<i>Under the Skin</i>: la fantascienza come ecologia culturale del postumano
10.13125/2039-6597/3812
Considerando la fantascienza nella prospettiva dell’ecologia culturale e come un ‘caso speciale’ di ri-mediazione, Under the Skin (Sotto la pelle), il romanzo di Michel Faber (2000) e il film omonimo diretto da Jonathan Glazer (2013), possono essere considerati “imaginative counter discourses” che esplorano il soggetto postumano. La fantascienza, offrendo interpretazioni multiple delle (im)possibilità del reale trascendendo la necessità della trasparenza mimetica, è un’esplorazione dei possibili laterali dell’esperienza. Sia il romanzo che il film, in modi interdipendenti, affrontano in forme immaginative le complesse relazioni tra le diverse specie, la violenza di genere, la separazione tra natura e tecnologia, lo sfruttamento degli esseri viventi nel mondo consumistico. “Sotto la pelle” sta ad indicare la comune umanità offesa e reclama il riconoscimento dell’interdipendenza tra il sè e l’altro/a all’interno dell’ecosistema e dei media che li ‘mediano’ e li comunicano.
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Rita Monticelli
Between
<i>Under the Skin</i>: Science Fiction as Posthuman Cultural Ecology
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https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
9
Essay
2019-05-30
2019-07-04
2019-06-01
2019-08-12
1
Rita Monticelli
2019/05/30
10.13125/2039-6597/3812
2039-6597
17
en
<i>Under the Skin</i>: Science Fiction as Posthuman Cultural Ecology
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3812/3382
9
           Under the Skin: Science Fiction as
            Posthuman Cultural Ecology

                                   Rita Monticelli


Abstract
      Considering science fiction under the perspective of cultural ecology and
as a ‘special case’ of re-mediation, Under the Skin, a novel by Michel Faber
(2000) and the homonymous movie directed by Jonathan Glazer (2013) can be
considered as ‘imaginative counter discourses’ exploring the posthuman
subject. Science fiction, by offering multiple interpretative (im)possibilities of
the real transcending the necessity of mimetic transparency, is an exploration
of the possible laterals of experience. Both the novel and the movie, in
interdependent ways, face in imaginative forms complex interspecies
relations, gender violence, the separation between nature and technology, the
exploitation of living beings in the consumerist world. ‘Under the skin’
indicates the communal humanity offended and claims the recognition of the
interdependence between the self and the other, within the ecosystem and the
media that ‘mediate’ and communicate them.

Keywords
    Science Fiction, Ecocriticism, Re-mediation, Under the Skin, Posthuman,
Gender




Between, vol. IX, n. 17 (Maggio/May 2019)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/3812
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology




       Under the Skin: Science Fiction as
        Posthuman Cultural Ecology
                                     Rita Monticelli


      By offering multiple interpretative (im)possibilities of the real
transcending the necessity of mimetic transparency, science fiction is
an exploration of the possible laterals of experience. Consumers and
producers of science fiction are aware of the discrepancy between the
virtual scene and the real world, and such awareness is an important
part of the experience, because it unveils the real as a construct, and
reveals its ideological, political, social and cultural assumptions,
searching for a cultural ecology of the present, aiming for concrete,
future actions.
      Culture is seen today as a network of re-shapes, re-creations,
quotations, repetitions, and transcoding of artefacts where the usual
and disused separation between different media opens up reflections
that imply interdependency rather than comparison. Science fiction, in
itself a structural challenge to ‘realism’, has shaped itself as the
representation of multimedia devices already within literary texts. In
this sense we can talk of science fiction as a narrative technique already
including complex forms of ‘multimedia adaptations’. Science fiction
indeed has configured the interaction between different media as a
significant production that, from its very beginning, interacts with
policies and counter policies, with social and cultural contexts,
producing different stories that, in turn, induce different emotive and
cultural responses.
      In order to propose an analysis of the interdependence between
Michel Faber’s science fiction novel Under the Skin (2000) and Jonathan
Glazer’s film (2013), I would like to choose as my starting point a few




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premises concerning science fiction as a special case of ‘re-mediation’1
and as eco-criticism.
     In their transformation of the original text, adaptation and
remediation also transform the ‘original’ into its future receptions.
Remediation in science fiction could also be the attempt of repairing
what is irreparable in reality in order to inspire concrete action in the
present. In science fiction, the accent placed on the body as a space for
re-mediation and experimentation shows, yet again, to what extent
cultural processes are always joined to the media informing them: that
is how technological media, to quote Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin (2000), acquire their cultural meaning in their very interaction,
in their paying homage to or challenging previous media such as
painting, photography, film, television. Literature, in this process
involving new media, is still today a crucial space for re-signification,
elaboration and (re)mediation. In this direction, adaptation, in this case
from novel to film, becomes, to quote Linda Hutcheon, re-mediation,
translation and inter-semiotic transposition between different systems
(Hutcheon 2006).
     Although Bolter and Grusin’s work refers to remediation as the
main feature of the new digital media, their analysis is applicable to the
film Under the Skin, because here it is exactly a case of repurposing: «to
take a “property” from one medium and reuse it in another» (Bolter –
Grusin 2000: 45). It is not a coincidence that the two authors use as
constant model Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 dystopian science fiction film,
Strange Days. The fact that they use it for the play of virtual media
deployed, moves to the background what I am interested in, namely
that science fiction is in itself a reusing, repurposing, borrowing and
refashioning of media (Bolter – Grusin 2000: 45-50). Science fiction
thematises the inseparability of mediality and reality, thus re-
signifying reality through those very media. In science fiction,



     1
       Remediation here refers to Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s
theorizations (2000) and to science fiction as a device implying interactions
among and transformation of different kinds of technologies.


                                                                                 3
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



remediation is textual and political re-form of the real: «all mediation
remediates the real» (Bolter – Grusin 2000: 59).

                  Eco-Criticism and Cultural Ecology
      Hubert Zapf, starting from Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind
redefines eco-criticism and cultural ecology not merely as interaction
and interdependency between ecological processes, natural energy
cycles, and cultural processes, but also as a holistic process, as a
«dehierarchized concept of mutual dependency between the (human)
organism and its (natural) environment, subject and object, culture and
nature» (Zapf 2010: 137). A process, I would add, that involves the
media that re-mediate and ‘produce’ these relations. The ecology of the
mind is, today, a pluralistic, holistic process of analysis of media-
multimedia, psychic, vital (bios) and cultural ecosystems, in a systemic
methodology. Such processes can be adapted and transferred to the
cultural ecosystems of art and literature as forces for «selection and
self-renewal» (Zapf 2010: 137-138). From this perspective of cultural
ecology, the inner landscapes produced by modern culture and by both
individual and collective awareness are as important as the external
‘environments’. Literature and other forms of cultural imagination and
creativity are necessary to produce the richness, diversity and
complexity of the inner landscape of the mind and of society, including
emotions and interpersonal communication, communications that are
«threatened by impoverishment by an increasingly overeconomized,
standardized, and depersonalized contemporary world» (Zapf 2010:
138). Zapf shows how literature per se may be described as a symbolic,
and particularly powerful means of ‘cultural ecology’. Literary texts
have explored not just the complex scenarios of social and cultural
relations with ‘natural’ ecosystems, but also the natural and cultural
relations between human and non-human through creative acts of
regression and future projections of eco-social and systemic relations.




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Within this perspective, eco-criticism2 in literature concerns the
analysis of discriminations linked to the differences of species, gender,
ethnicity, and dis-abilities. This type of literature

       […] draws its cognitive and creative potential from a threefold
     dynamic in its relationship to the larger cultural system – as a
     cultural-critical metadiscourse, an imaginative counterdiscourse,
     and a reintegrative interdiscourse. It is a textual form which
     breaks up ossified social structures and ideology, symbolically
     empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally
     separated. (Zapf 2010: 138)

      Such literature is a counter discourse to economic, political and
normative        forms       of     exploitation      and        ideological
interpretation/classification of human life, and shatters one-
dimensional visions of the world and the self, opening them up
towards what has been repressed or towards the excluded other, in its
most diverse forms (Zapf 2010: 138). Although the accent, in eco-
criticism, is placed on the relationship between nature and culture
(nurture), nature and technology and on the human/non-human
systems, the analysis of cultural ecology opens itself up to a reflection
on literature and in particular on science fiction as a cognitive
ecosystem and as a critical, reintegrating interdiscourse employing
science, technology in its relation with nature. Science fiction displays a
dialectics between reality and (im)possible experiences of the world:
the separation between fiction, science, and social reality is illusory.
      Science fiction, amongst the various narrative genres, may
actually be considered as a particularly powerful eco-critical discourse.
In the case of Under the Skin, science fiction as eco-criticism will thus
not be understood as a mere criticism of the environment and the
relationship between humans and non-humans (relationship which
will be overturned inducing a deconstruction and an overtaking of this


     See for instance: Slovic - Rangarajan - Sarveswaran 2014; Glotfelty -
     2

Fromm 1996; Iovino - Oppermann 2014.


                                                                                 5
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



dichotomy itself), but also as a counter-narrative on the relationship
between identity and difference, nature and culture, flesh and
technology. In this perspective, such science fiction is an ‘imaginative
counter discourse’, that is a disposition and a (textual) stand taken on
the matter of the spaces of exclusion and marginalization (through the
exposition of the cultural construction of the very same discourses),
and their counter-exposition in critical signifiers capable of producing
transformative, creative energy.
     Using technology as ‘techné’, as internal system, science fiction
can be a remediation of the real; it can become a means of continuous
cultural renewal between spaces of suppression and resistance and,
compared to other narrative forms, it is an exploration that includes
natural, psychic, and cultural systems investigating their own
interactions in imaginative forms3.

                            The case Under the Skin
     From this perspective, Under the Skin can be analysed as a re-
mediation of the book: an experimental film uniting and untying
different visual media (cinema, video clip, electronic music, digital
devices) translating the book into other forms. As its director Glazer
himself states, «I did not aim at making a film from the book, but I
wanted to transfer the book in another medium». That is to say, to
achieve a sort of mediamorphosis (Fidler 1997). In this critical direction,
Under the Skin (the book and the film together) can be considered as
interdependent imaginative counter-discourses: a unitary system,


      3
       As highlighted by Louis Armand, the issue of technology is to be
studied on a background of social, political, cultural and philosophical
aspects, without forgetting literature and art. At the same time, it is necessary
to take into account the fact that each of these discourses possesses a
technological dimension and that the notion of discourse itself is
fundamentally linked to the idea of technology – be it not just technique, or
‘techné’, in the sense of art, artifice, but also ‘craft’, artefact, or ‘system’ or
‘method in doing’ (Armand 2006: 1-4).


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albeit a heterogeneous one, and developed through different forms and
media.
      Faber’s text is, amongst many interpretations, an animalist eco-
criticism of consumerist capitalism, funded on the relationship
between human and non-human beings. The book has been defined in
different ways according to the diverse main lines of interpretation:
«[i]t is a novel about how life turns out for us all, regardless of our
physical make-up and where we call home» (Soyka 2000); «[i]t is a
novel about what is superficial and what is not, what is simple and
what is profound» (Ratzan 2013), as a novel of subversion, a novel that
shows that «[t]he monster without is the monster within» (Soyka 2000);
it could be considered as a dystopian novel, a critical dystopia, a horror
novel, a Bildungsroman, a story of trans-formation, a postmodern
novel, a novel on the road, travel literature, thus showing science
fiction as a hybrid genre.
      Published in 2000, Under the Skin centres on the story of an alien
sent to earth, Isserley, who was has been transformed into a woman to
abduct men, particularly muscular, as they have to serve as meat for
the alien elites. It is significant that the hitchhikers she picks up on the
roads of Northern Scotland, in her red Corolla, are a special kind of
human beings, they are very fit physically, but they do not fit into the
Scottish environment; they are ex-centric and, as the narrative shows,
already condemned by the dominant society4 to be ‘commodities’ in
the capitalist system, to be deprived of their language and sexuality to
be processed, packed and transformed into meat and distributed to the
very high classes of the alien world. These ‘vodsel’ (this is how humans
are called by the aliens), are fugitives, outsiders, and losers, with no
family and ties, strangers and homeless, unemployed, while Isserley –
coming from the working class – sees herself as an elf and a freak, thus
anticipating the double bind of being a strange case of human and an
exploited subject, sharing a communal ‘alienation’ with the humans. In

     4
      «In a way, the vodsel community itself seemed to be selecting those of
its members it was content to have culled» (Faber 2011: 182).



                                                                                 7
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



order to become human she has undergone several surgical operations,
but she will finally be transformed into a ‘real’ woman only through
the devastating experience of rape. Along this route, she identifies with
nature that is the soil that nurtures her life and sooths her physical and
spiritual pain. Always a hybrid, an in-between subject, she does not fit
into anything; both sympathetic (towards the end of the novel) and
indifferent, even aggressive, she stays in this ambivalent space till her
final decision that should connect her with the natural world and the
universe. Significant it is also the meeting with Amlis Vess5, the
vegetarian son of the owner of the company Isserley works for, who
paradoxically seems to be one of the fewest to show a sort of sympathy
toward the men/vodsels6.
      The novel’s textual ‘techné’ centres on the reversed relationship
between humans and aliens and on the becoming woman of the alien
protagonist. Nature is the substratum accompanying all of the
narration, nature as Isserley’s mirror, and as mediation between
human and non-human. Humans are transformed into meat by the
aliens through the labour carried out by Isserley who approaches and
seduces men according to the stereotypes and canon of human
femininity and brings them to the underground vaults where they will
be deprived of their bodies and identity. Isserley has become a woman
according to human canons and her body has become a hybrid, a
cyborg where nature and technology have blended without possibility
of separation between nature and culture, flesh and technology, as
mediation between identity and difference. In this psychic, cultural,


      5
        The encounter reveals Isserley’s self-recognition as ‘other’ from her
original self and as an in-between human/non-human being: «Being a freak
was so wearing. Amlis Vess, never having seen her before, would recoil.
He’d be expecting to see a human being and he would see a hideous animal
instead. It was that moment of… of the sickening opposite of recognition that
she couldn’t cope with» (Faber 2011: 77)
      6
        Very important is the question of language – that we cannot debate
here – that shows how it does not only describe reality, but how it creates
and establishes it.


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                                             Between, vol. IX, n. 17 (Maggio/May 2019)



natural and technological system, Isserley will be both the agent of
mediation between the two worlds, and the scapegoat of the system.
The novel also foregrounds gender and the relationship between
identity and otherness as artificial constructions through the
relationship between human and non-human.
      The film was released in 2013, many years after the publication of
the novel and was received in controversial ways. If, for instance, Peter
Hulm welcomes it as a «reverse thriller», he nevertheless criticises it as
potentially sexist (Hulm 2015); Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the movie
for The Guardian, considers it «very erotic, very scary», and recognises
and praises the strong visual impact of the movie: «The quicksilver
shapes of futurist bodyhorror fantasy are scuffed with social-realist
grit, but modified, too, with Jonathan Glazer's brilliant flair for visual
impact» (Bradshaw 2014)7. This famous/infamous movie also has
addressed issues concerning sexism and forms of racism and
discrimination, and, as well as the novel, it can also be reread in terms
of feminicide and violence against women. The film proposes a story
reinterpreted through avant-garde cinematic experimentations, and
transforming the film in a series of video clips (Glazer started his
artistic career as video clip director for Radiohead, Massive Attack,
Jamoroquai and many others) remaining, however, faithful to some of
the text’s deepest meanings, illuminating them. He also employs
experimental music and many silences and whispered, not always
discernible, languages, functional to the artistic rendering of Isserley as
existentially and culturally alien to the world of humans. The film
centres on gender difference and the use/abuse of the female both in
the psychic sphere and in the cultural/economic one, through the
representation of the double alienation of identity and otherness, of
human and non-human, within the cultural ecosystem of
marginalisation and alienation where nature is the mirroring space of

     7
       The reviews of the movie are many and go in very different directions;
especially interesting are the ones that analyse its intertextuality and its cita-
tions in comparison with other movies. See for instance: Hulm 2015; Piras
2015.


                                                                                    9
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



this marginality. The alien becomes a woman, as in the book, through
the experimentation of mirroring oneself into the marginal (human)
female other, her anthropomorphic appropriation, and eventually by
experiencing human violence on her own skin: an experience that will
draw her nearer to humans, overcoming the dichotomy between
human and non-human, but through the rape of her own (woman’s)
body. Under the skin, (alien) nature is the same for men turned into
meat and for women used as sexual objects by the humans.
     The film begins with the process of Isserley’s construction from
alien to human following the same path as the new-born child until her
transformation into an adult. First of all we see a technological object
that could be both the eye of the camera, the mechanical eye of the
alien and the space ship from which Isserley might have arrived on
earth. Unlike the novel, where Isserley is gradually unveiled as an
alien, in the film it is immediately clear that the protagonist is a special
kind of (human) being in formation. Isserley learns the language and
pronounces it through morphemes that recall the baby talk of new-
borns (See Figure 1), learns to see gradually, first in black and white,
then in colour.
     The sounds surrounding the newly born woman are first muffled,
indistinct, become recognizable little by little, and then reveal their
meaning. Glazer and the producer James Wilson in an interview
appeared on The Guardian reveal their experience in making the movie,
that seems to mirror Isserley’s construction: “Elaborate special effects
sequences were tossed. ‘It was like a big, extravagant rock band
turning into PJ Harvey’, Wilson says. While Glazer was obsessed

         over how the world might really look to new eyes. “I liked
      having it in my head. Finding the logic, the images. It's like
      learning an alphabet, then a language, then writing in it, then
      trying to write poetry in it.” (Leigh 2014)

     The separation between the natural world and the world of
machines and technology is depicted, as Manuel Piras reminds us
(2015), as a fog that separates two worlds, one urbanistic and machinic


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Figure 1




                                           11
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



      and the other naturalistic and incorrupt. In the book the world of
aliens is foggy and dark, there is no sea and no clear sky, its
representation is that of a polluted world; in the movie the separation
between technology and nature through the fog and mist also marks
Isserley's identification with the natural world as a source of freedom
and identity8.
      While in the novel Isserley’s haunt for hitchhikers starts in the car
where they are anesthetised and ends in the underground of the
mansions where they are transformed into meat, in the movie the
captured men, naked, are swallowed and drown into a black pool,
while Isserley moves smoothly over it (See Figure 2).
      The filmic remediation of the transformation into alien ‘meal’
unites the seductiveness of femininity through the black reflecting
surface that swallows the naked, vulnerable and unaware other, who
sinks in what seems not only to mimic the Lacanian mirror as ‘other
than the self’, but also the dangerousness of femininity functional to
the alien system through the mimesis of the human9. The black mirror
is both the Lacanian evolutionary mirror phase and desire as life and
death drive: this scene is therefore also a reflection of the dreams and
nightmares that seem to accompany human sexuality. However, as in
the novel, but especially here, what is represented is the nightmare of
the woman as a devouring being, the one who transforms the sexual
act into death.

      8
        In the novel, the idea of this blurred space is signaled by the word
murky (grey, gloomy, dark) that ‘translates’ for the alien world the human
‘mercy’ as the request of help from the captivated men. Murky is the word
she pronounces while being raped, misspelling the word mercy, word that
does not exist in her alien world (and actually as a practice in the earthly re-
ality): «Desperately, she searched for the right word, the word that might
make him stop. It was a word she knew, but had only ever seen written – in
fact, only this morning, a vodsel had spelled it out. She’d never heard it spo-
ken. “Murky”, she pleaded» (Faber 2011: 193).
      9
        Piras compares Under the Skin to Only God Forgives by Nicolas Wind-
ing Refn (2013), with which it would form a Lacanian diptych: on female and
male sexuality respectively (Piras 2015).


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Figure 2




                                           13
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology




                                               Figure 3




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      Being functional, Isserley is doubly alien: as a woman and as a
stranger in the new world, and in her own social system. Rereading the
book in the light of this scene, which could be the subject of in depth
examination from other socio-cultural and psychoanalytical directions,
the conditioning, not just cultural but also symbolical and psychic, of
the mutual fears and dangers of difference appears to be even more
powerful, especially when this difference is functional to the system of
capitalistic marketing (turning into meat) which makes both seducer
and seduced exploited and used in the chain of transformation of the
human into the non-human. What the film integrates and remediates is
exactly the symbolic system (made of culture and psychic energies) as
constructed on the exploitation and functionality of the marginal as
anti-human decoy. If the film does not present itself as animalistic
criticism, as Faber does, it however illuminates, by transforming the
technical mediums from narrative to visual, the symbolic mirror of the
law of the father in a mortal trap for the relationship between genders
and that between identity and difference.
      The power of the final scene where the alien reveals herself to us,
under the conventional woman’s skin she has stolen and mimicked
from other images and female flesh to perform as woman, reveals
Isserley as made from the same substance of the black mirror: signifier
and signified of being alien as a mirror of the human dehumanisation
of the (female) ‘other’ (See Figure 3).
      The last scene unveils the book10 and the film as a meta-narrative
on the body and the self as material and symbolic terrains, both


     10
        In the last section of the novel, Isserley makes the decision to ‘go
home’ and the way in which she decides to return to the ‘alien’ world can be
interpreted in different ways: «I want to go home, she thought, but her deci-
sion had been made: she had no home anymore» (Faber 2011: 286); «The aviir
would blow her car, herself, and a generous scoop of earth into the smallest
conceivable particles. The explosion would leave a crater in the ground as
big and deep as if a meteorite had fallen there. And she? Where would she
go? The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and ni-
trogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would be-


                                                                                15
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



hypermediated and hypermediatic. Reading both mediums leads to a
further consideration: the body as remediation of several technologies
of representation. In Under the Skin the body is a medium, a material
terrain ‘decorating’ the humanity/inhumanity of human/non-human
relationships. In defining the female body as a multimediated
construction, Anne Balsamo takes into consideration bodybuilding and
cosmetic surgery:

         In cosmetic surgery too, the body, often a woman's body, is
      technologically reconstructed, although not in this case by the
      woman herself but often by a male surgeon. Balsamo shows how
      surgeons visualize the female body as an object for cosmetic
      reconstruction. […]
         As Balsamo points out, the remediations of the cosmetic surge
      often serve to reproduce signs of the cultural ideal of "natural
      beauty. (in Bolter - Grusin 2000: 237-238)

      In the book Under the Skin the latter is structural surgery and in
the film it is transformative integument. In both cases it is an ‘over-the-
skin’ transformation, giving meaning to the psychic and political
economy of the two texts. Here, the body is flesh-technology and
cultural energy at the same time: its representation is tissue and the
technological means informing/creating it. In the process, the body is
shattered, fragmented, a body in pieces11; the ‘natural’ body incarnates



come part of the sky. […] Her invisible remains would combine, over time,
with all the wonders under the sun» (Faber 2011: 299). The transposition and
adaptation of this scene into the movie, makes more explicit the violence that
has led Isserley to this decision; while the movie ends with Issrley’s ‘parti-
cles’ ascending to the sky like snow while some of them linger and stop onto
the camera.
      11
         «The more he looked at this girl, the weirder she appeared. […]
Strangest of all, though, was her skin. Every part of her flesh that he could
see, except for her pale smooth breasts, had the same peculiar texture to it: a
downy look, like the hide of a cat recently spayed, just beginning to grow


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the features of technological images, uniting the alien to the
representations of femaleness – mimetic, but not transparent. The body
of the alien, once become a woman, surgically assembled, is re-
mediated through the re-visions of the cultural versions of the female
body and its uses and abuses (the rape). It is also a transfer of one
medium into the other (under the skin). The body thus shows itself as a
modifiable structure. Accordingly, the self is incarnated and re-
mediated from the body. Feminist theories are particularly aware of
the body as medium and interplay of media, of the interaction of
technology and the flesh, of the relationship between nature and
culture.
     Isserley is represented as a cyborg creature, very near to the
cyborg as envisaged by Donna Haraway, even if its mobile qualities
are turned into a dystopian experience in both the novel and the
movie. Haraway’s cyborg is a creature of social reality and fiction, a
cybernetic organism and a hybrid of machine and organism (Haraway
2016: 5), science and nature, crossing the boundaries between human
and non-human, species, materiality and thought, flesh and machine,
nature and technology. It also transcends gender polarizations. The
cyborg is a deconstruction of Western traditions and the postmodern
embodiment of difference and identity together. The cyborg re-writes
identity as affinity and bonding, it suggests an alliance more than
‘natural’ data:

        The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and
     material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility
     of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science
     and politics – the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the
     tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature
     as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of
     reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other – the
     relation between organism and machine has been a border war.



back the fur. She has scars everywhere: along the edges of her hands, along
her collarbones, and especially on her face» (Faber 2011: 205).


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Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



      The stakes in the border war have been the territories of
      production, reproduction, and imagination. […] No longer
      structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg
      defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social
      relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are
      reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation
      or incorporation by the other. (Haraway 2016: 7-9)

      The body is thus an imaginative counter-discourse and an
integrative interdiscourse, through the display of the media that
produce it, where it is no longer possible to separate the materiality of
the body from media informing it nor its historical and cultural
representations. The final scene where the body of the alien (under the
skin) and the woman as integument, plastic and aesthetic surgery,
reunite in their destruction and in their return to particles and atoms
falling from the natural world, signalling both the inhumanity of
humans and the ‘natural’ common belonging, without separation
between human and non-human. But they also signal the female body
as terrain for violence and abuse. Simultaneously, they show the body
as representation and remediation of the self that dissolves itself going
beyond the barriers between human and non-human, returning to the
communal elementary shared substances. Isserley’s frailty is in fact
part of a communal experience of the human condition. Judith Butler‘s
recognition of this form of fragility starts from precarity as shared
humanities. In her performative theory of assembly, the communal
condition of political and individual vulnerability is the connective
tissue that the living bodies share under the diverse skins of experience
(Butler 2015). Vulnerability and precarity also signify disappearances
from the apparatus machinery of the establishment. Borrowing Butler’s
words, the jointed reappearance of bodies in public spaces and social
movements can be seen in the case of Under the Skin as a representation
onto the scene of a communal posthuman condition of precarity that
does not only claim an individual recognition, but the recognition for
all human and non-human beings.




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                                          Between, vol. IX, n. 17 (Maggio/May 2019)



     Isserley, overcoming the dichotomy between human non-human
is a strange case of a posthuman subjectivity, tracing the continuities
and discontinuities between a ‘natural’ self and a technological
posthuman condition. Katherine Hayles reconsiders the posthuman in
a positive way:

        If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who
     regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground
     of being, 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 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 1999: 5)

     Although Isserley is also a scapegoat as in classical dystopian
science fiction, the sacrificial element that allows the critique implicit in
and induced by the dystopian world, her posthumanity calls for
empathy and solidarity for a reciprocal ‘survival’.
     Rosi Braidotti’s rewriting of the posthuman body in a nomadic
perspective envisages identities as fluid and flexible, embodying the
inseparability between culture and nature, technologically mediated
cultures and the globally connected societies. The nomadic subjects in
the posthuman era claim a politics of affirmation that challenges the
negative view of the posthuman condition and nihilism. Nomadic
subjects are part of a posthuman policy that recognises the
interdependence of all humans but also between human and other
species, and their habitats together with the technologies that mediate
them: «The posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes a
profound interconnection between the self and the other, including the
non-human or “earth” others» (Braidotti 2013: 59). Braidotti’s
interpretation of the posthuman does not work on shared vulnerability
as alliance, but her politics of affirmation does not dismiss this shared
position of disadvantage.



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Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology




     “Soyez réalistes: demandez l’impossibile”12: science
              fiction as a tool of transformation
     Science fiction is a sensorium of what is wrong in society, and also
a potential cognitive tool for self-renewal, where biophilic and
multimedial energies may find a symbolic space for expression and
reintegration in the ecology of cultural discourses and through the
exposition of the media structuring them. And the empathy we feel for
the common damaged and abused humanity (in the book and film)
once again signals the poetic and political function of science fiction for
an urgent reconsideration of the human/non-human relationship in
terms of overcoming ethnic and gender difference. The film is a
remediation of the critique-analysis of the relationship between
genders and between ‘differences’ both in the psychic sphere and in
their social symbolic construction.
     Science fiction as eco-criticism is, in this example, an ecology of
the knowledge of the processes of biopsychic and cultural life, and
their transformations through technology and social experiences. This
cultural ecology reveals the necessity of being aware of the uncanny
(eco-systemic) interdependence of life and death, identity and
difference, and of all different species.
     In this re-reading, empathy and solidarity are also the overcoming
of Western centrality in favour of a more global constellation, where
the polarity between ego and outer world, between freedom, social and
natural solidarity is overcome and reconciled (Dallmayr 2016: 3).
Empathy, then, is a foundational tension in eco-critical science fiction.
Thematised in Under the Skin through Isserley’s ‘metamorphosis’,
empathy reveals itself as a new way to reread the relation between
human and non-human, between identity and difference, male and
female. If for Descartes admiration was one of the primary passions,



       “Be realistic, demand the impossible” was one of the most famous
      12

slogans of the French unrest in May 1968.



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                                        Between, vol. IX, n. 17 (Maggio/May 2019)



empathy and solidarity seem to become vital for a different vision and
construction of the world.




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Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



Zapf, Hubert, “Ecocriticism, Cultural Ecology and Literary Studies”,
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                                       Sitography
Bradshaw, Peter, “Under the Skin Review – ‘Very Erotic, Very Scary’”,
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                                      Filmography
Under the Skin, Dir. Jonathan Glazer, UK, USA, Switzerland, 2013.


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                              The Author
Rita Monticelli

       Rita Monticelli teaches English literature, gender studies,
theories and history of culture at the University of Bologna. Her
research interests include utopia, dystopia and science fiction in
literature and visual culture, memory and trauma studies, the global
novel, postcolonial theories and criticism, orientalism, and travel
literature. Among her publications: The Politics of The Body in Women’s
Literature (2012), Topografie delle culture (2011, co-edited with R. Vecchi),
and the special issue of de genere “Small Island? Transnational
Solidarity in Contemporary Literature and Arts” (2017, co-edited with
L. Mari). She is member of international European research networks
centred on cultures of equality. She coordinates the international M.A
GEMMA (Women’s and Gender Studies) for the University of Bologna.
She directs the Research Centre for Utopian Studies.

      Email: rita.monticelli@unibo.it



                              The Article
Date sent: 30/04/2019
Date accepted: 15/05/2019
Date published: 30/05/2019



                       How to cite this article
Monticelli, Rita, “Under the Skin: Science Fiction as Posthuman Cultural
Ecology”, Immaginare l’impossibile: trame della creatività tra letteratura e




                                                                                23
Rita Monticelli, Science Fiction as posthuman cultural ecology



scienza, Eds. L. Boi - F. D’Intino - G.V. Distefano, Between, IX.17 (2019),
http://www.Between-journal.it/




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