Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture

E. King

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137338754
• eBook ISBN: 9781137338761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

Fictional narratives produced in Latin America often borrow tropes from contemporary science fiction to examine the shifts in the nature of power in neoliberal society. King examines how this leads towards a market-governed control society and also explores new models of agency beyond that of the individual.

1

ESPIRITISMO DIGITAL IN CYBERFICTION FROM BRAZIL

A particularly striking dimension of the novels referred to by de Sousa Causo and Ginway as Tupinipunk, is their blend of neoliberal fantasies of disembodiment with concepts of immaterial, spiritual bodies proposed by the espiritista sciences during the late nineteenth century in Brazil. The description of the cyborg bodies in the novels and short stories evokes the imagery of the electromagnetic body, the body understood in terms of electromagnetic flows. In one respect, this is a return to a tradition within science fiction (or, the fictional writing that critics such as de Sousa Causo and Haywood Ferreira have “retro-labeled” science fiction) that is as old as the history and prehistory of the genre in Brazil. Some of the first novels that can be usefully viewed in terms of early science fiction, including Brazil 2000 (1869) by Joaquim Felício dos Santos and O doutor Benignus (1875) by Augusto Emílio Zaluar, discuss ideas from magnetism and spiritism. De Sousa Causo, borrowing Roberto Schwarz’s formulation, argues that the strong presence of espiritismo in these texts, although heavily influenced by the writings of the French spiritist and science fiction author Camille Flammarion, points to the fact that the scientific ideas that drive the genre were “out of place” in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and that science and technology had little relevance for authors such as Zaluar.¹ Haywood Ferreira, meanwhile, argues that the dominant role played by the spirit sciences in these texts is evidence of a wider tension between religious and scientific worldviews. This tension resolved itself temporarily through adherence to espiritismo and it’s belief that the existence of the spirit world can be empirically verified with all the rigor of the latest scientific procedures.

However, the references to espiritismo in the Tupinipunk texts are made by way of the cyberpunk subgenre. As a result they set up two fantasies of disembodiment in confrontation: espiritista disembodiment and digital/informational disembodiment. The novels and short stories enthusiastically embrace one of the defining characteristics associated with the cyberpunk genre, namely, the embedding of digital technologies within New Age spiritualist philosophies and practices. Popular religions constitute a strong presence in Gibson’s foundational cyberpunk texts. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, for instance, one character describes how the first-generation of hackers to engage with the “datasphere” referred to in the novel as the matrix practice voodoo as a way of assuaging anxieties brought on by the digital sublime. When Artificial Intelligences start to emerge out of the informational complexity of the matrix, for instance, hackers begin to think of them as voodoo spirits or “loa.”² The language of voodoo is used as part of a strategy of containment in the face of the vertiginous deterritorialization of the information age. In the Tupinipunk texts, the flourishing of espiritismo in the nineteenth century is presented simultaneously as a mode of affective capture for positivist theories that were being adopted at the time as a national ideology, and as an expression of an affective excess that exceeds this capture. Similarly, New Ageism is presented simultaneously as indicative of market-driven biopolitical control of the body and a phenomenon that gives expression to what, in Beasley-Murray’s words, neoliberalism discards “as an opaque, irrational, and unrepresentable obstacle to its reductive mechanisms of rational calculability,” that is to say, affect.³

The paradox of this logic of disembodiment is that it does not entail discarding the body altogether but intervening in its processes to an unprecedented degree. The passage from national discipline to transnational control is characterized by an intensification of both the biopolitical interventions into the social body (now diffuse and increasingly global) and the disciplining of individual bodies that took place during the disciplinary era. As the spaces of enclosure described by Foucault are dismantled, discipline becomes evermore immanent to each individual body while nation-states cede control over the biopolitical management of populations to the market. The cumulative effect is not the production of normative citizens to participate in a hierarchical national society but consumers equipped for the flexibility of the market. The body in the control society becomes as flexible as the market logic that governs it. In El hombre postorgánico, Paula Sibilia uses Deleuze’s notion of the control society to trace the shifting conceptions about the body as the market becomes the guiding force behind biopolitical intervention. Driven by the market,

los tentáculos del biopoder amplían y traspasan las instituciones y áreas antes específicas para extenderse por todos los espacios, todos los tiempos, todas las vidas, durante toda la vida.⁴

the tentacles of biopower extend and exceed previously limited areas and institutions to pervade all spaces, times, and lives.

Sibilia characterizes the shift that has taken place in the conception of the body from discipline to control in terms of digitalization, or “the logic of universal digitalization.”⁵ According to Sibilia, due to increasing knowledge about genetic information, bodies in the control society “are thought of as systems for the processing of information, codes, encrypted profiles, and databases.”⁶ Through increased medical supervision and proliferation of diets encouraged by the mass media, the body becomes integrated directly into the cyclical rhythms of the market. Consequently, the body seems to have lost its consistency (“analogical solidity”): “in the digital realm it [the body] becomes permeable, projectable, programmable.”⁷ The possibility for the eruption of the “opaque, irrational, and unrepresentable obstacle” of affect is reduced to almost zero.

The concern with transcending the human body through digital technologies, one of the defining characteristics of the “cyberpunk” subgenre, has been widely interpreted as staging this logic of disembodiment. As Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould point out, in its privileging of information over materiality, the cyberpunk preoccupation with body transcendence “crystallizes” the fantasy of immaterialization upon which the operation of capital depends in the form of the abstraction of capital from labor.⁸ In the novels of William Gibson, the hacker characters routinely “jack into” the matrix using their cyberspace terminals and, in the process, leave their bodies behind to merge with the databanks of multinational corporations. The protagonist of Neuromancer has nothing but scorn for his physical body (which he refers to dismissively as “meat”) and considers the immaterial realm of cyberspace to be the real locus of life. In this, the cyberpunk subgenre provides the perfect analogy for the shift from national discipline to postnational, market-driven control. The cyberpunk fantasy of body transcendence restages, in the transnational realm of control, the logic of disembodiment contained within the social contract theory of the liberal political tradition. In the liberal contract, the citizen transfers power to the sovereign state in a process of transcendence of the individual body. The individual leaves behind his individual body to merge with the social body of the public sphere, which is guaranteed by the sovereign state. In cyberpunk, by contrast, the power of the individual is transferred to the market. This shift from liberal transcendence to a form of market transcendence is highlighted in the cyberpunk novels by the fact that the immaterial realm into which the individual protagonists merge is the amalgamation of databanks belonging to multinational corporations. In the world of cyberpunk, the multinational corporation has replaced the nation-state as the center of political power, and the product of this transcendence is no longer the citizen but the consumer.

Various cyberculture critics have thought through the connection between New Age spiritualism and the fantasy of disembodiment in US cyberculture of the 1980s. Erik Davis, for instance, has identified a line of continuity between the relationship to the body in New Age spirituality and the ethos of high-tech computer culture. In TechGnosis, Davis contends that “in many ways, freak spirituality [here he is referring to the psychedelic spirituality of early cyberculture pioneers such as Timothy Leary] simply reproduced industrial society’s belief in quick-fix technological solutions.”⁹ Similarly, in his discussion of “postmodern religion,” Bauman describes New Ageism as an agent of the increased individualization that characterizes postmodern society. New Ageism, for Bauman, is a form of what he calls (using Anthony Giddens’s term) “life politics” in which the subject, stripped of any real political agency and unable to connect his or her experience up to that of the wider social field, is reduced to maintaining an illusion of agency through the exercise of market-driven lifestyle choices. Bauman goes on to describe the attention paid to the body by New Ageism as market-driven discipline, a form of training for consumer bodies. He draws particular attention to the technologization of the mystical trope of body transcendence. For Bauman, postmodern culture has uncoupled the “peak experience” of body transcendence from religious concerns and “privatized it”:

The “whole experience” of revelation, ecstasy, breaking the boundaries of the self and total transcendence—once the privilege of the select “aristocracy of culture” (saints, hermits, mystics, [etc.])— . . . has been put by postmodern culture within every individual’s reach, recast as a realistic target and plausible prospect of each individual’s self-training and relocated as the product of a life devoted to the art of consumption and self-indulgence.¹⁰

The role of self-help discourse and New Age culture is to train the body to be more receptive to these peak experiences and develop “skills of self-abandonment and passive submission to the flow of sensations.”¹¹ Bauman goes on to claim that

the axiom which underpins all such movements is that experiencing, like all other human faculties, is above all a technical problem, and that acquiring the capacity for it is a matter of mastering the appropriate technique.¹²

Bauman’s account echoes that of Davis in his emphasis on how the body is conceived of as technology, in keeping with the technological ideology of neoliberalism. This attention to the body is really part of the neoliberal logic of disembodiment, since it teaches the body the essential skills for survival as a consumer-subject of the control society: flexibility and openness to the new sensations that drive consumer cycles of discovery and obsolescence.

Ginway’s analysis of the Tupinipink novels focuses on the way the texts subvert or undermine this capitalist logic of disembodiment that has been intensified under neoliberalism and staged through the cyberpunk trope of body transcendence. Ginway claims that the body functions as a “site of resistance” within the novels and that the authors insist on the materiality that has been disavowed in the neoliberal logic of immaterialization. Whereas Gibson’s hackers spend a good deal of their time merged with flows of information in the matrix, Fawcett’s electricians are confined to the dirty and dangerous streets of Rio de Janeiro. Whereas US cyberpunk treats the body as meat to be discarded in favor of the freedom of disembodiment, the Tupinipunk novels and short stories celebrate corporeality through lurid descriptions of sex and violence. Ginway interprets the treatment of the body in the Tupinipunk texts as a symptom of a crisis of the social contract between “o povo e seu governo” that erupted during the period of abertura as dictatorship merged into democracy. She locates a key difference between the Brazilian texts and their US models in the treatment of the figure of the technological implant. Whereas the implantation of technology into the body is usually presented as a pleasurable experience in US cyberpunk, in the Brazilian texts it is presented as a violent “invasion.” This sense of violation, Ginway claims, is symptomatic of anxieties experienced during the period of the abertura, when the corporatist vision of the nation (inherited from the Estado Novo) was dismantled and opened up to the market:

Apesar da abertura política, havia certo sentido de abandono por parte do público que esperava recuperar o patrimônio político absorvido pela ditadura. Sem apoio governamental, a população se sentia exposta e vulnerável às forças econômicas globais.¹³

Despite the political “opening,” there was a certain sense of abandonment on the part of the public that was hoping to recuperate the political heritage co-opted by the dictatorship. Without governmental support, the population felt exposed and vulnerable to global economic forces.

The dismantling of the social body, according to Ginway’s reading, is experienced as a crisis, and this crisis is transferred onto the violated cyborg bodies of the protagonists. While I agree with Ginway in reading the treatment of the body in these texts as symptomatic of the social and political shifts that took place during the period of abertura, I argue that the role of the digital body in these texts is more complex and conflictive. While Sirkis’s novel can usefully be read as an attempt to reterritorialize these global flows through a renewal of national discourses of the body, Fawcett often embraces these deterritorializing movements and pushes them further than the US cyberpunk texts.

Brazilian critics have largely dismissed the notable presence of mysticism in the cultural production of the postdictatorship era in Brazil as symptomatic of apolitical postmodernism and a form of collusion with neoliberal consumer culture. In his analysis of the culture industry in Brazil, Renato Ortiz, for instance, echoes Bauman in this condemnation of New Ageism as an adolescent form of Romantic rebellion against rationalism:

Enfase no sujeito “alienado,” que busca na droga, no misticismo ou na psicanálise, a forma de expressar sua individualidade; desarticulação do discurso, reificação da linguagem, o que equivale a uma desvalorização do conhecimento racional; recusa em se encarar o elemento político.¹⁴

Emphasis on the “alienated” individual, who in drugs, mysticism, and psychoanalysis, searches for forms with which to express individuality; the disarticulation of discourse, reification of language, which amounts to a de-valorization of rational knowledge; a refusal to think politically.

Meanwhile, Pedro Alexandre Sanches, in a suggestive aside from his discussion of Tropicália and postmodernism, argues that the mysticization of technology is a specifically Third World phenomenon that is reinforced in Brazil due to the country’s long tradition of popular religions:

Por estranho que pareça, não poderíam os tempos ultramodernos que correm ocultar, com toda sua purpurina e com todo seu aparato pantecnólogico, uma estructura perversa de atraso e de obscurantismo, de um neomedievalismo que nos remetesse de volta a treva medieval?¹⁵

As strange as it seems, these ultramodern times cannot conceal, with all their gloss of pervasive technology, a perverse structure of backwardness and obscurantism, a neo-medievalism that seems to be stuck in the dark ages.

This mysticism, Sanches goes on to argue, is a symptom of underdevelopment and indicative of the irredeemable apoliticism of Brazilian postmodernism after the brief glory of Tropicália. He goes on to dismiss high-tech mysticism as the “brutalização completa de uma sociedade tão gloriosamente cibernética quanto trágicamente subdesenvolvida”¹⁶ [“Complete brutalization of a society that is as gloriously cybernetic as it is tragically underdeveloped”].

However, the relationship between New Age spiritual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Espiritismo Digital in Cyberfiction from Brazil
• 2 Race and the Digital Body
• 3 Cruz diablo: Cyberspace as Frontier
• 4 Distributed Agency in Marcelo Cohen’s Casa de Ottro
• 5 Memory and Affective Technologies in the Argentine Comic Book Series Cybersix
• 6 Prosthetic Memory and the Disruption of Affective Control in the Graphic Fiction of Lourenço Mutarelli
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index