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Stylistic Brainchild and Corporeal Mapping in The Surrogates

D. Harlan Wilson
Wright State University-Lake Campus
david.wilson@wright.edu

© 2006 D. Harlan Wilson.
All rights reserved.

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Review of:
Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele'southward The Surrogates. Issues ane-5. Marietta: Pinnacle Shelf Productions, 2006.

1. In the tradition of Blade Runner (1981), Akira (the early on 1980s comics and film), Neuromancer (1984), Watchmen (1987), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Dark City (1998), the Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), and other neocyberpunk texts, The Surrogates, a 5-consequence serialized comic, deploys a host of traditional postmodern science fiction motifs, themes and gadgetry as fortification for its tech-noir storyline. The chief prescriptions for the plot include a formative crime, a protagonist who is forced to solve that offense, a gradual procedure of psychological awakening that echoes the method of crime-solving, an urban labyrinth setting, and high-tech mechanism that has gone pig-wild and produced a dystopian society. Surrogates uses this genre recipe, harnessing the techniques of by futurologies and narrative spaces equally conceived by the cyberpunks of the 1980s. The comic differs from its forerunners, however, by representing a post-capitalist condition that is defined past stylistic brainchild rather than by the stylistic superspecificity of former conceptions. William Gibson'due south novelistic version of internet, for instance, is propelled by hyperdescriptive language and imagery, and the cyberspace of the Wachowski brothers' Matrix films (flagrantly extrapolated from Gibson) is entirely rendered by state-of-the-art special furnishings. Illustrator Weldele works in a different style. He minimalizes and abstracts the stylization of many previous cyberpunk forms by consistently composing panels that look like sketches more than than finished products. As such, he constructs an innovative mapping of the torso. In Matters of Gravity, Scott Bukatman explains:

   Comics characterize the body in stories and envision the torso in drawings. The body is obsessively centered upon. It is contained and delineated; it becomes irresistible force and unmovable object. . . . The body is an accident of nascence, a freak of nature, or a outcome of technology run wild. The . . . trunk is everything--a corporeal, rather than a cognitive, mapping of the subject into a cultural system. (49)

   Bukatman'south analysis focuses on the superhero body, but his general idea can be applied to other comics. Surrogates thus corporeally maps the subject area into a system distinguished by technological excess and denaturalization (cyberpunk's overriding themes). Dissimilar former maps, this i demonstrates an aesthetic destylization to represent the nature of machinic want and selfhood. By destylization, I mean calculatedly threadbare graphics that signal a "mode of awareness" in the science-fiction genre, which has consistently functioned as "a complex hesitation nearly the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future" (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. 388). More specifically, The Surrogates revises the nature of cyberpunk subjectivity, which has generally been perceived in dystopian terms. It does so by illustrating (through the medium of its analogy) how cyberpunk texts are positively charged--not technologically ravished dystopias, just cornball matrices of promise and promise gesturing in utopian directions.
2. Prepare in the Courage District of Cardinal Georgia Metropolis in 2054, The Surrogates depicts a time to come where 92% of developed humans supervene upon themselves with androids. In lieu of going to piece of work or to dinner parties, people spend their time in a somnambulant state, reclining on lounge chairs. Their real, docile bodies are remotely wired into mechanical bodies by ways of spider-like mechanisms placed on the temples. Surrogates experience the actual goings-on of daily life for their human users, who experience the full spectrum of sensory impressions through their surrogates. This scientific discipline-fictional novelty is the maypole effectually which revolve the action and plot of the comic. The protagonist is Harvey Greer, a police lieutenant in search of a serial killer. Greer himself owns and uses a surrogate, which divides him against himself. Every bit a cop, his surrogate technology protects him in the event of being wounded or killed (he can merely go another one); at the same time, he resents being dependent upon engineering science, physically and emotionally, and wants to exist purely as a existent person. This tension is ready against the main plot: Greer's chase for the serial killer, a surrogate named Steeplejack. Steeplejack is endemic and operated by Lionel Canter, sometime employee of Virtual Self Incorporated (VSI) and inventor of surrogate engineering science, who is disgruntled because he originally conceived of the surrogate "equally an elaborate prosthetic, and never supported whatsoever utilise of the technology beyond that purpose. . . . He felt that the widespread employ of surrogates among adults was bad enough, merely amongst children . . . that was more than he could have" (v:14). Hence Canter, in the class of Steeplejack, assassinates the leader of a volatile anti-surrogate faction called the Dreads, sets off an EMP weapon of mass devastation that deactivates all surrogates, and provokes the Dreads to march on and demolish the factories of VSI. In the end Greer, who has stopped using his surrogate, solves the case, and the Dreads initiate a "massive surrogate cleanup campaign." Surrogates concludes on a proverbially grim cyberpunk annotation when Greer goes domicile to observe that his wife, unable to comport life without her surrogate, has overdosed on valium.
3. The thought of surrogates invokes what is perhaps cyberpunk's principal theme: the invasion of body and mind by the likes of "prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration . . . encephalon-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry--techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self" (Sterling xiii). The mankind is treated with Gibsonian aversion. Subjects prefer to operate in the world equally re-embodied consciousnesses, neurally interfaced with their "surries." There are several reasons for the popularity of surrogates as described in a fictional academic essay, "Paradise Plant: Possibility and Fulfillment in the Age of the Surrogate," published at the end of Issue 1. Above all, surrogates, which expect exactly like humans, allow one to assume different genders, races, and physicalities and so every bit to avoid, for case, "gender discrimination in employer hiring practices" and to "abolish such separatist philosophies equally prejudice and stereotyping." Mere vanity is of class also a concern. So is the marked subtract in crime (murder is a monetary issue--users losing their commodity-selves rather than their actual lives) and the wellness benefits (1 tin can experience the pleasure of smoking and drinking through the vehicle of a surrogate without experiencing detrimental wellness furnishings). Written past Dr. William Laslo, the essay is overtly biased towards the dominant post-capitalist technology. Laslo's views, however, are countered by religious fanatics (Zaire Powell III, a.chiliad.a. "The Prophet," and his constituency of Dreads), who perceive engineering as an abomination, and whose deportment provide the fundamental conflict of The Surrogates. That said, both parties (if just unconsciously) seem to recognize that surrogate-usage is a symptom of the imaginative constraints placed on subjects by article civilization and technological proliferation. They merely attempt to spin that symptom for their own ends. Dreads and non-Dreads alike need surrogates. Without the symptom, at that place can be neither disease nor cure.
4. Laslo'south essay implicitly challenges the modalities of posthuman selfhood. Every bit Due north. Katherine Hayles defines the trouble,

   at pale in my investigation into the posthuman is the status of embodiment. Volition the trunk continue to be regarded equally excess baggage, or can versions of the posthuman be constitute that overcome the mind/torso carve up? What does it mean for apotheosis that those aspects of the man nearly uniform with machines are emphasized, while those non easily integrated into this paradigm are underplayed or erased?. (246)

   By itemizing the essentially Deleuzoguattarian potential of surrogate applied science, Laslo speaks to this question of embodiment. Real bodies are residual, "excess baggage" that serves footling purpose other than to firm the minds that control surrogate bodies. Surrogate bodies, on the other paw, do non simply serve as "fashion accessories," a state of posthumanism that invokes Hayles'southward fear and loathing, but rather equally a "ground of beingness" that does non allow users to thrive on "unlimited power and disembodied bloodshed" (266) as they do in Neuromancer and its many spinoffs, whose protagonists crave cyberspace (and the loss of the human being body) similar a drug. For protagonists similar Neuromancer's Case in particular, this loss of "meat" is the ultimate empowerment, providing for a superheroic state of disembodiment free from the confines of flesh. With surrogates, however, subjects merely trade i grade of meat for a more dynamic and fluid course; and it is this state of re-embodiment that functions equally a "ground of being," in that subjects employ it not to get high but to perform/exist on the phase of life. Surrogate bodies can have multiple forms--they are rhizomes authorizing lines of flight from the constructedness of gender and race into a matrix of social and biological anonymity where one's true identity is birthday subsidiary to one's machinic part. In theory, then, Surrogates possesses a utopian mettle with a technology capable of realizing an agential posthuman field of study (à la Hayles).
5. The diegesis of the comic, however, exhibits just a latent utopianism; bureau lurks beneath the thick-skinned veneer of a dystopian tone, characterization, atmosphere and style. According to The Encyclopedia of Scientific discipline Fiction, dystopias bespeak "appallingly at the manner the world is supposedly going in order to provide urgent propaganda for a change in direction" (360). Surrogates resists existence polemical, leaving readers uncertain every bit to the ethics of its technology. Venditti himself says he wanted to exit the comic morally and ideologically ambiguous on this indicate:

   Whether The Surrogates is nearly the positive or negative aspects of technology's rapid growth is a question for each private reader. Personally, I don't know where the line is drawn betwixt good advancements and bad. To reflect that, I tried to populate the story with characters that represent both sides of the surrogate issue. Some are for surrogates and some are against them, and it's upward to the reader to decide which group is more sympathetic. (Pop Idea)

   Venditti's sentiment is a staple of what Brian McHale has called POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM, which represents electric technology in equivocal terms, characters both desiring and detesting the machines that speak their bodies and minds. Bukatman calls it terminal identity, a pathological subject-position incited by "the technologies of the twentieth century [which] have been at once the most liberating and the almost repressive in history, evoking sublime terror and sublime euphoria in equal measures" (4). Such a schized condition is a prerequisite for post-backer life, a life that, in The Surrogates, people enact by literally reinventing themselves in the grade of the commodity (surrogates are retail merchandise). This grade of the commodification has been explored past Marshall McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride (1951), a study of "industrial man" and the mode subjectivity is remastered by the symbolic economy of corporate advertisements. Surrogates reinvigorates this concept, exhibiting a chiselled fluidity fabricated possible past the commodification of the torso. This differs from customary cyberpunk, whose fluidity is contingent on bodily disconnection, whereas hither the body is foregrounded. Characterized past what Stelarc identifies as "anaesthetized bodies," "VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) entities" and "fractal flesh," surrogate fluidities manifest as seemingly agential phenomena. Surrogate applied science "pacifies the body and the world" and "disconnects the torso from many of its functions" (Stelarc 567), simply in and then doing information technology invites bodies to become chronic dissemblers, slipping in and out of whatever race, gender, or occupation one likes. The effect of the technology is, once more, a good for you actualization of Deleuzoguattarian flows. And yet, ironically, all this is linked to capital--the less money a trunk possesses, the less fluid and more static it must inevitably be. That is the fate of the post-capitalist subject field: having the dash to become schized but lacking the capital to execute it. Here Deleuze and Guattari's anti-capitalist agenda becomes inextricably bound to the organization of desire and ethics information technology aspires to transcend. Their agenda, in other words, becomes a mail-capitalist phenomenon that tin only exist successfully applied and fulfilled if it successfully fails.
6. At that place are two dominant visions of post-capitalism. Some acquaintance it with a reversion to a primitive society in the wake of a global cataclysm (representative texts are Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7 [1959], Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker [1980], Kim Stanley Robinson'south The Wild Shore [1995], and the Planet of the Apes films). Here the post-capitalist is the mail service-apocalyptic. More commonly it is used to denote an amplification or extrapolation of capitalism in its current form. Extrapolated diegeses of this nature are typically marked by a commodity-cultural pathology that has been induced by the fusion of humanity and applied science. This fusion resonates in the postal service-backer future equally shown by Venditti and Weldele besides every bit past their neocyberpunk precursors, especially the movement's two paradigmatic texts, Ridley Scott'due south Blade Runner and William Gibson's Neuromancer, both of which are also stock technoirs set in blipped urban labyrinths that feature beat protagonists. These classic elements of genre, setting and character continue to be regularly adapted by authors of postal service-capitalist literature and film, who ordinarily focus on dynamism of prose and on special furnishings. Venditti'southward protagonist is a desensitized discipline whose quest to unmask Steeplejack mirrors a quest to unmask his own identity and to resensitize himself. While lacking stone star-adulthood in most every fashion, Harvey Greer is a machinic body wired to and produced by cybernetic, consumer-capitalist technology, and is thus emblematic of the cyberpunk hero. His diegetic reality likewise belongs to cyberpunk, which, in its nigh effective guises, has ever flaunted a hardboiled noir sensibility and artful. In this way the comic exploits the mechanisms of its antecedents.
7. 1 crucial chemical element of The Surrogates, however, diverges from cyberpunk convention: the style of its illustration. Sterling says that cyberpunk is "widely known for its telling use of detail" and "carefully synthetic intricacy" (xiv). In written form, this has manifested as a descriptive superspecificity of bodies, technologies, and spatial realms (see, for example, any of the stories collected in Sterling'south authoritative Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology [1986]). In cinematic and comic strip form, it manifests a crispness of imagery, vibrancy of colour, and manic deployment of special effects, normally CGI (recent instances include Ultraviolet [2006], the Korean Natural City [2006], and Natural City [2003, 2005]). Surrogates opposes these forms of representation. Weldele'southward illustrations are abstruse, obscure, shadowcast. Apply of color is limited primarily to boring grays, browns and blues, and the appearances of characters and their surroundings are roughly defined. In some cases characters are depicted as stick figures. There is an attentiveness to detail in terms of exterior media, which, like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'due south Watchmen, The Surrogates uses to deepen and contextualize its diegesis (in addition to the aforementioned academic essay, these media consist of a classified ads page, a newspaper article, a idiot box script, and VSI advertisements). Only in terms of the action that unfolds on its storyboard, the comic rejects item and intricacy. At the same time, it is carefully synthetic--clearly a conscious act of rejection on the part of Weldele.
8. What, and so, does such an abstraction of fashion, an practise in minimalist aesthetics, indicate most the state of twenty-first century electronically enhanced society? Neocyberpunk has e'er functioned equally technosocial critique, and The Surrogates is no exception. Most of all, it indicates a full-fledged burnout of the existent and dissolution of the self brought on by media technologies, which take surrogated existence. The comic defines a panic civilisation, a "floating reality, with the actual as a dream world, where we live on the edge of ecstasy and dread. Now it is the age of the Television receiver audience every bit a chilled superconductor, of the stock market crash equally a Paris Commune of all the programmed supercomputers, of money as an electrical impulse fibrillating across the earth" (Kroker 14). In brusk, the torso, identity, existence itself are devoured by the commodified image. This dynamic is especially visible when comparing the VSI ads with the comic's storyboard. Sporting the grab phrase "Life . . . Only Ameliorate," the ads characteristic photographs of real people (that is, real models) whose purpose is to lure the fictional characters of the comic into purchasing androids (imitation people) to replace themselves. The levels of representation here fall into the realm of Baudrillardian simulacra and suggest that the (scientific discipline) fictional is more existent than the real, if only insofar as want determines perception and thus reality. The business of the post-capitalist advertisement, later all, is to convince consumers that, with the aid of a given commodity, they will get superhuman, which is to say science-fictional, as in Nike commercials featuring Just-Do-Iters who, thank you to their shoes, can spring over tall buildings in a single bound. Surrogates' visually destylized corporeal map shows how this process of commodification has weathered the contours of trunk, perception, and consequently want. The comic's dystopian mood is most pronounced in this respect.
9. More importantly, the comic's corporeal map introduces a curious dissolution of the technological sublime. Of the technological sublime, Bukatman writes:

   Just as Gibson'south net recast the new "terrain of digital information processing in the familiar terms of a sprawling yet full-bodied American urbanism, the sublime becomes a ways of looking astern in order to recognize what's upwardly alee.

   Only there's something else going on. The sublime not only points back toward a historical past; information technology also holds out the promise for self-fulfillment and technological transcendence in an imaginable near future . . . . The sublime presents an accommodation that is both surrender and transcendence, a loss of self that just leads--back? forrard?--to a renewed and newly strengthened feel of self. (106)

   This surrender/transcendence resonates throughout cyberpunk literature and film, which points back to the womb of an industrial past that bore the electronic nowadays of their respective futuristic accounts besides as to the technocapitalist globe we live in. The technological sublime is reified by the novel manner in which cyberpunk signifies by science fiction tropes and themes to represent its imagined presents. This retroaction includes 1980s cyberpunk and their 1990s and twenty-kickoff century offspring, products of a progressively science fictionalized world that continue to witness the literalization of formerly fictional cyberpunk realities. In contrast to other neocyberpunk texts, however, The Surrogates renovates its cyberpunk origins, rather than simply build upon them. Conventional cyberpunk represents the technologized torso in negative terms, depicting its cybernetic pathology in excruciating detail. By representing the technologized body through the medium of a stylized destylization that indicates a devolution of the human status, conventional cyberpunk becomes a source of not bad positive potential from which Hayles'southward agential posthuman might sally. Where one time the posthuman was, while degraded, sharply divers and capable, in The Surrogates it is ill-defined and burnt out. Here the technological sublime does not entail a loss of cocky that leads to a "strengthened experience of self." Instead it leads to an eroded experience of cocky. Its primary effect is nostalgia for an inherently optimistic posthumanism that, in its time, was explicitly pessimistic. What the aesthetic of The Surrogates finally maps, and then, is a new neocyberpunk that both stands on the shoulders of its precursors and delimits a new narrative physique and spatiality, that prompts united states of america to rethink its precursors' method of representation. Surrogates' achievement is a mode of awareness that permits us to wait awry at the science fiction genre's past, nowadays and potential future. Even more, as a poignant metanarrative and real world critique, the comic shows usa a post-capitalist condition in which the erosion of selfhood is synonymous with an erosion of the (disembodied) psyche and way, two cardinal factors of cyberpunk literature. The Surrogates confirms that, in Bukatman words, the "body is everything." Simply besides does it assert that the trunk is fading out.

Liberal Arts
Wright State Academy, Lake Campus
david.wilson@wright.edu

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Works Cited

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham: Duke Upwards, 1993.

---. Last Identity: The Virtual Subject field in Postmodern Scientific discipline Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Cook, David, and Marilouise Kroker. Panic Encyclopedia. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. "The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway." Science Fiction Studies eighteen:3 (November 1991): 387-404.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

Hayles, N. Katherine. "The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crash." Configurations five.2 (1997): 241-66.

McHale, Brian. "POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM." Storming the Reality Studio. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Human. 1951. Corte Madera: Ginko, 2002.

Stableford, Brian. "Dystopias." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.

Stelarc. "From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-Human Entities." The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Sterling, Bruce, ed. Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Album. New York: Ace, 1986.

Venditti, Robert. "Robert Venditti Talks About The Surrogates." Popular Thought. Interview with Alex Ness. <www.popthought.com/display_column.asp?DAID=742>.

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