Cyborg Orgy, part II

As cyborg orgy, MW3 instantiates the nightmare of Haraway’s cyborg. As Haraway writes, “the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (151). MW3 is clearly an outgrowth of, and complicit in the reproduction of, both militarism and patriarchal capitalism. Indeed, as the current genre-defining FPS, MW3 represents a union of militarism and capitalism that is perhaps unique in consumer culture. MW3 markets itself as “Modern Warfare”; its appeal is that it provides access to a simulation of the latest military technology. There is a dizzying array of possible weapons to use: rifles, submachine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns. Each weapon can be customized with various gadgets and attachments. In other words, you can quickly create your own custom solider, your own unique virtual warrior identity. As with other attempts at identify formation within consumerism, however, you ultimately are still only able to choose within a predetermined set of options; while you might have the illusion of choice, your identity is really predetermined.

MW3 eroticizes modern warfare. The game makes war and its modern technologies objects of desire. As a consumer object, the game satiates the fetishes of a particular consumer demographic: young white males. As Joker says in Full Metal Jacket, “I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.” MW3 answers our desire to wield the weapon technologies we see on television and movies… and to kill with them. Part of the appeal of Modern Warfare is that it’s Modern Warfare: the game lets us kill with real world weapon systems, and while the physics of the game are impossible, it certainly aims for a high-level of visual fidelity, right down to the brand names featured on the holographic weapon sights.

The multiplayer game completely removes the consequences of deploying real world weapons technologies, including even the potential for fratricide. The game’s most destructive weapons can be wielded with no possibility of killing team members, which is a relatively recent development in FPS. No friendly fire fits in with other attempts to make MW3 as mainstream and accessible as possible. Whereas other FPS games in the modern warfare genre aim for tactical gameplay and realism with an accompanying steep learning curve, MW3 includes a series of ingenious design features that ensure new players can pick up the game and score kills right out of the box.

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“But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins" (151).

As the above quotation suggests, Haraway believes that cyborgs have subversive potential, but I don’t know if they do in MW3.

Battlefield 2, a PC game released several years ago, shares a lot with MW3. However, when wielding this game's most powerful weapon, jet aircraft that could rapidly attack any part of the map (the ultimate eye-weapon-phallus within this particular cyborgic system), you always faced the potential of team killing. The lethality of your weaponry could always work both ways. Even this limited ethical responsibility is missing from MW3...

Cyborg Orgy

“And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” (Haraway 150).

I intend to read Modern Warfare 3 as it instantiates a particular posthuman embodiment, as it allows for a particular posthuman becoming. As Haraway writes, “modern war is a cyborg orgy,” but how does one participate in the cyborg orgy of this online first-person shooter?

In an orgy, you’re either fucked or you’re getting fucked – or at least this is one way, perhaps a phallocentric way, to look at it. MW3, if anything, is phallocentric. Players are basically embodied as a disembodied weapon-phallus-eye roaming around in the game-space, or “map.” Modern warfare is maneuverer warfare, and it is my goal to maneuverer my weapon-phallus-eye in such a way as to allow my cyborg to see my opponent before my opponent sees me. This allows me the chance to score lethal damage on my cyborg opponent, earning a kill, with as little risk to me as possible.

Getting the first look doesn’t always ensure you’ll score the kill, but it helps; it gives you time to fire your weapon without being fired at by your opponent, to fuck rather than be fucked. Space, via the exploitation of space through maneuverer, can be used to rob your opponent of reaction time. This can be an active maneuverer, as in flanking. To flank, one moves the weapon-phallus-eye to the side or rear of an opponent. Indeed, taking an opponent from behind is the most tactically dominant position. Flanking requires knowledge of the map, as well as an understanding and anticipation of how the opponent will move through space (in time). A skilled player can wipe out an entire squad with a successful flanking maneuverer.

Alternatively, one can exploit space passively, as in camping. A camper sets up in a spot that allows access to long lines of sight over high-traffic areas of the map. Looking down the sights of his rifle and catching his more mobile opponents unaware, the camper can dispatch multiple enemies with little risk to himself. Like flanking, camping requires knowledge of the map and enemy movement patterns through space (in time). Camping is generally a more conservative strategy; you place yourself at less risk because you move less and therefore have less chance of being caught within an opponent’s line of sight. Alternatively, you’re relying on your opponent to place himself within your line of sight, which often results in less kills.

This is the pleasure of this particular cyborg orgy – a panoptic spatio-visual coitus performed through stringing together multiple kills. I use the phrase panoptic spatio-visual coitus to connote the following image: I want to become a cyborg octopus with multiple visual tentacles ensnaring and fucking my opponents. I want to see my opponent without being seen in order to kill my opponent without being killed. I want to maneuverer myself through space and time in order to make this happen. This is how I derive my cyborg pleasure in MW3. Unfortunately, the cyborg octopus metaphor is limited because I can only take in one stream of visual information at once. I have only one tentacle, one weapon-phallus-eye. However, the game allows me to make this cycloptic weapon-phallus-eye more powerful, to see more, and faster, to fuck more people up more effectively.

String together enough kills, and your panoptic spatio-visual coitus becomes easier to perform. 5 kills earns you access to a missile fired from an unnamed aerial drone. The Predator missile interface, which your character accesses from a laptop computer (a simulacral interface-within-the-interface) affords a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and highlights your opponents in red boxes. You pilot the missile home, and if you’re successful, you fuck people up. Higher level kill streak rewards include an AC-130 gunship, which circles the entire map and allows you to fire devastating weapons on the entire enemy team simultaneously; becoming AC-130 is the preferred role to play in this online cyborg orgy. In Modern Warfare 2, you could drop a nuke on the map and end the round after 25 kill streak; this is the ultimate cyborg money shot.

Posthuman Media Project

Over the weekend, I dusted off my Xbox 360 and purchased Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. After renewing my Xbox Live subscription, I jumped into the multiplayer game for several hours in order to collect footage for my Posthuman Media Project.

Yes, the new Call of Duty allows you to upload footage from in-game to YouTube. This is very useful to me, as I’m not familiar with, nor do I have access to, video game footage capture software and hardware, which can be quite expensive. Call of Duty “records” information from each game you play and saves it for later viewing in a Theater Mode.

I put the word “records” in quotation marks because the game doesn’t literally record footage, but instead tracks information that allows for a recreation of the round you played within the game engine itself. You have access to a recording of your own first-person perspective as it appeared to you during the round. You can also use a free-floating camera to explore what other players were doing during the match, or watch them from a third-person perspective; you cannot, it appears, view the game from other player’s first-person perspectives. Theater Mode features a very simple interface for taking screen shots and editing clips from the raw recording. You can record segments from a longer match and put them together to create your own custom video. However, you’re limited by only being able to put together segments from one round; you cannot splice together action from multiple maps.

Also, any fancy John Woo-style cinematic techniques/effects have to be accomplished manually in the third-person camera mode, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make smooth transitions between different segments. Limitations aside, it’s great that the game comes with this ability – it’s perfect for putting together short clips to share with your friends on Xbox Live, which is really its primary purpose. It might even allow for possibilities that would be difficult with a game like World of Warcraft, for example; I’m not sure if WoW allows you to record a raid and replay it using the game engine. I get the impression that most Machinima videos have to be recorded digitally using third-party equipment (software or hardware).

For my Posthuman Media Project, I knew I wanted to do something with first-person shooters. What thesis I intend to present regarding MW3’s multiplayer and Theater Mode, exactly, is less certain. Here’s a first swing:

When I enter MW3’s virtual space, I become a cyborg. I become part of a cybernetic feedback loop; my body responds to the game, and the game responds to me. When I play multiplayer, my body responds to the game, the game responds to me, and I also respond and interact with other human/machine assemblages in a very fluid, dynamic way.

It’s really amazing, when you think about it, how precisely the game-machine can link players so far apart. Sure, there’s always lag, and it’s annoying as hell. However, a multiplayer first-person shooter relies on split-second timing – the quick and the dead are separated by fractions of a second. Mostly, the game provides the feeling that you’re genuinely in control of your own destiny in this regard; it’s less about who has a faster connection and more about how quickly you can aim and fire your weapon. 

Specialization

Lately I've been considering a change in specialization to rhetoric and composition. I'm not exactly sure what my specialization was before – Ecocriticism? SF? Posthumanism? None of these seem like especially attractive or coherent sub-fields within the English department. My work with sustainability at FGCU was less concerned with “ecocritical” concerns (as they might constitute an academic discourse) and more about institutional and educational practice. SF is problematic as it's not often recognized as "literature." It also doesn't have the institutional legitimacy of other bodies of cultural texts, such as nineteenth or twentieth-century British literature, for example. In other words, there isn't a clear and secure place for the study and teaching of SF within the English Department, and it would seem difficult to make a career as a scholar of SF. Posthumanism, as a developing sub-field within critical theory, is likewise on the margins of common professional practice, which isn't surprising given it's emergent, inchoate, and contested nature as a theoretical discourse. I’ve always felt as if I’ve been torn in a number of intellectual directions.

I feel as if I'm looking for a body of knowledge or a discourse, an area of sudy, through which to legitimize and bring together my intellectual interests. I acknowledge that this is problematic, this desire for legitimacy and coherence, but it seems like an unavoidable necessity as an academic Subject first, and a posthuman Subject second. Furthermore, without being too much of a mercenary, I would like to think the learning and intellectual output that I undertake in graduate school will result in a job; the theorization, teaching, and practice of writing seem to have a more definite place within the university than the theorization and study of SF or posthumanism (for their own sake).

Part of what sparks my interest in rhetoric and composition, however, is that it seems like my theoretical and literary interests could be accommodated within the discourse of rhetoric and composition. For example, SF has its own rhetoric. As writing, part of what SF does it ask us to reflect on the techno-human relationship and its future possibilities (including possible configurations of the trans and posthuman). SF defamiliarizes aspects of science and technology as a way of confronting us with the need to consider what we value and in what ethical regard we should view techno-scientific development. SF makes arguments. SF mediates between techno-culture and popular culture. SF also demands of its readers a certain "scientific literacy," and I would like to think more about the role of SF in educating, or miseducating, the public about the consequences of technological and scientific advance.

I like the prospect of re-engaging with pedagogy, as well. How does SF posthumanism connect with teaching? Most of the courses that I have taught are in rhetoric and composition – and, not having earned a fellowship, it’s likely I’ll be teaching a lot more for the UWP. Thus, it only makes sense to take advantage of the experience teaching rhetoric and writing, to connect it more fully with my scholarly interests.  

Posthuman ecology?

One concept that seems conspicuously absent from discussions concerning posthumanism is ecology and environment. Hayles's emphasis on materiality and embodiment has a quasi-ecological dimension. Haraway's critique of "organic wholeness" serves as an antidote to strategies of imaginative resistance to globalized technological consumerism based on a return to Nature. I think there's more for me to do, or at least research, to determine whether this has been done, in terms of drawing connections between environmentalist (a term I use to connote a popular field of rhetoric and thought) and ecocritical (a term I use to designate an academic discourse) texts and critical posthumanist texts. (As an aside, I think the distinction between "popular" and "critical" posthumanism is perhaps problematic - on what basis do theorists such as Simon claim to be more "critical" than their popular posthumanism peers?)

There are strains of ecocritical thought that complicate what Haraway identifies as the rhetoric of organic wholeness. "Queer ecology," for example, identifies how essentialist conceptions of nature play out in the construction of certain genders. This could be in the ecofeminist mode, in which women are associated with Nature, and men with Culture. Alternatively, narratives of men going out into Nature to escape Culture attempt to locate an authentic masculinity in Nature. Representations of nature as an organic, intact, integral, reproductive system also carry a kind of heteronormative valence. Queer ecology works against these tendencies by seeking to undo the oppositions I have gestured toward above. In Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought, Morton performs a very penetrating critique of predominant attempts to theorize Nature, ultimately arguing for the provisionality and inherent non-referentiality of any attempt to represent Nature.

What I would like to suggest is that popular environmental rhetoric is an overlooked counter-narrative to that provided by popular posthumanism. As Zizek muses in the documentary The Examined Life, the voice that tells us to stop, to hesitate, to not tamper with Nature (whether human nature or Nature nature) is the voice of environmentalism and ecology. What concerns me is that in criticizing the ideological limitations of these views, the ideology of organic wholeness, we (posthumanist theorists) do not provide a coherent and accessible alternative conceptual framework. The environmentalist emphasis on the organic serves to draw attention to the potential for industrial technological food systems to introduce undesirable pollutants into the environment, into animals, and individuals. Popular environmental rhetoric also draws attention to the plight of animals used in cybernetic food systems - these animal-machine hybrids certain embody the "nightmare" potentiality of Haraway's ironic political myth. Environmentalists are also right to point out the impossibility of brining nature within technological systems of control - as climate change reveals, the global economic consumer system has not accounted for the material conditions of its own possibility. In other words, both popular and critical posthumanists seldom reflect in a thoughtful way on the ecological and material limits posed to the development of radical posthuman technologies.

I am interested in the possibility of popular environmental rhetoric to function as a site for posthuman interventions in globalized consumer capitalism in part because environmental rhetoric is more intelligible and accessible to people than anything critical posthumanism offers. To put it rather crudely, which would you rather circulate within popular discourse: environmental rhetoric, or transhumanist rhetoric? Most people cannot sustain the indeterminacy, aporia, and eclecticism demanded by critical posthumanism - at least in my opinion. Perhaps I'm naively reaching for the emergence of some new kind of metanarrative - some utopian fusion of environmentalism and posthumanism, a technophilia and biophilia that acknowledges the limitations imposed by material embodiment...

Popular and critical posthumanism

Posthumanism as a term suffers from an excess of signification. It can mean many different things in many different contexts. I look forward to dwelling at length on its possible meanings and articulating my own perspective on the concept as I continue to read and write during my doctoral work. However, for now, I think the concept (posthumanism, the posthuman) has at least two primary connotations. Simon Bart distinguishes between "popular posthumanism" and  "critical posthumanism," which I think is a useful way of thinking about the tension between heterogeneous mass cultural representations of techno-human relationships and a heterogeneous academic discourse concerned with questioning the historical liberal humanist subject.

First, I will reflect a bit on popular posthumanism. I find academic discussions of popular posthumanism to be a bit frustrating, because seldom do theorists carefully distinguish between the various threads of popular posthumanist rhetoric, nor do they pay much attention to how "transhumanism," as a cultural and intellectual movement, might qualitatively differ and be distinguished from popular posthumanism. Figures such as Ray Kurzweil and Francis Fukuyama and Hans Moravec are also universally cited as progenitors of popular posthumanism, which isn't in and of itself a problem, but I feel academic critical posthumanism could benefit from trying to show in a more careful way how popular posthumanist ideas manifest themselves in popular culture. I mean, outside of a transhumanist subculture, how seriously do people take the ideas espoused by these thinkers concerning possible posthuman futures? What are the material, political, and economic effects of popular posthumanist ideas? What's at stake in how techno-cultural and techno-human relationships are imagined and represented, and, if academic posthumanists differ from these thinkers, do they offer a coherent alternative to the vision presented by Kurzweil in a work like The Singularity is Near? I don't mean to suggest that it's the responsibility of critical posthumanism to present a unified counter-narrative to that espoused by someone such as Kurzweil. But what I'm trying to understand is where both popular posthumanism and critical posthumanism intersect with mass culture. If we feel that we need to continue to challenge the liberal humanist subject (which is to a large extent preserved within popular posthumanism) with the aim of accomplishing specific political goals, where is this struggle occurring or where should it occur?

One reason why I gravitate so much to Hayles is her emphasis on embodiment and materiality in discussions of the posthuman; there's an almost ecological dimension to her work that I find appealing. She also presents a very concrete counter-narrative to popular posthumanism: organisms are not infinitely malleable beings reducible to patterns of information; they have a material basis that could be impossible to replicate once that form has been destroyed.

I also find Haraway very useful from a more metaphysical standpoint: her critique of the ideology of "organic wholeness," best articulated in the “Manifesto,” is very useful for thinking through virtually any popular representation of the posthuman. I'm not quite sure yet if there's a coherent politics that emerges from Haraway's project, but she's always good at helping me question dualisms, question self-assured ethical positions, recognizing our unavoidable entanglement in networks of nurturing and killing. For me, the cyborg, or the companion species, is a very useful way of thinking about posthuman subjectivity; I am not a whole, integral, autonomous, organic being. I am divided, damaged, artificial, and perhaps only in tenuous communication with all of my parts - but I'm not cynical, either.

Some thoughts on Posthuman Bodies

I fear that without saying “where we’ve been” and without defining specific political goals, even the best intentions to theorize embodiment as something other than “fixed location in a reified body” (Haraway 195) can obscure the historical and discursive production of subjectivities, and consequently hide some of the political opportunities and pitfalls available in understanding such productions. Defining or owning up to what those political opportunities are is what can prevent the posthuman project from becoming too much like Terminator 2, where the razzle-dazzle of single, plastic (not to mention white and male) bodies gets more airtime than the implied or direct, historical and discursive confrontations that supply the plasticity out of which culturally valid bodies and subjectivities arise. (236)

In this passage from her essay, “Terminating Bodies,” Carol Mason seems to want to foreground the “historical and discursive production of subjectivities” in relation to the theorization of posthuman embodiment. Mason puts her point another way when she writes, “It’s not really cyborgs, or any individual bodies, that we need to examine. It’s the examination of contingent and perpetual processes of historical and discursive re-production that can allow us to better locate, articulate, and specify the aims of this ‘political unity’ or ‘posthuman’ ‘we’” (237). In other words, Mason seems to worry that “the razzle-dazzle of single, plastic [posthuman] bodies” will become more important to posthuman theorization than the fluid cultural entanglements in which bodies and subjectivities take shape (236). Her reading of Terminator 2, for example, reveals that technology-centered analyses of the cyborg are only one way to approach the film; she makes a compelling argument that ideologies of race and gender, figured within the confrontation between Dyson and Connor, must be accounted for in attempts to theorize the cyborg. Mason suggests that the cyborg must be historically-situated.

Her claim that we need to define specific political goals in relation to posthuman theorization is also interesting me; I think this is to avoid the “razzle-dazzle” of looking at single, plastic bodies. One of the most powerful moments in her essay is when she reminds us that conservatives have used a certain posthuman discourse, a certain alternative conception of the body, to argue for the rights of unborn children – conservative arguments about fetal personhood reveal that “the embodied individual is only one of many possible interpretations of what counts as a legal person possessed of rights. This position therefore introduced the possibility that legal personhood might be assigned to some unit that is lesser or greater than the embodied individual” (251).

Posthumanist attempts to disaggregate and untangle bodies, embodiment, materiality, and subjectivity “swing both ways,” to use some of Mason’s language. I think this is why she suggests that this theorization must proceed with specific political goals in mind; the modes of analyses themselves don’t necessarily provide clear political goals. Haraway’s reminder that attempts to imagine the future are never innocent is particularly useful here; there isn’t necessarily any stable, utopian discourse to which we can appeal to argue for a coherent space of posthuman possibilities.

Term paper free writing 4

The posthuman could be a field of possibility, a socially and politically negotiated range of configurations operating within certain technological and material limitations. What the posthuman can become, in other words, is based on what people agree to, what people allow, and also what technology allows us to do. These changes will also take place within a mesh of ecological/material boundaries that will help co-determine what possible configurations of the posthuman are viable. Biotechnology and information technology (bioinformatics) offer individuals the possibility to radically transform themselves. However, the unintended consequences of globalized economic and technological development might be just as much a catalyst for posthuman becomings as the techno-transhumanist impulse. Environmental contaminants, ecological disintegration, lived human-techno relationships – part of imagining the posthuman is going beyond a “transhumanist” approach centered an autonomous individuals using technology to reconfigure themselves towards specific ends. Caught up in a webwork of technological and material flows, the nature of our becoming is only partially something we control. Cultural texts like SF have a role to play in co-determining the field of posthuman possibility. The posthuman is less a stable taxonomic designation and more something that refers to a mode of imagining, a mode of speculation; this is not an idle project, as the desires figured within imaginings of the posthuman have real consequences on lived realities.

What does the reproduction mean in posthuman terms? Perhaps before we examine its posthuman valences, it would be worth dwelling for a moment on its other possible meanings. In heterosexual reproduction, two organisms pass on their genetic material to their offspring. Sexual reproduction allows an organism to reproduce itself as a material system. Reproduction is imaginatively and emotionally-charged – to be deprived of reproduction is to be deprived of a possible future. Reproduction engenders a set of social relationships. Reproduction is culturally-negotiated by a set of sexual codes. Technology allows us greater options of choosing when and how we reproduce, but this ability doesn’t come without the possibility for accidents and malfunctions. Birth control, for instance, has returned as a politically controversial issue in the United States because of the sexual possibilities it affords women, because of the alternative social, familial, interpersonal, and sexual arrangements and relationships that it makes possible. As organisms, we reproduce the conditions of our own reproducibility. Reproduction requires material consumption, expenditure of energy; reproduction is an embodied activity. Reproduction creates a possible future, opens up a particular horizon.

The cyborg can be imagined as a challenge to heterosexual reproduction. It is prophylaxis. Technological barriers impede or change the functioning of the reproductive system. Fukuyama, for example, imagines a “postsexual” phase for posthumans brought about by possible radical life extension technologies. The idea of nature and natural sex enters here. A very particular kind of sex, heteronormative reproductive sex, is enshrined as the norm. Other lived sexual experiences and relations are defined as deviant or perverse. In other words, the cyborg is queer. Is the posthuman queer? As an open field, as an imagined entity still very much being defined, the posthuman could be queer. Like Haraway’s cyborg, the posthuman is part nightmare, part promise. The posthuman is utopic and dystopic, the posthuman is in some sense an imaginative construct that reveals to us, like a monster, what we are (not),  what we desire to become (or avoid becoming).