Cyberpunk

Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence". Thinking Before the Act

by Frederic Clement

Aside from the title and the opening and closing paragraphs, this article is an abridged version of the third chapter of the author’s book Machines désirées: La représentation du féminin dans les films d’animation Ghost in the Shell du réalisateur Mamoru Oshii, published in 2011 by Éditions L’Harmattan (© L’Harmattan 2011). Translation of this article by Guillaume Desgagné.

Since the enactment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths (the Bill 156... more Since the enactment of the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths (the Bill 156 regarding the sexualized representation of so-called “fictional youths,” recently passed in Japan), creators of manga and animé have had to promptly rethink the way they display sexuality in their works. Japanese director Mamoru Oshii, as a shrewd observer of his medium and society, had already been reflecting on the increased sexualization of fictional characters.

In 2004, several years before Bill 156, Oshii directed the animated film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a futuristic police story in which sex dolls modelled after little girls seemingly become sentient and murder their owners. What remains of desire and sexuality in the age of their mechanical reproduction? Such seems to be the question Oshii was asking in his film. It was, for him, a way of thinking the discomfort in his civilization, long before the Act. In this article, first and foremost, I propose to discuss a few points brought up in two essential writings about the depiction of little girls (the “shôjo,” literally “little female”) from renowned animé and manga scholars Susan J. Napier and Frederik L. Schodt. Then, I will study the movie itself, mainly through the inversion of what Napier names the “disappearing shôjo,” as well as a reflection on the doll’s body in the movie as being a kind of sexual “no man’s land,” both metaphorically and literally. Subsequently, I will analyze the movie through the prism of horror – or how, paradoxically, these dolls become monsters in order to fight abjection, and thus claim back their innocence.

The end of the old flesh: beastly bodily becomings as contemporary parable

by JD Taylor

Presented at "The End of..." Conference, University of Kent, 22 January 2012.

In 1981 Gilles Deleuze read in Francis Bacon's paintings a 'zone of the indiscernible' between man and animal. Bacon's... more In 1981 Gilles Deleuze read in Francis Bacon's paintings a 'zone of the indiscernible' between man and animal. Bacon's figures spasm through their wounded architectures, screams erupting as destabilised bodies attempt to escape their figurations. This paper develops this zone of the indiscernible to explore how human flesh has become a medium for representations of the end. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome [1983], a dark psychological conspiracy places the flesh under suspicion of suggestible media-corruption, as Max Renn transcends to abstracted data by orgiastically abandoning the old flesh.

Against the knowing futurism of Videodrome, this paper compares Charles Burns' Black Hole comic-book series [1995-2005], which uses the grotesque contagious corruption of teenage flesh as a dark analogy for growing up and loss of innocence in the haunted spaces of late 20th century  Americana. Overtly Freudian, the rich contrasts of Burns' work introduces the becoming-monstrous and the eruption of contagion which racks modern American anxieties about the ending of the human, most familiar in recent zombie narratives. Taking a parallel track, in both accounts beastly becomings are played out on the flesh to mark internal turmoil whilst offering two directions for a contemporary bestiary of our culture. Whilst Burns offers a pessimistic Quietism and submission to the mysterious disease, Cronenberg's narrative alternatively calls to end the old flesh and embrace the possibilities of cybertechnology. Baudrillardian pessimism is spliced with 'biopunk' subcultures alongside Eugene Thacker's theoretical forays into life as the 'unthinkable' (2010, 2011) to finally ascertain why anxieties over life, technology and the end continue to play on a corrupted flesh. Does power embody itself through a zombified life, or will the skin continue to subvert and revolt against human (and posthuman) machinations?

Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon's Vurt.

by Andrew Wenaus

Science Fiction Studies #113 = Volume 38

This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful... more This article examines how Jeff Noon grafts concepts from chaos theory to literature in order to develop a playful narrative form appropriate to representing multiple ontological levels. I argue this by looking closely at the roles of form, metaphor, and content in Noon’s stylish debut novel, Vurt (1993). The novel’s movement from order to disorder and finally towards a new order suggests that the structure of Vurt may operate mimetically according to the vision of reality proposed by chaos theorists. In this way, Noon experiments with literary form by reinterpreting the narrative spaces of virtual reality through the metaphors of fractal geometry, a spatial phenomenon that so delighted the popular imagination at the time of the novel’s publication. I explore the relationship between metaphor and content through the trope of conflict between order/chaos and meaning/hopelessness, and by applying Douglas Hofstadter’s theory of consciousness and his concept of the paradoxical “strange loop.” These tropes may cast light on the complexities of the characters’ intense desires for transcendence and how the form of the novel itself makes this ambivalent quest difficult, if not impossible. Accordingly, chaos functions not only as a reminder of the turbulence inherent in human experience but also of the exciting aesthetic possibilities this theory extends to literature.

Houdini e Faust: breve storia del cyberpunk

by antonio caronia

Tunel Infinity, Mirror Into Mirror: a Reading of William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy, Reading the Trilogy As An Allegory of Literary Postmodernism's …

by Steen Christiansen

Tres vías para salir de la nación en la historieta "(Bang)Kok. 60 maneras de escapar de una ciudad" de Renzo Podestá

by Alejandra Meriles

El concepto de nación más que una definición supone un campo de lucha, en el que las más variadas significaciones... more El concepto de nación más que una definición supone un campo de lucha, en el que las más variadas significaciones buscan formalizarse como posibilidades de hecho, ajustadas a la experiencia cotidiana del vivir en común-unidad. En esta ponencia se reconocerán ilustraciones de tres de aquellas conjeturas de sentido en la historieta (Bang)Kok. 60 maneras de escapar de una ciudad de Renzo Podestá. La primera, señalada ya desde el título, es la que remarca la correlación entre nación, ciudad y habitat, un ambiente compartido, producto también de la historia. que interviene en la constitución de los lazos sociales entre los sujetos coexistentes de una misma actualidad. En segundo lugar, la acepción acaso más conocida de nación: aquella que la vincula a un Estado y a un proyecto de gobierno. En este caso, la autoridad estatal ficticia asume el diseño de sus ciudadanos correctos, a través de un plan para hallar y extirpar la creatividad de aquellos con vocaciones artísticas; transformándolos, al mismo tiempo, en sujetos institucionalizados, futuros gobernantes y herramientas de control y dominio de los demás miembros de la institución. Por último, se encuentra una tercera referencia a una nación tal que comunidad espontánea y fugaz, basada en la empatía por la experiencia común no siempre manifestada ni reconocida. De todas éstas posibilidades de sujeto colectivo, los personajes principales de la historieta analizada, huyen. Empero, ¿se puede escapar del deseo de comunidad?

La Asociacion Efimera: Repensando el concepto de comunidad desde la literatura cyberpunk

by Gabriela Vargas-Cetina

Originally published online on Revista de Bioetica No. 11.  Sección Doctrina.

Partiendo de la premisa de que las formas narrativas en general reflejan las condiciones materiales y las... more Partiendo de la premisa de que las formas narrativas en general reflejan las condiciones materiales y las preocupaciones intelectuales de su tiempo, este trabajo plantea que el concepto de 'comunidad' no nos sirve para pensar fenómenos asociativos contemporáneos y se propone caracterizar nuevas formas de agrupacion por medio de una construccion teorica alternativa: el concepto de interfaz.

Speaking the Body: The Embodiment of ‘Feminist’ Cyberpunk

by Bronwen Calvert

Co-authored with Dr Sue Walsh (University of Reading)
Published in Speaking Science Fiction ed. Andy Sawyer and David Seed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000, pp. 96-108.

Cyborg Utopia in Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass.

by Bronwen Calvert

Published in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 34:95 (Autumn 2005) pp. 52-61.

In this paper I explore the connections between Marge Piercy’s novel Body of Glass (1991) and the “cyborg politics”... more In this paper I explore the connections between Marge Piercy’s novel Body of Glass (1991) and the “cyborg politics” set out in the writing of Donna Haraway. While Piercy’s novel itself is generally presented as a work of cyberpunk fiction, the link between it and Haraway’s work is less recognised. Throughout her novel, the genre conventions of cyberpunk fiction are apparent, but just as evident are Piercy’s social and political concerns, which are rooted in socialist and feminist movements of the 1960s. Piercy’s focus is upon the construction and maintenance of community, and upon the access of those communities to knowledge and information; the communities on which she focuses are locally-based “minority” groupings rather than multinational corporations or anarchic city-states. These concerns mesh closely with those of Haraway, whose “Manifesto for Cyborgs” Piercy cites as a direct influence. This is in the nature of a feedback loop, since Haraway has cited Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (written in 1978) as an influence on the “Manifesto” (written in 1985).

Mind, Body, Imprint: Cyberpunk Echoes in the Dollhouse

by Bronwen Calvert

Published in Slayage: the Journal of the Whedon Studies Association, 30-31, Summer/Fall 2010.

Thematic preoccupations about the connections between embodiment and technology appear in several contemporary... more Thematic preoccupations about the connections between embodiment and technology appear in several contemporary television narratives, including the extensive debates about versions of “humanity” in Battlestar Galactica (2003-9), explorations of transformation through cybernetics in The Bionic Woman (2007), and questions about the nature and relationship of mind, body and soul in Dollhouse (2008-10). All these preoccupations can be found within texts of “classic” cyberpunk from the early 1980s onwards; for example, films such as Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999), science fiction novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), and more recent “mainstream” fiction such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). This paper examines the connections between some key tropes of cyberpunk texts and the narrative of Dollhouse, including the exploration of the experience of embodiment and the relationship between body and mind.

The Influences of Technology: Understanding How Technology Contributes to Who We Are Online

by Marcus Leaning

The Cyberpunk Genre in Japanese Anime and Manga by Rufus Montecalvo

by rufus montecalvo

submitted as an undergraduate research paper

Anime and manga have become major entertainment exports of Japan since the last decades. As of 2006, Japanese anime... more Anime and manga have become major entertainment exports of Japan since the last decades. As of 2006, Japanese anime comprise almost sixty percent of all animation broadcast worldwide. It generates four billion dollars a year in the United States alone, and foreign revenue account for almost twenty-five per cent of the income of leading Japanese animation companies such as Toei. Particularly in the Philippines, a substantial segment of young people are exposed to Japanese popular culture through these avenues. During the 90s, several anime series were shown in the two major television channels of the country usually dubbed in Tagalog. A few examples are Sailor Moon, Voltes V, Daimos, Doraemon, Mojacko, Thunder Jet and Ghost Fighter. A specific genre in this huge industry is science fiction. A most interesting and specific sub-genre within science fiction in general and Japanese animation and manga in particular, is cyberpunk.

Education and the Politics of Cyberpunk

by David R Cole

The importance in contemporary education of critical theory as a pedagogic basis for the analysis of textual and... more The importance in contemporary education of critical theory as a pedagogic basis for the analysis of textual and cultural resources creates a space for educationalists to implement meaningful curriculum content. The genre of cyberpunk acts on this level, yet also activates a complex micropolitical field that will affect participants in these lessons. For example, education using cyberpunk assumes that computers shall be set into place in terms of the learning process, but contests the social functionalism of this placement as a means to enhanced, large scale capitalist organization

The Network and the Archive: The Specter of Imperial Management in William Gibson's Neuromancer

by Andrew Strombeck

Science Fiction Studies 37.2 [111] ( July2010): 275-295.

This article argues that William Gibson’s Neuromancer registers a tension between two historical moments of managerial... more This article argues that William Gibson’s Neuromancer registers a tension between two historical moments of managerial power: while steeped in the moment of the “network society,” with its simulated authority and flattened hierarchies, the text exhibits nostalgia for the more hierarchical moment of imperialism, best manifested in its lauded treatment of Straylight. While the network society provides mobility primarily for elites, it nevertheless offers possibility for subaltern masses to be visible within its networks. The network society, then, would seem to offer less masculine domination than the earlier moment of imperialism, an idea Gibson reinforces by dissolving the globalized manager Armitage. And yet managerial power does not dissipate with Armitage; the hacker Case, seemingly an outsider to power, emerges as a kind of manager by the novel’s end. Similarly, the subaltern subjects who seemed to gain power throughout the book’s plot—most notably the Rastafarians—are ultimately subordinated to the imperial power represented by Straylight.

Convergence of the Two Cultures: A Geek's Guide to Contemporary Literature

by Jay Clayton