Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanismin Catherine Lacey’s The Answers

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 NARRATING THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: TRANSHUMANISM AND CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM IN CATHERINE LACEY’S THE ANSWERS. MARÍA ABIZANDA CARDONA Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected] Received January 24, 2022 Accepted December 9, 2022 KEYWORDS: Fourth Industrial Revolution; transhumanism; critical posthumanism; embodiment; speculative fiction; feminism. PALABRAS CLAVE: Cuarta Revolución Industrial; transhumanismo; posthumanismo crítico; corporeidad; ficción especulativa; feminismo. ABSTRACT: Recent scientific breakthroughs under the wing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, particularly in the realm of biotechnology, have prompted an integral redefinition of the human, looking toward the posthuman state. Stances on this question range from the transhumanists’ advocacy of overcoming biological limits, to the indexing of technoscientific advancement to an antihumanist and postanthropocentric project championed by critical posthumanism. These debates have been translated into speculative fiction works such as Catherine Lacey’ The Answers (2017). This novel revolves around the Girlfriend Experiment, a state-of-the-art research project aimed at taking the next step in our emotional evolution by eliminating the need for romantic relationships, bankrolled by a film industry mogul. This paper analyses the representation of human enhancement in the novel, arguing that the depiction of the material consequences of the experiment upon its research subjects amounts to a rejection of the unrestricted development of technology along transhumanist and neoliberal tenets. In this, The Answers offers a critical take on the Fourth Industrial Revolution aligned with the principles of critical posthumanism. RESUMEN: Los avances científicos al amparo de la Cuarta Revolución Industrial, sobre todo en el campo de la biotecnología, han impulsado una redefinición integral de la humanidad, con la mirada puesta en lo posthumano. Existen diferentes posturas sobre 176 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 esta cuestión, yendo desde la apuesta por dejar atrás nuestros límites biológicos del pensamiento transhumanista, hasta la apuesta antihumanista y postantropocentrista del posthumanismo crítico. Estos debates se han trasladado a obras de ficción especulativa como Las respuestas (2017), una novela de Catherine Lacey. Ésta narra el “Experimento Novia”, un proyecto de vanguardia financiado por un magnate del cine, que busca dar un paso adelante en nuestra evolución emocional eliminando la necesidad de establecer relaciones románticas. Este artículo analiza la representación del perfeccionamiento humano en la novela, argumentando que el retrato de las consecuencias materiales de este experimento sobre sus sujetos de investigación supone un rechazo del desarrollo tecnológico de acuerdo con el pensamiento transhumanista y neoliberal. En este sentido, Las respuestas ofrece una visión crítica de la Cuarta Revolución Industrial en sintonía con el posthumanismo crítico. INTRODUCTION. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, claims that the scientific advances at the turn of the twenty-first century have ushered in a “fourth industrial revolution” (12), based on the integration of disciplines such as artificial intelligence and gene sequencing across the biological and digital realms. This revolution, notable for its “size, speed and scope,” is bound to bring about “unprecedented paradigm shifts in the economy, business, society, and individual in ways that were previously the preserve of science fiction” (Schwab 8, 93). Technological breakthroughs under the wing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, particularly in the fields of human enhancement and biotechnology, could reach the extent of prompting an integral redefinition of the human, moving toward a potential posthuman stage. This transition has sparked off intense ethical debates, with stances ranging from the opposition to the modification of nature on the grounds that it would “undermine human dignity” (Bostrom "Defense" 203) heralded by bioconservatist thinkers such as Michael Sandel in The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution or Jeremy Rifkin in Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World to the belief that that these technologies hold “enormous potential for valuable and humanly beneficial uses,” and will ultimately turn us Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers 177 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 into “posthuman beings with indefinite health-spans, greater intellectual faculties and the ability to control their own emotions” held by champions of transhumanism (Bostrom "Defense" 203). Rejecting these technophobic and apologist standpoints on human enhancement, the work of critical posthumanist theorists such as Katherine Hayles, Rosi Braidotti or Sherryl Vint sides with Donna Haraway’s binary-breaking cyborg, proposing to leverage the liberatory potential of technology to overcome the legacy of humanism and anthropocentrism. These debates on human enhancement have translated into literature, particularly in the field of speculative fiction, which Vint declares “a space of vernacular theorization” able to grapple with the new subjects and ethics of the posthuman zeitgeist by instantiating them in narrative (“Speculative Fiction” 220). The genre’s dialectical exchange with reality, Vint contends, can be mobilized to endorse specific directions for current technoscientific development, and thus can help us “envision and materialize alternative futures that seek to transform rather than intensify contemporary injustices” (Biopolitical Futures 8). In line with Vint’ approach to speculative fiction, this paper seeks to analyze The Answers (2017), a novel by the American author Catherine Lacey, under the light of current arguments on human enhancement. The Answers, a work that has been described as “genreblending” and “flirting with science fiction” (Rappis), narrates how Mary, a young woman plagued by a mysterious illness, enrolls on an cryptic “income-generating experience” to be able to afford therapy and settle her medical debt (Lacey 28). She becomes involved in the Girlfriend Experiment (GX), a research project aimed at taking the next step in our “emotional evolution” through the development of a “technological, therapeutic or medical solution for those who continually try and fail to find contentment in a romantic pair bond” (Lacey 46), bankrolled by the uber-famous actor-filmmaker Kurt Sky. After a series of secretive interviews, the selected women are assigned the roles usually fulfilled by a romantic partner—“a lover, a best friend, a nurturer, an intellectual equal, an oblique replacement for a lost or failed parent” (Lacey 46)—and asked to perform a series of Relational Experiments, role-playing sessions that allow the Research Division to track the physiological workings of love. Alternating between Mary’s autodiegetic narration in Parts One and Three and a heterodiegetic narration focalizing through multiple characters in Part Two, the novel depicts how the bond between 178 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 Mary and Kurt grows increasingly intimate, while the unethical, damaging effects of the experiment are disclosed. Mary is relieved from of her role as Emotional Girlfriend after a violent accident with Ashley, the Anger Girlfriend, who has become manic due to the Research Team’s unscrupulous tests. By the end of the novel, it is revealed that the GX’s recordings—unbeknownst to the Girlfriends— have been collected to produce Kurt’s magnum opus, the film The Walk, and their biological data harnessed to launch Identity Distance Therapy, a wearable device that promises to suppress the human need for romantic connection. Lacey’s portrayal of the Girlfriend Experiment, this paper will argue, exposes the limitations of the transhumanist ambition of transcending embodiment, and denounces the indexing of technoscientific development to neohumanist and neoliberal discourses by exposing its aftermath on its othered, gendered research subjects. This call for leaving behind the exclusionary rhetoric of (trans)humanism toward a more embodied, affective, and vulnerable subjectivity motivates a reading of The Answers as a narrative intervention in the posthuman question that sides with the principles of critical posthumanism. DEBATES ON THE POSTHUMAN: TRANSHUMANISM, CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM AND (DIS)EMBODIMENT. The preeminent transhumanist thinker Max More defines this movement as an ensemble of “philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology” (“Philosophy” 3). These enhancement options include the “radical extension of human health-span, eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capacities” (Bostrom “Values” 3). In other words, transhumanism promotes the radical extension of human capabilities in a perpetual progress toward the posthuman state. Transhumanism as defined above took form in the latter part of the twentieth century, crystallized in pivotal works such as FM- 2030’s Are You a Transhuman? Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World and More’s “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy.” As More explains, transhumanist philosophy is rooted in classical humanism and Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers 179 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 champions traditionally Enlightened ideals such as “the emphasis on progress, on taking personal charge of creating better futures, on reason, technology, scientific method, and human creativity” (“Philosophy” 4), appointing current innovations in biotechnology and life sciences as the main means to achieve this advancement. As famously traced in Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, the transhumanist adoption of these tenets extends to reproducing the mind/body dualism at the root of humanist thought. The Cartesian split equates self only with the rational mind and ignores the relevance and specificity of embodiment, which is in turn constructed as “abject, material, immanent, and vulnerable–that which forces us to recall our own limitations,” that which makes us “mortal and weak” (Vint Bodies of Tomorrow 183). This privileging of the mind is upheld by transhumanist thinkers, who aim to escape the material consequences of life as embodied beings through technological augmentation. As Hayles expounds, discourses driving the development of cybernetics and informatics in the twentieth century privileged the mind, “the informational pattern,” over the body, its “material instantiation,” thus making embodiment seem “an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (How 2). In this view, the body is rendered a prothesis to discard and manipulate at will, a perspective best illustrated by the common transhumanist fantasy to render embodiment and mortality obsolete through mind uploading. Transhumanist thought has been met with opposition for two reasons. First, that the posthuman state may be degrading for human dignity, a position adopted by bioconservatist thinkers such as Sandel, Fukuyama or Rifkin. In addition, and despite transhumanists’ insistence that wide access to scientific advancements will lessen social inequality, encourage tolerance and understanding (Bostrom “Values” 11), or even end world hunger and reverse environmental destruction (Kurzweil 181, 290); reasonable doubts about the social consequences of human enhancement have been voiced by theorists associated with critical posthumanism. The latter condemn the movement’s links with private enterprise and the corporate world and claim that technology developed along transhumanist lines may exacerbate “issues of egalitarian access to advanced technologies, the violence of social inequalities, massive job suppressions and the on-going depletion of Earth resources” (Braidotti Posthuman Knowledge 36). 180 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 Critical posthumanism shares with transhumanism the perception of the human as “a non-fixed and mutable condition” and “the notion of technogenesis” (Ferrando 27, 28), that is, of human’s co-evolution with technological progress. Notwithstanding these common concerns, posthumanism radically diverts from transhumanist thought, which, in Braidotti’s words, engenders “a perverse form of the posthuman” through its adherence to the humanist legacy and its alliances with advanced capitalism (The Posthuman 7). As a counterpoint to the shortcomings of current scientific discourses, critical posthumanism seeks to harness the transition to the posthuman stage to spark a political and philosophical reconceptualization, based upon the principles of antihumanism and postanthropocentrism. In her monograph The Posthuman, Braidotti exposes the rationale behind the movement’s rejection of the humanist legacy: At the start of it all there is He: the classical ideal of ‘Man’. An ideal of bodily perfection which doubles up as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values. Together they uphold a specific view of what is ‘human’ about humanity. Moreover, they assert with unshakable certainty the almost boundless capacity of humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectibility. This paradigm implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism. Central to this posture is the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration. Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behavior, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. In so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others.’ These are the sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies. (13) This dialectic of negative difference works in collusion with profit-driven capitalism, as it justifies the exploitation and commodification of those deemed “less than human.” Critical posthumanist thinkers state that capital dynamics under the Fourth Industrial Revolution commodify Life itself, as biological processes— gestation, stem cell production, tissue engineering—become annexed to capitalist processes of accumulation and are transformed into a means for generating surplus (Cooper). In this scenario, the Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers 181 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 “disposable bodies” of Humanism are “reduced to carriers of vital information, invested with financial value and capitalized” (Braidotti The Posthuman 117), forced to serve the “directly embodied debt peonage” that lurks behind the promises of technoscientific advancement (Cooper 150). Rejecting the indexing of technoscientific development to neohumanist and neoliberal precepts, critical posthumanism advocates for discarding the legacy of Cartesian dualism and redefining humanity as inextricably embedded, embodied and relational (Braidotti Posthuman Knowledge 67). Against transhumanist fantasies of transcendence and imperviousness, critical posthumanism states that all creatures, as embodied beings, are “intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them” along a nature-culture continuum that includes human, natural and technological others (Alaimo 435). This vitalist, monistic conception of life provides the blueprint for more egalitarian social, political, and ethical models, ones able to eschew the pitfalls of negative difference and individualism. These conflicting standpoints on the transition to the posthuman stage figure large in Lacey’s The Answers, which maps both the transhumanist wish to transcend embodiment and the dire consequences of this ambition for the othered subjects on whose bodies it is purchased. “WE ARE NOT DONE EVOLVING”: TRANSHUMANIST FANTASIES IN THE ANSWERS. Part One of The Answers, narrated by Mary’s autodiegetic voice, revolves around her incorporation to the Girlfriend Experiment (GX), a research project “at the forefront of the creation of truly innovative technological solutions to emotional and psychological problems” (Lacey 110). Pressed by “the onslaught of medical bills” collected searching for a diagnosis (Lacey 9), Mary contacts an advertisement promoting a “high-paying, low-time commitment income-generating experience” (Lacey 28). She goes through a series of thorough background checks involving the collection of her biometrics and interviews about her educational and familial background, her knowledge of popular culture, her views on romantic relationships, etc. After committing to a strict nondisclosure agreement, she is 182 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 designated the experiment’s Emotional Girlfriend—the most crucial role—and introduced to the plan and purposes of the GX, which is presented as “a state-of-the-art inquiry into some of life’s most challenging questions” (Lacey 33). Matheson, personal assistant to the experiment’s patron Kurt Sky, describes the motivation of the experiment as follows: In the greater context of human history, wealth and power have been indications that a person has secured excess resources for survival. The wealthy and powerful should therefore be nodes of philanthropy and evolution, the ones who move us, as a species, forward with thought and generosity. However, the American concept of celebrity has developed and beco me deformed in tandem with the rise of the information age. The paparazzi are now everywhere because anyone can be one with nothing more than a cell phone. The value we have placed on superficial knowledge of the personal lives of our celebrities is quickly creating a sort of emotional vacuum for many respected, talented, wealthy, and otherwise evolved individuals. [Kurt’s] ability to connect deeply and intimately with another person has been compromised by the fact that anyone he meets feels as if they already know him. How does he find meaningful human connection in a world of people who falsely believe they are already connected to him? How does he make friends who don’t just want to ride his coattails toward their own fame? How can he ever really trust someone, and thus, how could he ever safely be in love? (Lacey 42) The goal of the experiment, in Matheson’s words, is to develop “a nuanced view of human pair-bond selection, behavior, and maintenance,” aimed at finding “a technological, therapeutic and/or medical solution for those who continually try and fail to find contentment in a romantic pair bond” (Lacey 46), which would constitute the next step at humans’ emotional evolution. As presented in Part One of The Answers, the goals of the GX can be read in line with transhumanist ambitions of transcending current biological limitations. To begin with, the scientists of the GX’s Research Team conceive our present state as a transitional, improvable stage of our evolution, and believe that the findings of their experiment will be a catalyst for the next phase in our emotional development. As the advertisement of Identity Distance Therapy, the brainchild of the GX, puts it: Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers 183 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 Some might say that romantic frustration is just part of the human condition, that it's an inescapable problem we all must deal with– but polio used to be an inescapable part of being a human and we no longer deal with that. We evolve emotionally just as we evolve physically and we are not done evolving. (Lacey 289–290) In the framework of the research, then, the human need to establish romantic bonds and the vulnerability that relationality necessarily implies stand as a liability, an obsolete weakness that must be overcome by technological means. As part of their search for “a way out of this terrible cycle” (Lacey 288), the Research Team records the biometrics of the Girlfriends’ bodies as they rehearse relationship routines in the Relational Experiments, attempting to pin down the physiology of limerence, “the psychological and physiological state of a body as it falls in love” (Lacey 109), to be then able to reproduce it artificially. Hence, feelings are understood as informational patterns that can be extricated from the body, their material instantiation. In her discussion of the relation between transhumanism and the pursuit of happiness, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson argues that the advent of brain sciences has given rise to a “materialistic and reductionist” approach to happiness, equating human emotion with “chemical messengers, neurotransmitters, and neuromodulators” (15). This reductionist discourse is reproduced by the GX’s researchers in the novel, who contend that: A human system merely responds to the data it is given and creates a set of data as an answer to that data. Feelings and emotions are not mysterious. They are merely attempts to respond rationally to an uncertain world, a series of neurochemical reactions that can be analyzed and traced back to their origins. (Lacey 136) Nowhere is this materialist view of feelings more evident than in the concoction of Internal Directives, a cutting-edge technology devised by the Research Division to “transfer information into the body, telling it how to behave,” using electromagnetic pulses to modify the subject’s “Emotional Vulnerability Quotient” (Lacey 146), a formula that quantifies a person’s openness to others by measuring hormones, neurotransmitters, vagal tone, etc. Eventually, Internal Directives give way to the launching of Identity Distance Therapy, a virtual reality device that simulates “a total dissolve of the 190 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 information age, most clearly pictured in Ashley’s erratic sense of self and also evoked in the book’s cover. 1 Thus, Part Two stages in its form the issues explored thematically, bringing to the fore the harrowing realities of those left behind by the neoliberal, neohumanist discourses that fuel current technoscientific development. This denunciation, informed by the principles of critical posthumanism, is succinctly summarized in Mary’s lucid reflection: “Having a body doesn’t give you any rights at all” (Lacey 17). “WHO PUT ALL THIS FEAR IN US?”: THE ANSWERS’ VINDICATION OF EMBODIMENT. Part Three of the novel, spanning the last 38 pages, recounts Mary’s discharge from the GX after a violent accident between her, Kurt, and Ashley, the Anger Girlfriend. In formal terms, Part Three coincides with the return of Mary’s autodiegetic, chronological narration. Read as a counterpoint to the polyphonic narration of Part Two, this restoration of Mary’s narratorial control can be read as a translation of the recovery of her identity, her reclaiming of the mastery to define herself, breaking free from the dictates of the GX toward a new sense of the self based on the embracing of relationality, vulnerability, and embodiment. In an interview with The Paris Review, Lacey reflects on the wish to do away with the body shared by transhumanism supporters and the Research Team’s scientists: When I’m writing, I am very much thinking of the body and I don’t think this is necessarily a very modern concern—I do think there’s this very human, ongoing problem of people being dissociated from their own bodies. So sometimes work that addresses the intricacies of what is happening in a body and the way that it relates to our thoughts, the way it relates to the way we see the world, seems kind of familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Beneath our lives there is the physical rhythm of our existence, and yet so much of the time we are trying to ignore it. We want to ignore it, because it 1 The original cover of the novel’s hardcover edition pictures the piecemeal face of a woman, its fragments superimposed over each other, which can be thought to represent the Girlfriends’ mangled, disjointed identities after being subjected to the distressing practices of the GX. Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers 191 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 would be too upsetting to acknowledge the sort of temporary bloody mess that is your life. (Lacey in Traps) As discussed earlier, this ambition to rise above embodiment is at the core of the Girlfriend Experiment, which sees the human penchant for relationships, and the inevitable pain and frustration that come with them, as an obsolete soft spot, an evolutionary delay to be removed from human nature. The possibility and desirability of overcoming this need is, however, repeatedly contested throughout Part Three. In Part Two of the novel Mary had become increasingly involved in the “scheduled” relationship with Kurt, even exceeding the requirements of her role as Emotional Girlfriend. However, in their final meeting she realizes that, despite his claims that “we loved each other, from a scientific perspective, at least—and that’s all that counts,” her feelings had not been “an unfettered love but instead an obligation, a sense of being owned—how sad to think that these feelings might seem like love in the brain, that from the outside the difference couldn’t be seen” (Lacey 270). The GX’s failure to recognize true limerence undermines the very basis for the Girlfriend Experiment: if feelings cannot be reduced to informational patterns traceable and manipulable through technological means, they cannot be synthetically reproduced nor dissociated from the body, as promised by Identity Distance Therapy. Hence, the need for relationality cannot be dislodged from human nature, nor pain eradicated from human life. This realization, as well as the discovery of the end use of the Girlfriends’ data, prompts Mary’s definitive divorce from the GX and its promises. She cloisters herself in her apartment, discards her company-issued smartphone—a stand-in for her involvement in the GX—and devotes herself to a slow life of reading and reflecting, longing for “all these people who had come to and gone from her, people who had meant something, done things to her, changed her, made her who she was now” (Lacey 225). Mary’s relationships with these people, as most of the instances of romantic, filial, or amical relations that populate the novel, are failed and frustrated, a source of pain and regret. Counterintuitively, this seems to back the GX’s view of human relationships as a hindrance, the idea that “love was as thrilling as it was temporary, a prelude to pain” (Lacey 40). Yet, the novel harnesses the acknowledgement of pain as part and parcel of human life to put forward a vindication of embodiment. 192 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 Mary’s understanding of human experience as fundamentally affective and vulnerable, inextricably enmeshed with and traversed by others—“all these people who had come to and gone from her, done things to her, changed her” (Lacey 225)—offers the grounds for a rethinking of subjectivity and ethics, for the construction of horizontal, affective relationships with others. This reconceptualization is fully aligned with the critical posthumanist notion of the (post)human as “an assemblage, co-evolving with other forms of life, enmeshed with the environment and technology” (Nayar 13), standing in stark contrast to the transhumanist fantasies of imperviousness and transcendence. Mary’s plea for the acceptance of vulnerable embodiment, as opposed to the widespread will to “ignore the temporary bloody mess that is life” (Lacey in Traps), is the call with which Lacey puts an end to the novel: People changed. I changed. And isn't that enough for us? And who put all this fear in us, this fear of changing when all we ever do is change? Why is it so many want to sleep through it all, sleepwalk, sleep-live, feel nothing, eyes shut? Haven't we slept enough? Can't we all wake up now, here, in this warm valley between cold mountains of sleep? Sitting on my escape, I saw that man who often sold water bottles on hot days in the street, but since the day was ending and cold and it was time to go home, he seemed to have given up and was just trying to give them away. But everyone kept rushing past him, would not accept water from a stranger. (Lacey 290-291) At this point, we can circle back to Vint’s comments on speculative fiction, which she believes can be put to work for advancing critical posthumanist goals as “an ethical project, a way of participating in the deconstruction of the default ‘man’ of humanism and undoing the historical damage fostered by habits of human exceptionalism” (“Speculative Fiction” 221). In its narrativization of contemporary technological and social trends—human enhancement, commodification of life, social inequality—and its call for a reconceptualization of subjectivity and ethics that embraces rather than discards embodiment, The Answers contributes to the ongoing exchange between fact and fiction, amounting to a critical literary take on the Fourth Industrial Revolution that invites us both to chart the current path of socio-technological developments and to imagine alternative futures. Narrating The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers 193 Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 CONCLUSION. This paper has analyzed the representation of human enhancement in Catherine Lacey’s The Answers. The novel exposes the limits of transhumanist ambitions to transcend embodiment, denouncing its links with neo-liberal capitalism and its continuation of the biased Enlightened understandings of the human and the human body. Breaking away from these transhumanist discourses, the novel articulates a call for embodiment, affect and vulnerability as the basis for a renewed conception of subjectivity and relations, thus siding with the precepts of critical posthumanism. In this narrative instantiation of current technoscientific developments, The Answers intervenes in contemporary debates about human enhancement to both chart current trends and imagine alternative paths, in tune with Klaus Schwab’s demand for collective awareness and responsibility in the time of the posthuman: Technology is not an exogenous force over which we have no control. The more we think about how to harness the technology revolution, the more we will examine ourselves and the underlying social models that these technologies embody and enable, and the more we will have an opportunity to shape the revolution in a manner that improves the state of the world. (9) As a literary take on present or near-at-hand anxieties about science, technology, and techno-capitalism, The Answers can be ascribed to what Booker brands “the turn to dystopia” in speculative fiction, responding to “perceived inadequacies in existing social and political systems” (20). In this, it can be grouped together with other contemporary works on human enhancement in American literature, such as Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), Dave Egger’s The Circle (2013) or Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016). Written and set at the inception of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Lacey’s The Answers stands as a cautionary tale about our society’s foreseeable future if the posthuman is constructed along transhumanist, neoliberal lines. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Sonia Baelo Allué, Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, for her mentorship, generosity, and expertise. 194 María Abizanda Cardona Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26, 2022. Seville, Spain, ISSN1133-309-X, pp. 175-96 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.10 WORKS CITED. AARSETH, Epsen J. “Non-Linearity and Literary Theory.” The New Media Reader. Edited by Nick Montfort, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 1994. 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