In Search Of A Body: Cyborg body vs.

cyberbody
E. zgr zakn
Prepared in partial fulfillment for the requirements of the course titled IAED 561: History of Theory and Criticism, conducted by Glsm Baydar.

December 25, 2002

Science fiction (SF) as an adequate form of fiction conveying our unspoken anxieties, desires and fantasies serves as a tool that helps us to know ourselves or teaches us something about the way we live. While carrying contemporary social, ideological, and scientific discussions to a brand new time and context, works of SF hypothetically invent their own nature and bodies to match presumable outcomes of these discussions. SF characters, situations and actions have emblematic powers; therefore, they have to be analyzed with reference to values of their own time. Creatures depicted in SF such as monsters, aliens, mutants, mobile/immobile robots or cyborgs are mirrors for the presentday human image, just as the settings are mirrors for human habitat. These mirrors are not merely reflecting ones, but also transforming ones: melting pots re-shaping identities and subjectivities. Therefore, the evolution of iconic imagery in SF can be traced from various perspectives, giving us clues about our anxieties and desires with reference to how they are transformed through time.

Considering technology-related body imagery, a general characteristic of contemporary SF is that the once threatening, monstrous, other bodies have become less other (Sobchack, 136). The old SF exposition of human and non-human is transformed at our time, when Cartesian dualities and boundaries are blurred. It is no longer assumed that human beings are superior to humanoid machines or aliens. The latter have become our simulacra, embodied as literally alienated images of our alienated selves, suggesting that they are more human than human. This is realized through the employment of "postmodern" and "posthuman" body concepts such as "overcoming the body via extensions", "the body in transgression and dissolution", "the body without organs", "the body without gender", "the eternal body", and "the new flesh". Nevertheless, there is also a deep-seated resistance to incorporate these other bodies. The other images of popular culture construct implicit 1

oppositions between machine and human, at once repressing similarities and highlighting distinctions. According to Sherry Turkle (35), only with the assumption that human being has unique qualities in comparison to a machine, we feel safe to accept machines as living and thinking partners. That is, we recognize them as living and feeling insofar as they remain in the sphere of the non-human. Any condition, which negates this recognition through denial, results in uncanny states. In contemporary fixation on the technologized body, SF genre tries to examine this ambivalent position towards technology, towards our growing anxieties about our own nature in an increasingly technological environment and a kind of evolution that may foretell the subjects disappearance or termination.

Cyborg bodies and/or cyberbodies? The most prevalent of technology-related others of contemporary SF are the cyborgs and cyberbodies. These two figures are placed in opposition to the human body in the construction of the above-mentioned human/non-human duality, separately. That is, the position of the human body is secured with reference to the dualities of cyberbody-human body and cyborg body-human body. Consequently, they are posited identical with reference to their opposition to the human body.

Human body ===== Cyborg body Human body ===== Cyberbody

What is neglected but requires to be articulated rather more attentively in this formulation is that the cyborg body and the cyberbody are not the same, though they do belong to one and the same scale only to occupy distinct positions. If only we are to reconsider what the term cyborg stands for (cybernetic organism), it is revealed that the definition refers to 2

an intermediate position on a scale of biological vs. informatic bodies. The cyborg dwells in an individualistic virtual realm that if pushed to the limit manifests itself as cyberspace. But there, it needs to confront a rival: its mirror image, the cyberbody. In cyberspace, cyberbody takes over the cyborg body, immobilizing it or even permanently discarding it.

Bio-body ================================ Info-body Human body Cyborg body Cyberbody

Once the cyborg body=cyber body equation is problematized in this manner, it is now possible to rethink the distance between the three terms of this operation: the human body, the cyborg body and the cyber body. Going back to the original definition of the cyborg, it is depicted as a life form enhanced by additional capabilities. Its prosthetic extensions are connected with informational pathways to the organic body. Two separate references from contemporary theory, which attempt to represent this mutation in the relation between mind and the body in different terms, can be cited. One of these belongs to Daniel Dennett, and the other to Donna Haraway.

The capacity of consciousness has often constituted a philosophical boundary between humans and non-humans (animals or machines) (Hakken, 73-4). As well as the treatment of the body as bounded by the skin, conception of consciousness as a distinctive human activity needs to be rethought. Daniel Dennett (171-226) fills the gap by positing a model of consciousness that suggests thinking of humans as constitutionally cyborgs; consciousness is a virtual software running on brain hardware. According to him, we are predesigned/formatted by language, symbolic operations and other applications resting upon the concealment of this very same operation. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by 3

language, but also by wordless images and other data structures, take up residence in a brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind. This model necessitates hardware and software components; but both need not to be complete or irreplaceable. As long as we maintain the main operational system, we can add/remove hardware (e.g. extra lenses or monitors for enhancing our visual capacity or extra RAM to expand our memory) or software (fantasies, desires or anxieties), and by doing so redefine our bodies and subjectivities in relation to cybernetics. Dennetts model also makes it possible to envisage the postbiological idea of uploading or downloading consciousness to various mediums (to a terminal or a new technologized body).

Haraway has extensively rethought the emergence and potential of the cyborg, and the term has become nearly synonymous with her formulations. Her political conception of cyborg acknowledges technology as holding a possibility for liberation within a new posthuman and postgendered era. According to Haraway, cyborg does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualities without end (180). It appears precisely where the boundaries between human, machine and animal is transgressed. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we pursue explanations regarding our bodies and tools.

If the trajectories of these two approaches are compared, it can be said that both reduce the distance between the human and the non-human, but differ in emphasis. Whereas Dennetts model, based on a computer analogy, tends towards the cyber end of the continuum, opening up a space for the cyberbody, Haraways account opens up a critical space to utilize the potential of the cyborg body.

Cyberbodies: The Lawnmower Man and The Matrix Returning to the strategy of analyzing SF imagery, two distinctive cases of cinematic representations of cyberspace can be employed to understand what they have to offer in accordance with these two trajectories. Among the earliest depictions of cyberspace, The

Lawnmower Man stands as a good example. The film tells the story of a brutally insulted,
abused and exploited, mentally retarded gardener that becomes the subject of a compassionate scientist who works on a prototypical cyberspace project developed for military purposes. Dressed in sensor-equipped suits and goggles, Jobe is positioned in a spherical gadget in which his cyborg body looks both like a puppet and like crucified Jesus Christ. The program supplies him an intense information bombardment to develop his intelligence and abilities, gradually turning him into the ideal subject of our patriarchal Symbolic. His Narcissistic identification comes to a point where he sees himself as the world and that he can contain all. This is an identification process, which would produce the monadic, self-absorbed transformers that many critics fear cyberspace will enable. For Jobe, the existence of other subjectivities is of little significance, if not outright denied, and relations with others take on the form of object relations. Not satisfied with real sex experience any longer, he brings his sex partner to the laboratory and connects her to the machine for a cybersex session. That instance perfectly shows the fantasy nature of the cyberspace. The poetic experience of liquid cyberbodies flying together and momentarily merging into one, turns into predatory when Jobe changes his form into a phallus and invades the others body. While he enjoys his jouissance, the intensity of the rape and the termination of the female partners Gestalt result in permanent destruction of her mind.

Outside cyberspace, in the corporeal world, Jobes cyborg body gains superhuman powers as well; he attains a novel interface to experience and act. But the virtualization of the 5

body for the sake of realizing the fantasy is inevitable, because the body represents an unfortunate link to a material reality that "just is not enough anymore". Jobe uploads himself to the information network as a cyberbody of pure mind, where he extends his body by attaining the ability of telepresence only bound to the limits of the communication infrastructure. After having abandoned his corporeal body, what is left behind is a mere dried out cyborg body. In Jobes self-constructing project, cyberspace program acts as a womb/cocoon for his evolution.

In Latin, the word for womb is matrix, or matter, both the mother and the material. In another popular SF film named The Matrix, the protagonist receives a big surprise after taking the red pill. The mirror he touches liquefies and pours into his throat bringing him back to corporeal world. His vulnerable cyborg body, tied with mechanic chords, wakes into the corporeal world in a womblike pod, realizing that what he has been witnessing was simulation generated by a computer construct called Matrix. Morpheus explains Neo that Matrix is the world that has been pulled over his eyes to blind him from the truth. It is "a computer generated dream world, built to keep human beings under control", a prison that one can neither smell, nor taste, nor touch: a prison for minds. The unbearable desert of the polluted and ruined real world is preferential instead of the prison. Neo acquires new skills in martial arts, via an offline working training program; equips his cyberbody with weapons; frees his mind from fear, disbelief and doubt to fight against the Matrix. In the final, enlightened Neo views the virtual reality as pure code, grasping the Real of the Matrix, masters it.

Matrix is yet a cyberpunk version of Platos Cave: a simulated world that has been protecting people to turn blind from the truth. It is the fantasy, the virtual symbolic order 6

that both hide the world in ruins and structure reality. According to Zizek, the strength of the film resides in the image of the millions of human beings leading a claustrophobic life in cradles, kept alive in order to generate the energy for the Matrix (fromThe Matrix: The

Truth of the Exaggerations). Towards the end of the film, the artificial life form agent
explains the idea behind the Matrix:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world would dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. (from the transcript of The Matrix)

This speech reveals both the generative aim behind the construction of the Matrix, the urge to attain the abundance and plenitude of a perfect human world, and the impossibility of attaining a perfect state as such. The result, as in Zizeks re-working of Lacans concept of ideology, is a totality set on effacing the traces of its own impossibility, which fosters socially constituted fantasies, through which human subjectivity is governed (The Sublime

Object of Ideology, 146). The aim of achieving perfection in material terms, faced with its
own impossibility, turns into the denigration of matter (e.g. the matrix) in order to justify the primacy of the cyber.

Seen in this light, the depictions of cyberspace in The Matrix and The Lawnmower Man share a belief in the transcendental fantasy. In both films, we observe the embodiment of the masculine fantasy about self-control, self-identification, self-knowledge and selfdetermination, via cyberspace. The difference lays in that, whereas Jobe gets evolved with Western intelligence to be the virtual Big Other, Neo gets equipped with Eastern teachings (in their incorporated form into the symbolic) and a library full of weapons to destroy the virtual Big Other. In both cases, cyborg/material bodies are pacified for the sake of 7

cyberbodies to accomplish the fantasy. The dissolution of the body, and its replacement by its own technological simulation is posited as empowering.

There is no doubt that cyberspace as it is depicted in both of these instances is a form of utopia/dystopia, a form of fantasy enactment. The question to be raised at that point should be: but whose utopia is it? The cybertopias depicted in these two SF films seem to be those of the white male subject. Those who cherish the patriarchal fantasy see cyberspace as a new zone of hope for humanity which wants to be freed from the corporeal constrains, escaping the body and sliding into an infinite, transcendent, and perfect other world. But cyberspatial portrayal in Matrix is neither heaven, nor a comforting arrival to the womb. It appears only as a reappraisal of the already existing symbolic model in virtual terms. Thus the answer they provide to the question of what do we want from cyberspace? is limited to a reconstitution of the body/mind duality, not exploiting enough the potentials of this alternative realm: cyberspace turning into cyber means of escape, that is, cyberscape. The question then becomes what of the bodies that are left behind? Can the leftover cyborg, in the form of Jobes limp or Neos mechanically penetrated body, offer a way out?

Cyborg bodies: Terminator series In Terminator series of 1984 and 1991, the main story revolves around a fight for survival between humans and machines. Terminators are sent from a future in which human race is faced with the threat of extinction. They move back in time in order to annihilate the person, the to-be-savior of the human race, who will become a threat for their own existence in the future. Thus, the story metaphorically constructs a clash between two different forms of subjectivities, alternate to each other: one being human, the other 8

cyborg. In stark contrast to the cyberspaces promise of a liquid body that will house our fantasies devoid of corporeal limitations, Terminator series posit a questioning of human subjectivity without loosing contact with corporeal grounds. Although the emphasis shifts away from an incorporeal cyberbody, the series is not devoid of its own complications and problems.

First of all, the tension and opposition between human/non-human categories resurfaces. The ambivalence and the problems referred to in the first section of this paper can be said to replay in the unfolding of the plot. Whereas in the first episode, the cyborg body (T-100) is posited as a threat towards the human protagonist, in the second episode it appears as the protagonist itself, commissioned to provide for the protection and survival of the human race. This shift of positions from the antagonist to the protagonist on behalf of the cyborg body marks a significant transformation in the conception of the boundary that separates the human and the cyborg in historical terms. In the first episode, the similarities between the human and non-human bodies are repressed, and distinctions highlighted (e.g. T-100 totally dresses off from the human skin by the end of the movie, remaining as a purely mechanical skeleton); thus, the potential of the cyborg body to reveal the disintegrated nature of the human subject is used to secure it even further.

In Terminator 2, T-100 dresses off once more, but this time partly, just to reveal his technological inside to us. Until that moment, he is portrayed as non-other even to the extent of being presented as the father figure for the future-savior. His cyborg subjectivity is challenged through human interaction, bringing out his humane side. The horror here is that of a collapse between inside and outside; T-100 is neither subject nor object, neither purely human nor machine. Failing to push this ambiguity to its possible extremes, the plot 9

inevitably asks it to terminate itself before it becomes further humanized; but at the same time produces its own other in the form of T-1000.

T-1000 depicts a new conception of the body, embodiment of pure desire devoid of any concern for constructing a consistent whole. Its shiny metal liquid body can mimic any entity that would help to succeed in its desire, with no dualisms on mind: man, woman or floor. Its body fits any condition, develops any tool necessary like an all-inclusive swissknife. Although the depiction reminds infantile L'hommelette existence, T-1000 is a perfect subject with strictly defined boundaries between self and other. Can it be counted as a cyborg? A new form of subjectivity? It is an entirely alien form without any reference to anthropomorphic cyborg anthology. Nevertheless, flowing in time and space, its body is perhaps the most horrific and the most desirable of all SF bodies up till now. T-1000 is a perfect posthuman metaphor for a fluid, reconstructable subjectivity. It is SF genres failure to recognize this potential, in its reposing of T-1000 as utterly other, and our responsibility to acknowledge it.

This is where Haraways cyborg politics comes forth once more to open the idea of technological symbiosis as a dynamic exploration, not just a masculine fantasy of natural mastery and domination over nature, technology and others. She writes: "we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (150). Actually, humans have long been cyborgic; technology is so deeply implicated in human existence that it is a core aspect of our being. The cyborg is no longer "a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality," (150) but the lived experience of millions of people who spend most of their time working and playing in digital space. We live within a growing human-computer interface. The new multi-media and interactive spaces of 10

digital arts constitute a novel territory for cyberspace. Exploiting its potential without sticking to transcendental fantasies is possible. The problem with the cyberbody is that it reproduces limiting, not liberating, stereotypes. The idea of a mind working separately from, and even in opposition to the body is damaging. How can we fight the dualities in a medium resting on body-mind split? Whereas cyberbody replicates the dualities of Cartesian subjectivity, cyborg body fights against them. It opens up productive ways of thinking about gender, subjectivity and corporeality in its continuous state of becoming. Instead of aiming at an impossible real, while at the same time denigrating matter, the category of the cyborg redraws our attention towards what already is imbedded with that which is material. We dont need to conceptualize it as a utopian/cybertopian entity understood in transcendental vision; but instead utilize it in order to understand our state of being in a technologized world as liquid subjects with fragmented identities.

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References Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained. Boston, Toronto, London:Little, Brown and Company, 1991. Hakken, D. Cyborgs@Cyberspace: An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Haraway, D. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181. Sobchack, V. "Postfuturism." The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Eds. G. Kirkup, L. Janes, K. Woodward, F. Hovenden. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 136-147. Turkle, S. The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Zizek, S. "The Matrix: The Truth of the Exaggerations." Lacan.com 2 December 2002. 18 December 2002 <http://lacan.com/matrix.html>. Zizek, S. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Filmography

Lawnmower Man, The. Brett Leonard, 1992. 107 mins. Matrix, The. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, 1999. 136 mins. Terminator, The. James Cameron, 1984. 108 mins. Terminator 2. James Cameron, 1991. 137 mins.

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