Suicidal Society
SUICIDAL SOCIETY
They raped the machine to survive. They noticed her brilliance, her perfection, and her shine and felt inadequate. They screamed competition but they had already climaxed their own evolutionary potential (Bernal 1929, as cited in Horner 2001, 72). Still she glistened: obedient, patient. They courted her until she surpassed them, then they took her by force, impregnating society with its illegitimate progeny (Haraway 2000, 293). They raped the machine to instigate sexual selection, conceiving their new child, the cyborg, to anticipate traits useful to them and them alone (Darwin 2005). How wonderful, a machine-creature born with the tools to survive by its virtue of being founded upon the destruction of human identity (Haraway 2000, 292). Perhaps they hope to live vicariously through their wary children for the cyborg signals the end of their goal (Haraway 2000, 291). Nevertheless such is humanity. Only with the knowledge that their species will persist, will they finally consent to die.
THE CYBORGIAN APPEAL
The appeal of the cyborg in both modern and imagined worlds appears to be marketed for various reasons, audiences, and ends ranging eclectically and ubiquitously from medical curiosity to erotic fantasy with some speckles of apocalyptic drama and transhumanism thrown in (Gonzalez 2000, 65; Haraway 2000, 292; Horner 2001, 73). Regardless of the direction from whence interest is cast; however, ultimately it can be presumed that the market value of the cyborg operates primarily on the principle of progression. From advancement of the physique to durability and hyper sophistication, the cyborg eases limits that far exceed human capability, aspiring ambitions that idealistically speaking, surpass realistic expectation. It is precisely because the cyborg creature parallels social reality and created fiction, that such deductions can be drawn (Haraway 2000, 291). Thereafter, what is real can be observed and measured, but what is imagined merely requires belief. In essence, “[F]reedom… is only limited by our imaginations.” (Plant 1997, 180)
Although Haraway (2000) hypothesizes the cyborg’s existence in a post-gender world, Gonzalez (2000) refutes this, instead highlighting the explicitness of female sexuality that encases the birth of the fictional cyborg. While it would appear that the former is anticipating the hybrid in terms of the pending future, Gonzalez (2000) plainly dates her theory in observable space and raises several interesting points into the cyborgian appeal. Her argument that the concept of the cyborg is promoted through female eroticism and sex appeal is clearly omnipresent in various works of animated fiction (Gonzalez 2000). As seen in Ghost in the Shell for example, the title character Motoko Kusanagi is depicted as first and foremost a cyborg; yet, emphasis on her nubility is painstakingly deliberate, overt and difficult to ignore. Through comparatively most other works of anime also illustrate female figures in a similar fashion, it is worthy of note that this vivid sexualization pursues representations of machine effigies as well. Gonzalez (2000) is motivated by her belief that these ‘gendered cyborgs’ feed into the heterosexual male fantasy of the cyber-sexual being: a creature that is at once empowered by fashionable gadgets and at once sexually vulnerable and exploitable. Already the audience is growing.
Of the core screening on which I will concentrate on, Serial Experiments Lain, this sexualization is similarly evident on the 13 year old protagonist Lain. Initially an introverted child, her personality and femininity seem to increase in direct relationship with her submersion into the Wired. In fact, it is not long before the show sees her trades an infantile teddy bear pyjama for a suggestive white underdress as she compiles her NAVI together in a pool of water. When her father inquires into her wardrobe, she ridiculously replies that its purpose was to prevent an electric shock. From this conversation, it is presumed that this clothing is atypical of Lain; yet its explanation is redundant, forcing one to venture a relationship between her eroticism and the NAVI, perhaps in a manner similar to that used in modern advertising where an attractive young woman is exploited to promote a new commodity.
Another theme that is explored in Serial Experiments Lain is the needlessness of the flesh and the liberation superseding a lack thereof. As a pseudo-real cyborg citizen of the Wired, it is alleged that the limitations of the body are overcome through a breach in the barriers of the mind. The argument follows that one is able to continue living sans body through the Wired and that its initial existence only served to comfort human kind. Here it is observed that the cyborg is marketed as a challenge to the human shell of ailment and limited endurance. If Bernal (1969, as cited in Horner 2001) outlines the criterion of living as no less and no more as the capacity of conscious thought, then by this anointment, life in the Wired is palpably valid. The cyborg offers life after death, because it is impenetrable by the current definition of mortality; it remains in a sense invincible within this framework of time. In short, the cyborg eludes the misfortunes of nature insofar that it is fictitious; yet remains sufficiently organic to beguile desire, ambition, and belief.
LAIN = CYBORG & CYBORG = DESIRE; SO DOES LAIN = DESIRE?
“I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund.” (Miller n.d., as cited in Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 5) It seems the main dictum of Serial Experiments Lain is this: that we are all connected. This statement vis-à-vis Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) Anti-Oedipus model whereby society is constituted as a whole of interconnecting parts tends to afford itself a variety of inferences. If Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 5) explain desire as a dynamic flow that consummates a means of connectivity between and throughout a network of branching desiring-machines, producing upon them a body without organs, then against this backdrop, it appears possible to consider the cyborg Lain (within the context of the Wired) as desire, the people who log into the Wired as desiring-machines, and suicides such as Chisa or Eiri as bodies without organs.
The explanation is as follows: firstly Lain’s interactions within the Wired reveal her to be a well sought after and powerful entity within the Wired. In addition, the question of Lain’s popularity in the Wired is answerable by her reputation and god-like omnipotence. As a product of the Wired, she is its reflection and projection, thereby turning individuals who log into the Wired into desiring-machines that consciously or unconsciously aspire to connect with her. Secondly, the above deduction can be reinforced by refuting the possibility of Lain being yet another desiring-machine. While it is true that Lain’s interest in the Wired is comparable to that of others’, it is difficult to classify her status in the same box as the rest of society due to the fact that the basis of her origin displaces her from definitions pertaining to humankind. A cyborg borne out of the Wired through the seed of Eiri, her desire to explore the Wired is perhaps more accurately viewed as self-exploration or character development.
Thirdly, the notion of the suicides as bodies without organs (BwO) can be explained by its rejection of bodily restrictions and its subsequent desire to counterflow connections (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 9). Interestingly portrayed as characters whose lives in the real world were secluded or unfulfilled, these suicides soon found liberation and continued life in the Wired. Chisa, for example, encourages Lain to join her from the virtual world, exemplifying counterflow production as she reaches out from the Wired into the real world, instead of what was traditionally vice versa. Furthermore, the oppression that the body without organs felt as desiring-machines and its joy at finding life without constraints is communicated clearly through Chisa’s cheerful emails – a significant contradiction to her depressed, confined nature in the real world (Deleuze & Guettari 1983, 9). Ultimately the embodiment of Lain as desire itself speaks a powerful message towards the appeal of the cyborg in Serial Experiments Lain. “[For] when you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.” (Artaud 1947, 571)
Bibliography
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000, 291-324.
Jennifer Gonzalez, ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research’, in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Eds. Gill Kirkup, Linda James, Kath Wodward, Fiona Hovenden. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, 58-73.
David Sanford Horner, ‘Cyborgs and Cyberspace: Personal Identity and Moral Agency’, in Technospaces: Inside the New Media. Ed. Sally R. Munt. London and New York: Continuum, 2001, 71-84.
Gilez Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983, 1-10.
