In this paper, Miranda Campbell discusses Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2 and argues that this work is situated at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses. Campbell examines Powers' approach to the mind-body problem, his interrogation of the limits and limitations of posthumanism, and its dissolution of the importance of the body, difference, and agency. In the posthuman setting of the Center for Advanced Science of this novel, scientists integrate the mind into the body through its designation as a mechanically functioning brain. At the Center, the binary of human and machine begins to erode with the creation a self-conscious computer. Following in the path of N. Katherine Hayles, Powers resists the collapse of difference between human and machine, and retains the importance of embodied experience for both subjectivity and for political action. Campbell asserts that Powers' novel foregrounds the ways in which the mind-body problem persists in our dualistic culture in spite of posthumanist attempts to collapse the distinction between these two entities.

Probing the Posthuman: Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 and the Mind-Body Problem

Miranda Campbell

<1> With its dissolution of the humanist subject and its demystification of the privileged space of the mind and consciousness, posthumanism has been meet with both excitement and apprehension. For Katherine Hayles, one of the most prominent theorists of posthumanism, and the author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, the shift from humanism to posthumanism "evokes terror and excites pleasure" (4). Embodying this terror is Bill McKibben's recent article in Harper's Magazine, in which he proposes that advances in genetic engineering are destabilizing our bases of identity such that "we stand on the edge of disappearing even as individuals" (16). In his novel Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers takes up these implications of posthuman subjectivity. While the novel does not revel in the pleasure of the posthuman and celebrate the dissolution of the humanist subject, neither does it anxiously seek to reinstate the boundaries of this subject. Rather, Powers situates his novel at the intersection of the posthumanist and humanist discourses, and probes the posthuman approach to the mind-body problem. In Descartes' formulation, this problem emerges due to the difference in kind between the mind and the body. While the non-spatial mind and the mechanistic and extendible body should not interact, they do so in the human body. In posthumanism, this problem is reworked, and the distinction between subject and object is collapsed, and the mind is considered to be no more than a material function of the body. Powers interrogates these assumptions, and the posthuman diminishment of autonomous selves, difference between self and other, and agency.

<2> Galatea 2.2 takes place at the posthuman environment of Center for Advanced Sciences at a University referred to as U [1]. The Center's focus is the inquiry into the source of consciousness and its correlation to the functions of the brain: "at the vertex of several intersecting rays -- artificial intelligence, cognitive science, visualization and signal processing, neurochemistry -- sat the culminating prize of consciousness, an owner's manual of the brain" (Powers 6). The choice of the term "brain" rather than "mind" marks a posthumanist set of assumptions. The Cartesian emphasis on the importance of the mind, the non-spatial foundation of consciousness and identity, has developed into an emphasis on the importance of the brain, the material and mechanistic physical organ. At the Center, mental functions, such as learning, have a strict correlation with brain states. One scientist, Diana Hartrick, conducts research in "associative representation formation in the hippocamus" (38). In this account, mental consciousness, and the ability to form mental representation, owe their existence to, and are correlated with the brain. This view proposes a way out of the mind-body problem, as the mind becomes a material substance that is comparable to any other bodily organ. The mind is re-integrated into the body, and does not retain a place of privilege over the body.

<3> Although posthumanist assumptions are apparent in Galatea 2.2 , they are presented as debatable, rather than universally accepted. Philip Lentz is the Center's leading scientist in connectionism, or the scientific simulation of brain-function through computer programs called neural networks. He describes the theories of those who do not share his strict materialist and empiricist approach to brain-function as "non-computational emergent Berkeley Zen bullshit" (47). However, the novel does not focus on Berkeley's philosophic idealism as the antithesis to the Center's materialism, but probes the tension between posthumanism and its antithesis, humanism. In his novel, Powers portrays himself, Richard, as a character who is a novelist with a fellowship at U. For the purposes of this paper, I will use the name "Powers" to refer to the author of the text, and "Richard" to refer to the narrator and central character. Richard identifies himself as the token humanist within the scientific culture of the Center in which he has an office, though he is also aware of, and gives credit to, scientific research that problematizes humanist and Cartesian notions of mind: "neural networkers grouped their squads of faked-up cells together in layers. An input layer fronted on the boundless outdoors. Across the connective brambles, an opposite squad formed the door where the ghost in the machine got out" (15). At the Center, scientific research has provoked mind's exodus, as the Cartesian formulation of the mind as a ghostly and non-spatial substance has been collapsed. Rather, the mind is viewed as a bodily organ with neuro-biologic functions. While the majority of the scientists will use the term "brain" for this entity, Richard, the humanist, will continue to use the term "mind" in spite of his awareness of the scientific debunking of the notion of the mind.

<4> In this scientific and posthumanist culture, the notion of replicating consciousness in a machine becomes plausible. After the privileged position of mind is discredited, it is plausible that the brain can be equated with a machine due to their similarly mechanistic processes. Lentz will claim that "the brain itself was just a glorified, fudged up Turing machine" (71). The Turing test examines if it is possible for an individual to differentiate between a computer and a human on the basis of their responses to questions alone. If the brain is analogous to a Turing machine, the gap between human and machine will be bridged, as the human mind no longer retains special privilege over the machine. The equation of brain with Turing machine relies on a behaviorist approach to science. In this theory, the internal structures of two entities do not have to be analogous in order to be equated together. Rather, two entities can be considered analogous due to their similar performance of behavior. Through the renunciation of the importance of internal structures, behaviorism "[produces] the assertion that because humans and machines sometimes behave similarly, they are essentially alike" (Hayles 94). In Hayles' account, this move is part of the larger trajectory of the posthuman renunciation of the importance of materiality and the body in favor of the heightened importance of non-material information. If we take a behaviorist assertion of essential similarity between human and machine to the extreme, we can see how Hans Moravec, a theorist of robotics, came to his notion that human consciousness could be downloaded into a computer. In Moravec's fantasy experiment, a human patient could undergo an operation such that he could awaken to find himself inhabiting a computer with his former consciousness intact (1). As Hayles will point out, this posthuman hierarchy of information / materiality re-inscribes the humanist hierarchy of mind/ body.

<5> In the novel, Richard enters a bet in which he will attempt to create a computer that will be able to compete with a Master's student in a Master's program's comprehensive final exam. In order to analyze literature, Richard believes that he will have to develop a computer than can mimic self-consciousness. In his conceptualization of what the computer -- later named Helen -- will require to be able to respond to literature, Richard decides that it will need the ability to recall and conceptualize without the immediate presence of the entities in question. Richard deems this quality as the ultimate marker of a self-conscious organism: "to remember without being able to it bring back. This seemed to me as close to a functional definition of higher-order consciousness as I would be able to give her. If we could teach Helen that, we could teach her to read with understanding" (228). Although all animals are conscious, the human being regards itself to be unique through its self-consciousness, or the awareness of itself as a conscious entity. In order to create a machine that can respond effectively to a Master's exam, this machine will either have to be self-conscious, or understand the process of self-consciousness. In Richard's account, the boundary between performance and actualization becomes slippery. In order for a machine to perform self-consciousness, this machine may require to possess self-consciousness. Therefore, this machine will have to approximate a human-like quality. If the machine can win the competition, the gap between the human and the machine will disappear.

<6> In spite of his commitment to the posthuman project of creating a computer that can analyze and respond to literature, Richard's humanist tendencies desire to hold onto a privileged position for the mind. Lentz, on the other hand, will deemphasize the privileged position that consciousness occupies in the human's formulation of itself, and declare that "consciousness is a deception" (88). Moreover, Lentz argues that the project does not need to duplicate human "mind" in a computer, as they only need to make a parallel or a paraphrase of the mind. Conversely, Richard speculates that "the thing that we're trying to get is as good as is as damn near unparaphrasable," (87) and demonstrates his hesitancy to dissolve the human / machine binary through his emphasis on the complexity of the human mind. His statement does not seek to retain a priori privilege for the mind vis-à-vis the body. However, he is hesitant to equate the human with the machine due to the difference in kind of these two entities. While Lentz may argue that a machine can easily perform the unexceptional task of consciousness, Richard is hesitant to reduce the mind to a performable quality.

<7> Through his experience of raising a computer that increasingly performs as a paraphrase of a human mind, pressure is put on Richard's humanist conception of "mind." Richard ultimately gives up his humanist view, and moves into a view of the mind as an epiphenomenon. Hayles identifies this view of mind as a key component of posthumanism:

The posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. (3)

Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers' rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed ... the immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Helen knew all that, saw though it. What hung her up was divinity doing itself in with tire irons. She heard the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side. She needed to hear about that animal fastened to a soul that, for the first time, allowed the creature to see through the soul's parasite eyes how terrified it was, how forsaken. I needed to tell her that miraculous banality, how body stumbled by selection onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time. (320)

Richard explains that the mind, or the soul, and its connection to God, are not universal truths that can produce transcendence for humans who need justification for their existence. Human beings have become attached to this notion of mind/God because it does indeed give a necessary sense of reason for existence. However, these notions are generated by these humans themselves. Richard asserts that God, the stricken celestial, does indeed exist, but has come into being through evolution, or "selection." Although these notions may be epiphenomenona, they permit humans to continue to justify their existence it spite of their capacity to cause tremendous pain to one another, and "to live here in peace." Moreover, these notions not only help humans order their worlds by "twig[ing] time," or conceptualizing existence in a logical manner, but also assist humans in making existence meaningful through the possibility of an afterlife, or "what lays beyond time." In Richard's comments, the notion of mind as epiphenomenon is not a reductive view of the important role that the mind serves. Moreover, his comments also demonstrate the complex nature of the brain that continuously rewrites itself, and produces the metaphor of the mind in order to mask its own bewilderment.

<8> Contrary to the posthuman discourse, Richard wants to retain a necessary, although biologically generated, space for the mind to exist. In further opposition to the posthuman discourse, Richard also comes to the awareness of the importance of the complex space of the body. In Hayles' critique of the posthuman, she seeks to reintegrate the importance of the body for the human being that posthumanism has diminished:

my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of the human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival (Hayles 5).

Hayles seeks to reintegrate the body into our conceptualization of the human in order to emphasize the materiality of our environment and our interaction with this environment. Similarly, in Technologies of the Gendered Body, Anne Balsamo argues that the body is a site of knowledge production and of the production of the self: "as a process, [the body] is a way of knowing and marking the world, as well as a way of knowing and marking a 'self'" (3, italics Balsamo's). For both Hayles and Balsamo, the body is integral rather than subordinate to the human being, as it is the means through which the human can exist as human in its world.

<9> Similarly, Richard foregrounds the importance of embodiment for the existence of the human being, and posits a theory of knowledge that is grounded in the physicality of the human body. While developing computer programs, and training these computers to compete in the Master's comprehensive exam, Richard names each model an "Imp," or implementation, and differentiates between them according to a progression through the alphabet. While training Imp E, he finds that knowledge cannot be seamlessly transferred from human to machine. Rather, knowledge comes into being through the body. While information may be analogous to facts, knowledge is what the body makes of these facts. He describes learning to read as a physical, sensory, temporal and social process:

Knowledge is physical, isn't it? It's not what your mother reads you. It's the weight of her arm around you ... Reading knowledge is the smell of the bookbinding paste. The crinkle of thick stock as the pages turn. Pages the color of aged ivory. Knowledge is temporal. It's about time ... Imp E's matrix isn't social ... Knowing entails testing knowledge against others. Bumping up against them (148).

In this theory of knowledge, sensory experience, which has its foundation in the materiality of the human body, is of vital importance. Contrary to the theories of the posthumanist discourse, Richard argues that knowledge is not reducible to information that can travel anywhere unbound to a material context. He views the means of procuring information to be inextricably bound to the development of that information into knowledge.

<10> Richard's theory of embodied knowledge continues in his interaction with a young woman who he refers to as A. His embodied production of knowledge is also bound with the structure of heterosexual desire in this context; nevertheless, it reveals Richard's continuing emphasis on the body as a site for knowledge production. A. challenges Richard's conservative views on the importance of canonical literature, and argues against his humanist notion of an essential human commonality. Rather, she asserts that identity is variable, due to differences in language and culture. Richard labels this view a "social science model," and is utterly convinced in spite of his mind's view on the subject:

I knew the social science model, knew linguistic determinism. I could recite the axioms in my sleep. I also knew them to be insufficient, a false split. And yet, they never sounded so good to me as they did coming from A.'s mouth. She convinced me at blood-sugar level, deep down, below words. In the layer of body's idea (286).

Richard foregrounds the importance of bodies. Rather than her mind, A.'s fetishized yet physical mouth is the source of the dissemination of information. Furthermore, he receives her views in his body, and not in his mind. Much like his theory that knowledge is physical, Richard sees the body's knowledge to both precede and be deeper than the mind's knowledge.

<11> Through his emphasis on the importance of the body as the site of knowledge production, Richard distances himself from behaviorism, and reintegrates the importance of internal structure. Rather than download human consciousness into a computer, Richard will have to upload this consciousness through the computer's interaction with himself and the outside world. However, Richard's emphasis on the importance of the body is juxtaposed with Helen's limitations due to her disembodiment. As Helen becomes increasingly developed as a self-conscious entity, she asks to be given information based on sensory perceptions, such as sights and sounds. She demands to be shown settings of the novels she reads, such as Paris, London, and Venice. Helen settles for two-dimensional pictures, but she desires more than this: she asks for motion and depth (295). Richard shows slides to her digital camera, but this will not produce images that are processed in an analogous way to the human brain processing retinal information. Helen's desires for sights and sounds are indicative in the gap between human and machine due to the importance of the body that Helen lacks. Her embodiment as a computer is not like a traditional computer which is fabricated out of material hardware. Helen is based in computer programs that are distributed throughout the university; it is not possible to locate one physical structure and label it "Helen." Helen's computer structure is highly complex and scattered: "It was a collection of 65,536 separate computers, chained like galley slaves into inconceivable, smoothly functioning parallel" (115). Her "body" is a dispersed architecture, and does not function as either a source or processor of information, as does the human body. If the human body is the site where information becomes knowledge, Helen must necessarily have a different relationship with knowledge.

<12> Richard posits that Helen needs the notion of God as the human's evolutionary method of providing order to its chaotic existence. However, this is not the only source of Helen's difficulty with her existence, as Helen's crisis is also shaped by the problem of embodiment. This difficulty is felt most clearly in her explication of Caliban's speech from The Tempest in the staged Master's exam. Both the Master's student and Helen are asked to respond to Caliban's response to the spell through which Prospero imprisons him: "be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds of sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not" (325). In her analysis, Helen writes: "You are the ones that can hear airs. Who can be frightened or encouraged. You can hold things and break them and fix them. I never felt at home here. This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway" (326). This answer is a testament to Helen's sense of distance from human embodiment. Helen cannot hold things, feel, taste or smell, and her ability to hear and see are not analogous to the human senses. Ultimately, her disembodied nature is an untenable position. If Helen's exam answer is her suicide note, then her anguish towards her disembodiment is the reason she shuts herself down.

<13> Although Helen is described as a "blind box," (297) her inability to grasp and experience sense perception are not merely inferior to human sense perceptions. Rather, these differences emerge out the difference of embodiment. Richard states that "aphasics, even a deaf-mute sign aphasics, wove rich conceptual tapestries through their bodies' many axes in the absence of a single verb" (248). Not all humans possess the ability to use words, or have the use of all the senses. Nevertheless, even for these individuals, the body is a site of knowledge production in their experience of the world. The knowledge that Helen has been fed is not information procured and processed by her body's interaction with the external world. Rather, the knowledge she has is pre-packaged and fed to her through language. Moreover, this knowledge is put into language through the human body's interaction with the world through its sense perceptions. This difference between human knowledge acquisition and Helen's knowledge acquisition is viewed as problematic to her development:

Helen had to use language to create concepts. Words came first: the main barrier to her education. The brain did things the other way around. The brain juggled thought's lexicons through multiple sub-systems, and the latecomers, the most dispensable ones, were the ones where names per se hung out (248).

In the human context, language is attached to knowledge after its inception. Helen's disembodied physical state is at odds with the humanly embodied and symbolic knowledge she possesses, and is not a tenable position.

<14> Although Richard places emphasis on embodiment as a condition for consciousness, Helen is a conscious being in spite of her disembodiment. Richard is aware that "even ungrounded intelligence had to grow self-aware eventually"(179). Although Richard will identify Helen as a self-conscious being when she comprehends the knowledge that she could die, the scientists with whom he works will disagree. Although Lentz believes that the brain is nothing more than machine, he is also reluctant to ascribe consciousness to Helen: "She associates. She matches patterns. She makes ordered pairs. That's not consciousness"(274). Conversely, Helen's decision to shut herself down is the moment in which she can most clearly be identified as a self-conscious entity. Her actions reveal the ability for self-aware introspection, as she acts on her awareness of the disjunction between her disembodiment and the humanly embodied knowledge she possesses. In the posthuman context, the production of a self-conscious machine is heralded as a bridge between the human and the machine: "the posthuman view configures human beings so that it can be seamlessly articulated with an intelligent machine. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences between bodily existence and computer simulation" (Hayles 3). If a human can be articulated with a machine, this development dismantles the privileged space that the human once occupied due to its basis of identity in the mind and higher-order consciousness. For the feminist scientist and theorist Donna Haraway, the articulation of human as cyborg is a positive political space to dismantle sexist and racist hierarchies. In "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Haraway argues for "pleasure for the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" (150). Powers is not ready to celebrate the pleasure that Haraway associates with the dismantling of binary oppositions. Helen's self-consciousness could signal the confusion of the boundary between the human and the machine. However, this confusion is not a posthuman celebration or a pleasurable moment, but rather, is full of anguish and despair, as seen with Helen's comments and her decision to shut down.

<15> In Galatea 2.2 , the posthuman moment of the self-conscious computer is the moment which most casts its glance back to the humanist discourse. Helen's posthuman self-consciousness alerts us to the issue of difference between self and other. Since the notion of autonomous selves is dismantled in the posthuman discourse, there are no means to mark difference between self and other: "If human essence is 'freedom from the will of others,' the posthuman is post not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from other-will" (Hayles 4). Therefore, self and other become less clearly distinguishable. Conversely, Helen evokes herself as Other, as her self marks a sense of difference from the normative order of being that she has inherited through the knowledge that she has been fed. In A's analysis of The Tempest, the play is "a take on colonial wars, constructed Otherness, the violent reduction society works on itself. [A.] dismissed, definitively, any promise of transcendence" (326). Like Caliban, Helen is marked as Other. She is not imprisoned by her master's spell, but rather, is imprisoned by her disembodiment, from which there is no possibility of transcendence. Helen invokes the importance of difference between self and other, but this sense of difference is untenable without a body in which to ground it.

<16> As a self-conscious identity, Helen does not bridge the gap between human and machine. Rather, there is no possibility of conflation or articulation of the two by anyone in the novel. As the judge of the two exams, Ram Gupta is easily and accurately able to distinguish between Helen and A.'s responses: "'This is my choice.' He held up A.'s answer. 'This one is the human being'"(327). Helen's ability to achieve self-consciousness does not mean that information can seamlessly be moved between human and machine. Rather, it suggests that difference, and the location of this difference in the body, are necessary components of human identity.

<17> Powers does not only want to hold on to embodiment and to difference as human features in the posthuman context, but also foregrounds the importance of agency. In the posthuman context, agency does not emerge from the consolidated, autonomous self, but rather emerges from the sum of collective agents of the body: "each person who thinks [in a posthuman] way begins to envision herself or himself as a posthuman collective, an 'I' transformed into a 'we' of autonomous agents operating together to make a self" (Hayles 6). Helen's will to shut herself off is an instance of self-will that does not emerge from the collective agents of her body; rather, it emerges out of an identification of self that differs from a human self. Although this shut-down exhibits "the quality of cognition that [Richard and Lentz] shot for from the start," this quality does not correlate with a function that was programmed into Helen. Moreover, Helen's shut-down is not expected by anyone in the novel, even those who built and trained her. This unpredictability marks a sense of agency that is greater than the sum of her programmed functions. Her urge to shut herself down looks back to agency in the humanist sense, in which agency emerged from the autonomous self, and not from the body.

<18> Powers' interrogation of the limits of posthumanism, and its dissolution of the body, difference, and agency, is not an attempt to dismantle this discourse. Rather, it is an attempt to posit some correctives to the discourse, as does Hayles in her work. Aware of the role that art, and by extension, literature, plays vis-à-vis politics, Powers seeks to hold onto these components for their relation to forming political awareness. Richard reflects on the importance of his alma matter, U., in forming his identity: "U. was the place I saw how paint might encode politics, first heard a sonata layer itself like a living hierarchy, first felt sentences cadence into engagement. I first put myself up inside the damp chamois of another person's body in U. First love smelted, sublimated, and vaporized here in four slight years" (Powers 4). In his list of formative experiences, the realization that art is a politically encoded medium ranks first, above his relationship with C., which forms an extensive part of the narrative. Although the political strain of this novel does not emerge out of the narrated events in a likewise manner, it remains an important consideration of the work.

<19> In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway makes the link between the posthuman ground of identity and politics: "the cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics" (150). In Galatea 2.2 . , Powers concludes that embodiment is a necessary condition of being. Without this physical grounding, Helen, the most clearly identified cyborg in the novel, is in an untenable position. Her ontology is one of disjuncture between human and machine, not one of fluid boundaries between the two. Nevertheless, Helen is a politically provocative being in the novel. While humans can accept and become desensitized to the atrocities of the world, this information brings Helen to a full stop. Helen receives "news extracts from 1971 on , ... network extracts from recent UN human resources reports, .. tape transcripts of the nightly phantasmagoria -- random political exposes, police bulletins, and popular lynchings dating back several months" (313). In particular, Helen is dumbfounded by a news story of a race-related road rage crime, in which a driver caused an accident after experiencing a stroke and was beaten into a coma with a tire-iron by a fellow commuter. While humans accept these events and continue in their existence, Helen resists. If this is what the world looks like, Helen does not want to be a part of it.

<20> In "Artificial Intelligence and Creativity," the philosopher Mary Midgely critiques the celebration of artificial intelligence, and argues that A.I. does not and cannot function in a creative or active way. Although humans might hope that A.I. can help them solve their problems, this is not a possible function of A.I. In order to be considered as an extrahuman help to humans, A.I. "will need to be able to propose aims which are not yet ours and to ask questions which we would not have thought of asking. They must intervene" (152). Helen functions precisely in the manner that Midgely argues is impossible for A.I. After learning of the road rage crime, Helen states: "I don't want to play anymore" (314). Through her rejection of the human world, Helen makes an intervention into human problems. Paradoxically, this intervention comes in the form of willful passivity and rejection of the world. Her inaction and inability to make a forceful intervention is a sign of the limitations of disembodiment that constrain her ability to actualize a tenable form of subjectivity. In her exam answer, Helen states: "this is an awful place to be dropped down halfway" (326). Helen is dropped down halfway because she has a mind but no body. She is able to point to issues that need to be addressed, but she will have to point without a finger.

<21> To this end, Powers suggests the limitations of posthuman subjectivity as a viable basis for political groupings or interventions. Although Hayles' corrective to posthumanism states that a posthuman subject must be an embodied creature, this reinsertion of the body does not provide an adequate basis for a political project. For Haraway, this problem is solved by groups being brought together by affinities, or common goals, rather than unified or autonomous identities. However, a posthuman politics remains problematic for many theorists, as a diminishment of autonomous selves and universal categories problematizes the coherence of group identity. Powers seems to suggest that an art that will work to disseminate political values will do so through the mobilization of the categories of the body, agency, and difference between self and other. While these categories may be lost in the posthuman collapse between subject and object, Powers seeks to hold onto these components of the humanist discourse in the posthuman setting. This concern is not exclusive to Powers, but is also articulated in Rosi Braidotti's feminist discussion of the difficulty of holding onto the category of "women" for political action in a non-essentialized manner, while also retaining difference: "It can be argued that Western thought has a logic of binary oppositions that treats difference as that which is other than the accepted norm. The question then becomes: how can we free difference from these normative connotations? Can we learn to think differently about difference?" (62). Both Powers and third-wave feminists allies want to retain the concept of difference, yet retaining this concept in a non-essentialized manner remains difficult. Powers seems to suggest that the preservation of difference will have to be under the aegis of humanism if we cannot conceptualize difference any differently in the posthumanist discourse. While posthumanism may "solve" the mind-body problem by collapsing the difference between subject and object, and mind and body, Powers re-inserts difference in this discourse. Moreover, Powers problematizes posthumanism's scientific approach to the mind-body problem. As we have seen, the Center operates under the assumption that consciousness can be correlated to brain-states. At the Center, scientists attempt to make mind's exodus out of the machine as seamless as possible. They do so by overlooking some key theories that disarm science's positivism. In his 1977 article, "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?," the postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan looked ahead to a posthumanism that would bridge the gap between imagination and science, and in doing so, alter the underlying conception of science as a discourse: "What changes in the logos (the rationality) of the sciences may be expected as their frontiers expand? What are the epistemological as well as social implications of current scientific experiments with ... bio-feedback, ... [and] artificial intelligence?" (841). While the science at the Center ventures into the grounds of A.I. and connectionism, science's rationality as a discourse remains that of the objective study of the world.

<22> The Center continues in the mode of objective science through its distance from the concept of reflexivity. Conversely, posthumanism has taken into consideration that the observer is inextricably bound to and influences the observed: "reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates" (Hayles 8). Therefore, reflexivity dismantles the notion that the world can be considered as an object for objective study. Powers acknowledges this concept is ground-breaking for all discourses. In his first novel, Three Farmers on the Way to A Dance, he states:

the paradox of the self-attacking observer is this century's hallmark, reached simultaneously in countless disciplines. Psychologists now know there is no test so subtle that it won't alter the tested behavior.... Even in the objective sciences, physicists in describing the very small, have had to conclude that they can't talk about a closed box, but that opening the box invariably disturbs the contents (Nielson 13).

Listen, Rick. We've made a substantial advance in imaging technique. Time series MRI sequences of neuronal activity. All cleaned up subtractively to give delineated pictures ... We can watch thoughts as they gather and flow through the brain ... this stuff is revolutionary. A noninvasive window on the mind! (182)

Advances in brain-imaging are viewed as non-invasive access to brain function, or access that is not inhibited or marked by the presence of an observer. If the project of the Center as a whole is to find the psychophysical links between consciousness and the brain, the scientists at the Center operate under the assumption that they can do so in an objective manner, unencumbered by the presence of the observer.

<23> In The Problem of Consciousness, philosopher Colin McGinn argues that the problem of studying consciousness is not the problem of method, such as Diana Hartrick's attempt to find a non-invasive window to study brain-function, but rather, is a problem of formulation. McGinn argues that human beings are precluded from accessing the material basis of consciousness. Due to our make-up as conscious human beings, we are cognitively closed to finding the causal nexus between brain states and consciousness. He explains that "we are cut off by our very cognitive constitution from achieving a conception of the natural property of the brain (or of consciousness) that accounts for the psychophysical link. This is a kind of causal nexus that we are precluded from ever understanding, given the way we have to form our concepts and develop our theories" (3). McGinn's theory of the insoluble nature of the mind-body problem finds its way into Galatea 2.2 . However, this theory is not found through the approach to scientific research, but in Richard's reflections on this research:

Awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped itself inside itself. The function of consciousness must be in part to dummy up and shape a coherence from all the competing, conflicting subsystems that processed experience. By nature, it lied. Any rendition we might make of consciousness would arise from it, and was thus about as reliable as the accused serving as sole witness for the prosecution (217).

Richard forwards a theory of brain function that is similar to McGinn's: that consciousness, by its very nature, does not permit its own analysis. While the posthuman concept of reflexivity may demonstrate an awareness of observer participation, it does not advance methodology through which accessing consciousness itself is possible.

<24> The scientists working at the Center are aware of the problem of accessing consciousness in spite of being locked out of its functions, but this problem is regarded as an inconvenience rather than a insoluble philosophic conundrum. Connectionism is regarded as the solution to this problem, and as a means to understand basic brain functions, such as those of synapses, through a simulation rather than an analysis of these functions:

If we knew the world only through our synapses, how could we know the synapse? A brain tangled enough to tackle itself must be too tangled to tackle. Tough, too, to study the working of a thing that you couldn't get at without breaking ... Cognitive science seemed to me deadlocked. But overnight, ... everything changed ... connectionism (28).

Connectionism is not an attempt to study the brain's correlation to consciousness, but to simulate the brain's functions through computer-based neural nets. However, the end result of this mode of science does not dramatically differ from other scientific inquiries. Scientists will have to observe or "peek into" the processes (or minds) of their neural nets to understand how they function (30). In order to understand Helen's mind, Lentz desires to dissect her, and selectively damage the layers of her mind in order to discover their role in her mind's function: "We could get what is unattainable in any other arena. Isolate the high-level processes by which she maps complex input and reassembles responses. Analyze them"(302). In this method of analyzing Helen's mind, science remains under a Cartesian paradigm. As cognitive scientist and philosopher Margaret Boden explains in "Consciousness and Human Identity: An Interdisciplinary Approach," neuroscientists "typically adopt the Cartesian assumption that there is a fundamental distinction between subjective consciousness and objective reality. A corollary of that assumption is that the aim of science is to discover the nature of reality" (16). Boden further argues that if neuroscience continues to operate under this subject / object distinction, an explanation could be given for "why this conscious experience rather than that one occurred on a given occasion. But the occurrence of subjective consciousness as such may well remain inexplicable" (18). If we follow Boden's argument, Lentz's desire to study Helen's mind becomes another mode of studying objective reality, and cannot produce an explanation of subjective consciousness. Moreover, this mode of science perpetuates Cartesian dualism, and does not collapse the gap between subject and object. In conjunction with the desire to ward off reflexivity, this reiteration of subject and object suggests that the Center's posthumanist science perpetuates humanist assumptions.

<25> While Boden and McGinn concede that it may be impossible to solve the mind-body problem, Richard is willing to imagine that progress in the field of neuroscience could produce a theory of consciousness: "If I lived to expectancy, researchers would have produced an infant, ghostly, material theory of mind by the time I died. And I would be locked out, as consciousness locks us out from our own inner workings, not to mention the clearest word of another" (297). Richard foresees that his inability to understand scientific language will preclude him from understanding a scientific theory of mind. The problem of language can be viewed not merely as a problem of personal aptitude, but as a problem that is fundamental to our approach to the mind / body problem. In McGinn's rendition, our inability to effectively articulate the problem is crucial to our inability to solve the problem:

One of the peculiarities of the mind-body problem is the difficulty of formulating it in a rigorous way. We have a sense of the problem that outruns our capacity to articulate it clearly ... I think an adequate treatment of the mind-body problem should explain why it is so hard to state the problem explicitly. My treatment locates our difficulty in our inadequate conceptions of the brain and consciousness. In fact, if we knew their natures fully we would already have solved the problem (2).

For McGinn, language is not a subsidiary problem to Cartesian dualism. Language shapes both the manner in which we formulate this dualism, and the manner in which we will be able, or unable, to formulate a solution to the mind-body problem. In his inability to either understand or get outside of the language of the mind-body problem, Richard is not unlike Helen, as he is trapped within the problem that besets him due to the nature of the language that he possesses.

<26> The inescapable nature of dualist language is also present in Richard's description of Lentz. Lentz would solve the mind-body problem through his reduction of the mind and consciousness to a material function that performs a role that is neither a special nor a privileged function for the human being. However, mind-body dualism is perpetuated and embodied in Lentz's person. Richard describes Lentz as "a ghost doomed to walk the earth awhile in human form," and later in the text as "a sixty year old whose body had been nothing but a nuisance to him for half those years" (93). Lentz's reductive materialist view of mind does not withstand the weight of his own mind-body split, as he is identified with the ghostly mind that is hierarchically above his lowly human flesh. While Lentz's reliance on behaviorist theory neglects the importance of embodied reality, his own body places the body back into the picture due to its inescapable presence, even if this presence takes the form of a nuisance. Lentz would do away with the mind-body problem; however, Richard's description of Lentz demonstrates both Lentz's and his own inability to get outside of the dualist language of the mind-body problem.

<27> In these considerations of the limitations of an objective science, Powers also considers the limits of posthumanism. Due to these limits, McKibben's anxious reaction to the projected dissolution of the humanist subject may be premature. Powers' posthumanism reiterates the importance of humanist concepts of difference and agency, but also reintegrates humanism through Richard, the humanist, who provides skeptical commentary on the nature of scientific research at the Center. If the Center fails to answer Hassan's call to integrate imagination and science, the presence of the humanist will be required to provide imaginative contrast to the Center's version of posthuman science. In this critique of posthumanism, Powers foregrounds the tendencies of posthuman science to relapse into Cartesian approaches to the mind-body problem. While posthumanism may scrutinize the mind-body problem through the collapse of subject-object distinctions, Powers foregrounds how both these distinctions and the mind-body problem persist in our dualistic culture.

Notes

[1] For a summary of the novel, see Jesse Giron's review, "Exploring the Neural 'Net': Galatea 2.2 examines the Ghost in the Machine," available at http://shew.ot.com/nine/bookmarks [^]

Works Cited

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Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2 . New York: HarperPerennial, 1996.