In William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the novel that started the cyberpunk movement and in which the term “cyberspace” first appeared, Case, the novel's protagonist, believes that life is worth living only when in the space of computer
the “live sculptures”-performers that occupy public squares and invite tourists to take a picture with them. Instead of photographing the live sculptures, people in Dam Square had the chance to document themselves next to virtual statues that were visible only through the interface of the smart phone. Simple (well, as long as one possesses the proper device), fun and unique, this flash mob attracted indeed a large turnout.
Throughout their mobile devices, participants and viewers had a completely new view of the well-known square: Spiderman, Batman, Darth Vader and the Beatles were also there. The members of the digital community of this Flash Mob that became real in Dam Square had brought along their virtual statues, or maybe, their imaginary friends.
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simulation. Although he still has a physical presence in the story, he considers his body to be a plain container of his consciousness until he enters cyberspace – a “consensual illusion” accessed only by a computer – and anything he experiences through his body a merely “meat thing”. He therefore leads his life bodily isolated, but “jacked” into cyberspace. With the help of electrodes that create a direct neural link between the brain and the computer, he uses this brain-computer interface to access the global network.
Thus whenever he wants to go out on the streets he simply rides someone else’s sensorium through this network. Going back to the initial argument on the advantages of pattern over presence in the electronic age, Katherine Hayles suggests that in a world that is becoming overpopulated, overdeveloped, environmentally poisoned, and
potentially inhabitable, cyberspace possibilities “make physicality seem a better state to be from than to inhabit” (Hayles, 1999, p.36). Existing in a state of immateriality within computer simulation makes pattern the constitutive reality, reducing presence into an optical illusion, and questioning the notion of inhabitation within digitisation. But at the same time it is never simply a “meat thing” as Case argues. The situated body and its fluid electronic extensions, the heft of embodiment and the weightlessness of
information are intertwined and hybridised in complex ways. And then, turning physical spaces more and more simulated and temporal, on the one hand, and creating digital worlds resembling the real one on the other, is part of this complex and unresolved relationship.
“No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture can no longer be the resources for appropriation or incorporation of the other.” (Haraway, 1993, p.150)
Following this quote, and aiming to raise the question of what would constitute
“home” to a cyborg, Andrew Benjamin reflects on the relations between time, place, and presence in another significant science fiction story, that of the film “Blade Runner”
8 (Scott, 1982). According to Benjamin, the film brings together history (here the
8 The film is based on the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick and takes place in a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019. The majority of the population have left the earth to inhabit “Off World” colonies. These colonies are also the place for the genetically engineered organic robots called “replicants”.
Replicants are forbidden to be on the earth and those who ignore this are hunted down and "retired" by special agents known as "Blade Runners". The protagonist,
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future), architecture (here the dystopian Los Angeles), and the body (more precisely, the task being to identify the replicants within the humans) in a specific formation. The three elements are not only connected to each other so that altering the one would affect the others, but are also inextricably linked to the present as their interpretation can only be made following the current way of thinking. Thus the body not only functions as an analogue to the architectural, but moving away from the human body to the “replicant”
body and further to the cyborg body has to do with a process of its reformation and repositioning that directly affects the architectural, the “where” and the “home” of this reformed body. As the body transforms, the analogy between body and architecture is reconstituted by the change: “relation here is the site of critique; it is moreover critique’s condition of possibility” (Benjamin, 2000, p.162). Then having set up this framework, and going back to Haraway’s quote, what could be the house, the place for a cyborg? Benjamin argues that the reason why replicants appear as a threat to the film is because the opposition between the human and the machine is so clear, leaving no place to the cyborgs. Decay in both humans and their environment is what makes the
replicants represent the other, and as such the placeless:
“the transformation in question is decay. What comes to be juxtaposed within the cosmological urban fabric is decay – the continuity rather than the teleology of decay – and the modern vast. The replicant is seen as a threat within this context. It is at this point that the constraint governing both architecture and film need to be reintroduced.”
(Benjamin, 2000, p.164)
The replicants may seem indistinguishable from the humans – differentiating
themselves from robots, androids, and other constructions – but it is this resemblance, along with the fact that they do not grow old and they do not fall sick (they simply die when their predetermined period of life expires) that makes them a mediating feature in the film. They are the same within their differentiation, and both at home and not at home, according to Benjamin. They can never be at home because the architecture of the film cannot provide shelter to them, as it is made to provide a shelter to humans.
Thus if we want to see what being at home with replicants – and by extension with cyborgs – means, Benjamin suggests, we should rework the analogy between architecture and the body, having as a point of departure the replicant body. Then,
Deckard, is a blade runner who has to track down and terminate 4 replicants that have hijacked a spaceship and have returned to earth seeking their maker.
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conversely, having as a point of departure the cyborg body that we all are, that is, the body that does not end at one’s skin but is subject to connections and attachments and reformed by information, we could reconceptualise “home” as anything that may give space to our heterogeneous components and would be able to follow our
transformations along with our displacements.
By challenging the notion of “home”, this chapter has attempted to conceptualise the body as an open-ended construction that connects to the world in multiple and complex ways. The cyborg body becomes a trope against anything pre-given and fixed, and thus it opens up towards a more dynamically conceptualised world too. Taking further the opposition of the cyborg body to any conventional categorisation, the following chapter regards the human body as a machine in a world of machines and connections by
examining the construction of the avatar body, its relation to the corporeal body, and the world that it represents.
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