Table of Contents

Preface I

Table of Illustrations 2

Chapter 1: Introduction

Vibrations from the underground 4

Chapter 2: Production of Humans: Critique of Disembodiment

Human–machine 18

The Cartesian journey for no good reason 24

From Leibniz to psychoanalysis: “Let us calculate…” the law 26

Cybernetics: Effective communication or instrumental control? 38

Myth and a story about desire: Expansion of imagination 44

Chapter 3: Re-imag(in)ing of the Posthuman

The myth of cyborg: Subjectivity in stitches 54

Forces in relationship 71

Becoming a posthuman woman 75

Symbolization: initiating alternative forms of subjectivity 82

Chapter 4: Posthuman Consciousness

Posthuman consciousness: Mapping of the experimental world 87

Active and Reactive forces: Invasion 96

Affirmation of becoming: Posthuman at “the dawn of the world” 102

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Table of Illustrations

3.1: Enki Bilal: The Nicopol Trilogy: The Woman’s Trap (115) 67

3.2: Enki Bilal: The Nicopol Trilogy: The Woman’s Trap (110) 68

3.3: Enki Bilal: The Nicopol Trilogy: The Carnival of Immortals (23) 77
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Chapter 1

Introduction
 4

Vibrations from the underground

There is a certain departure from the human that takes place in order to start the

process of remaking the human.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

The “posthuman” figure in cyberpunk literature, cinema and graphic

novels has been present for more than two decades. Along with the metaphor of

cyberspace, this iconic figure has acquired great cultural resonance and become

increasingly visible across a range of academic and cultural texts. This is perhaps

not so surprising because cyberpunk metaphors enable us to articulate the

central tension of the digital age and reflect our experience of living in an

information-saturated environment. Today, when technology has become a great

tool for transnational capitalist domination, when our social reality is

characterized by “invasions” of the body and environment, cyberpunk provides

“political filters” through which we can see the world, as Donna Haraway

remarks, in hues of red, green, and ultraviolet. Whereas certain propositions of

postmodern politics define reality in terms of simulation and simulacra, that is, as

a hermetically closed capsule filled with floating images that bear no relation to

reality (Baudrillard 1-42), cyberpunk offers responses that stress the options for

political interventions and struggle within this technocultural context. With its

imaginative delineation of electronic spaces and places of information technology,

cyberpunk provides an affirmative vision of the post-industrial era that

transgresses the nihilistic simulacra of postmodern politics.

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As a sub-genre within science fiction and as a movement, cyberpunk

foregrounds the nightmarish reality of our world through voyages into the near

future in order to explore the effects of new technologies and illuminate the

dominant role of technology in society. Often, in sinister and dark futures of

cyberpunk narratives, communication technologies dominate every aspect of life,

while the arduous and futile battle of an ordinary citizen is fought against a

totalitarian regime of multinational giant corporations. In the same dystopian and

technologically-dominated worlds, we find possible interconnections between the

human and the technological, many of which are already vivid for contemporary

research scientists. As much as our daily interface with technology is

omnipresent, so is our need to question the continuing intellectual dominance of

the Enlightenment orthodoxies of reason, knowledge and truth. Although post-

structuralist discourses, post-feminist theory, and cyber-discourses have already

problematized the binary construction of language, the Western “grand

narratives” that have perpetuated Enlightenment rationality, and the patriarchal

notion of a unified subject, cyberpunk narratives have added a specific

intensifying dimension to these critiques – the dimension of urgency for what

Hakim Bey calls “reality hacking.”1 Absolute categories, universalizing theory, and

the notion of a unitary subject can no longer be taken for granted as the once

stable boundaries between human-machine, nature-culture, self-other, and

space-time start to “metamorphose and bifurcate beneath our feet” (Levy 31).

In the world of global transnational capitalism brought about by the new

information technologies and biotechnologies, the classical separation of science

1
Hakim Bey turns to cyberpunk science fiction to find the possibilities for political resistance in
contemporary society. Through cyberpunk narratives, Bey identifies “temporary autonomous zones”
or “islands in the net” as forms of “reality hacking” and “ontological anarchy” (Tomas 7). I return to
his concept in chapter 2 when considering the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari.
 6

and industry has become obsolete as genetic engineers and industrial investors,

mostly from the private sector, develop a relationship of exceptional intimacy.

Promises of immeasurable gain from future advances in human genetics and their

medical applications (e.g., gene therapy) are being made: “the research findings

become more immediately available on the stock market rather than in the

relevant scholarly journal” (Reiche 247). Already massive profits from industrial

inventions, particularly those marketed by transnational pharmaceutical

corporations, are evident as informational products become end-products.

Parallel to this increase in capital is the growing social divide between the wealthy

minority – who can afford these benefits and thereby extend their lives by

appropriating the end-product – and the vast majority of people that cannot

afford to pay for ever-increasing health care costs. In the not too distant future

of dystopian urban decay, cyberpunk fiction takes these issues of inequalities and

inequities to their extreme in order to address the frightening consequences

awaiting us if we do not check the current trajectory. Emphasis on the

transgression of boundaries between the artificial and the organic, which is

perhaps one of the central features of cyberpunk, not only contributes to a

rethinking of human subjectivity outside of hierarchical structures, but also

permits the development of alternative futures. It is precisely this detachment

from the restraints of realism – which is always at risk of being classified

“utopian” – that “liberates” cyberpunk representation and allows these “futuristic”

flights of imagination to be more ideological. In short, cyberpunk manifests the

desires, hopes, fears, and tensions of the digital era in peculiar ways. In the light

of postmodern theory – and deconstruction in particular – cyberpunk makes us

question, subvert, and surpass natural attributes and social categories by

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acknowledging that the signification systems are multiple, discontinuous,

originating and disappearing through intervention. In its creative efforts to

destabilize existing notions of time and space and to explore the possibilities of

imagining embodiment differently, cyberpunk is indeed a radical response to

today’s techno-scientific world.

By embracing Haraway’s proposition that “cyborg writing is about the

power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of

seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them (women, people of color,

etc.) as others” (Haraway 175), this study takes as its subject the representation

of the posthuman woman character in Enki Bilal’s cyberpunk film Immortel (Ad

Vitam) and his graphic novel The Nicopol trilogy in order to explore transgressive

human-machine symbiosis. The study also inquires into the representation of

gender performance in these narratives as these operate through both visual and

textual presentation of a prosthetic posthuman body. The central question I ask

is: “How does Enki Bilal’s posthuman woman, Jill Bioskop, potentially dismantle

the human-machine dichotomy and transgress the traditional paradigms

governing gender?” In posing this question, I consider the presence of certain

narrative devices, representative forms, and visual elements, and I assume that

dismantling the human-machine dichotomy and gender transgression can be

explored or envisaged. This implies that possibilities for change have to be

imagined before they can be enacted, which entails the acceptance of feminist

cultural politics and post-structuralist feminist theories.

In the light of post-feminist and post-structuralist theories, this study is

concerned with the rise of new models of subjectivity and embodiment, which

depend on technology, and as a result, the impact of technology upon human

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identity and the invention of multiple identities. Following the French philosopher

Jacques Derrida, there is no “outside of text:” all meanings are textual and

intertextual (qtd. in Wong). Everything we know is constructed through signs,

governed by the rules of discourse, and connected to other texts through allusion

and repetition. Enki Bilal’s cyberpunk narratives exist in relation to other texts,

other narrative discourses, and other futuristic images. In respect to the re-

thinking of the traditional categories, it is necessary to embrace a notion that any

radical shift in social language, such as dismantling of the system of

human/machine, space/time and gender dichotomies through the use of

technology, has to be imagined before being implemented.

Thirty years ago, Carl Sagan wrote that we appear to be on the verge of

developing a wide variety of intelligent machines, to which our adjustment is “a

matter of acclimatization” (Sagan 98). Since then, human beings have

experienced an explosion of new technologies that fundamentally transformed

the structure of the world for us. We have more or less “acclimatized” to a new

landscape where, in Donna Haraway’s words, “microelectronics mediates the

translations of labor into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic

engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence

and decision procedures” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 165). Inevitably, we

have come to witness the triumph of technology as a radical and revolutionary

transformation of traditional social institutions and concepts. We live in a time

when seismic waves of revolutionary consciousness travel underground at the

speed of light. The Internet and cyberspace have opened new playgrounds where

“the dynamics have not yet rigidified and new kinds of moves are possible”

(Hayles 93). We also live in a time when corporations, international organizations

 9

and national governments struggle to control the structure, content and flow of

information. As new computer and digital media technologies continue to alter

our sense of self, nations, time and space, waves from the underground produce

multiple new ways of becoming and new dramaturgical mappings of social life. It

is in social reality and science fiction that we sense these vibrations that

profoundly restructure social performances and result in the amalgamation and

blurring of boundaries between human and machine, masculine and feminine,

public and private, the self and the Other. In short, advances in science and

technology have created a new arena where even the boundary between social

reality and science fiction, as Haraway remarked, is an optical illusion.

In this dynamic environment, the distinction between human and machine

has reached a greater complexity, and it has achieved political significance in

postmodern discourse. The human-machine synthesis, as Jennifer Croissant

remarks, is even conceived as being the next stage of human evolution (285).

Studying Enki Bilal’s cyberpunk fiction may bring us one step closer to

understanding this synthesis and its potent ability to challenge a centuries-old

tradition of domination grounded in the image of unity and wholeness.

In chapter 2 of this study, before introducing differential and multiple

discourses for re-imag(in)ing the posthuman, I examine how Western

metaphysics has for so long perpetuated the system of binary oppositions that

are so deeply entangled with the projects of domination and oppression. As far as

René Déscartes is regarded as one of the founding figures of modern philosophy,

I begin with his philosophical account, which rests on the separation of mind and

body. Then, I continue with the influence of Cartesian thought on modern

philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics in order to illustrate the

 10

interrelations between metaphysical, scientific and technological discourses,

particularly in the construction of human nature, desire and subjectivity. From

Leibniz’s account of universal language and Kant’s transcendental subjectivity, I

explore Freud’s psychoanalytical theories of gendered subjectivity and desire and

Lacan’s structuralist approach to psychoanalysis. I argue that the fixed

presuppositions of Western thought are not sufficient to envision the relation

between human and machine in the contemporary technocultural world, and then

I propose fluid and dynamic configurations of this relation based on the accounts

of material reality and embodiment.

In chapter 2, in the section Myth and a story about desire: Expansion of

imagination, I embrace the realms of multiplicities, becoming, flows, desire, and

imagination through analyses of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theoretical

perspectives. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “becoming” and “body without

organs” are of vital importance to this project, particularly in the context of re-

imag(in)ing “potent fusions” of bodies and non-bodies and transgression of

boundaries in between, and I follow their theoretical insights all the way through

this study. In their work, which has significantly shaped the course of this

research, Deleuze and Guattari examine desire through the lens of Nietzschean

philosophy and apply a whole new series of concepts to the playground of

identity politics. They depart from the Marxist notion that desire belongs to

ideology, as well as from Freud’s formulation of the “unconscious,” which renders

desire as “unproductive” except in dreams. In contrast, they argue for a

“productive desire” and suggest an “active schizophrenia” as a model for

expressing such unbounded bodily production. In their concept of “the body

without organs,” the body is defined as a producer of desires that destabilizes

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anatomical classification, capitalist consumption, and binary models that depend

on a mind/body distinction and culture/nature opposition, in favor of a more

dynamically dispersed, nomadic, and emergent model of machinic embodiment.

As Elizabeth Grosz in her study Space, Time, and Perversion observes, with this

concept Deleuze and Guattari tear apart the traditional organization of the body,

and allow each constituent to transform or move into a new assemblage. Thus,

the dynamic components move and interact with other dynamic components,

forming new, temporary subjects or events. In this regard, the concept of “the

body without organs” is crucial for a discussion of cyborgs and posthumans. The

cyborg's hybrid biology, an assemblage of tissue and technology, is firmly

adaptable to external conditions and therefore creates a subject outside the

scope of human classifications like gender, health, race, age, and reproduction.

In addition, the same line of thought is found in their principle of multiplicity and

the rhizomatic nature of language, which I utilize to explain oppositional myths

and language as defined by desire and outside the scope of organizational

structures of power. The principle of multiplicity, then, enables a movement away

from what Lucy Irigaray calls “the economy of sameness of the One” (132) and a

movement toward subversive techniques that Haraway’s political myth carries. It

also facilitates heterogeneous spaces for Bilal’s posthuman woman, Jill Bioskop,

because it is only the notion of plurality and connectedness that can adequately

“guide” the presentation of this character.

Chapter 2 considers the importance of Lucy Irigaray’s argument of

productive desires by exploring what the idea of “excess” could mean to both

female gender and sexuality. Irigaray’s investigation of the possibilities of a

system that is not set up on the basis of binary opposition – one that does not
 12

subordinate multiplicity and fluid subjectivities – challenges Cartesian and

structuralist concern with a fixed notion of gender identity and subjectivity and

thus contributes to re-imag(in)ing the posthuman. I employ Irigaray’s notion of

“solid” and “fluid mechanics” to illustrate the possibilities for interruption of the

Western philosophical and scientific concepts of self and subjectivity, particularly

through the concept of “becoming posthuman.” Irigaray’s study, in this respect,

is significant not only for an understanding of “the economy of sameness of the

One,” but for envisioning the posthuman in a spectrum of different colors,

shapes, intensities, and movements.

Following the principle of multiplicity and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of

rhizomatic becoming, chapter 3 examines Donna Haraway’s influential ideas.

Ever since Haraway’s cyborg myth first came to celebrate the cyborg as a new

means of feminine identity and affiliation, this compelling icon of semantic

complexity has been aligned with issues of gender and technology. In Haraway’s

words, this “ironic political myth is about the transgressed boundaries, potent

fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as

one part of needed political work” (154). Indeed, the hybrid of machine and

organism, existing materially in the realm of technoscience and politically in the

techno-scientific imagination, has become a powerful agent in the deconstruction

of Western thought. Much like the posthuman woman Jill, Haraway’s cyborg is

the creature of a post-gender world; a creature without an origin. Patriarchal

allegiance, pre-oedipal symbiosis, fear, lack, envy, and salvation are all

problematic concepts for Haraway’s female cyborg. From this premise, I argue

that the posthuman or cyborg is “implanted” with lines of flight – another concept

drawn from Deleuze and Guattari – which create possibilities of physical and
 13

social transformation. These “lines of flight,” which in the context of cyborgs

become “failures of translation,” are initiated through embodied encounters with

material/sensible reality and lead to Haraway’s lines of affinity or “joint kinship.”

As Haraway suggests, within technology, “otherness” coexists with the human;

technology is not the Other of humanity, and the cyborg is not “it.” The cyborg

“is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (180). As Haraway’s account

demonstrates, cyborgs and their hybrid nature open up a semantic field for

problematizing a universal notion of humanity; a notion that has perpetuated the

system of binary oppositions, which have been crucial in understanding human

subjectivity. Although there may be other cyborg representations that contest

such arguments, I argue the specific representation of Bilal’s posthuman woman

character demonstrates this conception.

Another vital concept of Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of becoming-

woman, is utilized in chapter 3 in order to examine Jill’s metamorphosis into a

human-woman. Through illustration of Jill’s “becoming,” I examine affective

connectivity of organic and non-organic components and suggest that

posthuman woman Jill presents a model of subjectivity-in-stitches resistant to the

processes of overcoding and organization. This way, I imply that the re-

imag(in)ing of the posthuman as a dynamic process of rethinking subjectivity

insists on a departure from the organized patterns of the coherent self. With the

emphasis on Deleuze and Guattari’s “micro” becomings and affective forces of

materiality, chapter 3 then sets the stage for an examination of posthuman

consciousness that, I argue, Bilal utilizes as a new form of resistance to

contemporary postmodern cultural conditions.

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In chapter 4, my primary concern becomes posthuman consciousness,

which I examine by further exploring Jill’s transformative process. In delineating

Bilal’s response to the contemporary social field as an affirmative one, I argue

that he sets into motion “a world of becoming,” in both the Nietzschean and

Deleuzian sense, which enables his narratives to depart from the traditional and

polarized pro/contra model of discourse. Dynamic and “rhizomatic” in nature,

Immortel and The Nicopol Trilogy alter the script of late capitalist society and

contribute to a re-imag(in)ing of subjectivity as the effect of a dynamic process

involving heterogeneity and difference that includes corporeal as well as psychic

elements. This is to suggest that Bilal creatively dissects the compact and rigid

boundaries of the late capitalist society by attentively engaging with the forces of

life. In respect to this engagement with the forces of life, I continue to draw from

Deleuze’s work on the reactive and the active forces. Here I illustrate the process

through which it becomes possible to move beyond conventional notions of

perception and consciousness, which are informed by past conceptions and

respond to the power of binary discourses. In following Nietzsche, I argue that

this type of consciousness is reactive and composed of primarily reactive forces.

In an attempt to elucidate the dynamic interaction of forces-in-movement, I show

that the posthuman consciousness underlying Bilal’s narratives can take us

beyond the apocalyptic future. In light of the philosophy of becoming, I also

examine Nietzsche’s notion of “affirmation” and Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of

“becoming-imperceptible” to suggest that posthuman consciousness, as a form of

resistance, is not only a form of interruption of our current social and cultural

fields, but also a potent tool for the production of different social relations within

these fields. Subsequently, in this chapter, I engage with Tamsin Lorraine’s ideas
 15

on overcoming mind/body dualisms, another valuable source for rethinking

subjectivity and for illuminating the re-conceptualization of (post)human nature. I

turn to her insights to further examine what posthuman consciousness may entail

and how it relates to Bilal’s narratives and re-imagining of a future beyond the

burden of the past. Mobile, flexible, schizophrenic and nomadic in nature,

posthuman consciousness is premised upon active and fluid configurations of

bodies. It is crafted within webs of power in order to extract “energy” not only to

deform and denature the traditional categories, but to propose that

metamorphosis is needed and possible. Finally, I argue that Bilal, by

appropriating this strategy, creatively responds to the script of late capitalist

society and departs from the discourses of essentialism and control.

When seen in the light of these theoretical accounts, Enki Bilal’s

cyberpunk narratives invite us to question not only the human-machine

dichotomy, but the primacy of gender categories and the system of binary

oppositions as a whole.

Immortel and The Nicopol Trilogy present us with a posthuman

character Jill Bioskop, who transcends her “humanity” by negotiating between the

human and the non-human. Jill is a “misplaced” person without an origin, and in

Bilal’s words, “the greatest mystery of nature.” She is a mutant whose

metamorphosis is on the verge of completion. By taking a red pill, she becomes

what she calls a “human woman.” Throughout the narrative, Jill is “liberated”

from the boundaries of a “unified” perspective and simple embodiment. As Sadie

Plant suggests in her Weaving Women and Cybernetics, the rejection of the

subject position, as Jill’s case demonstrates, consequently leads to a rejection of

encoded and stable identities, which presuppose the logic of modernity (99-117).
 16

Jill questions what it would be like to become a human woman. As I illustrate in

chapter 3, her gender is meaningless to her subjectivity, because she is already

moving firmly “in” and “out” of the realm of pure human subjectivity. This

multiplied state of being that Jill presents, which can be interpreted through

Irigaray’s idea of “excess” and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming,

challenges the traditional ideologies of gender and, at the same time, requires

new forms of subjectivity and embodiment. As we shall see in the following

chapters, Jill Bioskop illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic interaction

between human and non-human constituents that, along with the principle of

multiplicity, contributes to rethinking gendered subjectivities and the relationship

between human and prosthetic bodies.

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Chapter 2

Production of Humans: Critique of Disembodiment

Human – machine
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What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire

life. That there is something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is. But

it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.

Morpheus, The Matrix

In an age of virtuality, the human–machine assembly attains scintillating

dimensions that profoundly disintegrate a territory marked by the production of a

master-language that for centuries has kept Homo sapiens and its desires

entrapped in “the economy of the Same.” In the course of this chapter, we will

see what both the production of a master language and the economy of the Same

entail, but at this moment let us briefly engage in a discussion of the constituents

of these dimensions. Every spark that composes these constituents and, in

return, is projected from the flow between carbon-based organic and silicon-

based electronic constituents consists of energy. This process contributes to a

degeneration of the mechanism that produced the idea of a unitary self and

observed “the other as the image of the one” (Irigaray 207). Like the flickering

green code in the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix suggests, sparks are partial

objects, fragmentary by nature. The constant interplay of these discontinued

energy discharges illuminates a hybrid and multifaceted nature of a human-

machine assembly, the nature of whose diverse intensities can conform to neither

a unified identity nor the conventional forms of philosophy and theories of

subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari write that desire is what “causes the current to

flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows” (Anti Oedipus 5). If sparks – that

is information/code – make the flow between human and machine, then desire is

what connects sparks with the flow. The flow, which is partial, inconsistent,
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always under rupture, and frequently fused with other flows of similar

characteristics, signals the shift away from the solid mechanics of the “one-eye”

subject in a “state of nature” to fluid mechanics of the “multiple-eye” subjects

that diverge from this very nature. In other words, partial and unpredictable

flows between organic and inorganic elements imply turning away from

enlightenment-derived modern and postmodern premises about nature, culture,

society and science.

To elucidate the relation between solid mechanics – attributed here to the

production of humans in the Enlightenment machine of reason, and fluid

mechanics – associated with the becoming of posthuman in the age of

microelectronics, we turn to Lucy Irigaray who writes: “Solid mechanics and

rationality have maintained a relationship of very long standing, one against

which fluids have never stopped arguing” (113). Appropriating the theory of solid

mechanics as a metonymical paradigm of Western philosophical and scientific

thought thus enables us to interpret the univocal (re)production of the ontological

status of the human as a predetermined and stable being. Another important

aspect of this paradigm is its implication that philosophy has largely governed the

2
discourse of science. Drawing on Irigaray’s writing on fluid mechanics and

posing it in reference to the posthuman, my purpose is to emphasize that any

process of remaking ourselves needs to involve “remaking the sciences which

construct the category of ‘nature’ and empower its definitions in technology”

(Haraway 43). As a metaphor, fluid mechanics illustrates how natural science

imposes limits on self-formation and history, and provides instruments to

dominate the body and the community. It also reveals the struggle over the

2
See: Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. New York & London: Routledge, 1995. 93-101
 20

nature of our lives, the nature of which is made in a collaborative process

involving human and non-human/artifacts.

Thus, the production of humans in this study is aligned with the

production of a solid and unitary entity, which gives precedence to rational over

emotional and inscribes rational to men and emotional to women. As Donna

Haraway notes, this “productionism and its corollary, humanism, come down to

the story line that ‘man makes everything, including himself, out of the world

that can only be resource and potency to his project and active agency’ ” (The

Promises of Monsters 317). Humanism, then, entails a calculation in which the

production of humans and disembodied objectivity is achieved through a

deduction of desire, fluids and embodied objectivity. In order to understand the

calculation and its consequences, it is vital to acknowledge the history of the

scientific and rational world view – that which inspired liberal humanism – as

closely related to projects of capitalism, militarism, colonialism and patriarchal

supremacy. Disembodied objectivity or “vision from a distance,” which will be

addressed later in the chapter, has been utilized as a weapon to control and

police the bodies of people and of knowledge. In contrast, embodied objectivity

inhabits the domain of paradoxical and critical feminist science projects. These

projects embrace partial visions, which humanism insists on deducting in order to

maintain the projects of domination and colonization. Along these lines, what the

humanist formula suggests is that there is only one “gaze” in the production of

humans, that which ensures active agency of Man by giving him power to see

and not to be seen. In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel

Foucault provides an illustration of this gaze by utilizing the metaphor of the

Panopticon, originally an architectural design for a prison developed by Jeremy

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Bentham in the early nineteenth century. In Bentham’s design, which was

circular with a central tower looking out on the periphery where the inmates were

housed, the surveillance of prisoners was made possible by “the effect of

backlighting” (Foucault, par. 2a). The backlight enabled the guards to see without

being seen, while the prisoners did not know whether they were being watched.

Foucault argues that the principal effect of the panopticon was/is to "induce in

the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the

automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, par. 2c). As visibility is that which

makes control and the exercise of power possible, Foucault continues: "He who is

subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the

constraints of power” (Foucault, par. 2e). Thus, what is being imposed on one

that is under the control of possible surveillance is a form of self-discipline and

conformity to the requirements of the “supervisors.” For Foucault, this visibility

creates “an inspecting gaze,” a gaze that exerts a power to bring about

conformity through an indirect approach of self-control rather than a direct

control. It is through this visibility, Foucault continues, that modern society –

“disciplinary society” - exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge.

In other words, all institutions in a disciplinary society are disciplinary insofar as

they represent a body of knowledge that is coercive and enforces discipline (i.e.,

particular modes of behavior and belief) on the individual, who in turn

internalizes authority. Omnipresence of the controlling eye or “an inspecting

gaze” is a constant reminder that punishment is always possible. Further,

disciplinary knowledge, which is accessible only to those capable of adapting, is

articulated through language and discourses that define subjectivity. As a key

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spatial figure in the production of modernity and a key dispositif3 in the

production of humans, the prison-panopticon metaphor illustrates the manner in

which the power is structured through the visibility that sustained the disciplinary

apparatus of modernity. “Visibility is a trap,” writes Foucault (par. 2a). In her

essay The Persistence of Vision, Haraway remarks that it is this master gaze, or

rather the unmarked positions which it creates, that allows Man to mark all other

bodies and “to represent while escaping representation” (Simians, Cyborgs, and

Women 188). What seems to be needed, Haraway suggests, is to reclaim our

vision, which “can be good in avoiding binary oppositions” (188). Following

Foucault, she also notes that “if we are imprisoned by language, then escape

from that prison-house requires language poets” (245). Later, we shall see how

Bilal escapes this “prison-house” and contributes to new articulations of the

(post)human. At this point, however, we will further examine the “architectures”

of the prison-house and its production.

The process of positing one vision over the other, e.g., the “solid” vision

over the “fluid,” and/or the mind over the matter/body, is conceptualized as

nothing but a reflection of the One. Western intellectual thought has perpetuated

this process in the system of binary oppositions that are – it is again worth

mentioning - deeply entangled with the projects of domination and oppression.

As Derrida taught us, in such oppositions “we are not dealing with a peaceful

coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather a violent hierarchy,” wherein "one of the

two terms governs the other... or has the upper hand" (qtd. in Foutz). Derrida

suggests that this “violent hierarchy” results solely from traditional ontological

presuppositions that need to be overturned if we are to reach “a peaceful

3
The word refers to any or all “system”, “mechanism” or “device” (Wood, par 3).
 23

coexistence.” The process of overturning requires deconstruction and

examination of the subordinated and excluded terms as a prerequisite for the

transformation of any presupposition underlying prevailing knowledge. To

illustrate, “body” has been an excluded term and always closely associated with

women and the feminine, while the dominant term “mind/reason” has been

implicitly connected to men and the masculine (Grosz 32). Deleuze and Guattari

argue that our body suffers from being organized in such way, i.e., “from not

having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all” (Anti-Oedipus

8). By placing “body” back into the discussion, we are already one step away

from this rigid organization. Connecting an organic body with a silicon body, we

have what Derrida called "the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept’, a concept

that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime" (qtd.

in Foutz). There are two outcomes from this premise. The first is that the

posthuman in an age of virtuality embodies this new concept and, as such,

cannot stand within the original ontological framework. The second outcome

suggests that what is needed to achieve an “other sort of organization” is to

embrace partial visions, visions produced through organic embodiment and

technological mediation. As an assemblage with multiple eyes and heads –

individual and collective – the posthuman moves out of the frame of binary

oppositions and dissolves the master gaze. Being associated with everything that

is fluctuating and not “enveloped in proper skins” (Irigaray 205), the posthuman

reclaims the sensory system.

Before we look through these multiple eyes of the posthuman, and let the

imagination flow across the single vision of a Cyclops, it is important to provide a

brief analysis of certain theoretical accounts that congealed our dreams and
 24

desires in exclusive and definite representations. Beginning with René Déscartes’

conception of rationality and his influence on modern philosophy and scientific

discourses, we will continue with Barthes’ analysis of myth as a meta-language in

the service of dominant ideology in order to argue for oppositional myth and

strategies of resistance that are inscribed in bodies of the posthuman.

The Cartesian journey for no good reason

Cogito ergo sum is one of the famous maxims learned by young children

in school. After being repeated so many times and at so many different places, it

becomes almost an undeniable truth – it becomes a “natural” thing. This

definition infuses much of René Déscartes’ work and it rests on a radical

separation of res extensa and res cogitans (corporeal existence and ethereal

thought). Although Déscartes was neither the first nor the last to propose an

exclusion of the imagination from the realm of reason, his scenario nevertheless

appears as that which “would dominate Western philosophical and scientific

definitions of rationality for centuries” (Tuana 60). This eminent figure of Western

thought, also regarded as the father of modern philosophy, concluded that the

subject becomes rational only by detaching “itself” from the desires, needs, and

particularities of the body. In Meditations on the First Philosophy, Déscartes

outlines his technique for transcending the body during the quest for certainty:

I shall now close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall call away all

my senses, I shall efface even from my thoughts all the images of

corporeal things, or at least (for that is hardly possible) I shall

 25

esteem them as vain and false; and thus holding converse only

with myself and considering my own nature, I shall try little by

little to reach a better knowledge of and a more familiar

acquaintanceship with myself. (Qtd. in Tuana 63)

Déscartes’ journey to truth begins with learning to overcome the body, which is

seen only as an impediment to knowledge. To achieve reason, our desires and

imagination must be renounced and the focus needs to remain solely on universal

issues. Thus, in the Cartesian system “it is mind alone, and not mind and body in

conjunction, that is requisite to a knowledge of the truth” (Déscartes qtd. in

Tuana 67). This binary was an essential element in the construction of the

modern human, who was perceived as rational and whose individuality was

considered stable only when guided by reason. Body, as “the unacknowledged

condition of reason” (Grosz 32), is reduced to mere flesh - a container that

provides sustenance for the mind. Given that body, emotions, passivity, and

other related attributes are historically envisioned as female and associated with

women, this conception of a rational person suggests that women may pursue

the rational life only if they renounce all those things that define their femininity.

Nancy Tuana in The Less Noble Sex argues that women in the Cartesian system

must reject even such characteristics as imagination if they are to “become the

man of reason” (64). This Cartesian model, with its privileging of masculine

characteristics, has penetrated deep into the pores of our social life and

discourse. It has been utilized as a blueprint in the production of the Western

human ontology and consequently has contributed to the emergence of

institutional and individual violence that has successfully maintained class,

race/ethnicity and gender inequalities for centuries. One does not have to go far
 26

back to uncover deeply embedded traces of Cartesian belief in science and

philosophy. However, before we turn to recent technological and philosophical

accounts that acknowledge the erasure of embodiment as a feature common to

both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman, it is plausible to

examine how Cartesian thought has influenced modern philosophy and woven

itself into the scientific discourse after Déscartes.

From Leibniz to psychoanalysis: “Let us calculate…” the law

In order to provide an in-depth analysis of binary logic marking the dualist

character of Western thinking, we will turn to the German philosopher and

mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), whose work is often considered to

be the foundation for a new system of logic and the metaphysics of modernity

(Heim 82-94). Leibniz’s account of a universal language – one that would later

become the ideological basis for computer-mediated telecommunications (Heim

92-94) – demonstrates a desire to unite all natural languages into one artificial

language. Leibniz envisioned this universal language to be composed of symbols

that would stand for concepts or ideas, and logical rules that would validate their

manipulation (Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind). In accordance with his philosophy of

the Monadology, where monads are “the real atoms of nature and, in a word, the

elements of things” (Leibniz), Leibniz believed that such language would be able

to reduce the complex human ideas and concepts found in natural language to

simpler concepts. Since natural language, according to Leibniz, makes reasoning

obscure, it is unable to perfectly mirror the intelligible thoughts. Believing “that

 27

all human ideas can be resolved into a few as their primitives” (Leibniz's

Philosophy of Mind), Leibniz formulated a plan in which symbols could be

assigned to these primitive concepts, and then characters could be formed for

derivative concepts by combining the symbols. In this manner, the universal

language or the system of symbolic logic would perfectly mirror the processes of

intelligible human reasoning. As Leibniz writes, “this language will be the greatest

instrument of reason,” for “when there are disputes among persons, we can

simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, and see who is right” (Leibniz's

Philosophy of Mind). Although Leibniz argued that monads would solve the

problem of interaction between mind and body, which is in direct disagreement

with the Cartesian dichotomy, he nevertheless continued to maintain the

rhetorics of disembodiment and the system of binary oppositions by assigning

priority to disembodied symbols over the embodied ideas found in natural

languages. As Paul Skoch notes in his study Towards Posthuman Embodiment:

Leibniz defined a universal language; not simply universal in its

bringing together of different natural languages but in its

attempted coalescence of everything, all experience. Leibniz

wanted humanity to experience reason from the advantaged point-

of-view that comes with divinity rather than the narrow, short-term

viewpoint we are offered by our material bodies. (Skeotch)

Thus, the body remains as an impediment to knowledge. In that humanism,

which has already been introduced as a term for a particular mode of production,

involves the rationalization of processes on the grounds of universal necessity,

exclusive binaries and global superiority, it becomes apparent that Leibniz’s

account of universal language – by ascribing much of the values of this mode of

 28

production – contributed greatly to metaphysics of modernity. His design of

symbolic logic and the notion of representational symbols continued to influence

later philosophical and scientific discourses, particularly those concerned with the

inner structures of cyberspace (Heim in Skeotch).

Striving for unity under the rubric of the Cartesian view of rationality was

also explicit in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), one of the most

prominent philosophers of the eighteenth century. In his famous study

Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant links reason with morality and, in

the light of Cartesian thought, argues for philosophical conceptions of morality

based on the separation of bodily desires and reason. In one of the examples

found in this study, Kant writes that only the person whose action is based on the

universal law of morality, or what he calls “the categorical imperative,” can be a

moral person (11). In other words, an action that is performed out of duty, not

out of desire, is the only action that can have moral worth. As Kant writes: “Only

the law can be an object of respect and hence can be a command” (13). From

this example, it would seem that Kantian moral persons have to learn to distance

themselves from emotions and desires and perform on the basis of reason. In

accordance to the Cartesian model, this linking of moral actions and reason

suggests that women, seen as lacking the rational faculties, are deficient in the

moral realm. This also implies that the language of Kant’s law belongs solely to

men. As for his immersion into a patriarchal ideology, one may turn to his

Observation on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in which Kant argues

the following: “The fair sex has just as much understanding as the male, but it is

a beautiful understanding, whereas ours (men’s) should be a deep

understanding, an expression that signifies identity with the sublime” (78).

 29

The premise above suggests several things. First, Kant’s “deep

understanding” arises out of the Cartesian subject and reinforces the idea that

only the rational mind can be identified with the self. This further suggests that

the subject exists outside of the dynamic space of real interactions. In other

words, the subject “possesses” the body and subordinates the production of

selves (multiplicities) existing in the space of real interactions for the principle of

unity and coherent self. The second point derives from the first and relates to

Kant’s transcendental subjectivity, which implies that only men are capable of

systemizing knowledge. This position, it could be argued, ensures “the unmarked

positions of Man” (Haraway 188), and resubmits women to the law of the father

and the dominant patriarchal discourses. As previously noted, this is the elevated

position, something of a deus ex machine from which one has the power to see

and represent the others. It is the mastery position – both in terms of language

and vision.

First and foremost, the “liberal” humanist subject flourished as a result of

this logic. Identified with the rational mind and divorced from the body, this

autonomous subject became the owner of “his” body. In How We Became

Posthuman, Katherine N. Hayles writes:

The liberal subject possessed the body, but was not usually

represented as being a body. Only because the body is not

identified with the self is it possible to claim for the liberal subject

its notorious universality, a claim that depends on erasing markers

of bodily difference, including sex, race and ethnicity. (5)

The Enlightenment philosophies of the liberal self-regulated subject, such as

Kant’s, and the hierarchical systems premised upon binary distinctions and binary
 30

language, have enmeshed into various accounts of human “nature” and have

gradually encompassed virtually every aspect of human life. From the “Invisible

Hand” of Adam Smith, in which we have a self-regulating market, to the political

philosophy of enlightened self-interests (Hayles 86), the discourses continued to

fuel the production of self-regulation and possessive individualism. Projects of

repression and domination, augmented by the masking of inequalities, continued

to develop contemporaneously.

The Cartesian influence has not left intact psychoanalytic theory. Given

that the fundamental components of psychoanalysis lie in questions of the

construction of gender and sexuality, how the concept of Self is formed/coded,

and how humans enter into the structure of language/code, the following

accounts are being introduced into the discussion to illuminate the

interrelationships of scientific and philosophical conceptions in the symbolic

production of Self and gender. An additional relevant aspect for the study

emanates from the fact that psychoanalysis has been used in film theory as a

model to address spectatorship and to explain several interlocking concepts:

fantasy, the scopic, identification and subjectivity (Kennedy 39).

In Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis argues that gender is a

social construct, and not the property of bodies (14). In order words, gender is a

construct, an effect of language and culture. Sexuality, along these lines, is also

a construct. The work of Sigmund Freud, preoccupied with sexuality and its role

in psychological development, is an example par excellence of how gender and

sexuality are (re)produced by the discourse of male sexuality. As explicit as he

was in his conceptions of female subjectivity and the manner in which selfhood is

attained, Freud could not escape a certain economy of the logos. Writing in the
 31

light of Enlightenment philosophies of reason, Freud revisited and exposed the

question of morality within his psychoanalytic theory and further reinforced the

idea of women as inferior. He believed that woman’s superego is incomplete, and

since the superego stands for a prerequisite for moral action, she again was

incapable of transcending her subjectivity and grounding her actions in the

objective realm of morality (Freud 27-56). Although Freud’s account of

subjectivity departs from Déscartes’ thinking in the way that Freud deals with

neuroses and mental illness (the presence of which obviously discount the

possibility of the subject being either unified or rational), he still grounds his work

on the premise that the mind has predominance over the body. The body is

considered, as Barbara Kennedy notes, only in relation to the biological difference

between male and female (42). For the illustration of Freud’s conformity to the

logos premised on dialectical oppositions, we may begin with his discussion of the

id and the ego, i.e., the unconscious and the consciousness. It is here that Freud

inserts the idea of the human self as divided between these two realms. It is

important to note that for him and psychoanalysis in general, all human thoughts

and actions – as much as the concepts of Self – are governed and shaped by the

unconscious and its desires. In this respect, Freud’s approach begins to question

the humanist ideal of the self as defined through self-determination and free will.

However, the Cartesian frame of reference is evident as he continues to argue,

“Where It was, shall I be” (Freud qtd. in Klages). The id, which according to

Freud is based on the pleasure principle, will be replaced by the ego, which

represents the reason (AllPsych). Freud, then, sustains the mastery of the “I” and

self-identity by holding to the idea that the conscious will replace the

unconscious. The Freudian discursive machine, locked into this restrictive binarist
 32

terminology, becomes even more intriguing when it moves into generating

mythical figures to represent family members and family relations. It prima-facie

defines maleness as “the norm.” This norm, which some would describe as a

standard of rightness and often righteousness, in relation to which all others are

judged, directly implies that Freudian mythical figures belong to an economy

where one holds a monopoly on value. Freud’s formula for the establishment of

sexual differences is not only an indicator of this reductive economy and binary

logic but also a model that would become the basis for later accounts of human

subjectivity, gendered identity and structures of desire (i.e., Jacques Lacan’s

psychoanalytic account, cine-psychoanalysis). Everything in this formula revolves

around Oedipus. In the Oedipus triangle, the father, who - as we shall see in

Lacan’s account - symbolically represents the Law of the Father by virtue of the

penis/phallus, takes over the mother, possesses and takes away the maternal

from the infant (Kennedy 41). The result of this traumatic experience of sexual

oppositions is the castration anxiety in the infant and the establishment of sexual

difference, which is equated with a fear of the loss of the penis/phallus. As

Barbara Kennedy, in her study Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation,

states: “sexual difference is marked through a division between ‘lack’ and ‘not

lack’, whereby the female equates with ‘lack’ ” (41). Freud then defines the

“feminine” in terms of atrophy and he justifies female passivity in terms of

anatomical-physiological imperatives. Besides reducing female sexuality, Freud

also reduces the productive unconsciousness, as he explains it only in terms of

Oedipal structures. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the Oedipal

operation or “application” circumscribes all libidinous elements of the unconscious

(99-101). Oedipus, along with the Law of the Father is “a referential axis.”
 33

Everything becomes “interpreted in terms of Oedipus, in relation to Oedipus,

within the framework of Oedipus” (99). Employed as a transcendental signifier

overseeing all unconscious processes, Oedipus warrants analytical order and

intelligibility, ensuring hermeneutic meaning and significance. At the same time,

the concepts of desire, subjectivity and the body - the very concepts that will

become problematized and questioned within the post-feminist theory, post-

structuralist discourse and cyber-discourse, as will be discussed later, remain

locked within the arena of morphological notions of the body.

This confirmation of binary and rationalist use of language, in which the

term “body” is reduced to its binary opposite of the mind, implies that the

Freudian discursive machine is, as Lucy Irigaray writes, “caught up in

metaphysical presuppositions” (73). Nonetheless, as has been mentioned,

Freud’s study became a referential axis to later investigations on human nature,

desire and subjectivity. Even though many of these accounts departed from the

original Freudian thesis, they still inherited the “norm” premised upon binary

distinctions, the notions of transcendent states and an “anatomical” body.

Whereas Freud based his formulae on a “biologistic account of male

supremacy”, Jacques Lacan based his psychoanalytic model on language and the

symbolic: the cultural, not the physical (Kennedy 43). Writing in the light of

structuralist linguistics, premised on the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de

Saussure, Jacques Lacan argues that the unconscious is “the ground of all being”

(qtd. in Klages) and is structured like language. The Freudian scenario in the

production of the Self is impossible and the ego is only an illusion. As previously

stated, Freud was holding to the idea that the consciousness/ego is able to

replace the unconscious/id, or at least he was interested in bringing the chaotic

 34

drives and desires of the unconscious into the conscious in order to enable a

certain order and meaning to be attained. Lacan, however, finds this premise

problematic because the unconscious, for him, resembles the chain/s of signifiers

that is/are constantly shifting and sliding, and thus can never be fixed. The

production of the Self, Lacan argues, is the process of trying to stop and fix the

chain of signifiers so that unity of “I” can be reached (Jacques Lacan, Klages).

For Lacan, this unity is an “illusionary” unity, and it occurs in what he refers to as

the mirror stage. Prior to the mirror stage, it is important to note, is the pre-

Oedipal stage of maternal plenitude and fullness (Kennedy 39). Lacan calls this

stage the Real, and defines it as the stage in which there is no lack, but rather

fullness and unity. Only once the infant moves out of this stage and enters the

mirror stage are the concepts of splitting and lack introduced. The infant sees its

own image reflected in a mirror and identifies with it. However, this vision is

orthopedic and it serves only as a corrective instrument that helps the child to

achieve the status of wholeness. The identification then equals misrecognition,

which is further reinforced with the approval of another person – usually, the

mother (Jacques Lacan, Klages). In this process, the ego separates from the self-

image and the first recognition that the infant has is a distinction between self

and m(other)/mirror-image (self as other). This recognition is followed by

“recognition of lack, either of the mother or the gratification of those early

biological needs within the pre-Oedipal state, provided by the mother” (Kennedy

39). This dialectical model of subjectivity implies that the infant recognizes itself

at the same time it loses itself in the mirror image, i.e., the other. It locks the

formation of subject’s identity into the binary modes of thinking, while prioritizing

the visual.
 35

The third stage that Lacan introduces is perhaps the most important for

this study as it deals with the notion of gendered subjectivity and explanations of

desire and, therefore, we shall address it in later sections. For now, it is

important to note that this third stage, which Lacan refers to as the Symbolic,

entails the notion of “difference.” This important “term” of structuralist linguistics

creates meaning in language but this is the oppositional difference where one

signifier within a system has meaning only because it is not the other signifier

(Structuralism, Klages). As I have already noted, Lacan bases his account on

structuralist linguistics, and thus uses this scheme to explain the Symbolic, which

is according to him the structure of language itself. Proceeding into the Symbolic

stage, the infant enters into language but it does so through a gender-marked

entrance (Jacques Lacan, Klages). The position of the male infant is different

from the position of the female infant. This division becomes lucid once we see

that the master signifier of Symbolic is the Phallus, through which “possession”

(symbolical) or “not possession” the sexual difference is explained.

As the center of language and the idea of the Father, the Phallus is both

the signifier of lack, and the place where there is no lack. The Phallus is also,

according to Lacan, the “Other.” As much as the Real, the Phallus/the Other is

this place where everything is whole and complete, and “inaccessible to the

human subject-in-language” (Lacan qtd. in Klages). Lacan writes that there is

always desire to reach this state, to recapture that lost plenitude of “unity” before

the split (the mirror stage). Language, he further argues, would be the only

means for the subject to do this, but language itself is not sufficient to “speak”

desire, and thus, desire can never be fulfilled (Kennedy 41). The Symbolic, then,

is constituted by the principle of Lack and the principle of Otherness. The position
 36

of the Phallus/the Other produces and maintains a never-ending lack, which

Lacan calls desire (Jacques Lacan, Klages). In terms of sexual differences, Lacan

categorically rejects the Freudian biological account, arguing that the Phallus is

not a part of any anatomical body; however, he still maintains that boys are

closer to the Phallus than girls because they have penises:

The fact that the penis is dominant in the shaping of the body

image is evidence of an autonomous, non-biological imaginary

anatomy. Though this may shock the champions of the autonomy

of female sexuality, such dominance is a fact, and one cannot be

put down to cultural influences alone. (Lacan qtd. in Kennedy 43)

As the passage above suggests, the access to the Phallus is still predicated upon

possession of the penis. It is here that we can see how Lacan’s account of

subjectivity maintains, in linguistic and symbolic terms, Freud’s primary

proposition that woman is subject to personal and social dejection through her

lack of a penis. What then binds both of these psychoanalytical accounts is the

construction of human subjectivity locked into the binary language, which firmly

distinguishes between the concepts of mind and body. As in the Cartesian

scenario, the term “body” is limited to its opposite term, the “mind.” It is

restricted to a notion of a disabled physical body with an organ. Due to the

epistemological supremacy of vision, the organ becomes the primary mark of this

(in Derrida’s term) “violent hierarchy” that constitutes gendered subjectivity.

Because of this prioritization of the visual, and the idea that it is only through the

representation of body as possessing or not possessing the phallus/penis that

human’s subjectivity can be produced, psychoanalysis – and particularly Lacan’s

account – found its place in feminist film theory. Although, cine-psychoanalysis

 37

re-appropriated Lacan’s account to argue for female desire, it still operated within

the same binary logic (Kennedy 43) and the body continued to be locked within

the physical attributes. As Kennedy remarks, what has been lacking in

psychoanalysis has been a wider conception of the term “body” (48). Following

Deleuze, in Space, Time, and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz outlines this wider

conception by suggesting that bodies need to be conceived not as monolithic

entities but as “assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the

thresholds between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often

temporary sub- or micro-groupings” (108). These are all important concepts to

which we will return later. For now, it is important to note that this problematic

conception of the body in the construction of subjectivity and desire, constrained

by anatomical and genital sexuality, implies that psychoanalysis and its binary

language structures have not been able to move away from the territory of the

mind, the precedence of which is taken for granted on the basis of metaphysical

presuppositions. Imbued with negative connotations, failures, and conflicts,

psychoanalysis, like language, organizes everything in restricted logic-based

formats. Such a structuralist way of thinking is not sufficient to explain either

“body,” desire, or the forces that underline the Deleuzian notion of “becoming,”

as will be seen in next chapter. These are the concepts that this research seeks

to explore and rethink through the cyberpunk imagery and Enki Bilal’s posthuman

woman Jill - the very concepts that will move the discussion away from the fixed

subjectivities, the notions of transcendence and the binarist use of language.

Since the relationship between human and machine pertaining to this

discourse cannot be envisioned within the fixed premises of “classical” Western

thought, an aim of this study is to appropriate the philosophy of “affect” and

 38

“becoming” (Nietzsche and Deleuze), both of which embrace forces and

mobility/fluidity. However, before bringing the relationship between human and

machine into the arena of affective connectivity and becoming, it is necessary to

see how these traditional discourses and “the faith in opposite values” (Beyond

Good and Evil 10) attempted to rationalize this relationship in an effort to sustain

those transcendent principles of desire and the fixed/immobile “agent.” For that

purpose, let us first turn to cybernetics, and see how the liberal humanist subject

strived to flourish through the cybernetic body.

Cybernetics: Effective communication or instrumental control?

The rhetorics of disembodiment, as has been discussed, became a

fundamental component of various discursive machines but it reached its full

momentum with cybernetics. Defined as “a science of control and communication

in complex electronic machines like computers and the human nervous system”

(Tomas 30), cybernetics has shown that control operates on the principle of

feedback loops. During World War II there was an increased “demand” to

optimize the function of the machines, so weapons could be used more

efficiently, i.e., at speeds humans were unable to perform. In order to make the

machines more efficient it was necessary to design them so that they were “able

to reflect on their own performance and produce adjustments: the science of

feedback” (Continues Contact). Transcendental domination was no longer

possible as the control came from the users of technology (Continues Contact).
 39

Despite this fact, the efforts to preserve the liberal humanist subject and the

Cartesian mind/body split persisted throughout the cybernetic tradition.

Hans Moravec’s story Mind Children, in which he imagines a man whose

consciousness is downloaded into a robot, is one of the most radical examples of

this dichotomy. In this story, Moravec presents “an escapist fantasy of

disembodiment” (5), writes Thomas Foster. He develops a relation between

information/immateriality and materiality in the strict binarist terms, following

the traditional Western line of thought. Again, the “violent hierarchy” is in play as

the scientist dedicates all of his imagination and knowledge to translating the

mind/human consciousness into a pure informational form that becomes

independent of any particular embodiment. However, Moravec is not alone in

envisioning such scenarios.

The early writings about the figure of the cyborg also maintain and

intensify the separation of humanity from its environment. In Manfred Clynes’

and Nathan Kline’s 1960’s essay Cyborgs and Space we find one of the first

speculations on the possibilities of cyborg embodiment. Although this speculation

emphasizes the adaptation of the human form to a new technological

environment, it still remains locked within the binary language of domination.

Clynes and Kline write:

If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously

be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to

keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The

purpose of the Cyborg . . . is to provide an organizational system in

which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and

 40

unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and

to feel. (31)

Founded on the premises of the Enlightenment, this belief in “freedom”

extends to liberal humanism insofar as it suggests that while humans are not to

be seen as machines, machines can function as humans, autonomous and self-

directed subjects. Cybernetic discourses had difficulty escaping the premises of

Western metaphysics. Subjectivity, organization, unity, and the economy of the

Same still remained a vital group of “subjects” defining the relationship between

humans and machines. Command, control and communication – the three main

actors of cybernetics – “are rooted in the repeated sacrifice of other ways of

being in and communicating about the worlds ‘we’ are in,” writes Stephen Pfolh

(The Cybernetic Delirium). Indeed, there was a persistent effort to sustain the

hierarchy in cybernetics and to maintain control over “disorganized” nature.

In The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, the

founding figure of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, writes: "In control and

communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the

organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency... for entropy to increase"

(qtd. in Norbert Wiener Quotes). From this, one could reasonably infer that

Wiener believes there is a need to sustain the traditional rigid boundary of

mind/matter if we are to have meaningful and organized communication and

control. But what exactly does this “meaningful” and “organized” communication

mean? Donna Haraway suggests that it means “the translation of the world into a

problem of coding, a search for common language in which all resistance to

instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to

disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (164). From this

 41

proposition, then, it could be argued that effective communication for Wiener is

an unrestricted instrumental power and every interruption of communication is a

threat to that power. As the passage above suggests, machines/organisms have

a common enemy: entropy or chaotic disorganization or noise. This is also

evident in the following:

The metaphor to which I devote this chapter (Organization as the

Message) is one in which the organism is seen as message.

Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as

message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to

specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to

answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a

pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism

becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism. (Wiener qtd. in

Organization as the Message)

The level of organization that Wiener proposes here reminds us of Leibniz’s

account of universal language, which was discussed above. Here we again face

the humanist account which involves the rationalization of processes on the

grounds of universal necessity, exclusive binaries, and global superiority. In her

interpretation of Nietzsche and his relevance to Deleuze’s work on “becoming,”

Barbara Kennedy writes that this simplification of the complexity of living

processes (that is, the translation of our unique experiences into universal

characteristics), implies that “language is too inarticulate to explain the sheer

vibrancy, force, intensity and creativity of life” (85). In the next section on myth

and desire these ideas are expanded, but for now it is important to understand

that language, working within restricted logic-based formats (as we have seen in
 42

Lacan’s account), is not able to encompass what Kennedy calls “‘life’ and the

non-linguistic force of reality” – both of which are fundamental to an

understanding of Deleuze’s concept of “becoming” (86).

In How We Become Posthuman, Katherine N. Hayles discusses a range of

cybernetic arguments for disembodiment and highlights the tendency of

cybernetic researchers and scientists to align cybernetics with the values of

liberal humanism. In her analysis of the work of Norbert Wiener, Hayles writes:

The revolutionary implications of this (cybernetic) paradigm

notwithstanding, Wiener did not intend to dismantle the liberal

humanist subject. He was less interested in seeing humans as

machines than he was in fashioning human and machine alike in

the image of an autonomous, self-directed individual. In aligning

cybernetics with liberal humanism, he was following a strain of

thought that, since the Enlightenment, had argued that human

beings could be trusted with freedom because they and the social

structures they devised operated as self-regulating mechanisms.

For Wiener, cybernetics was a means to extend liberal humanism,

not subvert it. (7)

As Hayles suggests, and as we have seen in the example of Clynes’ and Kline’s

essay Cyborgs and Space, the Cartesian rational self, the vision of the liberal self

as an autonomous and self-regulating subject, and a sense of agency derived

from a belief in enlightened self-interest are the values informing much of the

early cybernetic discourses. As these values imply, the cybernetic machine was

meant to extend a humanistic self into the realm of the machine. Once again,

ethereal thought exceeds corporeal existence. The rhetoric of disembodiment, it

 43

then seems, is merely a prolongation of long-time held belief that a human is a

unique entity and a distant being in an antagonistic relationship with his/her

surroundings. However, it is important to note that such rhetoric has allowed

cultural theorists, artists, and digital nomads to produce a critical perspective on

the technological mediation of human existence in general, and reflect upon the

artificial constitution of the Western self. Post-structuralist discourse and cyber

theory have begun to question the binary construction of language and

conceptual thought, placing the concept of the “body” outside this restrictive

arena. On the other side, artists and digital nomads have begun “violating” the

boundaries of the liberal “subject”… letting the imagination cut across those rigid

structures governing nature. As will be seen in chapter 4, new forms of

resistance bring embodiment back into the discourse. This study addresses a

specific form of resistance – the posthuman consciousness – which is only one

possibility of the ontological interruption. It is, nonetheless, a vital “flow” in the

re-imagining and re-imaging of the relationships between the concepts

(organisms and non-organisms) that have been ontologically separated as one

term governing the other. Cyberpunk narratives of Enki Bilal take us into the

world of what Hakim Bay calls “ontological anarchy” (Thomas 7). It is in Bilal’s

narratives that the posthuman, with its hybrid nature, invokes a compilation of

heterogeneous constituents of which none is stable but in a constant motion of

becoming – detached from one constituent and stitched to another. Through this

ongoing process of constructing and deconstructing once-stable boundaries, this

figure disrupts the Cartesian self and divulges the construction of a master

theater in which our desires and imagination were trapped in definite

representation. But before analyzing this process of “becoming,” particularly in

 44

terms of composing human-machine symbiosis, we will explore the avenues of

myths and desire.

Myth and a story about desire: Expansion of imagination

Once upon a time, Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, aimlessly

fluttering here and there, following his intuition. Of Zhuang Zhou he knew nothing.

Suddenly he awoke and immediately he was Zhuang Zhou again. Now he (who

now?) can’t tell whether Zhou had dreamt he was a butterfly or the butterfly had

dreamt he (she?) was Zhou.

Andrea Sick, Dream-machine: Cyberfeminism

In Myth Today, Ronald Barthes asserts that every myth is a message

(121-129), a system of communication that reveals many of our fundamental

values. The most important aspect of myth, according to Barthes, is that it is a

second order semiological system or a meta-language that works on a higher

level of codification than the linguistic one. In this second order of signification,

the denotative sign (it is what it is and what it means) becomes the connotative

signifier, which depletes the original denotative sign of its historical and material

reference and transforms it into a new signifier. Since Barthes’ illustration relates

to how bourgeois ideology instills itself into semiotic cultural phenomena, this

new signifier is constructed to reinforce and justify the naturalized bourgeois

concepts of “eternal truths.” Yet, if we take a look at early creation myths and

the interrelationships of scientific, philosophical, and theological conceptions of

women’s nature within Western intellectual thought, we see that it is possible to

 45

extend these “naturalized bourgeois” concepts into the realm of the Western

intellectual tradition in general. For example, in the primary creation epic of

classical Greece, Hesiod’s Theogony, we find the myth of Prometheus, the divine

champion of man who stole the fire from Zeus and returned it to men. The myth

depicts the creation of woman as punishment to men for Prometheus’ deceiving

of Zeus. After she is created as a reaction of the angry god, woman’s journey as

a metaphysically inferior and less perfect creature begins and permeates the

centuries-old tradition of Western thought. In other words, the notion of women’s

inferiority has been carried via popular mythology to various scientific theories

and cultural explanations and vice versa, as was discussed in the previous

section. From Aristotle and his biological explanation of women’s inferiority, to

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (woman as being intermediate between the

child and the man), the notion did not change – only the term did, from “inferior”

to “different” (Tuana 39). Although it is not in the scope of this project to trace

the Western intellectual tradition, it is relevant to mention that these beliefs and

themes evident in the Western worldview have had significant implications for the

construction of images of the nature of woman and theories concerning the

“proper” relationships between men and women.

What seems to be particularly important about myth is that it “hides

nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear." Myth also has “the

pretension of transcending itself into a factual system” (Barthes 125) in which it

manufactures new “naturalized” myths. Thus, myth has ideological dimensions

and it is through the signification processes of myths that we conceive everyday

reality. Given this analysis, myths are reflections of our cultural beliefs and/or

dominant ideologies. However, the struggle between different discourses and

 46

meanings within ideology points to interruptions in the flows of signification

processes and suggests that there is something fluid and revolutionary that is

disrupting the discourses, something that ideology as a concept alone cannot

embrace. Following Deleuze and Guattari, revolutions are made not out of duty

(coded flows) but out of desire, which is revolutionary in its own right (Anti-

Oedipus 104). Parallel to this, in addition to being reflections of our cultural

beliefs, myths are products of our desires, anxieties, fears and hopes. As such,

they are capable of cutting through the dominant discourses. But what does this

“cutting through the dominant discourses” actually entail? And how does it relate

to myths and our technologically mediated environment?

In the section on cybernetics, Nietzschean anti-metaphysical claims on

what cannot be expressed through language were introduced, in order to bring

into the discussion the tension between structuralist linguistics and “the non-

linguistic force/s of reality.” Nietzsche, whose ideas have influenced the work of

Deleuze – particularly in terms of “becoming” – criticized language for its inability

to capture the uniqueness of our experiences in life (On Truth and Lie). For

Nietzsche, our experiences (i.e., individual encounters) are wide-ranging – from

the “sense” of force, movement and compassion to the acceptance of cruelty –

and always fluctuating with different degrees of dynamisms. What we experience

in life then, according to Nietzsche, is a multiplicity of selves – “becoming.” This

multiplicity of selves, or what Nietzsche terms “many mortal souls” (The

Resentful Self 15) within an individual, involves a multiplicity of changing desires

and sensations (Kennedy 87). Nietzsche’s world of “becoming” thus is

experienced through the body, which Western ontology has positioned as a

subordinated term of the dominant term “reason,” as earlier noted. Considering

 47

our experiences as wide-ranging and ourselves in a constant motion of becoming,

it becomes apparent that each step to “explain” those experiences through

linguistic structures is equal to a step of reducing them. In other words, because

of its organizational structure and particularly its ties to metaphysics (the soul of

One transcendent Being), language encapsulates (codes) these experiences into

universally shared perceptions (see Leibniz’s calculation above). It gives us

values, which Nietzsche in The Will to Power defines as “the highest amount of

power;” and “the forms that rule,” in which “the sphere of the subjugated is

continually extended; or it decreases or increases according to the conditions

(nourishment) being either favorable or unfavorable” (180). Following Nietzsche,

Kennedy remarks that language “does not allow for an understanding of the

creativity of experience” (87). It restricts and distorts, she notes, the fluxes,

multiplicities and instabilities of life (86) – all of those that Nietzsche saw as “the

real” of our life. Language, as such, simplifies the complexities of living processes

- dynamics of “becoming.” In the light of the Nietzschean concept of becoming,

Deleuze formulates his own “lines of flight” or the notion of “becoming” – the

notion on which this study rests. Although Deleuze embraces Nietzschean anti-

metaphysical claims of dynamism and multiplicities, the “self” that emerges in his

account is not a personal self but an assemblage of singularities, “affects,”

experiences, experimentation and intensities (88). This self (if it can be termed a

self) is not predicated upon any ideal notion of its unity and wholeness, and thus

it has no lack. Instead, this assemblage is, as Tamsin Lorraine in her reading of

Deleuze observes, “a process or movement that dynamically becomes in the

space of the ‘between’ without reference to any end result or ideal totalization”

(145). What Deleuze, like Guattari, suggests with this process is the existence of
 48

proto-subjectivities, that is, a state of being prior to the social and cultural world

of language structures, as well as prior to an emergent sense of a physical self

(Kennedy 89). It is the pre-personal that exists as a field of different forces, the

forces that interact in ways to produce effects on one another. In Anti-Oedipus,

we see that these pre-personals are sexual drives, one’s internal organs,

emotions, aggression, experiences, and the surfaces of bodies. All are

“singularities” that are constitutive of the self but not experienced or “had” by a

Self, a subject or a person (Kennedy 89). Like Haraway’s “cyborg,” this

assemblage or “self” or “desiring-machine” has no personal biography. It

consequently has no “origin story in the Western sense,” and particularly, it has

no “truck with pre-oedipal symbiosis” (Haraway 150) or the Oedipal scenario.

“The cutting though dominant discourses” begins here, then, at the very moment

of the de-totalization and de-coding of the “concepts.” This is the point of

departure from the Western metaphysical claims so imbedded in linguistic models

– those that Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, find as “not abstract enough”

(7).

In order to better understand Deleuze and Guattari’s “ontological anarchy”

inscribed in the process of becoming and body as an assemblage or desiring-

machine, it is necessary to consider Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “the body

without organs.” However, before we explore the idea and connect this active

concept to the flows of Bilal’s posthuman woman Jill Bioskop, it is necessary to

examine how Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of multiplicity connects to language

and weaves itself into the arena of oppositional myths.

As mentioned above, Deleuze and Guattari find linguistic models not

abstract enough to explain the complexities of life. “The principle of multiplicity,”

 49

already implicated through the idea of pre-personals, has no subject or object,

but only, Deleuze and Guattari write, “determinations, magnitudes, and

dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity change in

nature” (8). The principle is based on the idea that there are “no points or

positions,” such as those found in structuralist linguistics. There are only

“abstract machines that connect a language to the semantic and pragmatic

contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole

micropolitics of the social field” (7). They also indicate that “there is no language

in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois,

slangs, and specialized languages” (7).

Following the principle of multiplicity, language – as much as the body –

“is not really structured as a language” (Shaviro 35). In Nietzsche’s account, we

have seen how language codes the flows (i.e., our experiences) into universals.

But while coding, language also misses “itself.” Language has no linguistic

structure, because in itself language is not an object, but a medium. Its inability

to speak “itself” is its power to presuppose (Wall). For Deleuze and Guattari, the

“tree” structure of language, as in the Chomsky model, is problematic, because it

“plots a point and fixes an order” (A Thousand Plateaus 7) – it is hierarchical in

nature. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in

the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification

proceeding: This is the case for a pivot-unity forming the basis for

a set of biunivocal relationships between objective elements or

points, or for the One that divides following the law of a binary

logic of differentiation in the subject. (A Thousand Plateaus 8)

 50

Rather than “the tree type” of language that starts with one point and proceeds

by dichotomy, Deleuze and Guattari propose another model – the rhizome type of

language. According to the principle of multiplicity, this model creates the

possibility to de-center language onto other dimensions and other registers.

Unlike the tree or root type of structuralist linguistics, the rhizome type “never

allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension

over and above its number of lines, that is over and above the multiplicity of

numbers attached to those lines” (9). In addition, rhizomatic connections

illustrate the process in which connections among “singularities” (see above) flow

from point to point. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write that

multiplicities are “connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground

stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (22). For Deleuze and

Guattari, this process of flow between multiplicities is performed in accordance

with an immanent principle of desire rather than adhering to the order imposed

by a plane of organization transcendent to its own movement (Lorraine 170). By

positing an immanent4 principle of desire, which also connects to an immanent

notion of the unconscious – instead of Lacan’s desire as “never-ending lack” and

Freud’s unproductive desire – we have a notion that insists on the productive

nature of desire. Not only that desire, in this case, “escapes” the Oedipal triangle,

but “language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a

signifying thing” (133). By embracing then the rhizomatic nature of language, the

principle of multiplicity and most important, the productive nature of desire, we

can now approach “myths” capable of cutting through the dominant discourses.

4
Immanence was a key word for Deleuze, and the term relates to what he called his empiricist philosophy
based on the empirical real without recourse to the transcendental. Deleuze insists that philosophy, rather
than setting up transcendentals, must approach the immanent conditions of that which it is trying to
think. Thought must create movement and consequences (See: Gilles Deleuze. Pure Immanence: Essays
on Life. New York: Zone Books, 2005. 25-33)
 51

As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari allow us to define language by

desire – by what causes language “to move, to flow, and to explode” (133).

Consequently, they also facilitate a movement away from the economy of the

Same and the linguistic tree that relies on dichotomy, so we can move into the

realms of desiring-production and call for “oppositional” myths that give us new

“signifiers.” These new signifiers, however, are constructed/produced not to

justify the naturalized “eternal truths,” but to expose the process of their

construction, that is, the production of nature as a mere construct situated in the

factual system. Rather than signifiers, they become active and “affective”

concepts. Disruption of the production of ethereal truths that support the factual

system occurs as these new signifiers appropriate the master language, become

responsive to their construction as discourse, yet are not trapped within it. These

“oppositional” myths, in accordance to Barthes’ thesis, still hide nothing but their

function is no longer to distort the factual system. The language/ideology of the

factual system is, in this case, appropriated as a tool and/or a rhetorical strategy

in order to expose how the “original” denotative signs are being stripped of their

historical and material reference in the aforementioned production of naturalized

truths. In the process, the excluded terms of phallocentric alignments are

examined and possibilities for transforming the presuppositions underlying

prevailing knowledge are open. In this way, oppositional myths inscribe

regeneration rather than re-birth and embrace our “situated knowledges” while

giving way to excesses of heterogeneity.

Whereas early creation myths explained the place of humankind by

delineating the characteristics that differentiate humans from other animals,

humans from humans (men from women), and the characteristics that set apart
 52

humans from the gods, oppositional myths in our analysis are about partial

subjects, partial connections, and imperfect stitching of humans and machines.

They are often sliced through with the sharp knife of irony that serves to trigger

our imagination away from isomorphic slots and into the direction of

heterogeneous multiplicities. Consequently, it is a multidimensional topography

of subjectivity that informs these myths; the subjectivity that inscribes an

opportunity to imagine that the past does not determine the future. The last is

important insofar as it marks the future in which we do not have to interpret

ourselves from “the vantage point of the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the

master subject” (Haraway 192). It is precisely this eye, as we have seen, that

gave vision to the myth of creation, through which men explained the “nature” of

humankind, while constructing detrimental dualisms that served to explain and

maintain the supremacy of the One through the unprivileged position of the

Other.

This is relevant for re-imag(in)ing of the posthuman in a broad spectrum

of colors, that is, for envisioning posthuman as the “multiple subject with at least

double vision” (Haraway qtd. in Sandoval 258). An important oppositional myth

that appropriates multi-colored lenses to look at our contemporary postmodern

world is the myth of the human-machine symbiosis in the age of micro-

electronics and transnational corporations. It is Donna Haraway’s myth of cyborg

– the myth that will subtly create a heterogeneous space for Enki Bilal’s

posthuman woman Jill Bioskop.

 53

Chapter 3

Re-imag(in)ing of the Posthuman

 54

The myth of cyborg: Subjectivity in stitches

… through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves,

irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words

that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a

violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense

erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

By undoing the here and now, it opens the way to new spaces, other

velocities… Questions, problems, and hypothesis bore holes in the here and now to

end up in the virtual world on the other side of the mirror, somewhere between

time and eternity.

Pierre Levy, Becoming Virtual

In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna Haraway writes: “a cyborg world

is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” (154). This

imposition, as was seen in chapter 2, is dependent on Wiener’s “effective

communication” and struggles over “nature's tendency to degrade the organized

and to destroy the meaningful” (qtd. in Norbert Wiener Quotes). A failure to

communicate effectively, Wiener believed, results from an increase of entropy.

For Haraway, on the contrary, this failure becomes an act of resistance insofar as

it jams the theoretical machine of disembodiment while giving way to embodied

encounters with material/sensible reality. Insistence upon “illegibility,” not

signification, of the cyborg is one of Haraway’s subversive techniques in

challenging “the informatics of domination” (Haraway 163), or contribution to

Wiener’s “increase of entropy.”

 55

In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze argues that we are no

longer living in Foucault’s “disciplinary society” but in “the society of control” (3).

Whereas “disciplinary societies,” in Foucault’s account, operate on the principle of

enclosure, “the societies of control,” Deleuze argues, operate in a continuous

network, or on the principle of “surfing.” The control which was once confined to

the time frame of a closed system (illustrated by the factory) gives way to a free-

floating control of what Deleuze calls “a single corporation that now has only

stockholders” (5). The former, Deleuze continues, designates the individual by

signature and by the number which indicates the individual’s position within a

mass (such as an administrative number assigned to a student in school or a

factory worker), while the latter regulates everything by a “code” or a “password”

(3). In other words, the information and computer technology upon which “the

corporation” depends has transformed the language of control and has

fragmented individuals into set of quantifiable elements. As Deleuze write:

The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark

access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves

dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become

“dividuals”, and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks"

(Postscript on the Societies of Control 5).

In Haraway’s account, this has reduced “the world into a problem of coding”

(Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 164). Information, she argues, is that kind of

unit that allows universal translation, and thus unrestricted instrumental power

(164). Molecular genetics, ecology, immunology, and sociobiological evolutionary

theory, Haraway argues, are all illustrations of the translation of the world into a

problem of coding. The Human Genome Project, a multibillion dollar,

 56

internationally networked research program to decode the human DNA not only

exemplifies that the organism has been translated into the problems of genetic

coding, it has also triggered a new boom in biotechnology stocks (Reichle 245).

This reduction of everything into “deformable and transformable coded figures of

a single corporation” can be challenged, and what Haraway suggests with her

ironic and active concept/icon of the cyborg is that this challenge lies in failures

of translation, which further lead (or may lead) to what she calls “joint kinship” or

lines of affinity. As she writes, “a cyborg world might be about lived social and

bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals

and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory

standpoints” (154). Considering the connected implication that these failures of

translation result from our embodied encounters with sensible reality or, as

Haraway notes, “lived social and bodily realities,” we can then read them in the

light of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “flows,” “movements,” or simply

“lines of flight” – deterritorialization/s. A line of flight, according to Deleuze and

Guattari, is a flow of movement that breaks with conventional social codes in the

creation of new forms of life (A Thousand Plateaus 204). The notion of line/s of

flight is a very important concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, as it

marks and constitutes their notion of becoming/s. In the previous chapter, we

saw how Nietzsche insists on the notion of becoming to develop his argument on

the multiplicity of selves, which also entails the multiplicity of changing desires

and sensations within an individual, who is always in a constant process of

becoming. For Deleuze and Guattari, as will be discussed later in this chapter,

the notion of becoming/s, although with origins in Nietzschean ideas, operates

 57

somewhat differently. It is premised upon the “processual” 5 dynamics of the

active/affective forces of materiality of bodies (of which not all are biological) in

assemblage with each other. But before we further engage with the concept of

becoming, which is indeed one of the most significant elements of their work, let

us return to their lines of flight.

In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and

Guattari provide multiple examples to show how the rhizome is constituted by the

endless number of lines of flight, all of which make connections between unique

living (and non-living) forms. Not to forget, the rhizome is a method and a

multiplicity that can be applied to any lived events, personae, concepts, social

formations, etc. (9). Let us now look at an example, one that constitutes a

variety of concepts that will be respectfully examined and utilized throughout this

project:

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a

wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is

nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s

reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by

transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous

elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates

the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis,

mimicry, lure, etc). But this is true only on the level of the strata –

a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on

one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same

time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a

5
Kennedy notes that rather than transcendence, Deleuze’s notion of “becoming” is expressed through
a sense of “immanence” or a “processual” continuum of movement and flux (87).
 58

capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a

veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a

becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings

about deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of

the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a

circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever

further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an

exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight

composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed

to or subjugated by anything signifying.” (A Thousand Plateaus 10)

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

Territorialities, then, are shot through with lines of flight testifying

to the presence within them of movements of deterritorialization

and reterritorialization. (55)

When seen in the light of this rhizomatic becoming, Haraway’s cyborg is

the creature constituted by or “shot through with” the failures of translation that

make possible new and affective connections between organic and non-organic

constituents. Then, failures are really nothing but bridges to new formations of

life – formations that escape the forces of repression and stratification as they

occur through attraction and combination of relations that are created out of and

in spite of difference. What Haraway proposes is crafting “effective affinities,” not

identities, of all those groups and personas that have been historically excluded

from the category of the universal human or marked as “other.” To build an

affinity of this kind, for Haraway, means to refuse stable memberships in the

social categories of race, sex, or class in favor of embracing differences,

 59

otherness, and specificities. It requires a departure from gender, race, or class

consciousness and from the endless splitting and searches for a new essential

unity in order to participate in “recoding communication and intelligence to

subvert command and control” (157-175). She argues that building such

affinities and learning to read the webs of power would not only undermine “the

justification for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism,

scientism, and other unlamented –isms, but all claims for an organic or natural

standpoint” (157). The myth of the cyborg, which insists upon the illegibility and

hybridity of “the illegitimate offspring of militarism, patriarchal capitalism, not to

mention state socialism,” makes available those movements that escape re-

territorialization into the “natural matrix of unity” (157). In other words,

illegibility undermines the codes of essentialism and hybridity the natural matrix

of unity. Cyborgs are deadly machines, Haraway notes, and they are “often

exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (151). Following this premise, cyborgs are

creatures constituted by “affective forces,” as it is in their “unfaithfulness,” which

presupposes failures of translation or lines of flight, that they are capable of a

becoming-other6. Haraway continues, “It might be the unnatural cyborg women

making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail whose constructed

unities will guide effective oppositional strategies” (154).

Yet, Deleuze and Guattari write, we must be wary because a line of flight

can always extend too much into a given direction and become a line of

destruction (Anti-Oedipus 321). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari

embrace the concept of the rhizome to outline the connectedness and the

inevitable and mutually informing contact of the lines of flight with the

6
Becoming-other is another concept of Deleuze and Guattari used in reference to the rhizomatic
production of subjectivity.
 60

surrounding terrain. However, they also warn that there are possibilities that

these lines of flight (if stretched too far) can reencounter organizations that re-

establish what was intended to be dismantled. They write:

Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it

is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as

well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.

There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines

explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of a

rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why

one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the

rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a

rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will

reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations

that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a

subject. (A Thousand Plateaus 9)

Perhaps it would be possible to argue that Haraway’s myth of the cyborg

reencounters “attributions that reconstitute a subject” and restores a notion of

(cyborgian) subjectivity, but this cyborgian “subject” no longer depends upon any

binary definitions of subjectivity. It is extended into the realm of heterogeneity

and premised upon embodied encounters with sensible reality. As we have seen

in the previous chapter, rhizomatic connections are performed in accordance to

an immanent principle of desire. Consequently, lines of flights are created by

desire, which no longer conforms to or is contained within any definite laws or

structures. As Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus, “Desire does not ‘want’

revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting

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what it wants” (116). Productive in nature, desire causes these cyborgian

“failures” to move and explode and rupture the coded and signifying language of

dominance and control. Haraway remarks that the cyborg, as a creature with no

origin story, is “embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of

repression, which we need to understand for our survival” (150). Having no

background, no personal history, and no non-productive desire, the cyborg

breaks out of the logic of the same that is governing the oedipalized (masculine)

subject. Consequently, the cyborg or the posthuman escapes the notions of fixed

subjectivity and gendered subjectivity, and enters the realm of constant

metamorphosis and partial connections. In this realm, following Deleuze and

Guattari, subjectivity is displaced through immanence, through Irigaray’s notion

of “the sensible transcendental” or the reality that exceeds our conceptual and

perceptual grasp. In other words, it is displaced through the pragmatics of

“becoming” (Kennedy 92). In chapter 2, the link between the notion of becoming

and the existence of proto-subjectivities was briefly introduced. Now, in order to

fully understand what this idea entails and how it relates to the posthuman, and

particularly Bilal’s character, it is necessary to involve a spectrum of concepts

that “constitute” the process of becoming. Let us first begin with Deleuze and

Guattari’s definition of “becoming”:

All becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is

not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to

proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy

is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject nor the

proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the

subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills,
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becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the

relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are

closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes.

This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire…

Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of

movement and rest because they enter into a particular zone of

proximity.” (A Thousand Plateaus 272)

The process of becoming, then, is a molecular process that involves a movement

through which particles of one entity are joined with particles of another entity.

An assemblage, to recall from chapter 2, is a process that dynamically becomes

in the space of “between.” It is composed of singularities or pre-personals that

exist prior to any notion of the self, but are constitutive of the self. These pre-

personals are in fact molecular elements, which, at the level of what Deleuze and

Guattari call “molar” organization, group themselves into relatively stable

configurations – molar aggregates (Lorraine 121). Later in this chapter, I explore

these concepts in depth to illustrate how Jill’s “becoming” disrupts and dissolves

the notion of fixed subjectivity. At this point, it is important to remark that

according to Deleuze and Guattari, “all becomings are molecular: the animal,

flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities…” (275). Thus, particles

may be emitted both by living and non-living forms, which takes us back to a

cyborg or posthuman or “machinic assemblage.” The cyborg or posthuman,

already a “machinic assemblage,” is also a composite that becomes through “the

notion of a material affect” (Kennedy 88). As previously mentioned, cyborgs are

capable of producing affective connections because they are creatures composed

of affective forces. For Deleuze, these affective connections are premised on the
 63

affective forces of materiality, or as Kennedy writes, “a materiality of bodies in

assemblage with each other, as molecular forces7 in coagulation” (88). In order

to exemplify such connectivity, we will turn to The Nicopol Trilogy cyberpunk

graphic novel and initially look at the first and the third stories of the trilogy in

order to return to the story The Woman’s Trap (1986), which is delicately caught

between the two and which provides the examples of “affective connectivity.”

Enki Bilal, a Yugoslavian-born graphic novel and film artist residing and

working in France, began his work on The Nicopol Trilogy in 1980 with a story

entitled The Carnival of Immortals (La Foire aux Immortels). Six years later, Bilal

wrote The Woman’s Trap (La Femme Piége) and with Cold Equator (Froid

Équateur), written in 1992, he completed his magnum opus. In 2004, he drew

from the trilogy to create an animation/feature film Immortel (Ad Vitam).

Although we return to Immortel later in this chapter, it should be emphasized

that narrative elements of the trilogy are only loosely connected to the film.

In The Carnival of Immortals Bilal introduces Alcide Nicopol, a deserter

who is in 1993 sentenced by a French military court to orbital suspended

animation and who after spending twenty years in a state of hibernation

mysteriously returns to Earth where his body becomes “inhabited” by the

Egyptian god Horus. The return to earthly life brings Nicopol into the dreadful

future of Paris, ruled by a fascist dictator Choublanc, and populated with humans

who obey, unquestionably, whichever “governor” comes to rule. Chaos, aliens,

grime and heavy dumping of greenish snow inform the environment of

totalitarianism in which the national boundaries have ceased to exist. As Nicopol

wonders through the gloomy streets of Paris in 2023, which are extensively

7
I return to the notion of “molecular forces” in the next section.
 64

labeled with fascist paroles, he learns that Parisian high society welcomes only

men. Women, mostly of reproductive age, are automatically sent to a sterile

underground clinic where the rate of birthing is scientifically accelerated in order

to design programs that would produce about 80% male children – all destined

for the government armies. Within this alarming environment, Nicopol and Horus

in symbiosis work together against the peculiar forces of the 21st century.

Despite different plans of the other Egyptian gods, Nicopol, with the help of

Horus, is being elected as a new governor replacing Choublanc’s fascist,

totalitarian regime with an egalitarian society; ominously after his election,

Nicopol, now separated from Horus, “retires” to the psychiatric center because, in

the midst of turmoil, he loses his sanity. His son, Nicopol Jr. Nico, takes his place,

but as new fascist regroupings arise along with terrorist attacks, Paris is again

faced with a troubling future.

Only fragmentally connected to the two previous stories, Cold Equator

follows the journey of Nicopol’s son, Nico, who on his journey to Equator City

develops a relationship with Yelena, a specialist in abnormal genetics and

hereditary anomalies. Parallel to their journey, film director Tuynten is directing a

film about Nicopol and a blue-haired woman with a pale skin, Jill Bioskop.

Retrospectively, through the film’s events, Nico is following up on the story about

his father, and with the helpful insights of director Tuynten, who appears to be

well informed about Nicopol’s endeavors, Nico learns about Nicopol’s relationship

with Jill. This relationship, as we shall shortly learn, is initiated in The Woman’s

Trap. The random scenes of the film in this graphic story suggest that Jill and

Nicopol’s romance is woven into a net of intriguing events. As the film’s director

Tuynten informs Nico of Jill’s rather difficult pregnancy followed by “vomiting up

 65

of the strangest things,” through one of the film inserts we briefly learn that Jill is

taking drugs to erase her memories of Nicopol. Back in the “real” time, Horus is

about to leave the Earth and in his conversation with Nicopol he advises him to

forget Jill and the baby as both of them are now, he remarks, “the affairs of

mortals.” Horus’ farewell to Nicopol consists of important lines that concern much

of the narrative as well as this study. He says: “Harmony must be restored from

chaos, we must reenter the ‘nun’, in short replace humanity with something

better” (154). The narrative closes with Yelena and Nico watching the final

images of the film, which keeps rolling until the last empty frame.

The following, second story of the trilogy, which is that which concerns

this study most directly as it considers the presence of “the affective

connectivity” of human and machine, takes place two years after Alcide Nicopol

loses his sanity and ends up in the psychiatric center. In short, it follows The

Carnival of Immortals.

Narratively, The Woman’s Trap explores the story of a special

correspondent of unknown origin, Jill Bioskop, whose blue hair, blue tears and

white skin contribute to her distinctive appearance. The violent and foggy streets

of a war-torn London in 2025 provide a dangerous but exciting mise-en-scene,

within which Jill is following and dispatching stories thirty years into the past and

within which her relationship with a mysterious character, John, is poignantly

evolved. A rather powerful and peaceful person whose face is covered with black

gauze, John appears to be from a non-human world. While he is helping Jill to

collect information for her story, which is loosely connected to the events that

took place in The Carnival of Immortals, John is murdered, only to appear again

with white-bleeding bullet holes in his back. His relationship with Jill, which is to
 66

some extent ambiguous, develops on the basis of rather unclear past memories

and throughout the story it attains an almost guardian-like sensibility - in the

sense that he is always there when she needs him, moving in and out of the

“real” world. Through Jill’s journalism and her passion for investigating stories

from the past, The Woman’s Trap sporadically evokes events that concern

Nicopol and Horus. After two years in the psychiatric center, Nicopol is

“awakened” and “accepts” what he calls his “soul’s sickness.” He decides to

assent to Horus to inhabit his body again, although in return he asks to be

introduced to Jill, who has been appearing in his nightmares. Before Jill and

Nicopol establish a relationship that will be the inspiration, as we have seen in

Cold Equator, for a feature film, Jill’s adventure, particularly after the moment

she finds John murdered, takes a bizarre turn. To assuage her grief over John,

she takes the H.L.V. drug – “John’s drug,” as she calls it – which eradicates her

memories. In the midst of her investigation and while on the journey from

London to Berlin, Jill “falls” into a series of events that “appear” to be mostly in

her mind. She commits three murders of men that she encounters on her journey

and finds out that her stories are the stories from the future. After the last

murder and before she takes an excessive dosage of the H.L.V. to eradicate what

she calls “bloody effective memories” of the murders, Jill decides that she must

write about the “horror” for her readers in 1993. After the story is written, she

collapses and John reappears to rescue her by giving her the right amount of

pills. Horus and Nicopol witness the scene and soon after, Jill joins them on the

trip to Cairo. With the two “little pills” in her pocket, Jill decides to engage with a

new love affair.

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Now we return to the sequence in which Jill decides to write about the

murders and in which she establishes an intense relationship with her type-

writer; the relationship composed of affective forces.

Jill and the type-writer, which is called “script-walker” in the narrative,

“fuse” in such an intense way that Jill collapses and the type-writer jams and

reaches the point of “still burning” (Figure 1). This happens, Deleuze and Guattari

would argue, as “they enter into a particular zone of proximity” (A Thousand

Plateaus 272). While in the process of “recording,” which is both the process of

writing and the process of recalling “bloody” events to mind, Jill enters the state

of delirium. The recording process affects her writing, which becomes repetitive

and declines to the point of being illegible, and it intensifies the connectedness

between her and the machine. It also affects the entire visual plane, which is

intensified with bright red color or blood throughout the panels (Figure 2).

Figure 1
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Figure 2
 69

The recording process itself creates delirium – or as Deleuze and Guattari write,

“the code of delirium” – which releases Jill’s “singularities” or “pre-personals” 8

from “the molar identity” 9 and further reinforces the dynamics of becoming “Jill-

the script walker,” because delirium, as much as desire, “proves to have an

extraordinary fluidity” (Anti-Oedipus 15). This composite – or what Haraway

would call “imperfect stitching” – of “Jill-script-walker” illustrates a movement, a

line of flight or escape through which the two bodies are joined together. In

Haraway’s words:

The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole,

simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched

together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to

see together without claiming to be another. (Simians, Cyborgs,

and Women 193)

Rather than explaining this affective “flow of movement” as the loss of Jill’s

subjectivity, it is possible to argue – following Deleuze and Guattari, that she is

presenting a model of subjectivity that disintegrates “solid” structures as it

continually incorporates fluidity and connectedness. These models of subjectivity,

based on the materiality of bodies in movement, no longer “coincide with the

social code” (Anti-Oedipus 15) and, consequently, no longer coincide with the

traditional ideologies of gender. The process of becoming, thus, involves

movements outside the fixity of gendered subjectivity and the system of binary

entities, which as we have seen, assign privileges to men over women. As

Haraway suggests, this opening of non-isomorphic subjects is “unimaginable

8
These are molecular elements. See: chapter 2 and chapter 3 section: Forces in movement.
9
The molar identity refers to a relatively stable identity and it is the concept to which I shall return in the
next section.
 70

from the vantage point of the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the master subject”

(192).

Whereas in The Woman’s Trap Jill “becomes” Jill-type-walker, or a

machinic assemblage, in Immortel (which is, as remarked earlier, to some extent

based on The Nicopol Trilogy) she is already “machinic assemblage” in the

constant process of metamorphosis to become what she calls a “human-woman.”

Jill’s becoming of human-woman can be seen in the light of Deleuze and

Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman,” which is in their philosophy “the key to

all the other becomings” (A Thousand Plateaus 277). But, before we turn to this

idea to illustrate how it entails destabilization of “the molar identity,” it is

important to consider Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs

and desiring-machines. Exploring these concepts and weaving them together with

others will further elucidate the connectedness of affectivity to dynamic

becomings, flows and fluxes, and failures of translation that the cyborg or

posthuman is composed of. These concepts will also enable deconstruction of the

essentialist category of “woman” and thus allow for re-imag(in)ing the “woman”

outside the representational realm of binary structures. As Kennedy suggests in

Deleuze and Cinema: Aesthetics of Sensation, “woman” as a term has been

encoded as “essence,” as a caretaker, woman as nature rather than culture, but

“if the radical democratic principles of a feminist politics are not to be sacrificed

then the very category ‘woman’ itself needs to be rethought and understood in

different and creative ways, providing a new site for political contest” (92).
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Forces in relationship

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write that “everything is

production” (4). Everything that exists - from stars, planets, stones, human

beings, animals, machines, etc. - is an active component of the dynamic flow of

life which is always in motion. All the forces of life are connected, and there are

always certain connections that we choose over other connections. As we

separate things to distinguish them from other things, we prioritize one

connection over the other. This process presupposes a level of organization. For

Deleuze and Guattari, life is the net through which run threads of molecular

forces, and none of these forces can be separated from the net except through

“abstraction” (8). Molecular forces, as Deleuze and Guattari illustrate, are in

constant flux, although they do have determinate relationships (36). These

forces-in-relationships or what they call “desiring-machines,” are described as

“binary machines” coupled together. They write:

This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and

another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of

this flow (the breast – the mouth). And because the first machine

is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially

drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire

constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by

nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to

flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows. (Anti-Oedipus 5)

Desiring-machines “make us an organism” (8), but no one of these

machines can determine the mechanism of the whole organism. What is

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produced by the linear series of binary machines is a “connective synthesis,”

which – at a specific time and place - produces a body without organs “as the

identity of producing and the product” of production (8). This production also

implies other possible organizations of body, as the linear series of binary

machines could always have been produced in another way. The body without

organs “belongs to the realm of antiproduction,” and resists any specific

organization of desiring-machines by setting up a “counterflow of amorphous,

undifferentiated fluid” (8). What this suggests is that an organism, which is made

up of desiring machines (thus, it is constantly in process rather than being a

finished product), is also constantly craving for its release from any determinate

organizations of its desiring-machines. In other words, the organism struggles

between production and its product, and it is this resistance of the body without

organs that leads to the formation of new patterns. For any change/movement to

occur there has to be fluidity in the machines. To ensure that there is fluidity,

production requires “an element of antiproduction,” that is, it requires a halt (8).

Thus, the body without organs stops the production of a determinate

configuration of desiring-machines and releases desire (or delirium - as we have

seen in Jill’s case) from the restraints of specific forms of desiring-production,

which would require repressing other forms of desiring-production. Deleuze and

Guattari write: “Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by

continually breaking down” (8).

For Deleuze and Guattari the desiring-machines, which constitute the

unconscious, are operating at a molecular level of production by constantly

creating flows and breaks in flows among molecular elements (287). The

desiring-machines live, they argue, “under the order of dispersion of the

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molecular elements” (323), which, as was noted earlier, are constitutive of the

self, but exist prior to any notion of the self. This brings us closer to

understanding the failures of translation and Jill’s dissolution of fixed subjectivity.

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is at the molar level of organization that

personas (or “subjects”) appear and the social investments of social repression

start intruding. It is also at this level, they continue, that these social

investments are being narrowed down to the familial investments. As was shown

in chapter 2, the familial investments are premised on the idea of lack and the

phallus as the signifier. I have discussed the interrelationship between Western

metaphysics and scientific discourses to suggest that the micro investments have

deep roots in the macro investments, particularly in the context of the

constitution of “subject.” Thus, at the molar level or the level of organizational

structures, the lack is introduced into desiring. In the following, Deleuze and

Guattari recapitulate what these investments “do” to desire:

[This] entire struggle for the phallus, this poorly understood will to

power, this anthropomorphic representation of sex, this whole

conception of sexuality… is no more than a conception, because it

is an idea that “reason” imposes on the unconscious and introduces

into the passional sphere, and is not by any means a formation of

this sphere – here is where desire finds itself trapped, specifically

limited to human sex, unified and identified in the molar

constellation. (Anti-Oedipus 323)

In other words, the molar level is the stage where the process of oedipalization

begins. It is the process where “the social machines” impose an oedipal

organization on the formation of subjects or “molar aggregates” and

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consequently exclude specific formations of desiring-machines – formations that

are not contained within the oedipal dramas (116). When Deleuze and Guattari

advocate schizophrenia instead of psychoanalysis, they are not arguing for the

loss of subjectivity, which actual schizophrenia entails, but rather the de-

oedipalization of the subjects, such is the case with the Jill-type-walker

symbiosis. Thus, schizophrenia is the process that enables new formations of

desiring-machines and opens the possibilities for alternative forms of social

production (116). It is a new form of subjectivity that continually incorporates

fluidity and the partial objects that “make up the parts of the desiring-machines”

(323). As we have seen in Jill’s case, the affective forces in movement establish

this new form of subjectivity as they “liberate the pre-personal singularities” from

the constraints of personal identities structured and imposed at the molar level of

production (A Thousand Plateaus 362). Becomings are, then, what Kennedy calls

“desubjectified affects” (94) that “in-motion-ly” escape the notion of a fixed and

unitary subject, as well as gendered subjectivity. The following example of

becoming human-woman will further illuminate this dynamic and the “rebellion”

against the totalizing structures.

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Becoming a posthuman woman

Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might yet be.

Never settle.

Lucy Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One

Perhaps the most potent example of rhizomatic becoming in Bilal’s work is

the process of Jill’s becoming a human-woman in Immortel. In the light of

Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman,” this becoming has nothing

to do with the actual entity of a woman, but it is a marker of a transformative

process for men and women. They write:

What we term molar entity is, for example, the woman as defined

by her forms, endowed with organs and functions and assigned a

subject. Becoming-woman is not imitating this entity or even

transforming oneself into it…. But emitting particles that enter the

relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a

micro-femininity, in other words, that produces in us a molecular

woman. (Deleuze and Guattari qtd. in Kennedy 92)

I begin with this premise to argue that Jill’s becoming entails fragmentation that

completely destabilizes the binary aggregations and thus allows for re-imagining

the posthuman as an assemblage of body/mind/matter (the molecular). I have

already remarked that Jill is a mutant, a “misplaced” creature that has no origin

and no oedipal narrative, but to illuminate this fragmentation we need to engage

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with the specific events through which her becoming a human-woman is

envisioned.

Immortel takes us into a dystopian New York City in the year 2095 where

genetically altered humans live side-by-side with non-altered humans. The city is

divided by levels which designate the zones “safe” and “not-safe” for humans to

enter. The “intrusion” – or not-safe – zone warrants the immediate death of

humans who attempt to enter. The Eugenics Corporation for genetics

engineering, or what was Choublanc’s fascist, totalitarian state in the trilogy,

controls the city and is in a constant hunt for non-humans which they use for

illegal experiments in the domain of nanotechnological research. The government

has an intimate relationship with the corporation, and every attempt of the

federal police to intervene in the “business” of the Eugenics is sanctioned by

merciless killing of its officers. The opening sequence presents us with the

Eugenics’ raid on non-humans in which Jill (Linda Hardy), a blue-haired woman

with a white skin and blue tears, is being arrested. During her arrest, a floating

pyramid appears over the city and we are introduced to the computer generated

gods of ancient Egypt, who are judging Horus, the falcon-headed god of light.

Horus, who in Egyptian mythology is also associated with the flight denoting the

transition of consciousness, is sentenced to death and given a limited time to

interact with the humans of New York and procreate. In search of a host body to

inhabit, Horus rejects every one that is genetically altered and finally encounters

Alcide Nicopol, a rebel against Eugenics who has been condemned to 30 years of

hibernation and whose cryogenics pod transport malfunctions and crashes while

bringing him back to Earth. Horus successfully inhabits Nicopol’s body, which he

supplements with a steel, prosthetic leg as a replacement for Nicopol’s own leg
 77

Figure 3
 78

lost at the time of the pod’s “gravitational collapse” (Figure 3). The Horus/Nicopol

dyad, which can also be read in terms of the open and dynamic idea of becoming,

begin(s) “their” search for a woman that will give birth to a child and prolong

Horus’ immortality; in other words, who will regenerate the flight that leads to

the transition of consciousness. But Nicopol’s lost leg has been found and

analyzed by Eugenics, which has initiated another search. In order to kill the

prisoner and the rebel opposing Eugenics, the corporation sends a genetically

enhanced shark-like creature after him. However, due to the supernatural

powers of Horus, the attempt fails. Unaware of her own powers and ability to

procreate with gods, Jill attends to her metamorphosis (or becoming) that

eventually leads to establishing a relationship with Nicopol/Horus and giving birth

to a blue-haired child.

Intrigued by Jill’s rebellion against the Eugenics’ forces, which she displays

at the time of her arrest, and her rather unique appearance, a friendly human-

woman doctor and researcher of the Eugenics Corporation, Emma Turner

(Charlotte Rampling), decides to examine Jill and offers her a job as a guinea pig.

It is in this sequence of Jill’s examination by Dr. Emma Turner that we learn that

her body is only three months old and that her organs are not “in the right

place.” Jill, as the human-woman doctor observes, is going through the process

of metamorphosis and her “lapses in memory” are caused by the “unidentified

drugs” that are provided to her by someone at Level 3, the Little Paris – the zone

where only non-humans can enter. In the following sequence, when Jill enters

the Little Paris we find out that the benefactor or provider of the unidentified

powerful drug that causes her metamorphosis is John, with whom she has a close

and, to some extent, ambiguous relationship. After she discloses her

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conversation with Dr. Turner and again stresses the fact that her organs are not

in the right place, John questions: “not in the right place? According to whose

criteria?” It is precisely this “right” criteria or this social code that Bilal

dismantles, as Jill already transverses the organizational structure of organism.

In the process of metamorphosis, which is the metamorphosis from mutant to

human, Jill’s body is repeatedly altered by the “unknown” drugs that push this

transformative process forward. While in the process of metamorphosis, Jill

moves in and out of the “human” world, which is in itself an action that

destabilizes any firm configurations. “Existing” in the realm of pre-personals, the

realm of molecularity and the affective, where molecular elements or

“singularities” have not grouped yet into stable configurations, Jill functions

outside the notion of any agency or fixed subjectivity. The “molar” identity of Jill

as woman is then irrelevant, as her “existence” involves the relation to the

elemental, the material, and the local forces that push subjectivity aside in favor

of “molecular becomings.” The binary concepts that favor issues such as gender

are dismissed from the start, and gender is no longer an issue. The realm beyond

subjectivity, as Kennedy suggests, is “in the materiality of an asexual, a non-

human primordial and existential integrity” (95). This “beyond subjectivity” and

“genderless” is implicated in the sequence after Jill’s sexual intercourse with

Nicopol, who also breaks the boundaries of simple embodiment by “consenting”

to the Egyptian God Horus to “inhabit” his body prosthetically. In this sequence,

Jill meets with the human-woman-doctor and questions the “nature” of this

relationship that is so ambiguous to her. Dr. Emma Turner suggests that she

might have experienced sexual intercourse before, but the reason why she no

longer remembers could be due to the chemical reactions that the “unknown”
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drugs cause on her mind and body. In the next chapter, we examine the

“posthuman consciousness” as a form of resistant strategy under the first world

transnational cultural condition and return to the issue of “the unknown drugs.”

For now, it is possible to argue that the process of Jill’s metamorphosis, which is

driven by the “unknown pill” or the material, chemical force, liberates fragments

or particles of a sexuality that is no longer on the level of an anatomically unified

sexed body as we have seen in chapter 2. In other words, her being oblivious to

the concept of this relationship as socially and biologically determined allows for

extending dimensions of sexuality into the realm where they can no longer be

enveloped by exclusive terms. Thus, sexuality is no longer premised on genital

bodies, but it is extended into what Kennedy calls “the beyond of sensation” (95).

Consequently, what becoming a human-woman entails is releasing her lines of

flights from any determinate configurations in favor of more dispersed

singularities. In her voyaging in and out of “humanity” - the travels that implicate

“lines of flight” - Jill is constantly analyzing micro elements and partial objects

that make humans what they are, and she does so by dissecting macro elements.

In her visit to the Human Museum, she explores organs of human bodies as

separate entities, and not human bodies as megalithic entities. She observes

digital bones, hands, legs – all of which are partial, micro-information about the

“human.” There is no identification with the actual molar entity of a woman or

human, but only exploration of parts and fragments of information that assemble

together through technological, social, and material forces – not only biological

and cultural. Jill’s disassembly of the hierarchical organization of the organism

into separate organs (into pieces of information) and her own body with the

“misplaced” organs resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of bodies

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without organs, and suggests that “becoming” a human-woman is a tracking of

the human as a composite of a series of fragments and processes. This process,

which operates on the molecular level and thus in the realm of the affective, goes

beyond the boundaries of stable subjectivity as it involves movements that meld

body and mind and matter together. Another sequence in Immortel suggests this

melding in the context of concepts and language. It is the sequence where Jill

analytically establishes an affective connection between the concepts of man,

woman and human. The line of connection that she makes between these

concepts goes beyond the deductions of rational thought and involves heightened

attunement to corporeal logic, which is, as Lorraine notes, “typically below the

level of awareness” (139). While in her bathroom conversing with Nicopol and

indirectly implying that she will soon have to forget about him, on the mirror Jill

writes a word MAN twice. In the process of writing, this “concept” (or body) is

decoded (or denaturalized) twice and separated from its uniqueness by entering

into the relation with two other separate “‘bodies” or sets of letters - “WO” and

“HU,” which she adds to the beginning of each MAN word. Thus, she injects

“movement” to the once stable and uniform concept or unit of MAN to create the

concept of HUman WOman. The stable concept of MAN now loses some of its

“unique” components, but also gains new ones as it fuses with the partial

elements (“HU” and “WO”) that constitute human and woman. This newly born

concept of human-woman, which unfolds according to an immanent desire which

constitutes itself in the process of creating concepts, is not a signifier of anything.

It does not imitate, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, any entity. But rather, it is

an active and affective concept that can no longer be conceived through binary

terminology, because it is rhizomatic in nature and does not proceed by

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dichotomy. Additionally, Jill’s move suggests that concepts could always have

been created otherwise, just as organisms, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, could

always have produced an alternative arrangement of desiring-machines.

Jill’s becoming of a human-woman then suggests not only a melding of

mind, body and matter together, but a transformation of the traditional idea of

body. Following the notion of bodies without organs and the rhizome type of

language, the idea of body (and language) is denaturalized and conceived as a

series of flows in assemblage with other bodies. Human woman as a term is not a

stable unit, as much as human man as a term is not a stable unit – they can be

assembled and dissembled. Bodies, which can be textual, social, cultural, human

and non-human, become elements in assemblage, fluid and mutable, constituting

life in becoming. Thus, the becoming of human-woman in Jill’s case is not

becoming an actual entity of woman or human, but “becoming” through the

material, molecular flows that are affectively driven, and as such resistant to the

processes of overcoding and organization. As a multiplicity of processes that have

no referent to agency or transcendent entities, “becoming” cannot be fixed within

any binary structures.

Symbolization: initiating alternative forms of subjectivity

Similar as Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari believe that social identity is

reliant upon – although by no means completely determined by – systems of

signification that present an array of conceivable social identities. Consequently,

they believe that “cyborg writing” and “rhizomatic,” “schizophrenic” writing

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introduce symbolization of the alternative models of subjectivity (and therefore,

objectivity) into the social, which in return may result or can foster actual

manifestations of such alternatives. Considering the examples of Jill’s becoming

in both The Nicopol Trilogy and Immortals, it is possible to argue that Enki Bilal

introduces alternative forms of subjectivity by insisting on “rhizomatic

becomings” of his character(s). It could also be argued, in the light of traditional

feminist thinking, that Jill’s becoming and the very process of metamorphosis

through bodily senses implies that she is still locked within the essentialist notion

of woman. As we have seen throughout chapter 2, within and throughout

Enlightenment epistemology, “woman” as a term has been encoded as “essence,”

equated with body and nature, and positioned as “other” against the dominant

term man/reason/culture. This definition of woman has been criticized by feminist

discourses for “implying that woman’s bodily essence is responsible for her

creative, nurturing and thus transformational properties” (Kennedy 92).

However, this line of argument would prolong and further reinforce the binary-

constructed debates and “representations” that this study wants to “escape” by

taking into account the molecular, assemblages and/or rhizomatic. As Haraway

suggests, the task is to find “a way out of the maze of dualism in which we have

explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (181). As we shall see in the

next chapter, one way of doing so is to engage with nets of power and their

forces in order to create new and revolutionary concepts. Another way, which

resonates with or can be the outcome of the former, is to initiate new

symbolizations (through discursive models) that would result or have practical

effects at the level of lived experiences. Haraway writes:

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In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths

of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those

origin myths, with their longing for fulfillment in apocalypse. The

phallogocentric origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are

built into the literal technologies – technologies that write the

world, biotechnology and microelectronics – that have recently

textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I.

Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recording communication

and intelligence to subvert command and control. (Simians,

Cyborgs, and Women 175)

“Cyborg writing” and, along the same path, cyberpunk fiction are capable

of “destratifying”10 the determinate molar structures insofar as cyborgs and the

posthuman, with the symbolization that they entail, can highlight those points at

which contemporary formations of human subjectivity and social sphere are

unstable and could transform/metamorphose into unprecedented formations.

Cyborgs are, after all, “the couplings which make Man and Woman so

problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined generating

language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction

of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master,

body and mind” (176). According to Deleuze and Guattari, “deterritorializing line

of flight” or “the schizoid movement of deterritorialization” liberates other flows

which extend deterritorialization beyond the individual or any determinate

configurations across the social field (321). Similarly, either a failure of

translation, the cyborg’s “movement of deterritorialization,” or the noise in

10
Destratification is Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the transformation of subjectivity by noting and
exploiting those points at which contemporary forms of subjectivity destabilize (Lorraine 125).
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Haraway’s account can release other flows of knowledge, production, etc., that

extend deterritorialization in the direction where alternative models of

subjectivity are possible and where crafting of new affinities would not “replicate

the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects” (Haraway 156-176). Through

constant becomings or “affects,” which are molecular, the posthuman no longer

can be referred to as a unified or totalized entity or agency. A composite of

biomolecular codes (genes), microchips, flesh and metal, always assembled and

disassembled, the posthuman is a model of subjectivity-in-stitches that is no

longer confined to the laws and economics of the same. Instead, the posthuman

illuminates a collaboration of the embodied subject and the world, which exists

on the basis of productive desire and the affective forces of materiality.

The possibilities for re-imag(in)ing the posthuman, as I have tried to

illustrate, are multiple. They are inscribed, first and foremost, in the notion of

molecular becoming, which clearly disrupts the binary structures of Western

ontology – not only in its ability to destabilize the molar identity, but also in its

processual dynamics with the material world. When seen in the light of molecular

becoming, Bilal’s posthuman woman character is no longer trapped within the

traditional categories of gender and human-machine. As Judith Butler in Undoing

Gender writes:

For the human to be human, it must relate to what is nonhuman,

to what is outside itself but continuous with itself by virtue of an

interimplication in life. This relation to what is not itself constitutes

the human being in its livingness, so that the human exceeds its

boundaries in the very effort to establish them. (12)

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Chapter 4

Posthuman Consciousness
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Posthuman consciousness: Mapping of the experimental world

Life would be the active force of thought, but thought would be the affirmative

power of life. Both would go in the same direction, carrying each other along, smashing

restrictions, matching each other step for step, in a burst of unparalleled creativity.

Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life.

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

We are the only ones who limit ourselves. Our own reactive consciousness gets in

the way. When you are ready to let go of your reactive consciousness, you'll have a bigger

spiritual desire because you'll be open to receive all the light that exists in the universe.

Karen Berg, God Wears Lipstick

The previous chapter illustrated the interplay of forces in the molecular

process of becoming a human-woman to suggest that re-imag(in)ing of the

posthuman, which is in itself a process constituted by a multiplicity of affective

forces, may contribute to a radical transformation of the way we experience

ourselves, the world around us, and our relationship with others – whether

humans, animals, machines, plants, etc. Such a transformation, as we have

seen, involves the constant dynamics of a series of fragments and flows in the

space of “in-between” that intermingle in “a no-man’s-land” (A Thousand

Plateaus 291) creating a being-of-becoming. This being-of-becoming has no

“other;” there is only a becoming, a becoming of other, a becoming of machine,

or a becoming of Jill-type-writer assemblage. The other coexists with the

posthuman. In a world of becoming, the force of metamorphosis shapes other

forces and transforms itself in the process (see below and chapter 3: concept-
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creation). Gender categories become futile insofar as the active forces enable the

posthuman to escape an oedipal organization imposed by “the social machines.”

There is no stagnation nor fixity, but only molecular lines of flight “injected” into

life. These forces-in-motion are capable of cutting across everything that is

coded, everything that is structured and organized at the molar level – the level

that aspires only to power.

To acknowledge these forces in practice, such as indicated in Jill’s

dissolution of subjectivity, means to open a path that would ultimately lead to a

transformation of consciousness. But, again, we must be wary because all forces

are connected, and these are only the “liberating forces” or “the active forces.”

In this chapter, I engage with the posthuman consciousness, the notion of

“affirmation,” and “becoming-imperceptible” in order to further exemplify that

Bilal’s posthuman woman not only challenges the traditional human-machine

dichotomy and transgresses gender categories but creates possibilities for

envisioning a future beyond the burden of the past, beyond the oppositions of

Western metaphysics. In this respect, I continue to examine the dynamics of

forces-in-movement and movements that arise in the space of “in-between.” It is

these movements that fuel the posthuman with a capacity for harmonizing, what

Tamsin Lorraine calls, “corporeal and conceptual logics” (7).

In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze writes that every

organization, every system has two types of forces that confront one another:

the “liberating forces” and the “enslaving forces” (2). The confrontation of these

two types of forces within a system points to the inconsistencies (produced by

the colliding forces) and consequently, the dynamics that mark possibilities for

different arrangements of that, or any other, system/entity.

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In the milieu of a dominant global world order, charged with

microelectronics and biotechnological politics, we are faced with a rather

frightening state of affairs. This is particularly so when we take into account the

extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity and continuously increasing

involvement of many corporations in university research, government, and all

forms of national and international communication technologies. This alarming

state, and the fact that capitalism not only maintains but contributes to the

increase of such extreme poverty, is important to acknowledge. But

acknowledgment itself is not sufficient, particularly not if it remains on the level

of passive recognition or the level of “reactive perspective” – to which I shall

shortly return. What becomes of vital importance, Deleuze suggests, is to “have

no fear or hope, but only look for new weapons” (3-7). Considering the

aforementioned forces and their constant interplay, along with Deleuze’s

suggestion, we should then actively engage with that world order and look for

new weapons. But, before we inject ourselves into the webs of power and into

those of forces, before we suggest what kind of new weapons are needed to

overcome our “apocalyptic” future alarmingly envisioned in cyberpunk narratives

in general, let us briefly look at how some contemporary theorists and cultural

critics respond to our post-industrial environment of information and

biotechnology.

Although there have been various cultural responses to the contemporary

developments, the most worrisome are those that have been apolitical in nature,

proposing adjustment to the climate of capitalism. In light of such an apolitical

ideology, Jean Baudrillard argues that the advance of sciences and

postmodernism has created the airless atmosphere in which floating images of

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the real no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever (Simulations 3). In

his definition of hyperreality, simulation and simulacra become the real and there

is no stable foundation on which to ground “the truth.” The final “truth” of the

entrepreneurial, de-spiritualized cosmos is a de-materialization of the “real life”

itself. It is a reversal into a spectacle, created to convince the masses of that

they are truly living in a real world. While this implies a certain urgency of being

actively involved in the subversion and dismantling of such “pervasive tyranny” of

the culture of the hyperreal, Baudrillard proposes that all we can do is to

accommodate ourselves to the “atmosphere” or refuse its blandishments (Vine,

par. 13).

A similar cultural pessimism and apolitical response to the late capitalist

society comes from Slovenian-born cultural critic and political philosopher Slavoj

Zizek, who argues that the first task today is not to succumb to the temptation to

resist or act. For Zizek, any attempt to intervene in order to change the current

state of affairs “inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: what

can one do against global capital?" (par. 11) But, this succumbing to inactivity is

not only recognizing the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity and not

doing anything about it – an instance of passive nihilism,11 but it is also refusing

to engage with those active forces in movement. That is, refusing the creativity

that flows within the Shakespearean stage of life in which there is no distinction

between the performers and the audience.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players,”

wrote Shakespeare (140-141). To refuse to acknowledge that this world that is

enveloped by chance, abounding with multiplicities of possible monologues,

11
Passive nihilism is one of the three forms of nihilisms that Deleuze delineates in Nietzsche and
Philosophy, and it refers to “the last man” too cynical to value anything and “for whom life is so
depreciated as to be stripped of all meaning and purpose” (Deleuze qtd.in Lorraine 150).
 91

improvisations that spring up creatively is to remain tied up to a scripted life of

late capitalist society. In other words, it is to give reactive replies to the script –

to be a (re)actor. This is not only to be unimaginative as a performer, but to be a

prisoner of the script and a slave of the audience. It also means to fail to

recognize the Shakespearean notion of the world as the experimental theater:

the boundary between the audience and the performer becomes obsolete as both

the audience and the performer set their creative energies free and together

intensively engage in the creation of an unprecedented script.

In the previous chapter, we have seen how Enki Bilal insists on (what

Deleuze and Guattari call) the “rhizomatic becoming” of his posthuman character

Jill Bioskop, moving away from the reactive consciousness of the performer

seeking boundaries to distinguish between the “us” and “them.” Later in this

chapter, I return to Deleuze’s concept of the reactive forces to examine how our

thinking, when informed by past conceptions, can only serve the power of such

binary discourse. But for now, I would remark that this type of consciousness

entails the production of reactive perspectives, which, according to Lorraine,

“analyzes only what is already apparent” (148). Bilal’s response to the

contemporary stage then has no implication of the inertness of apolitical

ideology. It also has no implication of nihilism, which can be accounted as a child

of the reactive nature of consciousness insofar as it depreciates life and creates

values higher than the life itself (150).

Whereas Zizek, for example, analyzes the contemporary stage by

following – without modifying – the oedipalized script of late capitalist society,

Bilal with Immortel and The Nicopol Trilogy engages with the stage of

experimental theater. He “liberates” those active forces of life to improvise the

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script and return to it with creative modifications. Bilal’s cyberpunk narratives

recreate the script of late capitalism through the performer/character that takes a

chance in “improvising the script.” Of course, it is Bilal who takes this chance,

and in the preceding chapter we have seen how these creative modifications are

achieved. But what is important to note at this point is that to take a chance in

order to improvise is to have the courage to play. It is to immerse in the

Nietzschean world of failures, successes, pain, laughter, and tears – the totality

of multiplicities of our experiences. It is to set free the world of becoming in the

space of “in-between” (see chapter 2). This also means, by Nietzschean and

Deleuzian philosophy, to “affirm” chance at every juncture, which can be done

only by moving beyond the reactive consciousness and its formation: nihilism

(see below). It must also be remarked that to affirm, for Deleuze, is to affirm

difference, and “not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create

new values which are those of life, which make life light and active” (qtd. in

Lorraine 149).

For posthuman woman Jill, “becoming” a human-woman is an experiment

that she dares to undertake. She affirms metamorphosis – a chance, regardless

of outcome, and in doing so, she affirms the being of becoming, the unity of

differences and multiplicities that metamorphosis itself brings in return. Whereas

the human has a tendency to burden his/her life with essences of

“unquestionable value” (Grosz 47), the posthuman travels light without the

baggage of past, and responds actively to life. What is being implied by Jill’s

affirmation to chance and her affirmation to its outcome is a metamorphosis of

what Nietzsche called “all-too-human,” a reactive response into posthuman,

active response.
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Before further exploring the concepts of reactive and active forces and the

notion of affirmation in its dual mode as implicated above, I would suggest that

this line of thinking implies the posthuman consciousness, which in Bilal’s

cyberpunk narratives becomes a new form of resistance to the first world’s

transnational cultural conditions. In this respect, Bilal’s response to the

contemporary stage is what Deleuze means by his proposition: “to look for new

weapons.” As Bilal appropriates this new weapon in the form of posthuman

consciousness, he moves beyond the polarized pro/contra model of discourse

that embraces definite and settled values, in favor of a dynamic discourse that

embraces the creation of new values.

Derrida taught us that no system, no method and no discourse can be all-

encompassing and singular: each discourse is inherently open to its own

deconstruction. To craft new forms of resistance, in the light of Derrida’s ideas, is

to rethink our common conceptions of politics and struggle, power and

resistance. In his re-imag(in)ing of power and resistance, Bilal then also moves

beyond the language of disembodiment and transcendence, which as we have

previously seen has a long and illustrious history in the development of Western

philosophy.

The posthuman consciousness, in its ability to actively and affirmatively

respond to the world of becoming, dismantles the structural grids that embody

the existence of fixed characteristics, given attributes, and functions that limit the

possibilities of change and thus of reorganization. It cuts through and goes

beyond essentialism and its unquestionable values that determine and limit what

lives. Essentialism, which is primarily concerned with the fixity and limits of

subjects such as fixed characteristics of women and men, creates no space for
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movements out of the fixed essential terms. It locks out possibilities for change

because the essence “underlies all the apparent variations differentiating”

humans from each other – whether that be women from other women, men from

other men, or children from other children, etc. (Grosz 47). The posthuman

consciousness recognizes no such values because, as we have seen in Jill’s case,

the posthuman has no memory of the past, which often invades consciousness

with “the higher values.” Jill is acting “under influence” of the “unknown” drugs

that function to prevent the past from “invading” her. The drugs carry an

implication of what Nietzsche terms “the faculty of forgetting,” which is the active

force that “guards” the reactive forces from bringing the past traces to

consciousness (Lorraine 152).

Later in this chapter, when I examine the interplay of these two types of

forces, I illustrate how this process of “active forgetting” is a necessary one if the

modifications of the script are to reach their full potential and be innovatively

creative. For now, it is important to highlight that the absence of past traces and,

consequently, the “unquestionable values” is what enables posthuman to allow

“action to emerge from the affirmative will to power” (Lorraine 151). This

Nietzschean concept of “the will to power,” which is “after all the will to life”

(Beyond Good and Evil 259), becomes highly important in the work of Deleuze,

as the notion itself entails “becoming” (see chapter 2): experiencing the fluxes of

a life in process. Deleuze writes:

…The will of power is essentially creative and giving: it does not

aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not

desire power. It gives: power is something inexpressible in the will

(something mobile, variable, plastic); power is in the will as “the

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bestowing virtue,” through power the will itself bestows sense and

value. (Qtd. in Lorraine 148)

The will of power then, in its affirming quality, means life-affirming. But it

can also be a manifestation of nihilism. Considering that both the affirmative and

the negative will to power constitute the forces-in-movement, the will of power is

that which is “internal to the production of force” (Lorraine 147). To say that the

posthuman allows “action to emerge from the affirmative will to power” is to say

that the posthuman renders life active and affirms life in all its particularity. The

posthuman perspective toward life, contrary to the reactive perspective of the

“all-too-human” (re)actor inclined toward vegetating the script, is vigilantly

aware of painful and discomforting aspects of life and yet is affirmatively

creative. Jill is aware of these painful aspects of life and yet she affirms chance at

“every juncture.” In the environment of a dystopian New York City in 2095, filled

with the constraining and totalitarian forces of the Eugenics Corporation, life is

nothing but a cesspool of painful experiences for both genetically altered and

non-altered humans. Situated in this environment as “the greatest mystery of

nature” on the verge of becoming a human-woman, Jill says: “I am afraid of

becoming a human-woman.” But still, she dares to play and let the present

“invade” her regardless of the outcome. She creatively affirms the life of the

experimental theater, which is forever in transformation.

It is this kind of affirmation that liberates the creativity of the

performer/audience, and consequently moves beyond the scripted and coded

society of control. It escapes following the “script” of the “effective

communication” (see chapter 2: Wiener) while “invent[ing] new forms of life

rather than separating life from what it can do” (Deleuze qtd. in Lorraine 149). To
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appropriate the posthuman consciousness as a new weapon against the coded

logic of late capitalism, as Bilal does, is not only to challenge but to deny and

demolish the reactive responses (and nihilism) while giving way to the creative

modifications of the “script.” In order to elucidate what this entails let us look at

the interplay of active and reactive forces.

Active and Reactive forces: Invasion

I suggested above that the posthuman consciousness has no traces of the

past, whereas human consciousness tends to cling to the formations that are

already in the past. I also suggested that this enables the posthuman to actively

affirm life in “becoming,” that is to engage in a process of destratification (see

chapter 3) in order to pursue those active lines of flight that open new paths.

Now, it is necessary to examine how the reactive responses of the human – in

this case, the performer – prevent him/her from modifying the script.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze argues that these reactive

responses rely on past perceptions and conceptions, which constrain the

human/performer from escaping a “repetition of the past” (qtd. in Lorraine 154) -

repetition of the “script.” The reactive forces, according to Lorraine’s reading of

Deleuze, are “the dominated forces” in the sense that they are governed by past

conceptions and perception. They are also “adaptive” insofar as they make the

performer adjust his/her (re)action to the already known “script.” The

improvisation is excluded and along with it, the very potential to modify the

script. For Deleuze, these are the perceptible forces. Active forces, to the
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contrary, are “the dominant forces,” creatively productive and “imperceptible.”

They are plastic; they go to their limit and affirm their difference (154).

“Creatively productive” implies that the active forces continually mutate in a self-

transforming process, producing effects that additionally influence further

transformation. To exemplify, we only have to recall Jill’s concept-creation from

the last chapter, where she scrambled the uniform concept of Man to enhance

and multiply the concept itself while creating a new concept of the posthuman-

woman. As Ronald Bogue notes:

Active forces impose forms on other forces, but they also change

form themselves; they are forces of metamorphosis and

transformation which shape other forces and simultaneously

‘become other’ themselves. In this sense, active forces alone affirm

becoming, and since the world is a world of becoming, active forces

alone have true being. (Qtd. in Lorraine 157)

Whereas the active forces belong to the world of experimental, non-

representational theater, the adaptive reactive forces inhabit the world of modern

theater, “realist” and representational. It is in the nature of reactive forces,

Lorraine notes, to separate the active forces from that which they can do, so that

the performer is able to produce “perceptible representations” of them (147). The

performer’s conscious perception requires relatively stable forms and since the

active forces, “imperceptible” by nature, mutate too quickly to come to conscious

awareness, their “perceptibility” is achieved only when they are separated from

their true nature. The reactive forces of unconscious then “invade” consciousness

with the conceptions and perspectives of the past, and making it rigid, preventing

the performer to act out his/her responses. This suggests that the reactive forces
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constrain the performer from establishing those affective connections which are

entailed in the molecular process of becoming-audience. The performer is

trapped in the already known “lines of text” or perceptions, which constrains

him/her from receiving and responding to new stimuli. Although the conscious

system is agile enough to receive new excitations, the repetition of the “already

known” would sooner or later cause the sclerosis of the performer’s

consciousness.

In the light of Nietzschean philosophy, the memory of this performer/

(re)actor then blames its objects for “its own inability to escape the traces of the

corresponding excitations” (Deleuze qtd. in Lorraine 153). The performer/

(re)actor – unable to act out his responses – needs something to blame for

his/her pain, and in his/her search for that something, s/he projects a reversed

image through which the reactive forces can represent themselves as superior to

the active forces. Thus, as Lorraine notes, the reactive forces “triumph by

pointing an accusing finger at the active forces of life” (153). As long as the

performer, or what Nietzsche would call “the man of ressentiment,” remains in

the world of modern representational theater, s/he would miss the active forces

that generate life and “allow consciousness to make room for new things” (140).

Instead of consenting to the reactive forces that prevent him/her from releasing

the very potentialities of his/her body to establish “microphysical and

micrological,” molecular connections with other bodies (Anti-Oedipus 361), in this

case the audience, the performer needs to “break alliance with reactive forces by

negating her (his) own reactive forces” (Lorraine 156). This break would lead to

the world of the experimental theater – that of the “imperceptible forces.”

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But before this break can be envisioned there is a remaining question that

awaits an answer. How is the performer to act out responses if the alliance with

reactive forces that “invade” his/her consciousness but apparently also contain

the memories of how to act is broken? Certainly, some relationship between the

new stimuli of the present and the script/the memory of the past is necessary if

the play is to take on the familiar forms of “acting” – that is, of ordinary living. In

the last chapter, I only insinuated at how Bilal’s Immortel deals with memory and

the invasion of reactive forces. Now, in order to answer the question above, it is

necessary to recall that Bilal opens up the determinate organizations of molar

aggregates by first implanting Jill’s body with organs that are not in the “right”

place, and then, which concerns the question above, by having her undergo the

process of metamorphosis which is activated and maintained by “the unknown”

drugs that actively function to halt the production of determinate concepts and

perspectives. Bilal, thus, permits the influx of molecular flows to take “place” by

utilizing the “unknown drugs,” as a form of the active force that prevents the

past from invading Jill’s consciousness. We have seen above how the reactive

force tends to prevent the active force from going to its limits, making reactions

become reactions to the already known. But according to Nietzsche and Deleuze,

the reactive forces constitute a second system, which is inseparable from the

consciousness, and which enables consciousness to be receptive to fresh

excitations (Lorraine 152). This system allows for reactions that are no longer

reactions to traces of the past but have become reactions to “the direct image of

the object” (Deleuze qtd. in Lorraine 152). Following Nietzsche, there is an active

force which separates the two systems of reactive forces and which prevents the
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past traces from invading consciousness. Whereas for Nietzsche, this force is “the

faculty of forgetting,” for Bilal it is the unknown drugs.

The function of the unknown drugs then is to promote “active forgetting”

so that Jill is capable of spontaneously acting out the responses instead of them

being reactions to what is in the past and perceptible. Her unconscious memory

system of consciousness, which is also important for conscious awareness,

enables her consciousness to act as “a constantly renewed skin” (Deleuze 152) in

the sense that she is responsive to fresh excitations rather than the

perceptions/impressions received in the past.

Although the unknown drugs function to “guard” the past traces from

intruding into her consciousness, this does not mean that Jill has no memory at

all, specifically in terms of the memory of ordinary living. In the sequence after

her sexual intercourse with Nicopol and after she reveals that she is oblivious to

the concept of sexual intercourse – which is precisely the result of drugs doing

their job – Nicopol says: “At times last night you gave the impression that you

knew it perfectly well.” The virtual totality of the past, Henri Bergson argues, is

composed of different levels - all of which are possible to enter (Ansell-Pearson

1112-1127). Which entrance we choose is up to us. Freedom, Deleuze writes,

“lies in choosing the levels.” “All levels and degrees coexist and present

themselves for our choice on the basis of a past which was never present” (qtd.

in Lorraine 159). In respect to the instance above, it becomes possible to argue

that out of the countless possibilities for recollection, Jill chooses those levels that

cannot be captured or explained by actual past conceptions and perceptions. But,

it is also possible to argue that Bilal does not question Jill’s virtual memory

system of consciousness, which departs from the reactive unconscious, as much

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as he reveals how culture is that which trains consciousness by endowing it with

a memory of words. Indeed, consciousness, which is according to Nietzsche,

based on “the faculty of forgetting” or in this case the unknown drugs, needs

something to give it firmness and consistency. Deleuze argues that it is “the

memory of the future” that allows subjects to pledge themselves to shared

projects of cultural becoming (Lorraine 153). This cultural memory, Lorraine

notes, is the memory of the will, and relates to a commitment to a future (153).

Following this line of thought, it could be stated that Jill is then committed to a

future in which the unknown drugs or “active forgetting” is a necessity in order to

attend to imperceptible becomings, which can transmute a negative will to power

into an affirmative one. Her cultural memory then is defined by responses that

are solely responses to the present stimuli, while her virtual memory, that of

sensibility, is defined by creative movements which can be activated but not

explained by “general causalities of another nature” (Deleuze qtd. in Lorraine

190). This is to say that she is a player in the world of experimental theater, who

is able to release those lines of flight that challenge not only the perceptible body

boundaries but also her own conventional understanding of “self,” of others, and

of her world – in which she establishes imperceptible encounters. This brings us

back to the notion of affirmation and the notion of becoming-imperceptible.

Affirmation of becoming: Posthuman at “the dawn of the world”

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I have already implied that Jill’s life in becoming constitutes “a mode of

double affirmation” (Grosz 61). This mode, to recall, entails the affirmation of

chance, which is to embrace any improvisation out of the multiplicity of possible

ones, and the affirmation of outcome, with which every return brings a newly

modified script. This way the affirmation of outcome becomes an affirmation of

difference and multiplicity. Deleuze argues, following Nietzsche, that it is only

through double affirmation that we can escape repetition of the past and the

nihilism that has prevailed in human history. Only by affirming life or a play in

becoming, which continuously repeats the production of difference and

multiplicity, shall we be able to move beyond the representational theater of

reactive forces and, consequently, the economy of sameness.

We have seen above how the reactive consciousness of the performer in

the representational theater seeks out the oppositions to distinguish between the

performer and the audience – the oppositions that constitute a “violent hierarchy”

where one entity “governs” the other (see chapter 2: Derrida) and consequently

a negative will to power. To expel the reactive forces and abandon the

representational theater then is a pre-requisite for the performer who wants to

transmute this negation into a power of affirmation. The movement toward an

affirmative will to power would necessarily entail that our performer releases

his/her body from reactive patterns in order to foster affective and creative

responses to a future that never repeats. Instead of subordinating the future to a

representation of the past (Lorraine 159), s/he then would be able to actively

create and discover new and fresh conceptions and experiences, to attend to

imperceptible becomings.
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According to Deleuze and Guattari, every becoming inevitably leads to

“becoming-imperceptible.” In A Thousand Plateaus, they write:

If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment,

with the becoming-animal that link up with it coming next, what

are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-

imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming,

its cosmic formula. (279)

Thus, becoming-imperceptible is going beyond ordinary sense experience and

becoming “an unfindable particle in infinite mediation on the infinite” (279),

which again involves going beyond the contemporary economy of subjectivity. As

Lorraine remarks in her interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-

imperceptible is putting the singularities of molecular processes into a continuum

that could result in new forms of living (189). To be receptive to imperceptible

encounters then is to leave behind a coherent sense of self and to depart from

the perceptible boundaries of not-only-human bodies but also, as we have seen

in this study, bodies of machines. It is to leave behind the traditional

understanding of “acting” and to open up, as Bilal does, the molar aggregates to

the influx of molecular flows. From the opening scene of Immortel, which is now

possible to read as the experimental stage for the posthuman consciousness, we

encounter chaos – the outside of determinate strata, in which silhouettes of

bodies of mutants and humans are moving through a blurred, indefinable space.

Becoming-imperceptible accesses the chaos. It is “to be present at the dawn of

the world” (A Thousand Plateaus 280), and to create new possibilities for living.

As soon as we move into the perceptible arena, we enter a dystopian New York

City in 2098 to find out that it is Jill, the posthuman, Haraway’s cyborg and not a
 104

goddess that emerges from Chaos. We then find out that becoming-imperceptible

requires one to “eliminate the too-perceived, the too-much-to-be-perceived”

(279). Bilal presents us with Nietzsche’s “overman,” that is “overwoman,” that is

a posthuman woman, whose vision is blurred, whose organs are not in “the right”

place, whose body is only three months old, and whose hair is electric-blue, in

layers and sparks when it is peeled off. Becoming-imperceptible is to eliminate

“everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in our molarity”

(279). Jill’s becoming-imperceptible is precisely this elimination of everything

that is “molar.”

Partial visions are vital for our survival; visions that are produced through

organic embodiment and technological mediation. It is a vision that fluctuates;

the vision that becomes molecular. It is through Jill’s eyes, the eyes of the

posthuman, that Haraway reclaims the sensory system for us - humans. By

creating what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency, Jill releases the

flows, lines of flight and sets into motion a world of becoming:

It is the plane of organization and development, the plane of

transcendence that renders perceptible without itself being

perceived, without being capable of being perceived. But on the

other plane, the plane of immanence or consistency, the principle

of composition itself must be perceived, cannot but be perceived at

the same time as that which it composes or renders. (A Thousand

Plateaus 281)

It is here that we can see how Bilal’s cyberpunk experimental theater

demolishes that “vision from a distance” or disembodied objectivity that has for

so long ensured the active agency of Man by giving him power to see and not to
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be seen (see chapter 2). Desire moves and cuts through the “conquering” gaze

and dissolves its structural, binary grids, while giving way to Derrida’s “irruptive

emergence of a new ‘concept’" – the posthuman. It is this concept, in all its

affirmatively creative and productive nature, that “can no longer be, and never

could be, included in the previous regime" (Derrida qtd. in Positions). This

assemblage of silicon and organic body, a network-body of amazing complexity

and specificity, is a blend of brain/mind and body that moves beyond the

Cartesian world and its detrimental boundaries. By setting into motion a world of

becoming, Bilal is setting into motion posthuman consciousness in which there is

always space for new things.

If writing is a form of becoming-imperceptible, as Deleuze and Guattari

argue, then what becomes possible to conclude is that both Immortel and The

Nicopol Trilogy, film and graphic novel, are forms of becoming-imperceptible.

This is to suggest that Enki Bilal with his cyberpunk narratives “forms a rhizome,”

increases his territory by deterritorialization, extends his line of flight “to the

point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of

consistency” (A Thousand Plateaus 11). Rather than calling Bilal’s re-imag(in)ing

a “tracing,” Deleuze and Guattari would propose, a “mapping” (see chapter 2). In

A Thousand Plateaus, they write:

What distinguished the map from the tracing is that it is entirely

oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. The map

does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it

constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields,

the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum

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opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is

itself a part of the rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 12)

When seen in light of Deleuze and Guttari’s philosophy of future, Bilal’s

“mapping,” his experimental cyberpunk stage, gives us new statements, that of

creation. He releases desire that for so long has been trapped and paralyzed

within its body. That is, he produces different desires; desires that are

unimaginable on the Western representational stage. Becoming a nomad in his

own experimental theater, Bilal produces his own unconscious and releases his

own active forces, his own lines of flight. He sets the stage into motion and

“everybody and everything” (279) on that stage into a becoming. In mapping the

social field of late capitalist society, Bilal presents us with affective connectivity of

heterogeneous elements; with powerful collectives that are born out of humans

and non-humans, technological and organic. In such modification of the script,

all we find are creative points of resistance from which we can further engage in

the re-imag(in)ing of a future beyond the burden of the past. To re-imagine is

after all to launch lines of flight to a new future – the future beyond the

apocalypse.

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Mediagraphy

 The Nicopol Trilogy. Writer and graph. designer: Bilal, Enki Comics.

Humanoids Publishing, 2000.

 Immortel Ad Vitam. Writer and dir. Bilal, Enki. DVD. 2004.