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Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism

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Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism 6/3/2019 Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture Identity and Mind/Body Dualism Benjamin, R. W. Jørgensen and Morten, G. Mortensen Steen Ledet Christensen Master’s Thesis Aalborg University Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism Abstract In this world of increasing integration with technology, what does it mean to be human and to have your own identity? This paper aims to examine representations of the body and mind related to identity in contemporary cyberpunk. Using three examples of contemporary cyberpunk, Ghost in the Shell (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2018), and Altered Carbon (2018), this paper focuses on identity in cyberpunk visual culture. The three entries are part of established cyberpunk franchises helped launch cyberpunk into the mainstream as a genre. The three works are important as they represent contemporary developments in cyberpunk and garnered mainstream attention in the West, though not necessarily due to critical acclaim. The paper uses previously established theory by Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway and expanding upon them into contemporary theory by Graham Murphy and Lars Schmeink, and Sherryl Vint. We make use of the terms posthumanism, transhumanism, dystopia, Cartesian mind/body dualism, embodiment, and disembodiment to analyse our works. These terms have been collected from a variety of sources including anthologies, books and compilations by established cyberpunk and science fiction theorists. A literary review compares and accounts for the terms and their use within the paper. The paper finds the same questions regarding identity and subjectivity in the three works as in older cyberpunk visual culture, but they differ in how they are answered. This paper compares the answers and provides a discussion regarding identity and mind/body duality in cyberpunk visual culture. Using the concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism we relate them to the different representations of the human body and its potential replacement. The circumstances of these transhuman and posthuman futures and the representation of the body closely relate to the previously mentioned terms of embodiment, disembodiment, and mind/body dualism. Additionally, we focus on the works’ settings, as they are important for contextualising the circumstances of the bodies and identities presented within their respective universes. The paper discusses that Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism contemporary cyberpunk visual culture, like its predecessors, reflect the worlds’ social problems, such as automation of work labour or environmental problems, within the given decade of their release. Furthermore, the paper briefly explores European cyberpunk, which shares many similarities with Western and Japanese cyberpunk. The most significant difference stems from the idea that there is no hope that technology can improve human life. For all three works, this paper finds that identity originates in how one identifies with themself, whether this is the body, the mind, or both. Unlike older cyberpunk works that focused on inhabiting virtual spaces, the paper finds that a recent trend returns the body as the focal point. Cyborgs, androids, and body modifications impact the ways we view and identify with our bodies. The paper concludes that cyberpunk remains a progressive genre, retaining visual and narrative elements of the genre, but a drastic change in the representation of the body and identity is occurring in contemporary cyberpunk. Likewise, trends of rebooting and adapting influential and classical works of cyberpunk are appearing, which allows for new angles of analysis in a changing genre that represents present circumstances. Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Posthumanism/Transhumanism ......................................................................................... 7 Dystopia/Utopia .................................................................................................................. 14 Embodiment/Disembodiment ........................................................................................... 18 Body modification .............................................................................................................. 27 Cyborg ................................................................................................................................. 32 Android ............................................................................................................................... 35 Ghost in the Shell: A Sense of Self in the Shell ..................................................................... 38 Do Androids Dream….?: Identity and self-sentience in Blade Runner 2049 ...................... 63 Altered Carbon: Sleeving your identity .................................................................................. 79 Contemporary Cyberpunk: Identity in Recent and Retrospective Cyberpunk and its Variants ................................................................................................................................. 106 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 123 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 128 Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism 1 Introduction Cyberpunk as a genre emerged in the early 1980s. In 1982 the feature film Blade Runner was released and became a cult film. In 1984 William Gibson’s Neuromancer was released to critical acclaim. These two works kickstarted the cyberpunk-era of visual culture and literary works, respectively. Before cyberpunk was agreed upon as a genre, the authors had mainly been known as “The movement”, the reason for why many of the first works of cyberpunk are called “Movement-era works” by scholars such as Graham Murphy, Sherryl Vint, and Lars Schmeink. Precursor works to cyberpunk were considered science fiction, with cyberpunk being categorised as a subgenre of sci-fi. For this paper we are interested in cyberpunk as a visual culture phenomenon, however, the literary traditions and works are an influence in visual culture and contributed to cyberpunk’s rise into the mainstream. Upon its release, Blade Runner did not receive critical praise, only years after its release (and after the release of Neuromancer) has it been praised as an influential work within the genre, visual culture, and socially. Cyberpunk is now a well-established genre within visual culture, with works being released in almost every format: graphic novels and manga such as Transmetropolitan (2009-2011) and The Surrogates (2006), and a variety of graphic novel adaptations of both Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) by Philip. K. Dick (A precursor work to cyberpunk); video games such as System Shock (1994), System Shock 2 (1999), and the Deus Ex-series (2000, 2003, 2011, 2016); table top and pen- and-paper games such as Cyberpunk (1988) and Cyberpunk 2020 (1990), feature films such as the aforementioned Blade Runner, The Matrix (1999), and more recently Alita: Battle Angel (2019); TV series and anime such as Ghost in the Shell-series (2002-2003, 2004-2006), and Westworld (2016), these are just a few examples among many other works. Contemporary Cyberpunk in Visual Culture: Identity and Mind/Body Dualism 2 As previously stated, our focus is on the visual culture aspect of cyberpunk, more specifically films and series produced in America. Again however, it must be mentioned that we acknowledge other cyberpunk works within visual culture and from other regions - such as Japan and Europe - and refer to them when applicable. Cyberpunk is also a genre that has been claimed “dead on arrival” by Claire Sponsler (as cited in Vint & Murphy, 2010, xi). Likewise, it has been described as able to “[...] go only so far before self-destructing under the weight of its own deconstructive activities” by Veronica Hollinger (as cited in Vint & Murphy, 2010, xi). Furthermore, Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling believed cyberpunk’s demise surfaced at nearly the same moment at it emerged, epitomised in Shiner’s New York Times editorial “Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk” and, later, Sterling’s retrospective “Cyberpunk in the Nineties.” (Murphy & Schmeink, 2018, xxi). What binds these cyberpunk works together is a series of tropes and traits that are common between them, whether it is literary or visual culture. To set the stage for this paper, we will expand upon what these tropes and traits are, a few of these we will go into detail within the next section, as those terms serve as key points for our paper. In their book Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018), Murphy and Schmeink posit that cyberpunk is an “[...] extrapolation of the developments of late capitalism and of postmodernity with its commodification of all aspects of life, especially reflected in the products of visual culture” (xxii). This can be applied to both the visual aesthetics and to key plot points in cyberpunk, the extrapolation of late capitalism and postmodernity appears in the way that most cyberpunk is set in a “distant” future (Blade Runner is set in
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