Finally, I am a brain in a jar
Sometime over the winter, I bought a sweater that I thought I could wear to an author event when my book comes out in March. The sweater doesn’t really fit me by any stretch of the imagination; it’s cropped at an awkward and unflattering length, the sleeves stick out strangely, the neckline is cut too high which on me always gives the impression of a huge, undifferentiated bosom like Quentin Blake’s drawings of Miss Trunchbull. But it has cool decorations on the shoulders—and as far as my book tour is concerned, shoulders are the only body I have.
Normally, a book event would be a source of extreme body-based angst. The idea, of course, is to focus on your writing, the product of your brain—but that brain is inescapably being ferried around in a troubling, unruly vessel, which you are expected to present for public perception. All my anxieties about my imperfect intellectual creation would, I know, catch and tear on this bigger, thornier physical unease: worries about my clothes binding or bulging, about how I fold and bunch when sitting in a chair or don’t know where to put my hands when standing, about not being able to control my facial expressions, about smells. All this is not entirely absent under current conditions—what if Covid rates are too bad for me to risk getting my hair cut by then? What if I can’t get this mask breakout under control? How do I replace my foundation, abandoned at 90% finished for a full year, when the label has rubbed off too much for me to see the shade? But the stress is, at least, confined to the collarbones up.
I hesitate to say that there are silver linings to this pandemic; silver linings are reserved for situations where people are stymied or saddened, not dead. But certainly for some of us, the isolation—not the pandemic per se, but the social distance it requires—comes with benefits. This year and counting of Zoom meetings, iMessage socializing, Crowdcast readings, and a Slack-based office has gotten me closer than I’ve ever been to my fond wish of one day being a brain in a jar.
This is, I suspect, a very 1980s-1990s dream, forged in the space between The Man With Two Brains and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman. (I was likely much more influenced by The Man With Two Brains, which my sister and I watched many times as a child, than by scholarly work on posthumanism, which I didn’t read until graduate school. In the movie, Steve Martin installs the disembodied brain he’s telepathically fallen in love with into the very hot, very recently dead body of his ex-wife. Once embodied, his beloved proceeds to eat compulsively, and it’s a clear position of the movie that she’s “ruined” the body by gaining weight. Martin’s character does decide he still loves her anyway, but to a fat kid, the message came through loud and clear.) People who were young a little later than me, which at this point feels like almost everyone, are instead into things like antidepressants and TikTok. It’s only people for whom the internet was once, however fleetingly, a new idea who still even bother imagining a hypothetical liberation of the mind from the demands of the flesh. Actually, it’s worse than retro—it’s out of touch. The idea that we could essentially upload our consciousness to the cloud was once so audacious that it was called cyberpunk. Now, it feels like tech-bro shit, Google Glass shit, rich and privileged and utterly insulated from any understanding of most people’s day-to-day problems or the structural issues that underlie them. Cyberpunk has been revealed as cybersquare.
My current pandemic trial run of disembodiment, too, is the product of privilege: I get to stay home with my fast internet connection and no kids. But being lucky to have this option doesn’t mean I shouldn’t enjoy it, and though (shocker) I do not enjoy the global disease outbreak part, I do find quite a lot of consolation in being an internet-bound presence. Video is all right—at least I’m only a head—but even better is the return to primacy of the text-only media of my youth, my natural habitat. I’m smarter there, in online textual communication, because even in real-time conversation I type fast enough to check a fact before I make myself sound like a fool. I’m more at ease, free of all the bulk and indignity of the corporeal form, all its compulsive little habits, all its secret miasmas. I’m cleverer, for no reason I can understand—I just have a swifter wit when it’s not ballasted by a physical form. In fact, as the dim, faltering light at the end of the tunnel gets stronger and brighter, this is my only regret: that I will soon have to step back into a body, back into the embodied world.
Of course, I have technically been stuck in a body this whole time—it’s just a body that’s also stuck in my house. But the replacement of most in-person activities with digital facsimiles has given me a little sample of the disembodied dream. I have still had to eat—but I haven’t had to choose or consume food in front of friends or strangers, and have been able to rely on mostly nuts, frozen meals, and powdered nutrient slurries. I have still had to exercise—but though I’ve been doing an online dance class “with my friends,” I always keep my camera off, finding that I move easier when I know I’m not observed. I have still had to get dressed—but I’ve switched from my leggings-and-skater-dress uniform, already something of an end run around the demands of fashion, to a sartorial concept I call “shapeless black void.” I have still had to shower and do laundry—but nobody knows when I don’t except my husband, who legally has to love me anyway. At one early group Facetime, a friend noted sheepishly that she had changed out of her sweaty shirt before the call, even though none of us could smell her. I have not been in much danger of making that mistake. If not precisely free of the body, I am at least comparatively free of having it perceived.
It’s a pale shadow of my ideal vision, the posthuman cyberpunk fantasy: the mind shattering its constraints, the glitchy meat electrics that give rise to our consciousness replaced by vast silicon networks, efficient and infinite. In practice this setup means you lose nothing and gain everything, since any pleasant corporeal sensation can just be replicated without mess or encumbrance or risk; you remain of the embodied world, but not in it. (This is presuming, of course, that you haven’t immediately evolved beyond the need for mere pleasant sensations, given that you have total control over your thoughtforms and all human information at your disposal and are thus effectively taking all antidepressants and watching all TikToks simultaneously.) Sensations and experiences remain available to you through your complete integration with the worldwide information network, which by the way is much more comprehensive in this scenario than our own tawdry internet. On the walls of your jar, or more accurately on the walls of your brain itself, you can project an improved shadow of the world.
The same story plays out in the anime Ghost in the Shell: the cyborg Major Kusanagi, recognizing that human identity arises from the limits and boundaries that separate one individual from the next, decides to cast off limits and identity alike. A rogue program called the Puppet Master tempts her with the promise of omniscience: “We have been subordinate to our limitations until now,” it says. “The time has come to cast aside these bonds and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.” When Kusanagi protests that she wants “a guarantee that I can still be myself,” the Puppet Master replies, “There isn’t one. Why would you wish to? … Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.” The meaning of “myself” is found in boundaries between the self and others, and boundaries mean restrictions. Because Kusanagi, unlike Case, isn’t human, she can—and does—cast off the barriers of selfhood and become “the whole show.” But this trope—the transcendence of machines, and the yearning and ultimate failure of humans held back by the limits inherent in their identities—exists in cyberpunk because we can’t do that. We can’t escape the body or the ego and, worse, we can’t even really want to—because the sacrifice it entails, the loss of the self, makes the idea of “wanting” meaningless. We are pathetic little humans, chained in our own humanity, writing fables about the triumph of machines. All that said, it doesn’t really matter if we are philosophically capable of transcending the body or not, since it’s definitely not physically possible and never will be. (Fifteen years ago, Ray Kurzweil predicted that the “Singularity,” the moment when technology advanced to the point where it allowed humans to move beyond biology, would hit in 2045; we now know that we’ll be deep in climate crisis by then and any putative Singularity will be at best a niche concern.) I’m just thinking about it, I suppose, because my beautiful experiment with living in the computer may be chugging very slowly to an end. There are many things wrong with the vaccine rollout on both a functional and a structural level; it’s too paltry and too chaotic and much too buffeted by systemic inequities. But it is also happening, really and non-theoretically, nudging the idea of “when this is over” from a wistful meme to a distant but actual date. Which means that, as we round the corner into a year of this strange isolation, I need to give some thought to the concept of bundling myself back into a body. Needless to say, I hate that concept. But I also don’t have much of a choice. The essence of humanity is circumscription; we are defined more by what we don’t know than what we do, more by what we can’t do than what we can. Even in a posthuman future—or, in this case, a posthuman endless pandemic present where time is meaningless—that drive for the sense of individual identity we can’t quite make ourselves give up, which is fundamentally a drive for limitation, pulls us back into the body. I don’t plan to make any kind of peace with the idea, but peace is beside the point: you don’t accept this the way you accept a job offer, you accept it the way you accept the inevitability of death. These are the wages of selfhood: the limitations and flaws, the vast swathes of ignorance, the bunchy butts and awkward hands, the sweat and the food in our teeth, the pitiful admiration of fictional intelligences that can achieve a wholeness we will always be denied. I ran an errand recently, which is rare—apart from taking walks, I have been genuinely disconnected from the physical world, almost certainly beyond what’s epidemiologically necessary or mentally great. In the course of the errand I had brief friendly interactions with four whole human people: the tailor I was dropping off a garment with, the owner and manager of my local coffeeshop, and a neighbor whose bulldog I stopped to pet. When I got home, I nearly cried over the magic and mundanity of it all. How normal, to have a fleeting casual interaction, and how absolutely outlandish. In-person socializing can often be excruciating for me, for reasons that aren’t worth getting into here, but these low-stakes pleasantries used to do the trick of making me feel grounded. In their absence I have settled for simply not feeling grounded at all, which goes perfectly with disembodiment: what use is the ground to a cloud? Being briefly pummeled with these very human encounters—four in no more than half an hour!—felt like being an astronaut plunging back into gravity, testing out the new old familiar unfamiliar pressure. Right now it’s crushing, but you also know you used to stand upright under it, and being encumbered this way was… good? Not good, but right. The weight was natural. The weight was what it meant to live on Earth. The errand, by the way, was an alteration to a dress I want to wear for a book event. This alteration is specifically for the purpose of making it look better on Zoom or Crowdcast, since it’s not like it has to fit well, which it doesn’t, but who cares. For now, at least, I still get to exist only down to the shoulders. Perhaps one day, inch by inch, reluctantly, I will emerge.