)5050 ‫ ( عدد يناير – مارس‬48 ‫حوليات آداب عني مشس اجمللد‬

[Link]
)‫(دورية علمية حملمة‬
‫كلية اآلداب‬ ‫جامعة عني مشس‬

Are We Already Posthuman?

A Study of Lucy Prebble's The Sugar Syndrome

Ayman Ibrahim Elhalafawy *

An Associate Professor of English Literature- Faculty of Arts Kafrelsheikh University
Halafawydr74@[Link]
Abstract
Since we are living in the age of modern technology in its various
shapes, one feels it is important to discuss what is posthuman meant by
being a posthuman. This study is going to apply some of the features on
Lucy Prebble's The Sugar Syndrome (2003) to investigate the belief that we,
as humans, are already posthuman now and we do not need to wait for the
future to be posthuman. This study attempts to apply posthuman concepts to
the selected play, drawing on the work of Cary Wolfe, Ihab Hassan,
Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Hans Moravec, and Thomas Carlson.
The paper is going to identify the archetypal figure of digital culture – the
posthuman subject – within a dramatic form. The recent study tends to
explore the effect of the digital technology in the humanist paradigm as well
as the dichotomy in the self that occurs as a result of the integration with
intelligent machines.
The Sugar Syndrome is a posthuman play due to the characters'
relationship with the internet. In fact, about half of the nine scenes in the
first act of the play are online, whether partly or completely, shifting
between the virtual and material world through the internet. The characters,
in this play, are multidimensional as what they appear to be is different from
their inner self, which their interaction with technology helps to disclose.
The model of identity represented in The Sugar Syndrome, reveals the
characters to be subjugated to factors that are heterogeneous and collective
rather than singular and self-conscious, which are integrated with the
intelligent machines. The main characters can be viewed as posthuman
subjects as they represent a cyborgic unity between the digital code and
unwanted desires of the flesh. In this sense, this play tends to assert the idea
that we, as humans, are posthuman through our consolidation with the
technology, machines, and the accelerating digital world, and we do not
want to wait for the future to be nominated as posthumans.
Keywords:
Technologyy, Posthumanism, Lucy Prebble, Cyborg, Internet, The Sugar
Syndrome.
.0202 ‫ جامعة عني مشس‬- ‫© مجيع حقوق الطبع والنشر حمفوظة حلولية كلية اآلداب‬

- 245 -
 ylyhhyhy lymaAhlA eb ima?..... h yAimahahlmbmiha bm mamyA
Since we are living in the age of modern technology in its various
shapes, one feels it is important to discuss what is meant by being a
posthuman. This study is going to apply some of the posthuman features on
Lucy Prebble's The Sugar Syndrome to investigate the belief that we, as
humans, are already posthuman now and we do not need to wait for the
future to be posthuman. The paper is going to identify the archetypal figure
of digital culture – the posthuman subject – within a dramatic form. The
recent study tends to explore the effect of the digital technology in the
humanist paradigm as well as the dichotomy in the self that occurs as a
result of the integration with intelligent machines. The paper attempts to
investigate whether the digital environment establishes a conflict between a
humanist and a posthumanist worldview.
Before dealing with the term posthumanism, we shall in advance
realize what is meant by humanism in order to fully understand it.
Humanism, as Cary Wolfe puts it, "is a broad category of ethical
philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the
ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities
particularly rationality" (xi). Wolfe adds: "[the posthuman] unsettles the
very foundations of what we call 'the human'" (69). Hence, Rosi Braidotti
asserts that the posthumanist perspective "rests on the assumption of the
historical decline of Humanism but goes further in exploring alternatives . . .
It works instead towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualizing the
human subject" (37). J. A. Cuddon suggests:
Postumanism denotes a philosophical position concerned with
reconceptualizing what it means to be human. Posthumanism
refutes all ideas of naturalness, and denies the existence of a
transcendent ‘human nature’ asserted by humanism. However,
posthumanists share with humanists a commitment to progress
and a respect for science and rationality... Indeed, the concept of
the posthuman is more or less coterminous with that of Donna
Haraway’s ‘cyborg’. (551-552)
In 1977, Ihab Hassan wrote an article which turns out to be the first
occurrence of the word "posthumanism". In "Prometheus as Performer:
Towards a Posthumanist Culture", Hassan states:
We need first to understand that the human form—including
human desire and all its external representations — may be
changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. . . . We need to
understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming
to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we
must helplessly call posthumanism. (843)
The humanist approach to make man the dominator of all the other
species, treating him as the center of the universe, is coming to an end.
Posthumanism implies an overlap between the humans and technology.

- 245 -
 )5050 ‫( عدد يناير – مارس‬ 48 ‫ اجمللد‬- ‫حوليات آداب عني مشس‬
Kathrine Hayles argues that "a dynamic partnership between humans and
intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny
to dominate and control nature" (288). Posthumanism does not necessitate
the end of humanity, it rather abolishes certain human concepts that work in
favor of the group of humans who had " the wealth, power, and leisure to
conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will
through individual agency and choice" (286). Hayles tends to assert that "the
posthuman evokes the exhilarating prospect of getting out of some of the
old boxes and opening up new ways of thinking about what being human
means" (285).
Hayles also advocates that Posthumanism implies an intensive and
multifaceted human fusion with intelligent machines to the extent that it is
"no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological
organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed"
(35). In order for humans to be posthumans, from Hayles's point of view,
they must go through changes and transformation which will never be
complete or " sharp breaks; without exception, they reinscribed traditional
ideas and assumptions even as they articulated something new". Hayels
also suggests, as the title of her book How We Become Posthuman?
instigates, that the transition from humanity to posthumanity will be led by
us as, "people become posthuman because they think they are
posthuman"(6).The technological revolution is an intrinsic component in the
realization of posthumanity. Hayles further illustrates that technology has
participated in the creation of new notions of identity and subjectivity which
will help to define the posthuman ontology. Nevertheless, the advancements
of technology are not going to be the only driving force beyond the
existence of the posthuman entity. The influences that technology stamps
upon humanity will .allow for the possibility of a posthuman object. It is
widely accepted that people carry out the development of technologies as
they cannot be developed by themselves.
In her famous Manifesto for Cyborgs, published for the first time in
1984, Donna Haraway adopts a line of thinking analogous to Hayles' in
exploring a literal representation of a posthuman figure: "the cyborg". She
defines a posthuman entity, or cyborg, as an entity that has overcome the
limitations of biology, neurology, and psychology to move away from
the constraints of race and gender. For her, a posthuman text is one which
clearly reinforces the act of searching for answers away from human
physical and psychological limitations. The posthuman is a beacon of hope,
the cyborg, and the offspring of the military-industrial complex that has the
capacity to destroy the binaries that created it (149). She further illustrates
that "by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in
short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our
politics"(150). The cyborg design of Haraway, very similar to what many

- 244 -
 ylyhhyhy lymaAhlA eb ima?..... h yAimahahlmbmiha bm mamyA
posthumanists today call the posthuman, is, in fact, a being questioning the
dualisms that are found in Western thought:
Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous
the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-
developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that
used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are
disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. . . .The
dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism
and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and
women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.
(152)
Moreover, Hans Moravec defends the transition of human
personalities to machines capable of achieving more physical strength and
intellectual expansion than the usual human body always hoping that
mankind will be able to defy the limitations of age and time and to gain
immortality in this way. He also argues that, in the next fifty years, human
race will evolve into a new species and will have true different descendants
which are the robots, "a machine that can think and act as a human, however
inhuman it may be in physical or mental detail". Moravec further adds that
such thinking "machines could carry on our cultural evolution, including
their own construction and increasingly rapid self-improvement, without us,
and without the genes that built us," creating a "post biological world"
which they dominate (2).
The idea of posthumanism has developed nowadays. A cyborg model
has gone far to include any one who is dealing with the various means of
modern technology. Human beings in the late twentieth century have
become cyborgs. Hayles argues: "as you gaze at the flickering signifiers
scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you
assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already
become posthuman"(xiv). Referring to this idea, Seda Ilter says:
Posthumanism is not simply about prosthesis, literal cyborgs,
humanoid robots or science fiction. Rather, . . .it refers to the
(re)construction of identity through the subject’s interaction with and
exposure to the highly technologised and media-saturated
environment. ‘Becoming posthuman’ means going beyond the
boundaries of the so-‐called human and furthering the sense of
subjectivity, not only through the extension of the material body
beyond the borders of the organic skin, but also through the
expansion of consciousness and cognition. That is, one becomes
posthuman once one uses the internet, socializes through Facebook,
or feeds information into online systems such as Wikipedia. (128)

- 242 -
 )5050 ‫( عدد يناير – مارس‬ 48 ‫ اجمللد‬- ‫حوليات آداب عني مشس‬
Thomas Carlson defines a "posthuman mode of being" as:
a techno-scientific existence that extends and reshapes the powers
of human thought, agency, and imagination (via informational,
communications, and other media technology) even as it alters the
boundaries and character of human and other life (thanks to
biological sciences and technologies, genetic engineering, and the
like). (15)
Carlson further advocates that humans have evolved into posthumans
due to the massive amount of digital technologies in the twenty-first
century, which have facilitated the creation of a new posthuman paradigm.
Carlson also focuses on the ideas of French philosopher Michel Serres, who
argues that the subject's relationship with the wider world has been
reconfigured through the integral existence of digital technologies, satellite
networks, mobile communications, and cyberspace. Serres writes that "we
are losing our finitude in demonstrable ways …undoing the boundaries of
subject and object, the borders of life and death, and the kinds of spatial and
temporal limits that have long defined us" (qtd. in Carlson 141). Depending
on this notion, "the human ' itself ' likewise grows increasingly difficult or
even impossible to locate clearly or define securely" (Carlson 141). Hence, a
posthuman subject, from the perspective of Richard Jordan, is "a biological
human who equates, compares, or models their identity with networked,
intelligent machines, such that cognition comes to both mirror and co-
evolve with a digital infrastructure" (25).
There are some posthuman aspects that should accumulate together,
or, at least, some of them must be there for a literary work to be called or to
fall under the category of posthumanism. There is, for instance, the
posthuman landscape which can be, in other words, a community in which
humans and technology are mingled together. A posthuman play focuses on
the subject not the machine. So, digital spectacles, including the online
confrontations, are not literally represented onstage, they are implied in
such technological cues as the dialogue, sound, lightening and movement
which help in creating the digital environment that the author wants for
moving from a physical to a virtual space and vice versa. A posthuman play
investigates the effect of the post on the human in the digital age. It tends to
examine what occurs as a result of the equation of the human with the
machine resulting in posthuman bodies or communities. It is not a must that
a posthuman body be a cyborg, in its old sense, or something that is
technologically modified. A posthuman body is one which is in some way
liberated from human restraints such as time or gender. This liberation
frequently consists of some kind of technological modification, although it
does not always have to involve mechanical aspects. The posthuman, as
Haraway points out when discussing the cyborg, allows for a post body state
of existence in which limiting binaries are deconstructed. A posthuman
character is a collection of more than one self in a way which indicates that

- 245 -
 ylyhhyhy lymaAhlA eb ima?..... h yAimahahlmbmiha bm mamyA
there is a split within the virtual and material component of one character
(149).
Lucy Prebble is a British playwright. She was born in 1980, to a father
who works for a software company, and a mother who is a state school
teacher. She lived in Haslemere, Surrey. She was first educated at Guildford
High School, then she studied English at the University of Sheffield where
she wrote her first play, Liquid, and won the PMA Most Promising
Playwright Award. Later on, she wrote The Sugar Syndrome (2003), for
which she won the George Devine Award, The Effect (2012), which won the
2012 Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, and ENRON (2009), which won
her an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play. Lucy was the creator
of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a TV series produced in 2007, which was
sold to Showtime, the major US channel famed for its daring dramas.
The Sugar Syndrome is one of the first plays of the twenty-first
century to explore posthuman themes. The play premiered at the Royal
Court Theatre, London, in October 2003. It has won several awards and as
of 2009 has been sold in seven [Link] is a play about a teenager at the
age of 17, whose name is Dani, a recovering bulimic, who likes to chat with
people on the internet. Dani chats with different men: Lewis, who is 22,
discovers that he loves and cares for her and tries to come near her
throughout the play. Dani pretends to be an 11 year-old-boy and chats with
Tim, a 38 year-old-man, who has once been convicted and put in jail for
raping young children. They later meet each other and he finds out about her
being a girl. They develop a friendship and talk together about personal
aspects of their lives. Tim has been careful with Dani, covering some facts
about his life at first, then he feels relief in her presence, which leads him to
open up to her revealing his hidden facts. Dani tells Tim about her eating
disorder, her hatred of the university, and her parents as well as their
imminent divorce. It is not until the end of the play, when Tim gives her his
laptop that Dani discovers that she has been putting herself in troubles
through her relationship with Tim that's why she seeks relief in connecting
with her mother and regaining the love she has once rejected.
Prebble, in The Sugar Syndrome, shows aspects of posthumanism
such as the use of modern technology in relation to humans. Modern
technology has become part and parcel of our daily activities. The Sugar
Syndrome is a posthuman play due to the characters' relationship with the
internet which is a sort of artificial intelligence. The characters' interaction
with the internet is seen throughout the play. The internet, "ageless and
omnipresent", as Jordan describes it, has a speaking role in two scenes in the
play and its presence is felt throughout the play (50). On the one hand, Dani
uses the internet to escape the miserable life she lives; moving from one
place to another, which does not make her able to make friends, not
enjoying the love and the company of her father who is careless about her,

- 245 -
 )5050 ‫( عدد يناير – مارس‬ 48 ‫ اجمللد‬- ‫حوليات آداب عني مشس‬
sending her money for the private school, but is not present physically in her
life, working in London and having an affair with a woman there. On the
other hand, Tim uses the internet to practice his socially unacceptable
desires. Through the characters' chatting on the internet, the inner and outer
conflict of the characters becomes clear to the readers. The internet knows
more about the characters than they know about each other. The characters'
relation with the technology represented in the internet remains
unconscious; which means that they are not aware of. It witnesses Lewis'
love to Dani which remains a secret between them at the beginning.
Lewis . . . I think you’re lovely. Sometimes I want to smash your
face in, like now, to remind you I’m here, but I think you’re lovely.
Will you not just write a little? Just to keep me going? Cos I just
keep imagining what you could be doing and it’s sending me
mental. I’m sorry but it is. I miss you. . . .
He sighs.
Internet Save as draft. (64)
When Lucy Prebble represents technology on the stage, she prefers
form to spectacle, in spite of the central role that the presence of the internet
plays throughout the play. Her stage directions illustrate that "the set should
remain spare and non-naturalistic throughout. The locations should be
evoked by space, detail, and lighting rather than replicated. Cyberspace in
particular needs not be naturalistically portrayed with screens and computers
etc. (26). During some of the turning points of the plot, Prebble intends to
break the borders between the online and offline encounters of the
characters. In fact, about half of the nine scenes in the first act of the play
are online, whether partly or completely, shifting between the virtual and
material world through the internet, using the sound effects of "Bing" or
"The scream of a modem dialling up," referring to discrete boundaries being
crossed (27).
The first meeting between Dani and Tim sets the posthuman landscape
of the play which is an anonymous chatroom. Dani, who logs in as (Dani
Boy), tricks Tim by pretending to be a boy and succeeds to attract his
affection towards her, depending on the information that appears on the
computer screen.
Dani and Tim in a chatroom.
Tim: Do you like football? Who are your favourite players?
Dani: I don't like football. I'm always in goal.
Tim: Has your dad taken you to any big matches?
Dani: He's not around much.
Tim: That's a shame. Does that make you sad?
Dani: (slightly amused) Not really, no. (32)
This setting recalls the Turing Test, made to assert that "the
gender and the human/machine examples are meant to prove the same
thing," in which there are three rooms; in the first room there is a woman,

- 248 -
 ylyhhyhy lymaAhlA eb ima?..... h yAimahahlmbmiha bm mamyA
the second room has a man and the third contains a computer (Hayles xiii).
They communicate electronically and the man has to find out which room
contains the woman and which one has the computer, or, in other words,
which conversation is the human and which is the machine. The test, as
Hayles has noted, makes
the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present
in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented
body, produced through verbal and semiotic markers in an electronic
environment. This construction necessarily makes the subject into a
cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into
conjunction through the technology that connects them. (xiii)
Hayles suggests that there can be a "disjunction" between the enacted
and the represented bodies as the man may fail to distinguish between the
responses of the woman and the computer in the same way that Tim is
convinced that Dani is an 11-year-old boy which is the represented body
and does not recognize her enacted body as a girl. Dani is also surprised
when she sees Tim for the first time in the park, as his enacted body is
different from what she has imagined him, as she discovers that he is
younger and "posh" (35).
There is even a crack that occurs between the virtual and material
concept within one character. Dani pretends to be a boy, which she believes
is the ideal represented body for her, while Tim escapes in his represented
body from his real life and his enacted body, which he believes to be wrong.
Thus, in the first encounter between Tim and Dani, they are presented to the
audience as material/virtual cyborgs as their enacted bodies perform their
represented ones before us. Their conversation divides the humanistic
element from the posthuman represented in digital environment. In this
sense, Dani and Tim are no longer seen as coherent subjects, but are
represented as a collection of the virtual and the material working
individually. Dani is divided through the conflict between the online and
offline personality, while Tim through the struggle between his unwanted,
archived desires.
Throughout the play, we are encountered with the different versions of
Dani's personality, which operate independently. Applying the above-
mentioned posthuman subjectivity, she is seen as the daughter, the 11-year-
old boy, the recovering bulimic and the sexual being. Dani, who has a
sexual affair with Lewis, has no mutual understanding and is angry with her
mother, is interested in Tim and opens her heart to him hoping that she
could help him to recover. All of these characters are true of Dani from a
posthuman perspective. The rebellious personality of the 11-year-old Dani,
at the end of the first Act, leads her to quarrel with Lewis because of his
refusal of the friendship she develops with a rapist, to leave her house after a
fight with her mother, from whom she becomes highly distanced, after

- 245 -
 )5050 ‫( عدد يناير – مارس‬ 48 ‫ اجمللد‬- ‫حوليات آداب عني مشس‬
finding about her father's affair seeking relief with Tim. Dani, dressed in the
clothes of a school boy, accompanies Tim to a night club, in an effort to
escape from the body she hates, the sex she no longer wants, and the
daughter she does not wish to be. Thus, the internet has allowed her to
explore a new personality unlimited by the humanist bounds of time, flesh,
or morality helping her to flee from her physical self.
The same thing happens with Tim, who tries to archive his unwanted
desires and suppress his demons through the internet. When he meets Dani
he appears to be funny, kind, and someone who differentiates right from
wrong, when she tells him about the man who has drawn his male organ in
the school yard when she was younger, he says to her, "You should have
told someone," then when she replies, "I thought all you lot would stick
together," he answers, "No one normal likes to hurt anyone, certainly not
children"(67). It is not until the end of the play that the pluralistic nature of
Tim's character appears when he gives Dani his laptop as he is afraid
because Lewis, who loves Dani and is jealous of their friendship, threatens
him. The humanistic part of Tim who has pretended to be in control of his
abnormality is buried now and the posthuman part is revealed, as Dani is at
last encountered with a dark side of Tim's personality, the online self she
has never met, although it has been referred to before. Tim's unwanted
desires, represented in a sexual attraction to young children, have become
cyborgic as he has tried hard to store them, after being prisoned for it, in an
intelligent machine.
Yet, when Dani tells Tim how she has been terrified the time when
she finds her father's porn magazines,
I couldn't get the picture out of my head of him, this big, cross man,
going at it over these silly photos. . . . But I couldn't sleep cos some
part of me thought when the magazines run out he'd come up those
stairs. Because suddenly I didn't know my Dad anymore. Something
controlled him. (67)
A connecting point between Tim and Dani is served by the cybernetic
notion of "something controlled him," as it views Tim's sexual desires for
children and Dani's eating disorders as being beyond their conscious control,
which helps in understanding the dichotomy of mind between the human
and the posthuman paradigms.
To sum up, the characters in this play are multidimensional as what
they appear to be is different from their inner self, which their interaction
with technology helps to disclose. The model of identity represented in The
Sugar Syndrome, reveals the characters to be subjugated to factors that are
heterogeneous and collective rather than singular and self-conscious, which
are integrated with the intelligent machines. The main characters can be
viewed as posthuman subjects as they represent a cyborgic unity between
the digital code and unwanted desires of the flesh. In this sense, this play
tends to assert the idea that we as humans are posthuman through our

- 220 -
 ylyhhyhy lymaAhlA eb ima?..... h yAimahahlmbmiha bm mamyA
consolidation with the technology, machines, and the accelerating digital
world, and we do not want to wait for the future to be nominated as
posthumans.
Eventually, the idea of posthumanism carries within it two dimensions
that we must be aware of as humans. Posthumanity may have its positive
and negative influence. The positive dimension is that humans will be freed
from the borders of gender, mortality and the limitedness of the human
mind. But some critics are still afraid of the negative influence that might
accompany posthumanism, because it might lead to a sort of discrimination
between the posthuman bodies which may be considered as superior to the
other type which is the traditional form of human beings in its old form
which might be considered as inferiors or they can enslave them or even try
to put an end to the human race. Such notion will take us back to the
inequalities that humans have always been suffering from in every epoch of
the human history.

- 225 -
 )5050 ‫( عدد يناير – مارس‬ 48 ‫ اجمللد‬- ‫حوليات آداب عني مشس‬

Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity P, 2013. Web.
Carlson, Thomas. The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print.
Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. UK: Wiley-Black
Well, 2013. Print.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. Free Association Books, [Link].
Hassan, Ihab. "Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?" The Georgia
Review 31 ( 1977) : 830-850. Print.
Hayles, N. Katherine . How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
Ilter, Seda. Mediatised Dramaturgy: Formal, Critical and Performative Responses to
Mediatisation in British and Irish Plays Since the 1990s. Brighton: Sussex U,
2013. Web.
Jordan, Richard. Posthuman Drama: Identity and the Machine in Twenty-First-Century
Playwriting. Australia: Queensland U, 2015. Web.
Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human
Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. Print.
Prebble, Lucy. The Sugar Syndrome. New York: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2003. Web.
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Ebook
Library. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.

- 225 -