Dis\/Corporatization: The Biopolitics of Prosthetic Lives and Posthuman Trauma in Ghost in the Shell<\/em> Films<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n\nDonna T. Tong<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\nAbstract<\/strong>: This paper explores the biopolitics both implicit and explicit in Mamoru Oshii\u2019s film duology Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. The prostheticization of life for Major Motoko Kusanagi is based upon an objectification of a cyborg self enabled and literalized through technology that is also a (mis)representation that conflates the biological self and technological self, and Oshii further problematizes this representation with the complication of the commodification and trafficking of posthuman lives, explicitly examined in more critical detail in the second film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em>. In other words, Oshii arguably imagines the extreme end of biopower in a posthuman world as human trafficking structured by a globalized political economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n
\nR\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/strong>: Cet article explore la biopolitique implicite et explicite dans la duologie de films de Mamoru Oshii Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. La proth\u00e9sisation de la vie pour le Major Motoko Kusanagi est bas\u00e9e sur une objectivation d’un cyborg habilit\u00e9 et litt\u00e9raire \u00e0 travers la technologie qui est aussi une pr\u00e9sentation d\u00e9form\u00e9e qui confond le soi biologique et technologique, et Oshii prob\u00e9matise encore cette repr\u00e9sentation avec la complication de la marchandisation et le trafic de vie posthumaines, examin\u00e9s explicitement dans des d\u00e9tails plus critiques dans le deuxi\u00e8me film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em>. En d’autres termes, on peut avancer que Oshii imagine la fin extr\u00eame du biopouvoir dans un monde posthumain comme un trafic humain structur\u00e9 par une \u00e9conomie politique mondialis\u00e9e.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n\nTable of Contents<\/a> | Article doi: 10.17742\/IMAGE.OI.10.2.5 | PDF<\/a><\/p>\nProsthetic Lives and Human Trafficking<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
I<\/span>n April 2016, media sources reported on how Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma had spent more than $50,000 USD to create and build a robot in the likeness of Scarlett Johansson (Glaser).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/01-image1.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cThe Scarlett Johansson Bot Is the Robotic Future of Objectifying Women\u201d by April Glaser
\nImage: BOBBY YIP\/REUTERS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/02-ScarJo-robot-Insider.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201c$50,000 robot that looks like Scarlett Johansson.\u201d Insider<\/em>. YouTube. YouTube, 1 Apr. 2016. Web. 6 Jan. 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThis particular use of current technologies in 3D printing, prosthetics, and robotics is positively uncanny given the previous year\u2019s announcement of the same actress\u2019 controversial casting in a live-action adaptation of Mamoru Oshii\u2019s animated film Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, a cyber-punk, dystopic film centered on cyborg technologies in a posthuman future.1<\/sup><\/a> Margo Kaminski observes that the ScarJo robot not only underscores the current \u201cage of interactive celebrity,\u201d but also takes it to its technological endpoint. What is frightful about this new reality is not just the potential for privately or commercially manufacturing life-like robots (eerily actualizing Oshii\u2019s \u201cgynoid,\u201d or sex robot, from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em>), but that the fact, as April Glaser points out, \u201cJohansson is literally being objectified\u201d (Glaser). But what is the legal status of such usage of Johansson\u2019s image? According to Kaminski, \u201cThe commercial use of one\u2019s face or name without permission can be thought of as a privacy harm, founded in autonomy, dignity, or personhood,\u201d and is grounded in concerns about misrepresentation and resulting potential harm (Kaminski). As such, right of publicity cases where such misrepresentation is alleged \u201cemploy a trope of \u2018involuntary servitude,\u2019\u201d implying that using \u201ca person\u2019s face without permission is like forcing that person to work at a job, harming their dignity\u201d (Kaminski).<\/p>\nInterestingly, these issues of consent and (mis)representation involved in \u201cinvoluntary servitude\u201d are already entangled in Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> duology. In the first film, Ghost in the Shell<\/em> (\u653b\u6bbb\u6a5f\u52d5\u968a K\u014dkaku Kid\u014dtai<\/em> \u201cMobile Armored Riot Police\u201d), Major Motoko Kusanagi and her partner Batou discuss her recent disenchantment with their work as agents for Section 9, a \u201cpublic-security\u201d government agency.2<\/sup><\/a> Kusanagi agrees with Batou that they are not enslaved to Section 9, but only up to a point: \u201cWe do have the right to resign if we choose, provided we give the government back our cyborg shells\u2026and the memories they hold.\u201d How such memories might be \u201cgiven back,\u201d however, is in no way clear. As a \u201cfully-cyberized\u201d being, Kusanagi apparently only retains her original organic brain; the rest of her body is literally manufactured and maintained by cyber-techs employed by Section 9. In the second film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em> (\u30a4\u30ce\u30bb\u30f3\u30b9, Inosensu<\/em>), which begins several years after Kusanagi\u2019s disappearance at the end of the first film, Batou admits to his new partner Togusa that, \u201cHer brains and hardware were government property and her entire memory, including the classified information, were part of the deal.\u201d Under these circumstances, resignation would be a kind of literal termination. As such, Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cprosthetic life\u201d amounts to a form of \u201cinvoluntary servitude,\u201d compelling continued employment as a public-security agent in order to preserve her continued existence and thus \u201charming\u201d her dignity.<\/p>\nMany critics of Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films have focused on their representation of the posthuman from different angles.3<\/sup><\/a> In this paper I focus specifically on their biopolitics, which intertwine present and future-oriented concerns about the posthuman. The prostheticization of life for Kusanagi is based upon an objectification of a cyborg self enabled and literalized through technology that is also a (mis)representation that conflates the biological self and technological self. This problematic conflation is already hinted at in the characters\u2019 inability to distinguish their own memories from data, the latter of which can be appropriated as private property. This conflation of memory and data is widespread and undergirds many of our own misconceptions about human thought processes. In \u201cThe Empty Brain,\u201d Robert Epstein succinctly denounces popular-culture fantasies that equate the human brain with a computer. As he points out, unlike computers, humans are \u201cnot<\/em> born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers<\/em>\u201d (Epstein, original emphasis). To demonstrate the difference between human memory and data storage, Epstein recounts having a student draw a one-dollar bill from memory and then letting the student use an actual bill as an exemplar. The first drawing is invariably less detailed and accurate and shows that human beings do not \u201cstore\u201d representations of objects as computers do, that people are \u201cmuch better at recognising than recalling,\u201d since remembering, for humans, involves \u201ctry[ing] to relive an experience\u201d rather than retrieving data from storage (Epstein). Thus, the idea of erasing or implanting memories already assumes that human brains are equivalent to computers; but this is a false assumption that the films elide.<\/p>\nIn Oshii\u2019s dystopic future this conflation of the biotic and the technological, in fact, becomes the central means by which posthuman lives are commodified and trafficked. In Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, Kusanagi\u2019s body is, in effect, owned by the state. Her status is implicitly one of indentured servitude. Since the construction and the continued maintenance of her cybernetic body are costly and moreover beyond her own means, discontinuing her employment would mean \u201creturning\u201d those highly-expensive parts, not to mention her memories as \u201cdata,\u201d back to the government that claims them as its rightful property. The film suggests that her individual subjectivity and quality of life would be so diminished by such forfeitures that she is essentially trapped in a technologically-enabled and -constructed posthuman slavery. In Innocence<\/em>, Oshii presents us with gynoids, or what are fundamentally sex-bots, who are explicitly property to be made, sold, traded, and so on, and whose value lies in their adolescent appearance and affect. In other words, Oshii arguably imagines what might be the extreme outcome of biopower in a posthuman world where human trafficking is aided and abetted by a globalized political economy and technological infrastructure. I am not contending that technology is inherently antithetical to human existence, but rather observing that Oshii depicts some of the dangers that should be addressed when we consider humanity\u2019s relationship with technology. In Oshii\u2019s highly technologized world, corporeality is contingent, commodified, and constantly under attack. In this regard, Michel Foucault\u2019s theory of biopower can help us consider how power operates in the literal construction, maintenance, and circulation of the cyborg, and the envisioned psycho-social ramifications of this, including the ways in which practices of power in\/form the subjectivity or otherwise impact the subjectivation of the cyborg.<\/p>\n\nRecognizing\/(Re)Defining Human Trafficking<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
T<\/span>he audience first meets Major Kusanagi when she is tasked to assassinate an ambassador helping a defecting computer programmer. However, the focus of the film and Kusanagi\u2019s main mission are the identification and arrest of the Puppet Master, a villainous hacker who \u201cghost-hacks\u201d the \u201ccyber-brains\u201d of various persons running the gamut of all walks of life from diplomatic translators to refuse collectors. After hacking them, the Puppet Master\u2019s victims are unable to remember their childhoods, personal histories, or dreams and life goals. In the course of solving the mystery and apprehending the Puppet Master, Kusanagi questions her identity as a cyborg, and challenges what it means to be human, especially in a world in which people, like computers, can be \u201chacked\u201d and have their memories tampered with. Towards the end of the film, the Puppet Master downloads into a female cyborg shell also manufactured by the same corporation as Kusanagi\u2019s, and professes to be artificial intelligence who \u201cbecame self-aware\u201d from \u201cwandering various networks\u201d and requests asylum from Section 9. This shell is immediately stolen by Section 6 agents; but Kusanagi and her partner Batou recover the Puppet Master\u2019s cyborg body, and \u201cshe\u201d confesses that \u201cshe\u201d took a corporeal form in order to meet and merge with Kusanagi to transcend the limits of both of their existences. Ultimately, Kusanagi agrees; but both cyber-bodies are destroyed by Section 6 agents at the moment of their merger, leaving Batou to recover Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cbrain shell\u201d and attempt to resuscitate her by implantation in a black-market cyborg body. She revives, and, after a brief conversation with Batou, departs, destination unknown, but with the understanding that, \u201cThe net is vast and limitless.\u201d<\/p>\nThe second film Innocence<\/em> commences with Batou and his partner Togusa arriving at a grisly crime scene. Batou follows a literal trail of blood to decapitated police officers and an adolescent-looking gynoid, naked under an untied red robe with an iris behind her ear, holding the head of one of the police officers in her lap. She attacks Batou, and, when he throws her back, she whispers, \u201cHelp me,\u201d as she rips open her own torso, in a cybernetic allusion to Hans Bellmer\u2019s Rose ouverte la nuit<\/em> (Rose open at night<\/em>, 1946).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/03-rose-open-at-night-1934.jpgLarge.jpg\")
<\/a>Bellmer, Hans. Rose Open At Night<\/em>, 1934. WikiArt<\/em>. \u201cHans Bellmer: Famous Works,\u201d N.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2018. <https:\/\/www.wikiart.org\/en\/hans-bellmer\/rose-open-at-night-1934><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nOshii adds his own twist by having panels of the gynoid\u2019s face also bursting open in a grotesque mirroring of her torso.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/04-Innocence_rose-at-night01.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/05-Innocence_rose-at-night02.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\nThus begins Batou and Togusa\u2019s investigation into the malfunctioning, murderous Hadaly 2052 gynoids, manufactured by the multinational company Locus Solus.4<\/sup><\/a> Following the clues from the bloody killing of Jack Volkerson, consignment inspector for Locus Solus, Batou and Togusa question the local yakuza, leading to a messy shoot-out. Afterwards, Batou is given a cryptic message about being \u201cin the kill zone\u201d right before his e-brain is \u201chacked,\u201d causing him to shoot his own arm, nearly killing bystanders. Continuing with the case, Batou and Togusa seek out Kim, a disgraced ex-special forces operative, and at Kim\u2019s decrepit mansion of automatons, puppets, and tableaux vivant, Kusanagi makes a brief cameo in her borrowed cyborg body from the end of Ghost in the Shell<\/em> to leave clues for Batou. Batou and Togusa discover through Kim that Locus Solus is holding the kidnapped girls so that their \u201cghosts\u201d can be copied onto the gynoids, presumably to make the gynoids more realistic and therefore valuable to customers. Batou infiltrates Locus Solus\u2019s floating manufacturing plant and faces the murderous gynoids. Just as they seem to overwhelm Batou, Kusanagi downloads into a gynoid body to help him. She confesses to be behind the cryptic warning about being \u201cin the kill zone\u201d when Batou was hacked. After shutting down the plant, they find and release one of the only still-conscious girls who explains that, with the help of a remorseful Volkerson, she tried to circumvent the three-laws programming of the gynoids in order to \u201cmake trouble\u201d so that someone would notice and investigate.5<\/sup><\/a> The film concludes with Batou being reunited with his dog while Togusa gifts his young daughter, who had been dog-sitting, with a porcelain doll.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/06-Innocence_Togusa-daughter-doll.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\nWhat is the connection between these two cyberpunk films and human trafficking? To begin with, it might be instructive to define human trafficking. According to the website for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), \u201cArticle 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines Trafficking in Persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation\u201d (\u201cWhat Is Human Trafficking?\u201d). Exploitation as explained by the UNODC \u201cinclude[s], at a minimum, the exploitation or the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs\u201d (\u201cWhat Is Human Trafficking?\u201d).6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\nWhile Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> duology does not purport to depict real or even allegorical representations of human trafficking, it nonetheless does imagine a posthuman future where technology and globalization create the structural conditions that propagate human trafficking in ways that disturbingly parallel the trends which Kathleen Kim and Grace Chang pinpoint in \u201cReconceptualizing Approaches to Human Trafficking: New Directions and Perspectives from the Field(s).\u201d A report published by Human Rights First claims that, \u201cAn estimated 21 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery\u201d (\u201cHuman Trafficking by the Numbers\u201d); however, as Kim and Chang observe, our attention is usually only focused one particular aspect of human trafficking, forced prostitution. In the first Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, Kusanagi\u2019s situation of a legalized indentured servitude is not sexual slavery, but a broader mix of \u201cforced labour or services\u201d brought about by the exigencies of a global political economy, where even the defection of a computer programmer is criminalized as violating an arms export treaty. To counter the consequences of \u201c[t]he advance of computerisation\u201d that portends the extinction of \u201cnations and ethnic groups\u201d (as explained in the opening titles), cyborg agents like Kusanagi are required to maintain public security; their technologized bodies, however, leave them beholden to their employers. As mentioned earlier, Kusanagi\u2019s employment is voluntary up to a point; if she or any other cyborg agent discontinues working for Section 9, they must \u201cgive the government back [their] cyborg shells\u2026 and the memories they hold.\u201d Her body is not hers, but is instead literally government property.7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\nInnocence<\/em> thus takes the implicit theme of human trafficking or forced servitude from Ghost in the Shell<\/em> and makes it explicit through its use of gynoids. The gynoids themselves are a very obvious case of human trafficking, fitting into the dominant understanding of human trafficking as primarily \u201cthe prostitution of others.\u201d In solving the mystery of the murderous gynoids, Togusa and Batou find that a black market in kidnapping adolescent girls is what provides the infrastructure for creating these sex dolls in the first place, thus adding another layer to the film\u2019s representation of the trafficking of sentient beings, made obvious through the implications of sexual exploitation. The gynoids are tabula rasa<\/em>, in contrast to Kusanagi whose cyborgization is meant as an extension of and\/or complement to her already existing abilities. Yet, these differences arguably highlight the ways in which Oshii\u2019s posthuman future projects a political economy where cyborgs and technology are not only embedded in structures of power, but where the enslavement of female cyborgs also scaffolds this hegemony. These two films thus highlight and critique the biopolitics that constitute and enable such exploitation, and the films make visible the ways in which these anxieties about technology and the self, while allegorically imagined through cyborg and gynoid bodies, are becoming more and more salient with each technological breakthrough.<\/p>\n\nBiopower and Corporatization of Cyborgs<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
I<\/span>n Society Must Be Defended<\/em>, Foucault asserts that biopolitics is best explained through a tidal shift in the exertion of power by the state where, \u201cThe right of sovereignty [which] was the right to take life or let live\u201d becomes \u201cthe right to make live and to let die\u201d (241). Where the apotheosis of the monarchial state\u2019s power lies in the king\u2019s order or stay of execution, the contemporary state\u2019s ability to withhold or offer life-saving or life-extending measures and technologies illuminates the dark path that the intersection of the biotic and the technological may portend. As such, Foucault\u2019s biopower and biopolitics are particularly pertinent to discussing Oshii\u2019s vision of a posthuman world where technology is so ubiquitous that there seem to be almost no characters without some sort of modification and therefore dependence on the biopower of the state. This is not to say that the state no longer retains \u201cthe right to take life or let live\u201d (as evidenced in capital punishment), but to highlight that a turn to biopolitics inaugurates a sweeping organizational and infrastructural change to the workings of the state. As Foucault notes, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say exactly that sovereignty\u2019s old right\u2014to take life or let live\u2014was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it\u201d (241). Biopolitics, unlike the older politics from which it is differentiated, \u201cdeals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power\u2019s problem\u201d (245). Biopolitics is thus not merely about a shift in the organization and exertion of power, but about how that shift is itself inextricably linked to and embedded in different knowledges and structures. In Innocence<\/em>, for example, even Togusa\u2019s daughter seems unable to escape the touch of biopolitics as made uncannily evident in her \u201cinnocent\u201d joy in her gifted doll, which is now hers to own and control.8<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\nThe politicization of the bio<\/em>logical, of life<\/em>, is made very evident in Oshii\u2019s films, and Kusanagi\u2019s indentured servitude itself offers a very concrete example of biopolitics, since her life is only made possible through her continued employment at Section 9. Her particular circumstances also highlight the myriad social and political relationships necessary to give rise to such a situation. Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> establishes Section 9, in contrast to Section 6 whose purview seems to be domestic matters, to be devoted to counter-terrorism, or securing the nation from external threats. It is unclear, however, whether technology is positioned on the side of counter-terrorism or against it. The opening explanatory titles assert that, \u201cThe advance of computerisation\u2026 has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups,\u201d implying the iconoclastic potential of technology. Section 9 therefore works to secure the continued existence of the nation as a nation, using the very technology that paradoxically portends the annihilation of the nation itself.<\/p>\nThis paradox no doubt stems from anxieties resulting from a posthuman society that seems to draw ever nearer. Indeed, with the (increasing) interpenetration of the organic body with the technology by which different medical advances that have been realized, the cyborg has become a particularly contentious figure in both our cultural imaginaries and in fact. These very scientific advances themselves call into question not only the wholeness of the organic being, but also the status of the human. Donna Haraway\u2019s \u201cCyborg Manifesto\u201d very famously ruminates on the cyborg\u2019s potential to blur and perhaps even dismantle ossified categories of race, gender, sexuality, and so on through its hybrid nature. In \u201cSex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity,\u201d Sharalyn Orbaugh argues that,<\/p>\n
\nThe cultural products that engage the notion of the cyborg help us to come to terms with the meaning of this new relationship between the human body and technology as that relationship unfolds: narrative helps us to work through the fears and desires of a particular historical-cultural moment. We are each of us already compelled daily to face the breakdown of the distinction between the mechanical\/technological and the organic\/biotic. Cyborg narratives allow us, in Jennifer Gonzalez\u2019s phrasing, to personify, condense, and displace the anxieties and hopes raised by this situation. (436)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Some of these anxieties and hopes are articulated by and through those living lives altered or enabled by technology as in the case of Neil Harbisson, \u201cthe world\u2019s first cyborg activist\u201d implanted with an antenna connected to a sensor in his brain that \u201ctranslates colour into sound\u201d (Jeffries). While Harbisson\u2019s self-coined \u201ceyeborg\u201d was initially meant to \u201chelp him counter a rare form of colour blindness called achromatopsia,\u201d he had the device upgraded to be Bluetooth-enabled so that he \u201ccan either connect to devices that are near [him] or [he] can connect to the internet\u201d (qtd. in Jeffries). Harbisson claims that such technological enhancements go beyond deciding to become a cyborg and are also \u201can artistic statement\u2014 I\u2019m treating my own body and brain as a sculpture\u201d (qtd. in Jeffries).<\/p>\n
Yet, perhaps the most interesting and telling feature of Harbisson\u2019s account is precisely what it is missing. His narrative of his journey \u201con the superhighway to transhumanism,\u201d although it declaims artistic freedom, bodily autonomy, and cyborg rights, does not account for the way that race, gender, or even class might inflect cyborg experience (Jefferies).9<\/sup><\/a> There is, for example, a jarring contrast between his story and that of Vanilla Chamu, a Japanese woman who became briefly famous after appearing on a Japanese variety show in 2013 and who admitted to having undergone more than 30 elective surgeries and procedures \u201cto look like a French doll\u201d (Ashcraft). The television show, however, did not introduce her as \u201ca living doll\u201d as she desired, but as a \u201ccyborg\u201d (Ashcraft). The label implies \u201cthat she no longer looks totally human\u201d (Ashcraft). The contrast between the two narratives, and who has control over them, is suggestive of Harbisson\u2019s privileged position, which allows him to disregard gender and race in ways that are denied to Vanilla Chamu. For him, becoming a cyborg gives him agency over his body and subjectivity in a way that Vanilla Chamu is pointedly denied. Her story is very blatantly shaped by constructions of race and gender, from a childhood of being bullied for being \u201cbusaiku,\u201d or \u201cugly,\u201d to spending more than $100,000 USD (Ashcraft) on various procedures to erase or rewrite that past trauma, and even her unwanted appellation as a cyborg. As a child, she was bullied and perhaps ostracized for failing to meet beauty norms set for women in Japanese society, but she also responds to this social rejection by revering porcelain French dolls. In some ways, this response also implies an internalized racial hegemony that privileges whiteness and white as beautiful (more beautiful than Japanese).<\/p>\nThese real-life accounts of \u201ccyborgs,\u201d as both embraced or externally imposed identifications, demonstrate a kind of schizophrenic polarization in cyborg experience. This polarization is reflected in Oshii\u2019s films where cyborgization is imagined both as allowing humans to surpass their original biological limits and as dehumanizing. There is admiration and, at the same time, disdain for the cyborg. Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films imagine the cyborg in contradictory, politically-charged ways, veering from a fixation on the super-human, gendered bodies of its female characters to a violent disregard for the same. This violent disregard arguably stems from the commodification of the cyborg. In \u201cFrom Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater,\u201d Christopher Bolton points out that, \u201cAt the story level, the major [Kusanagi] is both a strong heroine who has become powerful by internalizing technology and a technological object possessed by others<\/em>\u201d (733, emphasis added). The first film, as Bolton points out, vacillates between a valorization of the technology that has enhanced her abilities, conveying a \u201cmessage of bodily transcendence,\u201d and an apparent fixation on female sexualization and the body (736)\u2014hence the gratuitous nudity which is only superficially excused by the character\u2019s constant need to disrobe in order to make use of optical camouflage embedded in her skin. Kusanagi\u2019s cyborgization suggests that, \u201cthe gendered body is not transcended by technology but, rather, objectified and commodified to a greater degree\u201d (Bolton 735). Where Bolton goes on to contextualize Ghost in the Shell<\/em> within critical theories on puppetry and animation, I wish to concentrate instead on the issue of commodification. The films themselves centralize this commodification, making it fundamental to the structural underpinnings that inform the biopolitics of the cyborg.<\/p>\nThe two films highlight the construction of the cyborg (or gynoid), spending approximately five minutes showcasing the process in each movie, in ways that question the status of the cyborg in human society (and thus what it means to be human). Set to Kenji Kawai\u2019s now-iconic musical score \u201cMaking of a Cyborg,\u201d the opening titles present a filmic catalogue of Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cshell.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> The sequence begins in media res<\/em> with a metal skeleton already wrapped in fibres mimicking muscles and tendons. The sequence calls attention to Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cbrain\u201d with a montage of a limited-side, high-angle shot of a metal skull in several connected pieces with the \u201cfrontal bone\u201d joining the rest of the skull, followed by a green-light rendered scan of a brain, and then finally a back-shot of the metal skull closing up, presumably with an organic brain inside.11<\/sup><\/a> The depictions of medical imaging of Kusanagi\u2019s body or body parts are usually followed by frames of her body in \u201creal-time\u201d\u2014except for her brain. Besides leaving the question of Kusanagi\u2019s a priori<\/em> biological self unanswered (is she fully artificial with false memories \u00e0 la<\/em> Ridley Scott\u2019s 1982 Bladerunner<\/em>, or is her organic brain the only remaining component of her original biological self?), the catalogue also shows a complete lack of human involvement; every aspect is automated. Cybernetic technicians, doctors, and staff are only shown observing and taking notes during the \u201cbirthing\u201d process.\n<\/p>\nThe mechanization of birth not only dissociates cyborgs from humans in very literal ways, but also demonstrates the interpenetration of political economy and biology. In \u201cAll That Matters: Technoscience, Critical Theory, and Children\u2019s Fiction,\u201d Kerry Mallan describes \u201cThe \u2018birth\u2019 of the Major \u2026 as a result of computational numbers and codes\u201d (157).12<\/sup><\/a> The mediated procedure highlights the predominance of mechanization and presumably computer technology, dissociating the cyborg from human society through its completely automated \u201cbirth.\u201d Moreover, as Sharalyn Orbaugh observes, a \u201cfeature of organic reproduction as we know it is the importance of place\u2014the space of embodiment. One is born from a specific place, the body of the mother, into a specific place. This happens only once, in that time and that place\u201d (\u201cSex and the Single Cyborg\u201d 447). This singularity, however, does not hold for Kusanagi, who can always be reconstructed, \u201cemerg[ing] time and again from the same process\u201d (Orbaugh 447). An anxiety about replaceability and replication haunts the film and is especially evidenced in a sequence, set to Kawai\u2019s score \u201cReincarnation,\u201d in which Kusanagi, traveling by ferry along the canals of the city, meets the eyes of her doppelganger, visually and aurally implying that the other woman is also a cyborg.<\/p>\nAfter the bloody scene with decapitated police officers and a half-nude gynoid that opens Innocence<\/em>, Batou and his temporary partner Togusa go to confer with the local police forensics specialist, Haraway (obviously named after the theorist and scholar Donna Haraway). In her macabre lab filled with dismembered, deactivated, and defunct gynoids hanging in yellow-tinted bags, Haraway explains that the Hadaly 2052 is \u201cequipped with organs unnecessary in service robots,\u201d obviously \u201cintended for particular functions\u201d; that is to say, the particular model \u201cis a sexaroid.\u201d Haraway\u2019s conclusion casts the making of the gynoid in an even ghastlier light than the one that haloed the making of Kusanagi\u2019s cyborg shell.13<\/sup><\/a> The gynoid, in contrast to Kusanagi\u2019s cyborg, does not mimic the musculoskeletal structure of a human body, but instead pays distinct homage to Hans Bellmer\u2019s Dolls. Visually, like Bellmer\u2019s \u201cartificial girls,\u201d Oshii\u2019s gynoids are constructed from ball joints, wires, and tubing, reminiscent of puppetry and signaling a kind of uncomplicated (or less complicated than in Kusanagi\u2019s cyborg) construction that can be easily mass-produced and thus commodified. The anxiety about replaceability and replication in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, previously oblique, is made very blatant in Innocence<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/07-Innocence_gynoid01.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/08-Innocence_gynoid02.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019-10-2-open-issue\/tong\/09-image9.jpeg\")
<\/a>La Poup\u00e9e<\/em>, Hans Bellmer, International Center of Photography<\/em>, web, n.d., 10 Feb. 2018, https:\/\/www.icp.org\/browse\/archive\/objects\/la-poup%C3%A9e-5<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIndeed, the visual allusions to Bellmer\u2019s works are not just about the uncanny and the potentially endless production of doppelgangers that the army of gynoids at the end of the film realizes, but also about the biopolitics at work in the creation of this eerie legion of gynoids. Livia Monnet\u2019s \u201cAnatomy of Permutational Desire: Perversion in Hans Bellmer and Oshii Mamoru\u201d provides an in-depth history and analysis of Bellmer\u2019s \u201cartificial girls\u201d made out of \u201ctwo life-size mannequins\u201d (Monnet 286). In her follow-up, \u201cAnatomy of Permutation Desire, Part II: Bellmer\u2019s Dolls and Oshii\u2019s Gynoids,\u201d Monnet considers their influence on Oshii\u2019s film, and how the animated feature expands on Bellmer\u2019s ideas. Indeed, in one part of the \u201cbirth\u201d sequence, Oshii \u201cincludes the brief appearance of a variation of Bellmer\u2019s Torso Doll; the splitting of his Bellmerian prototype into two identical articulated dolls that float toward each other until their lips touch in a chaste kiss\u201d (\u201cAnatomy of Permutation Desire, Part II\u201d 154). While Monnet analyzes this scene in terms of Bellmer\u2019s art and theory of desire and perversion, I wish to concentrate on how this Bellmerian homage is also about replication. It extends in macro what the construction catalogue begins in the micro: the gynoid forms from what seems to be cell division, but then visually morphs into mechanical and puppet-like structures. Unlike the cyborg of Ghost in the Shell<\/em> with its intact and complete corporeal frame, this \u201cbirth\u201d sequence starts with separated body parts. This is a body that can be easily deconstructed and whose parts are easily interchangeable. The title of Kawai\u2019s accompanying music for this \u201cbirth\u201d\u2014\u201cThe Ballade of Puppets: Flowers Grieve and Fall\u201d\u2014evokes the gynoid\u2019s lack of individuality and uniqueness as well as their temporal brevity.<\/p>\nThe biopolitics of the gynoid in Innocence<\/em> are about this pervasive system of commodification and corporatization of what are not typically considered commodities to be bought and sold. At the first debriefing about the case, Batou and Togusa are given the specifics about the Hadaly model, including that it was \u201cdeveloped for testing\u201d and was \u201cprovided free of charge to contractors.\u201d It is unclear what kind of \u201ctesting\u201d could have been involved; but the gynoid, as a \u201cpet\u201d model designed specifically to be able to have sexual intercourse, is itself a kind of currency, \u201cgifted\u201d to various personages, including politicians and \u201cretired Public Safety official[s],\u201d hence requiring Section 9\u2019s involvement as Chief Aramaki explains. The gynoids not only stand in for trafficked girls, but are themselves replications of trafficked girls, \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d from those kidnapped and held hostage by corporations like Locus Solus. The film seems to suggest that while the biological girls are somewhat finite commodities, the gynoids can be infinitely produced even as their organic progenitors deteriorate from the \u201cghost-dubbing\u201d process. There are also some dark implications that the gynoids are not only market commodities themselves, but also, like the Puppet Master program of Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, might be collecting data for exploitation. In the final scene of the birth of the gynoid, the view rotates around her upper torso, ending on a close-up of her left eye, which opens to reveal a cornea whose outer rim mimics that of a camera lens. Possession of a \u201csexaroid\u201d like the Hadaly 2052 is, in the words of the forensic specialist Haraway, \u201cNothing to brag about to your neighbors but hardly illegal,\u201d though its manufacturing origins and possible use of it for surveillance and non-consensual recording definitely are illegal.<\/p>\n\nDis\/Corporatization of Cyborg Bodies and Posthuman Trauma<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
I<\/span>n addition to their adroit imagining of the encroachment of biopower into society via the cyborg, Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films also quite deftly question subjectivation and subjectivity under such circumstances. What is \u201cself\u201d if brains can be transplanted, e-brains can be hacked, and people can be \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d? The duology seems to dramatize a Cartesian mind-body duality that favors the metaphysical over the physical. Indeed, the disdain for the physical is literally violent in the films, as corporeal forms are torn limb from limb. Orbaugh\u2019s provocatively and pertinently titled essay \u201cWho Does the Feeling When There\u2019s No Body There?\u201d poses the fundamental question that haunts such dis\/corporatization of humans and sentient beings.<\/p>\nWhile Orbaugh brings Donna Haraway\u2019s early writings on the cyborg to bear on Oshii\u2019s cyborg films and vice versa, she doesn\u2019t really answer the question in her title, and I would argue that this lack of answer is due to two interrelated issues: posthuman trauma and the limits of dis\/embodiment. Orbaugh notes that Innocence<\/em> was conceived in response to a question in an interview in which Oshii was asked, \u201cIf humans have no memory and no body, in what sense are they still human?\u201d (204). For Oshii, if one is without memory and bodiless, what remains is omoi<\/em>, which, as Orbaugh explains, \u201ccan be translated as thought, feeling\/emotion, or even love, depending on the context\u201d (204). Thus, the epigram from L\u2019\u00c8ve future<\/em> that starts Innocence<\/em>\u2014\u201cIf our gods and hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well\u201d\u2014seems to gloss the film as indirectly celebrating the capacity for love as the ultimate raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em> for existence while never answering \u201cwho\u201d or \u201cwhat\u201d is doing the loving; it is simply enough that love exists. This interpretation is suggested by Orbaugh\u2019s observation that Oshii\u2019s Innocence<\/em>, like Haraway\u2019s theories about companion species, also explores the inter-subjective world between dogs and humans through Batou\u2019s love for and care of his pet basset hound. On one level, this love is very clearly \u201cscientific\u201d since, as Batou explains to Togusa and Ishikawa, his dog is a clone from the original (implying that the original may be deceased, or else suggesting, as was the case in Philip K. Dick\u2019s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>, that owning \u201creal,\u201d biological animals is a status symbol reserved for the rich and therefore beyond Batou\u2019s means). However, even these \u201cinnocent\u201d loves between man and companion-animal are clearly fused with biopolitics, and thus challenge such an \u201cinnocent\u201d exegesis.<\/p>\nA large part of the \u201cdark\u201d narratives that belie a simple valorization of love as the defining aspect of being human is the trauma that haunts the films. Posthuman trauma is invoked right from the start of the first film. When Kusanagi first appears on-screen, she is covered in a dark trench coat with sunglasses covering half her face, even though it is nighttime. There are competing streams of sounds that simulate multiple radio channels playing at once as she tries to hack or electronically eavesdrop on her targets, only to be interrupted by her colleague\u2019s calling her name. She facetiously dismisses his questioning of the \u201cstatic\u201d in her brain with the comment, \u201cIt\u2019s that time of the month\u201d (even though as a cyborg, she cannot reproduce biologically). While seemingly humorous, her dead-pan delivery, combined with the viewer\u2019s later knowledge of her cyborg status, make the dialogue more morbid than lighthearted. I think that beyond being darkly humorous, this moment and others indicate a kind of body dysmorphia.<\/p>\n
A sense of disconnection from her own corporeality plagues Kusanagi throughout the film, from the moment when she \u201cwakes up\u201d in her apartment after the \u201cmaking of a cyborg\u201d sequence all the way through to Batou\u2019s resurrection of her in a jarringly adolescent cyborg shell at the end of the film.14<\/sup><\/a>After interviewing the hacked garbage man, Kusanagi muses to Batou about what makes up an individual: \u201cA face to distinguish yourself from others. A voice you aren\u2019t aware of yourself. The hand you see when you awaken. The memories of childhood, the feelings for the future.\u201d The visual narrative of the film makes clear that these are elements that can be falsified or copied ad infinitum, from Kusanagi\u2019s own face which she sees replicated on her doppelganger to her voice that can be \u201creprogrammed\u201d to her hand that is mass-produced by a cyborg construction company (not to mention, memories that can be hacked and changed).<\/p>\nKusanagi is clearly at odds with her own corporeal existence. Her apathy towards her cyborg body is reflected in her indifference to her own nudity and her deep-sea diving hobby which could end in her death if the floaters that counter the weight of her heavy cyborg body fail. Her body dysmorphia is most pronounced when she forces her own bodily destruction attacking the tank that protects the shell of the Puppet Master, which was requisitioned by Section 6 to prevent Section 9 from discovering that this artificial intelligence was initially and illegally created as an espionage program. The film grotesquely highlights the ruptures of muscles, tendons, joints, and even bone as she futilely wrenches away at the top hatch of the tank, literally tearing apart her arms and legs as the force exceeds her own bodily capacity: \u201cAs Kusanagi struggles with a tanklike [sic] armored juggernaut, her artificial muscles bulge and swell until she assumes Arnold Schwarzenegger-like proportions, finally exerting such enormous forces that she literally pulls herself apart\u201d (Bolton 733). As Bolton observes, \u201cPortrayed in studied slow motion and accompanied by Kawai Kenji\u2019s eerily low-key score, the major\u2019s final dismemberment has a violent but curiously affectless quality that highlights her disregard for the physical form\u201d (733). He argues that this disregard for her body aligns with her desire to be free from Section 9: \u201cKusanagi\u2019s body is destroyed and only her brain remains intact, [this is] an outcome that frees her from that body and from Section Nine\u201d (734). Moreover, her merging with the Puppet Master allows her \u201cto transcend the body\u201d so that \u201cshe nearly escapes embodiment altogether\u201d (735). I agree that the film\u2019s narrative trajectory supports this analysis, but it obscures the implicit posthuman trauma of which her lack of affect is a symptom.<\/p>\n
This posthuman trauma in Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films brings together the increasing atomization of the body (and its commodification) and subsequent psycho-social effects. The medicalization of the body, as Foucault cogently argues, is not only linked to the rise of disciplinarity (i.e. the rise of the sciences as disciplines producing what he calls a \u201cmedico-sexual regime\u201d), but also disciplinary power in general\u2014in other words, biopower (Foucault, The History of Sexuality<\/em> 42). As Lesley Sharp notes in \u201cThe Commodification of the Body and Its Parts,\u201d \u201cscientific forms of knowledge currently fragment the body with increasing regularity\u201d with the material effect of \u201ca proliferation in the marketability of human body parts\u2026 [and] the ever increasing atomization of the medicalized body\u201d (289). Oshii\u2019s films literalize this fragmentation, highlighting the ways the market challenges an \u201cassumed human desire to protect personal boundaries and guard body integrity\u201d (Sharp 287).<\/p>\nThere are no real-life analogues that could capture the degree to which Kasunagi experiences the attendant trauma of collapsing boundaries and bodily integrity brought about by her cyborgization. The closest procedure would be a head transplant, such as Valery Spiridonov volunteered to undergo. Spiridonov suffers from \u201cWerdnig-Hoffmann disease, a genetic disorder that wastes away muscles and kills motor neurons\u2014nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that help move the body\u201d (Kean). While \u201cmany scientists and ethicists have slammed the project, accusing the surgeons involved of promoting junk science and raising false hopes,\u201d Sam Kean notes, \u201cThe past few decades have been a golden age of transplant medicine\u201d with \u201c[n]ew surgical techniques [making] reattaching delicate structures easier, and powerful new drugs \u2026 all but eliminate[ing] the threat of rejection\u201d (Kean). However, beyond the excruciating costs (estimated anywhere from $10 million to $100 million) and intensive labour (approximately 80 surgeons are involved), there are more intangible costs. Anecdotally, Teri L. Blauersouth, LPCC, discussed with me stories of patients with heart valve implants complaining about feeling emotionally blunted or numbed by the simple fact of the heart valve regulating their cardiac rhythm to the point that their hearts literally no longer raced when excited, nervous, fearful, and so on. Such anecdotal accounts highlight the intangible costs of such procedures for something certainly less intensive and encompassing than a head transplant.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the closest frameworks for attempting to understand the possible trauma from becoming a full-body cyborg are from psychological research on body concept and image.15<\/sup><\/a> In \u201cMental Representation of the Body: Stability and Change in Response to Illness and Disability,\u201d John D. Mayer and Myron G. Eisenberg discuss not only how body concept and body esteem may be involved in \u201ccentral aspects of the self-concept,\u201d but also how such aspects may influence a person\u2019s health and vice versa (155). For instance, illness may lead to lower body esteem and therefore may damage one\u2019s body concept. Under these circumstances, illness may cause negative self- and body-concepts. In a related scenario, if a person has negative self- and body-concepts, then such views may depress the immune system and cause or otherwise exacerbate suboptimal health conditions.<\/p>\nIt is clear that Kusanagi does not have a positive body concept and esteem, as evidenced by her complete disregard for her cyborg self, from her disregard of her own nudity (which cannot be cultural as Batou invariably turns away from her nude body in embarrassment or tries to cover her with his jacket) to her own consciously self-destructive actions. Orbaugh agrees that \u201cKusanagi\u2019s lack of shame is not depicted as a moral issue\u201d because \u201cKusanagi in a sense stands for the inauthenticity of the body\/shell, and it is therefore not surprising that she exhibits no affective connection with it or through it\u201d (\u201cEmotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human\u201d 162). Part of Kusanagi\u2019s negative body concept no doubt stems from the commodification of her corporeality as Bolton argues; but traumatization from such extensive bodily modification cannot be denied even as it is rarely directly referenced or addressed in the film.<\/p>\n
In the case of the gynoids and kidnapped girls of Innocence<\/em>, the trauma is both more straightforward and yet oddly absent from the narrative. Being abducted and held in what are metal cocoons are obviously traumatizing experiences, and the effective catatonia of the majority of the girls can be seen as traumatic responses to their captivity and confinement beyond the supposed degradation caused by \u201cghost dubbing.\u201d (It is unclear whether the degradation is physical, mental, or a combination of the two, only that as Kusanagi explains, \u201cIn past animal experiments, scientists mass replicated interior copies but had to abandon the practice as it destroyed the original being.\u201d) The girls\u2019 trauma is indicated through their physical confinement, eerie silence, and lack of responsiveness. The rows of cocooned girls, with only their unmoving faces and closed eyes visible through a small portal in each metal coffin, present an uncanny visualization of their trauma and reiterate anxieties about replication and replaceability previously raised in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. In this instance, the girls\u2019 faces appear identical and their non-responsiveness further suggests a lack of individuality. They, like their gynoid counterparts, are an army of identical bodies, made by their dis\/corporatization. Where the cyberization process in Ghost in the Shell<\/em> highlights the mechanical and technological replication of (cyborg) bodies, here the \u201cghost dubbing\u201d of Innocence<\/em> dramatizes the traumatic duplication of (biotic?) subjectivities.<\/p>\nHowever, the film does not fully explore the traumatic connection between the kidnapped girls and the gynoids. Firstly, the trauma experienced by the gynoids is completely off-screen, implied only by the near-nudity of the murderous gynoid that Batou shoots at the start of Innocence<\/em> and the forensic investigator Haraway\u2019s explanation of \u201cextra parts\u201d that pet- or work-model robots would not have. The police procedural film only uncovers and explicates that the girls are abducted to be \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d and that, \u201cIt was the ghosts that made Locus Solus gynoids so desirable\u201d to their clients. But what does it mean that the gynoid is \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d (or \u201crealistically\u201d copied) from an adolescent girl? There are some very dark implications that the clients do not value the gynoids merely for their girlish appearances, but also for their girlish reactions, which would involve traumatic responses since unwanted sexual contact would inevitably be traumatizing. Thus, the fragmentation of the body that is arguably at the root of Kusanagi\u2019s traumatic body dysmorphia in Ghost in the Shell<\/em> is extended in Innocence<\/em>\u2019s posthuman world to the \u201cghost\u201d or subjectivity that was seemingly reified at the expense of corporeality in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. This is demonstrated by Batou\u2019s harsh rebuke of one rescued girl that she and Volkerson didn\u2019t \u201cconsider the victims\u201d\u2014\u201cNot the humans,\u201d but \u201cthe dolls endowed with souls.\u201d In this light, the gynoid\u2019s murderous rampage is not just about \u201cmaking trouble\u201d so that the kidnapped girls can be eventually rescued, but also a traumatic response to sexual slavery.<\/p>\n\nPosthuman Warfare<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
In Society Must Be Defended<\/em>, Foucault asserts that, inverting Clausewitz\u2019s proposition, \u201cPower is war, the continuation of war by other means\u201d (15). Power is inevitably and inherently war-like since \u201cpower is not primarily the perpetuation and renewal of economic relations, but that it is primarily, in itself, a relationship of force\u201d (15). Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> duology dramatizes the inherently combative disposition of power, made very obvious in the biopolitics of Kusanagi\u2019s indentured servitude to Section 9 and in the construction and circulation of the gynoids. The explanatory titles at the start of Ghost in the Shell<\/em> inadvertently reveal a great deal about power\u2019s historically inimical nature even while ostensibly gesturing towards the possibility of equality: \u201cIn the near future corporate networks reach out to the stars, electrons and light flow throughout the universe,\u201d suggesting a transcendence of a merely human individuality, but for the time being\u201cthe advance of computerisation\u2026has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups.\u201d On one hand, \u201cwiping out nations and ethnic groups\u201d is a nod to the, at the time, growing association of electronic frontiers and freedoms with computerization as dramatized in films like Hackers<\/em> (1995). In Hackers<\/em>, one hacker\u2019s manifesto proclaims, \u201cWe [hackers] exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias\u201d in this \u201cworld of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.\u201d Together, the two films, which premiered a few months apart, demonstrate the increasing correlation of digital boundlessness and liberation with computer technology in popular culture. However, on the other hand, these opening titles for Ghost in the Shell<\/em> are also imbued with great violence since \u201cwiping out nations and ethnic groups\u201d has been historically accomplished through colonialism and military warfare; it has never been benign or uplifting, despite colonial logics and rhetoric. And indeed Kusanagi\u2019s indentured status can be construed as ultimately embodying a kind of neo-imperial logic of securing the nation with technological advances and computer coding rather than relying solely on physical force.<\/p>\nIn this manner, Oshii\u2019s film duology imagines and stages the ways in which war is further internalized within civil society, even apart from the state centralization of the authority to wage war. As Foucault notes in Society Must Be Defended<\/em>, \u201cThe State acquired a monopoly on war\u201d\u2014\u201cwith the growth and development of States throughout the Middle Ages and up to the threshold of the modern era\u201d\u2014so that \u201cit gradually transpired that in both de facto and de jure terms, only State powers could wage wars and manipulate the instruments of war\u201d (48). He argues that, \u201cThe immediate effect of this State monopoly was that what might be called day-to day warfare, and what was actually called \u2018private warfare,\u2019 was eradicated from the social body, and from relations among men and relations among groups\u201d (48). In the Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films, biopower is not about presenting a shift from extraterritorial conflicts to interior ones, or the substitution of one for the other, but rather about how power can permeate society so wholly as to be exerted upon an individual at the atomic level through the dis\/corporatization of the body. Even while \u201cprivate warfare\u201d or the ability of feudal classes to make war became a state monopoly, war itself did not disappear from society, but instead became disturbingly more diffuse and ubiquitous. The cyborg entities of Oshii\u2019s duology are \u201cinstruments of war\u201d.<\/p>\nHowever, the ways in which Oshii\u2019s cyborg is an \u201cinstrument of war\u201d in Innocence<\/em> is particularly disturbing, uncannily demonstrating the diffusion of biopower into every level of this posthuman society. When Batou infiltrates Locus Solus\u2019s gynoid-manufacturing plant, deliberately situated in international waters in order to obfuscate jurisdictional authority, he is met with the onsite managers, themselves non-humanoid androids demarcated by archaic Chinese numbering, releasing the unsold gynoids as a literal army. These autonomous sex dolls are not reprogrammed with attack protocols; rather martial programming is already embedded in them, which, in retrospect, helps explain the murders at the start of the film that precipitated Batou and Togusa\u2019s involvement in the case. During the forensic investigation at the beginning of Innocence<\/em>, Haraway found that \u201cthese gynoids are capable of self-authorizing attacks against humans\u201d because of a nullification of \u201cMoral Code #3,\u201d which constrains robots to \u201c[m]aintain existence without injuring humans\u201d (an intertextual reference to Isaac Asiminov\u2019s Three Laws of Robotics). Thus, the gynoid\u2019s attack off-screen of the policemen and her on-screen attack of Batou are not wild flailing, but very clearly expressive of combat knowledge. In this way, the gynoid, as an embodiment of biopower, also reveals how we can, as Foucault argues, \u201cunderstand power by looking at its extremities, at its outer limits at the point where it becomes capillary\u201d (Society Must Be Defended<\/em> 27). The gynoid, as an artifact of human ingenuity and creativity, is modeled, as Haraway complains to Togusa, \u201con a human image, an idealized one at that.\u201d Kusanagi, however, remarks, \u201cIf the dolls could speak, no doubt they\u2019d scream, \u2018I didn\u2019t want to become human.\u2019\u201d This replication of humanity in a non-human construct is not just about the vanity and egotism of human engineers, but about how biopower circulates between the nonhuman and the posthuman. Even as the trafficked girl screamed that she \u201cdidn\u2019t want to become a doll\u201d in response to Batou\u2019s scolding, Oshii\u2019s two films actually dramatize how dis\/corporatization envelopes the human and the human-looking, how the posthuman is uncannily more and more embodying the logics of commodification.<\/p>\n\nWorks Cited<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\nAnders, Charlie Jane. \u201cStunning Shots of the Real-Life Hong Kong Locations Featured in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>.\u201d Gizmodo<\/em>, 3 August 2011, https:\/\/io9.gizmodo.com\/stunning-shots-of-the-real-life-hong-kong-locations-fea-5827538<\/a>. Accessed 20 June 2015.<\/p>\nAshcraft, Brian. \u201cWhy This Japanese Woman Turned into a \u2018Plastic Surgery Cyborg.\u2019\u201d Kotaku<\/em>, 7 May 2013, https:\/\/kotaku.com\/why-this-japanese-woman-turned-into-a-plastic-surgery-493262883<\/a>. Accessed 27 July 2017.<\/p>\nBolton, Christopher. \u201cFrom Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater.\u201d Positions<\/em>, vol. 10, no. 3, Winter 2002, pp. 729-71.<\/p>\nEpstein, Robert. \u201cThe Empty Brain.\u201d Aeon<\/em>, 18 May 2016, https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer<\/a>. Accessed 20 May 2016.<\/p>\nFisher, Seymour. \u201cA Further Appraisal of the Body Boundary Concept.\u201d Journal of Consulting Psychology<\/em>, vol. 27, no.1, 1963, pp. 62-74.<\/p>\nFoucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality<\/em>, Volume 1: An Introduction.<\/em> Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.<\/p>\n\u2014. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, 1975-76<\/em>. Translated by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, Picador, 1997..<\/p>\nGardner, William. \u201cThe Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and Media in the Works of Oshii Mamoru and Kon Satoshi.\u201d Canadian Journal of Film Studies<\/em>, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 44-70.<\/p>\nGlaser, April. \u201cThe Scarlett Johansson Bot Is the Robotic Future of Objectifying Women.\u201d Wired<\/em>, 4 April 2016, https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/04\/the-scarlett-johansson-bot-signals-some-icky-things-about-our-future\/<\/a>. Accessed 15 July 2016.<\/p>\nHackers<\/em>. Directed by Iain Softley. United Artists, 1995.<\/p>\nHourigan, Daniel. \u201cGhost in the Shell 2<\/em>, Technicity and the Subject.\u201d Film-Philosophy<\/em>, vol. 17, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51-67.<\/p>\n\u201cHuman Trafficking by the Numbers.\u201d Human Rights First<\/em>, June 2017, https:\/\/www.humanrightsfirst.org\/resource\/human-trafficking-numbers<\/a>. Accessed 8 August 2017.<\/p>\nJeffries, Stuart. \u201cNeil Harbisson: The World\u2019s First Cyborg Artist.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 6 May 2014, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2014\/may\/06\/neil-harbisson-worlds-first-cyborg-artist<\/a>. Accessed 27 July 2017.<\/p>\n
Donna T. Tong<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Abstract<\/strong>: This paper explores the biopolitics both implicit and explicit in Mamoru Oshii\u2019s film duology Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. The prostheticization of life for Major Motoko Kusanagi is based upon an objectification of a cyborg self enabled and literalized through technology that is also a (mis)representation that conflates the biological self and technological self, and Oshii further problematizes this representation with the complication of the commodification and trafficking of posthuman lives, explicitly examined in more critical detail in the second film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em>. In other words, Oshii arguably imagines the extreme end of biopower in a posthuman world as human trafficking structured by a globalized political economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n R\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/strong>: Cet article explore la biopolitique implicite et explicite dans la duologie de films de Mamoru Oshii Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. La proth\u00e9sisation de la vie pour le Major Motoko Kusanagi est bas\u00e9e sur une objectivation d’un cyborg habilit\u00e9 et litt\u00e9raire \u00e0 travers la technologie qui est aussi une pr\u00e9sentation d\u00e9form\u00e9e qui confond le soi biologique et technologique, et Oshii prob\u00e9matise encore cette repr\u00e9sentation avec la complication de la marchandisation et le trafic de vie posthumaines, examin\u00e9s explicitement dans des d\u00e9tails plus critiques dans le deuxi\u00e8me film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em>. En d’autres termes, on peut avancer que Oshii imagine la fin extr\u00eame du biopouvoir dans un monde posthumain comme un trafic humain structur\u00e9 par une \u00e9conomie politique mondialis\u00e9e.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n Table of Contents<\/a> | Article doi: 10.17742\/IMAGE.OI.10.2.5 | PDF<\/a><\/p>\n I<\/span>n April 2016, media sources reported on how Hong Kong designer Ricky Ma had spent more than $50,000 USD to create and build a robot in the likeness of Scarlett Johansson (Glaser).<\/p>\n This particular use of current technologies in 3D printing, prosthetics, and robotics is positively uncanny given the previous year\u2019s announcement of the same actress\u2019 controversial casting in a live-action adaptation of Mamoru Oshii\u2019s animated film Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, a cyber-punk, dystopic film centered on cyborg technologies in a posthuman future.1<\/sup><\/a> Margo Kaminski observes that the ScarJo robot not only underscores the current \u201cage of interactive celebrity,\u201d but also takes it to its technological endpoint. What is frightful about this new reality is not just the potential for privately or commercially manufacturing life-like robots (eerily actualizing Oshii\u2019s \u201cgynoid,\u201d or sex robot, from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em>), but that the fact, as April Glaser points out, \u201cJohansson is literally being objectified\u201d (Glaser). But what is the legal status of such usage of Johansson\u2019s image? According to Kaminski, \u201cThe commercial use of one\u2019s face or name without permission can be thought of as a privacy harm, founded in autonomy, dignity, or personhood,\u201d and is grounded in concerns about misrepresentation and resulting potential harm (Kaminski). As such, right of publicity cases where such misrepresentation is alleged \u201cemploy a trope of \u2018involuntary servitude,\u2019\u201d implying that using \u201ca person\u2019s face without permission is like forcing that person to work at a job, harming their dignity\u201d (Kaminski).<\/p>\n Interestingly, these issues of consent and (mis)representation involved in \u201cinvoluntary servitude\u201d are already entangled in Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> duology. In the first film, Ghost in the Shell<\/em> (\u653b\u6bbb\u6a5f\u52d5\u968a K\u014dkaku Kid\u014dtai<\/em> \u201cMobile Armored Riot Police\u201d), Major Motoko Kusanagi and her partner Batou discuss her recent disenchantment with their work as agents for Section 9, a \u201cpublic-security\u201d government agency.2<\/sup><\/a> Kusanagi agrees with Batou that they are not enslaved to Section 9, but only up to a point: \u201cWe do have the right to resign if we choose, provided we give the government back our cyborg shells\u2026and the memories they hold.\u201d How such memories might be \u201cgiven back,\u201d however, is in no way clear. As a \u201cfully-cyberized\u201d being, Kusanagi apparently only retains her original organic brain; the rest of her body is literally manufactured and maintained by cyber-techs employed by Section 9. In the second film, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence<\/em> (\u30a4\u30ce\u30bb\u30f3\u30b9, Inosensu<\/em>), which begins several years after Kusanagi\u2019s disappearance at the end of the first film, Batou admits to his new partner Togusa that, \u201cHer brains and hardware were government property and her entire memory, including the classified information, were part of the deal.\u201d Under these circumstances, resignation would be a kind of literal termination. As such, Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cprosthetic life\u201d amounts to a form of \u201cinvoluntary servitude,\u201d compelling continued employment as a public-security agent in order to preserve her continued existence and thus \u201charming\u201d her dignity.<\/p>\n Many critics of Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films have focused on their representation of the posthuman from different angles.3<\/sup><\/a> In this paper I focus specifically on their biopolitics, which intertwine present and future-oriented concerns about the posthuman. The prostheticization of life for Kusanagi is based upon an objectification of a cyborg self enabled and literalized through technology that is also a (mis)representation that conflates the biological self and technological self. This problematic conflation is already hinted at in the characters\u2019 inability to distinguish their own memories from data, the latter of which can be appropriated as private property. This conflation of memory and data is widespread and undergirds many of our own misconceptions about human thought processes. In \u201cThe Empty Brain,\u201d Robert Epstein succinctly denounces popular-culture fantasies that equate the human brain with a computer. As he points out, unlike computers, humans are \u201cnot<\/em> born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers<\/em>\u201d (Epstein, original emphasis). To demonstrate the difference between human memory and data storage, Epstein recounts having a student draw a one-dollar bill from memory and then letting the student use an actual bill as an exemplar. The first drawing is invariably less detailed and accurate and shows that human beings do not \u201cstore\u201d representations of objects as computers do, that people are \u201cmuch better at recognising than recalling,\u201d since remembering, for humans, involves \u201ctry[ing] to relive an experience\u201d rather than retrieving data from storage (Epstein). Thus, the idea of erasing or implanting memories already assumes that human brains are equivalent to computers; but this is a false assumption that the films elide.<\/p>\n In Oshii\u2019s dystopic future this conflation of the biotic and the technological, in fact, becomes the central means by which posthuman lives are commodified and trafficked. In Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, Kusanagi\u2019s body is, in effect, owned by the state. Her status is implicitly one of indentured servitude. Since the construction and the continued maintenance of her cybernetic body are costly and moreover beyond her own means, discontinuing her employment would mean \u201creturning\u201d those highly-expensive parts, not to mention her memories as \u201cdata,\u201d back to the government that claims them as its rightful property. The film suggests that her individual subjectivity and quality of life would be so diminished by such forfeitures that she is essentially trapped in a technologically-enabled and -constructed posthuman slavery. In Innocence<\/em>, Oshii presents us with gynoids, or what are fundamentally sex-bots, who are explicitly property to be made, sold, traded, and so on, and whose value lies in their adolescent appearance and affect. In other words, Oshii arguably imagines what might be the extreme outcome of biopower in a posthuman world where human trafficking is aided and abetted by a globalized political economy and technological infrastructure. I am not contending that technology is inherently antithetical to human existence, but rather observing that Oshii depicts some of the dangers that should be addressed when we consider humanity\u2019s relationship with technology. In Oshii\u2019s highly technologized world, corporeality is contingent, commodified, and constantly under attack. In this regard, Michel Foucault\u2019s theory of biopower can help us consider how power operates in the literal construction, maintenance, and circulation of the cyborg, and the envisioned psycho-social ramifications of this, including the ways in which practices of power in\/form the subjectivity or otherwise impact the subjectivation of the cyborg.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he audience first meets Major Kusanagi when she is tasked to assassinate an ambassador helping a defecting computer programmer. However, the focus of the film and Kusanagi\u2019s main mission are the identification and arrest of the Puppet Master, a villainous hacker who \u201cghost-hacks\u201d the \u201ccyber-brains\u201d of various persons running the gamut of all walks of life from diplomatic translators to refuse collectors. After hacking them, the Puppet Master\u2019s victims are unable to remember their childhoods, personal histories, or dreams and life goals. In the course of solving the mystery and apprehending the Puppet Master, Kusanagi questions her identity as a cyborg, and challenges what it means to be human, especially in a world in which people, like computers, can be \u201chacked\u201d and have their memories tampered with. Towards the end of the film, the Puppet Master downloads into a female cyborg shell also manufactured by the same corporation as Kusanagi\u2019s, and professes to be artificial intelligence who \u201cbecame self-aware\u201d from \u201cwandering various networks\u201d and requests asylum from Section 9. This shell is immediately stolen by Section 6 agents; but Kusanagi and her partner Batou recover the Puppet Master\u2019s cyborg body, and \u201cshe\u201d confesses that \u201cshe\u201d took a corporeal form in order to meet and merge with Kusanagi to transcend the limits of both of their existences. Ultimately, Kusanagi agrees; but both cyber-bodies are destroyed by Section 6 agents at the moment of their merger, leaving Batou to recover Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cbrain shell\u201d and attempt to resuscitate her by implantation in a black-market cyborg body. She revives, and, after a brief conversation with Batou, departs, destination unknown, but with the understanding that, \u201cThe net is vast and limitless.\u201d<\/p>\n The second film Innocence<\/em> commences with Batou and his partner Togusa arriving at a grisly crime scene. Batou follows a literal trail of blood to decapitated police officers and an adolescent-looking gynoid, naked under an untied red robe with an iris behind her ear, holding the head of one of the police officers in her lap. She attacks Batou, and, when he throws her back, she whispers, \u201cHelp me,\u201d as she rips open her own torso, in a cybernetic allusion to Hans Bellmer\u2019s Rose ouverte la nuit<\/em> (Rose open at night<\/em>, 1946).<\/p>\n Oshii adds his own twist by having panels of the gynoid\u2019s face also bursting open in a grotesque mirroring of her torso.<\/p>\n Thus begins Batou and Togusa\u2019s investigation into the malfunctioning, murderous Hadaly 2052 gynoids, manufactured by the multinational company Locus Solus.4<\/sup><\/a> Following the clues from the bloody killing of Jack Volkerson, consignment inspector for Locus Solus, Batou and Togusa question the local yakuza, leading to a messy shoot-out. Afterwards, Batou is given a cryptic message about being \u201cin the kill zone\u201d right before his e-brain is \u201chacked,\u201d causing him to shoot his own arm, nearly killing bystanders. Continuing with the case, Batou and Togusa seek out Kim, a disgraced ex-special forces operative, and at Kim\u2019s decrepit mansion of automatons, puppets, and tableaux vivant, Kusanagi makes a brief cameo in her borrowed cyborg body from the end of Ghost in the Shell<\/em> to leave clues for Batou. Batou and Togusa discover through Kim that Locus Solus is holding the kidnapped girls so that their \u201cghosts\u201d can be copied onto the gynoids, presumably to make the gynoids more realistic and therefore valuable to customers. Batou infiltrates Locus Solus\u2019s floating manufacturing plant and faces the murderous gynoids. Just as they seem to overwhelm Batou, Kusanagi downloads into a gynoid body to help him. She confesses to be behind the cryptic warning about being \u201cin the kill zone\u201d when Batou was hacked. After shutting down the plant, they find and release one of the only still-conscious girls who explains that, with the help of a remorseful Volkerson, she tried to circumvent the three-laws programming of the gynoids in order to \u201cmake trouble\u201d so that someone would notice and investigate.5<\/sup><\/a> The film concludes with Batou being reunited with his dog while Togusa gifts his young daughter, who had been dog-sitting, with a porcelain doll.<\/p>\n What is the connection between these two cyberpunk films and human trafficking? To begin with, it might be instructive to define human trafficking. According to the website for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), \u201cArticle 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines Trafficking in Persons as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation\u201d (\u201cWhat Is Human Trafficking?\u201d). Exploitation as explained by the UNODC \u201cinclude[s], at a minimum, the exploitation or the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs\u201d (\u201cWhat Is Human Trafficking?\u201d).6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n While Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> duology does not purport to depict real or even allegorical representations of human trafficking, it nonetheless does imagine a posthuman future where technology and globalization create the structural conditions that propagate human trafficking in ways that disturbingly parallel the trends which Kathleen Kim and Grace Chang pinpoint in \u201cReconceptualizing Approaches to Human Trafficking: New Directions and Perspectives from the Field(s).\u201d A report published by Human Rights First claims that, \u201cAn estimated 21 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery\u201d (\u201cHuman Trafficking by the Numbers\u201d); however, as Kim and Chang observe, our attention is usually only focused one particular aspect of human trafficking, forced prostitution. In the first Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, Kusanagi\u2019s situation of a legalized indentured servitude is not sexual slavery, but a broader mix of \u201cforced labour or services\u201d brought about by the exigencies of a global political economy, where even the defection of a computer programmer is criminalized as violating an arms export treaty. To counter the consequences of \u201c[t]he advance of computerisation\u201d that portends the extinction of \u201cnations and ethnic groups\u201d (as explained in the opening titles), cyborg agents like Kusanagi are required to maintain public security; their technologized bodies, however, leave them beholden to their employers. As mentioned earlier, Kusanagi\u2019s employment is voluntary up to a point; if she or any other cyborg agent discontinues working for Section 9, they must \u201cgive the government back [their] cyborg shells\u2026 and the memories they hold.\u201d Her body is not hers, but is instead literally government property.7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Innocence<\/em> thus takes the implicit theme of human trafficking or forced servitude from Ghost in the Shell<\/em> and makes it explicit through its use of gynoids. The gynoids themselves are a very obvious case of human trafficking, fitting into the dominant understanding of human trafficking as primarily \u201cthe prostitution of others.\u201d In solving the mystery of the murderous gynoids, Togusa and Batou find that a black market in kidnapping adolescent girls is what provides the infrastructure for creating these sex dolls in the first place, thus adding another layer to the film\u2019s representation of the trafficking of sentient beings, made obvious through the implications of sexual exploitation. The gynoids are tabula rasa<\/em>, in contrast to Kusanagi whose cyborgization is meant as an extension of and\/or complement to her already existing abilities. Yet, these differences arguably highlight the ways in which Oshii\u2019s posthuman future projects a political economy where cyborgs and technology are not only embedded in structures of power, but where the enslavement of female cyborgs also scaffolds this hegemony. These two films thus highlight and critique the biopolitics that constitute and enable such exploitation, and the films make visible the ways in which these anxieties about technology and the self, while allegorically imagined through cyborg and gynoid bodies, are becoming more and more salient with each technological breakthrough.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n Society Must Be Defended<\/em>, Foucault asserts that biopolitics is best explained through a tidal shift in the exertion of power by the state where, \u201cThe right of sovereignty [which] was the right to take life or let live\u201d becomes \u201cthe right to make live and to let die\u201d (241). Where the apotheosis of the monarchial state\u2019s power lies in the king\u2019s order or stay of execution, the contemporary state\u2019s ability to withhold or offer life-saving or life-extending measures and technologies illuminates the dark path that the intersection of the biotic and the technological may portend. As such, Foucault\u2019s biopower and biopolitics are particularly pertinent to discussing Oshii\u2019s vision of a posthuman world where technology is so ubiquitous that there seem to be almost no characters without some sort of modification and therefore dependence on the biopower of the state. This is not to say that the state no longer retains \u201cthe right to take life or let live\u201d (as evidenced in capital punishment), but to highlight that a turn to biopolitics inaugurates a sweeping organizational and infrastructural change to the workings of the state. As Foucault notes, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say exactly that sovereignty\u2019s old right\u2014to take life or let live\u2014was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it\u201d (241). Biopolitics, unlike the older politics from which it is differentiated, \u201cdeals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power\u2019s problem\u201d (245). Biopolitics is thus not merely about a shift in the organization and exertion of power, but about how that shift is itself inextricably linked to and embedded in different knowledges and structures. In Innocence<\/em>, for example, even Togusa\u2019s daughter seems unable to escape the touch of biopolitics as made uncannily evident in her \u201cinnocent\u201d joy in her gifted doll, which is now hers to own and control.8<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The politicization of the bio<\/em>logical, of life<\/em>, is made very evident in Oshii\u2019s films, and Kusanagi\u2019s indentured servitude itself offers a very concrete example of biopolitics, since her life is only made possible through her continued employment at Section 9. Her particular circumstances also highlight the myriad social and political relationships necessary to give rise to such a situation. Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> establishes Section 9, in contrast to Section 6 whose purview seems to be domestic matters, to be devoted to counter-terrorism, or securing the nation from external threats. It is unclear, however, whether technology is positioned on the side of counter-terrorism or against it. The opening explanatory titles assert that, \u201cThe advance of computerisation\u2026 has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups,\u201d implying the iconoclastic potential of technology. Section 9 therefore works to secure the continued existence of the nation as a nation, using the very technology that paradoxically portends the annihilation of the nation itself.<\/p>\n This paradox no doubt stems from anxieties resulting from a posthuman society that seems to draw ever nearer. Indeed, with the (increasing) interpenetration of the organic body with the technology by which different medical advances that have been realized, the cyborg has become a particularly contentious figure in both our cultural imaginaries and in fact. These very scientific advances themselves call into question not only the wholeness of the organic being, but also the status of the human. Donna Haraway\u2019s \u201cCyborg Manifesto\u201d very famously ruminates on the cyborg\u2019s potential to blur and perhaps even dismantle ossified categories of race, gender, sexuality, and so on through its hybrid nature. In \u201cSex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity,\u201d Sharalyn Orbaugh argues that,<\/p>\n The cultural products that engage the notion of the cyborg help us to come to terms with the meaning of this new relationship between the human body and technology as that relationship unfolds: narrative helps us to work through the fears and desires of a particular historical-cultural moment. We are each of us already compelled daily to face the breakdown of the distinction between the mechanical\/technological and the organic\/biotic. Cyborg narratives allow us, in Jennifer Gonzalez\u2019s phrasing, to personify, condense, and displace the anxieties and hopes raised by this situation. (436)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Some of these anxieties and hopes are articulated by and through those living lives altered or enabled by technology as in the case of Neil Harbisson, \u201cthe world\u2019s first cyborg activist\u201d implanted with an antenna connected to a sensor in his brain that \u201ctranslates colour into sound\u201d (Jeffries). While Harbisson\u2019s self-coined \u201ceyeborg\u201d was initially meant to \u201chelp him counter a rare form of colour blindness called achromatopsia,\u201d he had the device upgraded to be Bluetooth-enabled so that he \u201ccan either connect to devices that are near [him] or [he] can connect to the internet\u201d (qtd. in Jeffries). Harbisson claims that such technological enhancements go beyond deciding to become a cyborg and are also \u201can artistic statement\u2014 I\u2019m treating my own body and brain as a sculpture\u201d (qtd. in Jeffries).<\/p>\n Yet, perhaps the most interesting and telling feature of Harbisson\u2019s account is precisely what it is missing. His narrative of his journey \u201con the superhighway to transhumanism,\u201d although it declaims artistic freedom, bodily autonomy, and cyborg rights, does not account for the way that race, gender, or even class might inflect cyborg experience (Jefferies).9<\/sup><\/a> There is, for example, a jarring contrast between his story and that of Vanilla Chamu, a Japanese woman who became briefly famous after appearing on a Japanese variety show in 2013 and who admitted to having undergone more than 30 elective surgeries and procedures \u201cto look like a French doll\u201d (Ashcraft). The television show, however, did not introduce her as \u201ca living doll\u201d as she desired, but as a \u201ccyborg\u201d (Ashcraft). The label implies \u201cthat she no longer looks totally human\u201d (Ashcraft). The contrast between the two narratives, and who has control over them, is suggestive of Harbisson\u2019s privileged position, which allows him to disregard gender and race in ways that are denied to Vanilla Chamu. For him, becoming a cyborg gives him agency over his body and subjectivity in a way that Vanilla Chamu is pointedly denied. Her story is very blatantly shaped by constructions of race and gender, from a childhood of being bullied for being \u201cbusaiku,\u201d or \u201cugly,\u201d to spending more than $100,000 USD (Ashcraft) on various procedures to erase or rewrite that past trauma, and even her unwanted appellation as a cyborg. As a child, she was bullied and perhaps ostracized for failing to meet beauty norms set for women in Japanese society, but she also responds to this social rejection by revering porcelain French dolls. In some ways, this response also implies an internalized racial hegemony that privileges whiteness and white as beautiful (more beautiful than Japanese).<\/p>\n These real-life accounts of \u201ccyborgs,\u201d as both embraced or externally imposed identifications, demonstrate a kind of schizophrenic polarization in cyborg experience. This polarization is reflected in Oshii\u2019s films where cyborgization is imagined both as allowing humans to surpass their original biological limits and as dehumanizing. There is admiration and, at the same time, disdain for the cyborg. Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films imagine the cyborg in contradictory, politically-charged ways, veering from a fixation on the super-human, gendered bodies of its female characters to a violent disregard for the same. This violent disregard arguably stems from the commodification of the cyborg. In \u201cFrom Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater,\u201d Christopher Bolton points out that, \u201cAt the story level, the major [Kusanagi] is both a strong heroine who has become powerful by internalizing technology and a technological object possessed by others<\/em>\u201d (733, emphasis added). The first film, as Bolton points out, vacillates between a valorization of the technology that has enhanced her abilities, conveying a \u201cmessage of bodily transcendence,\u201d and an apparent fixation on female sexualization and the body (736)\u2014hence the gratuitous nudity which is only superficially excused by the character\u2019s constant need to disrobe in order to make use of optical camouflage embedded in her skin. Kusanagi\u2019s cyborgization suggests that, \u201cthe gendered body is not transcended by technology but, rather, objectified and commodified to a greater degree\u201d (Bolton 735). Where Bolton goes on to contextualize Ghost in the Shell<\/em> within critical theories on puppetry and animation, I wish to concentrate instead on the issue of commodification. The films themselves centralize this commodification, making it fundamental to the structural underpinnings that inform the biopolitics of the cyborg.<\/p>\n The two films highlight the construction of the cyborg (or gynoid), spending approximately five minutes showcasing the process in each movie, in ways that question the status of the cyborg in human society (and thus what it means to be human). Set to Kenji Kawai\u2019s now-iconic musical score \u201cMaking of a Cyborg,\u201d the opening titles present a filmic catalogue of Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cshell.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> The sequence begins in media res<\/em> with a metal skeleton already wrapped in fibres mimicking muscles and tendons. The sequence calls attention to Kusanagi\u2019s \u201cbrain\u201d with a montage of a limited-side, high-angle shot of a metal skull in several connected pieces with the \u201cfrontal bone\u201d joining the rest of the skull, followed by a green-light rendered scan of a brain, and then finally a back-shot of the metal skull closing up, presumably with an organic brain inside.11<\/sup><\/a> The depictions of medical imaging of Kusanagi\u2019s body or body parts are usually followed by frames of her body in \u201creal-time\u201d\u2014except for her brain. Besides leaving the question of Kusanagi\u2019s a priori<\/em> biological self unanswered (is she fully artificial with false memories \u00e0 la<\/em> Ridley Scott\u2019s 1982 Bladerunner<\/em>, or is her organic brain the only remaining component of her original biological self?), the catalogue also shows a complete lack of human involvement; every aspect is automated. Cybernetic technicians, doctors, and staff are only shown observing and taking notes during the \u201cbirthing\u201d process.\n<\/p>\n The mechanization of birth not only dissociates cyborgs from humans in very literal ways, but also demonstrates the interpenetration of political economy and biology. In \u201cAll That Matters: Technoscience, Critical Theory, and Children\u2019s Fiction,\u201d Kerry Mallan describes \u201cThe \u2018birth\u2019 of the Major \u2026 as a result of computational numbers and codes\u201d (157).12<\/sup><\/a> The mediated procedure highlights the predominance of mechanization and presumably computer technology, dissociating the cyborg from human society through its completely automated \u201cbirth.\u201d Moreover, as Sharalyn Orbaugh observes, a \u201cfeature of organic reproduction as we know it is the importance of place\u2014the space of embodiment. One is born from a specific place, the body of the mother, into a specific place. This happens only once, in that time and that place\u201d (\u201cSex and the Single Cyborg\u201d 447). This singularity, however, does not hold for Kusanagi, who can always be reconstructed, \u201cemerg[ing] time and again from the same process\u201d (Orbaugh 447). An anxiety about replaceability and replication haunts the film and is especially evidenced in a sequence, set to Kawai\u2019s score \u201cReincarnation,\u201d in which Kusanagi, traveling by ferry along the canals of the city, meets the eyes of her doppelganger, visually and aurally implying that the other woman is also a cyborg.<\/p>\n After the bloody scene with decapitated police officers and a half-nude gynoid that opens Innocence<\/em>, Batou and his temporary partner Togusa go to confer with the local police forensics specialist, Haraway (obviously named after the theorist and scholar Donna Haraway). In her macabre lab filled with dismembered, deactivated, and defunct gynoids hanging in yellow-tinted bags, Haraway explains that the Hadaly 2052 is \u201cequipped with organs unnecessary in service robots,\u201d obviously \u201cintended for particular functions\u201d; that is to say, the particular model \u201cis a sexaroid.\u201d Haraway\u2019s conclusion casts the making of the gynoid in an even ghastlier light than the one that haloed the making of Kusanagi\u2019s cyborg shell.13<\/sup><\/a> The gynoid, in contrast to Kusanagi\u2019s cyborg, does not mimic the musculoskeletal structure of a human body, but instead pays distinct homage to Hans Bellmer\u2019s Dolls. Visually, like Bellmer\u2019s \u201cartificial girls,\u201d Oshii\u2019s gynoids are constructed from ball joints, wires, and tubing, reminiscent of puppetry and signaling a kind of uncomplicated (or less complicated than in Kusanagi\u2019s cyborg) construction that can be easily mass-produced and thus commodified. The anxiety about replaceability and replication in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, previously oblique, is made very blatant in Innocence<\/em>.<\/p>\n Indeed, the visual allusions to Bellmer\u2019s works are not just about the uncanny and the potentially endless production of doppelgangers that the army of gynoids at the end of the film realizes, but also about the biopolitics at work in the creation of this eerie legion of gynoids. Livia Monnet\u2019s \u201cAnatomy of Permutational Desire: Perversion in Hans Bellmer and Oshii Mamoru\u201d provides an in-depth history and analysis of Bellmer\u2019s \u201cartificial girls\u201d made out of \u201ctwo life-size mannequins\u201d (Monnet 286). In her follow-up, \u201cAnatomy of Permutation Desire, Part II: Bellmer\u2019s Dolls and Oshii\u2019s Gynoids,\u201d Monnet considers their influence on Oshii\u2019s film, and how the animated feature expands on Bellmer\u2019s ideas. Indeed, in one part of the \u201cbirth\u201d sequence, Oshii \u201cincludes the brief appearance of a variation of Bellmer\u2019s Torso Doll; the splitting of his Bellmerian prototype into two identical articulated dolls that float toward each other until their lips touch in a chaste kiss\u201d (\u201cAnatomy of Permutation Desire, Part II\u201d 154). While Monnet analyzes this scene in terms of Bellmer\u2019s art and theory of desire and perversion, I wish to concentrate on how this Bellmerian homage is also about replication. It extends in macro what the construction catalogue begins in the micro: the gynoid forms from what seems to be cell division, but then visually morphs into mechanical and puppet-like structures. Unlike the cyborg of Ghost in the Shell<\/em> with its intact and complete corporeal frame, this \u201cbirth\u201d sequence starts with separated body parts. This is a body that can be easily deconstructed and whose parts are easily interchangeable. The title of Kawai\u2019s accompanying music for this \u201cbirth\u201d\u2014\u201cThe Ballade of Puppets: Flowers Grieve and Fall\u201d\u2014evokes the gynoid\u2019s lack of individuality and uniqueness as well as their temporal brevity.<\/p>\n The biopolitics of the gynoid in Innocence<\/em> are about this pervasive system of commodification and corporatization of what are not typically considered commodities to be bought and sold. At the first debriefing about the case, Batou and Togusa are given the specifics about the Hadaly model, including that it was \u201cdeveloped for testing\u201d and was \u201cprovided free of charge to contractors.\u201d It is unclear what kind of \u201ctesting\u201d could have been involved; but the gynoid, as a \u201cpet\u201d model designed specifically to be able to have sexual intercourse, is itself a kind of currency, \u201cgifted\u201d to various personages, including politicians and \u201cretired Public Safety official[s],\u201d hence requiring Section 9\u2019s involvement as Chief Aramaki explains. The gynoids not only stand in for trafficked girls, but are themselves replications of trafficked girls, \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d from those kidnapped and held hostage by corporations like Locus Solus. The film seems to suggest that while the biological girls are somewhat finite commodities, the gynoids can be infinitely produced even as their organic progenitors deteriorate from the \u201cghost-dubbing\u201d process. There are also some dark implications that the gynoids are not only market commodities themselves, but also, like the Puppet Master program of Ghost in the Shell<\/em>, might be collecting data for exploitation. In the final scene of the birth of the gynoid, the view rotates around her upper torso, ending on a close-up of her left eye, which opens to reveal a cornea whose outer rim mimics that of a camera lens. Possession of a \u201csexaroid\u201d like the Hadaly 2052 is, in the words of the forensic specialist Haraway, \u201cNothing to brag about to your neighbors but hardly illegal,\u201d though its manufacturing origins and possible use of it for surveillance and non-consensual recording definitely are illegal.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n addition to their adroit imagining of the encroachment of biopower into society via the cyborg, Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films also quite deftly question subjectivation and subjectivity under such circumstances. What is \u201cself\u201d if brains can be transplanted, e-brains can be hacked, and people can be \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d? The duology seems to dramatize a Cartesian mind-body duality that favors the metaphysical over the physical. Indeed, the disdain for the physical is literally violent in the films, as corporeal forms are torn limb from limb. Orbaugh\u2019s provocatively and pertinently titled essay \u201cWho Does the Feeling When There\u2019s No Body There?\u201d poses the fundamental question that haunts such dis\/corporatization of humans and sentient beings.<\/p>\n While Orbaugh brings Donna Haraway\u2019s early writings on the cyborg to bear on Oshii\u2019s cyborg films and vice versa, she doesn\u2019t really answer the question in her title, and I would argue that this lack of answer is due to two interrelated issues: posthuman trauma and the limits of dis\/embodiment. Orbaugh notes that Innocence<\/em> was conceived in response to a question in an interview in which Oshii was asked, \u201cIf humans have no memory and no body, in what sense are they still human?\u201d (204). For Oshii, if one is without memory and bodiless, what remains is omoi<\/em>, which, as Orbaugh explains, \u201ccan be translated as thought, feeling\/emotion, or even love, depending on the context\u201d (204). Thus, the epigram from L\u2019\u00c8ve future<\/em> that starts Innocence<\/em>\u2014\u201cIf our gods and hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well\u201d\u2014seems to gloss the film as indirectly celebrating the capacity for love as the ultimate raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em> for existence while never answering \u201cwho\u201d or \u201cwhat\u201d is doing the loving; it is simply enough that love exists. This interpretation is suggested by Orbaugh\u2019s observation that Oshii\u2019s Innocence<\/em>, like Haraway\u2019s theories about companion species, also explores the inter-subjective world between dogs and humans through Batou\u2019s love for and care of his pet basset hound. On one level, this love is very clearly \u201cscientific\u201d since, as Batou explains to Togusa and Ishikawa, his dog is a clone from the original (implying that the original may be deceased, or else suggesting, as was the case in Philip K. Dick\u2019s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>, that owning \u201creal,\u201d biological animals is a status symbol reserved for the rich and therefore beyond Batou\u2019s means). However, even these \u201cinnocent\u201d loves between man and companion-animal are clearly fused with biopolitics, and thus challenge such an \u201cinnocent\u201d exegesis.<\/p>\n A large part of the \u201cdark\u201d narratives that belie a simple valorization of love as the defining aspect of being human is the trauma that haunts the films. Posthuman trauma is invoked right from the start of the first film. When Kusanagi first appears on-screen, she is covered in a dark trench coat with sunglasses covering half her face, even though it is nighttime. There are competing streams of sounds that simulate multiple radio channels playing at once as she tries to hack or electronically eavesdrop on her targets, only to be interrupted by her colleague\u2019s calling her name. She facetiously dismisses his questioning of the \u201cstatic\u201d in her brain with the comment, \u201cIt\u2019s that time of the month\u201d (even though as a cyborg, she cannot reproduce biologically). While seemingly humorous, her dead-pan delivery, combined with the viewer\u2019s later knowledge of her cyborg status, make the dialogue more morbid than lighthearted. I think that beyond being darkly humorous, this moment and others indicate a kind of body dysmorphia.<\/p>\n A sense of disconnection from her own corporeality plagues Kusanagi throughout the film, from the moment when she \u201cwakes up\u201d in her apartment after the \u201cmaking of a cyborg\u201d sequence all the way through to Batou\u2019s resurrection of her in a jarringly adolescent cyborg shell at the end of the film.14<\/sup><\/a>After interviewing the hacked garbage man, Kusanagi muses to Batou about what makes up an individual: \u201cA face to distinguish yourself from others. A voice you aren\u2019t aware of yourself. The hand you see when you awaken. The memories of childhood, the feelings for the future.\u201d The visual narrative of the film makes clear that these are elements that can be falsified or copied ad infinitum, from Kusanagi\u2019s own face which she sees replicated on her doppelganger to her voice that can be \u201creprogrammed\u201d to her hand that is mass-produced by a cyborg construction company (not to mention, memories that can be hacked and changed).<\/p>\n Kusanagi is clearly at odds with her own corporeal existence. Her apathy towards her cyborg body is reflected in her indifference to her own nudity and her deep-sea diving hobby which could end in her death if the floaters that counter the weight of her heavy cyborg body fail. Her body dysmorphia is most pronounced when she forces her own bodily destruction attacking the tank that protects the shell of the Puppet Master, which was requisitioned by Section 6 to prevent Section 9 from discovering that this artificial intelligence was initially and illegally created as an espionage program. The film grotesquely highlights the ruptures of muscles, tendons, joints, and even bone as she futilely wrenches away at the top hatch of the tank, literally tearing apart her arms and legs as the force exceeds her own bodily capacity: \u201cAs Kusanagi struggles with a tanklike [sic] armored juggernaut, her artificial muscles bulge and swell until she assumes Arnold Schwarzenegger-like proportions, finally exerting such enormous forces that she literally pulls herself apart\u201d (Bolton 733). As Bolton observes, \u201cPortrayed in studied slow motion and accompanied by Kawai Kenji\u2019s eerily low-key score, the major\u2019s final dismemberment has a violent but curiously affectless quality that highlights her disregard for the physical form\u201d (733). He argues that this disregard for her body aligns with her desire to be free from Section 9: \u201cKusanagi\u2019s body is destroyed and only her brain remains intact, [this is] an outcome that frees her from that body and from Section Nine\u201d (734). Moreover, her merging with the Puppet Master allows her \u201cto transcend the body\u201d so that \u201cshe nearly escapes embodiment altogether\u201d (735). I agree that the film\u2019s narrative trajectory supports this analysis, but it obscures the implicit posthuman trauma of which her lack of affect is a symptom.<\/p>\n This posthuman trauma in Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films brings together the increasing atomization of the body (and its commodification) and subsequent psycho-social effects. The medicalization of the body, as Foucault cogently argues, is not only linked to the rise of disciplinarity (i.e. the rise of the sciences as disciplines producing what he calls a \u201cmedico-sexual regime\u201d), but also disciplinary power in general\u2014in other words, biopower (Foucault, The History of Sexuality<\/em> 42). As Lesley Sharp notes in \u201cThe Commodification of the Body and Its Parts,\u201d \u201cscientific forms of knowledge currently fragment the body with increasing regularity\u201d with the material effect of \u201ca proliferation in the marketability of human body parts\u2026 [and] the ever increasing atomization of the medicalized body\u201d (289). Oshii\u2019s films literalize this fragmentation, highlighting the ways the market challenges an \u201cassumed human desire to protect personal boundaries and guard body integrity\u201d (Sharp 287).<\/p>\n There are no real-life analogues that could capture the degree to which Kasunagi experiences the attendant trauma of collapsing boundaries and bodily integrity brought about by her cyborgization. The closest procedure would be a head transplant, such as Valery Spiridonov volunteered to undergo. Spiridonov suffers from \u201cWerdnig-Hoffmann disease, a genetic disorder that wastes away muscles and kills motor neurons\u2014nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that help move the body\u201d (Kean). While \u201cmany scientists and ethicists have slammed the project, accusing the surgeons involved of promoting junk science and raising false hopes,\u201d Sam Kean notes, \u201cThe past few decades have been a golden age of transplant medicine\u201d with \u201c[n]ew surgical techniques [making] reattaching delicate structures easier, and powerful new drugs \u2026 all but eliminate[ing] the threat of rejection\u201d (Kean). However, beyond the excruciating costs (estimated anywhere from $10 million to $100 million) and intensive labour (approximately 80 surgeons are involved), there are more intangible costs. Anecdotally, Teri L. Blauersouth, LPCC, discussed with me stories of patients with heart valve implants complaining about feeling emotionally blunted or numbed by the simple fact of the heart valve regulating their cardiac rhythm to the point that their hearts literally no longer raced when excited, nervous, fearful, and so on. Such anecdotal accounts highlight the intangible costs of such procedures for something certainly less intensive and encompassing than a head transplant.<\/p>\n Perhaps the closest frameworks for attempting to understand the possible trauma from becoming a full-body cyborg are from psychological research on body concept and image.15<\/sup><\/a> In \u201cMental Representation of the Body: Stability and Change in Response to Illness and Disability,\u201d John D. Mayer and Myron G. Eisenberg discuss not only how body concept and body esteem may be involved in \u201ccentral aspects of the self-concept,\u201d but also how such aspects may influence a person\u2019s health and vice versa (155). For instance, illness may lead to lower body esteem and therefore may damage one\u2019s body concept. Under these circumstances, illness may cause negative self- and body-concepts. In a related scenario, if a person has negative self- and body-concepts, then such views may depress the immune system and cause or otherwise exacerbate suboptimal health conditions.<\/p>\n It is clear that Kusanagi does not have a positive body concept and esteem, as evidenced by her complete disregard for her cyborg self, from her disregard of her own nudity (which cannot be cultural as Batou invariably turns away from her nude body in embarrassment or tries to cover her with his jacket) to her own consciously self-destructive actions. Orbaugh agrees that \u201cKusanagi\u2019s lack of shame is not depicted as a moral issue\u201d because \u201cKusanagi in a sense stands for the inauthenticity of the body\/shell, and it is therefore not surprising that she exhibits no affective connection with it or through it\u201d (\u201cEmotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human\u201d 162). Part of Kusanagi\u2019s negative body concept no doubt stems from the commodification of her corporeality as Bolton argues; but traumatization from such extensive bodily modification cannot be denied even as it is rarely directly referenced or addressed in the film.<\/p>\n In the case of the gynoids and kidnapped girls of Innocence<\/em>, the trauma is both more straightforward and yet oddly absent from the narrative. Being abducted and held in what are metal cocoons are obviously traumatizing experiences, and the effective catatonia of the majority of the girls can be seen as traumatic responses to their captivity and confinement beyond the supposed degradation caused by \u201cghost dubbing.\u201d (It is unclear whether the degradation is physical, mental, or a combination of the two, only that as Kusanagi explains, \u201cIn past animal experiments, scientists mass replicated interior copies but had to abandon the practice as it destroyed the original being.\u201d) The girls\u2019 trauma is indicated through their physical confinement, eerie silence, and lack of responsiveness. The rows of cocooned girls, with only their unmoving faces and closed eyes visible through a small portal in each metal coffin, present an uncanny visualization of their trauma and reiterate anxieties about replication and replaceability previously raised in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. In this instance, the girls\u2019 faces appear identical and their non-responsiveness further suggests a lack of individuality. They, like their gynoid counterparts, are an army of identical bodies, made by their dis\/corporatization. Where the cyberization process in Ghost in the Shell<\/em> highlights the mechanical and technological replication of (cyborg) bodies, here the \u201cghost dubbing\u201d of Innocence<\/em> dramatizes the traumatic duplication of (biotic?) subjectivities.<\/p>\n However, the film does not fully explore the traumatic connection between the kidnapped girls and the gynoids. Firstly, the trauma experienced by the gynoids is completely off-screen, implied only by the near-nudity of the murderous gynoid that Batou shoots at the start of Innocence<\/em> and the forensic investigator Haraway\u2019s explanation of \u201cextra parts\u201d that pet- or work-model robots would not have. The police procedural film only uncovers and explicates that the girls are abducted to be \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d and that, \u201cIt was the ghosts that made Locus Solus gynoids so desirable\u201d to their clients. But what does it mean that the gynoid is \u201cghost-dubbed\u201d (or \u201crealistically\u201d copied) from an adolescent girl? There are some very dark implications that the clients do not value the gynoids merely for their girlish appearances, but also for their girlish reactions, which would involve traumatic responses since unwanted sexual contact would inevitably be traumatizing. Thus, the fragmentation of the body that is arguably at the root of Kusanagi\u2019s traumatic body dysmorphia in Ghost in the Shell<\/em> is extended in Innocence<\/em>\u2019s posthuman world to the \u201cghost\u201d or subjectivity that was seemingly reified at the expense of corporeality in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>. This is demonstrated by Batou\u2019s harsh rebuke of one rescued girl that she and Volkerson didn\u2019t \u201cconsider the victims\u201d\u2014\u201cNot the humans,\u201d but \u201cthe dolls endowed with souls.\u201d In this light, the gynoid\u2019s murderous rampage is not just about \u201cmaking trouble\u201d so that the kidnapped girls can be eventually rescued, but also a traumatic response to sexual slavery.<\/p>\n In Society Must Be Defended<\/em>, Foucault asserts that, inverting Clausewitz\u2019s proposition, \u201cPower is war, the continuation of war by other means\u201d (15). Power is inevitably and inherently war-like since \u201cpower is not primarily the perpetuation and renewal of economic relations, but that it is primarily, in itself, a relationship of force\u201d (15). Oshii\u2019s Ghost in the Shell<\/em> duology dramatizes the inherently combative disposition of power, made very obvious in the biopolitics of Kusanagi\u2019s indentured servitude to Section 9 and in the construction and circulation of the gynoids. The explanatory titles at the start of Ghost in the Shell<\/em> inadvertently reveal a great deal about power\u2019s historically inimical nature even while ostensibly gesturing towards the possibility of equality: \u201cIn the near future corporate networks reach out to the stars, electrons and light flow throughout the universe,\u201d suggesting a transcendence of a merely human individuality, but for the time being\u201cthe advance of computerisation\u2026has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups.\u201d On one hand, \u201cwiping out nations and ethnic groups\u201d is a nod to the, at the time, growing association of electronic frontiers and freedoms with computerization as dramatized in films like Hackers<\/em> (1995). In Hackers<\/em>, one hacker\u2019s manifesto proclaims, \u201cWe [hackers] exist without nationality, skin color, or religious bias\u201d in this \u201cworld of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.\u201d Together, the two films, which premiered a few months apart, demonstrate the increasing correlation of digital boundlessness and liberation with computer technology in popular culture. However, on the other hand, these opening titles for Ghost in the Shell<\/em> are also imbued with great violence since \u201cwiping out nations and ethnic groups\u201d has been historically accomplished through colonialism and military warfare; it has never been benign or uplifting, despite colonial logics and rhetoric. And indeed Kusanagi\u2019s indentured status can be construed as ultimately embodying a kind of neo-imperial logic of securing the nation with technological advances and computer coding rather than relying solely on physical force.<\/p>\n In this manner, Oshii\u2019s film duology imagines and stages the ways in which war is further internalized within civil society, even apart from the state centralization of the authority to wage war. As Foucault notes in Society Must Be Defended<\/em>, \u201cThe State acquired a monopoly on war\u201d\u2014\u201cwith the growth and development of States throughout the Middle Ages and up to the threshold of the modern era\u201d\u2014so that \u201cit gradually transpired that in both de facto and de jure terms, only State powers could wage wars and manipulate the instruments of war\u201d (48). He argues that, \u201cThe immediate effect of this State monopoly was that what might be called day-to day warfare, and what was actually called \u2018private warfare,\u2019 was eradicated from the social body, and from relations among men and relations among groups\u201d (48). In the Ghost in the Shell<\/em> films, biopower is not about presenting a shift from extraterritorial conflicts to interior ones, or the substitution of one for the other, but rather about how power can permeate society so wholly as to be exerted upon an individual at the atomic level through the dis\/corporatization of the body. Even while \u201cprivate warfare\u201d or the ability of feudal classes to make war became a state monopoly, war itself did not disappear from society, but instead became disturbingly more diffuse and ubiquitous. The cyborg entities of Oshii\u2019s duology are \u201cinstruments of war\u201d.<\/p>\n However, the ways in which Oshii\u2019s cyborg is an \u201cinstrument of war\u201d in Innocence<\/em> is particularly disturbing, uncannily demonstrating the diffusion of biopower into every level of this posthuman society. When Batou infiltrates Locus Solus\u2019s gynoid-manufacturing plant, deliberately situated in international waters in order to obfuscate jurisdictional authority, he is met with the onsite managers, themselves non-humanoid androids demarcated by archaic Chinese numbering, releasing the unsold gynoids as a literal army. These autonomous sex dolls are not reprogrammed with attack protocols; rather martial programming is already embedded in them, which, in retrospect, helps explain the murders at the start of the film that precipitated Batou and Togusa\u2019s involvement in the case. During the forensic investigation at the beginning of Innocence<\/em>, Haraway found that \u201cthese gynoids are capable of self-authorizing attacks against humans\u201d because of a nullification of \u201cMoral Code #3,\u201d which constrains robots to \u201c[m]aintain existence without injuring humans\u201d (an intertextual reference to Isaac Asiminov\u2019s Three Laws of Robotics). Thus, the gynoid\u2019s attack off-screen of the policemen and her on-screen attack of Batou are not wild flailing, but very clearly expressive of combat knowledge. In this way, the gynoid, as an embodiment of biopower, also reveals how we can, as Foucault argues, \u201cunderstand power by looking at its extremities, at its outer limits at the point where it becomes capillary\u201d (Society Must Be Defended<\/em> 27). The gynoid, as an artifact of human ingenuity and creativity, is modeled, as Haraway complains to Togusa, \u201con a human image, an idealized one at that.\u201d Kusanagi, however, remarks, \u201cIf the dolls could speak, no doubt they\u2019d scream, \u2018I didn\u2019t want to become human.\u2019\u201d This replication of humanity in a non-human construct is not just about the vanity and egotism of human engineers, but about how biopower circulates between the nonhuman and the posthuman. Even as the trafficked girl screamed that she \u201cdidn\u2019t want to become a doll\u201d in response to Batou\u2019s scolding, Oshii\u2019s two films actually dramatize how dis\/corporatization envelopes the human and the human-looking, how the posthuman is uncannily more and more embodying the logics of commodification.<\/p>\n Anders, Charlie Jane. \u201cStunning Shots of the Real-Life Hong Kong Locations Featured in Ghost in the Shell<\/em>.\u201d Gizmodo<\/em>, 3 August 2011, https:\/\/io9.gizmodo.com\/stunning-shots-of-the-real-life-hong-kong-locations-fea-5827538<\/a>. Accessed 20 June 2015.<\/p>\n Ashcraft, Brian. \u201cWhy This Japanese Woman Turned into a \u2018Plastic Surgery Cyborg.\u2019\u201d Kotaku<\/em>, 7 May 2013, https:\/\/kotaku.com\/why-this-japanese-woman-turned-into-a-plastic-surgery-493262883<\/a>. Accessed 27 July 2017.<\/p>\n Bolton, Christopher. \u201cFrom Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater.\u201d Positions<\/em>, vol. 10, no. 3, Winter 2002, pp. 729-71.<\/p>\n Epstein, Robert. \u201cThe Empty Brain.\u201d Aeon<\/em>, 18 May 2016, https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer<\/a>. Accessed 20 May 2016.<\/p>\n Fisher, Seymour. \u201cA Further Appraisal of the Body Boundary Concept.\u201d Journal of Consulting Psychology<\/em>, vol. 27, no.1, 1963, pp. 62-74.<\/p>\n Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality<\/em>, Volume 1: An Introduction.<\/em> Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.<\/p>\n \u2014. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, 1975-76<\/em>. Translated by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, Picador, 1997..<\/p>\n Gardner, William. \u201cThe Cyber Sublime and the Virtual Mirror: Information and Media in the Works of Oshii Mamoru and Kon Satoshi.\u201d Canadian Journal of Film Studies<\/em>, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 44-70.<\/p>\n Glaser, April. \u201cThe Scarlett Johansson Bot Is the Robotic Future of Objectifying Women.\u201d Wired<\/em>, 4 April 2016, https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/04\/the-scarlett-johansson-bot-signals-some-icky-things-about-our-future\/<\/a>. Accessed 15 July 2016.<\/p>\n Hackers<\/em>. Directed by Iain Softley. United Artists, 1995.<\/p>\n Hourigan, Daniel. \u201cGhost in the Shell 2<\/em>, Technicity and the Subject.\u201d Film-Philosophy<\/em>, vol. 17, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51-67.<\/p>\n \u201cHuman Trafficking by the Numbers.\u201d Human Rights First<\/em>, June 2017, https:\/\/www.humanrightsfirst.org\/resource\/human-trafficking-numbers<\/a>. Accessed 8 August 2017.<\/p>\n Jeffries, Stuart. \u201cNeil Harbisson: The World\u2019s First Cyborg Artist.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, 6 May 2014, https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2014\/may\/06\/neil-harbisson-worlds-first-cyborg-artist<\/a>. Accessed 27 July 2017.<\/p>\n
\nProsthetic Lives and Human Trafficking<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/a>
\nImage: BOBBY YIP\/REUTERS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/a>Recognizing\/(Re)Defining Human Trafficking<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\nBiopower and Corporatization of Cyborgs<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/a>Dis\/Corporatization of Cyborg Bodies and Posthuman Trauma<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
Posthuman Warfare<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
Works Cited<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n