D. Harlan Wilson

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

 

Review of: Venditti, Robert, and Brett Weldele’s The Surrogates. Issues 1-5. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. <www.popthought.com/display_column.asp?DAID=742>.