바이오음악과 언어적 소통에서의 포스트휴먼 윤리 미학: 리처드 파워즈의 『오르페오』

Abstract

his paper aims to investigate the posthuman ethics through the narrative of an avant-garde musician Peter Els’s biocomposing in Richard Powers’ Orfeo. By accepting that Richard Bonner embodies Els’s ‘Music of the Sphere’ as the verbal music, Els recognizes the importance of the communication with others and the communal solidarity. Els’s biomusic shows that the words are not the ‘absolute’ form, but permeate into the music, allowing the readers to experience the music vibrantly. This novel suggests that the biomusic can be embodied as the life form by the aesthetics of transgenic art. Its strategies show that life and art have the interchangeability. Powers offers the possibility of the fluid and multiple subjectivity in the vital posthuman vision through Els’s biocomposing, which considers the connectivity of life and art and the co-evolution of human and non-human, escaping from the anthropocentric unified and confined subjectivity. Els obsesses with the desire to compose the ‘Music of the Earth.’ Els intends to make the informative organism, inscribing the musical code into the bacterial DNA. Unfortunately, the bio-art experiment in his home lab triggers the actions of federal forces, DHS, which casts suspicions to him as a bioterrorist, causing Els to flee westwards across USA, to avoid the indictment of the Patriot Act. Els’s transgenic piece can not but fail because it cannot be heard as the aesthetic form. In the end, Els’s performing the biomusic as a verbal music shows that his music is able to attain the vitality. Els posts his composition method on Twitter message, accepting his collaborator Bonner’s advice. In conclusion, Powers emphasizes the importance of communication, as the readers listen to the biomusic and perceive the vitality by the imagination. As a way to escape from the data-dominated surveillance system, Powers asserts the posthuman ethics that we should create the network society, where vitality, diversity and sustainability are emphasized.