using pictures as proof. The subjectivity of these images is

masked with the objectively looking preciseness in the pictures. Subjectivity is at work in the public

5The Von Neumann probe is a hypothetical device, suggested by John Von Neumann (in his native Hungarian
Neumann János Lajos), that could repair and replicate itself—like biology does—from materials easily found in space.

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discourse but also in the laboratory. A quality embryo is not necessarily good-looking: even a

scientific eye can misjudge the embryo’s morphology as uneven and opaque and thus poor quality,

resulting in smaller chance of transfer. Besides, rating systems in different laboratories contribute to

which and how many embryos are chosen for the transfer (Desai et al.). Presented in a mediated

microscopic picture, a developing embryo is frozen in time—although in real time its genetic

material is replicating and recombining while the visual technology used to take its picture is

magnifying, illuminating, and penetrating its image.

The cyborg status of a clearly biological and technological IVF embryo is revealed, for example, with

the selection of embryo, assisted by time-lapse photography of developing embryos with

simultaneous computational assessment of cellular morphology and kinetics (Hanevik et al. 1399) or

with a pipette sticking into the blastocyst blastomere to biopsy a cell for PGD with a 98 percent

accuracy. “Though it is fully human (for what else can it be?), it is born of science, inhabits the

timeless ice land of liquid-nitrogen storage tanks, and feeds on special (pure) culture in its petri dish.

At once potential research material (scientific object), quasi-citizen (it has legal rights), and potential

person (human subject), the embryo has a cyborg liminality in its contested location between science

and nature” (Franklin ‘Postmodern’ 336). This in-between status of the embryo is particularly

relevant in the current moment as approximates of artificial embryos are being developed. For now,

they are not exactly like ‘natural’ embryos and are not yet able to develop into a person (Zheng et

al.). As Antonio Regalado writes with a reference to Huxley, “[t]he concern is that if scientists could

make human embryos in the lab, someone might use the systems to generate genetically modified

people, a dystopian scenario similar to the central hatcheries described in the novel Brave New World”

(‘Meet’ par. 10).

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Visual technology has always been a part of IVF with scanning, laparoscopic, x-ray, and microscopic

techniques. In its beginnings, egg retrieval was done through a laparoscopy, an invasive procedure

that reaches the ovary through the abdomen (today, an ultrasound needle is used to retrieve the eggs

transvaginally). The video technology that accompanies laparoscopies today was only developed in

the late 1970s and early 1980s (Kelley 35). The camera accompanying surgical instruments into the

body has joined the ultrasound in visualizing the ova—and eventually separating them from the

body in “all the reality of a metonymic assimilation” (Vasseleu 56). “For a woman patient in an IVF

clinic […] scientific images are not merely a form of photo-graphy; they participate in vita-graphy”

(57).

Such techniques of mechanical reproduction bring up Walter Benjamin’s distinction between a

surgeon (who works like a cameraman) and magician (who works like a painter).6 “[B]y penetrating

into the patient’s body” (13), the cameraman loses the natural distance and with it the ability to

create original (artistic) work. As opposed to a painter who creates a total work of art, the

cameraman creates a replica of what the camera has seen, putting together “multiple fragments

which are assembled under a new law” (14). In a documentary film, this realism of the camera is

taken for granted: the camera creates an entity from the objects and subjects it depicts as if they are a

fact. Julian Huxley was a central figure of documentary film in London of the 1930s, most known

for the film From Generation to Generation produced by the Eugenic Society (Squier ‘Embryos’ 140,

142). His younger brother Aldous also made plans to put Brave New World on screen; Aldous paid

6“The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician
maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of
hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the
distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution
with which his hand moves among the organs” (Benjamin 13).

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special attention to his vision of the film as well as the actual conduct of the camera, because it could

be easily manipulated considering the controversy of bottled babies (153). Aldous was blind for

more than a year as a teenager and lived with a severely impaired sight for most of his life. He knew

from personal experience that physical vision is not the only way to see and how crucial is vision to

conceptualizing ideas: “It is possible to make use of the movies to improve our vision of objects and

events in real life (The Art 42).7

In a poem by Aldous Huxley’s from the 1920s, ‘Fifth Philosopher’s Song’ (Leda 33), the lyrical

subject takes a microscopic view of eggs and sperm and portrays the competitive environment

between spermatozoa to reach a metaphorical Noah’s ark (which, in itself, is a metaphor for the

second origin, a rebirth)—an egg:

A million million spermatozoa

All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,

Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you’d quietly died!

7 Getting rid of the women’s bodies for reproduction yet again, Huxley offered a postmodern and posthuman view of
modernity and technology already in his first novel, from 1921, Crome Yellow: “With the gramophone, the cinema, and
the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more previous even than
these—the means of dissociating love from propagation. […] An impersonal generation will take place of Nature’s
hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it
requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at this very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros,
beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world” (Chapter V).

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In Huxley’s poem, Susan Merrill Squier describes the twentieth-century view of reproduction as a

“literary articulation [of the paralleled] scientific articulation in the germinal and scopophilic

obsessions of Edwards and Steptoe,” who succeeded in creating the world’s first IVF baby

(‘Embryos’ 167). The collective and active sperm floats in “an interstellar uterine space, no maternal

body to be found” (ib.), very much like Helen

Dunmore’s ultrasound poetry poem of a fetus as an

astronaut, both of which split the gestating mother

from the embryo.

The splitting of the maternal body from the

reproductive process is an old idea and contains

many forms. In alchemy, mother as a shelter and

nurturer and father as a creator is attested in the

Figure 48 Preformation, drawn by Nicolas Hartsoecker
belief that homunculus, a microscopic man in sperm 1694.

Hartsoecker’s drawing of homunculus inside the head of a

(animalculism) or eggs (ovism), from which a human human sperm became the icon of preformationism.
“Looking at the head of a sperm with these crude devices
[optical microscopes] left much to the imagination, and the
being develops. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus more creative among these early observers described tiny
human beings curled up in the sperm head” (Neaves 2541).
provided a formula to create a homunculus outside a
WikiCommons, public domain, uploaded on Oct 30, 2019.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Preformation.GIF
woman’s body. This conception stems further back

to ancient Greece, where many texts subscribe to the ideology of preformationism—the view that a

tiny human is transferred from the father and planted in the mother’s body—which prevented

women to take part in generation.8 The debate between preformationism (which is the belief that

8See an example from Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the final play of Oresteia: “The mother of what is called her child is no
parent of it, but nurse only of the young life that is sown in her. The parent is the male, and she but a stranger, a friend,
who, if fate spares his plant, preserves it till it puts forth” (121).

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organisms develop from tiny versions of themselves and that the embryo/fetus is thus a static and

preformed entity) and epigenetics (which beliefs that organisms develop from lesser to greater

organization during gestation)9 continues through history, most notably with Darwin and genetics

turning to preformationism. In the twenty-first century, epigenetics is convincingly winning the

battle.

Epigenetics contributes to the division between the mother and the future child during pregnancy by

sketching the fetus as a self-made and self-developing entity: paternal inheritance and mother’s labor

are left out of the equation (Henderson 112). In literature, this representation of the Romantic fetus

as “a perfect bourgeois subject” (113) developed with the literary genre of the novel. The novel is

the ultimate human genre because it taught the bourgeoise how to be a subject, which coincided

with the modern concept of the human. The novel thus prescribed the human state through

subjective experiences and enforced humanist conception of a genetic human as an upper class,

white, free, able-bodied, heterosexual man. Starting in the last decade, the novel itself became a

target of identity politics criticisms: novels written by straight white males are being boycotted by

feminist readers, many of whom only read novels written by women, non-white, and/or gender-

non-conforming persons (see Cunningham, Cosslett). Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818),

thematizing the modern human, is a prescient case of criticizing this humanist view of the universal

human. Donna Haraway writes that the bourgeois novel and realism have been replaced with science

fiction and postmodernism in the posthuman era, together with the shift from “white capitalist

patriarchy” to “informatics of domination” (Simians 161). Again, Frankenstein anticipates these shifts

as, according to some scholars, the first text of the science fiction genre.

9 The term epigenetics is used today to designate non-genetic factors in development.

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Shelley’s novel is also representative of the Romantic and epigenetic conceptions of reproduction.

Like all other texts on humanoid creation, Frankenstein’s creature is motherless—a mother is not

even in question. Andrea Henderson finds the gap between the fetus and woman’s body grew wider

with the shift in representation that portrayed gestation and birth as mechanical (103). This scientific

representation and the epigenetic belief fed into the Romantic construction of reproduction by

eliminating the mother and giving all credit to the father. Modernity built on the Romantic notion of

reproduction by industrializing the body, as presented in Brave New World, by completely mechanical

ectogenesis and by putting the products, test-tube babies, into assembly lines (Squier ‘Reproducing’

117).

Birth is an event that physically separates one body from another. Maggie Nelson writes in her queer

family memoir The Argonauts that to give birth is to surrender the body “to go into pieces” (84). IVF,

on the other hand, separates the inseparable: a woman is separated from her eggs that develop

outside of her for at least two and up to six days under the watchful eye of an embryologist. Patients

undergoing IVF today are routinely given photos of their few-days-old embryos before they are

transferred into the uterus—the very first portrait of a potential child. Huxley prophesizes this idea

in Brave New World as well: “Embryos are like photographic film” (21)—they can only stand red light

and, like photographs, need to develop.10

Another aspect where vision, and particularly photography and film, takes the role in reproduction is

in the room for sperm donation, sterile but amply equipped with pornographic materials. If a

10With new technology of 4D ultrasounds it could be said that ‘fetuses are like videos.’ Walter Benjamin has, in fact,
called the technique of mechanical reproduction—the cinema.

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woman’s role in IVF is orchestrated through the hormonal chemistry by her physician, a man’s role

is set up through visuality in order to obtain sperm. In Richard Meier’s third cycle of his poem

Building Matilda, titled ‘The Science Bit,’ this contrast is especially prominent: “all the time these

chemicals control / the essence of you, you are null, an absence.” The depiction of the woman is

again rather her disappearance while “ten eggs appear, collected to be mixed / with what the male

produces in a small // white room before some pictures of a blonde / who looks completely up for

it, and not there” (25). The detached sexual act for the sake of “the science bit” trumps the judged-

upon artificiality of charting temperature to trace ovulation in Sharon Olds’s ‘The Planned Child.’

The sexual act of the IVF process has a solely technological purpose of fertilizing the eggs and must

be performed in a much stricter time frame than the natural ovulation window. As in a ritual,

everything and everyone participating—from the strength of light and the level of room temperature

to the preciseness of the technician’s work and the patient self-administering the hormonal

injections—must perform just right. At this point in the process, the perspective is zoomed in to the

petri dish. Likewise, Meier’s perspective is microscopic when he presents the activity around the

obtained eggs and sperm as crucial to the process of ‘building’ his daughter, piece by piece,

procedure by procedure.

6.2 The Identity Problem

Few inventions in science and technology have not previously been imagined in film and literature.

Fiction operates in a privileged cultural space where speculation can grow on current, historicized, or

fabricated cultural, societal, scientific, and technological developments. Just as fiction is inspired by

scientific inventions and speculations, science gets inspired by, for example, fictional Eliza Doolittle

to create the first chatbot ELIZA and, further, a Star Trek computer which updated the basic

chatbot into a virtual assistant, nowadays a part of every personal phone and computer. Science

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speculates, experiments, and builds on the established knowledge and, likewise, fiction speculates,

experiments, and builds on already existing texts; for example, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a predecessor

to Hawthorne’s biotechnological Rappaccini’s Daughter and to AI HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space

Odyssey (Evans et al. xiii). Science fiction, in particular, plays with the “worlds of if” which are

connected to the reader’s world through a logical relationship (linear, causal, extrapolative) while at

the same time permitting for a metaphorical or symbolic reading (Evans et al. xv). According to

Darko Suvin, science fiction is a “literature of cognitive estrangement,” which is achieved by a

novum (cognitively explicable but strange innovation) in the world of if. Science fiction shows readers

a distorted, metamorphosed image of the present as transported into the future; by being tied to the

present, this literary genre makes for a perfect philosophical exercise in reflecting on the

developments in science and technology and broader (ib.).

When Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca appeared in theaters back in 1997, much of what the film depicted

was not possible. Only twenty years later, the basics of Gattaca’s genetical engineering through IVF

and PGD are possible and sometimes practiced. Unfettered developments of PGD application have

already put prospective parents into a position where they can choose their child’s genetic make-up.

Scientists dream on: Based on already available technologies of comparing the prospective parents’

DNAs before the couple would even meet, American geneticist George Church created a start up

for a dating application that would allow matching of people whose children could not get one of

the 7,000 rare genetic diseases (Pelley par. 71, 74). And writers dream on as well.

GENETICIST
You've already specified blue eyes, dark
hair and fair skin. I have taken the liberty
of eradicating any potentially prejudicial
conditions – premature baldness, myopia,
alcoholism and addictive susceptibility,
propensity for violence and obesity –

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MARIA
(interrupting, anxious)
– We didn't want—diseases, yes.

ANTONIO
(more diplomatic)
We were wondering if we should leave some
things to chance.

GENETICIST
(reassuring)
You want to give your child the best possible
start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection
built-in already. Your child doesn't need
any additional burdens. And keep in mind,
this child is still you, simply the best of you.
You could conceive naturally a thousand times
and never get such a result.

The scene from the beginning of Gattaca reveals what I call the identity problem: inquiring about and

designing desired features in a not-yet-existing person. The discomfort of the couple and the

dissonance between them and the geneticist is palpable. Maria and Antonio naturally conceived their

first child who was born with a heart defect, which is why they decided to take the in vitro

fertilization (IVF) route with preimplantation genetic testing (PGD) for their second child. In the

futuristic world of Gattaca, IVF with PGD is an ordinary way of procreating. By conceiving their

first son naturally, the couple went against the norm.

Have Maria and Antonio harmed their first son? The nonidentity problem,11 first devised by Derek

Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984), sees to suggest that Maria and Antonio have not wronged him.

The nonidentity problem calls attention to the fact that some decisions we make now will change

11 The nonidentity problem, also called a paradox of future individuals, is a philosophical problem vaguely related to what
I call the identity problem. In ethics, the nonidentity problem is common in the area of prenatal life and mostly all
future-directed choices. The paradox holds to three main intuitions: 1) a person-affecting view, which says that an act
can only be bad if it is bad for someone, 2) bringing someone into existence is not bad for that person, even if their
existence is difficult, meaning that life inherently holds more value than nonlife, and 3) which contradicts 1) and 2), that
bringing someone into existence can be wrong even if it is not bad for someone. This means that at least one of the
three intuitions is false (see Parfit, Woodward, Kavka).

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who comes into existence at a future time by affecting the timing of conception. For example, in the

case of Maria and Antonio, if they had decided to use IVF with PGD instead of having their son

naturally, the child who would subsequently be born would be a different individual than the one

who was in fact conceived and born, since it would grow from a different sperm and egg. In identity

changing cases like this one, Parfit argues that our decisions do not make a person worse off than

they otherwise would be, unless the life they have is worse than never having existed.

It seems to follow that the couple did not do harm to their son if we assume that the son they had

naturally would likely not have been chosen among the available IVF embryos due to his heart

defect. Alternatively, the pregnancy might result in selective termination due to prenatal testing

results. In a futuristic scenario, the fetal heart defect might be fixed before or during the pregnancy,

which would ultimately block the nonidentity problem from arising. It would not, however, prevent

the identity problem if the defect were treated after birth.

It is not only in a sonogram image that a fetus can be separate from the womb. “When the genetic

text of the unborn child can be embedded in a biological site far removed from its origin, the

intimate connection between child and womb which once provided a natural context for gestation

has been denatured,” writes Katherine Hayles as an example of denaturing the context (Chaos 272).

Prenatal information is all the more crucial for the identity problem when a not-yet implanted

embryo is being evaluated. First of all, evaluation of embryo morphology, mosaicism, and other

factors that contribute to the embryo being chosen for the transfer or discarded is based on a well-

researched but overall changing scoring systems which vary among the clinics and include three

prominent biases, all mentioned in this chapter: the subjective view of an embryologist, the

supposedly objective perspective offered by the visual technology, and the fact that the evaluation

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events take place sporadically.

Prenatal information is useful for patients and clinicians—testing is encouraged so that proper

assessment can be in place—but it is also a burden. When a prenatal test diagnoses a human being at

an embryo or a fetal stage with a heart defect, spina bifida, and short stature or identifies an

abnormality, such as eleven digits, it crosses a boundary into a physician-patient discourse where at

least five value systems meet: the patient’s, their partner’s, and the clinician’s, as well as that of the

institution and wider society. In Gattaca, the mainstream ethical values are obvious: the couple is able

to choose superfluous features while the society, with the geneticist as its proxy, takes over to

eliminate the undesirable ones. The most salient boundary crossing is made, however, when the

identity of the future person is labeled deviant by one or the other value system, and especially when

these value systems clash.

In Western healthcare settings, the four main ethical principles (of justice, nonmaleficence and

beneficence, and respect for the patient’s autonomy) play a crucial part in reaching ethical decisions

on prenatal life. Briefly summarized, these principles advocate—in the same order as above—for the

medical personnel to give a fair treatment when needed, do no harm and be of benefit to the patient,

and require the patient to be a rational person with a capacity to act freely, with a voluntary act, and

intentionally, with understanding, as the basis for informed consent.

Potentially problematic decisions in IVF that may not satisfy all four ethical principles are

transferring two embryos at the same time, choosing an embryo of a certain sex although it is of

lower quality than other available embryos, or choosing donor gametes when the partner is fertile or

subfertile but not infertile. Not choosing against deafness or Down’s Syndrome is a controversial

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decision at the PGD stage of IVF: in the UK, for example, it is forbidden to transfer an embryo

with known aneuploidy (while Iceland has close to eradicated people with Down’s Syndrome

through prenatal testing and abortion). Physicians might view choosing an embryo with known

aneuploidy as voting for non-health over health, thus going against the essence of medicine

(Galarneau). It is in such cases where the borderline lies and where we need to listen to individual

stories and contexts, many of which are found in fiction and nonfiction.

6.2.1 A Brief History of The Identity Problem

The identity problem has existed even before ultrasound first offered a peek into the uterus,

revealing the sex and health status of the fetus. In a broader sense, it has been around, albeit

unnoticed, at least since the idea of eugenics was discussed in fictional utopias, such as Samuel

Butler’s Erewhon: or, Over the Range (1872) and Francis Galton’s Kantsaywhere (1910), both highly

influenced by Charles Darwin’s ideas. Yet, the identity problem grows larger and more obvious with

the advanced technology of prenatal diagnostic and screening tests as well as with assisted

reproductive technologies, which can manipulate embryos even before they are created.

Granted, people already make choices about their potential child’s genetic, cultural, and partly

environmental characteristics when choosing their partner. Yet, when these decisions are made in

the realm of assisted reproductive technologies, they are much more rational and intentional—and

sometimes agonizing. Choosing a donor is a task that cannot be taken easily. The commercialization

of sperm and eggs tells us that. For example, Ivy League donors are paid better, even if everyone is

aware this money is only buying a chance of the progeny being similar to the donor. Another set of

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issues comes from the fact that these patients are disproportionally wealthy, white, and older, while

donors and surrogates are oftentimes all the contrary.

Various prenatal tests offer more certainty about the forming individual in vitro or in the uterus, but

are, despite similar results, a target of vastly different levels of controversy. PGD and chromosome

blood testing are such an example: they often reveal the same information on aneuploidies and sex

of the embryo, but PGD incites much controversy while chromosome blood tests receive little

reflection on their ramifications (see Kaposy). PGD is invasive and can be harmful to the embryo by

suppressing its development, albeit rarely, while chromosome blood testing involves only non-

invasive blood draw. From an ethical perspective, however, prenatal blood tests often result in

heavier consequences for the patients, if acted upon. Chromosome blood testing takes place at the

end of the first trimester of pregnancy and prospective parents who opt to terminate a previously

wanted pregnancy must undergo an abortion. PGD, on the other hand, takes place days before the

embryo is ready to implant in the womb, at the point when the pregnancy is far from a certainty.12

For some conservative people, not choosing an embryo that underwent a PGD with poor or

inconclusive results is already at the level of murder. For others, it does not come even close to

abortion. During the Alabama heart bill legislative debate the state senator and sponsor of the

abortion bill Clyde Chambliss said: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not

pregnant” (Newkirk par. 1-2).

12Although the days of the cycle before the implantation or missed period count retroactively as the first days of
pregnancy, when, in the natural course of the process, the fertilized ovum travels from the ovary to the uterus, the
implantation is only to take place a few days after the transfer of the embryo to the womb.

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By virtue of PGD, a three-day-old embryo can have its identity revealed, in some aspects, more

clearly than that of a child or even adult whose genetic predispositions show up only through the

course of life or, perhaps, never at all. Such embryos can be identified as female or male, abled or

disabled, blue, brown, or green-eyed, right and wrong. New tests open new ethical questions. We

will soon be able to point out other relevant and irrelevant genetic factors as well, for example, later-

onset diseases, such as BRCA1 and 2 mutations which greatly increase the risk of developing certain

types of cancer later in life (Robertson 214). Eliminating Tay-Sachs disease is less controversial than

eliminating conditions such as Down’s syndrome or genetic blindness because Tay-Sachs disease

reaches two criteria that are commonly concerned as justifiable for germline editing: the disease gets

severe very early in life and results in childhood death. Genetic diseases with late onset, such as

Huntington’s disease (30-50 years old), are more likely to be generally condoned simply due to the

chronological development of the disease. Likewise, eliminating genetic diseases where death may be

prevented with treatment (e.g. cancers) and genetic diseases with a wide range of severity (e.g.

mitochondrial diseases) is less clear-cut.

6.2.2 What Does Literature Say About Prenatal Tests?

A technology similar to PGD was depicted in Brave New World. In the Hatchery, a factory in which

all human beings are created via technology similar to a combination of IVF and artificial wombs,

each embryonic and fetal information chart is labeled with information of “[h]eredity, date of

fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group [a caste].” The narrator makes an argument that the

knowledge of fetal characteristics makes the prospective human “[n]o longer anonymous, but

named, identified” (20-21). Information about their identity reduces the human, individual, and

personal statuses of these embryos and fetuses: it might be a fetus, but we also know that she is a

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female with perfect pitch who will experience an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. We thus estimate

and evaluate the individual’s identity and future on the basis of their genes. Like Huxley, I argue that

there is a profound difference in our relationship to an embryo or a fetus that is a blank slate vs. an

embryo with identity markers of medical prognostics.

“Even queer theorists are sobered to learn the sex of an embryo,” writes Andrea Long Chu, queer

theorist and a trans woman (67). Another issue with sex selection is that embryos of transgender

people can, so far, render only their sex but not gender; it is not difficult to imagine consequences if

studies examining transgender genetics prove fruitful for prenatal testing. No information is simple

and straightforward in prenatal life, not even the sex, as widely attested by sexual discrimination

against female fetuses in many cultures. IVF allows, by the mere protocol of the technology, for a

manipulation of the birth and sex orders of potential siblings. While this choice may simply be a

collateral luxury secondary to treatment (such as the physical features Maria and Antonio chose via

PGD) and possibly the last thing on the mind of patients suffering the pain of infertility, this is not

the case for everyone. Those willing to undergo IVF with PGD, and those who can afford it, are

able to choose from a growing repertoire of features. Where to draw the line, then? “Diseases, yes,”

says Maria, unaware of the many repercussions of her simple answer.

Maria and Antonio’s first child exhibits extreme will and ability by (illegally) penetrating into the

group of genetically modified people. On the contrary, some genetically superior people in Gattaca as

well as Brave New World fail at genetically conditioned prospering or have unexpected health issues.

The only guarantee these two dystopias offer is that the world will get grimmer and more stratified,

more scientific and superficial—overall, less of what makes us human. The suffering and harm are

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still there, in a different form. Humans are there in a different form. In utopias, human diversity and

pathology are eradicated or at least substituted with a scientific remedy.

Principles of contemporary bioethics in the West (principle of justice, beneficence and non-

maleficence, and respect for autonomy), together with cultural traditions and values (such as

solidarity, virtue and professional ethics, etc.), serve a noble goal, but not all suffering and harm is to

be alleviated at the stage of prenatal life. There are other, often times safer, ways of dealing with

deafness and some types of heart defects after, rather than before, birth. (As a matter of fact,

deafness brings with it not only the deaf community but a whole deaf culture, with language as its

central point.) As technology progresses, there will always be newer and better solutions at all stages.

With every new invention we will need to evaluate which intervention at which stage is the most

appropriate and ethical in a given case and in general. In vitro gene editing made crucial steps

towards clinical use much faster than it was predicted or allowed, eliminating undesirable conditions

from an already-identified embryonic or fetal individual. IVF thus serves at least two roles: treatment

of prospective parents’ infertility (as restitutio ad integrum) and selection (and potential treatment) of

prospective children’s genetics (which could be viewed as restitutio ad integrum when eliminating a

genetic condition or as transformatio ad optimum, an access point of the man-led evolution).

The quest for perfection is in human nature. All the same, the very essence of human nature is

diversity and pathology (diseases, yes). Pathology, per George Canguilhem, is not a deviance of the

norm, but rather a different kind of norm. In Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy

(1987-89), every genetic anomaly is treated. Yet, humanity is doomed due to a Human

Contradiction—a lethal combination of “intelligence at the service of hierarchical behavior” that is

essential for our species (Adulthood 467). In the buzzing biotechnological (r)evolution we are

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undergoing, we should turn to fictional and (auto)biographical narratives before we make any

decisions on behalf of other human beings, nascent or not.

6.3 Donors

Related but distinct from the identity problem is what we might call the likability problem.

Homogenity and affinity, as in being alike someone and as in finding someone likeable, are key to

pairing the couple with their child in gamete donation, which ultimately results in another type of

affinity—that of blood.13 Sperm and egg donation are now commonly discussed in the light of

designing rather than creating a child with so-called designer babies. There are also other prominent

concerns, such as donor recruitment, exploitation, compensation, and commodification of human

materials. When choosing a donor, one cannot choose the sex of the child (as can be done with

PGD) but can choose against or for a disability, race, or cultural background and against or for

musical or athletic talents—the donor search is designed on the basis of these identities and

affinities. Genes and environment are believed to make us who we are, which is why medical

information, from seasonal allergies to family members’ causes of death, is basic for the donor files.

Additional information concerns their looks, physical abilities, and personality.

In an essay on A Cup of Jo, one of the most read and community-fostering women lifestyle blogs in

the USA (Forbes ‘Top 10’), led by Joanna Goddard, Caitlin describes the process in California

13 Apart from gamete donation, liking is not a common directive with IVF and PGD, despite the sensationalized and
targeted talk about embryo selection of designer babies. Granted, it does take place in IVF and PGD procedures of
which the purpose is non-medical sex selection—but these are rare. In a more ethical practice, it can only take place, for
example, when a couple undergoing IVF has more embryos of the same quality and they are asked which one to implant
first; they can freely choose the sex of their child or select against or—less freely—for a disability, such as leukemia or
deafness genes. (It is unethical and sometimes also impossible to de-select embryos that are carriers of genetic
conditions, i.e. would not have them themselves but could transfer the genes to their progeny.)

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Cryobank, the dominant bank in the industry: “You have a million factors though which you can

story these donors. They list the obvious stuff—height, age, ethnicity, eye color, hair color—but

then they also have ‘staff impressions’ of the person and ‘artistic contribution’ (they can choose to

draw a picture or write an essay). They share SAT scores and a full medical history. Most of them

include childhood photos” (Goddard par. 3). Not far from “ordering from a menu” (Goddard par.

9), in marked-based USA and other commercial banks across the world, gametes are now

predominantly bought by homosexual couples and single people on the basis of a wholesome donor

evaluation (Eber par. 7).

When choosing a sexual partner for procreation, the subconscious usually takes the role of finding

the likeable in the partner. Animals that we are, our pheromones led us to people to whom we are

most genetically compatible in order to produce the most optimal offspring—or so says science

(More and Grady 200). People describe it as “an intuitive non-cognitive experience— ‘I just felt she

was the one’, ‘it just felt right’ and ‘my ovaries were singing’” (Farsides 352). In the infertility

subgroup of parents, this process involves choosing new people: a physician and sometimes also a

donor (in about 14 percent of cases in the US (Kenney and McGowan 15) the solution involves a

third party).

When choosing a donor, creating a child is more intentional and the reproductive choices more

rational. In gamete transaction, the two methods of choice seem rather separate: liking or disliking

the person does not come in the package with calculating the desired genetic traits. One can go with

a subjective or an objective method or try to balance both. More and more agencies offer in-depth

information about their donors, from age and medically relevant information to hobbies and essays

written exactly for this purpose, commonly including pictures and sometimes also audio or video

recordings. All this information testifies that gamete transaction is considered much more than a

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reproductive, merely biological, event. This is also why asking a friend or a relative for a donation is

a popular choice among many (More and Grady).

Figure 49 Database of egg donors.

Credit: Sunshine, Egg Donation Agency. Used with permission. www.eggdonors.asia/blog/in-vitro-gametogenesis-ivg-embryology/

In ‘Who’s Your Daddy?,’ an episode (2.23) of House, M.D., one of the world’s most watched series in

the 2000s, physician Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), single and nearing her forties, decides to pursue

IVF. She firsts tests a colleague as a potential donor by taking him out for a date, but finally decides

against it. She then looks through medical and personal data of available sperm donors and cannot

decide between two men with the ‘cleanest’ profile: no inheritable diseases, “four living

grandparents,” etc. (12:15). When she asks another physician, the antagonistic protagonist, Greg

House (Hugh Laurie), for a “medical opinion on genetics” of the two candidates, he tells her such

rational choices are wrong when creating a child. In his typical manner, he assumes from their

personal information that the chosen donors are “losers” and reminds Cuddy that she is “designing

a kid—a loser kid” (11:55; 12:41). Instead, he advises Cuddy to find “someone you like” (35:45). She

explains that she is “not going dancing with [the donor], I’m looking for a healthy sperm,” to which

he responds, “Who they are, what they do, that doesn’t matter?” (12:20). In his opinion, the whole

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picture needs to be considered: genes and their expression as well as epigenetic factors.14 To make

the point, House violates confidentiality of the donor process and invites the chosen donor, a young

medical student, for a false job interview from which Cuddy realizes she dislikes the donor as a

person. “You gotta know who you’re getting in bed with,” preaches House at Cuddy (32:15)15 and

reiterates: “you should know: genes matter. Who you are matters. Pick someone you trust” (35:35).16

It is never revealed which donor she finally chose and she does not succeed in having a live birth,

but suffers two unsuccessful transfers and a miscarriage (a result of choosing bad genes?). After

giving up on IVF, Cuddy finally becomes a mother in her second attempt at adoption. In her

adoption cases, the birth parents’ genetics or their likeability are not considered, and neither is

attested substance abuse during one of the pregnancies. The dilemma, at least in House, M.D., exists

only with donation, where the choice of who will the child be rests solely on the patient.

Caitlin, who went through similar dilemmas like Cuddy,17 asked herself, “Ultimately, how important is

your choice? You have no idea and no way of checking. It’s a mystery” and concluded, “After all, my

14House backs up his method of wholesome choice on the theory of natural selection, which is largely based on
genetics. He compliments Cuddy: “I was just thinking what your mother looked like, because your father obviously
chose her for breeding purposes” (2:06). Cuddy, who is Jewish, aligns this theory with German views on eugenics during
the Holocaust, revealing the dangerous and unethical side of what was thought to be the purifying of the genetic pool.

15This sentence alludes to the Bible stories in which to know someone means, in some occasions, to have sex with them. In
one such story, Leah becomes Jacob’s wife in a plot of deception orchestrated by the father of the two sisters: Jacob
marries Leah thinking he married her sister Rachel, whom he prefers—but did not get to know.

16 Including trust into the process of choosing a donor could be interpreted in the light of the subplot rather than
general advice: referring to trust as a factor in the decision might be House’s way of telling Cuddy that he is trust-worthy
since he is one of the rare people she told about her treatment and even asked him to administrate her progesterone
injections. Cuddy, despite being sexually and intellectually attracted to House, decides to test House’s best friend as a
potential donor but stops herself from asking House (5:30)—another choice of Cuddy’s that puzzles and bothers House.

17Caitlin and her wife Claire describe an “interesting […] shift in expectations:” “When we went in, I thought, ok, we’ll
get a 6’2’’ Olympian with a Ph.D. Because why wouldn’t you? But then you start thinking, okay, what IS a barometer of
success and potential, and what’s really just your interpretation? It turns out to be a real value test” (Goddard par. 5). For
Caitlin and Claire, “the subjective things made a difference, like the staff impressions saying, oh, he’s friendly or he was
smiling. One guy seemed perfect on paper—he was on the Persian Olympic soccer team (my wife is Arab; I’m super
athletic)—but the staff described him as moody” (par. 6). The banks take some burden off the buyer’s shoulders by
pointing out the candidates’ talents and achievements, asking them to undergo donor psychological screening, and

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brother, sister and I are all genetically of the same stock, but you could not pick three more different

people” (Goddard par. 10). Yet, the weight of this choice is exactly how the donor industry earns

billions.18 Even if we know genetics is largely unpredictable (that choosing an athletic donor does not

guarantee an athletic child),19 the donor industry flourishes around elite universities. “We try to

always place the labs near strong universities,” says Scott Brown, VP for Communications at

California Cryobank, who notes that clients show a “slight bias” for donors with advanced degrees

(Eber par. 2). Aaron D. Levine’s study has shown that the bias is more than slight, as it is the

strongest presence outside the banks among donor agencies and individual couples (27). The banks

are merely following the trends, clearly fostering “eugenic implications […] since social class and

financial constraints limit users’ access, while social preferences and medical ‘standards’ limit men’s

universal participation” (More and Grady 200).

Established in 1977, Cryobank, Inc., later California Cryobank, opened its first branch in Palo Alto,

California, the second in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the third in New York City (‘About’). The

now largest sperm bank in the USA and one of the biggest in the world “says its donors are the cream

of the cup. Less than 1 percent of the 20,000 men who apply to be donors each year are accepted.

‘It’s tougher to get into California Cryobank than it is Harvard or Stanford,’ brags Brown” (Eber

screening their behavior whenever they visit the clinic. In the end, Caitlin and Claire chose a non-Arab (“there weren’t
many Arab donors”), “celebrity look-a-like” donor, “mainly because he seemed nice” which “translated across the page
in an unexpected way” and “weighted out some of the more impressive credentials” of other donors (par. 7-8). In this
case, liking the donor as a person (“he seemed nice”) trumped his physical likeness (non-Arab) with the couple.
Nonetheless, the donor was like the couple in other ways, for instance, his athleticism was a factor, although it turned
out that the child “might not be naturally sporty” (par. 13). After a play of genes, the couple was surprised to see their
son “is a lot like [Caitlin], even though [her] wife carried him and [she] had no genetic stake in the endeavor” (par. 11).

18“[T]he global sperm market is valued at more than $3.5 billion and is expected to reach nearly $5 billion by 2025
thanks to improving reproductive technology and growing acceptance of same-sex marriage” (Eber par. 1).

19California Cryobank lists a “legend” on their website when “the world renowned dancer, Isadora Duncan once wrote
to George Bernard Shaw, ‘You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body, so we ought to
produce the most perfect child.’ To which Shaw is alleged to have answered, ‘My dear woman, what if the child inherits
my body and your brains?’” (‘Sperm’ par. 58).

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par. 2) who says that the trend has “increasingly [been about] who is this person, not just what is this

person” (par. 7). Sperm banks “reproduce masculine ideals through their representation of

phenotypic, biological, and social characteristics” (Moore and Grady 186), focusing on the physical

dominance (height, weight, favorite sports) and social survivability (occupation, grade average,

college) as well as one’s interests and personality.

With a few prominent differences from sperm donors,20 the oocyte donation centers search for

young, pretty, educated, and accomplished women. Both types of centers search for what seems

superficial rather than significant medical qualities. Thus, in matching donors with clients, being alike

in blood type, ethnicity, or some other significant medical factor is often just as important as a

quality that is less certain to be inherited but is nonetheless highly valued in the world, such as

beauty and education.21 Unfortunately, again on the expense of clients, sperm banks have a

20Obtaining the eggs involves hormonal ovarian simulation and subsequent egg retrieval, which are much more invasive,
painful, costlier, and physically riskier than sperm donations. Moreover, the American Society of Reproduction Medicine
recommends egg donation to not be performed more than “approximately six” times (The Practice 195) while sperm
donation could be, and often requires to be, a long-term commitment: “men must typically donate at least once a week
for a year” because screening the donors is costly (Almeling 69). Furthermore, “[e]gg donors must conform to rigorous
height/weight ratios; sperm donors do not. Women over 30 are unlikely to be accepted as donors; men can donate until
they are 40. Sperm banks require that men be at least 5’8” tall; egg agencies do not set height minimums. Most sperm
banks require that men be enrolled in college or have a college degree; egg agencies do not. Most egg agencies require
psychological evaluations to assess how women feel about having children out in the world; sperm banks do not require
that men discuss this possibility with a mental health professional” (ib.).

21Donor Concierge, an agency for finding Ivy League egg donors, reinforces “The Myth of the Ivy League Egg Donor”
while rebuking it in a disclaimer: “While many people have an ‘ideal’ donor in mind who attends Harvard or Yale, the fact is
that many young women who choose to donate their eggs are just as intelligent, attractive and ambitious as Ivy League egg
donors. And there is a question of availability—young women who attend exclusive Ivy-League schools often don’t choose
to be egg donors because they may not have the time or inclination to do so” (‘Find’). Nonetheless, compensation for an
Ivy League donor used to be $5,000, which is nowadays an average number, and is now closer to $20,000. Three identical
advertisements in Harvard Crimson, the Daily Princetonian, and Yale Daily News from 2006 offered $35,000 on behalf of a
couple who sought an exceptional woman, and that same year $50,000 was offered in Brown Daily Herald (Levine 31),
despite the American Society of Reproductive Medicine guidelines prohibiting the linking of compensation to donors’
personal characteristics (Ethics 15-16). “To avoid putting a price on human gametes or selectively valuing particular
human traits, compensation should not vary according to the planned use of the oocytes (e.g. research or clinical care,
the number or quality of oocytes retrieved, the outcome of prior donation cycles, or the donor’s ethnic or other personal
characteristics)” (Ethics Committee of The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, Financial Compensation of Oocyte Donors
(2007) in Levine 28). This view has not changed in the latest 2016 report, and neither has its warning (Ethics 15-16).

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problematic history: one such example is the Repository for Germinal Choice, founded by Robert

Graham, an enthusiast in eugenics, whose bank sold their customers semen of Nobel Prize winners in

1980s and 1990s—the Nobel part of which turned out to be completely false (Plotz). Although many

believe eugenics have fallen out of favor after the horrors of the Nazi regime, ART and related

technologies bring back its practices in a less organized and unified form.

California Cryobank points out that “[a] sperm bank cannot genetically determine or in any way

manipulate the intelligence, talents or physical characteristics of any child conceived from the sperm

it supplies” (‘Sperm’ par. 55). Genes are, of course, never a guarantee; yet, the business model these

successful gamete banks have been built on is precisely a personal approach to genetics.22 Commercial

egg and sperm banks make a great effort to help buyers find eggs they like and that are like them, for

instance, finding donors with artistic talents, sports achievements, or celebrity-look-a-likes is California

Cryobank specialty. The “distinction between a ‘need’ and a ‘want’ which is often engaged in a health-

related discourse” (Farsides 355) goes against the “‘good enough’ donor” narrative (356). Many

websites and applications are made today to match people with donors based on searching ‘the right

sort of person,’ and their gamete samples are often available through a simple internet search.

Not unlike Sophie Wenzel Ellis’s Doctor Mundson who wanted to pair the most perfect people, the

dating landscape is adjusting to pairing only the most genetically compatible people. Harvard geneticist

George Church is developing a dating app, called Digi8, which would match people with compatible

22Sperm and egg banking might be one of the reasons why studies to determine genetic basis for these traits are well-
funded, despite the preoccupation with innate traits as a social consequence being all too familiar from the past eugenic
efforts and the danger that the results of these studies are easily misinterpreted and misused (Rohlfs par. 9). Rori Rohlfs’s
guest post also points out how the eugenic history of the field of genetics is easily overlooked in scientific practices and
calls for scientific accountability in unwittingly supporting eugenic arguments (par. 10).

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genetic profiles, meaning that “about 5 percent of population” (Pelley 74, Noor par. 7) would not be

matched because they could (but not will) produce offspring with genetic defects. Although Church

himself suffers from narcolepsy, attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, which he sees as “an

advantage” but which would also disqualify him from most searches, he still “hope[s] that society sees

the benefit of diversity” (Pelley par. 75-76). Church calculates the financial benefit of his service: “It’s

7,000 diseases. […] It’s about a trillion dollars a year, worldwide” (Pelley par. 74). The argument of

the great costs related to gene therapy over the use of his app could convince many people. But, as

Janus Rose points out, “for anyone not white, cis, able-bodied, or male, it’s obvious where all this is

going”—modern eugenics is a real danger (par. 5). Church’s lab was famously one of the first such

places to hire a full-time ethicist, who in this case to works with the goal of “genetic equity” that

would give all people access to genetic technology (Rose par. 11).

Male donors have never been hard to find for Cryobank: “It’s a way of making money without really

doing anything,” one commented. The other, although seeing it as a help to “couples who otherwise

cannot have children” and “the money [as] the incentive,” had some moral impediments: “You

shouldn’t try to mold the child before he or she is born” (Mucklo 17). A study of egg donors has

shown that 88 percent thought the best thing about donating was “being able to help someone”

(Ethics 17) rather than the financial incentive. Rene Almeling’s study shows the opposite result: the

money incentive is crucial.

In addition to these differences, egg agencies and sperm banks assume women and men have different
motivations for providing sex cells. While my interviews with egg and sperm donors reveal that most are
motivated by money, staff portray the transactions in highly gendered terms. Drawing on the stereotype of
women as nurturing caregivers, egg agencies emphasize the plight of infertile couples in selecting women who
want to ‘help’ people by giving the ‘gift of life.’ In contrast, sperm banks encourage men to earn money with an
easy ‘job’ (Almeling 68).

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Figure 50 Posters advertising gestational surrogacy.

Featured in Rene Almeling’s article (69): “Equipped with puns that alleviate the heaviness of the topic, the altruism of egg donation is
accentuated by depicting another woman who would benefit from such donation with a resulting pregnancy.”
Credit: Circle Surrogacy. Used with permission.

Paid and unpaid donations both bring their own set of problems. The way the fertility industry is set

often exploits donors and patients. Like usury, the (often illegal) practice of lending money where

money is ‘unnaturally’ increased by unreasonably high interest rates, the donor industry thrives on the

exchange of ‘natural’ gametes for money. “Among its other wrongs, usury destabilizes the relation of

money to goods” (Berry 432). Usury is, in its essence, the reproduction or breeding of money: “usury

takes money whose natural telos is to facilitate exchange, and uses it for the unnatural end of

reproduction” (Hawkes 346). Just like sex became free of reproduction with contraception and thus

made what some saw as an act of breeding into a barren act, usury turns sterile money into the

unnatural increase and reproduction of money.

Such unnatural reproduction of tokos (meaning ‘offspring’ but also ‘interest’) is a key theme in Oedipus

the King. While the economy of the Theban state (polis) suffers from infertility, Oedipus’s household

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(oikos) is reproduced in an unnaturally redundant and socially perverse way (Shell The Economy 96-98).

Oedipus does not realize his wrongdoings because he does not understand his own generation, i.e.

who generated him and who he generated. “Do you know who your parents are?” Teiresias asks him,

implying a related question: Do you know who you are? (Sophocles 240). Only at the end of the play

does Oedipus realize the true status of himself as tokos and the price tha his family and his state paid

for his blind actions: what he believed to be bad luck (tuche), was in fact bad birth (100). Reproduction

as a techné or technology of gods is interfered with the unnatural generation of Oedipus.

Ezra Pound, building on Dante’s Inferno, also writes against usury in his Cantos LI (1937, 33):

Usury kills the child in the womb

And breaks short the young man’s courting
Usury brings age into youth; it lies between the bride and the bridegroom
Usury is against Nature’s increase

The wide and long-lasting condemnation of usury comes from the Old Testament (Exodus 22:25 and

Deuteronomy 23:19), however, many that condemn usury overlook Deuteronomy 23:20 which reads,

“Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury:

that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou

goest to possess it.” In the US, most donations and surrogacies are paid, except for those that count as

a favor to relatives or close friends. Aristotle, in The Nicomachean Ethics, condemned usury—or money,

gold and silver, for that fact, seeing money as unnatural because it does not increase as do products of

farming, hunting, and herds. As such, usury is also against nature. Aristotle classes usurers with

pimps—which is also one of the meanings of the word usurer; a pimp is a sexual usurer (Shell The End

126). Is a company buying and selling human gametes for profit a human trafficker as well?

The Donor Concierge website welcomes potential clients in search of an egg donor: “We know that

you begin the journey of egg donation with expectations of finding a highly educated, genius egg

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donor with good SAT scores, with advanced degrees from a prestigious university—someone just like

you, […] a younger version of you with similar values and background” (par. 6). The theory of

imitation goes back to Aristotle who established a generally accepted theory of generation (human begets

human) and with it three highly influential beliefs regarding the inheritance: first, that women only

contribute by nurturing to their child while men contribute the material, second, that every seed’s

perfected result is a male child, while a female child is an imperfection, a “mutilated” male (2.3, 4.1),

and third, that children who resemble their mothers instead of their fathers, both in form as well as in

character, are an anomaly, especially some “resembling none of their relations, yet do at any rate

resemble a human being, but others are not even like a human being but a monstrosity” (4.3).

Departing from the type is a monstrosity for Aristotle as well as in the World State order. It is already

in Aristotle that the women’s part in creating generations is taken away, as they merely serve as a vessel

for creation performed by men: “The product of her labor is not hers” (Cline Horowicz 197). As we

have seen above with ART and other technologies used for reproductive care (ultrasound), all of

which are focused on women, women are again considered more as nurturers, renting their wombs

and their eggs.

This long-existent discrepancy between the two sexes is also evident from Almeling’s study which

found that male donors are more likely to view themselves as fathers of the children produced from

their donation than female donors are to view themselves as such a child’s mother. (A similar finding is

reported by a therapist who works with infertile couples: male partners are “much more attached to

these ideas of ownership and [the child being] ‘mine,’ and much more tied to the genetic connection

in terms of what it means psychologically or what it means emotionally” (Fetters ‘The Overlooked’

par. 5)). Almeling suggests that fatherhood is “more often reduced to a cultural equation in which

sperm equals dad” while motherhood is more separable than fatherhood: one woman can give her egg,

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the other the uterus, and the third can raise the child (69). In her conclusion, Almeling also sees our

beliefs as stemming from the Greeks’, where the father provided the generative seed and the mother

the nurturing soil. Although IVF and its related technologies have shaken these beliefs and are

revolutionizing our conceptions of family and kinship, the longstanding cultural understandings of

reproduction remain.

Reproduction has never been a private event since it is just as much a social act. Assisted

reproductive technologies brought novelty into this process by erasing intimacy from the act of

conception and including into conception the actual human labor: “[M]edically, legally and ethically

other parties will have a role in determining how and if a pregnancy is established,” altogether

“restricted by financial considerations or by scarcity of donated gametes” (Farsides 353). The two

people conceiving the child are not present during the conception which is handed over to

technicians: a clinic becomes a site of procreation and the clinicians the actors in conception. For

some, the other person is a donor (possibly a stranger), the inclusion of whom into one’s or a

couple’s procreation is never a light decision, as I show above. Further, the loss of privacy and

sexuality in relation to reproduction during the infertility evaluation and treatment is often

humiliating to couples (in the evaluation of fertility, the mere first step, consider finding out about

one’s infertility or subfertility and the timed and intrusive nature of post-coital tests) (see more in

Raphael-Leff 41, Fetters ‘The Overlooked’ par. 5). Last but not least, “[w]hat was once a private act

of love, intimacy, and secrecy is now a public act, a commercial transaction, and a professionally

managed procedure” (Franklin ‘Postmodern’ 336).

Jodi Picoult’s novel, Sing You Home (2011), depicts how infertility struggles and pregnancy loss can

become unbearable for some partners. In a typical Picoult manner, the novel gathers a whole array

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of issues that arise with infertility and the use of ART. After a painful breakup, a new dilemma

forms for Zoe and Max, the protagonist heterosexual couple: What to do with their frozen embryo?

Zoe enters a homosexual relationship and wishes to have her embryo implanted into her partner,

and Max moves in with his brother and sister-in-law who suffer from infertility and would gladly

accept Max’s embryo donation. The former couple takes the matter to the court. Although the court

decides otherwise, Zoe ultimately gets the embryo and raises a daughter in a three-parent family,

with her wife, who carried the child, and Max as the biological father and social parent. Most people

live in non-nuclear families today that include stepparents. In this view, a three-person baby, in

which the third ‘parent’ gives the mitochondrial DNA, or a baby grown from an adopted embryo

(i.e. created by two people and carried by a gestational surrogate or mother) should be less

controversial: at stake is the origin of genes but not the place and style of upbringing, education,

family dynamics, etc. But, as it turns out, for many, these stakes are (too) high.

6.4 Biases

In the section on biases, I will first look into different groups of people that are biased against in the

fertility practice, starting with women, infertile people, children conceived through ART, and ending

with LGBTQIA+ people. I hope to show how the intersection of these biases changes our

understanding of any single bias considered here in isolation.

Feminist critics have written extensively on the topic of reproduction. Since the woman’s body is the

site of natural and assisted reproduction, all bioethical debates around birth control, abortion,

delivery practices, woman’s rights in pregnancy in relation to the fetus, and ART foremost affect

woman’s health and politics on women’s (and thus human) rights. As Heather Latimer concludes in

her examination of reproduction and sexual politics in North American fiction and film, “the fight

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over women’s fertility is at the centre of discussions about humanity” (161) and “[a]s long as

biopolitical considerations govern citizenship considerations, women’s bodies will continue to be a

battleground for the state’s interest in definitions of who or what is considered a person and a

citizen” (162). This is also the case for transgender and non-binary people. Ironically, women and

people who identify as LGBTQIA+ need to campaign for equal rights and their own personhood as

much as for reproductive rights, both of which can conflict with the fetal personhood.

The fertility industry inevitably exploits women by putting their health and lives at risk as much as it

helps them to have children—any kind of human reproduction so far has been based on this

paradox. ART tends to focus on treating women solely, even if women are not the cause or the only

cause of infertility and even if they are perfectly healthy themselves. This means that if a woman

does not suffer from infertility but her (male or female) partner does, the treatment as it is today will,

in a majority of cases, be conducted on the healthy patient. As Irma van der Ploeg points out (156),

women are often willing to undergo these treatments with a not-easily-achievable and sometimes

unrealizable goal of having a child for overcoming medical problems of their significant others, be it

their partner or their potential offspring (for example, in order to prevent some congenital

anomalies). Another consequence of this focus on women is that research on male infertility and

treatment options is so scarce. Male hormone therapy and varicose removal are rather underutilized

though “highly effective and widely available” (‘Nonsurgical’) in contrast to commonly used

intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which can only be done during the IVF process. To sum

up, it is only the woman’s body that this advanced technology can improve and rarely cure, for now.

We can see this lack of interest for the male side of reproduction already in Brave New World, which

lists details about obtaining and growing eggs but gives no information on how the many sperm

samples, needed for the massive reproduction in Bokanovsky’s Process, are obtained and handled.

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Although bearing less stigma than in the past, the diagnosis of infertility is still significantly

stigmatized, especially outside Western nations, with some people considering those who are

infertile, particularly women, as a “second-class person” (Ergin et al. 47). The condition is not always

curable, which results in involuntary childlessness23 (Lechner et al.), and the solutions to the

problems of infertility, such as paying for PGD, a donor or a surrogate, are often judged, especially

if these solutions are not the last resort for having one’s own progeny.24 Besides numerous medical

and social challenges that infertile people need to overcome, infertility is challenging not only for the

diagnosed but also for their (family, friends, work) communities.

Ageism is a known bias regardless of the use of ART because fertility drastically decreases after one’s

mid-thirties. Clinics tend to discriminate against older patients because the success rate of these

patients is lower and might affect their overall success rates. Prenatal testing and procedures for

pregnant persons over 35 are more common. Moreover, the medical label for such pregnancies used

to be ‘geriatric pregnancy’ and was changed to ‘advanced maternal age.’ Due to the ethical

responsibility towards the future child, ART pregnancies after the maternal age of 42 tend to be

discouraged. However, since a small percentage of pregnancies was achieved even after the maternal

age of 45, some scholars argue that the decision whether a person should be allowed to undergo

fertility treatments should not be based on age alone (Gleicher et al.). Besides that, studies in embryo

mosaicism, which is believed to be more common in older patients, have shown that even an

23 Involuntary childlessness is not to be confused with choosing to remain childfree.

24In children’s literature and folklore, a couple without children will inadvertently animate an object or meet an animated
object that will become their child: a ball jumps into their house through a window (as in Jan Malík’s puppet play), the
woman bakes cookies and one turns to be alive (as in Gingerbread Man), etc.

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embryo with abnormal cells may develop into a healthy baby (Karow, Stephen Hall). These studies

gave older patients a chance of having a genetic child despite the mainstream practice that would

never transfer an embryo with abnormal cells. All embryos and people are mosaic to some level, but

we are wary of mosaicism as we do not know possible negative effects (e.g. cancer).

Another issue with ART and theory around it is that it has only recently started questioning the

products of this technology: the children created by its means. Before they were ever created, IVF-

conceived children were stigmatized, considered as nonhumans and scientific creatures and

monsters. In 1938, the British magazine Tit-Bits predicted that the test tube babies are only “a few

years” away in a report titled ‘Could You Love a Chemical Baby? For That’s What Science Looks

Like Producing Next.’ “Will these sexless, soulless creatures of chemistry conquer the true human

beings” (Burke 3), thus presenting them as oppressive to the desired development of society, like

Aldous Huxley’s, Olaf Stapledon’s, and many other dystopias (Duncan Wilson 51). In 1969, only

fifty percent of the Americans polled by LIFE magazine said they could feel love toward an IVF

baby conceived from their gametes and only a good fifty percent imagined that such child would

love them back (Ball How 224).

When Landrum Shettles attempted to create an IVF-conceived baby in 1973 and was halted by the

chief of obstetrics gynecology Vande Wiele, who destroyed the embryo, the consenting but poorly

informed parents-to-be, the Del Zio couple, filed a lawsuit against Dr. Wiele and the Columbia

Presbyterian Hospital for causing them severe physical and mental anguish. The lawyer of the

defendants argued: “These physicians […] had no way of knowing whether their efforts would

produce a ‘monster birth’ or a normal child” (‘2 Charge’ par. 8). Coincidentally, the Del Zio trial

took place while the world welcomed the first IVF-conceived baby, Louise Brown.

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After the children were born, the prejudice was still going strong. When Louise Brown, or “the

superbabe” as Britain’s (at that time tabloid) newspaper the Evening News called her, was born on July

25, 1987, the image of her “tiny newborn body was overwhelming evidence that a revolution in

human biology was underway” (Hurlbut 39). Brown herself said: “Had there been anything at all

wrong with me, it would have been the end of IVF” (Nugent par. 6). As a child, Brown toured the

USA and Japan with her parents, who explained to her that she was “born a little bit different than

everybody else” (CBS 2:10). In Brown’s opinion, they did the tour so that the world could see that

she was a normal child (1:00-1:40). Nonetheless, she was teased by children at the playground and

sometimes even by adults, and asked if she is wholly human by comedians: “What would you do on

Father’s Day? Do you send a card to the Dupont [chemicals] Corporation?” (Ball 208).

When Natalie, Louise’s sister and the fortieth child in the world to be conceived via IVF, had her

first child, the newspapers avidly reported that her child was conceived naturally (‘First’). Natalie was

the world’s first IVF-conceived person to have her own child—and the world heaved a sigh of relief

to the news that the generation continues ‘naturally.’ When Gilles Deleuze writes in ‘Desert Islands’

of an animal “whose mode of reproduction remains unknown to us,” he labels it as a thing which

“has not yet taken a place among living beings” (13),25 because “it is not the production of life that

we look for when we judge it to be life, but its reproduction” (13). An IVF-conceived baby that

would grow up unable to reproduce without the technology that created him or her would likely be

cast as a different type of human: the infertile type, human-made.

25“Nous pouvons trouver en nous la source d’un tel thème : pour la juger nous attendons la vie non pas à sa production,
mais à sa reproduction. L’animal dont on ignore le mode de reproduction n’a pas encore pris place parmi les vivants”
(16).

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Children created via donor offspring were also viewed negatively. Loren, one of the first babies in

Australia to be conceived through embryo donation, testifies: “It wasn’t until I was an adult that I

realised that some people perceived my existence as problematic or my mother as a lesser being”

(par. 8). A famous Italian gay couple, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, expressed their desire

for children in 2005 when they were featured on the cover of Vanity Fair holding four prop babies,

yet in 2015 they attacked gay adoption and IVF in the Italian magazine Panorama, condemning

“chemical offspring and rented uterus” explaining that “life has a natural flow, there are things that

should not be changed”26 (Ward par. 3-4). Stefano Gabbana added that “family is not a fad. In it

there is a supernatural sense of belonging.” Domenico Dolce said procreation “must be an act of

love” and called IVF children “children of chemistry, synthetic children”27 as “uteri [should not be

for] rent, semen chosen from a catalog” (par. 5-7). After a backlash, most prominently by Elton

John, another gay star who had two children with his husband via surrogate, they later apologized. A

couple of years later, a Google search reveals the most common questions regarding IVF children

are full of prejudice and fear: “Do IVF babies look different? Are IVF children infertile? Can IVF

babies be delivered naturally? Is [sic] IVF babies are normal? Are IVF babies healthy adults?” and so

on. Some of these questions (such as, are IVF babies at higher risk for birth defects or low birth

weight?) are medically justified (Hansen et al., Kovalevsky and Coutifaris).

26“Sono gay, non posso avere un figlio. Credo che non si possa avere tutto dalla vita, se non c’è vuol dire che non ci
deve essere. È anche bello privarsi di qualcosa. La vita ha un suo percorso naturale, ci sono cose che non vanno
modificate. E una di queste è la famiglia” (Marocco).

27 “O almeno dovrebbe essere così, per questo non mi convincono quelli che io chiamo i figli della chimica, i bambini
sintetici. Uteri in affitto, semi scelti da un catalogo. E poi vai a spiegare a questi bambini chi è la madre. Ma lei
accetterebbe di essere figlia della chimica? Procreare deve essere un atto d’amore, oggi neanche gli psichiatri sono pronti
ad affrontare gli effetti di queste sperimentazioni” (Marocco).

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Such reactions are not unexpected, as already attested in the early speculations on what was then

called the test tube babies. Assisted reproductive technology is intrinsically linked to creating

humanlike entities because they mimic natural processes with a final goal of fulfilling (perfecting) the

imitated creation. That is to say, ART offers “a promise of delivering children who are ‘just like’

other offspring, but through a process of mimicry that is not quite the same as the original process

on which it is based” (Franklin Biological 34). The goal of robotics, AI and related disciplines is to re-

create and imitate the humanlike (e.g. make AI virtual assistant voices more humanlike), and the

collateral goal is to perfect the humanlike into the best possible human version or even better than

human (e.g. make carebots or AI psychotherapist more attune to human emotions than a human

could be). Similarly, the goal of ART is to treat infertility (into fertility to create humans), and the

collateral goal of ART is to select undesirable human traits (and thus eliminate the undesirable

traits). It is unethical to not treat a known and preventable condition, nonetheless, there are many

questionable cases (such as selecting deafness or against deafness (see Scott ‘Uses’)), many of which

are ethically related to the non-identity problem. Such twofold practice therefore subjects human

reproduction to the fascinating and daunting task of creating and designing the human. If the

creating part is considered an infertility treatment (restitutio ad integrum), the designing part is

considered as controversial enhancement (transformatio ad optimum) (see Wiesing).

Discrimination is ample at every step for people who identify themselves as LGBTQIA+ and

choose to have children by the means of ART. For example, although sperm banks now mostly

work with “lesbian couples and single mothers by choice, which now make up 80 percent of its

business” (Eber par. 7), homosexual couples still tell stories about how the physician thought the

partner of the patient was a friend of the family (Emre 27). Transgender, asexual and intersex people

are fewer in comparison and receive even less accommodation. The preservation of fertility is a

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controversial topic in and outside the transgender community because one needs to make a decision

before transitioning or stop the transitioning for a few months to subject themselves to ART, often

before they are ready to think about having children. “It’s unrealistic to expect trans teenagers or

even young trans adults to know whether they want to have their own children. They are eager to

start transitioning, a momentous, all-consuming next step in their lives, meant to relieve what has

been a painful fact of life” (Spataro par. 10).28 Adoption brings up its own issues for people in this

community, which micha cárdenas sums up perfectly in her hybrid poetry/bioart project ‘Pregnancy’

and a poem entitled 20150109_123554.mp4 (55):

but we decided to do this together,

to go the biological route,
because adoption seems almost impossible,
for two sick brown queer and trans women,
with histories of mental illness and poverty in both our families,
you know, just the usual for QTPOC.29
The legal rights you have to your baby,
are more tenuous if you don’t have a biological input,
and I don’t want another trauma at an international border,
and the cost of IUI, ICSI and IVF are in the tens of thousands,
oh the privilege of
cis-hetero reproduction!

Transgender identity permits the fathers to be mothers and the parents to be nonbinary. The parent

who fathers the child (gives sperm) could be a trans woman and thus a mother, as in the case of

cárdenas and Joanne Spataro. Joanne Spataro, a lesbian engaged to a trans woman, wrote in an op-ed

that the trans community focuses more on hormones and surgical procedures of transitioning, while

“fertility is almost taboo” (par. 9). Joanna and her fiancée, who transitioned four years ago, are able

to try “the way fertile cisgender people do: They simply couple up, and boom — a child is born”

28Only a third of trans teenagers considered having biological children in the future. 45 percent said they would prefer
to adopt, 22 percent stated they did not want to have children, 8 percent said the cost of fertility preservation is too high,
1 percent found masturbation to produce the sample too uncomfortable and 1 percent were unwilling to undergo
fertility preservation due to concern about potentially delaying hormone treatment (Nahata et al. 42). All of them might
change their mind.

29 QTPOC stands for queer and trans people of color.

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(par. 2) just like privileged cis-hetero reproduction. Both heavily weaned of hormones, Joanna off

birth control pills and her fiancée off estrogen, they attempted to recreate a male-female

reproduction that is not their own.

The process of imitating natural reproduction is even more challenging for cárdenas, as a trans

Latina woman, who writes: “They told me I would be sterile / the doctors and brochures, / that I

couldn’t do this, / what I’m doing / But they don’t know / and they lied to me / other trans women

/ have done it” (54). Aligning the “viciousness of the lie” with the “truth of the fatal violence that

disproportionately affect trans women of color” (Emre 28). cárdenas writes: “the feeling of urgency

of reproducing in the face of a world that wants me dead” (49). At the 2014 Civil Liberties and

Public Policy Conference, Morgan Robyn Collado stated that “violence against trans women of

color is a reproductive issue because they are prevented from living long enough to realize their

dreams of having children” (48). Suicide is another fear: “I take hormones every day of my life out

of necessity, / just to have a body I can live in, / to avoid death, / to survive, / both to avoid my

own suicidal ideations […] / And to avoid death at the hands of others” (54).

If anyone, a transitioning or transitioned trans woman is used to taking estrogen, which is also a

required part of IVF cycles. cárdenas realizes that “in these pills there is a home for me” as they

have “heal[ed] the deepest wounds” (45). To achieve a pregnancy, the unwelcome transformation is

required: “the hormonal chemistry I was born with bubbling up in my body / it feels so foreign”

(ib.). cárdenas does not have medical support of her “lying doctors” so her only resource to achieve

“a woman pregnant with life” are “other trans women” who “have done it:” “Sadie said, get a

microscope, / don’t pay hundreds of dollars for doctor visits to check your semen, / with a $50 kids

microscope, / you can see sperm, / morphology and motility” (55). In this poetry collection,

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cárdenas sheds light on the many implicit biases working against queer and transgender people as

well as people of color—and against their access to reproduction and ART. The accessibility that

these communities often lack includes social normativity, physical and mental ability, financial

means, as well as support of the law and healthcare system, including biases of individuals working

within these two systems.

In Pregnancy, Cárdenas links her journey to a genetically related child to a sex change because she

needs to transition back from a trans woman in order to produce viable sperm. Andrea Long Chu, a

queer theorist and also a trans woman, sees sex change as the closest change to a pregnancy:

“pregnancy is a form of body modification so extreme that its result is another person. In this, it

resembles nothing—except, perhaps, sex change” (68). In her description of an upcoming sex

change surgery (also called gender confirmation surgery) she seems to desire an easier and more

efficient way to achieve the transformation: “Later this year, I will pay another person a lot of

money to carve me into a different shape. She will probably do a good job, but it will be

disappointing anyway. What I want isn’t surgery; what I want is never to have needed surgery to

begin with. I will never be natural, but I will die trying” (67). Her desired sex will be human-made,

sculpted out of her body like Pygmalion’s desired woman is sculpted out of ivory.

The intersection of these biases reveals a common theme: the naturalness of reproduction is

repressed by every single deviation from the normative fertile human male-and-female reproduction.

Every accommodation of these biases—be it artificial insemination of a single woman or choosing a

donor over partner’s gametes in the cases where the partner could transfer a genetic disorder to the

child—is transgressive and needs bioethical (that is medical, societal, and moral) justification. The

artificiality in all these biases is of a human intervening into what is perceived to be in the domain of

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nature. According to this view, natural reproduction is closer to a sacred act (for example, in

Christianity, the God controls conception and ‘knits’ the fetus in the womb (Psalm 139:13)).

This view of nature stems from the eighteenth century’s perception of nature which is considered a

metaphysical ontological realm rather than the domain of scientific knowledge and engineering.

The attitude towards these biases in ART has improved, however. Nowadays fertility clinics feature

a list of fictional and non-fictional books on the topic of infertility and raising and educating

children who resulted from ART. Many children’s literature and young adult fiction books are

available on the topic, particularly for the children of donors. This literature unanimously encourages

the parents to share (k)information about their children’s origins with their children. Margaret K.

Nelson surveys young adult fiction which features donor children and concludes that as opposed to

texts focusing on adoption, which is often depicted as “a shameful secret, a problem to be solved, or

a legally suspect event” (Parsons et al. 70 in Nelson 52), 30 texts from her analysis present donor

conception as normalized: “That is, being donor-conceived does not dictate the plot in the majority

of these books” (52). The purpose of writing about donor conception in young adult fiction is both

to familiarize and normalize this way of conception among donor-conceived children and their peers

(Nelson 38), while the purpose of children’s literature on ART is to help parents disclose to their

children how they came to be and to equip them with age-appropriate language to explain the

science or the struggle behind it. Literature for very young children is especially rich in presenting

varieties of ART trajectories from an emotional and technical angle. Many of these books are part of

a series, each with a different scenario. For example, Our Story: How We Became a Family, The Pea That

Was Me, You Were Made For Me, and Happy Together all present variants of how ART structures of

families come to be: heterosexual couples using IVF, solo mothers through donor intrauterine

insemination, two fathers through a gestational surrogate, etc. Children’s literature, adjusted to the

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understanding of the topic by age range, tends to use symbolism (e.g. You Were Made For Me by Sheri

Sturniolo and Hannah Pak explains making babies with making puzzles) and sometimes also animal

symbolism (rabbit, bear or elephant couples struggling to conceive, and “the very kind koala” as a

surrogate for a human couple in The Pea That Was Me) or plant metaphors (embryo as a pea,

surrogacy as being “grown in another garden”). Surprisingly, authors rarely take advantage of the

many folkloristic or other known children’s stories where a childless couple often gets an

unconventional child (such as a ball in Mlíček Flíček [tran. as Roly Poly] by Jan Malík) in an

unconventional way (the ball jumps through the window of an elderly couple when they wish for a

child, a gingerbread man is baked by a childless old woman). Some books focus on the struggle and

challenges that couples undergo, for example, in The Extra Button by Jules Blundell the couple needs

to go through an inhospitable forest and meet frightening animals. Grown in Another Garden by

Crystal Falk labels the infertile woman as “broken,” and You Were Made For Me presents the infertile

couple unsuccessful in finishing a puzzle. Since they “just couldn’t make the puzzles fit right,” they

asked “wonderful, giving people […] who happen to have just the pieces you need” for “the most

precious pieces made with love and with care,” goes the text alongside an illustration with people

passing each other puzzle pieces and DNA depicted in a double helix. Other books focus on the

technical side of the ART process and some also include a religious explanation. For example, Hope

and Will Have a Baby by Irene Celcer and Horatio Gatto describes the child as a gift from God. All

books emphasize how much the baby was wanted, often using the concept of a miracle and the

rather recent term rainbow baby (a baby born after a previous miscarriage, still birth, or death of an

infant). With an exception of My Story by the Donor Conception Network that was first published in

late 1980s, these books are all written after 2000 and received a special library label, e.g. “children of

sperm donors” in 2012 (Sarles and Mendell in Nelson 39).

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With CRISPR-modified IVF-conceived babies we are yet to learn about possible reproductive quirks

caused by in-vitro genome editing. So far, only Chinese twins dubbed Nana and Lulu are known to

be conceived and modified with the help of these technologies; the public learned the twins are

healthy and that some of their brains were likely altered (inadvertently enhanced cognition and

memory) in the gene editing process (Regalado ‘China’s’). The most current paper (still under peer

review) on germline editing shows that it might be too dangerous to practice genome modification

on human embryos any time soon as the on-target effects, i.e. inadvertent deletions or additions to

the DNA, can be many and serious (Alanis-Lobato et al.). U. S. National Academies, U. K. Royal

Society, and the World Health Organization are currently working on establishing international

standards for germline genome editing. These organizations have no enforcement power, however;

only individual governments do.

6.5 Utopias and Kinships

Producing ideal children is one of the tasks in forming utopias. In other words, utopians are true

designer babies. Utopias are exclusive gated communities, keeping humanity as we know it excluded

from their world (like ‘savages’ kept in Reservations in Brave New World) or transforming native

‘savages’ into ideal citizens (like Abraxans in Thomas More’s Utopia).30 The transformation of regular

humans into utopian superhumans is most commonly achieved through creating new generations of

30 “But they report (and there remain good marks of it to make it credible) that this was no island at first, but a part of
the continent. Utopus that conquered it (whose name it still carries, for Abraxa was its first name) brought the rude and
uncivilized inhabitants into such a good government, and to that measure of politeness, that they now far excel all the
rest of mankind; having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite
round them. To accomplish this, he ordered a deep channel to be dug fifteen miles long; and that the natives might not
think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labor in carrying it on.
As he set a vast number of men to work, he beyond all men's expectations brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his
neighbors who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were
struck with admiration and terror” (50).

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citizens whose formation could be supervised since their very beginnings with the ideological and

literal conception.

Even if not all utopias establish technologized or eugenicized reproduction, they begin with the

abolition of the family already in the earliest approximation of a utopia, Plato’s The Republic (380

BC)31 (see more in Carley xvi). Social and biological kinship is overridden in The Republic by the

children’s kinship to the state: in Plato’s ideal polis any child-parent bonding is discouraged since

children are required to be given to the state, allowing the state to mold them into model citizens.

Effectively, the ideal polis laws require that “the children shall be common, and that no parent shall

know its own offspring nor any child his parents” (457d)—the children are thus common. Thomas

More built on Plato’s view in his Utopia (1516): children live together with parents, but their bonding

is discouraged because the children, if the original family grows too large, might be sent to live with

a less prolific family. The state is responsible for population balance in utopias, including Brave New

World.

As a result of scientific revolution, utopias tend to turn their task to regulate reproduction into a

matter of science and technology. Feminist utopias, like Charlotte Gilman’s Herland (1915) and

James Tiptree Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976), allow for parthenogenesis and cloning in

order to reduce or eliminate women’s reproductive labor. In science fiction, such as Sophie Wenzel

Ellis’s ‘Creatures of the Light’ and Lilith Lorraine’s ‘Into the 28th Century,’ reproduction is fabricated

as partly natural and partly technological. Genetic (eugenic) technologies are also a popular choice,

for example, in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; or, Over the Range (1872), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr

31 Plato’s The Republic realized in the pseudo-historic embodiment of the island of Atlantis.

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Moreau (1896), Francis Galton’s Kantsaywhere (1910), and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997). Besides

Butler, Wells and Galton, a number of other prominent socialists, such as G. B. Shaw and Havelock

Ellis, advocated eugenics as a tool of social engineering. As a matter of fact, eugenics was

mainstream science until the infamous Nazi practices in Europe and forced sterilizations of

‘undesirable’ citizens in USA were publicly condemned. As in Brave New World, many newer utopias

try to eliminate sexual reproduction in favor of scientifically perfected procreation. Utopias outside

of the science fiction genre tend to establish natural reproduction by connecting men and women

through a state-led scheduled intercourse, such as in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (My) (1924), Margaret

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and Berta Bojetu’s Filio Is Not at Home (Filio ni doma) (1990).

Genetic kinship is weak in each of these works as it is subordinate to a new dystopian social order.

In Brave New World, there is but one known nuclear genetic family in which the child was conceived

through sexual intercourse and born (not decanted), as still practiced in the Savage Reservation.

Linda and, ironically, the Director of the Hatchery himself conceived John on their retreat to the

Savage Reservation in New Mexico. For the Director, who has no idea he fathered a child, such

paternity is considered obnoxious per social convictions of the World State. When John confronts

him, calling him by the obscene word “father” (140), the Director is utterly shocked (as is everyone

else witnessing the event) and runs away in embarrassment. Not unlike some sperm donors, the

Director does not want to be contacted by his offspring and does not consider himself a father of

this child. The institution of a family is abolished and judged upon in the World State and likely

unimaginable to him. In addition to that, the Director cannot be certain that the child is genetically

his. He can either trust John and Linda’s words or turn to a DNA test or genetic finger printing.

Such genetic proof would likely not change anything in a state where any kind of kinship is ignored

and considered perverse. Linda, on the other hand, acknowledges her kinship to John who she

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birthed and mothered in a Reservation where social and genetic kinship still play a role. She can also

be sure about being John’s mother as the umbilical cord between them was cut only after his birth.

The world of ART challenges traditional views on kinship with new arrangements, imaginable only

through ART. (Genetic) kinship used to be predominantly built on hierarchical order of lineage of

consanguinity (blood ties) or affinity (marriage ties),32 the rules of which are now subjected to ART

regulations and often blurred. For mothers that underwent IVF, the umbilical cord is not a proof of

genetic connection with their child—although one could argue that genetic kinship is established

also through gestation or nursing through the mixing of bodily materials. The embryo could get

mixed up in the laboratory, which can leave all parties clueless about the lack of genetic connection.

In more than one case of such mix up, the already-born babies were identified to be of a different

race than the birth parents and the court returned them to their genetic parents (Zhang ‘IVF’ par. 5,

8); the settlements of cases where the children already bonded with the families that raised them are

“unclear” (par. 9).

In third-party reproduction, random families with half-siblings (sometimes called diblings) are

genetically related through a donor they have likely never met. Families with the same donor can

find each other through this information and some consider themselves a family. The three-person

baby is another such biological kinship where the third person is usually only a donor but not a

parent, even though the more common term is three-parent baby. Biological kinships get quite complex

with the use of ART: an embryo might get adopted for the adoptive mother to carry the pregnancy

or for the surrogate to carry the pregnancy for the adoptive mother. In the latter case, the child

would have a genetic mother (embryo donor), a birth mother (surrogate), and a social mother (the

32 These are the so-called true kinships as opposed to fictive kinships, which represent chosen kinship ties.

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one who would effectively and legally mother the child), as well as a genetic father (donor) and a

social father (the effective and legal father). Adoption is one of the traditional roles in kinship that

comes closest to such arrangements, which are nonetheless unique and far more literal in ART.

Not all of these kinship relations are entirely new, but they do take a new form through ART. IVF

and artificial insemination made virgin birth possible in a literal sense. In Christianity, virgin birth

designates another reproductive transgression: God the father is not human. “The foundling

mythology of Christianity, like that of Rome, involves a god’s abandoning the child that he generates

by a virgin: God and Mary parented Jesus who was raised by another father (Joseph) just as Mars

and the Vestal parented Romulus and Remus, who were raised by another mother (the she-wolf)”

(Shell Children 139). Jesus, like embryos today, was “interpreted as not only a miracle child, born to

the extraordinarily virginal Mary, but also as an ordinary bastard” (ib.). (I will look more closely into

interspecies kinships in the next section.)

When called a bastard (plastos, primarily meaning counterfeit), Oedipus hurries to the oracle to learn

the truth he then refuses to recognize, believing too strongly and literally in kinship as it presents

itself, i.e. that his adoptive parents are his biological parents. He also beliefs he transcended his

natural conditions (of birth) and physical limitations (his limp body) with his mind when he becomes

a king of Thebes. Ironically, in aristocracy birth and blood lines matter much more than one’s

abilities—or luck (tychē). He believes himself to be a self-made, foreign king (tyrannus) of Thebes and

does not ever consider himself a born, native king (basileus). With his unnatural reproduction he

unwittingly violates the laws of the state (polis) and the household (oikos), which results in the

transformation of Thebes into a tyranny. A plague renders infertile all forms of life (crops, livestock,

humans) in his state while his own household is involved into a socially perverse human production,

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as attested in the name of his daughter-sister Antigone (anti-gonē: against generation). Oedipus

believes that his life is ruled by chance (tychē) and not fate conducted by gods. Reproduction as the

technology (techné) of the gods is skewed by Oedipus who, per Geoffrey Hartman, makes it

“redundant […] in replacing his own progenitor”: “By killing his father and marrying his mother he

has destroyed the triad of father, mother and son. He is not a third one over and beyond his origins,

but is at one with them” (Shell The Economy 98). For a similar reason of unknown biological origins,

2500 years after Sophocles’s Oedipus The King, sperm banks developed a need to regulate that certain

donors do not over-reproduce and a need to share with the donor-created progeny information of

their biological relatives outside their family in order to prevent potential couplings among siblings or

children and their biological parents. At the same time, ART also allows for destruction of generational

triads like father-mother-child or husband-wife-sister-in-law through gamete donation or surrogacy,

for example, in the case where a mother carries her daughter’s genetic child as a surrogate. And then

there is synthetic biology which allows us to propagate living organisms without any generation: when

biological systems are disposable, reproduction is irrelevant and generation is untraceable. If one really

wanted to have something like generation and evolution in printing the genome of their offspring, they

would introduce an element of chance into synthetic design—like Oedipus we like to believe that our

life is ruled with it.

Modern genetics has been a focus of science and the public for the last hundred years, and

increasingly due to ART. ART knits strangers together into closer biological relations while enabling

no-contact reproduction and allows for what used to be impossible, for example, for two men to

have a child. Their child could be genetically related to both of his male parents: with sperm

donation and a relative who serves as a gestational surrogate, one man becomes a social and

biological father and the other genetically an uncle but socially also a father. ART therefore leaves

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space for other ways of forming familial connections: “Which of the following is fundamental—the

genes I share with my genitor, the love between my adoptive parent and myself, the milk I sucked

from my mother, the blood I commingled with my blood brother, the wafer and wine I shared at a

communal feast, or the dust from which all things (including myself) are made?” (Shell Children 4).

Genetic and biological kinships are reified and valued in ART, as attested, for example, in adopted

and donor children’s desire to search for their roots, i.e. biological parents or siblings they have not

yet met. However, genetic kinship does not automatically prevail over parental love or over religious

beliefs (such as cult-like Christian communities that expel any outcasts: the universal siblinghood

between the members of the community prevails over genetic connection). Some researchers claim

that we live in an era that tries to discard hyper-individualism and the nuclear family model of the

second half of the twentieth century by setting family structures through created kinship, most often

through an extended chosen family, sometimes also called forged family or fictive kinship (Brooks).

Queer people and other marginalized groups often build so-called chosen families. Sophie Lewis

returned to the 1970s feminist call33 for the abolition of the family in her 2019 monograph Full

Surrogacy Now, where she argues that we should establish new radical kinships where everyone takes

care of everyone. Everyone is a mother and a child at the same time: every child is raised in a village

and the elderly are taken care of according to their needs. In Lewis’s utopian and anti-capitalist

arrangement, genetics and biology are completely irrelevant as a part of changing family relations

into the Harawayan kin. Ignoring the embodiment of pregnancy and birth accentuates the

33Among radical feminists, Shulamith Firestone is credited with the idea of family abolition in her 1970 manifesto The
Dialectic of Sex, where she identifies biological family as the basis of women’s oppression because it forces women to bear
the brunt of reproductive labor. The idea had been popular for about a decade, with feminism largely embracing family
values afterwards and leaning towards reforming the nuclear family structure rather than abolishing it—which is also a
preferred solution in most of the fictional texts mentioned above.

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involuntariness of the experiences, especially if related with a gender transition, and “makes ideas of

compensation and reproductive exchange poor solutions for the potential disruption to the self”

(Jarvis par. 11).

Regardless, couples who use ART with a third-party donation tend to use the same donor for their

children (Keshavan par. 15-25, Goddard par. 12), supposedly because they like the donor and/or

they like the idea that their children will be genetically related. This means they often need to

continue to pay storage fees for the gametes donated for their first child for when/if they decide to

have another child. Although described as a mere commodity in many cases,34 couples enter into a

special kind of kinship with their donor (or, similarly, surrogate). Caitlin comments: “I don’t think

about the donor very much anymore, but there are tiny moments where I’m like, that’s my wife, and

maybe that’s the guys, and maybe that’s me” (Goddard par. 11). In a lesbian couple, one partner can

carry the embryo created by the other partner and sperm donor, making both parents biologically

related to their child: one being the genetic parent, the other being the birth parent (and thus also

mixing their genes and bodily fluids with their progeny). The embryo enriched definitions of genetic

kinship by becoming genetically arbitrary and multifold.

Defining kinship in ART where multiple parties are involved through donation, adoption, or

surrogacy begins with the embryo and resolves with the child being placed into a family. For Sarah

Franklin, the embryo yields “liminal kinship” not only to specific family relations but to human

family as a whole, as a human species: we all were once embryos (‘Postmodern’ 336). This reinforces

the idea that all of humanity is our family—that we are of the same kind and kin. In biologist Michael

Caitlin writes: “Some of these guys have a lot in stock. The bank can email you if it’s selling out, in case you want
34

more” (Goddard par. 12).

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Ghiselin’s view, biological species are not “kinds, or classes, or organisms” but “wholes composed

of organisms” (448). He argues that a species is an abstract class (like a planet) while Homo sapiens

should be viewed as an individual with a history and location (like Jupiter). In this way, like David

Hull proposes, “there are no laws of nature for particular species” (449). Ghiselin further argues for

his view of a particular species as an individual because “organism in the abstract cannot

reproduce—only an individual organism can do that” (ib.). Charles Darwin thought of the

reproduction of species the same way: in his theory, the species evolves as an individuum and

reproduces as one body, composed of many organisms. Darwin also warns about the term species

misleading us to think of a species as a stable entity where there is, in fact, steady change. In seeing a

particular species as one, we are all related, all of the same kin and kind, which implies that sharing

gametes through asexual reproduction is only a cunning way of mixing and improving our genetic

material. Literal and figurative kinship is then, as in Brave

New World and other utopias, a matter of societal choice,

regardless if the reproduction is sexual or asexual.

6.6 Hybridity

As we have seen in Chapter 5, biotechnology mimics

natural processes of human reproduction while at the

same time transgressing them, resulting in the altering of

the human. Biotechnology of today has a hybridity that

Figure 51 Pregnant person as a chimera.
can cure human pathologies but at the same time
Radiograph of a pregnant woman from a 1924
publication (demonstrates the fetus in breech
transgresses ontological and moral borders of what is still presentation, with its head (labeled with the arrows) in the
left upper quadrant.
considered human.
Image from Benson and Doubilet (94). Used with
permission of RSNA.

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Hybridity is found in nature but considered extremely unnatural. For example, female horses and

male donkeys can produce a mule. Only rare species can interbreed, and the sterility of their progeny

is considered a sign of insuperability. Another, less known example is that of twin embryos merging

into a single entity. Some humans are born with their never-developed twin in their bodies (even

fraternal twins might have up to eight percent of cells from their twin (Robson par. 12)). Some

animals within certain species (with less complex sex determination, such as chickens, lobsters,

cardinals, moths, etc.) are born with one side of the body as male and the other as female, joined

down the center into the so-called bilateral gynandromorphic entity. Such animals might seem as an

entirely unnatural phenomenon: even among their own species these animals are ignored and

unlikely to find a mate (the cardinal of this kind never tried to sing (Robson par. 18)). Biological

hybridity has a long history in reproduction: one in which it is considered a boundary of biological

difference, as in the case of mules, and the other, familiar from lab experiments, where new

combinations are made and remain in a pre-entity stage.

An example for the latter hybridity is cell fusion, a cellular process of recombination of cultured cells

that takes place during embryogenesis or morphogenesis, for example. Cell fusion was mobilized as

a way to forgo sexual breeding: “it was often described as ‘parasexuality’ or ‘genetics without sex’”

(Landecker 184). (Parasexuality is also a common designation for pygmalionism, as shown in chapter

3.) This parasexual approach— “going to the same end by different means” (217)—resulted in a

surprise: anything could be crossed with anything else. Lewis Thomas commented in 1980 that “the

‘laboratory trick’ of cell fusion seemed to reconfigure ideas and practices of the individuality of living

things to an extraordinary degree” and mused that, “in a way, it is the most unbiologic of all

phenomena, violating the most fundamental myths of the last century, for it denies the importance

of specificity, integrity, and separateness in living things” (183-84). The use of the term ‘unbiologic’

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implies that biologically cell fusion does not make sense—that it is somehow unnatural, artificial, an

exception to the natural order or rules of logic. Cell fusion is not unbiologic per se but demands a re-

conceptualization of biology as a biotechnology.

In a reproductive sense, cell fusion opened an option of asexual approach for higher-level

organisms; as Guido Pontecorvo wrote in 1962: “If fungi could have both sexual and parasexual

systems, so could higher organisms” (81; also in Landecker 188). “Barriers of species, immunological

incompatibilities between individuals—in fact, any form of biological difference that could be

thought of—fell away” (Landecker 218). Cell fusion has fundamentally shifted our views of

hybridity as it has shown there are no “intracellular mechanisms for recognizing incompatibility

between individuals or species” (184). Biological difference thus exists only at the higher levels of

organisms, where boundaries of species integrity and organismal individuality are signaled through

infertility and immune reactions. At the level of cell fusion, a hybrid cell could be made that could

reproduce in culture, sometimes indefinitely (182), breaching another fundamental concept of

natural and human sciences—immortality.

This internal homology of organisms enables experimentation with human-derived tissues carried in

animals and vice versa: a promising venue for medicine. Fiction and science have long played with

this concept. For example, Michael Crichton35 imagined the revival of the dinosaur species in his

1990 novel Jurassic Park (also turned into a successful blockbuster film). Thirty years later, famed

geneticist George Church and the Broad Institute are working on bioconservation to bring back the

35Michel Crichton also created a 1973 film Westworld which was an inspiration for the Westworld series (2016–), where
sentient and conscious humanoid robots serve for fun and terrible exploitation in a Western-themed amusement park.
We might have such parks one day—we already have such humanoids in shopping malls to give us directions or, frankly,
for admiration and to satisfy our curiosity about these new creatures.

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woolly mammoth through interspecific pregnancy (also called interspecies pregnancy or

xenopregnancy) performed by their relatives, Asian elephants (‘Progress’, Nicholls). The idea of an

interspecific pregnancy for the purpose of recreating an extinct species is not that unusual

considering that it was recently shown that different species of elephants have interbred in the past

(Palkopoulou et al.) and that some animal species can grow in a different species animal somewhat

successfully (e.g. giant panda embryos with rabbit ooplasm were gestated by a domestic cat (Chen et

al.)). Interspecific pregnancies run into many immunological and genetic barriers, even with related

species, such as domestic goat and sheep (Fernández-Arias et al.). Although at a cellular level such

hybridity works as any other mixing, the biological damage of interbreeding is high: unsuccessful

implantation, miscarriage, genetic defects, etc. Knotty concerns keep emerging: growing organs or

fetuses of one species in another species might actually influence the gestating animal’s behavior or

abilities through residual cells of the organ or fetus. Crossing these boundaries with a human mind

trapped in animal’s body is a nightmare fit for H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Although cell fusion as a hybrid method fell out of favor in labs due to the view that modern

genetics and molecular biology are drivers of change in the twentieth century, its exploration during

1960s pointed out “the notion of the reversibility of biological states [which] has become central to

the idea of ‘reprograming’ cells with cloning and stem cells in the first decade of the twenty-first

century” (183). With the invention of this new approach to hybridity, the human-induced artificiality

manifested in biology as an array of options that have previously not yet been imagined, except in

fiction, such as H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau.

A year before Doctor Moreau was published, H. G. Wells worked as a biology instructor and wrote a

short newspaper piece called ‘The Limits of Individual Plasticity.’ In a very Dr. Moreau manner,

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Wells criticized the prevailing fatalism of hereditary thinking and speculated about organismal

plasticity—similar to what was later discovered with the above-mentioned cell fusion. In words he

later placed in mouth of Dr. Moreau, he pointed out “that there is in science, and perhaps even

more so in history, some sanction for the belief that a living thing might be taken in hand and so

moulded and modified that at best it would retain scarcely anything of its inherent form and

disposition” and that “the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental

super-structure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new variety

of being” (90). And just like cell fusion has shown that on a cellular level, where everything goes

with everything, Wells argued that “these principles […] have never been shown conclusively to be

necessarily limited to these small things” (ib.).

In this short essay as well as in the novel, Wells poses questions to the limits of plasticity: How far

can humans push biological materials before “the thread of life” is broken? The Island of Dr. Moreau

ends with human-animal chimeras quickly reverting to their inherent animal form and behavior. He

further addresses the basic question of what is today known as synthetic biology: does the origin of a

human-made organism make any difference in regard to a naturally occurring organism? (Landecker

8). His answer seems to lie in-between: the nature of life is set in advance but can also be reversed

(as a re-birth perhaps) through human intention.

The outline of the idea of plasticity is sketched already in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871),

of which alarming extensions present the human as “not fixed, but entirely mutable” and evolution

without a sense of purpose or direction (Luckhurst xx). In the conclusion to his On the Origin of the

Species (1859), Darwin already tries to hold back this vision, suggesting that evolution might work

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towards perfecting the species36 and that this progressive development applies to humans in particular.

As Wells’s novel reminds us, the qualities of plasticity bring new puzzles to the table: the material

living things can be vastly manipulated but biological matter can also react in unexpected ways (as

we see today, for example, in gene editing that can produce off-target effects we may not be aware

of and, as of now, cannot completely trace or control).

Chimeras are regularly created in laboratories but generally prohibited in the clinical practice.

Already in laboratories ethical concerns abound. When, for example, structures of human origin are

inserted into the brains or reproductive systems37 of nonhuman animals, “the chief worry seems to

be that in the process of biologically humanizing a research animal, scientists might inadvertently

morally humanize the resulting chimera” (Munsie et al. 944). Even when chimerism is not on the

table, the use of stem cells and embryotic cells in laboratories causes fear. For example, embryonic

stem cells can grow into embryo-like structures called gastruloids. The moral question poses itself:

Should we consider them as embryos?

We have recently learned that fetuses are more biologically intertwined with their carriers than

previously thought. Research has shown that pregnant persons may carry genetic material of the

children they gestated for years, sometimes decades, after the birth (Rijnink et al.).38 Some of the

36“And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will
tend to progress towards perfection” (Darwin On 165).

37“Making hybrid cells may sound like transgenesis, which is the use of recombinant DNA techniques to cross species
boundaries without sexual reproduction. Transgenis animals are made by inserting a foreign gene into an egg, and
thereby into the germline of the resulting organism; the adult animal then carries the gene in all of its cells and passes it
on to the next generation” (Landecker 182).

38This microchimerism is most obvious with women who carried male fetuses as their Y chromosomes were found all
over their bodies.

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children’s cells were not only found in mother’s abdomen but also in her brain. A pregnant person’s

body is a chimera in itself, but it has not been known until recently that women who have given

birth remain microchimeras for some time, sometimes decades, after birth. Women with an x

number of children are therefore chimeras of x+1 organisms. This is a particularly fascinating

finding for gestational surrogates and persons pregnant with donor eggs, i.e. anyone who has carried

children that are not genetically related to them—as this turned out to not be entirely the case.

The case for reproductive chimerism is often made in science fiction and children’s literature works.

In Dr. Seuss’s 1940 children’s picture book Horton Hatches the Egg, the chimera is not the parent, as

with women described above, but the interspecies child. A lazy and irresponsible bird Mayzie leaves

her egg in care of a loyal elephant Horton who sits on it during her break that turns into a

permanent vacation. After a long wait, the egg hatches at the moment the elephant and the bird

meet again, and the bird argues that the egg is rightfully hers. Her argument is lost, however, as soon

as an elephant-chick emerges from the egg. Horton’s dutiful surrogate gestation made the gestating

chick grow elephant ears, a tail, and a trunk: “And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like that!

/ Because Horton was faithful! He sat and he sat!” concludes the narrator. Interspecies reproduction

is also the topic of the following three science fiction texts I discuss in the following section.

6.6.1 Posthumanist Biology: Hawthorne, Boucher, Butler

6.6.1.1. On Microbes

Posthumanism and science that brought on posthumanist philosophical perspectives taught us to

think of ourselves as hybrid beings—literally. Thinking in terms of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, we

are more aware of social and biological collectiveness of the human existence. For example, that our

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biological bodies—and every other organism—co-exist with bacteria, fungi, archaea, and viruses in

what Haraway calls “multispecies flourishing” (Staying 2, 120, etc.), Anna Tsing “interspecies

entanglements” (vii, 137-142, etc.), and Rosi Braidotti “a colossal hybridization of the species […]

consolidated by pervasive technological mediation” (26). We are thus cross-species bodily forms

living among other multi-species assemblages in an equally microbial habitat and a species that

technologized itself into techno-biological cyborgs—and might do so as well with other species or

create new, not-yet-existing ones.

We cannot exist nor function without the microbes, and we would have never evolved without them

either. Learning that eight percent of human genetic makeup is of viral origin or that a level of

serotonin, the ‘happiness hormone’ which affects how we feel and think, depends on

neurotransmitters produced by our gut bacteria (rather than genetics, for example), should make us

reevaluate how we perceive posthuman bodies. Since microbes make for a large percentage of our

body’s cells and are an important part of our physiology, does that mean that being human includes

a multitude of agencies that operate simultaneously on levels as diverse as microbiome and glands?

In this sense, the exodus of anthropocentrism is solely a shift in perspective from the human as the

center to the nonhuman, including nonhuman entities and agencies existing in the human body.

Looking at nature from the perspective of the microbiome reveals our interconnectedness with the

biosphere. Viruses are dangerous but indispensable agents of evolution. They move DNA between

species, provide new genetic material for evolution, and regulate vast populations of organisms. As

Wai Chee Dimock argues in her new book, Weak Planet, we should not perceive them as

pathological but rather symbiotic to us humans, despite the risk of this symbiosis (quite a bold but

necessary calling, as it turned out, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.) Scientists are finding

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viruses in the soil, the ocean and even deep caves, as they can infect all types of life forms. Tobias

Rees’s essay strikes a similar note: it is striking that “the evolution of life seems to have emerged

from collaboration—symbiosis—and not from struggle or competition” (par. 58).

Viruses also challenge other biological categories, such as categorizing basic life forms. Biologically,

they are not alive in the same sense as animals: their life depends on a living host cell of an organism

(animals, plants, microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea) which they infect and where they

replicate. As such, they cannot die and could be considered immortal. As organisms at the edge of

life, viruses are considered a life form by some biologists because they carry genetic material,

reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, even if they lack some other basic criteria for life

(e.g. cell structure). They must, however, invade some other organism in order to live and reproduce:

crossing the species in order to live and breed is a prerogative of their existence.

Evaluating the human from the microbial perspective is fairly new to science but—again—not to

literature. In 1905, Mark Twain began writing a novel he never finished titled Three Thousand Years

among the Microbes. The fragment states that it was translated by Twain from the Original Microbic

language. Inspired by scientific monographs on microbes, especially H. W. Conn’s The Story of Germ

Life, Twain turns the narrator, one of Conn’s students named Huck (on a bizarre version twist on

Twain’s earlier and more famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), into a cholera bacterium

named Bkhsp which lives in a body of a Hungarian immigrant. Huck retains human consciousness

while simultaneously experiencing the world as a microbe. Through this hybrid narratological

experiment (not unlike that in Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’), Twain is able to reevaluate the human through a

nonhuman perspective in a way yet inaccessible to science. By pointing out the similarities of the

two species that live is such a different world frame, Twain defamiliarizes the human, which is

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exactly the opposite of how scientists of the time framed the relationship between the human and

microbes. “Conn recuperates human significance by framing the microbe and its value in human

terms,” designating pathological and “friend[ly]” germs in terms of human mastery over the world

(Weed 221), and Twain satirizes this view, making the human an insignificant, microscopic player

“concealed in the blood of some vast creature’s veins” (Twain 24). In their introduction to Carl

Zimmer’s A Planet of Viruses (2011), Judy Diamond and Charles Wood point out that viruses should

not be viewed only as pathological because they are valuable as “dynamic players in the ecology of

Earth” (xi). This is also the argument Twain made on the case of bacteria more than hundred years

earlier, when viruses had only begun to be discovered (the yellow fever virus, one of which is also a

character in Twain’s text, among them). This microbial perspective is also an original position from

which microbiology, especially when intertwined with ecology and its nonhuman agencies in the

biosphere, re-defines the human, nature, and technology.

As our technologies have become biologized and, vice versa, biology has become technologized

(Franklin Biological 3), we use viruses as a tool of agency in CRISPR-Cas9, TALEN and ZNF

genome editing technologies, some of which have been used as a part of IVF. CRISPR is a

technology derived from bacterial DNA and works in humans because we are, like all living beings,

descendants of bacteria. Humans have thus repurposed a completely natural technology, invented by

bacterial and archaeal immune systems to fight off viruses. Another example of biologized

technology is the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells, for which “viruses are used to transport

the required genes, and the genes, or factors, themselves become tools in the process of forcing a

cell to reorganize itself” (ib.). In relation to new biologized technologies, Jean Baudrillard concludes

that “we must ask if this final solution toward which we unconsciously work is not the secret

destination of nature, as well as of all our efforts” (9).

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The framing of technology as juxtaposed to nature, posited in Enlightenment, does not hold up

when faced with the concepts of hybridity, cyborgs, and interconnectivity. Hobbes’s uncivilized

nature became a realm of nonhuman animals perceived to be without any reason and thus separate

from the human animal; whereas the human is in the realm of politics, a genuine human state of law

and order which is an artifice and anti-nature. The pre-Enlightenment concept of technology as

contingent on nature cannot encompass today’s technologies either: in this view, nature and humans

are both a common part of the cosmos. The ontology of modernity clearly distinguishes between

natural, human, and technological; yet, the nineteenth-century view of technology as an imitation of

nature has quickly proved inadequate. Even if we agree that ART processes imitate nature, synthetic

biology does not fit the simple imitation of nature; and although AI was conceived as an imitation of

human intellect, it has since also forged into directions that are clearly not pursuing our imitation. It

was already with Darwin’s theory of evolution that these views on technology were shaken up: if we

approach nature in terms of evolution, then innovation is just as much a work of nature as it is a

human contribution. In fact, some biotechnologies that we use today were invented by microbes:

antibiotics, plasmids, CRISPR-Cas9 (Rees par. 64). A microbial view of nature brings the nature

from the realm of nonhuman, as ontologically and politically separated from the human in the

Enlightenment, back to the human: viruses are an essential part of us and also an essential part of

animals, bacteria, and other living beings. In the light of this view our differences diminish.39

39 It is not unusual that science cannot always determine if a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 was a natural occurrence or, as
conspiracy theorists would like to believe, human-made in a lab (which is not impossible since many labs create new
types of coronaviruses). The 1977 pandemic H1N1 strain, for example, was likely “a laboratory accident, a live-vaccine
trial escape, or deliberate release as a biological weapon” (Rozo and Gronvall). If it is so difficult—and close to
impossible in some cases—to draw the line of origin of a pandemic virus, then we must adjust the definition and outline
of technology into nature and biology as technological inventors, which are always evolving together with their creations.
Clearly, this perspective is useless for categorization of natural vs. human creating and editing, which is ontologically
necessary even if the origins might remain unknown sometimes.

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Categorizing different types of technologies, however, has lost its purpose: We are no less cyborgs

had we been edited or created through a biological technology than through a computational or

some other visibly inorganic technology. Consider neuro implants, typically electrodes surgically

implanted under the skull, which are both a computational and biological technology at once and are

studied in the field of brain-computer interfaces, i.e. the field that connects neural systems and

computers chips. Biotechnologists and programmers who work together on creating individualized

gene drugs for patients with rare genetic defects talk about inscription—“genetic typos” (Hayden

par. 4)—and say that their work “is all code” (par. 6). Synthetic biologists, like Stanford bioengineer

Drew Endy team, have already built a biocomputer, called the transcriptor, which uses proteins and

DNA in place of silicon chips to store and transmit information based on a logical system (Bonnet

et al.); overall, the analogy between computational and biological codes is growing closer in

complexity of each with neural nets, which biologize the computational technology. Further

discussion on how novel technologies like AI and synthetic biology influence our conceptions of the

human, nature, technology, etc. is needed, but out of the scope of this dissertation. Nonetheless, the

concept of posthumanist biology, as described by Pramod Nayar, might prove fruitful when placed

in the intersection of human and natural sciences.

6.6.2 Hawthorne and Boucher

Another example of hybridity we have recently become aware of is the variety of genetic evidence

that members of the Neanderthal species mixed with humans (Zimmer). Our DNA is therefore

mosaic in more ways than we have imagined, crossing into a different hominoid species. (As

mentioned above, this interspecies breeding was also proven in animals, e.g. elephants (Palkopoulou

et al.).) Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined a similar but more species-distant and science-based

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interbreeding of the human species with plants in his well-known short story Rappaccini’s Daughter

(1844).40 This story follows a Pygmalionesque motif in which a young naïve suitor Giovanni falls in

love with a beautiful, hardly human woman Beatrice, the daughter of a rogue scientist Rappaccini.

Rappaccini turns Beatrice into a poisonous plant-woman, ultimately killing her and turning her lover

into an equally poisonous hybrid man.

With this story, Hawthorne describes a principle of posthuman biology that reinvents human origins

as a part of a larger transformation of the human into a posthuman entity. The next step in

posthuman biology is, per Pramod Nayar, posthumanist biology, in which the human species

biotechnologizes itself into a new interbred human species.

“Fiction such as Butler’s moves toward a species cosmopolitanism via configuration of biology and new modes
of biological citizenship. The preliminary stage is a posthuman biology in which authors like Butler present a
new theory of origins and move toward the idea of species domestication and deracination. This domestication
marks the moment when a new kind of posthumanist biology becomes visible. Individuals are now trained to
deal with their new biology, but also to acquire a biological citizenship in more than one species through
memoirs acts and a newly instilled sense of the ethical” (Nayar 127).

Nayar’s proposal of posthuman/ist biology is a rather short account (a journal article’s worth) that

deserves more attention, which is why I extend it here to the Rappaccini stories and investigate it

further in Butler’s opus. Building on the whole discussion from this chapter, I pinpoint three

novelties in the shift towards posthumanist biology.

The American science fiction writer Anthony Boucher continued Hawthorne’s story in a two-page

short story ‘Rappaccini’s Other Daughter’ (sometimes titled ‘The Other Rappaccini’s Daughter’)

(1999) by turning Hawthorne’s preliminary stage of posthuman biology into posthumanist biology.

40Octavio Paz dramatized the story in 1953 and argued in the prologue that the story originates in an ancient Indian tale
that traveled to the West through Gesta Romanorum and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (3).

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In Hawthorne, Rappaccini’s work on Beatrice was a failed experiment: she was made poisonous to

humans and could not be saved from being poisoned herself. Boucher imagines another

Rappaccini’s daughter, Laura, who managed to cultivate herself into society as a human woman,

despite her partly plant DNA. “That shallow youth” Giovanni fell in love with Laura as he did with

Beatrice (Boucher 447). Worried since he himself was also poisonous as a “victim of the Rappaccini

method,” Giovanni was fortunate to find “a living object [to which] he was to discharge the normal

impulses of youth” (ib.). (Calling Laura a living object not only underlines the objectification of

women but also the fact that she was not wholly human.) Laura and Giovanni were Rappaccini’s

newest guinea pigs and “[l]ike guinea pigs they bred—if not indeed like hurkles,” spreading their

nonhuman genes via reproductive means (as in in vitro gene editing technology).

The beautiful couple was obviously not quite human, however: everyone around them needed to use

masks and still felt “the dulcet and balsamous breath” (447). This problem was obscured in their

progeny: women used their masks unnoticed and men inserted filters

in their beards. Up to the early nineteenth-century, stench was

believed to carry disease; for example, the plague doctors stuffed the

beaks of their masks with a mixture of scented herbs to protect

themselves from inhaling the infected air. The progeny of Laura and

Giovanni smelled pleasantly to other people, like flowers, even if they

were poisonous to them. “After a quarter of a millennium had passed,

Figure 52 Copper engraving of
Doctor Schnabel von Rom, a plague
doctor (literally, Dr. Beak) from in the first half of the twentieth century, the pure Rappaccini-
Rome.

The image by Paulus Fürst, cca.

Guasconti strain (under a score of advisable pseudonyms) had spread
1656, includes a satirical macaronic
poem. throughout the earth in such numbers that the problem of integration
WikiCommons, public domain.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: with ordinary, unscented, non-lethal humanity was an acute one” (ib.).
Paul_Fürst,_Der_Doctor_Schnabel
_von_Rom_(Holländer_version

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Namely, people with plant DNA were still poisonous to humanity untouched by their plant genes.

The problem was solved by “a Rappaccini” who suggested advertising “the sweet Rappaccini

breath” to the rest of the world who “had always shown a liking for [it]” (448). All humanity was

imbued by Rappaccini-Guasconti’s venomous fragrance by the late twentieth century, this time not

with reproduction but with mass-selling of chlorophyll that alternates one’s genes (as in in vivo gene

editing technology). Using both, first in vitro and then in vivo gene editing technologies, Laura and

Giovanni have become Lilith and Adam of the new interbred humanity. Unknown to anyone but a

few Rappaccinis, the new humanity was unethically subdued in a scientific experiment (just like

Rappaccini’s first daughter Beatrice) and the old humanity died off on its expense.

6.6.3 Butler

Like Anthony Boucher continuing Nathanael Hawthorne’s famous story, Octavia Butler perfected

the transition from the posthuman to posthumanist biology in her own works. In her memorable

and disturbing short story ‘Bloodchild’ (1984), humans would have gone extinct had they been not

forced to gestate an extraterrestrial species. The short story served as an inspiration for her later

trilogy, called The Xenogenesis Trilogy or Lilith’s Brood (1987-1989), which includes novels titled Dawn,

Adulthood Rites, and Imago.

‘Bloodchild’ takes place in indefinite future on an extraterrestrial world where humans serve as

gestational beings to a higher, insect-like species known as the Tlic. The Tlic can only reproduce in

symbiosis with animals—of which humans have proved to be the easiest to work with—who are

required to host their eggs inside their bodies for the time of pregnancy. In exchange for this

procreation-based oppression, humans are given a special compound to live in (with Earth

presumably uninhabitable) and sterile Tlic eggs to enjoy as a kind of opiate that keeps them calm and

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content (not unlike soma in Brave New World). Although many people read this story as an allegory of

slavery, Butler renounced this reading in the afterword (30). The core of the story is the familial love

the humans feel for the Tlic that are affiliated with their families. Due to the strong familiar bonds

of the Tlic with the Terrans, these connections cannot be written off as a Stockholm syndrome

either. The Tlic choose human families they want to reproduce within, take care of them by giving

them opioid eggs, and stay in close relationships with the matriarchs or patriarchs of the families as

well as with the chosen children.

The story focuses on a boy named Gan who had been chosen to host the eggs for T’Gatoi, an

important member of the Tlic. We meet Gan at the point where he is ready to bear children but has

not consented yet to be impregnated. While agonizing over the decision, he sees a birth of larvae

going terribly wrong: a man giving birth is screaming of pain due to being eaten alive by the

emerging larvae before T’Gatoi comes to help, numbs him and surgically removes the young. Gan is

given the option for his sister to be the carrier of T’Gatoi’s children: “It will be easier for Hoa. She

has always expected to carry other lives inside her. […] Human lives. Human young who should

someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins” (26). He, nonetheless, feels obligated and honored to

be the gestational surrogate for T’Gatoi, whom he respects and loves (“I loved watching her move”

(9)) and to whom he has connected since his very birth (“I was told I was first caged within

T’Gatoi’s many limbs only three minutes after my birth” (8)).

In fact, Gan (or any human) does not have much agency in his relationship with the superior

species, but he overcomes his fear even if that means sacrificing his own life. Resistance is futile. By

“joining the families […] everyone had a personal stake in keeping the peace [among the two

species]” (12). “Firearms were illegal in the Preserve” (12), but Gan manages to find a gun and

admits to T’Gatoi: “I wouldn’t have shot you” (29). His familial love and a sense of duty towards the

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other prevails over the coercion, fear, or disgust he might feel when gestating endoparasitic worms:

“[T’Gatoi] had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age” (29). Gan’s and T’Gatoi’s

families form an interspecies family that developed through chosen kinship: T’Gatoi and Gan’s

mother “had grown up together” (7), “T’Gatoi had even introduced [Gan’s] mother to the man who

became [Gan’s] father” (8), and T’Gatoi chose Gan when he was still an infant to become a bearer

of her own children when he matures. The beauty of Butler’s story is in this multidimensionality:

Terrans are not entirely victimized by this relationship. They are corporeally vulnerable, sometimes

risking their lives in the Tlic gestation; yet, the Tlic are vulnerable too as their future generations lie

in the other species’ gestational acts. Rather, the relationship between the species is a matter of co-

existence and co-dependence.

In Lilith’s Brood, the first novel of The Xenogenesis Trilogy, humans again find themselves at the edge of

extinction: they have almost gone extinct in a nuclear war which left the Earth uninhabitable and

their only option to continue the species is to mingle their genes with an extraterrestrial species

called the Oankali. The Oankali made humans infertile to breed among themselves without the

extraterrestrial third party so that, like in ‘Bloodchild’, humans are eventually forced to participate in

a symbiogenesis41 of the Oankali-human hybrids: “For humanity to survive, it must become posthuman

with other species” (Nayar 133). Some of the ‘old-world’ humans survive, but they need to comply with

the interbreeding. The most capable of these Oankali-altered or space-born humans are sent back to

Earth after they are prepared to live on the changed, wild planet, made livable for humankind by the

Oankali. These preserved humans on the verge of extinction have to make a mental, conscious shift

towards the posthumanist biology of their origins and bodily existence in order to survive.

41Symbiogenesis is a term from evolutionary biology by Lynn Margulis. In When the Species Meet, Haraway writes about
symbiogenesis with her dogs: “Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells […]. I bet if you were to check our
DNA, you’d find some potent transfections between us” (When 15).

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Undergoing this colossal existential change, humans struggle especially with reinventing and

procreating themselves through a symbiogenesis. Mating is not always a choice: Lilith, a black

woman, is chosen by the Oankali to be the mother of the reborn humanity. Even those who are

willing to mate are repulsed by a mere thought of touching, living and breeding with the Oankali.

The Oankali, on the contrary, thrive on the genetic trade, difference, diversity, exploration of the

other, and symbiogenesis (they have used this reproductive process numerous times in their history,

incorporating traits from other extraterrestrial lifeforms). Before the Oankali meet with the humans,

they change their shape from slug-like creatures to a more human-like shape—a shape that, as they

are aware, is nonetheless shocking and fear-inducing to humans at first. Even before the procreation

system is established with Lilith, humans are altered by the Oankali: Lilith is made cancer-less,

physically stronger and more resistant to injuries. Lilith at first resist to “be tampered with” (76); in

particular, she is worried that correcting her brain tumor and altering her brain chemistry will change

her. After this first unwilling contact with the Oankali, all life on Earth already carries its organelle.

To interbreed, from the Oankali perspective, is therefore only a benefit to humans but redundant to

them because the Oankali had managed to subdue the humans and mix with them asexually before

the first human accepts to interbreed. Besides that, before the ‘old-world- humans were in conscious

contact with the Oankali, the aliens have taken their gametes, “stuff from men and women who

didn’t know each other and put it together and made babies in women who never knew the mother

or the father of their kid—and who maybe never got to know the kid. Or maybe they grew the baby

in another kind of animal. They have animals they can adjust to—to incubate human fetuses, as they

say” (94)—a Brave New World ruled by an alien race.

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Posthuman humans can be zealous in their scientific curiosity and technological invention:

“Humankind does not discriminate; it willingly becomes its own guinea pig under the same terms as

the rest of the world, animate and inanimate. Humankind blithely plays with its own future as a

species in the same way that it plays with the future of all other creatures. In its blind quest to

possess greater knowledge, humankind programs its own destruction with the same casual ferocity

that it applies to the destruction of everything else” (Baudrillard 16-17). The shift towards a more

inclusive and interconnected posthumanist world—in which the spaceship is alive, composed of

solely organic materials, feeding people but also being fed, growing and being grown—is a challenge

to humanity used to reckless life before the nuclear war that destroyed the Earth.

In all the fictional works discussed above, Butler works with three novelties in the shift towards

posthumanist biology: ecological (all life is connected), biotechnological (biology as technology), and

symbiotic (positive exchange). Humans have grown to be more aware of our interdependency and

interconnectedness with flora and fauna, living in, on and around our own bodies: “To be one is

always to become with many. […] my companion species who are my maker” (Haraway When 4).

This realization is related to how we view and practice biology as technology (biology as

biotechnology) and also as art (bioart). In relation to both previous shifts, we have also re-evaluated

our relationship to human pathology (human body is full of errors, human character is fallible). As

we attempt to breach pathology with popular technologies (pharmaceutical, nanotechnology, AI,

etc.), we use natural processes—some of which could be pathological—to work into our zealous

goal of perfecting ourselves (for example, viruses or animals’ biomaterials to heal or enhance ours).42

42For example, in 2019, a woman in Japan was the first to receive an ‘artificial’ cornea transplant to improve her vision.
The cornea was made from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that were ‘reprogrammed’ with the help of a virus.
Before this treatment, people with damaged or diseased corneas received transplants from dead donors (Cyranoski).

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At the same time, the turn towards ecology and sustainability demands not only human symbiosis at

the level of our bodies but at a planetary level. The ecological shift, with a common goal to prevent

further climate change, makes an assumption (prevalent in studies on the Anthropocene) that

everything nonhuman holds a moral authority over pathological, violent humanity. Posthumanist

biology believes that only technology can correct this fault in human character and make a better

world for all species.43

These shifts are, in short, the Oankali philosophy of life, based entirely on (posthumanist) biology.

The following passage from Butler’s Dawn, the first novel of the trilogy, encompasses the

posthumanist message of the extraterrestrials that ultimately manages to re-structure human values

and practices, as attested in the final novel of the trilogy, Imago.

“Nikanj44 smoothed its body tentacles in amusement. ‘Anything to do with Humans always seems to involve
contradictions.’ It paused. ‘Examine Tino. Inside him, so many very different things are working together to
keep him alive. Inside his cells, mitochondria, a previously independent form of life, have found a haven and
trade their ability to synthesize proteins and metabolize fats for room to live and reproduce. We’re in his cells
too now, and the cells have accepted us. One Oankali organism within each cell, diving with each cell,
extending life, and resisting disease. Even before we arrived, they had bacteria living in their intestines and
protecting them from other bacteria that would hurt or kill them. They could not exist without symbiotic
relationships with other creatures. Yet such relationships frighten them” (426).

As Pramod Nayar points out in relation to the passage, it is “practically a paraphrase of Lynn

Margulis, Scott Gilbert and other theorists of evolutionary biology; […] all biology is multispecies,

symbiotic and mutually dependent” (128). The humanity in ‘Bloodchild’ as well as in Lilith’s Brood

breaks off into a radical re-birth, a second origin. This means that the old ways have likely proved to

43The exploitation of the environment seems to—predictably—be moving into space. Butler’s texts all take place there
and consider the symbiosis at the level of the universe. Other science fiction works address this issue as well, many in the
fashion of Robinsonade (e.g. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Mars Trilogy or Ridley Scott’s film The Martian, based on Andy
Weir’s novel).

44Nikanj is an Oankali of the third sex (that use the pronoun ‘it’), called Ooloi. The Ooloi are capable healers of human
pathologies and have a strong urge to breed with a human couple. Nikanj breeds with Lilith, the first human to create
new interspecies humans.

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be wrong; we learn in Lilith’s Brood that humanity was close to eradicated and the Earth

impoverished and that they both need to be rebuilt in order for humans to ever live on Earth again.

Although “human contradiction”—as human pathology, self-centrism and violent dominance are

called throughout the trilogy—prevents humanity to thrive, humans might be able to overcome it

through posthumanist biology that leads us to interconnectedness with the world and the universe.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, transformation is the ultimate goal and solution to Pygmalion’s problem,

and it is granted by a divinity after Pygmalion shyly alludes to it in a prayer. In Butler,

metamorphosis is also the goal and solution, but requires a series of metamorphoses across the

human species (here, as in Michael Ghiselin, the whole human species is treated as an individuum).

In Butler, humanity is the creator and the created at the same time. The first metamorphosis of

humans is the contact and the crossbreeding with the Oankali which affects their biology and, more

drastically, the genetics. This new hybrid humanity, called constructs, needs to learn an interspecies

way of living in a posthumanist world that includes Earth and space. This metamorphosis affects

human character, behavior, and culture. Another metamorphosis, to which Butler dedicates the

second and third book of the trilogy, Adulthood Rites and Imago, is physical metamorphosis of the

constructs in puberty and adolescence, when, to a varying degree, constructs grow sensory tentacles

and patches (and some learn about their sex only then as they can be sexless during childhood). The

hybridity of constructs is on a spectrum, physically and mentally: some might ‘pass’ as a human

physically (like a racially non-white person can pass as white), they might look more Oankali (and

thus nonhuman), or they might turn to be the Ooloi, the third sex (it), which requires another

physical and mental metamorphosis. A construct Ooloi, the protagonist of Imago, serves as a final

proof of successful interbreeding, a result of a sequence of successful metamorphoses of humanity.

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Butler’s fiction is focused on depicting the process of intraspecies transgressions. The confrontation

of the two species is always violent and acerbated by disgust in humans. In ‘Bloodchild,’ growing

parasitic larvae under one’s skin is a repulsive thought, but less so when considered an action of

gestational surrogacy based on familial love and connection. Similarly, in The Xenogenesis Trilogy, these

familial connections need to be fostered into a kinship (for example, this connection does not occur

between human hybrid Akin and his sibling as they are not able to grow up together and bond). The

violent birth scene in ‘Bloodchild’ is shocking and intense, as any birth, but more so because of the

imagery of slaughter with larvae emerging from the man’s flesh and his near death. Disgust that

humans would otherwise feel towards the worm-like Tlic or towards the tentacled Oankali is

replaced with a symbiotic sense of familial belonging. No interspecies procreation is possible

without the acceptance of the new human condition, of which the first step is the loss of repulsion

towards the nonhuman and eventual affection for the nonhuman reproductive partner. The literal

mixing of human DNA with another species is only a consequence of a more significant change. By

breaching the fatal human flaw, “the human contradiction,” humanity is improving itself in its

physical (diseases, injuries, any bodily disfunction) and mental pathologies (violence, selfishness,

racism, etc.). It should be noted, however, that this breaching of humanity as we know it can also be

criticized as a utopian/dystopian transhumanist dream. When posthumanism characterizes

everything ‘beyond the human’ as a continuous good and a moral authority, be it nature or

nonhuman beings, it reaches a self-destructive point of criticism towards the human.

6.6.4 Bioart

Bioart was born at the turn of the twentieth century and fiction has far preceded bioart in addressing

biological hybridity. Bioart uses visuality to address social and philosophical questions posed by

working with live tissues with the help of biotechnology. By visualizing an aspect of technological

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practice, bioart helps us rethink these technological or scientific tools under the aesthetic, social, or

ethical inquiry as covered by the artificial humanities. (micha cárdenas’s poetry, mentioned in the

LGBTQIA+ section, could also be considered bioart since she worked with human tissues.) Bioart

uses technologies available in practice, such as visualizing technologies used in reproductive care, but

not necessarily the way they are practiced in healthcare or elsewhere due to utilitarian, ethical, or

some other reasons.

Art became more important in researching the fundamental contradiction of the contemporary

human, for which the standard concept of the human as an autonomous self-contained being —and

perhaps the conceptual category as the human itself—fails us. This rupture was filled with

technologies as fields for establishing the new conception and practice of the human. Bioart, much

like engineering, formulates research questions in situ of their practices, a manner utterly distinct

from that of literature and philosophy from which both could extract a proof of principle and build

vocabularies for the twenty-first century.

I would like to offer an illustrative example of this posthumanist practice in Slovenian bioartist Maja

Smrekar’s project K-9 Topology, which included three

subprojects: ‘Ecce Canis’ (2014), ‘Hybrid Family’

(2016), and ‘ARTE_mis’ (2017). In ‘Hybrid Family,’

Smrekar focuses on co-evolution and dependency

of human and dog species, two of “the largest

invasive species on the planet” (‘ARTE_mis’ par. 2),

Figure 53 Maja Smrekar and Manuel Vason, K-9_topology:
Hybrid Family, Berlin 2016. evoking Rosi Braidotti’s and Donna Haraway’s
Used with permission. www.majasmrekar.org/k-9topology-
hybrid-family work. A part of the project was a three-month

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seclusion of the artist and her dogs, during which the artist stimulated her milk production with

breast pumping and breastfed her puppy Ada. For a human to nurse a puppy is obscene: it

compromises human dignity, regardless of the co-development of the human and dog species. Our

pets, and particularly dogs, are largely a part of our families and thus our kin, but not of kind (Shell

Children 148-50). Smrekar comments on this project from a perspective of a dog-mother, which led

her to introspect the faults of her own human species: “A side effect was the increase in oxytocin

hormone levels, which led to an increase in empathy and my personal resistance to the cynicism of

the zeitgeist. By being pregnant with a meaning, and thus becoming (m)Other, I was further drawn

to explore my ‘decolonial reproductive freedom in a dangerously troubled multispecies world’ *(see

Haraway, 2016)” (‘Hybrid’ par. 1). By mixing fluids, this time not blood as in consanguineous

kinship but through collactaneous affinity of milk and saliva, familial kinship is transmitted

regardless of the species difference (Shell Children 158).

Smrekar performed a reverse situation from the foundation myth of Rome, in which twins Romulus

and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf and later parented by a shepherd and his wife. The practice

of animals nursing humans is not considered as obscene as the other way around because humans

consume animal products, including milk, albeit not usually suckling milk directly from the

source.4546 Both practices, however, have been present in different cultures for a variety of health,

religious, and cultural reasons. A wet nurse is therefore not always human.

45This does not mean, however, that debates about the animalizing effect of drinking animal milk and about the harmful
affinity when nursed by other women than the mother were not common already in Montaigne’s time (Shell Children
159). Vaccinations are also related to animals and therefore animalization, not only in terminology (Lat. vacca means cow,
and the term vaccination comes from Edward Jenner’s work on smallpox vaccine) but also in the related practices of
inventing new vaccines in human and veterinary medicine.

46Treating animals as a separate species by milking them, riding them, eating them is an anthropocentric act that gets
disqualified only with the rare cases of talking animals (discussed in Chapter 2) or with treating animals (or other
nonhuman objects) as our pets (our kin, but not our kind; as discussed in Chapter 3).

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Michel de Montaigne writes in an essay Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children about the exclusively

mothering act of nursing on the case of an interspecies connection between goats that are taught to

suckle infants as wet nurses. Displaying vehement care towards the foster-child they connect with,

“Beasts do as easily alter and corrupt their natural affections as we:” the goats “well-knowing

[children’s] voices when they cry […] come running to them; when if any other than that they are

acquainted with be presented to them, they refuse to let it suck, and the child, to any other goat, will

do the same” (252). In the same essay, Montaigne also writes of the affection that develops between

“pitiful” human wet nurses and the children they nurse: “we see in most of them an adulterate

affection [affection bastarde], begot by custom toward the foster children, more vehement than the

natural; and a greater solicitude for the preservation of those they have taken charge of, than their

own” (ib.).47

Popular culture still presents examples of humans nursing

animals. One of Georges Brassens’s most known and most

controversial songs, his 1953 hit Brave Margot, talks about a

simple-minded, well-meaning shepherdess Margot who adopts a

Figure 54 The cover of the Belle and lost kitten and feeds her with her own milk: “Le chat la prenant
Sebastian’s first album Tigermilk (1996).

WikiMedia.
pour sa mère / Se mit à téter tout de go / Emue, Margot le laissa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BelleAndSebasti
anTigermilk.jpg

47 In Slovenian literature and history Montaigne’s observation has a strong presence. First, it is most known as a
folkloristic and literary motif of the beautiful Vida (lepa Vida), a young mother who leaves her elderly husband and young
infant to become a wet nurse for the future king of Spain. Second, it is also attested as a historical account of a period
from the second half of the nineteenth century until the Second World War, when women from Slovenian littoral region
left for Egypt in order to serve as maids and wet nurses, often to never return home to their own children. They were
called Alexandrinians (Sln. Aleksandrinke) and their stories have been depicted in literary accounts (Josip Jurčič, Ivan
Cankar, Alojz Gradnik, Edvard Kocbek) and documentary films (Metod Pevec’s Aleksandrinke).

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faire / Brav’ Margot.”48 Margot’s nursing becomes a daily curiosity for male onlookers and makes

the women of the village jealous to an extent that they put the kitten down—curiosity literally killed

the cat. Another example, not influenced by Brassens, is the cover of the Scottish band Belle and

Sebastian’s album, a photograph that the band’s lead singer and songwriter Stuart Murdoch made of

his then-girlfriend Joanne Kenney. Per Murdock’s description on how the album got its name and

the cover photograph, Kenney was sitting in a bathtub naked and spontaneously took a stuffed tiger

toy to cover her breasts and, as he recounts, “I supposed it was the obvious thing that she might

breast feed the tiger” (par. 27).

The breastfeeding practice in Smrekar’s projects alludes to human cultures in which nursing an

infant is formative of kinship. In the continuation of the ‘ARTE_mis’ project, one of Smrekar’s

emptied ova was used as a host for her dog Ada’s somatic cell and was grown in a laboratory like an

IVF embryo would have been grown until the blastocyst stage. “The resulting hybrid cell was never

meant to become a chimera, as it is an artistic attempt of questioning the current biotechnological

possibilities, from which the impossibility of the mythological man-wolf emerges in all its poetics.

Instead, it suggested that if we care for Planet Earth and our survival upon it, we might as well

morph into creatures that treat their environment with more consideration than we do” (‘K-

9_Topology’ par. 5).

“The cat mistook her for her mother / And began suckling right away, / Moved, Margot let it carry on / Good girl
48

Margot” (tran. author).

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Smrekar’s vision in this project is close to Butler’s The

Xenogenesis Trilogy. Hybridity of the human species is an

idea as old as humanity: mythologies are rife with human

hybrids (consider Minotaur, centaurs, sphinxes, etc. in

Figure 55 The lion-man sculpture from Germany Greek mythology). The novelty of Smrekar’s project is
(dated to 37,000 years ago).
the technological application of the hybridity and the
Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lion_man_photo
provocative approach to it, i.e. stepping in the socially

forbidden and uncharted territory of a human breastfeeding a nonhuman and creating

human/nonhuman embryos, regardless of their social kinship. Bioart further illuminates the fact that

in science today, hybrid organisms are both a fact and a science-fiction fantasy that operates in the

realm of a factual scientific seriousness. Cartography, literature, visual arts, and other disciplines have

long merged fact and fiction as well as human form with nonhuman forms—something that is not

traditionally expected of quantitative disciplines. For example, in Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History

(77-79 CE) the natural world is a construction of the mythic and the empirical, seamlessly without

contradiction. Literature and the arts have found means of addressing and coming to terms with the

change of the most fundamental practices and concepts around the human. Through the proposed

framework of the artificial humanities, they can be studied by extracting their vocabularies, concepts,

philosophical stakes, and human implications.

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7 Conclusion: Back to Mythologies

This dissertation examines the twentieth-century Western literature that fits into the Pygmalion

paradigm or relates to the Pygmalion myth and, more broadly, to questions of human creation and

enhancement in conversation with the latest developments in science and technology. By

investigating what is human, already-human, and not-yet-human in terms of language, paralysis, pathology,

reproduction, and hybridity, this project builds a novel interdisciplinary framework, which I have

termed artificial humanities, for discussing biotechnological, neurotechnological, and AI engineering

through a literary lens. The artificial humanities framework could be extended to other technologies

and natural sciences. This dissertation is based in comparative literature and stretches from medical

and health humanities to bioethics and artificial intelligence ethics, the history of science and

technology, disability studies, and future studies, providing scaffolding for literature-based inquires

in women and gender studies, ethnic studies, film and media studies, and further directions.

Attempting to outline the fundamental ontological question of the human essence is an ambitious

and self-defeating goal that nonetheless helps to inform ethical dilemmas brought forth by new

technologies that we as a society need to deal with immediately. In this dissertation I have examined

the question What is human? is examined from different angles and disciplines, with a focus on AI

chatbots, neurotechnology used for heavily paralyzed people, and assisted reproductive technology.

My main thesis lies on the premise that current framing and defining of the human takes place in

STEM, unbeknown to engineers and scientists who are creating and re-defining the human by their

practices which seemingly focus on the nonhuman alone. I argue that literature and literary

scholarship have been in a privileged position to be able to reflect on the questions pertaining to

new technologies, thanks to the philosophical insights and space for speculation that are largely

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inaccessible to quantitative sciences. The finding that the humanities should be a part of every

technological practice calls for a reevaluation and restructuring of research and education.

Interdisciplinarity was the first step towards the merging of disciplines, but a more practical and

malleable approach is needed in which both humanities and engineering benefit from each other.

This dissertation shows that literary contributions to scientific and technological developments

could and should be more substantial and beneficial to the most pertinent technological dilemmas in

research as well as in general conversation. The main goal of this project is to pave the way for

literary studies and related disciplines to research the philosophical stakes and the human

implications of novel technologies. Specifying the relevance of literature and humanities in fields

where they are not traditionally present and conventionally found is especially pertinent to the crisis

of liberal arts education.

Animation and humanization of a nonhuman entity is the heart of the Pygmalion myth, the central

trope of this dissertation. The axis of the human-nonhuman relationship as examined here is always

between the human creator or the human user and the (technological) creation. As a counterpart to

creator-created and lover-beloved relationships, this axis is paralleled with the characters from a

variety of the Pygmalion paradigm texts. These factual-fictional parallels are especially useful in

discussing ethical dilemmas raised by novel technologies and building a framework that enables non-

literary disciplines to include literary texts in the discussion on technology ethics.

In this project, the Pygmalion myth framing helps to indicate three related phenomena relevant to

today’s technologies which the myth has introduced throughout its literary and cinematic history: 1)

development of speech and agency in Pygmalionesque creations, 2) pygmalionism and paralysis as

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medical diagnoses, and 3) human-nonhuman reproduction. Although the Pygmalion myth has been

widely discussed in literary scholarship and beyond (e.g. the Pygmalion effect in psychology), the

three phenomena in focus here have been largely disregarded. New technologies and the ethics

surrounding them have been addressed in a variety of humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields,

which tend to employ literary examples to present an issue at stake or illustrate a point, assuming

some references, such as Frankenstein or Gattaca, as common knowledge. Nonetheless, studies that

delve into an actual analysis of literary works in relation to novel technologies are surprisingly rare in

literary scholarship (as opposed to social sciences). In this dissertation, using literature as a baseline

for discussing challenges in technology ethics turned out to be fruitful with findings not only in texts

that have not yet received much scholarly attention (such as the Slovenian and Serbian short stories)

but also within canonized texts (such as Pygmalion and Brave New World).

The overall finding of this dissertation concerns the theory of posthumanism, which has split into

two streams, the more practical ontological posthumanism and more theoretical critical

posthumanism, the latter of which often makes claims that it has overcome anthropocentrism. I

show that anthropocentrism still permeates both streams and suggest a more interconnected

approach to defining the human. The evidence for this approach is found in every chapter. In the

posthuman language chapters (1 and 2), I demonstrate the demand for galateas of all sorts—AI

systems, social robots, animals of different species, and humans of lower class—to mimic normative

human language, behavior, and identity. In the first four chapters, I show the rising interest in

creating humanlike objects (virtual assistants, social robots, sex dolls, etc.) as companions. In the

pygmalionism and paralysis chapters (3 and 4), I address the increasing possibility of enhancing

human bodies and minds with neurotechnology in relation to the levels of personhood ascribed to

severely paralyzed humans and to humanlike entities. In the final chapters on assisted reproduction

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and hybridity (5 and 6), I find that biotechnology has overcome the mimicry of natural reproductive

processes in in-vitro fertilization, threating to alter human evolution in a most anthropocentric way:

by experimenting with our own body tissues, which in the past included living fetuses (e.g. Robert

Goodlin’s experiments with artificial wombs) and most recently IVF embryos and now-living infants

(the Chinese CRISPR-edited twins dubbed Lulu and Nana). All the technologies discussed here act

both to cure human pathology and to enforce a Pygmalionesque dream of the human as the creator

and the manipulator of life.

Besides this general theoretical argument, the six chapters build a practical framework for using

literature to address current ethical and philosophical dilemmas. Each chapter shows how literature

reflects on current and speculated developments in science and technology. In Chapter 1, I show

how literature anticipates the nascent science of machine language training on the example of G. B.

Shaw’s Pygmalion. In chapter 2, I take Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 and Andrej Tomažin’s and Roald

Dahl’s short stores as examples of literature anticipating questions that will arise with developing AI

technology. In relation to human-machine interface, or machine “interspecies” communication, I

also examine actual and fictional examples (Karel Čapek, Ted Chiang, Julio Cortázar) of animal

communication in humanese, making a claim that a social connection is preliminary to successful

communication with animals as well as machines. In chapter 3, I explore pygmalionism (i.e. ascribing

personhood to objects and humanlike virtual galateas) as a medical and social condition, finding that

our attitudes about this growing practice have shifted towards acceptance. In chapter 4, I

demonstrate through short stories by Zoran Nišković, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), and Roald

Dahl and through memoirs by Phillipe Vigand and Jean-Dominique Bauby how bodily paralysis

affects patients to develop a personal relationship with their co-agents, be they human or

nonhuman. In chapter 5, I detail how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World anticipated in-vitro

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fertilization technology (together with some other technologies it enables, such as gene editing and

artificial wombs) and delve deeper into bioethical issues around current and speculated assisted

reproductive technologies. In chapters 5 and 6, I show how the scientific terminology and visual

technology used in reproductive technologies affect our conceptions of human reproduction as

such. In addition, on the basis of the previous five chapters, I advocate in the final chapter for a

symbiosis with our nonhuman surroundings, based on Octavia Butler’s works.

The project concludes with exploring the notions of hybridity (as transgressing and blending

borders) and interconnectedness (connecting over borders), bringing the Pygmalionesque topic back

to mythologies, which are full of transgressive acts that may result in hybrid creatures. I address

these notions in the biological and reproductive sense; however, the cyborgian idea of an

interconnected hybrid is much broader and also includes computational technology. One such

example is the Estonian mythological creature Kratt which became a synonym for AI in Estonia:

Kratt was a hybrid created out of hay and household objects who became alive when a (Faustian)

pact was made between Kratt’s master and the devil, allowing the master to make the creature do

any kind of menial labor (Haynes par. 1). If we began with a simple examination of the vocabulary

around terms like human and humanlike as they are used by AI and social robotics companies as

well as by neurotechnological and biotechnological laboratories, we would pave the way for

extracting new vocabularies and ideas that support their practices. Literature, as an active podium for

carrying and reinterpreting mythologies and traditions, a pioneer of ideas and their repercussions,

and a critical tool to reshape conceptualizations and values, offers a venue to distinguish, appraise,

and revise the meanings of novel technological practices.

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