The Medusa Complex: A Theory of Stoned Posthumanism
Ted Hiebert
Medusa was once a beautiful maiden, vying in beauty with Athene herself, until one night she slept with Poseidon in one of Athene's own temples. Outraged, Athene inflicted upon Medusa the punishment for which she is known, turning her into a winged monster with glaring eyes, serpents for hair, and a gaze that turned those around her to stone.
This theory grows out of Medusa's shadow, in particular because the gaze of Medusa perfectly represents the intricacies of the question I want to address. For the gaze of Medusa can be seen as a convincing metaphor for the liberal humanist gaze -- at essence an objectifying gaze, a gaze that constitutes its subjects according to rules, most often unchosen by them, but which never-the-less become the communal basis of Western living. But this metaphor functions no less well with regard to the postmodern gaze -- a gaze that does not immobilize through bodily petrification but through the intellectual paralysis of uncertain subjectivity. And finally, for the question of the posthuman and its emphasis on all things self-reflexive, we need only ask: what would happen when Medusa looks into the mirror and confronts herself in the deadly gaze of her own vision? Here we find that Medusa's fate is also the fate of the posthuman, negotiating the psyche of one whose very gaze has become intoxicated by potentialities, a proliferating imagination given the power not only to conceive, but now also to still, to produce, to surround itself with the delirious statues of a fallen real.
The Medusa Complex is the operational psyche of syncretism, that which brings together not only disparate ways of perceiving and believing, but of being -- that which transforms through precisely its refusal of traditional boundaries, of flesh or stone, of mythology or history, of intellect or art.Ê But more than that, The Medusa Complex in fact reverses these boundaries, rendering them unintelligible, non-functional -- fictional, but paradoxically present none-the-less. In this sense, contemporary individuality has become performative to a point of excess -- the intoxication with postmodern possibility becoming the grounding point for a discursive leap into the possibilities of imaginative formulation.
The Medusa Complex is the governing psychological drive of a posthuman world, now stripped of its responsibility to remain fictional.
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