Motoko Kusanagi is a metaphor for us in the 21st century. The cyborg's body has no boundaries, it flows, changes, is crushed, and reborn from the dirt and ashes. This flow constitutes our way of being.
In 1985, Donna Haraway published A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s in Socialist Review . Haraway's academic background is very complex. During college, she majored in Zoology and Philosophy, and also studied in Theology. In 1972, she completed her Ph.D. in biology at Yale University. Her theories were also born from a dual background of natural science and philosophy. In the Manifesto, she denies the possibility of women - or indeed any "group" - pursuing a collective discourse. The rapid development of science and technology is changing our lives at a speed that was once unimaginable, and following this change comes the questioning of traditional dualism, the reshaping of identity, and the "cyborg" Unique Politics.
Cyborg (cyborg) is a combination of cybernetics and organisms. This concept was first proposed by American scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline. They believe that cyborgs symbolize the possibility of human beings living outside the earth in the future, and believe that science and technology will be able to modify most of the human body structure so that we can adapt to more harsh living environments, such as other planets. Based on the concept of cyborg, Haraway developed it from a sci-fi concept to a sharp edge in deconstructing traditional Western philosophy. "A cyborg is a fiction that depicts our social and physical reality," she said in the article . For Haraway, cyborgs are more than just a science-fiction vision or speculation about the future. It is a real, metaphor for how human beings should survive in the 21st century.
In the Manifesto, Haraway identified three of the most important "boundary break-downs" in 20th-century science, each of which broke different binary perceptions. The first thing to be destroyed is the binary cognition of humans and animals in the traditional sense. The study of modern evolution fundamentally challenges the creationism represented by Christianity in Western thought. In the creationist narrative, humans are fundamentally different from other animals, such as humans being closer to God and possessing superior intelligence and morality similar to God. With the development of modern evolution, creationism is becoming more and more fragile, and this trend of thought has also given birth to more and more discussions about animal rights: human beings are actually only one of the products of evolution, and we and animals may There is no essential difference.
The second boundary to be breached is the duality between man and machine . The concept of strong artificial intelligence, which is very famous in cognitive philosophy, refers to artificial intelligence that is no different from humans, with reason and emotion. Whether such artificial intelligence is possible or not has always been a hot topic of debate in cognitive philosophy. Hiller once proposed the thought experiment "Chinese Room" to demonstrate that a machine can never "understand" what it is running on. Turing, on the other hand, believed that we will one day develop machines that truly "think". At the moment, "AI rules the world" may be just a joke. But it’s hard to deny that the lines between humans and AI are blurring so much that we sometimes wonder: Is there really a golden rule that perfectly separates humans from machines?
The final broken boundary proposed by Haraway is the opposition between the physical and the non-physics . Haraway pointed out that the development of microelectronics has made the carriers of technology, such as machinery, increasingly invisible. “Miniaturization has changed our experience of machinery.” Technologies such as Bluetooth and wireless networking disrupt our inherent perception of machinery as “tangible.” Hearing aids, pacemakers, electronic chips, and the like are ubiquitous and imperceptible. We are gradually losing the strict distinction between the physical and the non-physical, and those electronic devices are becoming a part of us. The destruction of this boundary is also the most critical destruction - the boundary between technology and the biological has been crumbling, many of us seem to have become cyborgs in the real sense - we are one with the machine, and the body itself has become part of the technology carrier.
Man and animal, man and machine, body and non-body. These three key border breaches are an interrogation of traditional Western philosophy. Those binary oppositions that have long been taken for granted—mind and body, soul and body, spirit and matter—have become increasingly vulnerable during this interrogation. Haraway then argues that any search for a collective discourse, that is, for the binary opposition of 'us' and 'them', will also become meaningless, because we can no longer define in homogenous terms Anyone. For example, a person may be middle class, female, and minority at the same time. These identities do not necessarily blend harmoniously with each other, and even often conflict and collide, and cannot be encompassed by a single term. Therefore, Haraway believes that what we should pursue should not be a single identity, but an affinity. In this kinship, we are like cyborgs—existing as individuals, connected to each other, but not sharing the same singular identity. Cyborgs break boundaries, bringing with them the unknown and the chaos that characterizes the times we live in.
This kind of contradiction and confusion is also shown by "Ghost in the Shell" in the language of the film. Many scenes in the film show the demise of boundaries, either explicitly or covertly. The opposition between man and machine is the first to be broken, and the "birth" of Motoko Kusanagi in the film's opening is an example. Kusanagi Motoko is a member of the ninth section of the public security bureau of the intelligence agency, and is also a "biochemical person" whose limbs have been completely transformed. Almost all of her body was replaced by prosthetics and machinery, and only a small piece of gray matter remained from her "original" body. It may be difficult to define whether Motoko Kusanagi is still a human being. Will that little piece of lingering gray matter decide if she's a human? If so, should she be considered a machine if her grey matter is also completely replaced? Or when her grey matter is replaced to what extent she will cease to be human? These are almost unsolvable questions. Motoko Kusanagi is the embodiment of this series of interrogations.
The Nativity scene of Motoko Kusanagi begins with a set of montages. In this montage, electronics, prosthetics and muscle tissue are meticulously assembled. A human-like body then slowly rose through a corridor full of liquid. For context, the corridor may have been made of steel or glass. Motoko Kusanagi's slow passage through the tunnel seems to be a metaphor for human production. The difference is that human babies are delivered from the mother's birth canal, while Kusanagi Motoko is born from the "birth canal" of steel and glass. It is not a flesh and blood that passes through this "birth canal", but a mixture of machinery, electronic equipment and organisms - cyborg. We often use the source to determine life, which is why the scene of production has often been sanctified since ancient times: because production symbolizes the birth of new life. The birth of Kusanagi Motoko seems rather ironic. Her cyborg body is so familiar and unfamiliar, in a way we all know, yet delivered like a monster. How else can we define human beings if even the origins are obscured?
Motoko Kusanagi's body continued through the tunnel, gradually revealing the physical characteristics of a young woman in the process. Gender is yet another broken binary. Gender in Ghost in the Shell is a very vague concept. For example, the Puppet master has a female appearance but a male voice, which is unexpectedly harmonious to the audience. When Motoko Kusanagi's body finally surfaced, it was replaced by another set of shattered montages. Her body is fragmented along with this montage. This may also symbolize a rejection of the full female body symbol. "Fragmentation and reconstruction" is Haraway's definition of a cyborg body. The cyborg's body is not an organic whole, it is fragments, chaos, a polymer of contradictions.
If the birth of Motoko Kusanagi is still a metaphor, the boundary-breaking in the climactic scene of "Ghost in the Shell" is explicit and aggressive. This scene describes the confrontation between Kusanagi Motoko and the puppet master. Interestingly, this confrontation is carefully arranged in an abandoned natural history museum. Almost all natural history museums emphasize the difference between Homo sapiens and animals, such as human beings can use tools, humans can think, and humans can reason. The natural history museums I went to as a child also had separate sections about how humans became the pinnacle of nature. The choice of an abandoned museum as a confrontation point may itself be a harbinger: the traditional narrative of the anthropocentricity will eventually be abandoned.
As the confrontation between Kusanagi Motoko and the puppet master became more intense, the tree of life evolution carved on the wall of the museum was also destroyed by tank bullets. And at the top of this tree of life is also human beings. The tree of life was abandoned and destroyed, symbolizing a challenge to the binary opposition between humans and animals, a decentralization of human beings. When the confrontation ended, Kusanagi Motoko and the puppet master were finally connected to the same network, and their bodies were no longer distinct individuals. The voices of Kusanagi Motoko and the puppet master alternately appeared from her body in fragmented form. Including the "rebirth" of Motoko Kusanagi from the girl's body at the end of the movie, it seems to emphasize the replaceability of the body. Thus, the boundary between "body and non-body" disappears.
Tree of life, organism, dualism, boundary, these concepts are all deconstructed by "Ghost in the Shell" using the language of the lens. Motoko Kusanagi is a metaphor for us in the 21st century. When technology has developed to such an extent that many of the cognitions we rely on for survival have been blurred, how should we continue to survive in this uncertainty? As far as the Manifesto is concerned, it seems that the best way out is to accept the confusion and stop clinging to a single, homogenized identity of "I." We are all cyborgs. The cyborg's body has no boundaries, it flows, changes, is crushed, and reborn from the dirt and ashes. For Haraway, this flow constitutes our way of being:
“The late twentieth century, a mythical age like ours, we are all monsters. Theorizing and assembling a mixture of machines and organisms; in short, we are cyborgs. Cyborgs are our ontology , it gives us a politics of identity."
Reference source
Clynes, M. & Kline, N. (1960) Cyborgs and Space. Astronautics. 26-27, 74-76.
Derrida, J. (2002). The Animal That Therefore I Am, Critical Inquiry 28(2): 369–417.
Fernandez, ST (2014). Collective body (p)arts: female cyborg-subjectivity in mamoru oshii's ghost in the shell. Pertanika Journal of Social Science and Humanities, 2(February), 111–120.
(The illustration basically comes from imdb)
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