This
paper explores the ideologies implicit in the representation
of posthuman bodies in William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction.
It first outlines a taxonomy of posthuman bodies. It
then isolates four major forms of the posthuman in Gibson:
the laboring body, the repressed body, the disappearing
body and the marked body. The laboring body is mostly
gendered, and tends to project the work of the body.
However, cyberpunk sees bodies as subservient to the
capitalist cause, and hence, represent them as laboring
bodies, whether male or female. The repressed body is
one where the `original' tends to be subsumed under
technology, and is placed under the control of devices
and software. The disappearing body is one whose `original'
form is altered through replacements and additions.
Finally, the marked body links the human form to consumer
culture with acquisitions of prosthesis and the desirable
appearances. After this taxonomy, the essay moves on
to discuss the politics of posthuman bodies in three
realms: families, aging and citizenship. It explores
the implications of `cyborg families', where traditional
notions of a family are overturned through technological
alterations. Cyberpunk does not offer anything other
than expensive technology as a solution to aging - as
this essay notes in its discussion of the ideologies
of aging in the posthuman age. Finally, it addresses
the question of citizenship, and the changing ideas
of the individual and community in the age of cyborgs,
as they alter the landscape of politics itself. It thus,
calls into question several of the hagiographic assumptions
made about the advent of the new technologies.
Literary
imaginations, especially after Mary Shelley's cult text,
Frankenstein (1817),have been concerned with
questions of techno-bodies. With the arrival of first,
computers and second, Information and Communications
Technologies (ICTs), techno-bodies - wired, surgically
altered, augmented - have been at the forefront of a
specific sub-genre of science fiction: cyberpunk.Cyberpunk
fiction's obsession with the body has appeared as four
main themes, according to its early critic and practitioner,
Bruce Sterling: body invasion through prostheses, genetic
alteration and/or mutation, implanted circuitry and
cosmetic surgery (Sterling, 1986, p. xiii, p. xv). |
