10.13125/2039-6597/5420
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2039-6597
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28838
Cristina Savettieri
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Between
Posthuman
Entering the Simulacra World. Aesthetic and Cultural Phenomenologies in Literature, Media, and the Arts
Text.Serial.Journal
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Introduction
2022-12-03
2022-12-03
2022-11-30
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i-xix
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Cristina Savettieri
2022/12/03
10.13125/2039-6597/5420
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University of Pisa
2039-6597
24
Posthuman
xix
urn:nbn:it:unica-28838
Entering the Simulacra World. Aesthetic and Cultural Phenomenologies in Literature, Media, and the Arts
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12
           Entering the Simulacra World.
              Aesthetic and Cultural
           Phenomenologies in Literature,
                Media, and the Arts

              Alessandra Ghezzani – Laura Giovannelli
                Francesco Rossi – Cristina Savettieri



Abstract
     This issue of Between aims to investigate the phenomenology of simula-
cra and their range of functions (conceptual, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and
in the media). What is meant here by ‘simulacrum’ is any artificial creature or
phantasm that imitates or replicates the outward form and/or behaviour of
living beings, especially human beings. By doing so, it blurs the boundaries
between life and artifice, human and non-human. As a notion, ‘simulacrum’
covers a variety of hybrid, liminal and often spectral figures populating the
premodern, modern and contemporary imagination: from statues to pup-
pets, from golems to homunculi, from automata to robots, from cyborgs to
avatars and, ultimately, Artificial Intelligence. The case studies collected here
lay the groundwork for an inquiry wherein literary works are assessed from
both the point of view of textual analysis and in connection with the compel-
ling relevance that the theme of simulacra has been gaining in the cultural
sphere, including contemporary debates on the ‘trans-‘ and ‘posthuman’.

Keywords
     Simulacrum; Spectrality; Virtuality; Non-human; Posthumanism




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5420
Ghezzani - Giovannelli - Rossi - Savettieri, Entering the Simulacra World




          Entering the Simulacra World.
             Aesthetic and Cultural
          Phenomenologies in Literature,
               Media, and the Arts

              Alessandra Ghezzani – Laura Giovannelli
                Francesco Rossi – Cristina Savettieri




                   1. Simulation, copy, representation
      When entering the world of simulacra it may not be superfluous to
make a preliminary distinction between simulation and representation. To
represent an object generally means to imitate or copy it, as a referent of re-
ality, while simulation consists in a replication of a real being, object or con-
dition through the dissimulation of their artificial qualities, as if they were
actually real conditions, objects and beings. The whole difference amounts
to this: the simulacrum is not subject to the mimetic regime, because it
does not refer to anything outside of itself. It does not simply imitate, but it
exists autonomously, so to speak – on its own, independently of the being
whose features it assimilates. In Victor Stoichita’s words, then, a simula-
crum is «a fictional object that does not represent. It exists» (2008: 203).
We are dealing with two different – and, in some ways, opposite – models
of fiction, on which Jean Baudrillard reflects in one of the most eloquent
passages of Simulacra and Simulation, where he precisely points out the dif-
ference between representation and simulation:

         Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of
      the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a
      fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the
      utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the
      sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every
      reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by



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     interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole
     edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. (Baudrillard 1995: 6)

      This is, of course, only one of the possible approaches to this matter,
whose implications reach beyond philosophy and literary theory, and con-
cern fiction as a space delegated to a reflection linked to reality in a double
sense: as a reflection of and upon reality. Defining the simulacrum is indeed
a challenging task, not only in light of its many different generic meanings
(artificial being, statue, illusionary image, phantasm), but also because of
the broadness of its implications at the theoretical level. Simona Micali’s
contribution, “Il Simulacro e la Copia: l’immaginario contemporaneo del-
la vita artificiale” [“The Simulacrum and the Copy: The Contemporary
Imagination of the Artificial Being”], lays fundamental theoretical ground-
work for a sharper definition of the notions of copy and simulacrum and
their interplay with identity issues. Building on the opposition posed by
Deleuze between the copy-icon and the simulacrum, the article analyses
some contemporary works presenting hybrid figures of artificial beings
as copies or ‘continuations’ of human beings: the Black Mirror episode Be
Right Back and the novels Permutation City by Greg Evan and Klara and the
Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The issue under scrutiny is whether, in the era of
a pervasive digital mediation, the unstable distinction between copy and
simulacrum which informs the fictional imagination could be a sign of an
ongoing change bearing on the notion of identity, one that blurs the bound-
aries between authentic and simulated, natural and artificial entities.

                             2. Hyperrealities
      Hence, simulacra do not fit into the conventional structures of refer-
entiality. As products of simulation, they rather tend to locate themselves
in a second reality, which overlaps with first-degree reality to the point of
replacing it completely. In order to describe this peculiar phenomenon,
Baudrillard employed the concept of ‘hyperrealism’, which encompass-
es what does not simply imitate the real through an effect of similarity,
but replaces it as well by making itself autonomous or, more precisely,
self-referential. This is a dimension involving «that which is always already
reproduced» per se, so that we find ourselves plunged in «the ‘aesthetic’
hallucination of reality» (1993: 73-74).
      The literary implications of this aspect are manifold. In the article
“Hyperrealities and Simulacra in Goethe’s Faust” [“Iperrealtà e simulacri
nel Faust di Goethe”], Francesco Rossi analyses the German masterpiece


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along the lines of Baudrillard’s philosophy of virtuality. In particular, the
second part of Faust is interpreted in the light of the pre-modern mediati-
zation of experience, in which subjects are considered hybrid and disem-
bodied, floating within what can already be defined as a hyperreality. In
the characters that populate Goethe’s classical-romantic phantasmagoria
one can find reflections of a condition in which the human being proves to
be increasingly dependent upon his artificial creations.
      Be that as it may, simulation and hyperreality are typical features of
contemporaneity (Hayles 1999), and particularly of what has been defined
as the post-medial condition (Eugeni 2015), with its drive towards an ulti-
mate de-materialization and disembodiment of communication, in which
the new media become more and more ubiquitous and pervasive. In “«We
accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented»: The Truman
Show Effect” [“«Accettiamo la realtà del mondo che ci viene presentato»:
l’effetto Truman Show”], Biancamaria Rizzardi pursues a line of inquiry
connected with the notion of a ‘similarity effect’ that ushers in a hyper-
real dimension where counterfeits and fakes half-mockingly take centre
stage. By drawing inspiration from Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) as
well as Marc Augé’s and Jean Baudrillard’s theories, Rizzardi investigates
the features, dynamics and paradoxes of artfully concocted, make-believe
worlds such as the model town in Peter Carey’s American Dreams (1974)
and the theme park in Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998). In particular,
light is shed on the discursive and material processes whereby real places
are eventually superseded by narratively credible ones and on the ‘magic
spell’ that the latter cast on both visitors and readers. These spectacularised
replicas or simulated constructs of late-capitalism postmodernity can be
seen as disturbingly taking on a life of their own. In “White Noise, ovvero
la realtà come ritorno del represso” [“White Noise, or Reality as the Return
of the Repressed”], Stefano Brugnolo highlights the ambivalence of Don
DeLillo’s perspectivation on the ‘civilisation of appearance’ in his famous
novel. He argues that the author is both fascinated by the coming of a new
world and interested in real-life events as opposed to their representations
and simulations. In this sense, the novel can be seen as depicting a ‘return
of the repressed’ built on a disturbing ‘return of reality’.
      The emergence of a simulated reality has also a remarkable impact on
contemporary aesthetics and poetics. Giovanni Melosi’s article, “Simulacri
poetici: estetica dell’automatico e Computerdichtung in ambito germanofo-
no” [“Poetic Simulacra: The Aesthetics of Automation and Computerdich-
tung in the German Context”], tackles this specific question by focusing on
Computerdichtung, a concept that encompasses stochastic and algorithmic


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poetry produced in Germany since the second half of the 20th century. In
this case, the phrase ‘poetic simulacra’ refers to mechanical devices that
can fulfil the requirements of artistic creation, albeit undermining some
theoretical and aesthetic principles on which man-made literature is based,
i.e., authorship and textual referentiality. Indeed, one can hardly overes-
timate the fact that computer-generated poems are not completely acces-
sible through the lens of traditional arguments. As argued by Max Bense,
among others, they do call for a specific poetics of automation.

               3. Archaeologies of the simulacrum
      These first considerations on contemporaneity do not cover all the im-
plications of our topic, which is deeply rooted in the ancient and pre-mod-
ern world. Among its foundational myths one can mention the story of
Narcissus, in whom Andrea Pinotti has recently identified the archetype
of the immersive experience connoting augmented digital realities. The
legendary boy might be seen as a sort of prototype for the «experiencer
who grasps the image as if it were itself reality, and not a mediation of it»
(2021: 19, our translation). Another important archetype is that of Pygma-
lion, the artist who was able to turn one of his sculptures into a real woman.
Besides setting an illustrious precedent in the long series of statues brought
to life by the skill of their creator (albeit often by divine intercession too),
Pygmalion also paves the way for a fictional paradigm. This paradigm is
precisely what the aforementioned Stoichita considers as fundamental for
the investigation of any «artificial construct, devoid of an original model»
and somehow «existing in and of itself», because it «does not necessarily
copy an object from the world, but projects itself into the world. It exists»
(2008: 2).
      The literary representations of the relationship between creator and
creature are often steeped in religious imagery. In “’Ad imaginem suam’.
The Adamic Model and Exclusive Monoanthropism in Human Simulacra”
[“’Ad imaginem suam’. Il modello adamitico e il monoantropismo esclusivo
nei simulacri umani”], Matteo Zupancic shows to what extent the Adam-
ic model of the Biblical tradition can influence literary works on human
simulacra. Turning to some exemplary case studies taken from different
periods and cultural contexts, Zupancic outlines a theoretical framework
concerning the thematic relationship between the maker and his creations,
while also drawing on Warburg’s concept of Nachleben, which enables him
to shed light on a number of crucial topoi of this tradition.
      The archaeologies of the simulacrum are also at the forefront in Marco


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Battaglia’s “Beyond the Wall. Renaissance Embodiments of the Old Norse
God Freyr” [“Beyond the Wall. Epifanie rinascimentali del mito norreno di
Freyr”]. This paper deals with the literary and iconographic tradition of
a well-known Old Norse divine triad, which underwent all sorts of syn-
cretism, starting from 15th-century Sweden. Such images of an allegedly
barbaric world also become an example of a very particular kind of gen-
der transition through simulacra: a form of early, unexpected evidence of
the fluid stereotypes embedded in the concept. Battaglia’s argument thus
capitalises on the metamorphosis of that triad, wherein the male god Fric-
co becomes the (otherwise misplaced) Frigga, in an analogy with the Old
Norse fertility gods of Freyr and Freyja.
      In the backdrop of medieval and pre-modern civilisation, magic and
technology shared a common stem which included all forms of human
interaction with nature via spiritual means. In this context, the simulacra
world comprised homunculi and innumerable golemic creatures (La-
Grandeur 2013) through which alchemists pursued the ancestral dream
of parthenogenesis. Be they man-made or supernatural, those simulacra
were creatures at the edge of the human, whose monstrous features could
take on moral and even metaphysical meanings. Luca Baratta’s “«Shall the
Head neuer come to that Nature requireth». Acefalia come simulacro della
colpa e del caos nell’Inghilterra della prima età moderna” [“Acephaly as
Simulacrum of Guilt and Chaos in Early Modern England”] deals with the
representation of acephaly in early modern English street literature (par-
ticularly throughout the first half of the 17th century) as a symbol of the lack
of guiding principles and, therefore, as a public sign of guilt. Baratta shows
how, in many pamphlets of the period in which monsters were widely
present, deformity played an ambivalent role. On the one hand, the phe-
nomena related to it aroused curiosity, as they were perceived as traces of a
divine message; on the other hand, deformity acted as a means of collective
moralisation and even as a political or religious dispositif.
      Matei Chihaia’s and Alejandro Ferrari’s “Artificial Life in Horacio Qui-
roga: Commercial Advertisements, Cinema, and the Prompted Suspension
of Disbelief” [“Vita artificiale in Horacio Quiroga: gli annunci pubblicitari,
il cinema e la sospensione dell’incredulità”] probes instead how far the
simulacrum’s influence can go in modern popular culture, especially in
connection with the press. By looking at the way in which artificial life is
handled in the works of Horacio Quiroga, a Uruguayan-Argentinian writ-
er, Chihaia and Ferrari extrapolate two different models of literary inven-
tion. The first one is interwoven with the history of technology and owes
much to Quiroga’s own passion for science and the cinema. The second


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one is associated with forms of publication such as the illustrated maga-
zine’s serialised novellas, commercial advertisements and other kinds of
illustrations. The analysis also reconstructs Quiroga’s growth as an author,
thus pointing out how behind the making of the artificial being stands the
making of the artist.

           4. Fictional reconfigurations of the human
      Simulacra can also be seen as special cases of a liminal anthropology
that has always been present in literature (Achilles et al. 2012), even be-
fore it found its way into science fiction (Haney 2006; Caronia 2008). Sim-
ulacra consequently belong to the collective imagination. They could be
approached as fictional articulations of a paradigm in which the human
clearly tends to lose its central position, or, at least, to assume a different
relevance from that of the Vitruvian Man and his glorified place at the
centre of the universe. At the same time, such a centrality was anything but
alien to the status of the hybrid, since it consisted in an uncanny mid-posi-
tion between different instances, which was always negotiable from a sym-
bolic, moral, and material point of view.
      Hence, one of the reasons for the uncanniness of simulacra is to be found
precisely in their cross-border character, whose gothic and fantastic ramifi-
cations in literature at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries – not only Mary
Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein, or Jean Paul’s and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s au-
tomata, but also the manifold extensions of human beings via their doubles
(Jourde - Tortonese 1996; Stoichita 2006; Fusillo 2012b) – are probably epiphe-
nomenal expressions of this deep-lying liminality. In “Il duello con sé stessi:
Il cavaliere doppio di Théophile Gautier” [“Duelling with Oneself in Théophile
Gautier’s Le chevalier double”], Paolo Tortonese provides an in-depth analysis
of Gautier’s fantastic tale in relation to its overt and less known sources. Le
chevalier double appears to echo some of Poe’s and Hoffmann’s earlier works,
while also drawing on a tradition dating back to 17th-century Spain. Torton-
ese proceeds to highlight the different meanings that Poe and Gautier gave
to duels as well as the momentous motif of duelling with one’s own double.
      Alessandra Ghezzani’s “Simulacro e usurpazione dell’identità in al-
cuni racconti di Borges” [“Simulacra and Identity Usurpation in Some of
Borges’s Stories”] is closely related to this topic. Ghezzani investigates the
dynamics of identity usurpation as a device for the creation of doubles in
some of Borges’s stories. Such doubles participate in the intricate pano-
ply of inverted, symmetrical, recurrent and overwritten destinies that have
crammed the Argentine author’s work since its narrative beginnings. The


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way Borges approaches this issue is, on the one hand, linked to his concept
of personality (i.e., a succession of states of consciousness as opposed to
the notion of the ego as a totality) and to a more general ‘idealistic’ inter-
pretation of reality (as filtered through Berkeley, Hume, and Schopenhau-
er). On the other hand, it builds on the idea of the imperfect copy derived
from Gnostic doctrines.
      In both cases, we are faced with characters or situations taken from
literature, or from the collective imaginary, that are revisited by authors
in different ways and guises, from the portrait up to the ghost and Doppel-
gänger. Without taking anything away from psychological explanations,
the supernatural dimension of these figures concurs with the revival of be-
liefs that do not seem to have been overcome by modern rationality. Their
return joins ranks with an inhuman or even posthuman ‘otherness’, which
mysteriously breaks through the artificial surface of simulacra and eludes
human control. But this is also the reason why uncanniness (das Unheim-
liche) can manifest itself under the heading of both horror and seduction.
      Heinrich Heine is a master in this kind of ambivalence. ‘Imperfect sim-
ulacra’ are, according to Alessandro Fambrini (“Simulacri imperfetti: corpi
mortali e creature immortali” [“Imperfect Simulacra: Mortal Bodies and
Immortal Creatures”]), those who appear in the scattered pages of “Flo-
rentinische Nächte” (Florentine Nights), one among Heine’s most elusive
and intricate prose writings. The simulacra which populate this spooky
story – connoted with grotesque and subtly ironic traits, too – embody a
particular type of posthuman phenomenology that, despite its 19th-centu-
ry imprint, foreshadows features of the contemporary posthuman, such
as the dialectical interplay between the consciousness of human mortality
and the (human, all-too-human) aspiration to immortality.

         5. The ‘ghost in the machine’, and in the statue
      The relationship of the human with the transcendent – be it of a divine,
natural, or artificial origin – raises the issue of the interconnections that
exist not only between the organic and the mechanic, or reality and virtu-
ality, but also between living and non-living things. Against this backdrop,
simulacra are often characterised by an operational autonomy, sometimes
even an independence of thought. Because of their hybrid and transitive
nature, they have been associated with the sphere of spectrality, and it
is no coincidence that ‘simulacrum’ and ‘phantasm’ are contiguous terms
in Deleuze’s critique and reversion of Platonism. The expression ‘ghost in
the machine’, first used by Gilbert Ryle in the 1940s in order to call into


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question the Cartesian mind-body dualism, sums up one of the uncanniest
aspects of simulacra. That is to say, the fact that they can be endowed with
an intelligence or a soul of their own, not subject to either the machine or
the organic structure that houses it – and, of course, independent of their
creator. This sort of intelligence which unexpectedly reveals itself in the
artifact is perceived as uncanny precisely because of its relation with bio-
logical matter and a cognitive quality commonly considered as exclusive to
living beings. For this reason, simulacra in literature frequently remind of
ghosts, whose apparition transgresses the fundamental rules on which the
conventions of realism are based (Puglia et al. 2018).
      In “Simulacri dell’invisibile: voce umana e strumenti musicali nel Ro-
manticismo tedesco” [“Simulacra of the Invisible: The Human Voice and
Musical Instruments in German Romanticism”], Giovanna Cermelli delves
into a widespread theme in the literature of German Romanticism, namely
the one regarding the connections between musical instruments and the
human voice as alleged manifestations of a soul in the artefact – a ghost-
in-the-machine case ahead of its time. Indeed, this topos can be traced to
the paradigm of the competitive imitation involving the machine and the
human being, an important trend in 18th-century culture taken up by E.T.A.
Hoffmann in several of his works. Paolo Bugliani’s article on “Spectral Sim-
ulacra of Authors in Henry James’s and Max Beerbohm’s Decadent Short
Stories” [“Simulacri spettrali dell’autore nei racconti decadenti di Henry
James e Max Beerbohm”] projects the question of spectrality onto the po-
etological and metaliterary level by establishing a connection between this
thematic field and the post-structuralist concept of the ‘death of the author’.
Through the analysis of some Decadent short stories by Henry James and
Max Beerbohm, Bugliani foregrounds how, in contrast with any Promet-
hean exaltation of the individual creator, the disembodied authorial image
is here mostly marked by the traits of ‘otherness’ typical of spectral figures.
      In a similar context, Giovanni Bassi’s “«As ‘twere he». Alcune consi-
derazioni sul ritratto fotografico nella cultura letteraria inglese del tardo
Ottocento” [“«As ‘twere he». Some Reflections on Photographic Portrait in
Late-19th-Century English Literary Culture”] tackles the notion of photo-
graphic simulacra against the backdrop of fin-de-siècle technological inno-
vations in the field of photography and as a reworking of a long-standing
trope in Western literary culture, namely the portrait of the beloved. Delv-
ing into Thomas Hardy’s photography-related poetry and prose, Bassi
demonstrates how, in this body of texts, such portraits undergo a process
of fetishisation until they turn into ghostly surrogates for absent persons
and/or desired bodies. Frequently used by many other late-19th-century


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English writers and poets, these fetishised images are strikingly in tune
with later theories of photography and simulacra. They also look back on
earlier literary portraits of beloved ones within Western culture’s abiding
ekphrastic imagination.
      The living statue remains one of the most popular characterisations
traditionally associated with the simulacrum. In “Ciranda de Pedra: Man-
ifestations of the Living Statue in Portuguese-language Literatures” [“Ci-
randa de Pedra: declinazioni della statua viva nelle letterature di lingua
portoghese”], Valeria Tocco and Sofia Morabito investigate some typical
manifestations of this presence in a diachronic perspective. Their con-
tribution focuses on how Portuguese-language literatures give shape to
simulacral figures – statues, in particular – and on the role attributed to
simulacra in relation to the sphere of the human. To achieve this goal, Toc-
co and Morabito call attention to the ways a number of classical, romantic,
modernist and post-modernist writers, such as Camões, Melo, Carvalhal,
Sá-Carneiro, Clarice Lispector, Pepetela, and Jaime Salazar Sampaio, have
developed this topic.
      Exploring another side of the multifaceted relationship between ar-
tistic manufacts and the semantics of simulacra, Marco Maggi’s “Rianima-
re il mito. Un simulacro di Fedra in Guido Gozzano” [“Reanimating the
Myth. A Simulacrum of Phaedra in Guido Gozzano”] singles out a short
story by Guido Gozzano, Alcina (1915), which ironically revisits the topos
of the sculpted beauty coming to life. In comparison with the slightly ear-
lier Gradiva (1903) by Wilhelm Jensen, in which the phenomenon remained
ambiguously poised between reality and illusion (or delusion), in Gozza-
no’s text the supposed animation of the bas-relief is explained away in
terms of a hallucinated perception from a first-person narrator affected by
meningitis. Maggi also reads this denouement by counterposing it to Ga-
briele d’Annunzio’s Fedra (1909). While d’Annunzio’s work is an attempt
to revive the myth as well as the tragedy canon, Gozzano does not seem
to aim to archeologically restore the past. On the contrary, in the age of
technical reproducibility, he develops a layered, complex idea of tempo-
rality in which the present is not easily substituted by the past. Rather, the
present and the past coexist in a conflicting and paradoxical way within
the simulacral image, much like copies no longer fit to represent reality.

                   6. Interfacing with the non-human
     Predominantly inspired by science fiction and its media transpositions,
our current imaginary is populated by different kinds of homo artificialis,


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ranging from cyborgs to the contemporary avatars of digital media, up to
cutting-edge forms of artificial intelligence. Even if these creatures are not
the only ones in the simulacra world – which also includes supernatural
beings whose origin does not entirely fit into the mechanistic paradigm –
Baudrillard’s typology has acquired a distinctive value in this regard. His
categorisation distinguishes between three orders of simulacra, respective-
ly called «counterfeit», «production», and «simulation» (Baudrillard 1993:
50). The latter corresponds to the kind of virtuality which triggers the «pre-
cession of simulacra» phenomenon (Baudrillard 1994: 1-42), typical of a
world where digital devices tend to anticipate reality, so that simulation
eerily ‘precedes’ its own referents.
       This said, Baudrillard’s taxonomy should be taken with a degree of
flexibility. In Towards a Posthuman Imagination in Literature and Media, Simo-
na Micali notes that the three orders cited above might actually be detected
in various sorts of technological simulacra. As a matter of fact, each of those
simulacra is provided with an «interface» connected to the human (coun-
terfeit), with a «machine» constituting the body of the simulacrum as a
material artifact (production), and with an «artificial intelligence» (simula-
tion) whereby the machine acquires a subject status (2019: 123-130). Micali
goes further by placing the simulacrum among the figures of the ‘non-hu-
man’, that is to say, «what evokes the ‘human’ by analogy or similarity
without being such, a being which is characterized and perceived main-
ly or exclusively for its difference from man. As in the Freudian negation,
‘non-human’ points at humanness through its negative, expressing and
denying at the same time» (ibid.: 15). This definition stimulates debate over
our topic and also envisages a different direction than the one taken by the
so-called ‘non-human turn’ (Grusin 2015). If the latter conceptualises the
wiping out of differences between human beings and other creatures, the
focal point of any research dealing with simulacra should precisely define
the peculiarities and, possibly, the reasons behind such differences. Some
case studies collected here address the issue.
       Giulio Milone’s “Umani, androidi, divinità. I simulacri di Kazuo Ishi-
guro” [“Humans, Androids, Gods. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Simulacra”] looks at
the mirabilia mechanica sphere through an intriguingly blurred lens that po-
sitions itself halfway between the artificial-intelligence predicament and a
reforged human(ised) perspective. Attention is drawn to Ishiguro’s eighth
novel Klara and the Sun (2021), where the eponymous first-person narrator
is one of the androids that an imaginary society of the future has been pro-
ducing and customising to the needs of families with sick or unsuccessful-
ly ‘lifted’ children. A solar-powered Artificial Friend, Klara lives up to her


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assigned role by duly assisting the seriously (if temporarily) ill Josie. In the
meantime, Klara is prompted to follow a trajectory which sees her distance
herself from the automaton’s ingrained ontological otherness and deeply
sympathise with humans. By welcoming and celebrating the life-giving
force of the Sun, Ishiguro’s AF might be said to further reverse paradigms
and set foot on the only-too-human soil of affective ties and metaphysical
beliefs.
      Roberta Ferrari’s “A Plunge into Otherness: Ethics and Literature in
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan” [“Un’immersione nell’alterità: etica e
letteratura in Machines Like Me di Ian McEwan”] makes a foray into the
uses and effects of Artificial Intelligence with regard to fundamental as-
pects of human life such as interpersonal relationships and moral behav-
ior. When compared to Ishiguro’s novel, the text analysed here manifestly
stretches the boundary towards the uncanny. Ian McEwan’s Machines Like
Me (2019), a ‘What if novel’ mainly set in the 1980s but also playing on al-
ternative/apocryphal history, similarly focuses on an android. However,
the consequences of this creature’s growth and agency are definitely more
disquieting. The ominously named Adam is in fact a hyper-sophisticat-
ed, smart machine that ends by upsetting the main characters’ lives and
posing questions on codified norms, dominant ideologies and, ultimately,
the meaning of humanity itself. Facing Adam, a human-like simulacrum
forged out of robotics and cybernetics’ technologies, is like engaging in a
wearing strife between an anthropological selfhood and a soulless, judge-
mental avatar.
      From this angle, the issue of the simulacrum ties in with contempo-
rary discussions concerning transhumanism and posthumanism (Caronia
2020), two attitudes and philosophical views whose refractions in liter-
ature are often loaded with ambiguity. This is confirmed, for instance,
by Fausto Ciompi’s “«The Future of Humans in the Posthuman»: Frank-
issstein by Jeanette Winterson” [“‘Il futuro degli umani nel postumano’:
Frankissstein di Jeanette Winterson”], where the investigation is carried out
through a discursive terrain that pays heed to Baudrillard, Derrida, Fou-
cault, Haraway and Heidegger, among others. Ciompi provides insights
into the compelling intricacies, metaphorical fields and narrative structure
of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), a work that simul-
taneously builds on the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction
and on theories grounded in Post- and Transhumanist Studies. Partly a
rewrite of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its composition process in the
19th century, Winterson’s book also revolves around present-day England
and the interconnections between a transgender doctor (Ry Shelley) and


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a transhumanist scientist (Victor Stein), alongside their feats in matters of
AI, augmentation, and cyborgification. Ciompi illuminates this context in
a way that raises questions on an alleged «better biology» which is actually
unable to bring forth any real upgrading. In Winterson’s novel, the future
of humans in a posthuman world seems then to keep pace with a popu-
lation of «boundary creatures straddling alternative ontologies and often
acting as less than humans».
     It must be underscored that, while looking forward to the self-over-
coming of the human, transhumanism continues to rely on an essentially
anthropocentric worldview, in the conviction that the mind/body en-
hancement could be achieved via biomedical and mechanical engineering.
Indeed, this is a hypermodern as well as archaic phenomenon related to
auto- and alloplastic practices that have set the scene for the semiotic inter-
actions between the anthropic subject and the environment since the begin-
ning of time. These practices even remind of the emotional and prerational
dynamics of phantasmatic substitution through the fetish (Fusillo 2012a).
Along similar lines, Cristina Savettieri analyses an interesting case of the
interplay between literary discourse, body enhancement and technology.
In her article “Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Mari-
netti” [“Corpi ibridi tra utopia e trauma in F.T. Marinetti”], she looks at a
selection of texts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with the aim of throwing
new light on the role that the experience of the First World War’s combat
played in the evolution of the narrative of the body in Marinetti’s imagi-
nation. With the outbreak of the war, pre-war futurist simulacra and hu-
man-mechanical creatures that used to objectify radical utopic homosocial
fantasies turned into actual prosthetic bodies. However, in such an unprec-
edented by-product of technological warfare’s extreme violence, steel and
flesh mingled while prostheses did not seem to foreshadow the birth of any
immortal creature. If different social discourses (medical science, politics,
war propaganda) attempted to frame this traumatic re-codifying of the hu-
man soma, Marinetti adjusted his earlier utopic constructs by transforming
them into uncanny entities, devirilised, and sexually vexed.

                     7. Posthuman perspectives
     While transhumanists cling to the notion of the centrality of mankind,
albeit at a higher level of mind-body performativity, posthumanists set out
to definitively eclipse the realm of their own species. The goal of posthu-
man thinkers is to supersede the extolling of the human by duly taking into
consideration other forms of existence which are impermeable to dichoto-


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mies such as man/machine, male/female, man/animal, and so forth. Post-
humanism, then, is not an anthropocentric current of thought, although
one could still find in it different sets of ethical values and perspectives
(Herzberg, Watzka 2020). On the one hand, it embraces the domain of tech-
nological utopianism, along with issues steeped in the IT-field’s dazzling
progress throughout the last few decades, including the “Great Singular-
ity” discourse (Kurzweil 2005) and mind-uploading. On the other hand,
posthumanism endorses a form of radical criticism of anthropocentrism,
namely of a human-centred worldview, which is seen as a univocal and
normative – and, therefore, potentially discriminative – construction. In
her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), Donna Haraway had already cast cyber-
netic organisms as configurations which crossed the limits of the tradi-
tional humanistic subject and that consequently acquired simulacral traits.
This school of critical posthumanism (Herberchter 2013) goes beyond
conventional humanistic categories in order to leave room for a nomadic
subjectivity (Braidotti 2013) in dialogue with present-day forms of commu-
nication, interconnection and hybridisation encompassing human beings,
animals, and the machine.
      This aspect has been emphasised in various ways by contemporary
authors from the areas of literature, cinema, and the theatre. Among the ar-
ticles collected in this issue, readers can be referred to Lucia Della Fontana’s
“Analogue Film, Ghostly Ontologies and the Fairy-tale in Bella e perduta
and Lazzaro felice” [“Pellicole analogiche, ontologie spettrali ed elementi
fiabeschi in Bella e perduta e Lazzaro felice”], which shares Micali’s theoreti-
cal ground and focuses on two recent Italian films: Pietro Marcello’s Bella
e perduta [Lost and Beautiful] (2015) and Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice
[Happy as Lazzaro] (2018). They both give cinematographic shape to the
impossibility of establishing a distinction between nature and culture, vir-
tual and real, human and non-human. In these films, the clash is no longer
located between reality and hyperreality, but in a phantasmatic dialectic
that rediscovers the value of the biological body by placing it in a network
of historical, social, and technological relationships. Pivoting around the
organic element, these works showcase characters that are ontologically
liminal, hovering between the human and the animal sphere. Moreover,
they both explore a hybrid type of narration at the crossroads between
the documentary and the fairy-tale and encourage a form of ecological
engagement.
      Moving from an exploration of the pervasive presence of animals in
Sarah Kane’s experimental oeuvre, Sara Soncini’s “Performing Simulacra:
Human/Animal Intersections in the Work of Sarah Kane” [“Simulacri sulla


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scena: intersezioni umano/animale nell’opera di Sarah Kane”] addresses a
hitherto neglected dimension of Kane’s joint engagement with the bound-
aries of subjectivity and those of theatre. The by-now massive scholarship
on Kane has tended to see her work as epitomising an overcoming of the
dramatic paradigm and as equally marked by increasingly dehumanised
constructions of subjectivity that culminate in the disembodied theatri-
cal landscapes of her late plays. By combining textual and performance
analysis, the article charts the complex, changing configurations of Kane’s
thought-provoking intersections between animals and human subjects on
stage and offers an extensive discussion of the role of animals as key play-
ers in Kane’s dramaturgy of simulacra.
      Finally, other posthuman physiognomies that are gathering momen-
tum in contemporary speculative literature concern organic humanoids or
eugenic mutants, who reify a nomadic subjectivity mainly cleaving to a
material and biological substratum. Fed through various channels, be they
technical-scientific or esoteric-mythopoeic, such a substratum becomes the
natural element of hybrid and metamorphic creatures that, while situating
themselves at the human/nonhuman species interface, can be shown to de-
velop, adapt and acquire cogency in protean and challenging ways.
      In Camilla Del Grazia’s “Remades and their Sociospace in China
Miéville’s Bas-Lag Trilogy” [“I ‘Remades’ e il loro spazio sociale nella tri-
logia di Bas-Lag di China Miéville”], the notion of the biotechnological
hybrid is magnified and appraised through a political lens. The so-called
Bas-Lag series (2000-2004) by British author and activist China Miéville is
self-declaredly imbued with ‘weird fantasy’ traits and references to steam-
punk technology that give a vivid imprint to contemporary speculative-fic-
tion writing. In the multiracial, imperialistic and half-magical universe
of Bas-Lag, “Remades” are lawbreakers of various species whose bodies
have been purposely re-engineered as a punishment for their offences.
Availing herself of a posthumanist as well as Foucauldian approach, Del
Grazia meditates on how such modified, re-created, human-animal and
partly mechanical creatures could be cast as simulacra of a changing so-
cial panorama where the dictates of capitalist economy, civic control and
the centralisation of power are prime moving forces. Indeed, Remades are
physical embodiments of «discursive as well as material practices that de-
fine social living in different spaces» within the Bas-Lag confines.
      Francesca Mussi’s “North American Indigenous Perceptions of the
Apocalypse and a Renewal of Kinship Relationships through the Imagina-
tion” [“Le percezioni dell’apocalisse sul fronte indigeno nordamericano e
il rinnovarsi dei legami di parentela attraverso l’immaginario”] enters the


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simulacra world through an oblique route whose milestones are constitut-
ed by archetypal and iconic symbols as well as figurative paradigms from
the imaginary of Indigenous peoples across Canada. By interweaving Eco-
criticism, Postcolonial and Indigenous Studies, Mussi tackles the notions of
climate change and environmental apocalypse through the historical and
mythopoeic filter of an indigenous episteme. In so doing, she lays empha-
sis on what those peoples already perceive as a post-apocalyptic condition
coinciding with the aftermath of settler-colonialism and its disruption of
ancestral kinship relationships. Mussi then highlights how speculative-fic-
tion works such as Lee Maracle’s “The Void” (2016) and Daniel H. Justice’s
“The Boys Who Became the Hummingbirds” (2016) can be instrumental
in conveying a powerful message of healing and renewal. By enhancing
Indigenous traditional knowledge systems and kinship values that take
into account both humans and the land, these texts cut ties with a shadowy
universe of simulacra with the intent of restoring one of living entities.
      In “Blackbeard and the Post-Anthropocene Humanoids: Tracing the
Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy” [“Black-
beard e gli umanoidi del Post-Antropocene: una disamina del post/transu-
mano nella trilogia MaddAddam di Margaret Atwood”], Laura Giovannelli
takes her point of departure from the post-apocalyptic setting of Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) in order to investigate the mean-
ings and phenomenologies of a simulacrum conceived as the materiali-
sation of a hybrid, osmotic and nomadic ontology. This kind of organic
simulacrum is the result of ‘mad scientist’ Crake’s brash biotechnological
experiments, which have redesigned the human along post-anthropocen-
tric lines and vis-à-vis a global-scale environmental disaster. In what is
dramatically portrayed as a new, posthuman geological era, the ‘hum-
animalised creatures’ that Crake has forged via genetic engineering do
emerge as the fittest inheritors of the Earth. Giovannelli looks closely at
the Crakers’ identity as multispecies humanoids hovering between an an-
thropological and a zoomorphic dimension. She finally observes how, if
capable of establishing bioegalitarian relationships with the ecosystem,
such pseudo-primates also show uncanny features that come to the fore
through their leader Blackbeard, in whose progressive familiarisation with
rational and symbolic thought one may catch a potentially transhuman,
back-to-human longing.

This publication has been funded by the University of Pisa as a research outcome
relating to “PRA – Progetti di Ricerca di Ateneo”, project n. PRA 2020-2021_63 “Il
simulacro nella letteratura e nella cultura medievale, moderna e contemporanea”. Trans-


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lations, editorial work and proofreading have been carried out in collaboration
with CLI, the “Centro Linguistico” of the University of Pisa.



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                                      The Authors

     Alessandra Ghezzani teaches Spanish Language and Literatures at
the University of Pisa.
        Email: alessandra.ghezzani@unipi.it

    Laura Giovannelli is Associate Professor of English Literature at the
University of Pisa.
        Email: laura.giovannelli@unipi.it

    Francesco Rossi is Associate Professor of German Literature at the
University of Pisa.
        Email: francesco.rossi@unipi.it

     Cristina Savettieri is Associate Professor of Contemporary Italian Li-
terature at the University of Pisa.
        Email: cristina.savettieri@unipi.it




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                              The Article
     Date submitted: --/--/----
     Date accepted: --/--/----
     Date published: 30/11/2022



                      How to Cite This Article
       Ghezzani, Alessandra - Giovannelli, Laura - Rossi, Francesco - Savet-
tieri, Cristina, “Entering the Simulacra World. Aesthetic and Cultural Phe-
nomenologies in Literature, Media, and the Arts”, Entering the Simulacra
World, Between, XII.24 (2022): i-xix, www.betweenjournal.it




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