Session 5a: The Cyborg II: Politics and Representation
Chair: Dominic Williams

Terminal Perceptions: Visual Media, Post-Human Identity, and the Paranoid Schizophrenic
Richard M. Benjamin

Thematically, recent American film and digital media have fixated over how visual culture can transform and infiltrate the human subject, a post-humanist theme that glorifies the media’s power, yet also disdains the invasive and terrorizing effects of its reach. Gone is the quaint notion of a “whole,” “autonomous,” or “authentic” human subject. Contemporary American film has collapsed the previously rigid boundary between the biological body and the image. Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), Natural Born Killers, The Cable Guy (Ben Stiller, 1996), The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999), The Matrix series (Wachowski Brothers), and Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) are among a slew of dark films that present near-apocalyptic themes whereby the characters’ lives are transformed by the commodification logic of media culture.
Such films fictionalize media critic John Fiske’s proposition that contemporary media no longer represent reality “second-hand,” but create or affect the reality they once reported and mediated. In many these films “life” is digital entertainment. They foreshadow Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezo’s self-serving prophetic declaration, “Real life is just another platform.” These unsettling scenarios represent the evolution of the cybernetic media “self.” And mainstream American men have fully internalized the “logic”—capitalist, aesthetic, ontological, consumer—underpinning television, film, and the cybernetic media self. Many live by the assumptions and protocols of ubiquitous visual media. Thus their film spectatorship has been transformed by the time-shifting, cognitively-parallel, reality-bending visual media and venues of the past several decades: the multiplex cinema, the VCR, the internet, video games, etc.
This presentation will analyze the “terminal perceptions” of white American male film protagonists and their matrix of science fictive media. This paranoid matrix of science fictive media implicates them as a particularly media-defined, media-manipulated “endangered” species. (“Terminal” perception refers both to screen subjectivity and their perceived potential extinction.) Within the context of contemporary national (American) events, the presentation will investigate the paranoid-flavored, reality-dissolving tenor of recent media— film examples: eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999), The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002), and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). These films depict a paranoid, dystopic vision of the present and future, but also implicitly fetishize the commodity-logic of media technologies, which permit/demand white American males to occupy multiple identities. The presentation will also analyze how digital media – namely video games and Internet sites – project these themes.
The presentation argues that these media induct the white male American protagonist into a schizophrenic state that exhilarates, but threatens to extinguish him. Such a “post-human” digital state (predictably) inheres a dystopic/utopic double-edged significance. The presentation also argues that these schizophrenic states are metonyms for white male anxiety of several split concerns: “reality”/media, whiteness/otherness, masculinity/femininity, and ecstasy/anomie.

The Cyborg Body Politic: Politics in the Post-Human Age
Renata Koba
University of Tarragona, Spain

In another thousand years we'll be machines, or gods.
Afriel, from the science-fiction story Swarm.

The machine is us, our processes, the aspect of our embodiment.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto.

Are we living in a Cyborg Age?
In the post-human age the continuous proliferation of technological devises or cybernetic machines makes the boundaries between the human and the machine more blurred. Cybernetic systems are being integrated into our lives, bodies. As Chris Hables Gray (1995), an American critic of technology claims, there is no longer a partnership between humans and machines, it is rather a symbiosis which is managed or controlled by cybernetics, the language common to both organic and mechanical bodies. Thus one might speak about the age of the vital machine, the fourth discontinuity¹ or the age of the transhuman that is the co-evolution of humans and machines. That fusion with technology causes shifts in identity of individuals and the resultant organism (cybernetic organism) is one that, although derived from a human precursor, is no longer recognisable as naturally human.
The following text attempts to interpret the implications of the fourth discontinuity. It shows how the language of technology redefines, rewrites and re-establishes stories about identity, politics, gender, love and death. It focuses on aspects or consequences of cyborgisation of societies as well as human beings.
People are definitely changing their perspectives through the fusion with technology and thus, just as Frankenstein’s monster, the good Terminator or Spielberg’s mecha (mechanised organic) tried to speak as humans, now humans seek to speak as cyborgs in order to give voice to new experiences. Cyberculture reflected in the Internet, video games, drugs, music and rave parties is spreading at a high speed. All these changes reflect new telecommunication technologies. Since the bodies of people, business and government are becoming more tied to technology they too become cyborgs. And if humans accept their new status as a cyborg they might perceive and confront new changes from a cyborgian point of view offering novel and shocking perspectives or possibilities of living in the new world order.

Cyborg Iconography: Constructing the Image of the Cyborg
Carlos Arenas
University of Valencia, Spain

Before cyberpunk converted the cyborg into its icon par excellence, this figure was already outlined by some artists and writers. Fantastic art and science fiction developed this hybrid in different ways in the realms of fantasy and imagination. The basic element in a cyborg is the interpenetration of organic and inorganic in a human being, the rupture of the body membrane and the coexistence of the body with the machine, with the creation of a New human as a result. We can find some examples of cyborgs in comics, arts and movies. All of these images helped to create the image of the cyborg in advance, in a visionary way. That term is sometimes mixed with others such as robots or androids, machines that can be human in appearance, but there is no cyborg without the symbiosis, without a truly human part belonging to it. The cyborg is a complex organism, and has become a person that today exists, as a result of prosthetics and implants in the fields of medicine and experimentation. Some authors think that the influence of the media and the dependence on machines has already created a cyborg in all of us. But in the original sense, a physical connection is required in order to call someone a cyborg.

One of the pioneers of this imagery was the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who already in the 60s and in the 70s created a entire world based on the union between flesh and metal, body and machine, in a peculiar surrealistic way, inventing a futuristic style, called by Giger himself biomechanics. His influence on modern fantastic art, science fiction film and in the cyberculture has no limit. Since Giger, other creators have added more images and elements to shape the visual aspect of the cyborg, as rich as we know it today. Superheroes of the comic world, cyberpunk characters, science fiction movies, body artists, digital creators. Every artist has his own idea of what a cyborg looks like.