Technium and Posthuman Becoming: A Critical Posthumanist Reading of Dan Brown’s Origin

Abstract

As human beings have entered the twenty-first century, they have evolved to become a constantly evolving, super-intelligent, and posthuman species in this techno-driven era. Contemporary human beings are not the same Homo sapiens, the early modern humans, who are believed to have evolved 2, 00,000 years ago in East Africa. Over the course of time, Homo sapiens have undergone several significant biological, lingual, and ontological adaptations to survive, populate, and control the world. So, as contemporary critical posthumanists claim, human beings have become post-human beings and are always in the process of ‘becoming’ or evolving. Also, critical posthumanists uphold that the becoming of the posthuman happens only in the interconnectedness or symbiosis of humans with non-humans. Dan Brown’s Origin deals with one such imaginable possibility of humans evolving further into posthuman beings because of their symbiotic relationship with technium. The novel prophecies or predicts the realistic as well as the imaginable possibility of the human species mixing or merging with technology into a complex, interconnected, interdependent species becoming posthuman beings in the near future. The objective of this research paper is to use critical posthumanism theory to read, analyze, and interpret Dan Brown’s Origin. The researcher highlights and analyses the fictional possibility of humans in their symbiosis, intra-action, and trans-corporeality with technium, i.e. engagement and fusion with the modern technologies that alter humans’ subjectivity and identity evolving to become posthuman beings through critical posthumanist reading of Dan Brown’s Origin.