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Stylistic Abstraction and Corporeal Mapping in The Surrogates
*D. Harlan Wilson *
/ Wright State University-Lake Campus/
david.wilson@wright.edu
(c) 2006 D. Harlan Wilson.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele's The Surrogates. Issues 1-5.
Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006.
1. In the tradition of Blade Runner (1981), Akira (the early 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
five-issue serialized comic, deploys a host of traditional
postmodern science fiction motifs, themes and gadgetry as
fortification for its tech-/noir/ storyline. The main
prescriptions for the plot include a formative crime, a
protagonist who is forced to solve that crime, a gradual process
of psychological awakening that echoes the method of
crime-solving, an urban labyrinth setting, and high-tech machinery
that has gone hog-wild and produced a dystopian society.
Surrogates uses this genre recipe, harnessing the techniques of
past futurologies and narrative spaces as conceived by the
cyberpunks of the 1980s. The comic differs from its forerunners,
however, by representing a post-capitalist condition that is
defined by stylistic abstraction rather than by the stylistic
superspecificity of former conceptions. William Gibson's
novelistic version of cyberspace, 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 effects.
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
finished products. As such, he constructs an innovative mapping of
the body. In Matters of Gravity, Scott Bukatman explains:
Comics narrate the body in stories and envision the body 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 birth, a
freak of nature, or a consequence of technology run wild. The
. . . body is everything--a /corporeal/, rather than a
/cognitive/, mapping of the subject into a cultural system. (49)
Bukatman's analysis focuses on the superhero body, but his general
idea can be applied to other comics. Surrogates thus corporeally
maps the subject into a system distinguished by technological
excess and denaturalization (cyberpunk's overriding themes).
Unlike former maps, this one demonstrates an aesthetic
destylization to represent the nature of machinic desire and
selfhood. By destylization, I mean calculatedly threadbare
graphics that indicate a "mode of awareness" in the
science-fiction genre, which has consistently functioned as "a
complex hesitation about 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 illustration) how cyberpunk texts are
positively charged--not technologically ravished dystopias, but
nostalgic matrices of hope and promise gesturing in utopian
directions.
2. Set in the Backbone District of Central Georgia Metropolis in
2054, The Surrogates depicts a future where 92% of adult humans
supplant themselves with androids. In lieu of going to 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 means 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
science-fictional novelty is the maypole around 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. As a cop,
his surrogate technology protects him in the event of being
wounded or killed (he can simply get another one); at the same
time, he resents being dependent upon technology, physically and
emotionally, and wants to exist purely as a real person. This
tension is set against the main plot: Greer's hunt for the serial
killer, a surrogate named Steeplejack. Steeplejack is owned and
operated by Lionel Canter, former employee of Virtual Self
Incorporated (VSI) and inventor of surrogate technology, who is
disgruntled because he originally conceived of the surrogate "as
an elaborate prosthetic, and never supported any use of the
technology beyond that purpose. . . . He felt that the widespread
use of surrogates among adults was bad enough, but among children
. . . that was more than he could accept" (5:14). Hence Canter, in
the form of Steeplejack, assassinates the leader of a volatile
anti-surrogate faction called the Dreads, sets off an EMP weapon
of mass destruction 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 note when
Greer goes home to find that his wife, unable to bear life without
her surrogate, has overdosed on valium.
3. The idea 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 . . . brain-computer interfaces, artificial
intelligence, neurochemistry--techniques radically redefining the
nature of humanity, the nature of the self" (Sterling xiii). The
flesh is treated with Gibsonian aversion. Subjects prefer to
operate in the world as 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 Found: Possibility and Fulfillment in the Age of
the Surrogate," published at the end of Issue 1. Above all,
surrogates, which look exactly like humans, permit one to assume
different genders, races, and physicalities so as to avoid, for
instance, "gender discrimination in employer hiring practices" and
to "abolish such separatist philosophies as prejudice and
stereotyping." Mere vanity is of course also a concern. So is the
marked decrease in crime (murder is a monetary issue--users losing
their commodity-selves rather than their actual lives) and the
health benefits (one can experience the pleasure of smoking and
drinking through the vehicle of a surrogate without experiencing
detrimental health effects). Written by 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.k.a. "The Prophet," and his
constituency of Dreads), who perceive technology as an
abomination, and whose actions provide the central conflict of The
Surrogates. That said, both parties (if only unconsciously) seem
to recognize that surrogate-usage is a symptom of the imaginative
constraints placed on subjects by commodity culture and
technological proliferation. They merely attempt to spin that
symptom for their own ends. Dreads and non-Dreads alike /need/
surrogates. Without the symptom, there can be neither disease nor
cure.
4. Laslo's essay implicitly challenges the modalities of posthuman
selfhood. As N. Katherine Hayles defines the problem,
at stake in my investigation into the posthuman is the status
of embodiment. Will the body continue to be regarded as excess
baggage, or can versions of the posthuman be found that
overcome the mind/body divide? What does it mean for
embodiment that those aspects of the human most compatible
with machines are emphasized, while those not easily
integrated into this paradigm are underplayed or erased?. (246)
By itemizing the essentially Deleuzoguattarian potential of
surrogate technology, Laslo speaks to this question of embodiment.
Real bodies are residual, "excess baggage" that serves little
purpose other than to house the minds that control surrogate
bodies. Surrogate bodies, on the other hand, do not simply serve
as "fashion accessories," a state of posthumanism that invokes
Hayles's fear and loathing, but rather as a "ground of being" that
does not allow users to thrive on "unlimited power and disembodied
mortality" (266) as they do in Neuromancer and its many spinoffs,
whose protagonists crave cyberspace (and the loss of the human
body) like a drug. For protagonists like 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
one form of meat for a more dynamic and fluid form; and it is this
state of /re/-embodiment that functions as a "ground of being," in
that subjects use it not to get high but to perform/exist on the
stage of life. Surrogate bodies can take 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 altogether subsidiary to one's
machinic function. In theory, then, Surrogates possesses a utopian
mettle with a technology capable of realizing an agential
posthuman subject (à la Hayles).
5. The diegesis of the comic, however, exhibits only a latent
utopianism; agency lurks beneath the thick-skinned veneer of a
dystopian tone, characterization, atmosphere and style. According
to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, dystopias point "fearfully
at the way the world is supposedly going in order to provide
urgent propaganda for a change in direction" (360). Surrogates
resists being polemical, leaving readers uncertain as to the
ethics of its technology. Venditti himself says he wanted to leave
the comic morally and ideologically ambiguous on this point:
Whether The Surrogates is about the positive or negative
aspects of technology's rapid growth is a question for each
individual reader. Personally, I don't know where the line is
drawn between 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 up to the reader to decide
which group is more sympathetic. (Pop Thought)
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 most repressive in history, evoking
sublime terror and sublime euphoria in equal measures" (4). Such a
schized condition is a prerequisite for post-capitalist life, a
life that, in The Surrogates, people enact by literally
reinventing themselves in the form of the commodity (surrogates
are retail merchandise). This form of the commodification has been
explored by Marshall McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride (1951), a
study of "industrial man" and the way subjectivity is remastered
by the symbolic economy of corporate advertisements. Surrogates
reinvigorates this concept, exhibiting a categorical fluidity made
possible by the commodification of the body. This differs from
customary cyberpunk, whose fluidity is contingent on bodily
disconnection, whereas here the body is foregrounded.
Characterized by what Stelarc identifies as "anaesthetized
bodies," "VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) entities" and
"fractal flesh," surrogate fluidities manifest as seemingly
agential phenomena. Surrogate technology "pacifies the body and
the world" and "disconnects the body from many of its functions"
(Stelarc 567), but in so doing it invites bodies to become chronic
dissemblers, slipping in and out of whatever race, gender, or
occupation one likes. The effect of the technology is, again, a
healthy actualization of Deleuzoguattarian flows. And yet,
ironically, all this is linked to capital--the less money a body
possesses, the less fluid and more static it must inevitably be.
That is the fate of the post-capitalist subject: 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 system of desire and ethics it aspires to transcend.
Their agenda, in other words, becomes a post-capitalist phenomenon
that can only be successfully applied and fulfilled if it
successfully fails.
6. There are two dominant visions of post-capitalism. Some associate
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's The Wild Shore [1995], and the Planet of the Apes
films). Here the post-capitalist is the post-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 technology. This
fusion resonates in the post-capitalist future as shown by
Venditti and Weldele as well as by their neocyberpunk precursors,
especially the movement's two paradigmatic texts, Ridley Scott's
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
post-capitalist literature and film, who usually focus on dynamism
of prose and on special effects. Venditti's protagonist is a
desensitized subject whose quest to unmask Steeplejack mirrors a
quest to unmask his own identity and to resensitize himself. While
lacking rock star-machismo in virtually every way, 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 also belongs to cyberpunk,
which, in its most effective guises, has always flaunted a
hardboiled noir sensibility and aesthetic. In this way the comic
exploits the mechanisms of its antecedents.
7. One crucial 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 constructed 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's authoritative Mirrorshades: A
Cyberpunk Anthology [1986]). In cinematic and comic strip form, it
manifests a crispness of imagery, vibrancy of color, and manic
deployment of special effects, usually CGI (recent instances
include Ultraviolet [2006], the Korean Natural City [2006], and
Natural City [2003, 2005]). Surrogates opposes these forms of
representation. Weldele's illustrations are abstract, obscure,
shadowcast. Use of color is limited primarily to dull 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's
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
television script, and VSI advertisements). But in terms of the
action that unfolds on its storyboard, the comic rejects detail
and intricacy. At the same time, it is carefully
constructed--clearly a conscious act of rejection on the part of
Weldele.
8. What, then, does such an abstraction of style, an exercise in
minimalist aesthetics, indicate about the state of twenty-first
century electronically enhanced society? Neocyberpunk has always
functioned as technosocial critique, and The Surrogates is no
exception. Most of all, it indicates a full-fledged exhaustion of
the real and dissolution of the self brought on by media
technologies, which have surrogated existence. The comic defines a
panic culture, 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 TV audience as a chilled superconductor, of the
stock market crash as a Paris Commune of all the programmed
supercomputers, of money as an electric impulse fibrillating
across the world" (Kroker 14). In short, the body, identity,
existence itself are devoured by the commodified image. This
dynamic is particularly visible when comparing the VSI ads with
the comic's storyboard. Sporting the catch phrase "Life . . . Only
Better," the ads feature photographs of real people (that is, real
models) whose purpose is to lure the fictional characters of the
comic into purchasing androids (fake people) to replace
themselves. The levels of representation here fall into the realm
of Baudrillardian simulacra and suggest that the (science)
fictional is more real than the real, if only insofar as desire
determines perception and thus reality. The business of the
post-capitalist advertisement, after all, is to convince consumers
that, with the aid of a given commodity, they will become
superhuman, which is to say science-fictional, as in Nike
commercials featuring Just-Do-Iters who, thanks to their shoes,
can leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Surrogates'
visually destylized corporeal map shows how this process of
commodification has weathered the contours of body, perception,
and consequently desire. 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's cyberspace recast the new "terrain of digital
information processing in the familiar terms of a sprawling
yet concentrated American urbanism, the sublime becomes a
means of looking backward in order to recognize what's up ahead.
But there's something else going on. The sublime not only
points back toward a historical past; it 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 only leads--/back? forward?/--to a renewed and
newly strengthened experience 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 present of their
respective futuristic accounts as well as to the technocapitalist
world we live in. The technological sublime is reified by the
novel manner in which cyberpunk signifies past science fiction
tropes and themes to represent its imagined presents. This
retroaction includes 1980s cyberpunk and their 1990s and
twenty-first 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 body 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 condition, conventional cyberpunk becomes a source of great
positive potential from which Hayles's agential posthuman might
emerge. Where once the posthuman was, while degraded, sharply
defined and capable, in The Surrogates it is ill-defined and burnt
out. Here the technological sublime does not entail a loss of self
that leads to a "strengthened experience of self." Instead it
leads to an /eroded/ experience of self. 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, then, is a /new neocyberpunk/ that both
stands on the shoulders of its precursors and delimits a new
narrative physique and spatiality, that prompts us to rethink its
precursors' method of representation. Surrogates' achievement is a
mode of awareness that permits us to look awry at the science
fiction genre's past, present and potential future. Even more, as
a poignant metanarrative and real world critique, the comic shows
us a post-capitalist condition in which the erosion of selfhood is
synonymous with an erosion of the (disembodied) psyche and style,
two key factors of cyberpunk literature. The Surrogates confirms
that, in Bukatman words, the "body is everything." But likewise
does it assert that the body is fading out.
/ Liberal Arts
Wright State University, 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 UP, 1993.
---. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
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 18:3 (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 5.2
(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
Man. 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 Anthology. New
York: Ace, 1986.
Venditti, Robert. "Robert Venditti Talks About The Surrogates."
Pop Thought. Interview with Alex Ness.
.