In a scene in the movie Bladerunner, the future cop Deckard is analyzing a photograph of a nondescript room. The photo has been digitally re-created, and Deckard is manipulating the perspective of the photo on a viewing screen, looking for clues. But the computer's re-creation allows Deckard actual entry into the roo m: He can see around corners and zoom in on objects not apparent in the actual photograph. The flat image becomes 3-dimensional; a representation becomes actual space.
But it's electronic space, cyberspace. The Bladerunner scene depicts a time when dat a develops contours, when human/machine interface projects human subjectivity into a new type of reality. The writers and filmmakers of science fiction have been exploring this new realm, and the place of the human subject within it, for some time now. Bu t the technology has arrived - digital video and photography technology is on par with Deckard's device. Sci-fi prophecy is rapidly becoming real-life human self-discovery.
In his book Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject In Post-Modern Science Fictio n, (Duke University Press, 1993), NYU film professor Scott Bukatman surveys the electronic age, the computer culture and the cyberpunk sci-fi that attempts to define the societies and individuals that cybernetic culture will create. Bukatman, quoting sci- fi author and critic Norman Spinrad, asserts that "cyberpunk is about how our increasingly intimate feedback relationship with the technosphere we are creating has been, is, and will be, altering our definition of what it means to be human itself.'"
Us ing rigorous scholarship, and drawing on a vast array of sci-fi literature, comics, films and criticism, as well as numerous postmodern authors and critics, Bukatman makes a strong case that the human/machine interface is approaching an ever-increasing sy mbiotic relationship. This relationship presents "a movement away from the traditional experience of the body and toward some sort of ecstatic activity of cybernetic fusion."
This fusion forms the Terminal Identity. The human will no longer be defined by the external reality of the corpus. The physical world will recede in importance as the activities of existence take place more and more within the networks and matrices of the cyberspace. The sense of self will be determined by what data the individu al accesses; MTV's "Plug In" promo is apt in this context - who you are is what you are plugged into.
Where the body goes and what it does remain question marks. Bukatman shows how most cyberpunk sci-fi, such as the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, injects the person into the data stream, but the person retains a subjective sense of reality. The cyberspace is perceived by the individual; the individual is not absorbed by the cyberspace. But what is this perception? Certainly nothing like bodily awa reness as we understand it. Bukatman writes, "[W]ithin these discourses, the body is hardly inviolate - it is instead a site of almost endless dissolution. From here the language of terminal identity becomes increasingly de-forming of the human, as the su bject is simulated, morphed, modified, retooled, genetically engineered, and even dissolved."
Virtual reality is only the beginning. Evolution into cybernetic organisms is conceivable within the next century. But Bukatman seems to take offense with the paranoid future visions of many sci-fi narratives. He marshals examples that celebrate the freedom to be achieved by jacking in. Once present in the infinite datascape, the subject has an entire universe in which to hide out in.
If you haven't figured it out yet, this book is pretty heavy going. It is written in the language of post-modern criticism, which means you get to learn neat words like diagesis and trope. Fortunately, the only sci-fi you really need to be familiar with is the movies, and every one has seen Alien(s), The Terminator (s), Bladerunner. If you haven't seen Videodrome, a prominent and conceptually effective example, rent it.
But Bukatman isn't just tearing apart art. This is about the shape of things to come. This glimpse into the future can help you plot your own strategy to address the coming of the new flesh. (Hugh E. Jabor)