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Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cyborg has emerged as a dominant figure in science fiction cinema. Images of this figuration have entered the popular imagination, and the celluloid cyborg has become synonymous with an understanding of contemporary life, a life that is heavily reliant upon the information technologies of our postmodern age. Scott Bukatman rather boldly states that "it is the purpose of much recent science fiction to construct a new subject-position to interface with the global realms of data circulation," and he famously calls this new subject-position "terminal identity" (8). He also goes on to argue that "[c]inematic style [has] become a part of social and gestural rhetoric, an integral part of the presentation of self in the era of terminal identity" (43).
At the least, Bukatman is suggesting that the various behaviors and etiquettes acquired by subjects of a postmodern technological society are highly influenced by cinematic portrayals. In this panoptic era, our self-presentations are not only becoming increasingly mediated by and through visualization technologies, but postmodern identities are also, somewhat literally, bound up with the performed images presented by cinema. Consequently, given that the cyborg manifestly enacts a form of subjectivity that interacts with technology on the most intimate of levels, close attention to the way in which it is enacted and performed in cinema is very important. In fact, I would argue that presentation of the celluloid cyborg necessarily highlights how aspects of performance are currently part of postmodern living. For instance, the actors involved in depicting a given cyborg can be understood, literally, as cyborg actors, their performance being so obviously enmeshed with the technological apparatus of the cinematic machine. It follows, then, that the performing cyborg may also serve to defamiliarize aspects of supposedly "naturalistic" acting and characterization in film, therefore bringing into contention questions of authenticity in both the real and reel world.
The importance of the cyborg as a provocative figuration has not been missed in academia. The cyborg is, by definition, a hybrid interconnected figuration, a figure that complicates traditional Cartesian dualisms, a figure that presents a challenge to established philosophies/models built up around conceptual divisions and used in the production of "authenticity narratives." By this I am primarily referring to narratives...