Cyberbodies: Imaginative Agency in Digital Futures

Science fiction is readable as a species of philosophical fiction, asking questions about what it means to be human. The significance of imaginative agency in big franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Transformers, and X-Men is too large to outline here, but two films starring Scarlett Johansson supply a manageable navigation of the complex and powerful coding of imagination and agency through cyberbodies. It is no accident that the cyberbodies in question are female, since imaginative agency remixes gender politics in stories about controlling reproduction. As Marina Warner pointed out apropos Jurassic Park’s all-female dinosaurs, monstrous mothers have a long history in storytelling.¹ Where classic science fiction represented science as masculine reason controlling – and dominating – a monstrous female body, futurist fiction of the digital age gives imaginative agency to feminine subjects able to reconcile not just mind-body splits but human-machine dualities. Though human-machine duality can be explored through masculine subjects – poetically, in the case of Blade Runner, prosaically in Blade Runner 2049 – ideological interpellation mapped through femininity, and white femininity in particular, can assume a base of useful fluidity. Young women need placing somewhere, even in fantastical futures.

Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014) is a film about superintelligence, a concept normally applied to computers, mapped onto a human. The film begins with a young woman in Taiwan who is lured into being a drugs mule and forced to carry a packet of drugs in her stomach. It leaks, with terrifying effects. Normally, claims the film, the human brain works at 10 percent of capacity; this drug ramps her up to 100 percent. The drug, incidentally, is described as CH4, a substance made by a mother in the early stages of pregnancy which enables a fetus’s development. So monstrous maternity is back in the mix. Our heroine acquires extraordinary physical strengths and mental abilities, her senses gloriously heightened: she can see trees circulating nutrients, hear people’s distant conversations, and understand Chinese instantly. The film’s narrative plays with action thriller conventions, in which our heroine applies her new skills to punishing the drugs baron who set her up, and finding the other mules whose supply of the drug she needs in order to contain and sustain the effects of her own overdose. Taking a trip to Paris, literally and figuratively, she engages in a wild car chase and several bang-bang shootouts while managing to meet up with an old-style professor whose work speculates on brain capacity, in order to seek his advice and offer herself as a short-lived research subject. In an interview Besson said he was compelled by “the fact that we have just hundreds of billions of cells who communicate just together, like one thousand signals per second per cell. You know the web is nothing compared to that.” But the comparison drives the film.

Intersecting with this loose and wild plot are several conceptual threads, one of which features modern Lucy transported to a dinosaur world. Wearing a little black dress and stilettos and seated in an office chair, she encounters the first hominid squatting in a stream beside her, an apelike creature scooping water. Connecting through the gaze, modern Lucy, all blonde and smooth and white, stretches out her hand – and in a witty parody of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, her god-like finger is touched by the hairy finger of our maternal ancestor. Besides the considerable pleasure of seeing patriarchal art’s most iconic moment pastiched into a female-friendly revision, there is also the pleasure of time-telescoping – and in a scopic frame! – in that two Lucys meet: Besson’s digitally-informed Lucy and Lucy of archeo-anthropology, specifically AL 288-1, an incomplete hominid skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson in Ethiopia in 1974, who became globally known as “Lucy;” also the hominid traces discovered elsewhere in Africa by Mary Leakey. Premodern and postmodern stretch as categories through haptic possibility. Imaginative agency is thus not all visual – remember fingertip action is central to using a keyboard, and digits are integral to most digital activity. The opposable thumbs which made tool-using Homo sapiens a smart species are the anthropological antecedent of the opposable thumbs essential to efficient smart phone use. Digit-ality mirrors digital-ity. As Miko Elo has explored, “Touch exceeds the tactile world; touch is more than the sense of touch. It is not only a matter of contacting surfaces, it also has depth: something can be so touching that a human being or an animal is thoroughly moved.”² That’s the old sense of “touching”; in the digital era, fingertip actions – touch, swipe, sweep, pinch, drag – stand in for bodily agency, which gestures to cognitive comprehension too. But, says Elo, that process is epistemologically unstable:

This reciprocal structure of touch is not, however, symmetric but twisted out of joint by the pathic moment. The self is always preceded by something that touches or exposes the self. We could speak here of a horizon of encounterings. It is only the pathic exposure that makes the self turn to itself as sentient. It is worth noticing that this is not merely a reflexive structure, as exposure always involves the transitive formation of the self. Jean-Luc Nancy has introduced the paradoxical idiom se toucher toi to describe this. It implies that touch always singles out some point, and the point it will need to make from this is still left open. In this sense touch is not symmetrical and self-enclosed, it has something gestural about it.³

What Lucy gestures to, in her encounter with hominid Lucy, is a gesture to the becoming of self, possibly digital, mirrored in the evolution ahead of prehistoric Lucy.

Time-traveling through history to prehistory by means of relentlessly modern computer graphics, contemporary Lucy ponders the meaning of life and intelligence. And what form does this intelligence take? Able to absorb endless information – an amusing scene on a plane shows her manically processing thousands of webpages from two laptops simultaneously – Lucy wavers between intelligence as heightened sensation and intelligence as infinite knowledge. Besson plays briefly with the familiar sci-fi idea that as humans become more machine-like, they lose emotional capacity – a romance with a French cop is given a brief flick, or flic, of significance, as Lucy, unable to fancy him, says she’ll have him along anyway as a reminder of desire. For once a male lead is a floating signifier. But the film drops it, perhaps because Blade Runner covered that ground unbeatably. There’s a coldness to Lucy in her steely gaze and robotic sashay which suggests superintelligence is something machine-like. The denouement has Lucy becoming a mass of black blood goo with a life of its own which seeks out computers and melds with them, only for her body to disappear and her essence returned to the professor as a natty little hard drive.

Besson’s film was brilliantly described by one reviewer as having ideas coming out of its arse: indeed, but at least they’re ideas.⁴ His film claims the meaning of life is time, without which we cannot know we exist; this idea is crammed with vestiges of irony into a meaningful hour and a half in the cinema. Special effects take us through Lucy’s body in trip-roaring rollercoaster visuals; they also take us through sequences of evolution, back through hominids, jellyfish blobs, dividing cells, primordial soup, and the big bang. Much of this is gaspingly beautiful: at the point of the formation of the earth, comets rain down with flailing tails like spermatozoa.

So what has all this to do with life writing? In the early stages of her transformation, Lucy reconnects with memories from infancy: in a touching scene she phones her mother – as you would – and tells her she remembers the first touch of cat fur and the taste of breast milk. So superintelligence is positioned as fully retrievable, complete, reliable memory. That’s what we look for in computers.⁵ It is also endows the autobiographical contract with a fantasy of fullness: suppose you really could remember everything, not just as data but as organic articulations. What language could there be to convey the full body sensorium – itself a fantasy – for digital subjects whose fingertip agency condenses the body which nonetheless feels sensation beyond the haptic? And a body which processes those sensations into chimerical memories? The paradox of a body able to recall fully draws on the trope of “memory” for writeable digital storage, which Wendy Chun has explored: “Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage . . . digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines.”⁶ Besson’s Lucy, recuperating the ephemerality of life and reversing physical degeneration, becomes a fantasy of the perfectible body-machine.

In the final stage of the drug, Lucy morphs into a substance that looks shiny, sticky, and sharp as it glumphs over floors; it has the goo-like characteristics of Kristeva’s classic abject,⁷ but also the cinematic gene of previous technologies of knowledge, in spooling celluloid or audio tape. Intelligence is like a machine, the film suggests – specifically, like the hard black plastic of computers. Although in several scenes Lucy applies superintelligence to bodies – she can see her banal flatmate’s kidney problems, she can diagnose a tumor as inoperable – the convulsions of the drug on her own organism flatline into action film superheroics. Her powers are gloriously witchlike, and the cardboard villain finally remarks on this: the metaphor of supernatural is one of few ways to figure superintelligence. Lucy’s final merging with a machine – almost erotic, in its representation of similarity and difference – condenses her to a rectangular device, like an iPhone, from which all traces of the bulgy rectangular packages of the blue crystal drug are excised. One might explore how blue, neon blue, is used to represent intelligence in the form of digital lines of communication; it is also the color of traditional police sirens, one of which Lucy claps on the car in which she speeds through Paris the wrong way. The common denominator would be decoding: the intelligent detective evolving into the all-knowing machine?

Besson’s Lucy has much in common with his other films about lone actors – Leon (1994), in his blow-them-up plot, and Nikita (1990) in her dig-deep self-reliance. The professor – who seems wildly old-fashioned, not least in the way he is respected – is not an effectual father figure; there are no protectors. The men are bodies with guns, again almost nostalgically so, and though Lucy blasts away too, she dispenses with thugs by mind powers as much as violence. There are few feisty female roles in the cinema; there are even fewer in which a female lead is given a transcendental human part. One other is Alien, or the Alien series, where as in Lucy questions about reproduction are asked. The professor proposes evolution requires either immortality or reproduction to pass on knowledge. Evading any biological monstrosity of motherhood, Lucy reproduces herself as a hard drive. Digital development defies the cruelty and greed of the drug baron; a machine escapes emotion. The film wants it both ways, in that when the professor holds the hard drive, he smiles. It’s a knowing smile, as if what he knows is something not contained in a machine, even when connecting with it. Perhaps that’s an idea coming out of Besson’s arse; perhaps it should remind us machines don’t have arses. The knowing something might also be understood as imaginative agency: the potence of potentiality.

If computers serve us with intelligence, a transfer of intelligence from them to us might be utopian or dystopian. Besson inclines to utopianism, in that Lucy responds to her superperceptual abilities with wonder, reverence, and reverie. Imaginative agency is applied to how she sees history – the human past – rather than a better future. Agency is passive in that scenes unfold before Lucy; it is also active in that she welcomes their presence and celebrates their import. Imaginative agency works at multiple levels: the film – its script, its direction, its mise-en-scène; the narrative – agency is inherent in action films and often explicitly so as plots turn on people’s actions; the viewer, who recognizes agency of director and characters, and who takes in the whoosh of time travel and maintains conceptual steadiness in the face of metaphysical welter.

A film which focuses even more deeply on the tensions of cyber and organic forms of knowledge and intelligence is Ghost in the Shell (2017 dir. Rupert Sanders, based on a Japanese manga written by Masamune Shirow. [Thanks to Rob Gallagher for noting that this manga spawned an anime franchise – two films and at least one series.]). In Ghost in the Shell, a human reconfigured into a cyberenhanced crime fighter also runs through plots of origin, maternity, identity – a very life-writing set of preoccupations, though with an emphasis on ethics rather than epistemology: the central character, Major Mira Killian, uses her mental powers to pursue criminals who turn out to be less criminal than the owner of the corporation who owns and directs her. Imaginative agency here involves perceptions, often delicate, about the role of affect in identity as the cyberhuman struggles to resolve conflicting emotions. Relevant to digital thinking is the resource of the network. The bad guy who is also a good guy invites the Major to join his human network, a joined-up reserve of potency to fight the corporate villain. Dispensing with artificial intelligence, what Hanka Robotics has developed is a human brain in an artificial body – a ghost in a shell. Imaginative agency is invited to engage with slippery and thorny ideas of identity which faintly invoke the soul as a construction, ineluctable. The problematics of identity, especially corrupted memory, are described in digital terms as “glitches.”

That Scarlett Johansson stars in both films is more than coincidence. As Zara Dinnen and Sam McBean explain, “the face in cinema is just as much a digital object as the face as produced by social media or biometric surveillance … and in the recent films of Scarlett Johansson, the face is never just object, it is also always narrative.”⁸ The paradoxically expressive immobility of Ryan Gosling’s face has also been noted as appropriate for the hybrid identity of his character, part replicant, part human, in Blade Runner 2049.

Although the genre conventions of science fiction structure their possibilities, both films use discourses of altered corpus and enhanced intelligence to think inventively about identity in the digital age. When bodies become digital objects, what happens to imaginative agency? (A question also relevant to Besson’s 2017 film Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets. ) There is, however, a big glitch in the imaginative workings: race. I’ll pick up two aspects, which to some extent converge. One is casting; the other is epidermal. Futurist sci-fi blockbusters have attracted criticism for adopting Asian aesthetics whilst screening out Asian characters. As one critic put it in a headline, “Cyberpunk Cities Fetishize Asian Culture But Have No Asians. The ‘Blade Runner’ universe is visually Asian, so where are the Asian people?”⁹ Adapting a Japanese manga as a star vehicle for a very pale-skinned actor, The Ghost in the Shell generated controversy in its casting. “The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) has blasted the casting choice of Scarlett Johansson in ‘Ghost in the Shell’ just ahead of the film’s opening weekend. In a statement released Friday, the group condemned the movie’s ‘whitewashing’ of Johansson’s character Motoku Kusanagi who first appeared in the Japanese manga of the same name.”¹⁰

Controversy then extended to color-washing whitewash:

After the backlash surrounding Johansson’s role in the film, producers reportedly attempted to quell the controversy with an old standby Hollywood uses to fix a lot of problems: CGI.

According to multiple independent sources close to the project, Paramount and DreamWorks commissioned visual effects tests that would’ve altered Scarlett Johansson in post-production to “shift her ethnicity” and make the Caucasian actress appear more Asian in the film. (ibid.)

It’s the latest, and most extreme, case of “beauty work,” the new trend in Hollywood to discreetly use visual effects to tweak an actor’s appearance, making them thinner, younger or stronger. The Ghost in the Shell tests were conducted by Lola VFX, the same company that aged up (and down) Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and is considered the industry leader in so-called beauty work. Though the tests were requested by the production team, once they were developed and reviewed, the idea was rejected “immediately,” says an insider.¹¹

Besides Caucasian displacement of Asian, a second instantiation of racialization can be read off a scene in which Johannson’s character wonderingly touches the freckled cheek of the character Lia, played by mixed-race British model Adwoa Aboah (see Fig. 1 below). Where the Lucy-Lucy encounter playfully connected categories of hairless and hirsute, the Major-Lia encounter puts touch as a form of agency acted out by the white cyborg on a female human who is nonwhite. Embodiment is racialized in several ways. One is simply body, enhanced by Aboah’s classically African-sculpture profile. Another is costume: Johansson wears black, ironically; Aboah has a sexualizing corset and stockings. Third, Lia’s skin seems to fascinate the Major not just because of her color difference, but because she is also strikingly freckled. Her skin, in other words, is variably different, even to itself. The freckles are Aboah’s own, though decoration of facial skin is often a feature of assumed otherness among sci-fi aliens. What Paul Gilroy has called attention to as “epidermal thinking”¹² is here possibly doubled by the two-tone effect of freckles. Freckles insist on skin as a medium rather than fleshliness. Where the machine-human has smooth, uniform skin, the human has skin of varying tone and texture. That epidermic variability may be a way to convey haptic complexity rather than simple racializing or eroticizing. But it also makes skin texture a manifestation of embodiment from which the pale cyborg is apparently exempt. In some scenes the Major wears a thermoptic suit – a pale second skin, veined, a simulacra of white skin – which allows her to become invisible. One might read this as an ironic take on whiteness, or a reinstatement of whiteness as having special power – a reinstatement which might be ironic too.

A small diversion into the cultural significance of freckles suggests they have a surprising relation to cyberbodies. Simone Browne has analyzed digital epidermal thinking in relation to biometrics;^13,14 if fingerprints are taken to be secure marks of identity – unique, individual – freckles are more unstable, possibly like the beauty spot or patches worn at European courts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They appear as an increasingly emphatic feature on the images of a model, musician, and influencer, Lil Miquela. She first appeared in 2016 on Instagram, where she accrued 1.5 million followers. Two years later she was outed as a fiction, created by a company called Brud, who have also created other “sentient robots” active on social media. It was rumored that Brud are developing the means for anyone with an iPhone to create their own CGI “human.” Some Miquela posts play with human curiosity about being human, a quality that can make traditional cyborgs into metaphysical beings: thus one post asks, “What’s It Like To Be You?”

Where cyberbodied beings carry the possibility of being philosophical in the hybridity of their bodies, “fake humans” assume a fully human body, albeit an overdetermined one in conformity to commodified beauty – that is, female figures and faces conform to types promoted through fashion and pornography. Nonetheless, fakeness can trigger debate about the meaning of being human, once it is revealed that the apparent person is a CGI fiction. Debates are complicated by the performativity of humans, especially online, and the artificial enhancement of some human bodies, which makes artifice compatible with being human. In 2019, as Arwha Mahdawi bemusedly analyzes, “Bella Hadid, a human supermodel, has been accused of ‘queerbaiting’ after making out with Lil Miquela, a computer-generated influencer, in order to sell designer underwear.”¹⁵ The marketing was for Calvin Klein, who were forced to apologize – less for using girl-on-girl action to sell their stuff, and more for queerbaiting, Hadid being a known heterosexual. Computer-generated influencers are attractive propositions for companies because they are totally controllable, but they also seem attractive fronts for politics – Miquela, who voices pro-LGBT views and expressed support for Black Lives Matter, was trolled by a white, pro-Trump, fake human called Bermuda. Blurring the line between fake and real people, these creations also blur identity politics in alarming ways:

“I’m not sure I can comfortably identify as a woman of color,” a recent Instagram post from Miquela said. “‘Brown’ was a choice made by a corporation. ‘Woman’ was an option on a computer screen.”

Not comfortably identifying with race or gender? That sentiment too comes at the behest of a corporation, even if it fits with a preference for fluidity among the app generation. As Emilia Petrarea puts it, this digitized body phenomenon

holds up a mirror to the ways in which technology has morphed our own constructions of self. We don’t yet live in a world where realistic-looking fake humans roam the streets, but in the meantime, technology has transformed us into fake-looking real humans. Social-media personalities like the Kardashians alter their bodies and edit images of themselves so heavily that CGI characters somehow blend naturally into our feeds.¹⁶

It seems no coincidence Miquela has freckles (though so too does the British model Emily Bador, a real person whom she resembles) – ironically now a fake sign of authenticity, or a sign of a body that CGI features to tether its pretense of being real. Faux freckles were fashionable in 2017 – online beauty tutorials show how to paint them on with henna cones, a practice promptly denounced as cultural appropriation. Freckle-positivity presents nature as art, artfully natural, supposedly, a real sign of human, though now also a sign of real human artifice. There are some freckled male models, but freckling seems more played out on female faces. In her magisterial study of skin, Claudia Benthien stressed “the immense significance of skin as a symbolic form for cultural processes as a whole and its importance to the individuation and self-becoming of the human being, in particular.”¹⁷ Enlightenment-based ideas of self-realization through skin have changed: in the digital world, the human being can change plain skin for spotted, and back again – and with an ease less available to the cyberbody who is metaphysically stuck in being part human, part machine. In this welter of fakewash, cyberbodies pose as philosophically real so as to question illusions of imaginative agency. The future can hardly keep up with the present.