Introduction

In the following paper I will be discussing notions in literature and movies

which focus on the future of mankind and the effects they have on our reality. As we
enter further into the 21st century, the speed with which technology (especially
communication technology) increasingly shapes the way we live and the way we
perceive the world is accelerating. In the last few decades the shift from the industrial
age towards the age of information has frequently served as the central and
predominant subject for many SF novels and movies.
How will new technologies change human beings? Will humans become a part
of the machine (a great fear often expressed in SF)? And which effects will these
transformations have on mind and body?
In the first four chapters I will deal with different forms of posthuman
representations in popular culture while the in last I will shortly reflect on the ideas
behind the transhumanist movements. Virtual reality, the cyborg, David Cronenberg
and the mutants in the Marvel Universe offer many different perspectives on
posthuman appearances and beings. The transhumanists believe we can achieve a
posthuman state of being, which will be necessary for the survival of mankind.
In the conclusion I will undertake answering the question if we are on the
verge of becoming posthuman and why a critical posthumanism is necessary.
I have added an appendix to present certain images of SF-movies and comics,
and the influence they exerted on each other.

1
 1.The last man on Earth or how we became posthuman?

At the beginning of the 21st century, the human race has definitely entered a new phase in
the evolution, a phase which in contemporary thought is repeatedly referred to as the
“posthuman condition” (Rossini 2003).

What is this condition mentioned in the title and what do we mean by posthuman? If
we delve on the word as such it becomes quite obvious: post in this context is meant
as temporary, in other words meaning “after-humanism”. But is this really the basic
idea? Essentially, posthumanism is rooted in philosophical scepticism claiming
uncertainty in knowing the subject in contrast to the ideas of Kant and Hegel
concerning acquiring knowledge through experience and reason leading up to an
understanding of the subject, which in turn is grounded in the teachings of Descartes.
The subject, though, has not become obsolete, but is rather decentred by postmodern
and poststructuralist philosophers. The concepts of postmodern and postmodernity are
difficult to define. Basically they are “a cultural and ideological configuration said to
have replaced or to be replacing modernity and modernism” (Jary&Jary 1991: 487).
Postmodernist theorists as well as very influential thinkers such as Derrida took a
critical standpoint of our western way of thinking and the dualisms evolving from
this, and vice versa. “Distrust of technology and questioning of positivist
Enlightenment philosophy, such as the inevitability of progress, is characteristic of
postmodern thought” (Clark 1998: 6). Moreover, the idea of the subject was attacked,
which excluded the ‘other’ because of being different. “Postmodernity is marked by
the return of the ‘others’ of modernity: woman, the sexual Other of man, the ethnic or
native Other of the Eurocentric subject and the natural or earth Other of techno-
culture emerge as counter-subjectivities” (Braidotti 2002: 117).
Postmodernity and the times we live in are defined through exchanges, so-
called flows, that are cultural, technological, financial, products and people
(Appadurai 1996). Transnational companies and financial markets have replaced the
nation and weakened the power of national government and the state. Production has
shifted from the Fordist model of a rationalized, organized labour force towards a
policy of “flexible accumulation”, by which companies have downsized the total size
of their core workforce, relying more on sub-contractors and outsourcing in order to
maximize profits and thus accelerate turn-over speed. In addition, we are experiencing
as a result of these processes a rapid and expanding globalization which, together with
2
modern communication technology, is generating a time-space compression of the
world with increased attention being placed on ‘the direct and the instant’ in
postmodern lifestyles (Harvey 1989).
Posthumanism is linked closely to postmodernism: “a time in which ‘humans’
are no longer the most important things in the universe” (Gane 2006: 432), and “is
characterized by its opposition to humanism” (Ritzer 2007: 3548). It is used to
interpret different aspects of social life and human interaction: philosophical, cultural
and the state of condition man is in. On the one hand, one can observe the
development in which logocentrism is being displaced from modern thought, in which
in the meantime animals and man are perceived as equal, which also has had an
influence on the animal rights movements and their ideas. On the technological side
posthumanism lays the ideological groundwork leading up to the appearance of
science-fiction thought and literature after cybernetic research became firmly
established. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are
cyborgs” (Haraway 1980: 150).

But there are also many negative views on the matter. Francis Fukuyama has
published in the last two decades several nightmare visions of the fate of humans
through the usage of biotechnology and genetics. Fukuyama represents the tradition of
liberal humanism based on Kantian thought of human nature and its origins and
believes it to be threatened by these technological developments. Fukuyama argues
that the state and governments have to keep an eye on this matter and pass regulations
to maintain the uniqueness of humanity. The computer also threatens man’s position
in our world as Time Magazine declared a computer to be “Machine of the Year” as
the replacement for “Man of the Year” in 1982, since there were no appropriate
human candidates (Badmington 2003: 12). But Fukuyama’s view lacks historicity
since the human nature and humanism he refers to, and which he considers to have a
universal legitimation, are exactly the points anti-humanistic theory tried to demystify
(Herbrechter 2009: 144).
Inspired by SF novels the transhumanist movement believes in a posthuman
vision of the world and the possibilities to achieve this aim through technology, a
position attacked by Fukuyama as mentioned above, who believes that the
modification of any key characteristics will lead to a chain of changes with

3
unpredictable outcome (Fukuyama 2004: 43). Oliver Krüger mentions the reason why
many transhumanists believe in this is the apparent necessity to overcome the physical
body and boundaries because of the future death of our planet, the end of the world
(2004: 255). Many futurists believe the survival of mankind depends on colonizing
the galaxy. One of the most prominent groups are the Extropians, with one of their
main influential thinkers Max More believing in the possibility of human immortality
through the use of cryogenic technology, that is cryopreserving the human body until
the day technology is invented to make this vision possible. The introduction to the
virtual worlds of the internet fused many new ideas amongst the Extropians and other
transhumanists. “The Extropians and the Children of Mind were revelling in their new
found status as unlikely seers of an uploaded future, a stark or glorious future ... in
which human beings left behind the ‘meat’ and uploaded their brains to live in the
miasmus of the Net” (Cooke 2006: 20). This idea is widely represented in the
cyberpunk genre, which I will refer to more closely at in the following chapter.
“‘Posthuman’ tends to designate a perceived change in the nature of the
human brought about by developments in the fields of cybernetics, neuroscience and
genetics and their resultant technologies since the Second World War” (Wallace
2005: 26). Wallace provides us further with a list of these technologies including a
wide range from computer and communication technologies to the medical
technologies enhancing human bodies and altering abilities (2005: 26).

Since there are two main approaches to posthumanism, one which embraces
the possibilities of change and one that tries to repress these developments in
whichever way possible, I will therefore delve more closely on both versions of
posthuman texts. Donna Haraway stresses the importance of the concept of ‘joint
kinship’ between the human and technology, which in other words means the
awareness for the material reality, that is which defines and shapes us and our worldly
environment to overcome hierarchical structures. Haraway writes that technology and
humans are closely intertwined and therefore cannot be separated. She undertakes to
point out how power structures continue to remain through hybridization or
cyborgization; and if we take a closer look at a variety of issues, like gender and
reproduction, we see how the cyborg can actually shake the pillars of Western thought
and have a liberating effect. “The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and
human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and
4
women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically” (Haraway 1980:
160). Once we realize that our existence is not free from exterior factors without any
transcending factors we can then start a critical analysis of what it means to be
‘human’.
Western thought has a long tradition of perceiving the mind as being
independent of the body, as in Christian faith and as mentioned earlier with the
Cartesian dualism. The mind is placed hierarchically above the body and, therefore,
there is a hierarchy also amongst our body parts, giving a higher value to the head1.
Holistic views of human nature contradict this notion and precede Donna Haraway’s
focus on the material reality. The criticism of posthumanism is not the transformation
of human kind, but the invention of the concept “human” and the oppressing elements
brought about by this idea. “The task of posthumanism is to discover those uncanny
moments at which things start to drift, of reading humanism in a certain way, against
itself and the grain” (Badmington 2003: 19). And as he further writes, in the way
Lyotard used the prefix post in another sense than temporal (Lyotard 1990: 45), we
must understand the post in posthumanism accordingly. The post is the beginning.

Early examples of posthumanist literature are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

and Gustav Meyrink’s Golem. The fate of the human being has always caused worries
for many writers of horror and SF literature. Apocalyptic scenarios raise fear about
the loss of control of human over their inventions in the area of technology, which
will lead to the demise of humans (as can be seen in dystopian movies like Matrix,
Terminator and Stephen King’s eighties SF-horror-crossover Rhea M2). But this is
only one aspect of many.
Other writers have dealt with the transformation of human through the usage of
technology: here the concept of the cyborg comes into play, as being not hundred
percent human nor hundred percent machine, but is placed on the border between the
two and transgresses the concept of human. In most SF stories the cyborg is a
dangerous and destructive force. The cyborg is a hybrid creature, which “threatens a
community of authentic human subjects: capable of masquerading as non-android, it
blends with mainstream society, infringing upon the boundaries of the human
1
Extropians, for example, offer a preservation of the head, if someone can’t afford to deep-freeze the
whole body. Futurama (1999) mocked this idea, showing several celebrities, living only as heads in
tubes.
2
Based on a Stephen King short story, machines and electronic gadgets are animated after a comet
passes Earth and start attacking humans and killing them.
5
collective” (Galavan 1997: 413).

Further on I will undertake a closer look at positive ideas connected to the

cyborg and the self-reflexive liberating potential for humans which it contains.
Humans have changed through the course of history and we will continue to change in
future and in effect more radically through the use of technology in our everyday life.
This fact is unpreventable. The development of tools has altered our abilities to
interact with our environment and to “perfect” the surroundings we live in to our own
advantage. The cyborg might probably be the next phase of human evolution. Once
we come to recognize that the process of cyborgization is already happening and that
we are all hybrid beings, can we focus on future challenges and how we are to handle
these developments.

6
 2.Simulated Worlds

I.Cyberspace

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts....A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city lights, receding” (Gibson 1984: 51).

Long before the internet became an integral part of our everyday life in the
first world countries, several scholars, such as Marshall McLuhan and SF-authors like
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, thought about the possibilities and changes
society will undergo with the introduction of new communication technology. The
term cyberspace is associated very closely with the latter two authors. Gibson
envisioned, with his personal view on cyberspace, a world made up of geometrical
forms, lights and the representation of oneself in a digital form does not resemble
necessary the physical body. Probably Gibson’s work was the most influential vision
of cyberspace, by which many latter novels of the genre were inspired in the depiction
of the VR3. Gibson’s imagination of cyberspace also had “a considerable effect on the
development of three-dimensional virtual reality imagining software” (Hayles 1999:
21).
Cyberspace also has many different names which we use for its description;
‘matrix’ and ‘grid’ (reintroduced early this year with the reboot of Tron) are further
examples. In most novels and movies cyberspace is mostly linked to hackers and their
illegal activities; and cybernetics in general with the military, changing human beings
into weaponry.
In the meantime, the cyberspace known as internet has become part and parcel
of our everyday life in both positive and negative ways. On the one hand,
communication, cultural and economic exchange for the benefit of mankind (or an
elite class) has increased through the time-space compression (Harvey 1989)
experienced by the use of the internet. On the other hand, governments are trying out
new methods of surveillance and the military is discovering a new terrain for war.

3
I will use the short form of Virtual Reality ‘VR’ during the text
7
“Cyber-war” is an increasingly repeated noun in contemporary news implying that
hackers and their activities are to be considered “first strikes”, which means terrorist
acts, and consequently combated by special IT units of the military. Because hacker
activities are viewed today as more or less criminal acts and insolent acts of defiance
(with groups like LulzSec going as far as to mock their “victims”) the military is
attempting to take control of the cyberspace under the apparent threat of cyber-
terrorism by these groups, as seen in the case of wikileaks (Lobo 6/2011). The
government of Great Britain even goes as far as to maintain that cyber-terrorism will
become the greatest threat to governments in contemporary times, thus resulting in the
government spending 650 million pounds in the development of anti-hacker-
technologies and task forces (Harvey 5/2011).

Cyberspace is often depicted in the movies as totalitarian technology,

enslaving the people. Probably the only movie touching on the question on how
cyberspace can be used to adjust, enhance and improve our personality is Lawnmower
Man (Krüger 2004: 222), based on a short story by Stephen King. The protagonist
transforms from a simple minded gardener into a highly intelligent human being
through the mind-enhancing experiences in cyberspace. Braidotti interprets
Lawnmower Man as reconstructing masculinity by depicting the evolution from idiot
to little boy to adolescent to cowboy to losing virginity to macho to psycho and finally
to serial killer in the end. At one point the subject believes he can see God and wants
to share his experience with his girlfriend making her reach the ultimate orgasm,
which is followed by the cybersex (or psychic rape) scene in which she is literally
blown apart and goes insane (2002: 251). “This becomes almost a manifesto for
evolutionary psychology” (Braidotti 2002: 251). That is an issue which we might not
consider positive.
There are parallels at points in the depiction of the VR and the fluid body
appearance of the people roaming the cyberspace with surrealist imagery as well as
with Timothy Leary’s descriptions of his experiments in the sixties in California4 with
psychedelic mind-enhancing drugs aiming to perfect the human mind, especially the

4
During the Flower-Power era of the sixties and seventies, the use of psychedelic drugs had been very
popular. Leary had close contacts with the Flower Power-movement and was experimenting with LSD.
The people who he worked together with gave detailed information of their feelings and experiences
during their drug trips.
8
melting together of two people during the cybersex-scene. “1960’s LSD guru
espoused a utopian transcendent vision for this technology, hyping it indirectly as
electronic acid. At a 1991 appearance in Chicago, Leary proselytized for VR as “a
legal method to achieve expanded awareness”” (Dinello 2005: 151). Leary was
originally a psychologist, who later spent much of his time working on the idea of
how to perfect the human being. In addition, he was also a futurist with his SMI²LE-
Project5 with its three main themes: infinite life, space migration and intelligence
enhancement (a point very common amongst transhumanist thinkers).
Life in VR, mind without body: is it possible? Hans Moravec is one of the
pioneers to believe in the possibility of uploading human consciousness into a
computer and leaving the body behind. He presented his ideas in Mind Children: The
Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, which become one of the central points of
criticism and the opening words by Hayles in How we became Posthuman (1999: 1).
The meat/flesh (body) is viewed as a prison of the mind, which we will be able to
neglect in future, since after the Cartesian view the mind and body are entirely
separated. But the projected obsolescence of the body also implies the loss of
biological matter, normally viewed as the immovable material upon which gender
differences are constructed and inscribe male privileges, because the dislocation of the
body creates anxieties reducing the complexity of the mind to the brain and defining
this brain as male or female (Chilcoat 2004: 156), a notion criticized by many female
writers and scholars. Cyberpunk builds most of its stories around the idea of the
mind/body separation. But what are we then to make of the bodily experience which
influences our view of the world and our perception of what is real?

II.Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is “a genre best known for its rejection of embodiment and

embrace of an existence in cyberspace” (Vint 2007: 102). The main protagonists are
“consol cowboys” (Fernbach 2000: 234) and hackers who spend most of their life in
´VR´, street samurais, criminals and corporate agents. Further characteristic features
are bodily modifications, transnational corporations replacing the governments and an
overall pessimistic dystopian tone.
The eighties were the decade, in which many of the most influential
5
http://www.smi2le.org/cms/
9
cyberpunk novels were written, long before we entered cyber-culture. Bruce Sterling,
with Schismatrix, and William Gibson, with Neuromancer, are the most prominent
authors who created this specific genre.
Visually, the worlds imagined and their cyber-city aesthetics go back to
movies like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and also Jean "Moebius" Giraud, who was
heavily influenced by the movie Metropolis and who was later to become one of the
best-known comic artists with his extraordinary imaginary of future cities (e.g. set-
design of The 5th Element6) and working for SF comic magazine Heavy Metal.
Bukatman also mentions Angus McKie, with his high-tech science fiction illustrations
which have had a great formative impact on cyberpunk design (1993: 133). (See
appendix Fig.II.4.1, Fig.II.4.2, Fig.II.4.3 and Fig.II.4.4 P.67-68 for comparison
between cyberpunk city designs). Elaine L. Graham writes that the genre of
cyberpunk emerging in the 1980’s directly originates from Fritz Lang’s vision of the
future with its urban wastelands and its division between the wealthy class, free from
physical imperfection and death through the use of technology, and the underclass
(2008: 193).
Cyberpunk is often very dystopian, placing the stories in a near future from
now where nation-states have often been abolished and which in the meantime are
controlled by transnational mega-corporations; but in comparison to dystopian novels,
there is no criticism or collective solution to the situations described. Dystopian
novels aim normally at a critique of certain developments detrimental to society. The
cyberpunk protagonists are mostly concerned with the struggle of survival in the
urban jungle surroundings or in the world of cyberspace. Graham writes that “the
physical environment is either that of urban decay and social disintegration or
computer-generated virtual worlds” (2008: 193). Common features of cyberpunk are
designer-drugs used to boost the physical and mental boundaries and prostheses for
bodily modifications, e.g. weapons, x-ray vision etc., in addition to the sun hidden
litter-covered streets and high rises, symbolizing the power structures and hierarchies,
and uninhabitable wastelands outside the cities. The economic situation forces most
characters either to engage in criminal activities, e.g. hacking data, or for women to
sell their bodies, like for instance Molly Millions in Neuromancer who has her mind

6
Luc Besson’s colorful SF-movie was a centered around its visual aesthetics. Next to Moebius, who
designed the city with much similarity to his early SF-comics, Jean Paul Gaultier, the famous French
star designer was responsible for the outfits and costumes.
10
switched off during sexual intercourse so she can’t remember her activities as
prostitute. Melzer specifies: “In Cyberpunk poverty translates into prostitution and
professional surrogate motherhood for women, while men hustle - either as console
cowboys or pimps who deal in women, drugs, and software” (2005: 163).
Most cyberpunk literature has been written by men and, therefore, the
depiction of women is often very androcentric and rarely takes a critical approach in
questioning classical gender-roles. Cyberpunk’s view of identity is often very
individualistic and does not offer any alternatives. With female cyberpunk author Pat
Cadigan, for example, there has been a shift in the contents of the stories and
contemporary cyberpunk enthusiasts hope to overcome racist and sexist prejudices
existing in the material reality (Vint 2008: 104).
Although the majority of cyberpunk literature depicts virtual worlds and
adventures within those worlds, several classical SF works about cyborgs or
dystopian futures (which I am going examine in the following chapter) are also
considered cyberpunk because of their settings, even if they don’t introduce any form
of a matrix.

III.Neuromancer

Neuromancer, taking place partly in the cyberspace, partly in the “real” world,
is the major influential work from which most SF-cyberpunk novels draw their
influence. Written in the beginning of the eighties and then published in 1984, Gibson
was disappointed that he did not manage to release his work ahead of time since
Blade Runner had appeared in cinema in 1982. Gibson feared that many people would
think he took the visual aesthetics from Blade Runner, which he personally thought to
be the first movie with a cyberpunk look. Neuromancer is first novel in the Sprawl-
Trilogy. The Sprawl is a type of megacity along the East Coast of the U.S., where
Boston has grown together with many different cities to become a giant sprawl down
to Atlanta - BaMa. In this urbanized surrounding corporations rule and the average
person is degraded to roam the garbage-littered streets in a constant battle for survival.
“Black factories” exist in the side-alleys which offer surgical assistance for
implanting prosthesis.
We have a dark dystopian post-industrial world presented to us. One of the
flaws in the imagery of Gibson was that he overestimated the power of the

11
corporations, which he envisioned as the future leaders of states. After two decades
have passed, the shift in power towards the financial sector has grown stronger.
Gibson is not really dystopian since he introduces a lot of technological imagery in his
text, but there is no critique of traditional power structures throughout Neuromancer
(Baccolini 2003: 71). The power structures remain and there is no utopian outlook.
On the other hand, Gibson’s cyborg imagery, which reinstates the humanist position,
differs totally from Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a self-deconstructor of
humanism.

In the world of Neuromancer we are introduced to a former hacker named

Cage. Cage was a “console cowboy”, until the day he messed up a run7 and had his
ports, through which he had direct access to cyberspace once jacked in, destroyed.
Since that day he is not able to re-enter the cyberspace, which made him become
depressive, because he is trapped in the "meat", that is the entrapment of the mind in
the physical body. To compensate for the loss of enjoyment of the VR Cage turns into
a drug addict but can’t overcome his emotional problems, thus going further and
further down the spiral. (Cage murders for money so he can afford his drugs. He is
depicted in the way we imagine classical junkies to be). One day he is approached by
a female street samurai8, Molly Millions, who is working for some mysterious person
called Armitage. She offers Cage a deal in which he will have his pods for access to
the cyberspace restored and in return he will have to hack into a computer system and
steal certain information. With time it becomes clear that Armitage is a former soldier
and only survivor of a military operation in Russia which went wrong. He has lost his
memory and is now controlled by a mysterious entity, Wintermute, who is revealed
later on to be an AI who wants to become something “more” or as Wintermute puts it:
it wants “personal” evolution. In the future, the development of AI’s is forbidden
under so-called Turing-laws9. Cage becomes the instrument of liberation for

7
Gibson´s use of the term run, for a mercenary missions, became popular throughout SF
8
"Cyberpunk fiction similarly incorporates many references to popular culture. William Gibson said
of one of his novels, `Neuromancer` is filled with these bits and pieces; it’s very much a homage to
something. I didn’t really think of it as a book, I wanted it to be a pop artifact’ (Collins 2005: 168)."
There are many references to Rastafarian-culture, Asian-culture and Pop-culture.
9
Alan Turing (23.6.1912 - 7.6.1954): English mathematician, who created the Turing-machine, a
forerunner of the modern computer.
12
Wintermute. Using his re-obtained cyber-skills Cage starts “jacking in” again,
enjoying once again the experience of cyberspace, proving his real strength to be in
the VR. In the cyberspace the deadly ICE10, security programs which can flatline a
hacker’s mind, are a deadly menace, but only for the “runners”. The cyberspace
consists of geometrical forms and lights and data highways. At the end of the story,
Cage manages to set Wintermute free and it fusions with Neuromancer to become a
new form of AI. Although Wintermute is portrayed as extremely omnipotent, he is not
able to set himself free without exterior help. The melting together of Neuromancer
with Wintermute makes them become a new entity, the entire matrix. In the
succeeding novels traces of the new entity still exist in the internet in form of voodoo
deities, but Wintermute has vanished in search for other AIs in outer space.

IV.Welcome to Cyberia: The Matrix

The Matrix is not concerned with the idea that humans will transform into
man-machine hybrids, but more with the question how reality is experienced and is
similar in its approach to Ghost in the Shell, in which life exists/can exist in form of
digital data, with no material agenda. “No need for architecture, we’ve got Facebook
now” (Gardner 2009: 122), already lets us know towards which kind of future we are
heading which is probably the basic idea of the Matrix: we are all going to become
ghosts, not in a shell, but in the machine. In the Matrix every human being already has
entered a posthuman phase of existence. The body has become extinct and is
neglected in the future of mankind. Matrix offers a very classical view on the question
of mind/body dualism. “Matrix” originates from the Latin mater, meaning mother and
womb.
In contrast to Gibsonian cyberspace, the virtual world is not experienced
consciously as a place of digital architecture with its own sensations, but as a
representation of contemporary reality surrounding us. The inhabitants of the Matrix
do not realize that they are living in it and the digital representation is one’s self
(Melzer 2005: 153). There are no geometrical forms and digital lights with data
flowing by, but simply a never changing version of any postmodern American big
city. Outside of the Matrix the world has become uninhabitable due to a war between
machines and mankind, turning the surface of the planet into a form of post-nuclear

10
Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics: cyberspace defense systems.
13
wasteland. The survivors travel the planet by spaceships. There is one last free town
remaining with the biblical name Zion. There are many representations of religious
motifs in the movie in general (Herbrechter 2009: 119).

Neo, a computer hacker, feels that in his existence something is missing. A

group of renegade hackers approach him and explain to him the reason for his
feelings: he is not alive but instead is trapped in a computer-simulation called The
Matrix, stimulating his mind and consciousness. This stimulation is needed to keep
the body of the humans alive, who serve as batteries for the machines. The year is not
known but is assumed to be about 200 years on in the future in which mankind has
lost domination over the world to the robots. In a final battle man tried to darken the
sky so that the robots and machines would have their energy source taken from them
(implying that all machines run on solar energy). Unfortunately, the plan did not
succeed and the intelligent machines found a new energy source: the human body.
Therefore, mankind has been enslaved by the machines and kept in special facilities
which continuously reproduce humans using the warmth of the body as power supply.
The human being has become an organic battery; the consumer has become the
consumed. The Matrix was developed by the machines especially for the task of
keeping the mind of the humans alive, but a certain emptiness remains in the souls of
some of the digital inhabitants of the Matrix. The renegade hackers free these people,
who are on the search for “more”, a deeper meaning in life (a very religious aspect),
from the Matrix and show them the real world which does not really exist anymore, in
order to raise their awareness, which means freeing the world from the machines and
destroying the Matrix.
When Morpheus confronts Neo with the truth behind the Matrix, he gives him
the choice to decide between two pills, one which will make him forget everything he
has been told about by Morpheus and another, which he decides to choose. By doing
this a psychedelic mind-enhancing type of trip begins, opening the conscious and
awakening Neo from his sleep. During an early scene, Neo is holding a copy of Jean
Baudrillard’s Simulacrum and Simulation in his hand, hinting at the idea that
everything happening is a form of hyper-reality (Toffoletti 2007: 33). Baudrillard
distinguishes between orders of the imagery appropriate to the three successive orders
of simulation: the first being the utopian, the imagery realm attending the order of
representation, in which signs and values are made to represent an original order of

14
natural signs; secondly, followed by the order of production and work, the simulation-
culture of the bourgeois order, in which signs and values strive for equivalence to the
original; thirdly and lastly, the simulationist order of the hyper-real, the cybernetic
striving for complete operational control over the signs and values (Criscery-Ronay
1991: 389). At the end, simulation does not reproduce reality, nor does it hide it;
simulation starts to produce reality, which is then referred to as hyper-reality
(Toffoletti 2007: 33).
Neo is the so-called “Chosen One”, a type of archaic messiah depending on
modern development who shall bring about the change. His personal saviour
Morpheus believes strongly in this notion. Teaching him new abilities through the
usage of computer-programs linked to a person’s mind, Neo learns all kind of new
abilities in order to return to the Matrix and combat the system and its agents with
superhuman powers, defying all laws of physics. The victim of the system uses the
system in order to precisely fight the system. Everybody inside the Matrix could be a
potential agent, therefore Neo has to decode the facade. The allegories with modern
society are very clearly presented. Neo accepts his fate and by realizing that inside the
Matrix anything goes, he is successful in achieving the status of the saviour-to-come
(which is not presented in the first movie, leaving the end open).
In the end of the first movie he is able to decode the Matrix, sees behind it and
recognizes the world of 1-and-0’s. Neo is in reality a form of posthuman warrior, a
super-being, but only in digital form, since all of his powers really only exist in the
machine. In reality he is a vulnerable a fragile ordinary human, with a pod to his brain
that he can directly link in to the internet or the world of the Matrix, where his true
potential can be unfolded. This takes the idea of the recovery of the body ab
absurdum and really is only a recovery of our mind. The sequels, and mostly the third
instalment with its final conclusion, even if unsatisfying, try to establish another
posthuman Neo in comparison to the first movie with its “conservative message about
an ‘essential’ human body” (Melzer 2006: 154) through which the ‘real’ reality can
only be experienced. Its heavy religious undertone presents to us a divine-type of
Neo, with special powers, which is later revealed to be a counter-virus, a wetware-
software hybrid, created to combat viruses and malware, represented by Agent Smith,
affecting the status quo between humans and machines:

Wie sich herausstellt war Neo nie ganz Mensch oder Maschine, sondern etwas "Drittes",
also metaphysisch gesehen eine Leerstelle zwischen Fiktion und Realität, nämlich
15
 Software. Weder "hardware" noch "wetware" zugehörig, ist Neo im Grunde ein reines
"Medium" oder das Übersetzungsprinzip und versprochene posthumane Subjektivität ...
an sich (Herbrechter 2009: 119).

There are many similarities in the Matrix to the works of Gibson, but many
aspects differ largely. One striking point is the strong female character which helps
the protagonist during the course of the story. “Trinity’s strength, skills, and black
leather attire remind us of Molly Millions, Gibson’s technologically enhanced female
figure that roams the Sprawl of his narratives, a descendant of Joanna Russ’s Jael in
‘The Female Man’ (1975)” (Melzer 2006: 157). Clearly, the Amazon lady, the femme
fatale, has always been attractive and frightening at the same time and a permanent
feature in SF stories. In comparison though, Molly Millions, who follows no one
really, is a clear character in her own way with “any maternal/sexual object function
she might have for Case is foreclosed by her self-agented professional attitude and
actions” (Harper 1995: 406), while Trinity serves as the female mother-like figure,
giving herself to Neo and supporting him on his way to become posthuman through
her “unconditional love and self-effacing femininity”; a very human ingredient
(Herbrechter & Callus 2008: 106; Herbrechter 2009: 119). Unfortunately, most
cyberpunk stories don’t present a positive attitude towards women, but often depict
them as entire male chauvinist fantasies. In general, they appeal to male readership
which is stereotypically white, male and technophile; except for the new wave of
female SF writers offering different notions of posthumanism. The expression
“jacking in” describes the pleasure of the male-computer interface, suggesting male
masturbatory fantasies of heterosexual unification with the feminized technology;
although the hackers search for transcendence of the meat, cyberpunk always brings
back the body back, even if it has become obsolete (Fernbach 2004: 245).
There is also an alternative reversal reading of Molly Millions, possessing
physical strength which Cage does not have, since his body is weak and fragile (Vint
2007: 105). The other aspect of criticism is the focus on the individual rather than a
collective group of people, as can be seen in the Matrix, which places its hope in a
form of Übermensch for the liberation of mankind. “The two most common criticism
of the genre are that it is merely misogynistic, boys’-own-fantasy escapism, and that it
offers only individual transcendence of, not social solutions to, the problems it
diagnoses” (Vint 2007: 103). Under these circumstances the cyberpunk genre does not
offer much of a positive alternative vision of the posthuman.
16
 V.Liberation or Enslavement?

Looking at both of these works expounding on the possibilities of living in a

digital created environment, there are many questions which we are confronted with
and challenge our own thinking of the basic definition of what it means to be human.
As mentioned above, one of the leading figures of the debate, Hans Moravec,
believes in the possibilities of uploading our consciousness into a computer and our
mind becoming data. The movies analyzed above “do assume that human heads, or
rather what is inside of them, is purely locatable, something to be read, analyzed,
transferred, circulated, exchanged, grasped, held, and manipulated” (Chilcoat 2004:
169). This idea seems to be very attractive to many people, who think they can
overcome the limitations of life, e.g. death, body, and develop into a new type of
human being freed from the “meat”.
But there are ideas which stand in opposition to this notion, as Cooke points
out, that “the fantasy of uploading one’s consciousness had been replaced by the far
more ‘egalitarian’ lowest-common-denominator fantasy of downloading someone
else’s consciousness from Amazon.com, or having your own consciousness pre-
determined there in stripped down, agent-led shopping-preference form” (2006 :24).
The vice versa of the imagined has taken place.
Many critics are anxious of the idea and even frightened of the vision of
neglecting the body totally and that it has become obsolete. As Hayles points out in
How we became Posthuman, the bodily experiences can’t be separated from our
perception of our human identity (1999). Our human identity and nature is
constructed through the importance and the roles we model onto our bodies. What are
we to do with the aspect of gender, which will become obsolete in cyberspace, since
forms of sexuality relying on the body can’t be practiced anymore and are maybe
replaced by virtual sex? And does the virtual offer the same forms of satisfaction like
the material world? We already can see that people cross gender boundaries in the
internet, taking up the opposite gender in games or different social media platforms
and interpreting their view of gender behaviour in a new way without state institutions
and their control. Hebrechter writes:

Dezentralisierte Medien wie das Internet mit seinen neuen Möglichkeiten und
Mechanismen zur Subjektkonstruktion übt größtenteils radikale Autonomie gegenüber
staatlicher Intervention, internationaler korporativer Interessen, sogar gegenüber dem
17
 allgegenwärtigen Markt. Sowohl neue Formen individueller Identitäten (Facebook,
Myspace, Avatare in Diskussionforen und Chatrroms und bei Online Gaming) als auch
neue Kollektivitäten und “assemblages” (MUD, MOOs, usw.) heben eine zunehmende
Verquickung von Mensch, Medium und Technologie hervor und machen das traditionelle
auf Autonomie begründete liberal-humanistische Subjekt obsolet (2009: 161).

Valeska Lübke gives a good account of gender-crossing and gender

performances in the internet in “CyberGender - Geschlecht und Körper im Internet”
and how these internet identities or virtual bodies are influencing the attitudes of the
individuals in everyday life. Furthermore, disembodiment does not occur in the
internet but a new form of embodiment takes place (Lübke 2005: 58), based on our
permanent identity constructing, by which we define our persona. Taking these
aspects and working them through, we can see how the internet also challenges the
classical gender roles and that people are interested in new interpretations of
themselves. As mentioned above, being free from the physical and material reality, in
which our body exists, can liberate us from the prejudices we place on “impure
bodies” and the construction of the “other” as a threat to our own norms. But in the
end, the notion that online personas transcend social and cultural hierarchies still
remains a utopian myth (Chilcoat 2004: 248).

18
 2.The Cyborg

I.I’m a cyborg, but that’s OK

In order to better understand the following sections on science-fiction movies,

we should first take a look at the definition of a cyborg. A cyborg was known by
many names e.g. android, humanoid and replicant. The term was coined during the
1960’s by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in an article for a magazine discussing
human-machine systems, since both believed the human being has to adapt in order to
survive in an extraterrestrial environment in the future. They thought the cyborg as a
“self-regulating man-machine system”. Clynes was the chief research scientist in the
Dynamic Simulation Laboratory of the Rockland State Hospital, New York, and
Kline was a clinical psychiatrist and Director of Research at the same hospital
(Haraway 2004: 299).
A cyborg, in science-fiction, is basically a hybrid between a robot-machine
and human or biological tissue; in some stories they may even possess a real human
brain. The cyborg is a human subject augmented by chemicals, bionic prosthesis and
neural implants.
The idea for the concept of the cyborg in stories originated through Norbert
Wiener’s cybernetics science and the preceding android novels from Russian writers
like Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem, to name probably the early two most
influential novelists. The analogy in the development of the cyborg in novels can be
traced back to first the robot, then the android, which was nearer to human and finally
the cyborg as its fusion. As I have already mentioned, several critics have claimed that
we are all cyborgs, since we introduced technology into our everyday lives. The
cyborg, the synthesis between machine and human, is regarded as the next
unpreventable stage in the evolution of human.
But again, there are two sides to the origins of the cyborg. “Cyborgs beginning
with mechanical systems to which human characteristics and identities are integrated
are always made to kill. Cyborgs beginning with a human being (if not a human body)
with an existing identity and personal history are generally made to survive, clearly a
desirable feature for feminist politics” (Croissant 1998: 295). We can see the fear and
anxieties that the military is exploiting the cyborg potential merely for their “war

19
games”11. The fear exists that all apparent natural distinctions in our world will
crumble, once we all become cyborgs. Technophobic standpoints are often presented
in SF novels. “Fusing cybernetic device and biological organism, the cyborg violates
the human/machine distinction; replacing cognition with neural feedback, it
challenges the human-animal difference; explaining the behaviour of thermostats and
people through theories of feedback, hierarchical structure, and control, it erases the
animate/inanimate distinction” (Hayles 1999: 84). It is an idea, which seems very
frightening for many people, but also attractive for many others as is in the case of the
transhumanist movement.
Liberating ideas linked to the cyborg and its useful potential come from
feminist thinkers and writers such as Donna Haraway with her essay “Cyborg
Manifesto”. “The cyborg became some saviour from the strictures of identity and
identity politics; fluid, changing, malleable identities fast became the principle
conduits of exchange in ‘virtual’ realms” (Cooke 2006: 21). Haraway’s cyborg
concept was a radical new approach to the question, “what are we to think of the
cyborg?” But first, let us take a closer look at influential works of popular culture
featuring various models of cyborgs.

II.Cyborg Stories I: Living on the Edge - Blade Runner

In 1982 BladeRunner was released, a motion picture adaption of Philip K.

Dick’s Do Androids dream of electric sheep?. Dick published his work back in the
1960’s and ever since has written well-known Sci-Fi novels, dealing with similar
topics e.g. TotalRecall, Minority Report and A Scanner darkly. In most of Dick’s
novels technology acts as the long arm of the government, breaching the grounds
between the public and the private (Galavan 1997: 418). Hayles writes on the content
of the novels that Dick took up many ideas from scientific literature, extending “the
scope of inquiry by staging connections between cybernetics and a wide range of
concerns, including a devastating critique of capitalism, a view of gender relations
that ties together females and androids, an idiosyncratic connection between entropy
and schizophrenic delusion, and a persistent suspicion that the objects surrounding us

11
A movie with this title from the early eighties depicts the danger of a computer-program not being
able to distinguish between simulation and reality and therefore wants to start a nuclear missile attack
on Russia.
20
- and indeed reality itself - are fakes” (1999: 161). Questioning reality becomes one of
the main points in BladeRunner movie.
BladeRunner opened up modestly at the box offices, but went on to achieve
cult-status after its release on video and later received huge recognition by critics
internationally. Ridley Scott changed a part of the original book, adding a twist to the
story leaving one of the major questions unanswered: is Deckard a replicant? The
director’s cut solved the mystery concerning Deckard’s identity. Unfortunately, Dick
died shortly before the screening of the movie and never had a chance to comment on
it.

BladeRunner takes place at the beginning of the 21st century; mankind has
been successful in the development of artificial life and intelligence. Humanoid
robots, cyborgs called replicants are created to serve mankind in different ways. From
working force up to pleasure cyborgs, the whole diversity of society is reconstructed
through the replicants, who can be viewed as slaves. Replicants started to riot and did
not accept the fate as slaves for mankind, the reason why earth government sent these
androids into exile on Mars. Six replicants of the Nexus-6 generation return to earth
on the search for more “life”, since the replicants only have a lifespan of 4 years. Two
of the replicants are killed, while trying to break into the Tyrell Cooperation. Deckard
is a disillusioned bounty hunter, who takes on the job to eliminate the 4 remaining
androids, which is called “routine retirement”. His nemesis is the leader of the
replicants Roy Batty (the initials of BladeRunner inversed). The hunt begins through
the whole of future Los Angeles and after a while it is not clear anymore who the
good is and who the bad is, who is human and who is not? Deckard eliminates all the
replicants, except Roy Batty, who saves Deckard’s life at the end of the movie. Roy
Batty, at his moment of death, realizes the real value of “life”, with his famous last
words that “all memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain” (Scott 1982).
Deckard returns home with a last order to kill Rachael, but refuses and escapes to Los
Angeles “with her to spend whatever little time her short, engineered life leaves them
together in a different world, as a last shot indicates, a realm of light, greenery and
life, rather than the dark, rainy cityscape which has produced them both” (Telotte
1983: 49). The end shot is the only scene in the movie, where we can see daylight.
The central question of Blade Runner revolves around what makes human a
human? Is it his memory which forms his identity? “The problematic nature of human

21
nature is precisely the topic on which Blade Runner with its formulation of doubling
motif attempts to shed some light” (Telotte 1983: 48). The doubling refers to the
capability of creating human doubles - the replicants.
“Let me tell you about my mother...,” then comes the blast from the gun which
is the answer given by Leon, a replicant, right at the start of an interrogation by a
BladeRunner. The mother theme is very essential to defining someone’s personal past
and history. The mother is the root, the origin of a life, background, past and identity.
Replicants, who are artificially created, do not have a mother. They did not enter life
and this world according to the laws of biology, but by the laws of modern science
and technology. Therefore, the existence of a mother is denied which creates an
emotional gap in the replicants. Leon reacts very nervous to the question posed and
his answer is a violent one for being angry about this fact. Rachel, a replicant of a
newer generation who does not know that she is a replicant, believes she has a past
and is human (even if it is only constructed) because she has a picture of her mother
which symbolizes memory. Pictures are a link to the past and construct memories,
even if these may be false as seen later during the movie that the pictures are
manipulated to give the androids a identity, which makes them emotionally more
stable (and easier to control). The Nexus-6 replicants know about their fate and due to
the short life span, they are looking for answers, identity and more life. The
humanoids under the leadership of Roy Batty, the “fallen angel”, approach their
“creator”, the deus absconditus in the words of Raimar Zons (2001: 242), Tyrell, the
head of Tyrell-Corporation and inventor of the replicants, but unfortunately he is not
able to fulfil Roy Batty’s wish for more life. The replicants are already, using Tyrell’s
quote, “more human than human”, physically stronger, equipped with better memory
(-devices) than normal humans and emotionally very intense (in comparison to the
inhabitants of L.A. who behave like robots), only restricted in their lifespan. If the
creator is not needed anymore, than he is sent to the grave and so Roy Batty seals his
“fathers” lips with the kiss of death, before squeezing Tyrell’s eyes into his sockets.
The gift of seeing is taken away. The eyes play a major role on the question of
identity. The replicants eyes are analyzed during interrogation, since the eyes are
considered the key to the soul in old mythology. Deckard’s perception of reality is
questioned while taking a look at the videos recorded during Leon’s interrogation.
Originally, he says: “my mother...let me tell you about my mother”. And on the
recording Leon says: “I’ll tell you about my mother.” It is argued, until now, if this

22
was a directing mistake made by Ridley Scott or if this was meant for the viewer to
question what he might see, hear or experience with his own senses. The perception
might be flawed. Deckard must confront himself more and more with what he
believes to be true or not while the story evolves.
Deckard personally increasingly becomes like a machine during his mission to
terminate the replicants. The bounty hunt for the replicants is called a “skin job”, a job
implying that their elimination is not murder. But even this is questioned in the death
struggle of Pris and Zhora, shown in slow motion of how Zhora is shot cowardly in
the back by Deckard, then crashing through windows and dying, while the feathers
are falling down like snowflakes and of how Pris fights for her life in spasms of
agony. Is Deckard really only destroying robots or killing living beings? This
becomes even more problematic when Deckard starts to realize that he is not the
human he thought his is. Gaff, the cop who hires Deckard for the mission, is a
typically stereotype LA cop, “the kind of cop that used to call black men niggers”,
and very talented at origami. Deckard notices that he himself might be a new
generation of replicants just like Rachel, Tyrell’s personal assistant and a new
generation of cyborgs, who are not aware that they are replicants. “The replicant
Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg
culture’s fear, love, and confusion” (Haraway 1985: 178). And further, with “the
character of Rachael, Tyrell’s nearly perfect replicant, this increasingly blurred
distinction between man and the copies with which he has become obsessed finds its
clearest example” (Telotte 1983: 49). Rachael is nearly raped by Deckard after she
visits him in his flat. Instead of fighting against Deckard for his attempted abuse, she
“passively gives herself to the hero, returning again to the position of passive
human/machine object” (Harper 1995: 415).
In one scene Deckard dreams of being naked in a forest and he sees a unicorn
walking by. Dreams are something personally which nobody can take a look at or
control. They belong to one and define the person. This notion is addressed when
Gaff, at the end of the movie, places an origami unicorn in front of Deckard’s door
before Deckard escapes from Los Angeles. Deckard is shocked by the fact that
someone has insight to his dreams. Insight, or are his dreams given to him by his
creators? Which means that he is not human but only a reproduction of a human with
false memory and identity given to him, making him believe himself that he is a
human being? „In BladeRunner geht es - auf Messers Schneide - um das Ende der

23
Unterscheidungen, um den Wärmetod der Differenzen - und um die vermutlich letzte
und schwerste narzißtische Kränkung des Menschen: um die Unhaltbarkeit der
anthropologischen Differenz“ (Zons 2001: 235).

The director’s cut differs at this point from the original, which was more in
keeping with the book displaying Deckard as human, but through his job he behaves
more and more robotic, while the later cut clearly defined Deckard as a cyborg which
would explain his emotionless behaviour. BladeRunner’s strength is the breakdown of
the typical dualist oppositions, which are central in most movies. There is no clear
distinction between good/bad, reality/illusion, human/machine, through which Scott
takes a critical stance on our classical western thinking. It would be interesting to pose
the question if the name Deckard, which is pronounced the same as Descartes, should
give a hint at the state of knowing and consciousness of the main character, since
Descartes was concerned with these ideas in his writings: cogito, ergo sum. In
BladeRunner the replicants think, so are they to be viewed as “independent subjects”?
If this should be the definition for rational beings, what are we to make of the
replicants? Since their main problem is the lack of empathy, emotions being the
apparent essence of humanity.

III.CyborgStories2: Armoured Bodies

Terminator was James Cameron’s breakthrough movie, which paved the way
for him to become one of Hollywood’s most successful directors of all times at the
box offices, with blockbusters e.g. Terminator 2, Titanic, Avatar. James Cameron had
learnt the art of movie-making by Roger Corman, master of schlock-cinema.
Terminator was not a big budget movie and Arnold Schwarzenegger not yet a
big movie star, after switching from the world of body building towards “acting”.
This was the movie which would truly turn him into the menacing action icon he
would later represent; the unbeatable, hyper-masculine, pumped-up being who mainly
responds in a simple way to problems - with violence. Schwarzenegger has become
the Terminator eliminating everything in his way in nearly every following movie.
Actor, artificial figure and real person fall together, and therefore it should not be
surprising, that Schwarzenegger is referred to in media and newsreports as the

24
Governator12, implying he is able as a politician to “terminate” any kind of problem.
“Arnold is not only the perfect man, he is the perfect postmodern, Puritan pilgrim:
demonstratively humanoid and incarnate, and thus of this world, but retaining just
enough of his Puritan/fascist discipline in order to not be corrupted by it” (Larson
1997: 63). The perception of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a type of role model
representing Puritan values has suffered suddenly after the scandal about his
illegitimate son early in 2011 (S.P.O.N. 5/2011).
In Terminator, the battle for the future has started; a future, in which mankind
borders on extinction and the machines have taken over. The few moments, in which
we see the future, are dark and menacing. Several groups of people have survived the
nuclear holocaust, which the master computer program of Skynet had started in order
to annihilate mankind. It is a future, where men have lost their dominance and control
over technology. The only hope for mankind is one single person John Connor, with
the divine initials JC. Once again with have a figure of an all-saintly messiah13 who is
the only chance for freedom of mankind. Skynet has tackled the problem of time
travel and sends a T-800 model back to present day (at the time of the movie it was in
the 1980’s), in order to terminate the mother of the not yet born leader of the
resistance. Of course, the resistance sends back one of their own men to protect Sarah
Connor. Braidotti notes on the religious aspects, that “In Terminator I the male
prophet descends to earth and to ensure that the elected female does reproduce the
future Messiah, thus saving the humans” (2002: 208), limiting the role of the female
entirely to the mother figure, which I pointed out earlier with Trinity in the Matrix.
The Terminator starts a killing spree, using the telephone book to find all women who
are named Sarah Connor. The real Sarah Connor escapes with Kyle Reese, the soldier
from the future, who later gets Sarah pregnant with John Connor. After a long chase,
running away from the Terminator, Sarah Connor manages finally to destroy the
Terminator in a metal factory, crushing it underneath a metal press.

The torn off facial skin of the T-800 is probably one of the best known images

12
A comic series with this title will be released. Of course, Arnold is the main hero. The stories will
be written by Stan Lee, Marvel’s creator and leading author.
http://popwatch.ew.com/2011/03/30/arnold-schwarzenegger-the-governator-exclusive/. The series been
dropped after the scandal.
13
As with the Matrix and the lead character, Neo
25
of a cyborg covered with human tissue, but being completely out of metal under the
skin. Many movies and comics14 take up this image and rework it for further use, as
with Deathlok’s cover of the first publication in 1990. As such, the Terminator has
become one of the most influential cultural icons of male cyborgization, with its
imagery being reproduced over and over in many forms of consumer products
(Fernbach 2000: 235). (See appendix Fig.II.1.1 and Fig.II.1.2 P.64 for comparison).

Robocop (1987), in comparison to Terminator, provides us a real hybrid

between technology and biology. Murphy is a cop in Detroit, who is lured in a trap
and shot literally to bits and pieces. The Detroit-PD has been privatized and is run by
OCP, Omni Consumer Products15, the mega-corporation controlling Detroit. The only
chance in saving him is turning him into a cyborg; but this also means the loss of his
former identity and self. Murphy, reborn in a Frankenstein manner by the hands of
Robert Morton as Robocop, has to come to terms with his new body; he does not fully
control his new body and has to learn from scratch to be a crime enforcer. Coping
with his new body and his new form of existence Robocop fights crime in the streets
successfully, being almost invulnerable.
Through the course of movie, his memory of his previous life before he
became Robocop starts returning. Robocop realizes he was the former cop Murphy,
who had a family to which he can’t return and also remembers the people responsible
for his murder. One by one he eliminates them, until he realizes that the corporation
who created him, OCP, is responsible for the criminal activities from the gang which
murdered him. The construction of new military and security systems requires human
bodies to work with. Robocop represents the new body, the new technologies at the
working place and the automatization of the police. Robocop has a paradoxical role:
one, which is feared for the dehumanization of mankind and the loss of work through
the take-over of machines; on the other hand, Robocop is considered the only thing
which can bring peace back to the decaying streets of LA, but again only as far as he
has been programmed to do so (Croissant 1998: 295). After investigating and finding
out the truth surrounding his death, and fighting off a other version of security robot,
ED209, he finally is able to get his revenge by shooting Richard Jones, the main

14
As I mention later, the Marvel comic Deathlok uses much of the Terminator’s imagery.
15
Verhoeven criticizes, by giving the company this name, the development of consumer mentality and
its control through mega-corporations.
26
villain, who to begin with is protected against Robocop by a security directive
programmed into Murphy. After being fired by his boss, who Jones takes hostage, the
directive does not work for him anymore and finally Robocop is able to shoot the
villain. In the movie plot, Robocop is accompanied by his female partner Anne Lewis,
the only person who still sees the old Murphy who she knew behind his new
appearance, while the other people see him merely as crime fighting machine.
Through her assistance he finally becomes aware of his former ego and the value of
being human, but does not return to his former self and his family; instead he
continues as Robocop, although he responds to question of who he is by the OCP
president with his name Murphy. In the end he accepts himself as a human and the
movie closes.

Robocop deals with the issue of identity connected to one’s own personal
memory in similar ways to BladeRunner. We are what our memories make us. After
Murphy is executed and re-animated as Robocop, he simply functions as a machine
until the point his memory starts returning and therefore comes to realize who he once
was. The moment of realization is followed by a moment of extreme agony as
Murphy realizes he is not able to go back to his old life with his family, although he
still is Murphy, he has become something different. He can feel for his family, as he
says, but he can’t fully remember them. But what is he now? Is he simply a machine
with human consciousness or still a human with an “armoured body”? The movie
decides that Murphy accepts his new fate and refuses to return to his family, which
has moved away from Detroit after his “first” death, offering no alternative solutions
for a new model for the nuclear family: the child, the mother and the robot-daddy.
Since he still has his memories, which define his identity, there would have been the
possibility for the alternative approach, instead of reproducing classical notions of
families and humans. The second instalment, Robocop2 (1990), explores the family
theme a little more, showing Murphy in the beginning following his former family.
OCP reprogram Murphy and try to erase the little bits of memory he still has and deny
the little amount of human left in him, forcing him to accept the idea that he is nothing
else than a machine.
On the other hand, Paul Verhoeven satirizes humanity’s addiction towards
new technologies. Anytime a new technological device or machine is introduced the
first attempts to use the technologies basically go wrong, resulting in the death of

27
innocent people. One scene shows ED209 at his first appearance losing control,
shooting and killing an OCP worker. In another, a news flash shows the results of a
defence satellite losing control, firing of its laser cannons, destroying a part of
California where the wealthy live and killing two former presidents. Techno-euphoria
ends mostly in chaos. The second movie continues with the failures of technology,
showing all new Robocop2 models to be mentally weak and committing suicide. As
the psychiatrist Dr.Faxx, who is developing new cyborgs, explains the using of former
cops, who were very macho and body-oriented, is not very effective because the
disembodiment they experience by becoming a cyborg leads to an unstable self
perception resulting in suicide.

IV.CyborgStories3: Fem-bots or Warrior-Queens?

The reason I chose the specific writings in this section is because of their huge
international impact on the cyberpunk genre and the imagery of cyborgs, which was
not often recognized by Western scholars until lately. Shifting towards Japanese
mangas and stories dealing with posthuman representation, Ghost in the Shell has
reached internationally a high reputation as being one of Mamoru Oshii’s major
works. Oshii’s movies are in most cases very philosophical cyberpunk movies, as can
be seen with the Polish coproduction Avalon (2001). Battle Angel Alita is a still
ongoing manga series, which will be brought to big screen by no one else than James
Cameron, who seems to enjoy the topic of posthuman forms of existence, since he
made Terminator, Avatar and the TV-series with strong similarities of its main
character to the figure of Alita, Dark Angel16. Both stories have a female lead
character.
Mamoru Oshii’s ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is an influential cyberpunk classic. The
plot is centred on a female cyborg, Major Kusanagi, who works for a special
government branch called Section Nine. Major Kusanagi once had a human body, but
for her job her real body is replaced by a cyborg body, which in comparison to the
real human body is physically stronger and not so vulnerable. Already here the
classical western norm with a male strong protagonist is changed and instead a female
is placed in the main role; she is by far superior to her male right hand Togusa, who is

16
The main actor is Jessica Alba, who with her big eyes and ´petit´ figure bears similarities to female
manga characters.
28
more or less entirely human. Kusanagi can only achieve this status through the
modification of her imperfect female body using technology, which places the natural
female as such in a weaker position, for Kusanagi at first is not able to do what she
does. As a matter of fact no human being is, therefore Kusanagi is already physically
one step further than any ordinary human being.
Major Kusanagi receives mission to hunt down a cyber-criminal called the
“Puppet Master”, a life-form completely put together by data and information, but
with an own mind and consciousness making it believe (or feel) that it is a new
species. Here the idea of artificial intelligence becoming independent is taken up
again, although it only can exist in computers and the cyber-world of the internet.

There are different readings of the sub-text which Ghost in the Shell offers.
Although the classical notions of western cinema are non-existent, since we have a
female protagonist as the hero and the villain; even if bodiless it is more a male type
of being. Carl Silvo claims that Mamoru Oshii did try to appeal to a western audience
and says that in the end Oshii does portray the female cyborg as a sexual being (e.g.
the nudity, while the male characters never expose themselves to this extent).
“Kusanagi is thus reinscribed within one of our most familiar paradigms of
femininity: woman as sexualized object for the enjoyment of the male gaze” (Silvo
1999: 67). At the end of the movie, although the Major is a cyborg, the natural idea of
reproduction is introduced again. The Puppet Master has to unite with the Major to
become a new life form, while this act of unification is more or less in the classical
sense a sexual act between man and woman. “Surprisingly, however, this process of
re-embodiment ultimately ends up gendering the material body in a way that
perpetuates the body’s historical construction within the narrative of patriarchy”
(Silvo 1999: 68). In this idea it can also be seen that reproduction and the unification
of opposite genders will always happen, no matter in which way technological
development occurs.

Battle Angel Alita17 (Yukito Kishiro) is still an on-going series dealing not
only with cyborgs but also with nano-technology and its challenges, prostheses, and
then again with the question of human nature. Unfortunately, research is still pretty
limited on Alita. Humans live either on the surface of the Earth, which is covered in
17
In Japan BAA was published under the title GUNNM
29
litter and trash, or surrounded by wastelands. High in the sky, Zalem, a city floats,
connected to an outer orbit city called Jeru. Zalem’s inhabitants are scientists or
highly educated living in a Utopia. Their bodies are still “pure” and no modifications
have taken place. The people living in Scrapyard produce the goods for Zalem, while
Zalem in return dumps their rubbish onto the surface. Amongst this chaotic
environment Edo, a scientist exiled from Zalem, roams Scrapyard until he finds the
torso of a female cyborg. He reconstructs the body and brings the cyborg back to life
calling her Alita. Alita doesn’t remember her former self and starts on a quest for her
identity. She becomes a bounty-hunter putting cyborgs out of control, then an athlete
in a rollerball-type of game, then a rebel and a liberator. The fascinating side of Alita
is the focus on the body and nano-technology. She does not remember her skills and
identity, but her body does. Alita changes her body several times in the story, which
in return alters her mind and emotions. Not only does the mind have influence on the
body and controls it, but it return the body influences Alita’s self-perception. At one
point, she is given a berserker-body which proves uncontrollable, but is a powerful
weapon. Alita refuses the berserker-body and replaces it with another. The berserker-
body is stolen by Zapan, a character with a weak mind and depressive because of the
death of his girlfriend. Being equipped with the new body, the berserk-body takes
over Zapan’s mind and sends him on a killing spree, which is stopped by Alita
through tearing him literally apart. The interchangeability of bodies and body-parts is
a constantly recurring theme during the series and Kishiro presents many version of
what might happen to society through the use of new technologies. “Interestingly,
Kishiro depicts two kinds of cyborgs: a biological brain coupled with a mechanical
body ... and a biochip coupled with an organic body” (Taillander 2010: 6).
At the end of the first series instalment, it is revealed that Zalem’s people,
who, because their bodies are pure believe they are superior to the people in
Scrapyard, have their brain exchanged with a micro-chip when they are eighteen, in
order for the master-control-program Melchizedek, in charge of Zalem, to create a
perfect society with no delinquent behaviour. There is no clear distinction between the
“pure” and “impure” body. Taillander writes that Alita “deals about shifting
boundaries in a highly technological environment, no characters fit precisely into one
of the corners but only symbolize the hybridization of some of them” (2010: 7).
Kishiro does not reject hybridization as denaturizing nor embracing it as evolution
like in transhumanist fashion, but makes the point that “human-hood” is defined in
30
complex ways, always in motion and never static, which widens the possibility for
recognition of alternate “human” forms (Taillander 2010: 12). Alita is permanently
struggling for recognition and social acceptance as a cyborg and acts many times
more “human” than many humans.

V.Prosthesis

Prosthesis, a characteristic feature of cyberpunk, is not only a controversial

issue concerning persons equipped with it, but also in a wider ethical sense. Are we
allowed to alter our bodies through technologies and still consider ourselves human?

“The ambiguities surrounding the figure of the cyborg could be compared to the
ambivalent feelings experienced by a person wearing a prosthesis. Prostheses enhance
our bodies, but they also remind us of our failings, thus endowing us with a double
identity: the better self and the failing self. Prostheses refine our capacities and alert us to
out incapacities; they consolidate the edges of our bodies and simultaneously blur them
(Cavallero 2000: 50).”

In Neuromancer, Gibson frequently describes characters which have modified

their body or replaced missing limbs with prosthesis. These visions of bodily
modifications were not new; Television has presented shows like the Six-Million
Dollar-Man 18(1974-1978), which had been was a major success in the seventies. The
prosthesis is the first step on the way to become a human-machine hybrid.
As mentioned in the quote above, prostheses are very ambivalent in their
representation. They confront us with the questions of the purity of the body and its
apparent contamination through the insertion of technology into it. Technology made
it possible for many individuals to survive physical disabilities, which in the past
would have proven fatal. Stephen Hawkings, trapped to his wheelchair and electronic
devices which help him to communicate with others, would not be able to contribute
to the scientific world with his knowledge if he didn’t use these technological
devices. Furthermore, the evolution and domestication of human beings could only
be achieved by employing these technologies. “In order to use a tool successfully
human must incorporate that tool into their bodily image. Even without the physical
inversiveness of “socket” technology, our tools - our machines - become extensions

18
The show is based on the book Cyborg (1972) by Martin Caidin.
31
of ourselves” (Vint 2007: 119). For McLuhan, operations of the media serve the
function of an prosthetic extension of the human (Toffoletti 2007: 124); a point I will
get back to in the later chapter on Cronenberg.
Alita offers many variations of the theme of prosthesis: from microchips
replacing brains, complete bodies with human brains, which we call cyborgs, or just
limbs, which were replaced after their loss, similar to Gibson’s bartender at the
beginning of Neuromancer with his pink supplement arm. Prostheses have helped the
survival and further development of humans, but “there are those in this society who
actively and articulately resist cyborgification, who honour biology and give it
primacy over technology, and who would vastly prefer to focus our efforts to
transcend biological limitations on honing our intuition and our psychic abilities
through meditation, organic food, and vision quests into the wilderness” (Davis-
Floyd 2008: 260). This view limits the thinking of possibilities and chances resulting
from the new technologies.

VI.Rethinking the Cyborg - A Benefit for Humans?

As we can see with the various concepts of the cyborg, there are many different
thoughts concerning the future development of mankind. In some of the
technophobic stories we are downgraded to machines, fulfilling the orders and work
we were programmed to do or we abuse our creations for the same reason. The other
scenario is that the machines will take over the world and gain dominance over
humans: we will either become slaves or be annihilated totally.
The alternative concept helps us to rethink the norms of society and the core
nature of what it means to be human, which can never be answered in its totality. The
cyborg can have a liberating effect and force us to define our categories of gender,
race, and humans in general, from scratch. At the same time the cyborg is an attack
on the classical liberal humanism with the white male subject at its centre, breaking
down the hierarchies and maybe leading to a more egalitarian society. As Haraway
describes her ideas on the cyborg and the reason for writing her “Cyborg Manifesto”:

For me the notion of the cyborg was female, and a woman, in complex ways. It was an act
of resistance, an oppositional move of a pretty straightforward kind. The cyborg was, of
course, part of a military project, part of an extraterrestrial man-in-space project. It was
also a science fictional figure out of a largely male-defined science fiction. Then there was
32
 another dimension in which cyborgs were female: in popular culture, and in certain
medical culture. Here cyborgs appeared as patients, or as objects of pornography, as "fem-
bots" - the iron maiden, the robotized mechanic, pornographic female. But the whole
figure of the cyborg seemed to me potentially much more interesting than that. Moreover,
an act of taking over a territory seemed like a fairly straightforward, political, symbolic
technoscientific project (Haraway 2004: 323).

But then again Cooke raises the point that “the cyborg, that gleaming
herald of a posthuman world, had lost the sheen it once had, no longer worthy a
vehicle for encapsulating the fears and fantasies of a culture enmeshed in a global
technological becoming. Imagine; cyborgism was about capital after all!” (2006: 24).
The cyborg has become harmless with no revolutionary or transgressive potential,
with global operating human resource management companies using its image for its
brand-potential. The cyborg has become nothing else than mere tech-talk, nothing else
than sign-value in Cooke’s opinion (2006: 25). The cyborg at most times was a
feature of Hollywood. So what are we to think of the cyborg now?

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 4.Cronenberg and Body-Horror

I.Cronenberg´s vita and his movies

Canadian movie-maker David Cronenberg presents us different visions of the

posthuman, especially focusing on the bodily aspects. Born in the 1940’s, he started
studying first biochemistry in the 1960’s, before he changed his subject to English
literature. Before gaining international recognition after his successful remake of The
Fly, he made many low-budget movies, some of them reaching cult-status. Although
not really “good” movies they are enjoyed by fans for the bizarreness and grotesque
style and are often very surrealistic. On the other hand, there have been many negative
comments concerning the violence and sexuality depicted in them, preventing the
critics from establishing a empathic connection between issues of the human body and
society (Mathjis 2003: 31). The narrow mindedness of the critics prevented a more
detailed analysis of the films, leading to many movies being considered as metaphors
for the AIDS-virus. In the meantime, his movies have been the focus of academic
research and Cronenberg has received several awards and was a member of juries at
different international movie festivals, e.g. Cannes.
Many of his movies were considered to have established a new genre in
cinema: the body-horror. Body-horror centres on the visual destruction or
disintegration of the physical body through e.g. diseases, parasites, mutilation and
mutations. Shivers, Rabid, The Brood mark the beginning in a line of Cronenberg
movies dealing with the penetration of the flesh by an alien or something other, may
this be a living thing or a machine, as well as the mutation of the body after being
penetrated. Young gives us a summary of the basic ideas of his movies:

Cronenberg’s films target the isolating thrust of civilized society as the breeding ground of
uncontrollable monstrosity; they insist that the monstrous is not in our natural but cultural
selves - in our efforts to quell flesh, sanitize speech, and sublimate desires; and in our
"civilizing" institutions to keep the monster from rearing its ugly head (2002: 298).

Dinello considers that corporate techno-science and viral invasions are at the center of
Cronenberg movies, which are surreal and disturbing, with bodies exploding, violated,
distorted and disfigured by technological and viral invasion (2005: 202). And
Bukatman writes in relation to the meaning of the body, that “in contemporary SF and
34
horror, the body is also narrated as a sight of exploration and transfiguration, through
which an interface with an electronic-based postmodern experience is inscribed”
(1991: 343), which can be seen in Cronenberg movies. Bukatman links Cronenberg
with McLuhan’s vision of a new stage in the development of man. The spatialization
of both bodily and viral forces presents a collision between McLuhan’s extension of
the body beyond its biological boundaries and Baudrillard’s vision of the usurpation
and dissolution of individual power (1991: 83).
Two of his works, which gained higher attention than many of his other
movies, are Videodrome, considered a postmodern classic, and eXistenZ, both dealing
with the concept of reality, its perception and the changes of the body, best
exemplified in the following short quote from Videodrome: “Kill the old flesh - Long
live the New Flesh!” (Cronenberg 1983). But what should this new flesh be and how
should it look like? And what are we to call the results: mutants, cyborgs? Or simply
freaks?
Cronenberg interrogates the classical mind-body dichotomy, in order to
establish a new form of trichotomy: that of mind-machine-body. He views mind-body
as undividable connected phenomena. The machine doesn’t become a prosthesis for a
intact part of the body but remains the “alien other”, which appears as catalyst for or
effect of bodily deformations and can become an enemy or sexual partner (Papenburg
2007: 128).

II.Video-word made flesh!

Videodrome from 1983 is considered one of Cronenberg’s early

‘masterpieces’. Up until now it is considered a postmodern example for cinema,
breaking down boundaries between reality, illusion and one’s own perception. The
viewer is lost during the course of the movie between what is really going on and the
protagonist’s imagination. Bukatman describes Videodrome as an estranging
portrayal of image addiction and viral invasion, caused through a destabilized reality
in which image, reality, hallucination, and psychosis fall indissolubly together (1993:
85). Braidotti writes that Videodrome is a classic, because it addresses the issue of the
physicality and the corresponding malleability of the male body, while showing to
what extent the body is constructed (2002: 24).
The title Videodrome reflects the idea, that there are similarities between

35
Videodrome and the Hippodrome, an open arena. Videodrome is a contemporary
equivalent to the coliseum, in which the audience is politically silenced through the
orchestration of violence (Papenburg 2007: 90).

James Woods plays Max Renn, an owner of a private Cable-TV station. He is

always searching for the newest violent and pornographic material for his station in
order to keep his viewers interested and excited. During his search he discovers a
pirate TV-Station showing Videodrome, a torture-snuff show. Apparently, the show is
televised from a Third World country. Renn starts to enjoy the content of the show
and presents it to Nicki Brand, a psychiatrist Max starts dating after a talk show where
he gets to know her. She also becomes attracted to the content of Videodrome. After a
sadomasochistic sex scene between the two, while watching an episode of
Videodrome, Nicki searches for the origins of Videodrome which they both believe to
be sent from Pittsburgh. Nicki never returns and Max starts his own search leading
him to Professor Brian O’Blivion, who only appears on TV-screen and is one of the
masterminds behind the sinister show, stating that “the battle for the mind of North
America will be fought in the Arena: Videodrome”.
Max Renn discovers the sinister plan behind Videodrome and finds Brian
Convex, the man responsible for Videodrome and also for the murder of Professor
O’Blivion. Convex is the head of Spectacular Optical, the company which developed
Videodrome. The name of the company itself is ironical, referring to the sensation of
visual spectacles. Brian Convex orders Renn to “Open up, Max. I’ve got something I
wanna play for you”. Renn’s belly has mutated into an organic videorecorder, with a
certain similarity to female genitals. Papenburg calls it the “videovagina” (2007: 102).
Convex inserts a video-cassette into Renn, reprogramming him and making him
follow the orders given to him. Renn pulls out a gun from his belly, which grows
metallic extensions, penetrating Renn’s flesh and fusing together with him, “an
inversion of McLuhan’s sense of technology as human extension” (Bukatman 1993:
92). In addition, the TV-screen in the movie also becomes an extension of the human
being, replacing the eye and planting image directly into the brain. Renn goes to his
TV-station, shooting his two partners involved in the TV-station. Videodrome’s
production company wants to take over Renn’s Channel 83, so they can transmit the
Videodrome signal to a broader public. Renn escapes the crime scene, pretending to
be innocent. Videodrome turns out to be a government mind-control experiment and

36
Renn is the first victim not to be killed by the viral infection caused by the viewing, as
his assistant Harlan remarks after revealing that he had been working for the program
all the while. By watching Videodrome society should be purified from the people
consuming shows defined as “filth”. Refusing a next programming by Harlan his
belly, or the new grown organ, mutates through Renn’s will into a fanged video-
recorder, a vagina dentata (Papenburg 2007: 103), ripping off the skin of Harlan’s
arm and hand while the rest of the remaining arm is turned into a hand-grenade.
Harlan reacts with shock, looking at the rest of his hand and stumbling away from
Max in fright. Harlan falls against the wall and explodes, making him fly through the
wall. After Harlan’s death, Renn goes and searches for Bianca O’Blivion, who he is
supposed to kill, but is reprogrammed by her to shoot Convex. Convex, although only
being shot, starts to disintegrate and his flesh rots away while dying. Renn makes his
way to the final scene, the room where Videodrome was shot. Nicki Brand’s image
appears on a TV-screen telling Renn that she had never been real from the start. She
was the original girl murdered on Videodrome. Her image infected Renn’s mind from
the first viewing. Nicki explains to Renn the last step he has to take to leave the old
flesh behind and become the new flesh.

I’ve learned that death is not the end. Your body has already done a lot of changing, but
that’s only the beginning - the beginning of the new flesh. You have to go all the way
now. Total transformation. To become the new flesh, you first have to kill the old flesh.
Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to let your body die.

On the TV-screen Renn’s image appears, placing the gun, which has now become
completely a part of Renn’s arm, to his head and triggering it killing himself. Instead
of seeing the pictures of Renn’s death, the TV explodes with organs and the entrails
scattered all over the place. Renn understands that if he wants to become an image
like Nicki has he has to commit suicide, which he finally does with the screen turning
black.

The fascination of Videodrome is Cronenberg’s focus on the transformation of

the body and neural system due to the influence of new media technologies. There are
many satirical aspects, as seen by the names given to the people with certain intent,
especially with Professor O’Blivion, who only exists as an image or Brian Convex,
who is the Head of Spectecular Optical. The next point Bukatman discusses is the

37
reliability of imagery, as he creates a permanent confusion between the real with the
image and the image with the hallucination. In one scene Max starts to whip the TV
with the image of Nicki on the screen, while the image is addressing him. Cronenberg
does not mythologize the cinematic signifier as “real”, but plays with this confusion
he leaves the viewer with (1993: 91). The movie contains a lot of sexual and violent
imagery in combination.

Yet if Cronenberg is not ridiculing the sex-and violence connection, even if he is only
promoting it on screen, he is probably only doing so to prevent it in real life. The main
character of Videodrome, Max Renn, chooses programming for his pornography channel
for a living, presenting hidden urges to the public in a way that parallels David
Cronenberg’s role as a director. As Max Renn puts it, “Better on TV than in the streets.”
According to such logic, enacting these fantasies on screen prevents the viewer from
enacting them in real life (Goldberg 2007: 6).

The TV becomes the supplement for experiences in “real” life, stimulating the viewer
sexually and getting him addicted to the image. The addiction is similar to that of a
heroin addict, leading to bodily disintegration and abuse of the “drug”, or in Max’s
case the image. Bianca O’Blivion, who is in charge of the Cathod Ray Mission, leads
Max to her father through the building, walking pass image-addicts covered in robes
and who are watching pornographic material in order to keep them silent. There are
many motifs of religious beliefs in Videodrome, which can be clearly seen in the
altered quote from the Bible “You have become the video word made flesh”, and at
the end, when Max destroys himself to be resurrected as the immortal “new flesh” -
the image. He converts and submits to his new faith. Papenburg writes that the new
interpretation from the Bible quote hints at the idea that technology has replaced
religion, with Professor O’Blivion being the new media prophet (2007: 96). And the
TV screen has become the temple of worship - the new god.

III.Death of eXistenZ

eXistenZ is often compared to The Matrix, since both deal with experiences in
VR. But Cronenberg does not deliver a high-tech SF spectacle, but rather a dark
vision with a pessimistic feeling to it. The fusion of the organic with technology

38
creates bizarre gadgets, e.g. the tooth-gun, baring similarities to H.R. Giger’s19
creations. eXistenZ is in line with Videodrome, dealing with similar topics and again
with the focus on bodily transformations. “In many ways an updating of themes
explored in Videodrome, Cronenberg's eXistenZ continues the auteur's fascination
with protagonists seeking to redefine their corporeal and existential realities” (Chaw
2003). And Dinello describes the movie as an articulation of the relationship between
humans and their VR entertainment technology leading to the point where the
cyberspace world fractures and replaces the real world (2005:169).

Allegra Geller, a female game designer with cult-status, wants to release her
latest creation called eXistenZ - the title of the movie. Before the release she tests a
proto-version with a focus group. Twelve people are randomly selected from an
audience. There are strong references to Christian religion, placing twelve people in a
church surrounding the “game-pod goddess” Allegra Geller. Papenburg describes the
scene as ironic because the audience reacts in an ecstatic way in the church, a place of
worship, but here it is the technology which has become God (2007: 159). If a person
wants to play the game his body has to be modified with bio-ports, with which they
connect to flesh-pods through an umbilical cord. In the movie they are simply called
UmbyCords. While in cyberpunk the hacker enters the cyberspace, in eXistenZ the
game is transported into the player. The bio-ports are organic, having a life of their
own and are pulsating. They look like a hybrid between a living thing and a
technological device. Once plugged in they use the player as energy source and
engage in a certain symbiotic relationship. During the game the pod makes sounds
and squeals, further making the viewer think of it as a living being. Allegra treats
them as little infants, when holding one. Dinello notes that this is a perverse twist on
cyberpunk’s neural implant technology, the bio-port pipes the game software from the
pod into the player’s spinal cord (2005: 169). While playing, the gamers are in a
trance like state, laying on the floor and experiencing eXistenZ. Allegra Geller is
attacked during the presentation of the game by a fanatic with a bizarre tooth gun. She
escapes with the help of Ted Pikul, who becomes her bodyguard. Allegra’s pod,
which contains the only version of eXistenZ, is damaged during their escape. She
wants to repair it and has to “jack in”, but convinces Ted first to join her. Ted does not

19
Suisse artist (*5 February 1940, Chur) and Oscar-winner, who designed the alien in Alien, Species
and many other SF or horror movies. Well known for creating bio-organic paintings.
39
have a bio-port and first needs one installed. Ted, in contrast to Allegra, is
technophobic and had rejected the bio-ports for this reason. Cronenberg alters and
twists gender stereotypes with the woman’s affinity towards and the male rejection of
technology (Dinello 2005: 170). There are many sexual implications, but with a
certain twist: The woman penetrates the male protagonists with the cord from the bio-
port. The experience of eXistenZ seems to lead to a form of sexual gratification. Since
both of them are on the run, the bio-port has to be installed illegally with the help of a
strange odd character called Gas at a gas station. Gas uses a type of gun, shooting the
bio-port into Ted’s spine. The bio-port is placed at the lower port of the spine and
looks like a hole, which can be stretched to shove the UmbyCord in. Through placing
the bio-port in the lower back Cronenberg mocks the common notion of cyberpunk in
which the hackers have direct access to the VR through their interfaces, which are
normally connected to their brains. By doing this Cronenberg twists the hierarchy of
the body around which gives normally a higher value to the head (Papenburg 2007:
175). Unfortunately, Gas betrays both and installs an infected bio-port which nearly
destroys the game-pod after Allegra and Ted try to jack in. Gas is killed, and Ted and
Allegra are once more on the run, bringing them to a scientist who repairs Allegra’s
pod and installs a new bio-port into Ted.
After both enter the VR of eXistenZ the boundaries between illusion and the
game and the real start to crumble, but at this point we don’t really know if everything
which happened prior were “real” events. In the VR they discover new bio-ports
which they plug into their body, entering new levels of VR. Allegra knows her way
around the virtual world. When Ted is told to look for a Chinese restaurant in the
forest and to order the special, he follows the instructions to proceed with the game. If
certain key words and actions aren’t said or done, the gamer gets caught in a type of
loop. The Chinese waiter rattles off the chef’s daily selection, explaining that mutant
reptiles and amphibians produce previously unknown taste sensations. But Ted insists
on the daily special and gets a dish that’s really bony. The bones click together into a
gun, similar to the one with which Allegra was shot. Ted is overcome by an impulse
and takes three teeth out of his mouth inserting them into the magazine of the gun. He
uses the gun to shoot the Chinese waiter, who had just served him his dish. After the
bizarre encounter in the restaurant they stumble upon a trout-farm, in which the bio-
ports are assembled. The game-pods are basically animals, as the scientist, who is
specialized in repairing the pods, explains in the movie. In the manufactory, the

40
workers cut out organs from amphibic creatures and use their nerve cells to assemble
the pods. Outside of the manufactory there are ponds, in which the eggs used for the
pods are breed. Cronenberg shows the exploitation of animals by humans for
entertainment.
Ted and Allegra enter deeper into the game. They are confronted by a
technophobic group, Anti-eXistenZalists, the “Realist Underground”, combating the
game and Allegra. Allegra believes she has returned to reality, but when the house
both of them are in is attacked by the Realist Underground they notice they are still in
the game. Ted Pikul is revealed to be a member of the “Realist Underground” and his
mission is to get close to Allegra, trying to kill her. Allegra suspected Pikul to be an
assassin and had placed an explosive device in his bio-port with which she kills Ted.
But suddenly, Allegra, Ted and other faces from the game wake up in a church testing
a beta-version of a game called tranCendenZ. In this alternate VR, Allegra and Ted
are not any more the characters they used to represent. They are a couple and the rest
of the gamers, figures from eXistenZ. Ted and Allegra confront the game developer,
who became sceptical by the course the game had taken. Ted and Allegra pull guns
from the dog beside them and shoot the programmer and his assistant, shouting
“Death to tranCendenZ”. As they go to leave the church the Chinese guard at the
entrance tells them not to shoot him and asks them if they are still caught in the game,
then the movie ends.

There are many points about eXistenZ worth analyzing in more detail. For
instance the fanaticism of gamers being caught up in their own worlds and losing
touch with reality is probably the most obvious. Then there are the different attitudes
towards technology and the roles they play for gender construction. It is noticeable
that Cronenberg breaks with the classical norms: the men are fearsome, violent, and
technophobic and fighting that what they don’t understand, while the women are
“future-oriented”, technophile, which is not traditionally associated with classical
gender roles. Cronenberg’s future vision is not a shiny one with a modern outlook,
instead it is one where the organic melts together with the inorganic, producing
disturbing images of this crossover.

41
Both movies I have just discussed contain similar basic ideas:

A scathing satire on advanced gaming technology, eXistenZ and Videodrome reflect

techno-anxieties about the literal penetration of entertainment and media technologies into
our bodies, our nervous systems, our lives. While not completely embracing the flesh,
Cronenberg expresses the horrific side of our passive slide into cyborgism and
technological enslavement (Dinello 2005:171).

Both movies reflect male´s anxieties of the penetration of the flesh by an exterior
force, thus feminizing the male´s body. In Videodrome, Renn has grown a new organ
through which he can be penetrated, while in eXistenZ, Pikul has a hole in his spine,
which serves a similar purpose.

IV.Metalmorphosis

The transformation of the body into something new, a posthuman being, and
the change of personality experienced by the “victim”, the fear for the loss of control
is a central motif in both of Cronenberg’s movies. Several critics and scientists have
described these new emerging bodies as grotesque bodies (e.g. Papenburg 2007).
Criscery-Ronay gives a definition for the grotesque as an embodied physical anomaly,
whose existence can’t be explained by rational science (2002: 84). And further on
writes that “with the grotesque, awareness is turned in toward physicality and
presence, contingency and change, with the added problem that it may actually
change the thing being observed and implicate consciousness in the mutations of the
object” (2002: 85).

Tetsuo Iron Man is another cyberpunk classic which also transgresses the
boundaries between the two genres leaving us with a disturbing movie and various
grotesque bodies, sharing similarities with the bodies in Cronenberg movies. Tetsuo
Iron Man (Tsukamoto 1988), which also discusses Cronenberg central theme of
penetration of the flesh and the occurring transformations, is filmed in a surrealistic
fashion, making the viewer familiar with Buñuel and Dali remember the style of Un
Chien Andalou (1929).
In Tetsuo, a metal fetishist penetrates his flesh with a shard of metal, shoving
it into his hand. The metal starts growing together with him. Metal starts to sprout
42
from under his skin. After an accident with a businessman the metal infects the latter
in the same way. The businessman, while turning to metal, murders a woman with his
metal-drill-phallus grinding her to death after having a nightmare of a woman raping
him with a metal tentacle coming from her vagina. Then he searches for the metal
fetishist, with whom he has a showdown, racing on their feet through downtown
Tokyo. After the race the two men have become one. “An AIDS allegory, a parody of
man/machine hyper-violence, and a brutal horror story about the infection of
cyborgization, Iron Man denounces runaway technology and ... follows the cultural
logic of body modification and posthuman transformation to their literal and
grotesque conclusion” (Dinello 2005: 133). Bukatman describes Tetsuo as “an
impressive (and happily unpleasant) work of techno-surrealism” (1990: 308). And
further writes that the fusing of man and machine does not have a liberating effect and
does not dissolve any boundaries, but instead rather reseats the male subject position
of virile power and control, showing the anxieties of men against women (1990: 308).
The main idea behind Tetsuo is in Dinello’s opinion emphasizing the cyborg as a
tormented, clanking metal behemoth rather than a confident macho man-machine
ideal, expressing how the techno-metamorphosis from man into cyborg turns flesh
into a weapon (2005: 135). But not only does the imagery of Tetsuo have a
disturbing effect on the viewer. The sounds and the music are industrial, alienating the
viewer from the happening on screen. During the course of the movie “the voice of
the protagonist becomes increasingly mechanized as he loses his humanity and
becomes closer to a machine, reflecting the dehumanization central to cyberpunk and
industrial’s basic philosophy (Collins 2005: 173)”.
The second instalment of Tetsuo, Tetsuo Body Hammer, differs from the first,
although it is rather a remake than a continuation, with its focus on becoming a human
weapon. The arm of the main character transforms at first into a giant gun, before the
whole body becomes a weapon. “Less concerned than Iron Man with the sexual
implications of metal fetishism, Body Hammer visually elaborates the idea that the
mechanization of a human being can be a source of vengeful power but requires total
dehumanization” (Dinello 2005: 134). The name Tetsuo is a reference to another
anime cyberpunk classic Aikra20 (1988), in which one of the main characters, Tetsuo,
mutates losing control over his body and grows together with inorganic material

20
Akira was the first full length anime movie to be shown in European cinemas. It can be considered to
be the initial spark igniting the international euphoria for mangas.
43
during the showdown scene.
All of these movies share a common ending with no return to the “old flesh”,
or what is defined in cyberpunk as the “meat”, the human body, which becomes
obsolete in its former “version”. Tsukamoto fuses man with man and metal into a new
life-form, assimilating everything they pass on their way, covering the world beneath
entirely in metal. Cronenberg’s movie are very satirical and often a direct attack on
our norms and gender thinking. Tsukamoto’s movies are more apocalyptic. But like
mentioned above, both put their main focus on the destruction of the body, which
occurs at the end.

44
 5.The X-Factor - Mutants & Superheroes

In addition to movies and novels, comics have also been featuring

representations of the posthuman in many ways and from early on. Cyborgs, robots,
androids, superheroes, super-villains and others have been filling papers of comics
and graphic novels from the USA to Europe to Japan (as clearly illustrated in chapter
2 above), even often dealing with actual contemporary or social issues.

As part of our culture, comic books (and the industry itself) present a number of social
phenomena, including gender, race, and sexual inequality or stratification, and violence.
Intentionally or unintentionally, superhero books also reflect cultural assumptions about
gender and American values (e.g. individualism) (Hall&Lucal 1991: 61).

The influence and topics of comics has often been neglected by scholars in the
last decades, since in their view comics were a pulp genre with no value. Ever since
Alan Moore’s Watchmen became one of the top SF novels of the 20th century, there
has been a shift in the perception of comics, now suddenly being considered as adult
entertainment. There are comics dealing more or less with any topic, but SF is
probably the biggest genre amongst comics written.
Popular cyborg figures in comics are Robocop, Terminator and Marvel’s first
black skinned cyborg Deathlok21. On the cover of the first issue of Deathlok there is a
clear reference to Terminator, with half of the face exposing the metal beneath the
skin. Interestingly Deathlok fuses issues of racism with cyborg matters. Being black is
viewed as much as being a cyborg, a construction. As Riviera writes, “Deathlok re-
imagines blackness as a complex, diasporic cultural production, not an essential or
naturalized, or fixed identity” (Rivera 2007: 108). And in addition to the figure of
Deathlok, LeiLani Nishime analyzes the concept of the mulatto cyborg and what it
stands for, comparing the mulatto cyborg with Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of the new
mestiza22 (2005), a new hybrid culture. The mulatto cyborg and the new mestiza are

21
Deathlok’s first appearance was in 1974 as Manning in Astonishing Tales. In 1990 the character
received its own 4-part mini-series. While the first Deathlok was an US-Soldier transformed into a
cyborg, the second Deathlok is an African-American scientist and pacifist, who had his brain against
his will transplanted into a cyborg created by the military.
22
Anzaldua, Gloria M., Borderlands/La Frontera-The new mestiza , San Francisco: AuntLuteBooks,
1999.
45
boundary violations, transgressing fixed norms. “Ultimately, it is the mulatto cyborg,
chaotic, ironic, without nostalgia or origin that promises a future of mixed-race
subjectivity” (Nishime 2005: 47).

Before I take a look at posthuman superheroes, I will shortly discuss Batman,

who is a very special case in the world of superheroes. He does not have any
superpowers or special abilities. He is a “normal” human through and through, but
with the help of technological devices, he becomes the superhero. There are clear
distinctions between Batman aka Bruce Wayne and “ordinary” humans. One is his
access to extreme wealth, enabling him to carry out his actions as well as develop the
weapons and tools needed. One can discern the stark similarities with Iron Man aka
Tony Stark, who is also a billionaire, but in comparison to Bruce Wayne he is not able
to live without his technological inventions. Furthermore, he is not as ordinary as
others, possessing extreme intelligence and extreme physical abilities. Batman is an
example of self-perfection, propagated by transhuman thinkers, e.g. Max More and
Hans Moravec. Even though he is “normal”, he stands above the masses of people. He
has reached a condition of perfection which man can achieve in our world and in
nature, and tries to experience his true potential as a human being. In order to achieve
this condition, he has to work out and do a great deal of training, requiring a lot of
self-discipline. Bruce Wayne can be considered a transhumanist, but not yet
transhuman. He is a “perfected” man.

Bruce Wayne as Batman is the best of the best of humanity, yet he is only human. He
represents the human condition, maxed out to its perfect form. He is a superhero and a
transhumanist, but he is unable to become transhumant. He is super in his impossible
maxing out of human potential, and transhumanist in his self-made effort to move
beyond any limits he can. Batman thus represents humanity´s current stage (Munkittrick
2010).

The category of the mutants, in which the DNA has undergone a change
leading mostly to enhanced abilities of the character, is often bordering on the
category of the cyborg, a “hybrid” being; many heroes or villains can be put into
several of the following categories, so a clear definition of the character is not often
easy. Mutants have become an extremely attractive subject in present times.
“Contemporary culture has shifted the issue of genetic mutations from the high-tech

46
laboratories into popular culture” (Braidotti 2002: 179). Whether or what were the
origins of the change, and if they were natural or engineered evolution, we do not
often know, since they aren’t presented in many cases.
Mark Oehlert distinguishes between three different types of cyborg/mutants
using Chris Hables-Gray’s distinctions between the cyborg classes: first, there is the
controller e.g. Wolverine, Omega Red and Iron Man. The controller has a cyborg
component implanted into his system and is able to use these modifications through
mind and will. The problem with Wolverine, although he is put into this class of
cyborgs, is that in a later issue he is stripped off his admantium23 skeleton, which
leaves his real skeletal structure exposed, showing that his blades in the fist were not
implanted, but are made of his own bone, meaning that he was born as a mutant and
not created by the military after all in the Weapon X program. Jean Gray mentions this
in the first movie:”The metal is an alloy called admantium, supposedly indestructible.
It´s been surgically grafted to his entire skeleton.” She mentions further, that
Wolverine was only able to survive this procedure due to his extraordinary healing
skills.
Probably the best example for a controller though, is IronMan, the wealthy industrial
boss Tony Stark, who not only controls a cyborg suit, but has become a hybrid
himself, depending on technology to keep him living, since he was fatally wounded in
the heart in the beginning of his story.
Secondly, we have the bio-tech integrators which are very extraordinary, e.g.
Cable. Their abilities are not often explained and their cyborg system cannot be
removed since it is a part of them; "the relationship between Cable and his cybernetic
system is a more intimate and symbiotic one than exists for the class of controller
cyborgs”, as Oehlert puts it (1995: 224). Anytime needed the bio-tech integrator can
use his abilities through will power, offering a wide range of useful skills and
abilities.
Lastly, there are the genetic cyborgs, e.g. Captain America, Spiderman and
Hulk (Oehlert 1995: 222). This last class of cyborgs is what we commonly understand
as mutants. Instead of using prosthesis and implants, their DNA has been modified
leaving the heroes or villains with extraordinary powers which common human does
not possess. Often these changes happen through accidents as with Spiderman, who is
bitten by a radioactive contaminated spider, which cause the change from Peter Parker
23
Admantium is a fictional metal in the Marvel World. It is unbreakable and extremely hard.
47
to Spiderman or the Hulk, a brilliant scientist who is exposed to gamma-waves, which
turn him into a type of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde character. If he becomes enraged he
becomes the unstoppable and menacing Hulk. Although Spiderman and Hulk are
genetically modified for the better or the worse, they are still limited to human
“flaws”, such as getting ill or eventually dying.
Captain America is the typical example of the military turning humans into
cyborgs for their own purposes. Steve Rogers, a puny and “unmanly” man, has the
wish to serve the U.S. Army in the fight against fascist Germany and communist
Russia and thus becomes a human guinea pig for the army testing out a new product,
which alters Steve Rogers’s abilities and turns him into the invincible Captain
America. His arch-villain, the Red Skull, is a crude mixture of a communist and
fascist. Probably, Captain America was the Marvel comic with the heaviest patriotic
undertone and the most politicized mainstream comic-character - a posthuman soldier
to combat the “red wave”. In the analogy of the Marvel universe, Captain America is
the first genetically modified soldier of a military project, which is in analogy with the
creation of Wolverine in “Weapon X”.

The experience/success of these posthuman superheroes is attached to a masculine

potency that is achieved by possession, use and manipulation of technology. The heroes’
various material apparatuses exist as an extension to their physical bodies. More
specifically, what we have is the attachment of masculinity to consumer items, particularly
technology (Cook 2009: 48).

Even, if we have a wide range of characters, the comics mainly appeal to a male
readership (and were mainly drawn for a white male audience, except for Deathlok,
who was directed at a black readership).
The Marvel Universe reproduces the basic ideas over and over again,
rewriting, reinventing their own heroes. The similarities between the characters are
precise, since the different concepts of superpowers have influenced writers
throughout the decades, leading to similar characters being created, as can be seen
with the examples of Wolverine and Ripclaw. (See Appendix Fig.II.2.1 and Fig.II.2.2
P.65 for comparison).

48
 I.X-Men: Movies and Comics

Next to Spiderman probably one of the most successful Marvel comic is the X-
Men, from which three movies have been made followed by several spin-offs of its
characters, most notably Wolverine, who enjoys huge popularity amongst the readers
and viewers of X-Men. X-Men, at first created for young readers, dealt with the topics
of racism, sexism and further forms of oppression and exclusion. The X-Men are
different to mutants like Spiderman, who becomes one by accident. The X-Men are
born with their abilities. Many TV cartoon series, and in the meantime a Japanese
anime24, have been made. The X-Men have been ongoing since four decades, which
makes their universe very complex and due to the amount of different writers
involved in the series, there are many contradictions in the characters and storylines.
In comparison to JLA25, a DC comic, featuring also a group of superheroes, who fight
of danger and threats to the USA and Image’s Cyberforce, with its hyper-masculine
combat-happy superheroes (Burt 2005: 175) (see appendix Fig.II.3.1 and Fig.II.3.2
P.66), e.g. Ripclaw who is a direct copy of Wolverine with his claws and his battle
fury, X-Men takes a more psychological approach to the characters reasons and
motivations and the problems they face in and with society..

The primary concern of the JLA is to save humanity from disasters and to fight off those
that come looking for a fight. The X-Men live in a world where the evolutionary process
has put mankind face to face with its replacement, the super-powered mutants (Klock
2003).

A shift towards posthuman questions is visible here. X-Men works against reductive
definitions as with the Image26 heroes, who a merely reduced to muscle and style. The
X-Men are not just an idealized “battle unit”, but offer an alternative utopian society
(Burt 2005: 175). The comics and movies differ from each other in certain aspects and
representations of characters. Since the new millennia there has been a new wave of
many comic writers, most notably Mark Millar, who has been busy rewriting the
entire Marvel universe with the Ultimate-series. Millar’s Ultimates are a radical

24
Marvel has four different TV-mini-series produced by the japanese anime company Madhouse. The
cartoons inculde X-Men, IronMan, Blade and Wolverine. http://www.animax.co.jp/marvelanime/
25
Justice League America
26
Another big comic company founded by Todd McFarlane, the creator of Spawn. Image focuses on
adult-entertainment. They show more violence than in the Marvel Universe.
49
revisioning of the most classical Marvel heroes. Klock writes that Millar’s
posthumanism offers a very pessimistic outlook of the future with rather ambiguous
heroes than clear cut ones. Millar’s Xavier does not only help people, but instead
abuses his powers for his own personal goals. “Posthumanism in Xavier ...
dangerously verges on something unsympathetic (the merely human reader is, of
course, aligned with those “ape men” mutants have come to replace)” (Klock 2003).
The mutants, frustrated by experiencing discrimination, are starting to develop in the
same direction.

The most striking point with X-Men is that we are presented with different
ideas of posthumanism, than that which I have touched upon in my preceding chapters
- a posthuman pluralism. We do not have the alteration of the body through genetic
engineering (not even with Weapon X, since they use mutants for their experiments),
nor are we presented with any forms of prosthesis in this case except for Cyclops,
who needs his eye-device to keep his deadly beams under control). Instead, we are
confronted with a wide variety of mutants, who raise questions about our posthuman
future. From the sixties until now there has been a change in the portrayal of the main
characters. While in the past there was a positive approach to the posthuman issue,
contemporary times have changed the premises, especially with Mark Millar, who I
mentioned above. Because Mark Millar and Adam Kubert’s Ultimate X-Men and the
movies exist outside of the continuity of X-Men, readers do not have to be familiar
with more than forty years of the X-Men universe in order to understand what is
happening.

X-Men is the story of a group of extraordinary mutants, led by the wise Dr.
Charles Xavier, a powerful telepath struggling for the peaceful coexistence between
mutants and humans. Since humans are afraid of losing their dominance to the
mutants, conflict is bound to happen, as observed when the movie starts with a quote
by Charles Xavier:

Mutation. It is the key to our evolution. It is how we evolved from a single-celled into the
dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, taking normally thousands and
thousands of years, But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward (Singer
2000).

50
Not only does this quote introduce us to the main idea of the story of genetic
evolution, but also hints at the question of hierarchies and dominance in the world.
This is clearly illustrated by the evil mutants surrounding Magneto who believe it is
their destiny to overcome mankind and prevail as the new species on Earth. The
central struggle is between the leading characters: Magneto and Xavier, who were
once former friends with utopian visions. Magneto aka Eric Lehnsherr is a survivor
of the Holocaust and because of his trauma lost faith in the notion of peace between
humans and mutants, shifting his goals towards the subjugation of man to the
mutants. To achieve these goals, he gathers a group of “evil” mutants around him,
who see their personal role in the domination of the Homo Sapiens, since they
consider themselves Homo Superior, to use Magneto’s words. Magneto has turned
into the fascist minded Übermensch, viewing humans on the edge of extinction and
the mutants rightfully claiming their role as the new dominating species on Earth. His
pessimistic beliefs result from the idea that integration of the other is not possible.
Magneto describes the human beings as parasites living off of the resources meant for
the mutants. Magneto is constantly declaring war on humans, claiming that war
between humans and mutants is unpreventable; and history has shown that the
dominant species survives, while the weaker become extinct.

The X-Men, living on the margins of society, are being alienated by the
ordinary humans for their looks or special abilities. The former have to struggle to
maintain peace and not to fight the humans, although the mutants are treated badly by
the “real” humans. “The anti-mutant sentiment in X-Men titles easily corresponds to
institutional and everyday racism, (hetero-)sexism, homophobia27, and anti-
Semitism” (Hall&Lucal 1999: 63). Charles Xavier, their leader, is physically
handicapped and bound to the wheel-chair. Since he is the most powerful telepath,
the bodily restrictions do not hinder him in his actions. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the
creators of X-Men, were influenced by the civil rights movements and Martin Luther
King, the charismatic leader of the movement. Charles Xavier should represent his
personality, charisma and humanistic values. Hall and Lucan further write, that X-
Men “demonstrates the politics of separatism and assimilation as various mutant

27
Comic-writers were often concerned with the problems of marginalized groups. Many American
authors had a Jewish background and came to the U.S. to avoid the Holocaust. In Europe, Alan Moore
set up the AARGH-Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia in England in 1988 to raise
awareness against the Local Government Act, banning homosexuals from all public services.
51
leaders try to find solutions to the hatred and ignorance of “normal” human beings”
(1999: 63). Xavier is the counterpart to Magneto; both of them intelligent,
charismatic leaders, but one believing in integration and the other in domination.
While in the movie Xavier is presented as a heartily father figure, Millar introduces a
more sinister side to Xavier, aware of his posthuman condition, knowing the mutants
to be ahead of humans in the evolutionary process (Klock 2003).
The most popular figure in the series is Wolverine, not due to the depth of his
character28 but for the unleashed and uncontrollable anger, bringing very violent
justice to those who apparently deserve it. Wolverine is a very ambivalent character,
always falling back into his old behavioural ways, which often makes him a menace
to his own “people”. Wolverine had been created as a weapon by the humans, which
they can use against the mutant threat. The Weapon X project is described by Millar
as “the antithesis of the X-Men in every way” (Millar 2001: 2). Weapon X exploits
the mutants, turning them into violent beings. Weapon X sees their only value as
being living weapons. Weapon X does not promote a peaceful solution between
humans and mutants. Wolverine himself is not aware of his mutant past, but thinks of
himself more as a cyborg, as a military creation. Although he is a mutant, his
posthuman side is only revealed when he shows his claws; the rest of the time he
reminds the reader of a mixture of a rockabilly, with his sideburns, and Canadian
hunter; a real macho character. The rawness of his aura makes him also charismatic,
but all in all his actions are mostly violent.
Another interesting character of the X-Men, although no lead character, is
Mystique, who gained more attention in the movie adaptations. Mystique, a shape-
shifter, is similar in her/its potential powers to the “Liquid Metal Man” of Terminator
2, who “seems neither a product of human technology nor subject to physical law.
“He is the monster of some diabolically other Nature” (Larson 1997:62). The concept
of morphing, “taps into our own sense of being a subject in flux” (Toffoletti 2007:
102). Because she/it is anamorphous she/it poses a threat to the notion of being
human, since she/it can adopt any organic or inorganic shape, which also allows it to
transgress gender boundaries (Herbrechter 2009: 106). The latter can also be applied
to Mystique. Mystique does not have a definite gender (although portrayed as a
woman in comic and movie), and no background story as the only X-Men character.

28
A background story of Wolverine’s origins was presented for the first time in the movie Wolverine:
Origins - as the title already says. Until then, his exact past and childhood had never been revealed.
52
The character does not contain any depth to its personality or anything “human” we
can relate to. Mystique transgresses the definition of human, clearly becoming a
posthuman subject (MtM 2011). As Braidotti writes, she might not be a she, but
rather a developing subject, the other amongst the others, “a post-Woman embodied
subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential
metamorphosis” (2002: 11). Something like this raises anxieties about our
definitions. Can they be upkept? The shapeshifter poses a threat to the human being
in the same way the anamorphous “Liquid Metal Man” from Terminator 2 does. It is
faceless and without identity, and therefore without mother. The shape-shifter’s
identity is fragile, because it possesses multiple personalities to choose from, offering
other ways of living; a postmodern subject embracing thousands of possibilities
(MtM 2011). Furthermore, the shape-shifter does not live according to the time we
live in, since she/it does not have a definite age. And she does not fit in any of our
categories, being able to change her gender and cross boundaries. Braidotti again
writes, that “the nomadic or intensive horizon is a subjectivity ‘beyond gender’ in the
sense of being dispersed, not binary, multiple, not dualistic, interconnected, not
dialectic and in constant flux, not fixed” (Braidotti 2002: 80). The nomadic subject is
constantly on the move of becoming, but never reaches there, since it is constantly
redefining its own subjectivity. The nomadic subject is flows of transformations
without any final destination; it is a form of intransitive becoming (Braidotti 2002:
86). Mystique is a nomadic subject. She/it is always on the move. She/it does not
possess a clear shape or form, by which we define ourselves. Her/its body becomes
dubious. We never accept her/it as a final subject, since she/it always alters her/its
appearance and therefore, who or what she/it is.
Although being genderless, she is given a female lover Destiny in the comics,
which the reader does recognize as a lesbian relationship, since Mystique is
feminized throughout the movies and comics. The lesbian relationship confronts once
again the heterosexual norms of society. In the movie she is most times naked,
although her genitals and nipples are covered in scales. Mystique remains an
ambiguous figure, which makes her actions not seem very clear to the reader/viewer -
she is neither good, nor bad.
Another posthuman mutant in the series is Jean Grey, who has similar powers
to Xavier. In the third movie, the omnipotent and almost “divine” creature, the
Phoenix awakens in Jean Grey. The Phoenix is an entity, which does not have clear

53
bodily boundaries. Possessing telepathic and telekinetic abilities it is able to feel
everything around it and control them. It is able to fuse with its surroundings and
other people. An example is given: “When Xavier touches a fork Jean is levitating
with her mind in mid-air, Jean can feel Xavier’s pulse through the fork. Again in a
posthuman idea, Jean’s consciousness extends beyond her body into the fork and
surrounding environment, effectively exemplifying that she is embedded as part of
that environment” (MtM 2011). Unfortunately, Phoenix is not presented clearly who
or what it is, in the movie. After the Phoenix has risen it starts to destroy its entire
surrounding and only Wolverine, with his ability to cure himself, is able to stop
Phoenix from destroying the world, like it did to many others. Klock states:

The Phoenix is alien in every sense (including extra-terrestrial): it is eternal, outside space
and time, and has no regard for individuals or any part of the created universe. This is the
central problem: the Phoenix is a negative endpoint -- the dark idea that will eventually be
produced by evolution's violent progress from Human to Posthuman and beyond -- not a
progressive Posthuman utopia, but something completely alien and inhuman that will
destroy us all (2003).

The Phoenix is probably the most powerful figure, the highest force ever created in
the Marvel world. The Phoenix is as mighty as God. In this context, Klock compares
the ideas of the posthuman to Gnosticism, which he considers a deeply pessimistic
religion with its notion that the world is a prison, and although it might be our destiny
to evolve into something different that human, it is also a step into a dark future, in
which we might become destroyed or more advanced in the fields of torture,
humiliation and cruelty (Klock 2003).

II.Variations of Heroes

Superheroes and mutants offer us a different perspective on posthumanism.

While in many SF novels the posthuman is often presented as a threat, in the world of
comics we normally take position with the posthumans. The posthumans are normally
sympathetic and mostly charismatic, but the “normal” humans are caught in their
prejudices and usually discriminating the “other”, which threatens the purity of the
“human community”. Since there are a wide variety of categories under which we
place the superheroes, it is difficult to define certain characters as transhumans or
transhumanist or even posthumans. Mark Miller shifted the content towards a more
54
pessimistic standpoint, noting that posthumans will always be on the battleground
against ordinary humans.
The imagery presented in comics and in graphic novels should be taken
serious, since they have a large influence on SF novels and cinema in the meantime.
Marvel has set up its own movie studios in order to transfer their characters from
paper to celluloid. Superheroes and villains are attractive to audiences; this year many
more big Hollywood adaptations e.g. Green Lantern, Captain America will hit the big
screen. In a time, in which the talk about DNA dominates the scientific discourse the
cyborg is not any longer fashionable for cinema - the superhero and mutant is.

55
 6.Science Fiction and Reality: Transhumanists & Art

As we have seen in the preceding chapters, there are many different visions of
the posthuman future. Cyborgs, VR, mutants and freaks offer interesting perspectives;
they might differ from pessimistic and negative to positive notions. Much of SF
literature and cinema has influenced our lives: the possibilities of wireless
communication and the digital age have made us change our view of the world and
ourselves. There are many movements, especially the transhumanist branch, which
mixes and takes ideas from SF novels and science. “SF, then, is not a genre of literary
entertainment only, but a mode of awareness, a complex relationship between
imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future” (Criscery-
Ronay 1991:38). Max More, one of the leading figures of posthuman visionaries,
offers a list of SF novels for those interested in transhumanism (Vint 2008: 181).
Gibson’s visions of disembodiment in Neuromancer seem until now to have a strong
influence of the view of immortality through being digitally uploaded.
Interestingly, many of the key thinkers have not originated from social
sciences and humanism, but are mostly mathematicians, physicists, and robot and
computer experts. The human is viewed as a machine or a pattern of information;
natural sciences are used to explain complex issues concerning humans, reducing the
perception of humans to mind, which controls, and the body, the vehicle of the mind.
Social questions in order of defining structures which influence people’s lives are
often ignored or not understood. Vint further describes their views “Like the self-
made man of liberal humanism, Extropians efface the operation of social structures to
position social subjects in different relations of power” (2008: 177).
Besides the transhumanists, ideas connected to becoming a cyborg have also
influenced the world of art with its prime example, Stelarc. The connection between
machines/science and humans is one of his central themes.

Zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft werden in der gegenwärtigen Phase des menschlichen
"logos" neue Verbindungen möglich, insbesondere im Bereich der "Performance" oder des
"ästhetischen) Experiments, die die Einbeziehung von Technologie in die
Gegenwartskunst sowohl thematisch als auch ästhetisch-formal begünstigt (Herbrechter
2009:33).

56
 I.Transhumanist movements and thinkers

In the following I am taking a brief look at the transhumanist movements, their

basic ideas and link these to motifs of SF novels, with a further look taken at the three
key thinkers of transhumanism.

Max More:

Max More is an Extropian, who believes we can achieve a posthuman status

through self-improvement eventually leading to self-transformation, ideas related to
the core principles of liberal humanism. More was born in Bristol and received his
Ph.D. in politics, philosophy and economics. He is probably the leading figure of the
Extropians. Max More was also the founder of the Extropy Institute in California,
researching possibilities of transhumanism. The Extropy Institute can be considered a
transhumanist ideological “think-tank”. But first, what are the Extropians?
The Extropians want to achieve immortality. Human existence is not
considered perfect and the human body has to be modified for future survival. Until
the technologies are developed, which will grant immortality, the bodies of the
members are cyropreserved after death or if they are incurably ill. A basic problem
though is keeping the number of members together for the future, for the fear that no
one besides themselves will show interest in their resurrection. Pepperell describes
their basic views “as an optimistic belief in the power of technology to transform, for
the better, that which we know now as human existence. Extropy is the opposite of
entropy, the pessimistic principle that the entire universe is decaying into chaos”
(2003: 170). The Extropians want to achieve a posthuman form of existence and
therefore advocate their notion of transhumanism. Max More describes his
transhumanist philosophy as “philosophies of life that seek continuation and
acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and
limits by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and
values, while avoiding religion and dogma” (Pepperell 2003: 170). As we can see, the
Extropians position is extremely techno-oriented.
In the appendix I have added the Transhumanist Declaration written by Max
More, his wife and several transhumanist companions (see appendix: Fig.I.1, P.63).

57
Hans Moravec:

In the preceding chapters I have often mentioned Moravec without taking a

deeper look at who he is. Moravec, born 1948 in Austria, built his first robot at an
early age. His parents migrated to Canada, where studied and worked in several
laboratories researching robot technologies. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy,
1980 at Stanford University. A short time later he published Mind Children. The
future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), which made him one of the founders
of a posthuman philosophy. He had been strongly influenced by Isaac Asimov’s ideas
of robots and the three robot laws. He strongly believes that Artificial Intelligence
will replace humans one day, probably in the next thirty years as he claims. He is
constantly repeating his message since several decades now. Moravec’s ideas have
been rejected by the world of AI-researchers, since he is merely a robot-designer and
scientist, and not concerned with the development of AI’s (Krüger 2004: 118).

Ray Kurzweil:

Raymond Kurzweil, who also was born in 1948, is a computer engineer. He is

a successful entrepreneur establishing six computer companies and inventing many
electronic gadgets, like the innovative Xerox-reading machine, which can turn written
texts into speech. For the transhumanist movements his book The Age of Spiritual
Machines: When Computers exceed Human Intelligence (1999) is of major
importance. Kurzweil shares a similar position with Moravec, believing that AI’s will
eventually succeed humans one day and develop a higher form of intelligence.
Humans will become the “nanny” helping with the “birth” and development of the
AI’s - the next step of evolution (Herbrechter 2009: 48).

All individuals mentioned above share a similar idea that humans will gain a certain
form of transcendence through digital technology. Disembodiment and life in VR are
once again in the tradition of Descartes and establish a hierarchy of the value of body
parts. Although many may not be religious in their standpoints, as with Max More,
who takes a strong position against religion in his writings, their perception of human
nature and the possibilities of immortality seem to have a certain religious undertone.

58
 II.Cyborg Artist: Stelarc

I am taking a brief look at Stelarc and his work to show that cyborgization is
not only limited to either the military and industry or literature and movies. Stelarc is
a performance and media artist from Australia, who is fascinated by the possibilities
robotics, VR, and other technologies offer for the exploration of the idea of the
interface for the creation of art. From his performances in the seventies to his
performances in the eighties there was a significant shift.

Stelarc’s fascination with challenging the physical parameters of the body and
interrogating the limits of its capabilities was evidenced in his early body suspension
performances of the seventies. But it is in later performances that Stelarc explores the
ideas of bodily extension and enhancement in the context of electronic culture and digital
communication networks. Rather than enacting the loss of the body into technology and
media systems, Stelarc’s performances suggest that a new kind of corporeality is created
in the mix of biological and information systems (Toffoletti 2007:126).

Probably, one of his key examples of the fusion between human and machine and the
art resulting from this unification is the robot arm he had attached to his own arm,
copying all the movements he made with his real arm. The performance was called
“handwriting” (see appendix Fig.II.5 P.69). The robot arm, the “third hand”, was
carrying a pen and drew independent to the movements of the real arms. All hands
together wrote the word: EVOLUTION. The third hand was activated by pulse
signals, which are sent from his abdominal and leg muscles through electronic wires
into the hand, making the wires and hand become a part of the artist´s body circuitry
(Toffoletti 2007: 126) Another famous performance he carried out was to find out the
effects of gravity on the bodily limits and boundaries. Stelarc had ropes and wires
directly installed into his body, which was hanging from the ropes in the free room.
Stelarc is constantly experimenting with the interfaces between body and technology
and how these experiences will alter our perception of reality and change the art we
create. Stelarc works together with scientist from many different fields for his
experimental performances. Internationally he gives lectures and takes part in
conferences dealing with posthumanism. Using the concepts of the cyborg, we can
consider Stelarc the first official cyborg artist.

59
 7.Conclusion

Are we already posthuman? Is mankind on the edge of extinction? Are we

losing control of our own technological creations and which way will they become a
part of our life?

Science-Fiction often portrays a dark dystopian negative future, in which the

author takes a critical standpoint, which should not be ignored or neglected by other
thinkers. The destruction of civilization, the loss of the body, lead directly to the
question: how and through what is human identity defined? They are often very
radical approaches and one might think about these sources being too pessimistic.
Taking a look at the newspapers and at recent developments, and going further
beyond the surface, will take us eventually there where the Science-Fictions novels
with their content have already arrived. We are embracing the evolution of Internet
and even if we might not become cyborgs or live in a matrix, the cyber-world does
construct new identities of real human beings who mainly live actively between the
borders of Internet and the material world. Network sites e.g. MySpace, Facebook etc.
can be seen as perfect examples how people create a new identity through which they
connect to other people in digital form. Taking this further are games as “World of
Warcraft” or “The Sims”, where the players spend days, weeks and some nearly their
whole life in the cyberspace. Fascinating is that the ego of many players becomes
linked to the success and fame their character has in the game. They define
themselves through their characters identity. Are they the “perfect people” for the
matrix? Are we already in the phase of posthumanism?
Our striving for new technologies does not mean to place technology over
human beings and establish another ideological hierarchy. The euphoria for
technology can be seen mostly in industry and late capitalism, which are only profit-
oriented; to quote Tyrell from BladeRunner one last time: “Commerce”. The basic
thoughts on how to deal with these developments are negotiated in contemporary
times nearly every day in the cultural sections of newspapers and society itself,
although not ending in such a negative way like many of the discussed pieces of
fiction.
Humans have always been changing since the beginning of time and have
always tried to survive in their environment making humans invent tools or other

60
gadgets, in order to simplify certain procedures and make life more comfortable.
Evolution is a process which never ends. Our appearances have changed in the last
centuries, as we have grown taller through a change in our diets and the advancements
in the fields of medical research. Technology can never be separated from humans,
since there is the necessity of its use in order to survive. As I have mentioned with the
example of Stephen Hawkings, that without the aid of technology he probably would
not be able to live and communicate in his environment. And nobody would speak out
loud and neglect him from being fully human.
I do not believe that we have become cyborgs, but rather we should accept the
fact, that the “purity” of the human community has always been infiltrated by exterior
forces, which maybe have been considered evil or detrimental by certain groups in
society. And who really is part of this human community? We should not work with a
metaphysical aspect in judging ourselves and other people; especially, the others we
needed in the past to construct the subject in Western philosophy. There is no such
thing as purity of our body or mind, which is bordering on a religious perception of
the world. The idea of transcendence and metaphysics separate the human parts from
each other and establishes a hierarchy of the body, with the head, and its brain, where
apparently the mind is seated at its center. We rather need a holistic perception of
humans, as many materialist thinkers argue. Our environment, our bodily experiences,
and our interactions with other humans, animals, and technology all add together to
the human beings we are. If we would reject the body and live in the cyberspace,
would we still be the humans we believed ourselves to be? What are we to make of
our sexuality than, which at the basis has a big influence on our subconciousness?
How would our perception of the world change?
All of these questions cannot be answered, for no one can foresee the future
and only can look at contemporary developments and how humans engage with them,
but much of those ideas will still remain SF visions, with no real meaning for our
lives, even if permanently new technologies are being developed. There are many
existing problems concerning these technologies. Who has access in order to
manipulate their own body?
And another central question always of our Western culture is: Who will
finance it? If there are no profits to be made, will posthuman existences be of interest?
The only people embracing these possibilities are the transhumanist movements, who
do have a certain influence on the discussion of posthumanism, but no big impact on

61
society.

We need a critical posthumanism to confront and overcome old notions of

humanity. The white, civilized Western male subject is not anymore at the center of
the world. Postmodern times have proven that there are many different cultures and
people; and poststructuralist thinkers, like Judith Butler, have shown that gender is a
performative act. We can always construct ourselves new and have multiple identities
we are able to choose from, as with the nomadic subject: we are always on the move
of becoming without ever reaching the final destination; which probably does not
exist and if, what should it be? We have to learn to accept alternative forms of being
and living; we have to overcome the hierarchies man has introduced to the world,
placing animals, technology, females, and other races beneath him. Critical
posthumanism tries to deconstruct the norms society has introduced and offer
alternatives, which also means progress; progress for the people, who have been
excluded from being a subject, and were turned into objects. The critical
posthumanism we need is a discourse on the conservative values of Western thinking,
deconstructing and reconstructing and pathing the way for a more tolerant future. No
matter, how we will look in the future, we are all part of and living in this world. The
‘post’ in posthumanism does not mean a post-biological embodiment, but the ‘post’
should represent the “real” heritage of humanism. Thus, the ‘post’ becomes our
starting point.

62
 Appendix:

I.The Transhumanist Declaration:

1.Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future.

We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging,
cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.

2.We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized.

There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile
enhanced human conditions.

3.We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new
technologies.
There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what
we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle.
Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.

4.Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects. We need to

carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications.
We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done,
and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

5.Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life
and health, the alleviation of grave suffering,
and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent
priorities, and heavily funded.

6.Policy making ought to be guided by responsible and inclusive moral vision, taking
seriously both opportunities and risks,
respecting autonomy and individual rights, and showing solidarity with and concern
for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe.
We must also consider our moral responsibilities towards generations that will exist in
the future.

7.We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals,
and any future artificial intellects,
modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific
advance may give rise.

8.We favour allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their
lives.
This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory,
concentration, and mental energy;
life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and
many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.

http://humanityplus.org/learn/transhumanist-declaration/

63
 II.Pictures

1.Cyborg-Images

Fig.II.1.1: Deathlok´s metal skeleton is exposed beneath his skin, similar to the depiction of
Schwarzenegger in the next picture.

Fig.II.1.2: The most classical cyborg image of the torn-off facial skin.

64
 2.Wolverine and Similar Characters

Fig.II.2.1: Wolverine exposing his claws ready to strike Sabretooth.

Fig.II.2.2: Ripclaw exposing his claws in rage.

65
 3.X-Men and other Groups of Heroes

Fig.II.3.1: A typical X-Men cover, showing all featured heroes.

Fig.II.3.2: CyberForce cover shows extreme similarities to the X-Men cover.

66
 4.Future Cities

Fig.II.4.1: Fritz Lang´s Metropolis.

Fig.II.4.2: The high-rises from above in BladeRunner.

67
Fig.II.4.3: A typical future city designed by Moebius.

Fig.II.4.4: Another future city design by McKie.

68
 5.Stelarc

Fig.II.5: Australian artist Stelarc with his „third hand“. The performance was called
´handwriting´.

69
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-Lobo, Sascha (2011) “Krieg und Spiel” in S.P.O.N., 08.06.2011.
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,767292,00.html. [Accessed: 12.7.2011]
-Harvey, Nick (2011) „Forget a Cyber Maginot Line“ in The Guardian, 30.05.2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/30/forget-cyber-maginot-
line?INTCMP=SRCH. [Accessed: 12.7.2011]
-S.P.O.N. (2011) „Private Probleme: Schwarzenegger stoppt alle Hollywood-
Projekte“ in S.P.O.N., 20.5.2011.
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/0,1518,763739,00.html. [Accessed:
12.7.2011]

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Picture-Index:
-Fig.II.1: ´Deathlok´, Unknown Artist,
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_sRGwORwAl98/SbkHD-ik7-I/AAAAAAAAAU4/Ua-
qzwE-VBo/s320/Deathlok.jpg. [Accessed: 12.7.2011]
-Fig.II.1.2: ´Terminator´, Cameron, James (1984). http://service.bz-
berlin.de/bzblogs/marrachsostblog/files/2011/06/Terminator.jpg. [Accessed:
12.7.2011]
-Fig.II.2.1: ´Wolverine´, Bianchi, Simone, Wolverine Black and White Vol.1,
NewYork: Marvel Comics, 2007.
http://im2.ebidst.com/upload_big/3/4/0/1279476146-8615-0.jpg. [Accessed:
10.7.2011]
-Fig.II.2.2: Ripclaw, Unknown Artist,
http://www.comicvine.com/ripclaw/29-26501/ripclaw/108-1896/?page=3. [Accessed:
10.7.2011]
-Fig.II.3.1: ´X-Men´, Pacheco, Carlos (1997), X-Men Cover Vol.80, NewYork:
Marvel Comics.
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/4/50322-4605-65779-1-x-men_super.jpg.
[Accessed: 10.7.2011]
-Fig.II.3.2: ´Cyberforce´, Silvestri, Marc (1992), Cyberforce Cover Vol.1, Berkeley:
Image Comics. [Accessed: 10.7.2011]
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ukn8Cqiuc/TIWGFPzXPPI/AAAAAAAAOVI/aJpu5Pom
png/s1600/1-1.jpg. [Accessed: 10.7.2011]
-Fig.II.4.1: ´Metropolis´, Lang, Fritz (1925-1926).
http://goingtothemovies.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/metropolis-01.jpg. [Accessed:
12.7.2011]
-Fig.II.4.2: ´BladeRunner´, Scott, Ridley (1982).
http://musicadeinvierno.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/bladerunner_mf.jpg. [Accessed:
12.7.2011]
-Fig.II.4.3: Moebius, Title unkown,
http://www.lambiek.net/artists/g/giraud/moebius_futuristic.jpg. [Accessed:
12.7.2011;]
-Fig.II.4.4: McKie,Angus, Title unknown,
http://dreamworlds.ru/uploads/posts/2008-04/1208153124_angus_mckie_021.jpg.
[Accessed: 12.7.2011]

75
-Fig.II.5: Stelarc, `Handwriting` ,
http://cdn0.sciencegallery.com/files/footer_images/Stelarc%20drawing%20with%20r
obot%20arm.jpg. [Accessed: 11.7.2011]

76