Further ruminations on the paradoxes of playing with toys

[niveau]

The Japanese anime film Ghost In The Shell II (hereafter GS2) furnishes us with an excellent cultural example of the way in which the technological supplementation and augmentation of the human body by patented technologies returns the definitions of humanity and technology to the question of their foundation, their presentation in being. The plot of GS2 is a series of life-like geisha robotic dolls endowed with the imprint of subjectivity (the opaque kernel of humanness that the film calls a ‘ghost’) have begun to murder their owners and the (mostly) human counter-terrorist operative Togusa with his cyborg partner Batô take over the investigation from the local police. Like Togusa’s partner Batô, many characters in GS2 are cybernetically enhanced. The cameo appearance by cyber-feminism theorist Donna Haraway as an at once human and cybernetic medical officer provides an especially instructive moment in the film. During a lab scene early in the film Haraway asks Togusa and Batô whether a child is as fully human as an adult. Using the example of a young girl playing with dolls Haraway comically interrogates the detectives about the meaning of the action: obviously the doll is not a real child, yet it cannot be conclusively stated that the girl-child is nursing the toy in preparation for having a child of her own because the toy is a doll and clearly not an infant. The doll the girl plays with presents itself in the immediacy of the example but the link between the doll and an infant is far more tenuous because not only is the infant yet to exist but if the doll actually was a substitute for the infant then this means that supplementation precedes presence. Or to rephrase the conclusion of this example in a philosophical light: it is predestined that all which appears to be has already been, and simultaneously that all which is cannot be what it appears to be.

I think I even did my head in with that one...
~Niveau