The Way of all Flesh: the Cyborg in science fiction cinema

I’m using this post to explore ideas about the cyborg, cybernetics and post-humanism and the ontological theory attached to these fields through the lens of science fiction cinema. To do this, I’m going to look at four science fiction films: Upgrade, Hardware, Tetsuo the Iron Man and Videodrome which exploit ideas of a technologically de-centered humanity in order to provoke unease. These films all share a technologised mise-en-scene, depicting antagonistic machine/human oppositions, and images of bodies disturbed or ruptured by metal. Takes such as these often reify technological augmentation or interdependence as intimately intertwined with either capitalism, tyranny, or both. Science fiction cinema frequently mediates the Cyborg avatar - a posthuman answer to the dilemma of our aging, unreliable biology, as oppositional. Indeed, science fiction commonly represents the cyborg in iconographic relation to the horror film, whereas post-human theory celebrates the emancipating potential of technology augmenting the body. More often than not, science fiction more closely represents human discomfort with technological sublimation than any speculative, liberating ontological possibility.

The repetitive presentation of cyborg bodies as frighteningly in-human and the predominantly negative attitude toward our interdependence with technology describes how science fiction frequently reflects, informs and reproduces our association of the post-human body with the tropes of the uncanny. All four films share signifying features common to dystopian sci-fi: a post-apocalyptic or near-future diegesis, the proliferation of panoptic surveillance (UHF scanners, video screens, CCTV monitoring, drone footage) symbolising technological omnipresence, and kinetic violence. Each of these films treat the cyborg body as a territory rife with pitfalls and threats. As we view them, our screens literally burst with images of modified limbs incorporating firearms, near-hypnagogic fugue states, and an erosion of personal subjectivity. All mediate the synthesis of human and machine as an ‘out-of-control-ness’ of being, experienced as a psychotic break, or moments of ‘body horror’ where organic consciousness is trapped against its will in a mechanical binary and becomes ideologically sublimated.

In Cyborg Manifesto (1991) American scholar Donna Haraway argues that “Modern medicine is ... full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that were not generated in the history of sexuality...Cyborg replication is outside human coupling.” This makes an explicit case for the cyborg as an emancipatory ontological possibility, existing outside the restrictive taxonomies of biological determinism and social conditioning. Elaborating on the framework proposed by Haraway, the academic Ann Weinstone uses her 2004 text Avatar Bodies to assert that the Cyborg should be considered a type of 'becoming', transcending stifling humanist vocabulary to conceive a dialogue of 'liberating autonomous self-creation'. However, both Haraway and Weinstone acknowledge the inherent instability of this ontological territory, with Haraway framing our hesitance in embracing the post-human body with the admission that cyborgs are “creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted,” and that the cyborg body contains the potential for 'monstrousness.' Weinstone appropriates Ihab Hassan's proposition that the Cyborg is capable of being a 'Promethean trickster' –“split by language, in intimate, shaping contact with technology, obeying only the law of change, and charged with the Nietzschean task of evolving humankind”–In particular, it is Weinstones’ use of nonhuman 'becomings'– which position humanity as the core critical component of any posthuman assemblage– and her attribution of the origins of this concept in the work of post-structural philosophers and psychoanalysts Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, that introduces febrile territory for science fiction scholars.

Deleuze and Guattari are wilfully, perhaps mischievously, cryptic theorists. Throughout their landmark text A Thousand Plateaus, the two constantly flit between biology, metaphysics, psychoanalysis and Marxism impishly refusing to settle in one territory or another. There are two concept frameworks proposed by Deleuze and Guattari that are particularly important to this post: the notion of machinic assemblage, and the Body-without-Organs (BwO). Machinic assemblages are characterised by a capacity to form productive connections, in the social, biological and conceptual realms. The machinic should not be interpreted as a fixed structure, but as a dynamic system, capable of producing ‘new flows and possibilities’. The Body-without-Organs functions as a plane of immanence, or potential, from which new possibilities and machinic relations can emerge. Deleuze and Guattari assert that the project of the BwO begins with human consciousness reaching the limits of its biological tolerances and experiencing a desire to ‘slough them off.’ Brent Adkins’ analysis of this idea describes the BwO in terms that echo Haraway and Weinstone: as a way of 'thinking about becoming' that is never subordinated or static. However, it is Mark Fisher's interpretation of the BwO as representational of a zone of ‘gothic’ immanence in his 1999 thesis Flatline Constructs–an ‘anorganic continuum’– a plane intersecting the 'living and dead,' that offers the most useful insight into why the concerns of cybernetic theory are simultaneously exercised by science fiction and countered through it.

Haraways description of the cyborg body as "...monstrous, duplicated, potent", is conjured when Fisher describes the Body-without-Organs as “emerging in the ambivalent form of the blade runners, terminators, and AIs that haunt current mass-mediated-nightmare.” Our mediations of the BwO often reproduce our mixed emotions towards it. Fisher proposes that the cyborg represents the ‘ultramodern’ persistently haunted by the spectre of the Freudian uncanny, although where Freuds thesis of the rejects the notion of a fear of the ‘animate inanimate,’ instead finding the locus of the uncanny in castration anxiety, Fisher contests this, insisting that the uncanny remains troubled by a tenacious entanglement with the gothic concern of the tension between life and un-life, that we must separate the cyborg from these persistent constraining supernatural qualities and rather frame cybernetics in terms of the Lovecraftian weirds’ potential to conjoin organic and inorganic modes previously considered incompatible. Perhaps these ‘ambivalent forms’–the murderous AIs, Androids and Replicants– are themselves a means of separating ourselves from a technological shadow to which we have a reified, mutually informing and co-dependent relationship. We (re)produce frightening technology, and (re)make films that reflect the fear that this technology (re)produces in us in order to allow us to ‘other’ it.

To illustrate this point, in a 2009 interview with The Quietus blog, Hardwares’ director Richard Stanley revised his original concept of his killer robot from an environmental statement to an acknowledgement of his profound unease at the 21c phenomena of the private sector driven industrial mass production and deployment of military robots, and the proliferation of drone warfare. Hardwares’ killer drone is revealed by the director to contain a chilling organic component: it is piloted by a human brain that Stanley opined might experience an 'endorphin rush' of satisfaction as reward for fulfilling its programmed objectives, similar to that described by pilots of remotely operated military drones when actively engaging the enemy in conflict zones. In Hardware the entire planet has become a war zone, ravaged by radiation and environmental collapse. His murderous anorganic automaton has been devised as another form of ‘final solution’ to the problem of uncontrollable overpopulation. It is not trained to distinguish ‘Friendly’ from ‘Opp’, much in the same way that ‘guided’ military ordnance cannot distinguish anything about a target beyond its designated coordinates.

To communicate the experience of Grey Trace, the protagonist of Leigh Whannels’ Upgrade’s once incapacitated, now technologically enhanced body, the fight scenes use a combination of tracking shots, camera angles and blocking that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has experienced the movement dialogue of any First Person Shooter video game. The combination of exhilaration and repulsion our once quadraplegic protagonist experiences at the inhuman efficiency and automated reflexivity granted by STEM, the AI-powered cybernetic augmentation chip implanted in his spine, allowing him to block and evade blows, withstand pain and coldly dispatch his adversaries relocates us back in the ontologic territory of the weird. In contrast, the film's cyborg villain Fisk exults in the superior advantages of his body’s technological adaptations and modifications. However, despite and because of being "more," in his own words, he remains intimidating, thus his enhancements only serve to reproduce and reinforce his alienation from society. Yet, his active attempt late in the film to entice the protagonist to ally with him, whether this is a ruse or not, betrays at least a subliminal desire for some kind of solidarity.

Civic TV CEO Max Renn’s experience of Videodromes’ sublimating technology is initially arousing and erotic, until it taps into his suppressed, violent sexual impulses in order to overwhelm him. The Videodrome ‘virus’ creates a terrifying, hallucinatory experience that consumes Renn’s identity, transforms his body, and converts him into an unwilling assassin. Inspired by Marshall McLuhan's proposal that emerging media holds inherent possibilities for ideological reproduction, David Cronenberg employs goopy prosthetics–sensual televisions, panting videocassettes, and monstrous ‘handguns’– as potent metaphors that presciently demonstrate how the free market scrabble of cable TV might become the breeding ground for instruments of ideology made literal, lethal flesh. Like a moth to a flame, Renn is drawn to Videodromes’ hypnotic signal, driven by a desire to beat his ratings competitors, in Videodrome, he discovers what he believes to be the perfect vehicle to propel his struggling cable station to the top. Instead, he finds that Videodrome has its’ own intentions, indeed it has an ideology, and that is what makes it dangerous.

Tetsuos’ cast experience a constant state of dynamic tension, whether frenetically dancing, love-making or self-mutilating. The difference and repetition they encounter in their technologically rationalised world seems to drive them to greater and greater extremes in order to achieve moments of liberation, visually communicated through hyper-kinetic editing and extreme camera angles. Tellingly, director Shinya Tsukamoto doesn't invite the audience even to explicitly identify his protagonist as ‘Tetsuo’ in script or credits, despite his focus on the man’s hapless body becoming a locus for an inexplicable and traumatic technological assimilation, rather he's simply a stereotypical working stiff: a ‘Salaryman’. Perhaps the name Tetsuo in fact represents the ‘final form’ –an ecstatic amalgam of protagonist and antagonist –taken in the film, libidinally compelled to consume everything in its path. As an audience, we are encouraged to identify with the overwhelming and de-centering effects of an urban experience where organic components are placed under increasing extremes of stress by inorganic encroachment: scrap metal, microwaves, transistors and wires. Similarly, Tetsuo overtly homages Freudian concerns, both in a dream sequence where the Salaryman is sexually assaulted by ‘organic machinery’ and, in an arch-Freudian moment, where his penis is replaced by a power drill.

Ultimately, an interrogation of these films, incorporated as a synthesis of shared science-fiction concerns, produces a critique of the technological, ideological, environmental and economic conditions of Capital, and reifies these conditions through repetition of shared themes of inevitable domination and sublimation. In contemporary science-fiction, the conditions of Capital suggest that technical interdependence is enforced, an external form of subjectivity. the characteristics of these films' shared coordinates–mutual antagonism, escalating tension and outbursts of violence–locate them explicitly inside the cultural coordinates of capitalism, a notion bluntly echoed in Upgrade when Gray Trace contrasts STEM creator Eron Keens’ zeal for the quantum possibilities of his technology with a curt observation: “You look at that widget and see the future. I see ten guys on an unemployment line.”

Contemporary science-fiction texts such as these suggest that the conditions of capitalism shape a definition of technological interdependence that we increasingly appear to experience as a form of subjugation. Engagement with such science-fiction films offers us a liberating opportunity to other the discomfort we feel at this growing interdependence. Perhaps the territory that requires questioning is the recurrent, alienated condition of the Cyborg, and the answer might be found in how this condition might have come to find itself synonymous with Capital.

Reading:

Adkins, Brent. Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Fisher, Mark. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-fiction. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. McLuhan, Marshall, et al. The Medium Is the Message.

Short, S. "No flesh shall be spared: Richard Stanley's Hardware." British Science Fiction Cinema.

Paul, John. Cult Director of Hardware Richard Stanley Interviewed. The Quietus 

Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism.