Cyberpunk bodies

Cyberpunk Bodies: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Foster’s “Meat Puppets or Robopaths?”

I. Description

Blade Runner is a film directed by Ridley Scott. The film is about Rick Deckard, a member of the Blade Runner Unit (a police squad that kills Replicants), who is assigned to kill genetically-produced criminal replicants (Nexus 6 Replicants). The story takes place in Los Angeles in November 2019. The Replicants were produced in the Nexus phase and were taken to the Off-world for slave labor. They are criminal replicants who were designed to copy humans in every way except for emotions. The Replicants have a four-year life span in place and are seeking for more years in their trip to Earth. Deckard is on a mission to kill the Replicants, apparently by himself, and learns about himself in the process as he falls for the girl, breaks two fingers, and battles evil.

Foster’s essay “Meat Puppets or Robopaths?” looks at David Skal’s novel Antibodies and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer and describes the similarities and differences in the mens’ explanations of what it means to be a cyberpunk. He also looks at the distinctions between mind and body and human and machine. Foster says Skal’s work contradicts its “own critique of the robopaths in more fundamental and less overt ways.” He then says that the novel represents lesbian sexuality and abortion activists as monstrous and that he doesn’t entirely agree with Skal’s ideas of a cyberpunk. Foster seems to be more in favor of Gibson’s Neuromancer. He references Gibson’s character Case, a “ ‘console cowboy’ ” and “futuristic hacker”, to examine the ‘post-biological’ attitude and the relationship between flesh and meat puppets. Foster uses a variety of authors and examples to demonstrate the thought of cyborgs being meat puppets or robopaths. He concludes his essay with the idea of Case’s girlfriend, Michael, who may be seen as either a woman with a nontraditional name, or as a man who identifies himself as a woman.

II. Terms and concepts

Blade Runner:

“Replicants are like any other machine- they’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit it’s not my problem.” –Rick. Machines have both beneficial and hazardous features.

Leon to Deckard: “Painful to live in fear, isn’t it?” Explores that when one is faced with death, they feel more pain and fear not just how long they have left to live, but how they are going to die.

Foster’s essay:

Cyberpunk- The thought of something being “high tech” and “low life” (Wikipedia)

Robopath- The idea of replacing the body with mechanical prostheses (pg. 215)

Meat puppet- prostitute (pg. 216)

Commodification- The experience of forced signification (pg. 221) – the process of making something into a good (commodity).

Embodiment- The subjective experience of having and using a body. (Wikipedia)

Case- The character in Gibson’s Neuromancer who has a neural implant that allows him to correspond with computer networks.



III. Review/questions/thoughts

Blade Runner:

“Chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure” Interesting that this was the welcoming message especially since this was what was advertised for those who came to America.

If the life-span of the “criminals” is four years, does that include a full life? Do they reproduce or have families?

Is this what the year 2019 is really going to look like? Whoa! I might be moving to L.A.…

Why L.A.? Why not New York City? Or Denver? Or Orlando? Or Minneapolis?

Replicant Rachel realizes differences between lesbian and a human. Doesn’t this implicate that she does have emotions since she responded by asking what her answer would mean?

Pris and Rachael as meat puppets?

What’s the significance with the owl? Does it have to do with vision?



Foster’s essay:

I thought the essay really didn’t have an ending. There should have been a conclusion paragraph that tied all of the themes together instead of it ending with thoughts about Neuromancer.

(page 211) What was Gibson really visualizing when he said cyberpunks ought to ‘live fast, die young, and leave a highly-augmented corpse’? It said that this refers to a body enhanced through mechanical prostheses and cybernetic interfaces but what was he really referring to?

(page 212) How have women’s bodies always been postmodern?

(page 216) ‘I may have been born meat, but I don’t have to die that way.’ What does this mean? How does one break away from ‘the meat’?