Cinema in Post-Human Age: Biopolitics, Artificial Memory, and the End of the Soul
This is precisely what cultural production, in this case cinema, can
potentially bring to us – the means to explore the possibilities of the future,
a space to negotiate the vestiges of the past, and an opportunity to make sense
and design the present all at the same time. Cinema, I surmise, allows us to
explore the various intersections of humanity, the world around us, and all
that lies in between. I was particularly challenged by Donna Haraway’s piece
entitled A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late 20th Century. She
asserts that the 20th century people are cyborgs and that as such they
reject all of the previous grand narratives of religion, capitalism, sexism,
and racism. The cybirg is a post-gender category and leads to new bondings,
couplings, and machinic entities, such as that between human beings and
animals, or the blurred boundaries in modern science and technology between the
organic and the machinic. But what is a cybord? A cyborg is a hybrid of machine
and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It
goes beyond a mere synthesis but it is a hybrid entity philosophically
speaking, that is it is drawn from ideas concerning how people want the world
to be, as much as any entity already in existence.
Haraway uses the film Blade Runner to convey her points. In
this film, the androids or the replicants are more beautiful and accomplished
than humans, who in turn are run down and sickly, like broken and defective machines.
This example made be re-think about our current society and I realize that if
anything has changed, it is the fact that now the premise of the film became
even more true. Today, our technologies are amazingly human; they are very
efficient; very capable; and now there are customized lens that projects ads
suitable for one’s lifestyle. I also remembered an episode in the series The Big Bang Theory, where Raj, a
metrosexual astrophysicist who has selective mutism that prevents him from
talking to women. Raj had to be drunk or at least tipsy in order for him to
talk to women. In this episode, Raj acquired a new IPhone and discovered the
feature SIRI. Realizing that he can talk with SIRI, she responds, she gives him
compliments, and answers his questions all the time, he then falls in love with
SIRI and set out to find her to proclaim his love to her.
Of course, this seems to be pretty mundane and
comical even, but then again it tells us how humans can fall in love with
technology; how the line that divides the emotions previously for humans alone
can now transcend and be allocated to machines. Furthermore, today people are
becoming more and more like machines themselves. It is as if they are still
living in a conveyor belt that everything is in routine that falls into
patterns – that people now go to work, bars, and home just to do the same thing
over and over again; that is to work and rest, and one rests to as to be able
to work the next day. There has been no time for real rest, not time for
meditation, all time is dedicated to working like a piece of machine.
Cinema in fact portrays
this phenomenon quite interestingly – as cinema provides an inevitable
intercourse between machines and humanity. Humanity is made to appear but the
influence of machine still remains apparent. Human emotions, activities, and thoughts
are depicted in films but these are not without the mediation of technology –
aye, it is through the efficient and effective mediation of technology that
these elements acquire authenticity and credibility. Through the manipulation
of light, of sound, and even of the scene itself, of the background, that the
portrayal of reality becomes clearer…that the face of humanity becomes closer
to truth. I say, perhaps it true. We are cyborgs and so films, which is a
fabric of social reality, also demonstrates this hybridity. Overall, I think
this is a good read in the context of films and thepost-human. One may buy it
or not, but, at the end of the day, reading Haraway, looking at films, and
looking at today’s reality one is encouraged to re-think how the world should
be viewed and how to relate to it. Perhaps, a look at intersections,
transitions, and transformations is a good vantage point to view the world.
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