Reimaging the Body
New technologies are reshaping our cultural forms. Among the various
technologies concerned with the relationship between the natural and the artificial, we are facing the potentiality of a future world in which our humanity itself will be transformed beyond recognition. During the Second World War, the invention of a new type of liminal machine exhibited lots of the behaviors characterizing living entities, such as homeostasis, self-directed action, adaptability, or reproduction. The expansion of this new realm suggests a possibility of the combination of nature and modern technologies. The liminal machine may be any self-organizing system. For instance, a physical robot operates without centralized control and mirrors the
purposeful action of organic life. These liminal machines exhibit what John Johnston terms “machinic life,” which describes “the forms of nascent life that have been made to emerge in and through technical interactions in human-constructed environments”
(Johnston iv). In The Allure of Machinic Life, Johnston suggests that machinic life mirrors “the behavior associated with organic life while also suggesting an altogether different form of ‘life,’ an ‘artificial’ alternative, or parallel, not fully answerable to the ontological priority and sovereign prerogatives of the organic, biological realm”
(Johnston 1). For Johnston, this machinic life is not distinctly opposed to organic life.
Rather, it actualizes its fundamental principles in another newly animated area in which “the biosphere and artifacts from the human world touch and pass into each other, in effect constituting a ‘machinic phylum1’” (1). With the evolution of liminal
1 The “machinic phylum” is a term Deleuze and Guattari used to describe the existence of a special
machine, the human subject is constituted a human-machine cyborg body. It is a process of becoming machinic which constitutes new forms of life. In the 21st century, the intermingling of human bodies and machines is more obvious. For example, a human with artificial cardiac pacemaker or prosthetic implants would be considered a
“cyborg,” since these attachments can keep the person alive or enhance his/her sensoriums or biological capabilities above and beyond what’s currently normal for humans.
Recent progress in life sciences anticipates that cyborg technology will form the future human evolution. A “cyborg,” the coinage of “cybernetic” and “organism,”
hybridizes both organic and synthetic parts. In the context of science fiction, cyborgs are often portrayed as beings with both machine and organism. When it comes to the figure of cyborg in SF, most of the people may think about Data in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and the feature films or the Japanese anime Ghosts in the Shell (1995). We might have no problem considering Iron Man (2008), the super hero who fitted with a heart pacemaker, as a human rather than a cyborg. But if one day in the future, people’s brains are jacked into computers, bodies are invaded by technology, limbs and organs are amputated and replaced by machines, to such an extent that their figures are barely recognizable as human.2 Can we still call them humans? Conversely, to what degree do non-humans share other
characteristics still thought to be exclusively humans? We no longer have a clear idea of what a human being is. It seems that cyborgs offer the possibilities of post-bodied
realm which crosses over the opposition between the organic and the non-organic, the human and the non-human. They show how the machinic phylum comes about and how it operates in the history and nature. Manual DeLanda, following Deleuze and Guattari, extended this realm to include all forms of non-organic life with self-organization. It is a different way of conceptualizing the development of technology.
2 See the related news. Victoria Woollaston. “Meet Frank, the world’s first walking, talking bionic man complete with artificial limbs and a beating HEART.” Daily Mail. 29 Nov. 2013.
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2465853/Meet-Frank-worlds-walking-talking-bionic-man-complete-artificial-limbs-beating-HEART.html#ixzz3VB4h3sRB>
and post-human forms of existence repeatedly suggesting that boundaries are fluid.
And the increasingly blurred boundaries among humans, animals, and machines are frequently invoked when one questions the difference between humans and
non-humans.
The very concept of the human has been extraordinarily controversial over the last decades. Many theorists have attempted to explore the vague boundary between the physical and artificial bodies. On the one hand, some theorists believe that humans are about to enter a new era. Francis Fukuyama, for example, in his Our Posthuman
Future, argues that the contemporary biotechnology will alter the concept of the
human: “the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors” (Fukuyama 130). And this new biotechnology moves human beings into a “posthuman” stage of history.According to Fukuyama, traditional argument about the boundary between nature and nurture is transferred by the argument that human nature is a meaningless concept because of the plasticity of human behavior. On the surface look, human beings look, speak and act variously from person to person. Most of the apparent differences
between human beings are conventional rather than natural. Human nature is not fixed, since human beings could be shaped by their social environments and thus behave in open-ended ways. Although human nature has provided a stable continuity to humans’
experience as a species, modern natural science has cooperated in expanding our view of who qualifies as a human being. As time goes by, the posthuman future may give human beings the capacity gradually to alter shared humanity over time. However, this shared humanity still locate and direct human beings by drawing boundary lines of humans with animals and machines. The concept of who qualifies as human beings thus marks the space in which humans are distinguished from every other living
creatures. It also appears that this preponderance of human beings marks or makes an absolute break from non-human/animal.
On the other hand, other theorists see the posthuman future as breaking down conventional assumptions and boundaries, especially those separating “human” from
“animal” and “human” from “machine.” In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway first reflects on digital technology and the artificial intelligence of the early 1990s.
Extending the meaning of “cyborg,” Haraway explores a combination of both organic and artificial life in which human beings search new ways to break the boundaries between nature and culture. Haraway suggests that the cyborg body represents a humanoid hybrid of computer technology and human flesh. From her statement, I associate cyborg monsters with the monster Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
This well-known story focuses on the issue of what constitutes humanity. Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy, would like to create an ideal perfect man with about eight feet in height and proportionately large. However, he created something horrible that was opposed to his plan. With the plot about Frankenstein’s fascination with new science and the creation of a human being, from Haraway’s perspective, the Creature can be considered as a cyborg monster which takes on the image of independent woman as “other” than the traditional female figure. Making some alterations in the concept of gender, Haraway uses the metaphor of the cyborg to encourage feminists to move beyond naturalism and essentialism. Though Haraway’s argument is mostly labelled as a post-gender statement, her concept of the cyborg attempts to break away from rigid boundaries. Therefore, her feminist cyborg offers the potential for liberation from the confines of specific problematic dualisms of self/other, male/female, natural/artificial, right/wrong, human/machine, mind/body and so on in the cyberpunk literature.
My thesis argues that we should not try to imagine a “posthuman culture” or
“posthuman age” that comes “after” the human when dealing with the existence of non-human subjects. Instead, it is only through a fundamental change in the concept of the human that we can move beyond the problem of anthropocentrism, speciesism and the dialectic of the human/non-human dualism.
Cyberbodies in Cyberpunk
A number of writers use science fiction as a device to comment upon the dilemma of such contemporary issues as cosmetic surgery, biotechnology, genetic engineering and nano-technology. Their fictional worlds deal with the potential consequences of futuristic technology and scientific innovations, from outer space travel to inner space landscapes of psychology and the media. Two common themes of science fiction are bodily modifications and the system operators.3 Through these imaginative contents they question the key analytical categories people have long used to structure the biological, the technological, the natural and the artificial. For example, Philip K. Dick explores the issue of defining qualities which separate human beings from androids in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). This novel focuses on the development and use of an empathy test, the Voigt-Kampff test.
It is designed to measure empathetic responses. Unable to be empathetic, androids fail the test by hesitating in response to what should be normal human responses. But the test turns out to be useless for detection of androids. Joanna Russ was another SF writer who challenges gender roles and sexist views during the 1970s with her novel,
The Female Man (1975). The story focuses on four female characters living in
different time and place. They encounters different views on gender roles when they3 System operators move around in cyberspace. Their bodies are connected to computers for input and output flows of information.
cross over to each other’s worlds. The novel ends with the characters returning to their own worlds, each with a new idea of what it means to be a woman. These SF writers claim that categories deriving from the fundamental divisions among subjects, their bodies and the outside world, are in danger of decomposing. Hence, science fiction which features computers, information technology and cyberbodies make predictions about the human future with utopian and dystopian possibilities.
The history of cyberpunk, as a subgenre of science fiction, can be traced back to the 1980s. The coining of the word “cyberpunk” first appeared as the title of Bruce Bethke’s short story “Cyberpunk.” It is a fusion of two very different words, “cyber”
and “punk.” The term “cyber” stands for “cybernetics,” which is relevant to the exploring of regulatory systems, including their structures, possibilities and
limitations. On the other hand, “punk” is a subculture that emerged in the mid-1970s.
The punk subculture is centered on a diverse array of ideologies, fashions and forms of expression. It is mostly concerned with anti-establishment or progressive views and the promotion of individual freedom. Many cyberpunk protagonists usually belong to the working or lower middle-class. These anti-heroes are placed in difficult
circumstances which they have little chance to overcome. The fusion of these two words thus emphasizes the main idea of cyberpunk: high technology and antisocial attitudes. Most of the cyberpunk novels feature a near-future Earth taking place online or in cyberspace, such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy4. Films like The Martix Triology (1999, 2003), Avatar (2004), and Sleep
Dealer (2008) can also be categorized as cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk projects a dystopian vision for postmodern times. Stories are set in a world of the illegal which is a combination of high technology and low life. The most
4 William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy comprises the novels Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999).
visible example is William Gibson, whose novel Neuromancer is characterized as a near-future world of computer networks and artificially intelligent entities. The protagonist, Case, is a talented cyberspace hacker. He can jack his consciousness into the global computer network in a virtual reality dataspace called the “Matrix.”
However, his central nervous system is injured as punishment for his betrayal, leaving him unable to jack into the Matrix. The setting is centered on the virtual environment or cyberspace which liberates the protagonist from the constraints of the physical body. The technology and computers represent the cyber part of the term while the street life in the fiction provides the punk part.
As cyborgs currently are on the rise, the rejection of the physical body as mere flesh leads to the celebration of the freedoms of disembodied subjectivity in
cyberspace. This discourse of the disembodiment has been central in Gibson’s cyberpunk novels. In his cyberspace world, the human body is like a mutable container of the self identity and consciousness. Many characters in his novel have their body parts readily being replaced, like Ratz the bartender’s stainless steel teeth and prosthesis arm in Neuromancer. And even dead bodies are recycled for the reuse of hearts or kidneys in the service of strangers. In the following discussion, I would be concerned with these different bodies.
In cyberpunk, the body is often referred to as the “flesh” and represented as weak, mortal, irrational. It should be left behind or blended with computer technology. It has been seen as the disembodiment of the subject. Thus, subjectivity becomes much more varied and flexible, surpassing the limitations of the physical body. The new technologies offer an escape from the conceptual dualisms of natural/artificial and body/machine and open up spaces for the human body to be transcended through a greater degree of flexibility. Some are human-machine hybrids like animal or human
transplantations and prostheses, while others are autonomous artificial intelligences which can only exist in the cyberspace. Once a particular location has been selected, from outer space to inner cyberspace and virtual reality, it allows interactions among a variety of manifestations of the “body” to question the limits of humanity. Examples of blending machines and humans are provided by such films as the RoboCop series (1987, 1990, 2014), the Terminator series (1984, 1991) and Blade Runner (1982).
Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) is about the transformation of the almost-dead policeman into a cyborg. The film describes the doubts and complexities of the human mind struggling to oppose the invasion of the technologically rebuilt human body.
These movie characters present visions of the bodies ranging from pure machine-based military figures to genetically customized human simulation.
If the interchangeability of bodies and machines is a recurring theme in science fiction, equally important is the representations of cyborgs. Here, the term “cyborg”
dose not only mean a combination of biological and artificial parts anymore. The combination of human and technology, including cell phones or computers, can also be called the cyborg. Take the network computer system for example. Through the application of the Internet to connect with millions of computers across the world, people become much more capable than they were before: information networks and communication technologies can be used by individuals through global interlinking of computers. These world-wide networks of computers intermingle the physical and the virtual bodies. Unlike the earlier prosthetic technological extensions, this networked visual avatar body creates a new type of “virtual cyborgian body5” which enables humans to extend the physical body and psyche to reach beyond the immediate
5 Although the cyborg typically represents a merging of human and machine, Donna Haraway and other theorists, like N. Katherine Hayles and Andy Clark, argue for a broader definition of the cyborg.
They bring up a definition including our daily interaction with the cybernetic technologies (Halyes, How We Became Posthuman 115).
physical environment. “Virtual” indicates the transformation from the user’s pulse, heartbeat and blood flow to the graphic and audio information in the VR
environments. That is, the computer technology has been expanded from a person’s extension of the body image and sensation to a vehicle for human to escape from the body. And the image of the “cyborgian body” represents a communication channel based upon the accurate interaction and exchange of information, messages and feedback within a virtual world.
The creation of virtual idols becomes a further challenge to the disembodied body. As computer-generated media figures, virtual idols exist independently in the digital media world. They do not need to eat, drink, or excrete, their bodies will not get tired and they will not become sick, either: in one word, they are immortal. These idealized idols are produced and packaged to maximize consumption, from popular music to advertising of other products and services. Virtual idols open up fresh opportunities for experiment recombination and play between human/computer relationships. Take Gibson’s Idoru as example. Through Laney, the novel’s
protagonist, Gibson explores the conflict between the actual person and the virtual celebrity. It is in the abstract space of the Lo/Rez fan club data bases that Laney encounters the interrelationship of space, place and digital architexture that is the idoru, Rei Toei. Idoru gradually introduces to the reader the concept of the
posthuman-as-data structure, from Laney’s unsuccessful search for the information surrounding the idoru’s “life.” Laney described his first sight of the idoru as follow:
“She is not cyberpunk; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an
Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some
unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative” (Gibson 233). Such descriptions
conjure images of cyborgs. The idoru is an architectonic systems of information and data, but Laney can watch Rei Toei’s hands and the way she ate. Although lacking in flesh, the figure of the idoru becomes a new mode of being.
The potential of computer technology does challenge traditional boundaries. The combination of the physical and the technological marks the reduction of the body to merely meat. By leaving the body behind, computer technologies such as VR systems take control over the nature of humanity and the self. As I observed above, for some years now there have been growing concerns about the apparent growing dependence of humans upon computers. The recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei, Post-humanist Desire (2013-14), addressed these anxieties.
Curated by Dr. Ming Turner, this exhibition responds to the continuously developing and significant theme of the “post-human,” under three subjects: the “cloned human,”
the “transgendered human,” and the “transformed human.” A group of twenty-five artists were invited to show their works which interpret the effects of body concepts and gender consciousness upon the psychology, value, and culture. The content and structure of the three aspects of this exhibition questions our anthropocentric views and guides us to discuss the following issues: In this modern computer-mediated world, how should we define ourselves as human beings with so many divergent and complex life expectations and identities? And to what extent can we seek new ways to break the boundaries between nature and culture? Though new technologies are often presented as a hopeful key to a better future, we users become victims rather than beneficiaries. Rather than being delivered from the restrictions and bonds of the mundane reality and the physical body, we are actually extremely limited. We do not
the “transgendered human,” and the “transformed human.” A group of twenty-five artists were invited to show their works which interpret the effects of body concepts and gender consciousness upon the psychology, value, and culture. The content and structure of the three aspects of this exhibition questions our anthropocentric views and guides us to discuss the following issues: In this modern computer-mediated world, how should we define ourselves as human beings with so many divergent and complex life expectations and identities? And to what extent can we seek new ways to break the boundaries between nature and culture? Though new technologies are often presented as a hopeful key to a better future, we users become victims rather than beneficiaries. Rather than being delivered from the restrictions and bonds of the mundane reality and the physical body, we are actually extremely limited. We do not