Be a Body: Exploring Post-Humanism Through the Music of Grimes.
Post-humanism is hard to define in a single paragraph. To put it simply, that is if I can, post-humanism is the philosophy that challenges what it means to be human. It crosses the boundaries of the meanings we’ve created about the human condition, it shuts down the view that humans are more important than other species, and it chips away at the grand narratives that support humanist philosophies.
Grimes is a musician and visual artist who offers us a way to explore this concept through her song titles and lyrics. She often employs a cyberpunk aesthetic, a genre known for post-human themes, in her videos and her music. In many of her songs, she weaves lyrics about the body into her synth-pop dream-like beats.
Be A Body from the album “Visions” (2012)
Grimes was quoted saying in the Vancouver Sun that she wrote this song because “everyone I know is always on their f — ing phone on the internet all the time. I just wanted to write a song about being alive in the real world — ‘be a body.’ Our technological advances have increasingly removed the fleshy body from communication. We can send messages now, even without a distinguishable human voice. Much of our existence is online, and some would say there is no digital dualism. By stating “be a body,” it is as if we have the choice to be a body now, instead of being attached to a body in every life scenario.
So what is the real world? Is it the one where we present our fleshy selves, or is the online world part of the real world? Would it be hard to unravel the two? Is self-hood always attached to a body, or can it exist elsewhere? These are contentious questions I don’t have the answer to, but they do challenge whether or not reality has to be embodied. Hans Moravec, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, saw human identity as a pattern of information and that human consciousness could be downloaded on to a computer. Now with social media, how much of your own identity is displayed online? Can people really know who you are outside of the body?
Flesh Without Blood from the album “Art Angels” (2015)
Grimes stated that she wrote this song about a false friendship. Although the term “flesh without blood” only appears in the title, and not in the rest of the song, it is pretty safe to assume that something that has flesh without blood could be seen as artificial and she’s referencing the fake aspect of the friendship.
The title evokes an A.I. feeling, one that could come straight from Bladerunner or Terminator. It also brings up questions about what a real human body is, and what an artificial one is. Does it stop at blood? Do we need flesh and bone? What about pacemakers and artificial limbs? I would say, and I’m sure you would too, that having those wouldn’t make someone any less of a human being. These technologies help us live, and also blur the lines between the binaries that dominate our narratives. What is real, and what is fake is not as easy to define as it once was.
Skin from the album “Visions” (2012)
Skin from the album “Visions” (2012)
Soft skin / You touch me with it / so I know I can be human once again.
I’m sure many of us have said at some point in our lives that we need “to feel human again”. Human or what it feels like to be one is a shifting concept. It isn’t that easy to pinpoint exactly what it means to be a body.
Further Reading:
Most of the ideas in this article came from the following thinkers-
How We Became Post-Human- N. Katherine Hayles.
The Cyborg Manifesto- Donna Haraway
