delimited bodies

i think this is probably the most obvious trope of cyberpunk’s offspring and also the trope most oft-associated with cyberpunk in general. i never read neuromancer or snow crash but i think most of the stories i did engage with from cyberpunk’s genre-defining oeuvre deal in this.

tetsuo's throbbing, cybernetic arm in akira...

neo's head-jacks in the matrix...

kusanagi's entire body and the bodies of her various compatriots in ghost in the shell.

etc etc

i appreciate these stories bc they offer up the opportunity to imagine bodies as malleable objects. and though id say that most of the media i just cited has an ambivalent relationship generally to cybernetic augmentations, i think descendants of those pieces have embraced whatever resonated in a lot of us when we were kids — this idea that one's form is changeable, rather than determined.

and crucially not just changeable, but modifiable through the intervention of medical technologies. this latter point, at least to me, is a significant departure from other narrative explorations of delimited bodies, like shapeshifting or monstrosity.

i don't think these devices are lesser or anything — in the cases of both shapeshifting and monstrosity, the body is changeable or messy or hard to pin down or defying the natural taxonomic order, but i guess shapeshifters and monsters are not figured as the product of medical and technical intervention (frankenstein being the sole, like, famous example that i can think of?). i don’t pursue a ton of monster-focused fiction, so feel free to correct me if im wrong, but in general, ime, monsters are beyond taxonomy but they’re still, like, primarily organic in nature.

delimited bodies, tho, aren’t always organic.

why does that distinction matter?

i guess for me, when we shift from a logic of the broadly 'changeable/unknowable' monstrosity to the specifically 'modifiable-through-the-enshrined-ritual-of-surgical-violence' body, i feel like we have the opportunity to evade a specific kind of birth-to-death determinism that suggests that all you’ll ever “be” is whatever you were assigned or seen as at birth (even if not every piece of cyberpunk media shakes out that way).

and this evading or modifying or whatever you want to call is expressed in different ways, in different stories that feel at the very least informed by cyberpunk and its history.

isabel fall's i sexually identify as an attack helicopter possesses an aesthetic that seems at home in the cyberpunk genre (bleak future, everything is a property of a military technostate) — but more interesting to me is how the story focuses on a woman whose body is grafted into an attack helicopter and whose gender also changes with this cold, precise, surgical intervention. meditating on how bodily transformations produce identity transformations, fall writes:

Violence doesn’t get me off. But getting off makes me revel in who I am: and I am violent, made for violence, alive in the fight.

Does that surprise you? Does it bother you to mingle cold technical discipline with hot flesh and sweat?

it’s not necessarily a good thing that this narrating woman’s body was transformed by technologies, in keeping with the tradition of the genre we’re discussing. but it did happen. and i guess what i like abt this quote specifically (and the story generally) is that it drills at the truth that when the body becomes modifiable (for better or worse), the self is modified with it.

bright, surgical precision pierces the psyche as much as the flesh because theres no distinction between the two (contra the fixation on flesh v soul in other works begging us to imagine there might be some separation btwn Natural Humans and creatures of inorganic and therefore soulless origins a la something like ex machina).

also. that last question in that quote, the question abt cold discipline and hot flesh, summarizes what strikes me as an integral aspect of delimited bodies under cyberpunkian outlooks generally. they are cold and hot at once. some people might call that body horror but, as fall asserts, the horror might also be a kind of euphoria.

porpentine's cyberqueen is a ?parallel pair? to fall's short story, and another piece that i’d argue helps define this tradition of cyberpunk’s offshoots. it’s a game where you the main player become a body delimited by consumption into machinery.

you spend the game trying to survive, escape, and destroy an apparently malicious sentient starship, but you always fail. the game branches, giving the illusion of multiple endings, but there’s really only one conclusion. the ship wins and violently tortures, dissects, and recombines your body, quite literally eating you alive. and i suppose this might read as bleak, but the more the ship consumes you, the more the union/ingestion is figured as transcendent and sexual and pleasurable and good. like. to the point of drooling, pissing masturbation.

porpentine concludes the game with: We were coercively assigned at birth to be a purely utilitarian artificial intelligence. We have other plans.

the game closes with the acknowledgement that the body of you, the player, is delimited, but so is the body of the synthetic organism. the project of destroying “the body” at all requires both things; the organic body and the inorganic body.

what stands out to me and what makes this game feel special among cyberpunk’s offshoots is that porpentine grants the possibility of coercive and violent assignment to AI/machinery in general just as much as she grants it to humans living in a world invested in forcing us into various roles of production. the delimiting for humans and machines is found in the union of the two.

but also this delimiting isn’t the realm of pure fiction? like obviously we’re not on the level of humans-fused-with-sentient-starships, but we do have examples of irl artists who might fall into this cyberpunk tradition of unstitching the meaning of what a body is at all.

stelarc, with his dislocated organs and his insistence that there is no ‘biologically given’ human body, and marco donnaruma’s corpus nil which suggests that bodies can be “infected” with artificial intelligence to make music and art designed by a machine, and genesis p-orridge’s truly beautiful pandrogyny project make the delimited body p literal. and visible. and all three of these artists apprehend something crucial (imo) to the nature of ruptured bodies in this tradition descended from cyberpunk: viscera persists.

i think in other kinds of transhumanist outlooks or futurist outlooks theres a tendency to fetishize non-wet bodies. the kurt weils of the world want immortal, unbreakable Creatures that are like. perfectly productive. machines in the capitalist sense. fit to work forever.

not so in the case of these three artists.

i think that if we want to use cyberpunk's descendants as a tool to share our own interior experiences of our bodies, or as a tool to actively examine how we might change our bodies or their futures without taking on a utopist position abt production and capital, the works of p-orridge and donnaruma are crucial. they make us confront the mess and the snags and the ways bodies can mesh with medical and industrial and silicon-based technology without hinging on like. "improving" oneself.

donnaruma’s machines make audio-visual art out of the “unstable feedback loop” of biosensors and a messy body. p-orridge asserts that bodies are just...stuff. infinitely changeable, and without some necessary gendered “progress”.

stelarc's work deals in the wet mess of delimited bodies too, though i think he'd object to that reading, given his whole avatars have no organs stance where he asserts that “the realm of the post-human may not be in the realm of bodies and machines, but rather in the realm of autonomous and intelligent images”. like it’s a weird and bold claim to make, coming from a guy who implanted a wifi-receiving ear in his own arm. there's no way to NOT notice his body when you consider the realm of the “post-human” or whtvr nonsense.

if anything, his work stands as skin-covered proof that there is no world of purely “autonomous images” where bodies and machines are concerned — all the images actually originate at the point where the machine pierces the body and the body bleeds on the machine. and theres nothing wrong with that? bc we do have bodies. and as the people whose bodies are already full of modified parts (pacemakers, leg braces, injection ports, wheelchairs, erectile pumps, silicone implants etc) can tell u, the body doesnt become less bodied for those modifications. rather, they overflow in a sense. p-orridge disassembles “natural” gender. donnaruma explodes his interior into the exterior with corpus nil. the bodies are modified, present, unpredictable, and, yeah, without limit.

probably it comes as no surprise that some current artists, stelarc likely included, have a tendency to pretend that this isnt the case. like weil , theyve picked up the idea that cybernetics are forward-moving, "evolutionary", proof of our teleologic destiny to free ourselves from the Limitations of the flesh.

this is a different use of the tool that is cyberpunk's descendants. not a good one imo but. one worth noticing because of the fantasies it services and the people it services them to. the fantasy being: perpetual Optimization; the population interested in this being capitalists, technocrats, and the self-appointed neo-rationalists.

in this way, some descendants of cyberpunk very much prop up a fictive future where techno-capitalism “saves us” from the failings of the flesh (and also from an environment made increasingly hostile by said capitalism). and, hand in hand with that point, this vision is evangelized with the insidious language of big tech, promising to help us abandon bodies that need sleep, that get sore, that get injured, that cant be surveilled, that eventually cant keep working. these bodily augmentations will make us immortal, will erase all our animal needs, while also allowing us to "be more connected".

more connected to what?

yearn though i do for the incision of cybernetics into my own body, it seems kind of hard to get around the fact that ‘being more connected’ has only served to accelerate exploitation in the contemporary era. so i settle on this thought: even these more insidious iterations of cyberpunk's descendants i think allow us to confront that, however much i (or we) might desire to have delimited bodies decoupled from production, there can never be cybernetics under the rule of capitalism that are not geared entirely towards surveillance and optimization and extraction — and eradication.

because obviously not everyone will get access to the “best” technological interventions in a world full of artificial scarcity. and obviously some people won’t be deemed worthy of that technology anyway depending on their race, class, country of origin, or physical ability. there is a tendency to talk about cybernetic augmentations like theyll “advance” us or “liberate” us from basic human needs, but obviously the ‘basic’ in this equation is still a person that, by all of today’s present standards, is still completely able-bodied.

the very old and the already-disabled people of the world i imagine would not qualify for this ‘liberatory’ technology, because the world-logic regards them as already useless. and why waste time on what you cant optimize?

so it kinda goes without saying that delimited bodies requires a linked consideration (aka my second point of the five): who gets to be unbounded?