allison - cyborg violence - bursting borders and bodies with queer machines

7/27/2019 Allison - Cyborg Violence - Bursting Borders and Bodies With Queer Machines

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In The News

Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders andBodies with Queer MachinesAnne AllisonDuke University

A new killer drug has hit the streets of Detroit and the cyborg RoboCop is hun tingdown its creator. Entering the warehouse where his computer tells him "nu ke" is beingmade, RoboC op sees the druglord and tells him, "Dead or alive, you're coming withme." Cain laughs as his underlings emerge from the shadows. Carrying guns , theymove in and shoot; a boy blasts off RoboCop's hands and a woman lacerates hisstomach with laser fire. Forced to his knees, RoboCop vows, "I will kill you" to Ca in.The thugs now encircle him and one, maneuvering a huge magnet, picks up thecy bo rg 's metal body then drops it onto a bed of warehouse scraps. Before RoboCopcan move, he is pinned down at his hands and feet with metal stakes. Standing overhim, Cain holds up a vial of Nuke and plunges it rapturously into his neck. Arm edwith too ls, the minions approach RoboCop and start dismem bering him. They hack,saw, and drill his body; a fade-out follows the severing of his left leg.The fragments of RoboCop are delivered to the precinct po lice station. W hat re-mains of him forms a pile that a technician moves to her lab to start rebuilding. Buther bossesexecutives at Omni Consumer Products (OCP) who own the policeforce as well as the cyber-cop have not yet decided whether RoboC op is worth thecost of reconstruction. Saying h e's "just a machine ," they halt his repair. But the po-lice who have gathered around the cyber-cop see this differently: "I t's like yo u'rekilling him."Tw o scenes later, RoboCop has yet to be reassembled. His body is strung up in thelab; the torso w ith attached head is hung eerily on a line. The police chief pleads forOCP to save him because he's "one of ours" and needed back on the job. A corpo-rate execu tive respo nds to this that they may just sell him as scrap. When OC P doesdecide to fix him, they pay particular attention to weeding out any human remainsin the cyborg . Yet, when asked who he is at the end, RoboC op answ ers "M urphy "the person he was before and w hose remnants were used to build the cybercop. Toldthis is an illusion, he is rewired to identify himself as "Rob oC op ."Shortly afterward, RoboCop w alks out the door. When he is greeted by h is fellowcops, they call him "Murphy."

Scenes from RoboCop 2, Directed by Irvin KershnerThe Media and Kids: Violent Connections?

When first w riting this paper in June 1998, the U.S. news media w as awash inwhat was then reported to be the latest episode of "teenage rage." Predating themuch more spectacularly horrific events at Columbine a few months later, this

Cultural Anthropology l6( 2): 23 7- 26 5 Copyright 2001 . American Anthropological Association.


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was a shooting by a fifteen-year old boy on the premises of his school inSpringfield, Oregon. In this case, a boy who had been expelled the day beforefor harboring a gun, opened fire at his school and, shooting randomly, killedtwo children and wounded twenty-two others. As in my local paper (the Newsand Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina), the press represented this as part ofa national "rash": shootings that took place at schools, in "unlikely" settings(backwater towns and, with Columbine, in the upscale suburb of Littleton,Colorado), with brutal results (twenty-six dead excluding parents shot else-where and scores wounded), and at the hands of white, teen-age boys. Stunnedby the savagery of these acts, people across the country were also stricken bytheir eruption in the "bedrock" of America and by homegrown boys driven tomurder over alleged slights and rebuffs. Although commentary struggled withexplanations (getting little further, though, than "boys caught up in teenagerage" [Cannon 1998:19A]), more profound was the incessant questioning"WHY?" as posed by the News and Observer in its headline following Spring-field (Cannon 1998:19A).

Making the same query two days earlier on National Public Radio (NPR),a reporter suggested the answer lay in today's culture of violence. On thisview, recourse to violence, particularly with guns, has become insinuated intoeveryday life in the United States like a national habit. Citing the example oftwo Hol lywood movies , Die Hard (1988) and RoboCop 2 (1990), with theirlitanies of shootings (61 in the case of RoboCop 2), the report noted the nor-malization of such violence and how its presence in mass culture matches itsspread in real-life. Gun usage has now become commonplace; a gun-ladenmovie l ike RoboCop 2 has been watched by millions of kids;1 and the recentschool shootings have occurred in "middle" America rather than the inner cit-ies (where the everydayness of violence goes unnoted). As picked up in thisstory, it is the mainstreaming of violence that seems disturbingly new to somany people in the United States today. And, with this perception, comes criti-cis m of ma instream m edia, a staple of everyday life here and well-kno wn forits diet of violence.

But how are these two forms of common violence actually related? Re-search on what is called "violent entertainment" or "media violence" was pro-liferating already when stimulated by the recent shootings. To date, the bulk ofthis has been con duc ted by peo ple w ho assum e a clear-cut definition of m ediaviolence, use quantitative methods in studying the effects it has on variousaudiences, and conclude that violent media is harmful for viewers, particularlychildren. In this research (conducted predominantly by scholars and officials inthe fields of public policy, violence prevention, law, medicine, education, psy-chology, communication, and media studies) ,2 media violence refers, as it doesin Sissela Bok's and James Hamilton's recent studies, to any media coverageor representation of bodily damage, destruction, or death including graphic re-portage of murder in the news, video games that feature killers and killing, andthe constancy of attack scenes and shoot-outs in movies and television includ-ing children's cartoons (Bok 1998; Hamilton 1998). Focusing on the effect(s)


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violent media has on various audiences, research such as Bok's has pointed toprimarily four: increased fear or anxiety about one's world, an appetite formore violence (in whatever form), desensitization to violence, and aggression.Where it has been most conclusive is in showing how children, particularly un-der the age of six and particularly for the medium of television, repeatedlydemonstrate higher levels of aggression after viewing scenes of injury and de-struction (Hamilton 1998). The most common explanation for this is that youngchildren, incapable of distinguishing the fantasy of mass media from reality,mimic the former in socially inappropriate ways in their behavior (Bok 1998).

But the mimicry of violent images and scripts goes far beyond the age ofyoung childhood, many suggest, and is at root in the new genus of casual bru-tality erupting in the (school)yards of middle America. In his remarks follow-ing the Springfield shooting, for example, President Clinton declared thatyouth today in the United States have become desensitized to violence by thedegree it inhabits their world(s) of (video) games, television, and movies. Thisview was even more strongly endorsed at the conference Clinton held on vio-lence after Columbineand in the report on "Marketing Violent Entertain-ment to Children" by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that ensued 3where Hollywood's role in inciting youth to violence is treated as a foregoneconclusion (unjustified, as a number of studies have shown, by the "evi-dence").4 The premise here is that media violence, even when not literallymimicked, engenders a mindset that sees violence as not only acceptable but"cool." As Sissela Bok (1998) has argued for children's shows like The MightyMorphin Power Rangers, fighting that leads to obliteration of one's opponentis normalized, glamorized, and made fun. Kids laugh when enemies are blastedand come to associate aggression with excitement, pleasure, and ego-boostsa dangerous message, Bok concludes, for how children view both the worldand themselves.

It is this conceptualization of violent entertainment and the impact it hason youth I wish to challeng e in my paper by considering a specific gen re vio -lent cyborgs popularized since the 1980s by such blockbuster hits as RoboCopand Terminator. By almost any definition, these movies are violent. But it isthe meaning and organization of this violence I wish to pay attention to here asfew in the category of killer cyborgcyborgs are hybrids of living mattermelded with cybernetic dev ices; and killer cyb org s, often indistinguishablefrom cyborgs, are cyborgs programmed to fight, kill, or attackare as neatlyand unambiguously drawn as critics like Bok would suggest. Although theirbodies both are and bear lethal weapons, the cyborg's identity is complicatedbeyond that of mere aggressor. Created themselves out of body-parts fromdead (often killed) human beings, these cyborgs undergo constant attack andcontinual reconstruction. Who or what the cyborg is, in fact, is a concern thatboth troubles and constitutes the plot, and establishing o n e s identity is a desirethat driv es as much as elud es the cyborg subject. Destruction then, though a dom i-nant trope in cyborg stories, is intrinsically linked to another theme identity co n-structionas cyborgs not only produce violence but are produced themselves


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out of violent acts. Thus while images of cutting, exploding, and splattering(re)cycle in this genre, "life" is both destroyed and reemployed as a result.

In considering a movie like RoboCop 2, I propose that we look at violenceas a force that not only "inflicts injury" (as the Oxford English Dictionary de-fines violence) but also produces identity in a realm of media entertainmentwhere destruction is particularly enmeshed in the making of a new subject, thecy bo rg . Suc h an em ph asis on what is productive rather than merely destructivein mass culture differs considerably from the standard conceptualization ofviolence within scholarly and public discourse on media violence. For exam-ple, in his recent book, Channeling Violence: T he Econom ic Market for Vio-lent Television Programming (1998), James Hamilton defined violence as thenumber of incidents of the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury ordamage to persons or property. By this definition, violence is something that isquantifiable, visible, and willful. The assumption is that we know violencewhen we see it, and its meaning is limited to one thingit destroys. Further,what is said about violence within media is also said about the impact it has onviewing audiences: violence attacks viewers by breaking down their sensitivityand resistance to aggression. Hence we get the NPR description of RoboCop 2as a movie with 61 shootings and the explosive statistics, much circulated inthe 1990s, that the average child in the United States will have viewed 8,000murders and more than 100,000 acts of violence by the time they leave elemen-tary school (Bok 1998:59). Reduced to such numbers, there seems little else tosay except that media violence holds a meaning for kids that is only deleterious.

This position is not unlike that of the anti-pornography contingency of1980s feminism spearheaded by Dworkin and MacKinnon that treated pornog-raphy only in terms of the violence it renders on women and failed to considerwhy and how it produces other effects, such as meaning and pleasure for regu-lar consumers. As critics (including Williams 1989: Kipnis 1992; Bright 1995;F.A .C.T . B ook Com m ittee 1992; Ross 1989; and Allison 20 00) argued. an> be-havior with mass or popular appeal is drawing in people for reasons that mustbe u nderstood rather than m erely con dem ned . S o too, I argue, about media vio-lence where research to date has been narrowly confined to interrogating ef-fects using an apriori definition (quantifiable, injurious acts) that limits the an-swers we get. Such an approach cannot account for the vast appeal of violentmedia across what is a broad spectrum of children today in the United States.Nor does this approach adequately examine the terrain and landscape of theviolent worlds so intensely imagined in movies like RoboCop 2 whose fanta-sies of disconnected and reconnected body-parts are speaking somehow tochildren and of something(s) in the lives they are leading today. My aim in thispaper is to start making these connectionsbetween the worlds that kids livein and their imaginary worlds of violent play populated with the continuallydisintegrating and reintegrated body-parts of humans, machines, killers, and he-roes. W hat I will prop ose is that fragmentation centers the violen ce in on egenre of media entertainmentcyborgsand that this trope both reflects a("real") world of flux, migration, and deterritorialization, and produces


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("imaginary") new subjects whose queerness bears the seeds of a constructivepotential for U.S. children today.5

PostmodernismToday's world of global capitalism and proliferating technologies is oftendescribed in terms of flows. Flowsof people, goods, money, ideas, imagesmove between bordersof nations, economies, culturesmaking this an ageof deterritorialization as much as reterritorialization. Production has shiftedfrom the Fordist model (Harvey 1989) of a rationalized labor force: of coreworkers who stay in one place and earn enough wages to consume what they

producethe mass produced goods that embed both the desires and disciplineof a modern lifestyle. Today, production is based on "flexible accumulation"where, geared to quick turn-over and a constantly changing market, companieshave downsized their core workers, diversified their holdings and productlines, and rely more on subcontractors, peripheral workers and out-sourcing.Increasingly there is a gap between those who produce and consume brandname goodsNike or Adidas shoes, for instanceand continually, in theUnited States at least, the gap is rising between the so-called haves and have-nots accompanied by a shrinkage of the middle class in-between .The condition of postmodernity in which we live is one of shifts and dis-persals, instability and movement, speed and ephemerality. Ever more ourworld is being remade and redrawn through various technologiesimage andinformation production, medical and genetic advances, m ilitary and star warnetworks. Our connections are quicker (whether by travel, phone, email, orCNN) to places and peoples further away; disconnections are quick toorup-tures of families, communities, workplaces, schools. David Harvey (1989)speaks of time-space com pression and the increased attention placed on the im-mediate and instantaneous in postmodern lifestyle. Consumption is more im-portant than ever in advanced capitalist economies and images not only sellcommodities but are commodities themselves, operating in an economy thatreifies the surfaces and impressions of things. Major consumer values are in-stantaneityfast food and speedy servicesand disposabilitygoods that canbe easily and quickly thrown out. Reproductions or simulacra are valued overoriginals and the cultural logic of postmodernity, as theorized by FredericJameson (1984), is marked by an aesthetic of the pastichethe jumbling ofmixed genres and past and present time periodsand schizophreniathe ex-perience of life as disjointed, incoherent, and lacking linear continuity.It is against this backdrop that I want to read children's play and, in par-ticular, a form of play in which the m edia in the United States has taken such akeen interest: violent entertainment. Within this category characterized by aprom inence of attacks, shootings, ruptured body-parts, and hyper-weapons is asub-set in which the explosiveness of violence is coupled with another, far lessstudied dimension, the making and remaking of a new kind of subjectthe cy-borg. Following Donna Haraway (1991), I take cyborg to be a fusion of artificialmachinery and living (animal, human, or alien) organism that confuses prior


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identity borders. T his confu sion is marked by both a dislocation and reaggrega-tion of bodies and body parts (of and between nature, nation, race, community,gen de r, co m m od ity , and/or culture)w hat I trace here through violenc e andqueerness. The figure of the cyborg has become exceedingly popular in (andcirculates between) two sites I pay attention tomass produced play in Japanand the United States since the 1980s that spreads across the multimedia ofcomic books (manga in Japan), cartoons (anime), film, live action television,video (and gameboy) games, and merchandise such as action figures.6 Repli-cants , terminators, RoboCops, and power rangers are the figures of this pla>world. And all are identified as not only cyborgs but also fighting machines:beings whose bodiesamalgamations of weaponry, machinery, and powersare programmed to fight, eradicate, disintegrate, splatter, shoot, mutilate, orkill. The stories, what there are of them, are orchestrated around the theme andstaging of excessive destruction. In the RoboCop movies, for instance, scenesof slaughter or mutilation occur ritualistically about every 10 minutes and, inThe M ighty Morphin Power Rangers, based on a live action television seriesthat has run continuously in Japan since 1973 and in the United States since1993, the team of clean-scrubbed teenagers who morph into power-suited war-rior rangers, battle and defeat at least one grotesque-look ing beast every show.What is the pleasure engaged by fans with such programming and how isvio len ce con cep tua lized ? M y own so n, recently turned 15, was a consumer andplayer of the violent cyborg genre for years. He delighted in the gore of boththe RoboCop and Terminator series, loved all the masked warrior cyborgswhen he lived in Japan as a young child, and played continually (until 12 or 13)with his cyborg action figures that he mobilized into intense battles pepperedwith an arsenal of blaster guns and fantasy super-weapons that ended indowned figures, severed limbs, and scattered body-parts. Adam is an uncom-monly sweet, gentle, feminist boy, yet he was drawn to a fantasy play of machowarriors with heightened powers and killer instincts. When asked what heliked in this play-world, his answer was simply "it's cool." When pushed toelaborate, however, Adam described not only the thrill and excitement of mul-tiple explosions, fast action, and powerful heroes, but also more studied andaesthetic pleasures taken in knowing, discriminating, and appreciating the de-tails of this un ivers e the plots and particularly the makeup of characters' bod-ies that fuse with weapons, powers, and vehicles.

In research I have done on children's mass culture in both Japan and theUn ited Sta tes , I am struck by a similar pattern: fascination with both the break-down and make-up of key characters. This is true in the case of Sailor Moon,for example, a highly popular, long-running (1992-97) manga (comic book)and television anime (cartoon) in Japan that, exported to several other coun-tries including the United States, features a group of teenage girls who trans-form into the superheroines, the Sailor Scouts led by Sailor Moon, to fight theevil Negaverse. As to the appeal of Sailor Moon, fans are most likely to cite thecomposition and array of charactersfive different girls who shift from theirown version of normalcy (one is smart, another lives at a temple, the lead character


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is a sleepyhead who loves to eat and play rather than study) to superheroism(each with distinctive powers, costumes, and names).7 And yet, when observ-ing children actually watching episodes of Sailor Moon in the United States, Inoticed how attentive they were to the action scenesthe moments of battlewhen, threatene d by destruction, the girls upgrade their pow ers and shape-shiftto zap, blast, cream, or otherwise eviscerate their foes. In asking later whetherany of the kids had found these battles to be "vio len t," one 12 year old shou ted"yes," adding that this was his favorite part of Sailor Moon. Becoming highlyanimated, he went over this and other attack scenes from the show in whichbodies break apart, disintegrate in mid-air, and mutate their form (an armchanges into a blade or what looks human transmutes into a monster, for example).Of the other twe lve children in this particular group , only one agreed withthe characterization of Sailor Moon as violent, adding that she liked violencein entertainment (as in slasher films like the Halloween series, which started in1978). The others, as is the far more typical reaction, thought "soft" and"cute" better described Sailor M oon given its gentle story and subdued graph-ics. Yet, for all these viewers (and fans in general), the appeal of the story is inthe shifts and multi-partedness of the characters, girls who transform and are,at either end, a complex of attributes. As a girl, Serena (the main characterwhose nam e is Usagi in the Japanese version) has a mixture of traits and, as thesuperhero, Sailor Moon, a constellation of powersweapons (tiara and moonprism wand), strengths (the ability to shift form, impersonate others, executemultiple attacks), and a make-over appearance (that, with new cleavage, jew-els, and a uniform that is now mini-skirted, turns her sexy and beautiful). All ofthe latter, it is important to note, are only revealed in the course of battle. Thismeans that transformation, the keyword in Sailor Moon, is always and inextri-cably linked to destruction;8 the girls transform only with the arrival of (and tocounter-attack) the destructive Negaverse, and, as superheroes, they use theirpowers to destroy. As the full name of the show (BishOjo Shenshi Se-ra Mun-[Pretty Soldier, Sailor Moon]) suggests, the construction of superheroism hereis coupled to, and dependent on, the persona of warrior-destroyer. So even inthis mild, sweet version of a cyborg killer, violence defined as acts intended todamage or destroy others is fundamental to the identity and appeal of the maincharacters) . 9 As I pushed this point with the children in my study , most admit-ted that they found the action scenes interesting not only for the transforma-tions that reconfigure the heroes but also for the disaggregation that unravelsthe enemiesa slow dissolution, as one gave the example, of a monster whocrumbled first with her hands, then arms, next the head, and finally the rest ofthe body. "C oo l" was the reaction.What the above responses by fans of violent cyborgs and transforming super-heroes point to is a fascination in what could be called the dissection of trans -human characters whether the focus is on the make-up or break-down of a sub-jecta distinction that becomes, itself, indistinguishable. Hence, an interest inthe com position of how cyborg bodies are built on and from multiple parts (chest-plates, armor, power belts, tiaras) bleeds into an interest in the decomposition


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(splattering , sm ashing , chopp ing, firing) bod ies undergo as a consequence ofviolent fighting. Thus, though coming at it from opposite ends as it were, boththe constructive and destructive components of cyborg violence are part andparcel of the same geometry: power as it fuses and defuses in bodies with shift-ing and exploding borders of identity. That is also to say, violence is not onlythe end to things, but also the beginning. In the case of cyborg myths, killingterminates the life of one kind of being (human) but also initiates the life of an-other (cyborg).

David Harvey (1989:311) has written critically of the "creative destruc-tion" fostered by the cyberpunk movie Blade Runner (1982), arguing, in ac-cord with the common criticisms of media violence, that its violence is exces-sive and encourages an aggressive stance of dealing with adversity by zappingand whacking one's opponent. With this perspective, violence is seen only interms of its destructiveness: as acts that injure, damage, or ruin people andthings and get glorified in the mass media by hyped-up special effects, inatten-tion to the consequences of violence, and the heroization of violent characters(B ok 19 98 ). Y et, as fans of cyborg action have suggested to me, "destruction"is a far more complicated operation and has implications for the constructionof new kinds of subjects as well: subjects who, made in the nexus of violence,em erg e with their lines of "hum anness" and "selfhood" redrawn.10 Unanchoredfrom the semblance of monolithic roots, these new subjects exceed the parame-ters of a singular identity and, in this sense, are queer. In the case of SailorMoon, for example, the supergirls have bodies/identities that (con)fusc pretti-ness with warriorship and have desires that roam towards each other as well astoward boys.1 1

Accordingly, my position is that it is important to consider what might beproductive as well as counter-productive for children today in the "creativedestructiveness" of cyborg fantasy. In this I am guided by what DonnaHaraway (1991) sees as the progressive potential of cyborgs: artifice that canhelp overcome the power inequities bred by worldviews that treat bodies asnaturalistic, where nature of one kind is taken to be inherently superiorselfversus other, white versus black, male versus female. Today's cyborg heroeshave bodies that complicate, rather than reduce to, nature and are possessedwith powers that are far more contingent and diffuse than those of earlier cul-tural heroesthe Superman of the 1950s television show, for example, wherehis powers were centered in and secured by a holistic, natural (male) body. 12If that was the Fordist model of fantasy phallicism, today's cyborgs are theflexible, postmodern model despite, or precisely because of, the fact they con-tinually explode.

Unlike those who commonly argue that heroes of violent entertainment,including cyborg violence, are drawn according to a modernist model of stablecoherency and "invincible" machoism (Springer 1993; Balsamo 1996; Bok1998) , I stress the ruptures, slippages, and excesses to which cyborg heroes arenot only subjected (through the constant attacks, incisions, intrusions, andpenetrations to their bodies) but also assume subjectivity itself.13 To do so, I


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use the example of a movie series, the RoboCop trilogy {RoboCop [1 9 8 7 ] ,RoboCop 2 [1 9 9 0 ] , RoboCop 3 [1993]), in which the volatility of the worldportrayed and the cyborg it produces are particularly clear if also excessive.My attempt here is to scrutinize the dimensions of both the violence and sub-jectivity in this specific text before speaking more generally of the genre of cy-borg violence and its situatedness within the world of media entertainment andthe socio-e con om ic conditions of late capitalism.

R o b o - Vio lenceThe movie RoboCop, the first in a series of three, starts off with a scene of

violence.1 4 Set in the crime-ridden city of Detroit where a newscast announcesthat three p olice officers have just been k illed, exe cu tives at OC P discuss plansto build what is to be a corporately run new city. Hoping to arm this city withfail-safe police who can maintain order over the rising, alienated underclass,OCP designs a robotic cop, Ed 209, whose test-run dramatically fails, brutallykilling an executive. It is the next design, this time for a cybernetic cop, thatconstitutes the story of RoboCop. These plans require a model policeman whomust die in order to be rebuilt as a lethally superior m odel co p. Targeted as thevictim, Alex Murphy is sent into an ambush with his partner, Anne Lewis, andsavagely blown apart by a group of thugs who taunt and tease him by firstshooting off his hand. The scene is graphic and gruesome, and Murphy is fi-nally killed by a shot to his head.

The violence of this act is not only intense and drawn out, but takes placeat the beginning of the story to unfold; indeed, the protagonist's murder is thevery condition of and for his rebirth as cyborg cop. The need to kill Murphy isdriven home in the process of rebuilding that follows. When, at one point thedoctors working on him discover that they can save one arm, the OCP-execu-tive in charge tells them to "kill it, shut him down, we want total prosthesis"and, leaning over Murphy's still human-looking body, barks "you're going tobe one mean motherfucker." By the next scene, Murphy has become a ma-chine: a fact we experience through RoboCop's perspective, looking up fromwhere he's lying on the table having his monitor adjusted, and seeing, as doeshe, through the scanner of his computer. RoboCop's position here and ours, ifwe identify with it, is one of vulnerability and unease: a state that continueswhen RoboCop is soon programmed, as a machine, to obey the directives dic-tated him by OCP. He repeats back his orders: serve the public trust, protect theinnocent, uphold the law.

Immediately, however, his weakness shifts to strength as the completedRoboCop walks powerfully now down the hall of the police precinct in hisbulky armature. His appearance and performance in the police shooting galleryimpress all the human cops; the citizens of Detroit are similarly awed with hissuperlative feats. As we see (all in a few seconds of movie-time): RoboCopstops a hold -up , save s the mayor being held h ostage, and rescues a rape victim.In all these acts, RoboCop performs with both the accuracy and dispassion of amachine; the hostage-taker is thrown out of a window and the rapist is shot


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(s ignif icantly) in the crotch. Although RoboCop's phallic powers are recog-nized by all, the question of his identity is far more troubling. As posed by anewscaster , "Who is he? What is he? Where does he come from?" In her ownanswer, "He is O C P ' s new warrior," RoboCop is identified as both a cyber-power and corporate property. What we learn from this statement is that, what-ever and whomever RoboCop is, he is controlled by someone else: the classicstate of alienation. This state and the unease and resistance it provokes are notonly the threads of the narrative but also the sites compelling the many specta-c les of violence that explode rhythmically throughout the film.

It is the struggle to gain control over his life and the remnants of his hu-man identity that launches RoboCop into the line of fire time and time again. Inthe Frankenstein trope formulaic in many cyborg stories,15 the machine createdby humans develops a mind of his own thereby turning on its creator. So toowith RoboCop who rebels against OCP by developing an identity and powerthat elude their control. This starts with his gun, made originally by OCP engi-neers as a high-tech machine, that is "remade" by RoboCop who gives it hissignature gun-hold.

It is this gesture (a twirl before returning the gun to its holster) that Lewisrecognizes as that of her old (and now dead) partner, Murphy. Sharing this in-sight with RoboCop triggers his own recollection of a past that he now recalls,but only sketchily, through two memories, both involving guns, that keep recy-cl ing (in Murphy's head and on the screen). The first is of Murphy's murderthat is a replay of the onslaught of guns and shots that killed him. This, need-less to say, is a terrifying imageof savage penetration and obliteration of theself. The second memory also calls up great loss: recollections of his wife andchild who Murphy remembers from the time his son, watching his cowboy idoltwirl his gun on television, asked, "Hey, Dad, can you do that?"

A s a father, Murphy appropriated this gesture to impress his kid. ForR o b o C o p , the mimicry stands for even more: a performance of manhood that ishis only link to human memory, relationality, and will. This is a postmodernm o v e , if there ever was one: a television image copied by the father to phalli-c ize himself in the eyes of his son and by the cyborg to humanize himself in hisown eyes and those of the viewer. Of course , RoboC op's gun stands for muchmore than the traces of his human self. It is also the tool that stands metaphori-cally for, and metonymically in for, his cyborg system. Unlike any other's,R o b o C o p ' s gun is not only more potent and deadly accurate, it is also housedinside his cyborg legliterally a part of the body of cyber-cop.

Twirling then firing his gun, RoboCop has both the powers of a cyborgand, as the narrative develops, the sensitivity of a human. It is the latterinquest of truth, jus tice , and .vengeancethat compels him to discover the iden-tity of Murphy's kil lers and the complicity of OCP vice president, Dick Jones,in the murder. This discovery re-exposes RoboCop to danger as Dick Jones de-cides to el iminate him, programming Ed 209, to do the kill. Being a bettermodel, though, RoboCop survives, disabling the robot. In the most gruelingscene in the film, he is attacked by masses of armed police who have been ordered,


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by their chief through OCP, to take him down. As they encircle a parking lot allfiring guns, the scene resembles the earlier one when Murphy was repeatedlyshot. This scene too gets drawn out and RoboCop incurs incredible damage un-til he is whisked off to safety by Lewis.In a scenario distinctive to the cyborg genre, RoboCop repairs his ownwounds, using tools brought to him by Lewis to open up his compartments andretool his insides. In the end, RoboCop removes his helmet, thereby exposinghis hybridized headhalf human, half machinein which state he finally re-fers to himself as Murphy. After another blow out encounter in the warehousewhere Murphy was originally shot, the finale has RoboCop confronting OCPofficials with proof of Dick Jones' crimes. The president fires Jones thereby al-lowing RoboCop to kill him (which his directive against killing any seniorOC P official wou ld otherwise have blocke d). Turning to Ro boC op, the presi-dent says "N ice shooting. W hat's your name, son?" RoboC op answers "M urphy,"ending the movie.

The Sensual i ty of ViolenceOne of the most obvious and memorable aspects of RoboCop and other

members of the fantasy cyborg genre (whether film, anime, cartoon, or comic)is its kinetic energy, fast-paced action, and intense explosions of fire, shooting,killing, and carnage. Some describe this, of course, in terms of violence: a vio-lence that is over-the-top, gratuitous, or excessivean excess, it is said, be-yond what the narrative needs or is all about. Yet it is precisely this surplus ofviolation that repeatedly cuts apart and into body lines as we know or haveknown them that defines the genre, lending it the flashes of intensity that pul-sate jaggedly rather than conjoin smoothly in narrative linearity. This is theearmark of a postmodern aesthetic: one, as Jameson (1984) has described it,that displaces a sense of history with an overload of sensations that play offand with various surfaces. The fact that machines constitute one of the mainsurfaces in this genre, assuming exciting if troubling new interactions with andfor humans, categorizes cyborg fantasy also as science fiction: stories thatimagine a time and space other than the here and now, usually with primacygiven the theme of tech nolog y. In the science fiction imaginary, a world of in-creased or different machinery is envisioned with images that, while futuristic,also serve to re-imagine the present. Again, according to Jameson, science fictionworks to "defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present" anddoes "so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization"(1982:150) .

Cyborgs, in the forms populating mass culture todayRoboCops, termi-nators, androids, morphin rangersboth are and are not imaginable. Or, betterstated, while cyborgs like this are not yet real, the reality they represent of theinterpenetration of machinery into the lives, homes, and bodies of people iscertainly familiar to us all. Cyborg fantasies all bear worlds heavily inlaid withmachines: both familiarlike phones, walkman, answering machines, and televi-sionsand unfamiliarnew kinds of vehicles, imaging screens, communicators.


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and weapons. Typically these stories are set in large cities such as Detroit, 16Los Angeles, and Tokyo, often following a world war or apocalyptic event.Their time-frame is the future, but within two or three decades of the present,and an emphasis is placed on space, visualized in terms of a pastiche that jum-bles high tech with low tech, and signs of material progress abutted againstthose of social, moral, and environmental decay. Akira (1988) and Blade Run-ner are both classics in this sense with landscapes littered with garbage andcrumbling buildings but also sophisticated machines; where everything isbleak and somber, almost entirely devoid of nature (which itself is indistin-guishable from artifice); and whose inhabitants are affectless, alienated, angry,and often alone, strained and divided by limited resources that are controlledby corrupt authority figurespoliticians, military commanders, and corporateexecut ives .

When the tone is so dark, the impression rendered of a technologized cy-ber-world is dystopic and the warning given is that technology breeds violenceand corru ption, and its seepa ge into our live s and bod ies must be watched, evenresisted. Yet not all cyborg sci-fi is dystopic. And even when this is its overtmessage as in RoboCop with its vile cybor g-m akers and the cyb org 's nostal-gia for the humanness it has lostcyber sci-fi still yields a pleasure and aes-thetics in its techno-craft. Constance Penley (1991) has described this as "technoir": where, while the narrative in RoboCop is critical of technology, the auraof its technologized images is celebratory undercutting the text's dystopia atthe level of cinematic pleasure. Yet others writing about cyborg sci-fi pay littleattention to the narrative altogether, concentrating instead on the sensory inten-sity and sensuality of the visual and sometimes aural presentation. Dan Rubey(1997) , for example, in writing about Star Wars (1977), George Lucas's block-buster trilogy, speaks of its "machine aesthetic": the spectacle made of sci-fimachines enhanced, indeed produced, by the cinematic technology of spec-tacular special effects. Rubey argues that this fetish of Star Wars machinerycreates the sensation of mergence in viewers with the machines on the screen.The emotions this conjures up are ambivalent; the rush of mastery from feelingone's body and powers augmented yet also a sense of vulnerability, even oblitera-tion, when imagining machines as controlling, dominating, or wiping out one-self.

In either c as e, o f co ur se, there is a play with the borders of human pow ers,existence, and mortality in fantasizing new machines. And, as anthropologistshave known for a long time, borders always provoke a mixture of danger andpleasure, and border-crossing is steeped in rituals, tinged often with violenceas in initiation rites. Carol Clover (1992), in her study of the violent genre ofslashe r films w atch ed primarily by adolesce nt b oys in the United States, has ar-gued, similarly to Rubey, that viewers shift in their identification with thecharacters (or machines) on the screen. Viewers delight in both the predatorypursuit of victim by the slasher, and the fighting back of the "final girl" indefending herself from attack. There is also what Clover takes to be gender-shifting in that boy viewers identify with not only the male slasher but also thefemale heroine on the screen. Film theorist Steven Shaviro (1993) has pushed


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this point even further, proposing that viewers of horror, violent, and slasherfilms identify or invest with the victims of attack not only when they are victo-riously overcoming their attackers (as with the "final girl") but also, and moreimportantly, when they are being pursued, dismembered, and slaughtered. ForShaviro, fol lowing the work of Bersani (1986), Battaile (1994), and Deleuzeand Guattari (1983, 1987), cinematic pleasure is structured more in terms ofmasochism than mastery. Viewers less identify with lead characters than theyare brought into contact with images through a process of contagion or mime-sis; the dissolution of fixed identities and borders transfixes viewers by imagesthat are horrific yet "strangely attractive" (Shaviro 1993:53). As he argues,"Anxiety over the disruption of identity is concomitant with, and perhaps nec-essary to, the very intensity of sensual gratification" (1993:56).

Such shifts, fluidity, and ambivalence are also at work in a cyber fantasylike RoboCop. The destructive action in the film continually explodes out butalso, and more interestingly, implodes into the key figure, RoboCop, withwhom most viewers I have spoken to center their attention. Right from thestart, Murphy/RoboCop is the object as much as the subject of brutal attack; asa human, he is savagely killed, and, as a cyborg, he is cruelly remade and per-petually hunted, shot, sawed, sliced, blasted, maimed, and retooled. Of course,RoboCop is hardly a passive victim and is aggressive himself in pursuing thosewho transgress the codes of civil obedience that he has been programmed touphold. Accordingly, RoboCop uses his cybernetic powers and weapons tosubdue, disengage, or otherwise eliminate criminals in acts that range frombreaking limbs and throwing people out of windows to shooting, firing, ex-ploding, and cracking bodies. Thus, while eruptions of force constantly pulsatethroughout all three films in the RoboCop series, the flow is constantly shift-ingemanating from as much as targeting both the "good" and "bad" charac-ters in the films. Not only does this make the explosiveness in the film bothmorally and ontologically variableit is connected to good as well as badforces and to both destructive and constructive endsit also portrays the heroas someone whose powers are far more fluctuating and fluid than stable andset: a character w ho se state-of-bein g con stantly shifts betwe en invinc ibilityand destruction, potency and impotency, and immortality and death.

Phal l i c Powers /Gendered Sel fDespite the volatility (and viability) of its powers, the violent cyborg is

consistently described in metaphors of gravity, denseness, and stabilityas a"fortress" with "rock solid masculinity," for example (Springer 1993). Thisstance is held by media scholar Claudia Springer who, writing of the RoboCopand Terminator films (Terminator [1984] and Terminator 2: Judgment Day[ 1991J), argues that cyborgsin mass culture are dominantly figured as not onlyviolen t, but also bulked up and macho.17 The choice of Arnold Schwarzeneggeras lead cyborg in the Terminator series seems prima facie evidence for thisthesis, an actor whose "aggressively corporeal" body literally signifies poweras physically large, visible, and phallic. To Springer, such a bodily image is


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retrograde on two scores. First, it misrepresents today's postindustrial, post-modern technology that, unlike the massive steam and hydraulic engines of anearlier era, runs on micro-electronic circuitry that is more passive and hiddenfrom view. To impersonate the labyrinthine technological networks ol ourcomputer age with the beefed-up body of a Schwarzenegger is not only inaccu-rate but also reactionary, signaling an unease with the technologization of to-day's world.

The "externally visible musculature" of RoboCop is also masculinist, sig-naling a second way in which it is regressive, according to Springer (1993).The gendering of the cyborg here relies on tropes of conquest, aggression, andbulktrademarks of the modernist male hero played by a John Wayne orSylvester Stallonewhich are old time survivals, superimposed onto, ratherthan radicalized by, the newness of cyborg technology. This view, commonamongst those writing about cyborgs in mass culture, is that, despite cyber-technology's promise to rewrite human flesh, identity still gets drawn usingrigid, naturalist, and masculinist notions of body and gender.18 Anne Balsamo(1996), Constance Penley (1991), and Fred Pfeil (1990), for example, all agreethat, wh ile certain borders get dissolv ed in cyborg fantasy, the border of genderrem ains "stu ck," as Pfeil puts it, "in a m ascu linist frame" (Pfeil 1990:88). Andin her study of a cognate to cyborgs, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on tele-vision, Marsha Kinder (1991) has similarly observed that, while the mutantturtles variously border-cross, the borders between female and male, and goodand evil stay unbendingly fixed.

But how static or stable is the identity of a RoboCop so commonly de-scribed as holistically "male"? Not very, was the response given by under-graduate students I taught in a semester-long course on cyborgs at Duke inspring 1998.19 Ac cord ing to them, RoboC op is a far more ambiguous and mud-died character than clear-cut along any planehero, public citizen, man. Thestrongest reaction evoked by watching RoboCop (shared for the other mostgraphically violent cyborg movie we viewed, Akira) was a sense of discomfi-ture, experienced as stimulating, both viscerally and intellectually, by aboutone-third of the students, but repulsive and distasteful by another third (almostas many males as females). None of the students (including the third who feltless strongly either way) said their viewing of RoboCop inspired feelings ofunequivocal mastery or reassurance, and those who said they identified withthe lead character did so in ways they described as complex and ambivalent (Iwill come back to this point later). As one student stated it, the film is "troubling."

As such reactions suggest, masculinity construed as "rock solid"withits evocations, I will later suggest, of the very bedrock of middle America feltso transgressed upon in the recent school .shootingsm isidentifics RoboC opas (dis)embodied in these films.

20Aggression is central to his characterization),without a doubt, but RoboCop is as much a violent figurethe macho warrior

bent on old-time revenge and killing one's foesas reconfigured by violenceinto something elsea bullet-holed carcass, a remade machine, a pile of scrap.Violence, in other words, works here to not only portray the cyborg as a


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allison - cyborg violence - bursting borders and bodies with queer machines

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