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SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 33, number 3, 2018: 88-110
The transition to a bio-engineered world: Johnny Mnemonic
and Westworld
Bert Olivier
University of the Free State
E-mail: OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za
The present paper addresses the theme of transition, not in stylistic terms, but by focusing on the
signicance of the genre of science ction as adumbrating, as well as informing, a different kind
of transition. Specically, by analysing two science-ctional cinematic works – one a television
series and the other a lm – it poses the question of the probability that one is currently witnessing a
global transition to a world where bio-technologically transgured beings will be nothing out of the
ordinary. Furthermore, if ctional projections of the current state of bio-engineering in a consumer
economy is anything to go by, such bio-technological production is likely to be accompanied by
cynical manipulation of people’s, specically wealthy consumers’, (lack of) moral sensibility for the
sake of corporate prots. The paper rst focuses on the work of Estonian artist Katja Novitskova,
where one encounters alarming images embodying the effects of biometric data-collection and
their application through bio-engineering to human and other animal bodies. The lm based on
William Gibson’s short story, Johnny Mnemonic, is examined in Rancièrian terms with a view to
demonstrating what possibilities await one in the not-too-distant future in the form of bio- and neuro-
engineered capabilities inserted into human bodies, effectively turning them into cyborgs (cybernetic
organisms). This projected scenario is further worked out in horrifying detail in the television series,
Westworld, where the notion of a theme park of the future is placed in the context of betting on, and
proting from, the likelihood that people would shed their moral scruples if offered the chance of
letting their latent aggressiveness (Freud’s death drive) run rampant to the point of raping and killing
‘perfect’, bio-engineered, human simulacra in the guise of ‘hosts/hostesses’.
Key words: bio-technology, cinema, Rancière, science ction, transition
Die oorgang na ‘n bio-tegnologiese wêreld: Johnny Mnemonic en Westworld
Hierdie artikel fokus op die tema van oorgang; nie in stilistiese terme nie, maar deur te konsentreer
op die wyse waarop die genre van wetenskapksie ‘n ander soort oorgang voorafskadu asook
beïnvloed. Meer in die besonder, deur twee wetenskapksie-rolprente (waarvan een ‘n televisiereeks
is) te ontleed, stel dit die vraag van die waarskynlikheid dat ‘n mens vandag getuie is van ‘n globale
oorgang na ‘n wêreld waar bio-tegnologies getransformeerde wesens niks buitengewoon sal wees
nie. Bowendien, indien ksionele projeksies van die huidige stand van bio-ingenieurswese in ‘n
verbruikersekonomie ernstig opgeneem word, sal sodanige bio-tegnologiese produksie waarskynlik
ter wille van korporatiewe wins gepaardgaan met die siniese manipulering van mense (veral
welgestelde verbruikers) se (gebrek aan) ‘n morele bewussyn. Die artikel fokus eers op die werk
van Estoniese kunstenaar Katja Novitskova, waar ‘n mens ontstellende beelde van die uitwerking
van biometriese data-versameling en hul bio-tegnologiese aanwending op menslike en ander
dierlike liggame aantref. Die rolprent wat op William Gibson se kortverhaal, Johnny Mnemonic,
gebaseer is, word vervolgens in Rancièriaanse terme ondersoek met die doel om te demonstreer
watter bio- en neuro-tegnologiese kapasiteite vir menslike liggame ‘n mens in die (moontlik nabye)
toekoms te wagte kan wees, wat hulle effektief in ‘cyborgs’ (kubernetiese organismes) sou verander.
Hierdie geprojekteerde toekomsvisie word verder uitgewerk in skrikwekkende besonderhede in die
televisiereeks, Westworld, waar die idee van ‘n ‘pretpark’ van die toekoms verbind word met die
geleentheid om wins te maak uit die waarskynlikheid dat mense hul morele bedenkinge oorboord
sou gooi indien hulle die kans gegun word om ten volle uiting te gee aan hul latente aggressiwiteit
(die Freudiaanse doodsdrif) – in so ‘n mate dat hulle nie sou skroom om ‘volmaakte’, bio-tegnologies
ontwerpte menslike ‘simulacra’ (nabootsings) in die gewaad van ‘gashere’ en ‘gasvroue’ te verkrag
en selfs te vermoor nie.
Sleutelwoorde: bio-tegnologie, rolprente, Rancière, wetenskapksie, oorgang
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The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in the
interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears (Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks).
…there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and
labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward
the operations of childbearing—but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do
not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming
itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the ofng, only under the species
of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity (Jacques Derrida:
Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences).
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (William
Butler Yeats: The Second Coming).
It has been more than 20 years since the world woke up to the news that a female sheep had
been cloned from an adult – instead of an embryonic – cell, which is what made her, the ewe
subsequently called Dolly (The University of Edinburgh 2016), so special. Symptomatically
speaking, this event inaugurated a new era, which might be called the ‘age of genetic, bio-,
and neuro-engineering’. And recently Chinese scientists announced that they had successfully
cloned two monkeys (Perry 2018), the rst such primates to be cloned in a similar, but more
advanced manner than that used to produce Dolly. Monkeys are, genetically speaking, primate
cousins of humans, hence it seems safe to say that it is only a matter of time before a human will
be reproduced through cloning.
Against this backdrop, and judging by a number of related phenomena, the world is at
present caught in a transition to what will be a very different world of the future; that is, if the
looming ecological crisis does not abruptly end the unfolding transition through unpredictable,
‘extreme climate events’ (Klein 2014; Lovelock 2010). This transition, signs of which are
reected, and refracted, in the arts – as I shall be showing below – is rooted in the information
revolution described, documented and critiqued by various authors (see Lyotard 1984a; Castells
2010; Hardt and Negri 2001; and Stiegler 2015, for example), and which is being applied to
the realm of living things, in the shape of what is known collectively as bio-technology. The
technological revolution described by Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (2010: 355-
499), reaching back to the invention of radio, then (later) television and eventually the internet,
has revolutionised contemporary societies, and is still doing so at every level, most fundamentally
in terms of a novel experience of time and space, which is socially (including technologically)
‘produced’, and which Castells calls “timeless time” (given the technological tendency to
overcome all time constraints through, for instance, instantaneous nancial transactions in global
space across the world) and “the space of ows” (which has transformed space into various
‘ows’, electronic and otherwise, along rhizomatic networks). These contrast with traditional
experiences of time and space, namely ‘sequential time’ and the ‘space of place(s)’, which are
still experienced by people, but have become subordinated to these currently dominant forms of
time and space. What Castells (2010: 403-404) calls the “culture of real virtuality” has become
hegemonic, with consumers today attaching more ontological value to what they encounter
online – in ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtual reality’ (part of ‘the space of ows’) – than in the ‘space of
places’, which they inhabit in physical form most of the time.
Most conspicuous in Castells’s work is his use of the metaphor, ‘the network society’,
which aptly captures the basic structure of virtually every level of social and cultural activity
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today – everywhere we look, we encounter networks: communication networks, nancial
networks, social media site-networks, criminal networks, transport networks in the air and
on roads. Furthermore, these networks, which are structurally decentralised compared to the
centralised structure of the typical modern city (for example), have had the effect of giving rise
to a new spatial conguration of cities (what Castells calls “mega-cities”), themselves situated
in sprawling “metropolitan regions”, with the cities being the major, decentralised, “nodal”
points fullling different functions (of comparatively diverse importance) in the networks that
intersect in them, and served by various components of the “space of ows” (Castells 2010: 434-
440). He provides the following retrospective summary of the relevance of ‘networks’, which
simultaneously illustrates (as will be seen below) its pertinence to the world conjured up by the
work of William Gibson (2010: 501-502):
The inclusion/exclusion in networks, and the architecture of relationships between networks,
enacted by light-speed-operating information technologies, congure dominant processes and
functions in our societies. Networks are open structures, able to expand without limits, integrating
new nodes as long as they are able to communicate within the network, namely as long as they
share the same communication codes (for example, values or performance goals). A network-based
social structure is a highly dynamic, open system, susceptible to innovating without threatening
its balance. Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation,
globalization, and decentralized concentration; for work, workers, and rms based on exibility and
adaptability; for a culture of endless deconstruction and reconstruction; for a polity geared toward
the instant processing of new values and public moods; and for a social organization aiming at the
supersession of space and the annihilation of time. Yet the network morphology is also a source of
dramatic reorganization of power relationships. Switches connecting the networks (for example,
nancial ows taking control of media empires that inuence political processes) are the privileged
instruments of power. Thus, the switchers are the power-holders. Since networks are multiple, the
inter-operating codes and switches between networks become the fundamental sources in shaping,
guiding, and misguiding societies. The convergence of social evolution and information technologies
has created a new material basis for the performance of activities throughout the social structure. This
material basis, built in networks, earmarks dominant social processes, thus shaping social structure
itself.
What Castells summarises so succinctly here must be kept in mind in the course of the
interpretations, below, of two cinematic works, which can both be understood as imaginative
futuristic projections of the likely direction into which the ‘network society’ may develop.
In fact, considering the evidence that bio-engineering (which is unthinkable without the
information revolution described by Castells and others) is already being practiced – witness
Katja Novitskova’s work, as well as UNESCO’s declaration on Human Genetic Data, both
discussed below – the speculative science-ctional character of both cinematic works does not
appear far-fetched at all (one easily forgets that ‘speculate’ is etymologically related to the Latin
for ‘mirror’ and ‘look’).
To be more specic regarding the transition to a society pervasively structured by bio- and
neuro-engineering, and indications that an accelerating process is currently underway, it is one
of recording, modelling and processing of data pertaining to human beings as well as other living
species, and on a virtually unimaginable scale. This has been made possible by bio-technologies
which may seem as if they represent the incipient development of the futuristic bio-engineering
that was imagined by William Gibson (1995) in his science ction novel, Neuromancer. Such
bio-engineering has the potential of transforming all life as we know it in spectacular, but not
necessarily benecial, ways, because it entails the dubious practice of tampering with our (and
other creatures’) natural endowments either by way of enhancing them (which is not necessarily
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a ‘good’ thing) or distorting or limiting them. A brief discussion of Neuromancer will clarify
what this means (see also Olivier 2013 and 2016a).
Case, the noir-hero of Neuromancer, is depicted as someone who used to be exceptionally
gifted as a web-‘cowboy’ (that is, hacker), until he made the mistake of using this gift to steal
from his employers, who did not hesitate to have damage inicted on him neuro-cortically
at one of the many illegal ‘medical’ (that is, bio-technological) clinics competing for clients.
Luckily for Case, he is canvassed by prospective new employers who are willing to have the
neuro-damage reversed at another clinic. His new partner-in-crime is Molly Millions, a futuristic
‘razor girl’ who has been bio-neurally enhanced to the point where her reexes are superhuman
by any standards, and is therefore a redoubtable opponent in any ght. Together they are tasked
to accomplish the penetration of virtually invulnerable digital defences to pull off the job of
the millennium: stealing a code that would make two superhuman AIs (Wintermute and the
eponymous Neuromancer) merge into an articial intelligence of sublimely unimaginable
proportions.
Not only were the terms ‘cyberspace’ and the ‘matrix’ employed by Gibson (probably
for the rst time ever) in this novel, but his imaginative exploration of the manner in which
bio-technology could alter the human body may have read like unlikely sci- stuff in 1984,
when the novel was published. In the world of Chiba, Japan, and The Sprawl (present-day New
York, which here reects the characteristics of Castells’s decentralised, sprawling ‘metropolitan
areas’), neural ‘souping up’ (or, in Case’s case, neural impairment), as well as cloning, hormone
treatment, organ replacement and enhancement, are commonplace in medical clinics (legal
and illegal), which vie with one another for clients. Judging by current developments in the
eld of the bio- and neural sciences – and particularly in that of the bio-technology leaning
on these as well as information sciences – Gibson’s prescient vision of a future where ‘nature’
is increasingly unrecognisable as such, is in the process of being actualised, albeit ‘under the
radar’. Gibson published the short story, Johnny Mnemonic (1981; anthologised in 1986), before
Neuromancer, and unlike the latter – which is slated to be lmed soon, at last (Cleveland.com
2017) – the former appeared as a feature lm (Longo 1995), with a screenplay by Gibson. I shall
discuss it (as well as the television series, Westworld) below as a cinematic instantiation of lm
art projecting a bio-engineered ‘cyborg’ (cyber-organic) world towards which the present one is
transitioning.
Exposing bio-industries’ ambitions: Katja Novitskova’s art
This is artistically and visually conrmed in the Estonian exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale
(see Russeth 2017 and Janke 2017). It is by the internationally recognised Estonian artist Katja
Novitskova, and is appropriately titled “If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes”,
which is a tting quotation from Ridley Scott’s classic sci- neo-noir Blade Runner (1982),
where one of the bio-technologically created ‘replicants’, Roy, says this to the bio-technologist
who created his eyes for the Tyrrell company. The reason why the exhibition title is so tting, is
because it captures the wished-for results of the present, burgeoning bio-technologies so aptly:
their implicit goal is nothing less than the replication (recall the ‘replicants’ of Scott’s lm)
and enhancement of nature in all her diversity – the ‘replicants’ were constructed to be able
to perform tasks in outer space that the ‘natural’ human body is not equipped to carry out.
Novitskova’s exhibition sets out to expose this kind of techno-transformation critically in a
series of vividly disturbing images, ranging from laboratory ‘worms’ and what appears to be a
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variety of embryonic beings, to what is probably the paradigmatic image on display, namely a
leopard whose eyes burn red with an unearthly electronic light – the dubious promise of fusing
the natural and the articial bio-technologically (probably for military purposes). One might
wonder what this has to do with the kind of bio-technological manipulation and enhancement
thematised in Johnny Mnemonic, Neuromancer and Blade Runner. The pamphlet (e-ux 2017)
made available at Novitskova’s exhibition explains it well:
If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes addresses the relationship between the domain
of seeing, big data-driven industries, and ecology in times of biotic crisis.
Currently, vast aspects of human and nonhuman lives are being registered and modeled on an
environmental scale. Collection and processing of data has become a tool used to map all possible
surfaces, moments and spectra on Earth and beyond – from faces to biological cell walls to dust on
Mars.
This is performed by human, and increasingly, robotic agents, and is directed at people, both wild and
captured creatures, and nonliving processes. Seeing has become an expanding extractive industry.
In the process new visual languages, commodities and life forms are being generated reecting back
to us our often violent entanglement with the world: patterns of embryonic development in mutated
lab-test worms, live-streamed ows of CO2 gas across the planet, or a group of near-extinct animals
passing by a tree and noticing the tracking camera.
Katja Novitskova works from new forms of imagery taken from the realm of present day visual
representation. This exhibition explores this radical new articulation of the role of the image, and
how constant planetary scale mediation gains an ecological dimension.
In other words, Novitskova uncovers the seldom noticed bio- and neuro-technological processes
that depend on information-gathering and that are incrementally alienating humans from what
is (was?) their life-world, by mapping and potentially (if not actually) altering their neural
composition through various forms of mapping and interference, concomitantly carrying out
the same task with regard to other beings. On the one hand, one might argue that this is part
of what is referred to as the emergence of the ‘posthuman’. Contrary to what the term might
suggest, this is not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing, given its rejection of modern ‘anthropocentric
humanism’ (Braidotti 2013; Olivier 2016), which brought with it untold calamities in the shape
of the technological domination of nature, demonstrating instead that humans are not the ‘crown
of creation’ – as previously assumed – but merely one species among many other intelligent
beings, natural and articial. So far so good. But the other, in my assessment ‘less good’ side of
posthumanism, which I would prefer to label ‘transhumanism’ (Olivier 2018), consists partly in
attempts, on the part of individuals (such as body-tech artist Stelarc; Dayal 2012), to transcend
human embodiment technologically. On the other hand, it is partly perceptible in the capitalist
hijacking of bio-technical research for purposes of prot and control by corporations, no less
than in the anthropocentric era, concomitantly transforming natural entities in a truly frightening
and alienating manner. An ostensibly innocuous example of this is the growth of the biometrics
industry, with its frightening potential of extensive control of people, even if this is touted as
‘Futureville’, where everything will be made ‘easy’ and ‘comfortable’ for (please note) paying
consumers (see CNN 2018: ‘You are your password’; for an exposé of the way this attempt at
the eradication of human needs undermines that which makes us human, namely ‘striving’ for
something we do not, and cannot ever completely, have, see Germain 2017).
There is already an awareness of what is at stake with these far-reaching bio-technological
developments. This much is clear from what is called the International Declaration on Human
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Genetic Data, by Unesco, of 2003. Under the ‘General Provisions … Aims and Scope’ of this
declaration it is stated (very signicantly, in light of what I am arguing here), that:
(a) The aims of this Declaration are: to ensure the respect of human dignity and protection of human
rights and fundamental freedoms in the collection, processing, use and storage of human genetic
data, human proteomic data and of the biological samples from which they are derived, referred
to hereinafter as ‘biological samples’, in keeping with the requirements of equality, justice and
solidarity, while giving due consideration to freedom of thought and expression, including freedom
of research; to set out the principles which should guide States in the formulation of their legislation
and their policies on these issues; and to form the basis for guidelines of good practices in these areas
for the institutions and individuals concerned.
(b) Any collection, processing, use and storage of human genetic data, human proteomic data and
biological samples shall be consistent with the international law of human rights.
(c) The provisions of this Declaration apply to the collection, processing, use and storage of human
genetic data, human proteomic data and biological samples, except in the investigation, detection
and prosecution of criminal offences and in parentage testing that are subject to domestic law that is
consistent with the international law of human rights.
With this Declaration in mind it seems to me that, unless there was a perceived threat, on the
part of bio- or genetic engineering, to the physical and ethical integrity of human beings, this
declaration would not have been issued in the name of ‘human rights’ and ‘freedoms’. But as
Foucault (1995) has taught us (putting it in a nutshell), ‘ethics always comes too late for power’,
and technological power is what is at stake here; hence the (to my mind futile) attempt to erect
a quasi-ethical, quasi-legal bulwark (in the guise of an international ‘declaration’) against what
is seen as the possible encroachment of medical and genetic-technological power on the terrain
of human integrity. In my experience (forgive me for being pessimistic about this), however,
human beings will only realise the full extent of the threat that bio-technology in its current
and probable future guise entails when it is too late, despite the many warnings in the shape
of written texts and art exhibitions. William Gibson’s work (referred to above, and discussed
further below) testies to the possible grounds for such pessimism in his dystopian vision of a
future world irredeemably trans- and disgured by bio-, neuro- and genetic engineering.
Jacques Rancière, the ‘aesthetic regime of art’ and the (re-)distribution of the sensible
The two cinematic artefacts which I propose to interpret as ‘prisms’ of sorts through which
the progression (note: not ‘progress’) towards a world shot through with the products of bio-
engineering, such as genetic experimentation and modication, may be discerned, readily lend
themselves to being understood by way of the work of Jacques Rancière, who is known for his
innovative distinction among three ‘regimes’ of art, sidelining the usual distinction between the
pre-modern, the modern and the postmodern (Rockhill 2011). These are, rst, the ‘ethical regime
of images’, inaugurated by Plato’s notion of art as imitation (Rancière 2011: 77), twice removed
from the archetypal Forms which constitute, according to him, the true objects of knowledge.
For Rancière, Plato’s model of the city as structured along lines of exclusion according to three
‘classes’ (the rulers, the soldier-guardians and the producers) represents a ‘distribution of the
sensible’ that accords the philosopher the exclusive right to create (political) ctions, denying
the artist or poet this right. In other words, all ‘images’ have to be prohibited, lest they undermine
the philosophically ‘just’ partitioning of the polis as determined by the philosopher. This means
that the ‘ethical regime of images’ is more about the exclusion of art than about art, at least of a
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certain kind, that of simulacra, and since Plato’s day there have been many incarnations of this
artistic regime, notably that which was enacted under the apartheid regime in South Africa.
To understand Rancière’s criticism of Plato, namely that the latter reduced art to the ethical
realm, one has to grasp the signicance of his phrase, ‘the distribution (or partitioning) of the
sensible’, and of what he terms the ‘police’ as agency for one instance of such ‘distribution’
(Rancière 2010: location 499):
Politics stands in distinct opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible…whose
principle is the absence of void and of supplement.
The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police
lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living. Its essence lies in a certain way of
dividing up the sensible. I call ‘distribution of the sensible’ a generally implicit law that denes the
forms of partaking by rst dening the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition
of the sensible is the dividing-up of the world (de monde) and of people (du monde)…
The ‘police’, in other words, far from being what one normally associates with the noun (although
this conventional meaning could indeed attach to one of the instruments of maintaining a ‘police’
order), is the collective name for any (pseudo-) political order which partitions or subdivides the
social realm in such a way that nothing is left, which means that it is exclusivist and hierarchical.
As I shall show regarding the two cinematic works to be analysed, the ‘police’ can assume
many different forms. The ‘partitioning of the sensible’ therefore pertains to the organisation or
structuring of the sensible world by artworks, speech, as well as politics (of which the ‘police’
is one instantiation) – that is, the comparative position, importance, eligibility and status
assigned to objects, people and interpersonal relations by the way they are represented in these
three practices. To put it differently: ‘the distribution of the sensible’, for Rancière, marks the
extension of what discourse theory has always recognised – namely, that language structures
and reects diverse power relations – to the realm of images and the perceptible world generally,
with particular emphasis on the fact that politics and the arts share the ‘aesthetic’ capacity of
‘(re-) distributing the sensible’ in this manner (see in this regard Olivier 2015). The implications
of this insight for the visual arts, specically cinema, should be obvious: lm, just like (language
as) discourse, contributes to the cratological (power-related) structuring of the extant world, and
can therefore be decoded accordingly. To understand this adequately, one has to consider cinema
as part of the third regime of art, the aesthetic (discussed below).
The second of Rancière’s artistic regimes – the ‘representative regime’ – marks a step
beyond Plato, and has its provenance in Aristotle’s Poetics, where principles for the distinction
between various arts, as well as for their relative independence from religious ritual and from
the community’s dictates were rst articulated (Tanke 2011: 78). It introduced a relationship
between the sayable and the thinkable that applied to the ‘distributions’ governing Greek
tragedy and that still operated in 18th-century European art, in the so-called belles-lettres and the
beaux-arts of classicism. Aristotle argued, contra-Plato, that there were artistic conditions which
allow the ethically benecial catharsis of ‘harmful emotions’, and where the ‘representation of
action’ therefore does not amount to the ethically unacceptable creation of ‘simulacra’, as Plato
believed. Instead, the ‘representative regime’ still has an ethical effect by maintaining an ethical
distribution of the sensible while, simultaneously, upholding art’s relative autonomy as mimesis.
This was most conspicuous in tragedy, but is perceptible in painting, too, where (up to this day)
this regime manifests itself afrmatively as well as negatively in the choice of subject-matter.
(One might even argue that the media, today, still pay homage to the representative regime in
its assiduous covering and documentation of the mostly vacuous activities of ‘celebrities’ and
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other elites.) Afrmatively, the latter corresponds with Aristotle’s valorisation of ‘action’ in the
Poetics – or the element of ‘fable’ in tragedy – such as historical events of note. Negatively,
on the other hand, subject-matter deemed unworthy (such as ‘common’ people and ‘ordinary’
objects), is relegated to the margins of art by, for example, reducing the scale of paintings
dealing with common people’s lives. Rancière puts it as follows (quoted in Tanke 2011: 81):
Classical poetics [that is, the ‘representative regime of art’] established a relationship of
correspondence…between speech and painting, between the sayable and the visible, which gave
‘imitation’ its own specic space.
The third and for present purposes most signicant regime – what Rancière names the ‘aesthetic
regime of art’, which is usually associated with modernity and modernism – is revolutionary
vis-á-vis the other regimes, precisely because it introduces ‘equality’ into art as a practice.
Surpassing the hierarchical partitioning of the sensible encountered in the other two regimes,
it legitimises every choice of subject matter by the artist, as well as any and every style or
treatment, including the most experimental. Not only is the depiction of historical events of note,
or important personages (in painting), or dramatic tragic action, executed by noble characters
(as in the ‘representative regime’), not the only admissible avenue of artistic creation (with its
concomitant ‘distribution of the sensible’ in social space). In contrast with this reafrmation
of hierarchy, the aesthetic regime does not obey and reinforce existing hierarchies, nor create
new ones. In a gesture of revolt against the art-regimes associated with Plato and Aristotle, the
art of the ‘aesthetic regime’ ruptures hierarchical, subordinating ‘partitionings of the sensible’
by introducing what Rancière (2007: 560) calls ‘dissensus’ into the sensible realm – a moment
of ‘aesthetic’ disruption, interruption, disturbance, or dislocation of the ‘normal’, sensible
parameters regulating social life as sanctioned by the ‘police’. If one considers that ‘aesthetic’
is derived from the ancient Greek, aesthesis, which means sensible perception through all the
senses, taken together, or ‘common sense’, the meaning of Rancière’s use of ‘aesthetic’ and
‘dissensus’ becomes clear: ‘dissensus’ stands for the puncturing of the ‘aesthetic’ police order of
‘common sense’ (that is, the conventional manner of perceiving the world), and the temporary
insertion into this ‘consensual’ order of something new, or different, which challenges the
homogeneity of this hegemonic world of inequality ‘dis-sensually’. In the light of this, the
‘political’ character of the arts, including lm – the ipside of which is the ‘aesthetic’ character
of politics – therefore resides in the capacity of images and language to (re-)organise or arrange
the visible, perceptible (mostly hierarchical) world in various ways.
Accordingly, Tanke (2011: 81) points out that: “To concern itself with itself, the subject of
painting must rst become a matter of indifference or, in Rancière’s terms, equality, the major
innovation of the aesthetic regime”. Further (2011: 81): “The aesthetic regime of the arts is thus,
at the most fundamental level, the abolition of the representative regime’s normativity”. This is
also the case with cinema, practised as art of the aesthetic regime. Instead of being held captive
by a grid of correspondence between the ‘effects’ of artistic ‘causes’ on ‘spectators’, as with
the representative regime, the spectrum of arts, reoriented according to the equality enshrined
in the regime of the aesthetic, is at liberty to appropriate their material, broadly, from all walks
of everyday life. The upshot of this, combined with their function of ‘partitioning the sensible’
realm along perceptual parameters, is that, through aesthetically mediated sensory experience
and imagination, this sense-(re-)organising function of the arts, paradoxically, reaches beyond
extant social reality to the future, insofar as it structures the present as its temporal, and temporary,
‘basis’. Hinting at the revolutionary role of art under the aesthetic regime in terms of equality,
Rancière remarks (in Dissensus, 2010: location 1504), reformulating Schiller’s assurance that
the foundation of art and of life is to be found in the aesthetic: “…there exists a specic sensory
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experience that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and
the community, namely the aesthetic”.
Before embarking on the proposed interpretation of two cinematic works in accordance
with Rancière’s radicalisation of the conditions of possibility of such interpretations, what one
might (with Foucault in mind) call his ‘historico-transcendental’ perspective on the process of
interpretation has to be added – for Rancière cultural practices such as the arts can (or should)
never be understood in isolation from the theory or philosophy that allows one to frame them
contemporaneously. In this manner the two distinct practices (art and theory) are understood
as being related, the one (theory) constituting the condition of comprehensibility of the other
(art) and vice versa (Rockhill 2011: 5). Instead of naïvely positing contemporary theory as
the ‘true homeland’ of artworks, on the one hand, or, on the other, reducing artworks and
literary texts to the empirical conditions of their production, in this way turning them into mere
documents of historical happenings, Rancière recognises the historical contingency of both,
without relinquishing either the ‘universalising’ capacity of theory regarding the intelligibility
of artworks, or the singularity of the work of art.
To put it differently, the intelligibility of works of art such as lm, for Ranciére, is made
possible by the ‘horizontal’ relation between these works, on the one hand, and their theoretical
counterparts – contemporaneous theoretical or philosophical works discursively setting out the
conditions of their comprehensibility – on the other. It does not end here either. Complexifying
the act of what I would call ‘responsible’ interpretation (with Nietzsche in mind), he insists on
another, ‘diagonal’ plane of historical inuence and signicance, which cuts across the horizontal
plane between art and theory (referred to above) and initiates what Rockhill (2011: 6-7) describes
as a process of “historical cross-fertilization”, or what Rancière “…has elsewhere referred to
as the complex intertwining of the horizontal and the diagonal dimensions of history”. In effect
this claries something that must have puzzled many philosophers and art critics, namely, how
it is possible for a set of ideas from one (perhaps long-gone) era to have a signicant inuence
on the theories or ideas belonging to a completely different, distinct, era. This happens when, for
example, the Aristotelian conception of art – what Rancière has named the ‘representative regime
of art’, given its hierarchical insistence on the kind of art that ‘distributes the sensible’ along
lines of exclusion which benet the ‘aristocratic’ elites of society – can be shown to intersect
with the artworks, as well as the theoretical texts of a given period, in this way exercising
conceptual force on these, so that they are recongured in their intellectual- and art-historical
specicity. Rancière puts it like this (quoted in Rockhill 2011: 7):
Opening this dimension that cuts across so-called historical contexts is essential to grasping the war
of writing…and its stakes in terms of the distribution of the sensible, the symbolic conguration of
commonality.
Only when this cross-historical conceptual displacement is taken into account, together with
the relation between philosophy or theory and art in a particular era, can one comprehend fully
what the implications of his phrase, ‘the distribution of the sensible’ amount to: it represents a
terse formula for that which, in Rancière’s novel thinking, brings theory (philosophy), art, and
politics (that is, the ‘sayable’ and the ‘visible’) together via the functioning of the ‘aesthetic’
(‘common sense’). Instead of, as in modernist practice, separating the aesthetic and the social or
political, Rancière demonstrates the interpenetration of these spheres without relinquishing the
ability to distinguish between them.
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Signicantly, as the following analysis of Johnny Mnemonic (Longo 1995) will conrm,
the art of the aesthetic regime has far-reaching revolutionary potential, in light of the future-
directed temporality that is embedded in such art’s openness to historically novel experiences,
on the one hand, and its irrepressible shaping of future social and political relations through
its aesthetic force of ‘dissensus’, on the other (Tanke 2011: 82) – something that is rendered
intelligible by relevant theoretical work (as will be shown). Rancière’s novel approach to art
as a practice that potentially disrupts the ‘sensible’ (note the ambiguity of this term) status
quo by introducing ‘dissensus’ or aesthetic ‘rupture’ into it, potentially re-ordering it in the
process, opens the way to a revealing aesthetico-political interpretation of works of art, as I
shall attempt to demonstrate below. It must be kept in mind, however, that artworks, including
cinema, distribute the sensible rstly via their distinctive modes of perceptual organisation
(which may reinforce specic ‘police’ relations), and secondly via irruptions of ‘dissensus’,
which introduce equality into their own aesthetic space(s), but also, secondly, into social space
by virtue of the aesthetic character of the political. Hence the task of interpreting the lms in
question along the lines suggested by Rancière’s notion of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’, and
of art’s capacity of ‘(re-)distributing the sensible’, which is aimed precisely at uncovering the
contours of a possible future world, already in the making, where the sensible will be congured
along different cratological (specically bio-engineered) lines of exclusion and inclusion, and
where one encounters disruptive instances of ‘dissensus’. How this applies to cinema, is claried
in Rancière’s (2013: 189) observation, that:
[The]…invention of singular bodies that alter the normal distribution of powers attributed to bodies
according to their condition, their place and their function is at the heart of cinema, by its own means
and by belonging to the aesthetic regime.
Johnny Mnemonic
I shall concentrate on the lm version of Johnny Mnemonic (Longo 1995) here, instead of the
short story by William Gibson, although it is signicant that Gibson wrote the screenplay for
the lm too, which deviates substantially from its literary counterpart regarding its plot. Hence,
not surprisingly, despite the narrative differences, the worlds conjured up through the distinctive
means of these two artforms, respectively – literature (written language) and cinema (sound and
image) – are wholly consonant with each other in terms of the aesthetic partitioning of the sensible
order. It is important to keep in mind, too, that both the literary and cinematic versions belong to
the genre of science ction, the hallmark of which consists in its demonstration that science and
technology comprise a pharmakon: on the one hand they harbour the power to construct new
worlds (particularly in their contemporary incarnation as ‘technoscience’), but on the other, they
simultaneously have the means to destroy worlds. As such, science ction invariably performs a
critique of techno-scientic society in various generic ways (satirical, afrmative, dystopian or
utopian, for instance) and by employing various styles (realistic, ‘gritty’, formally minimalistic,
or through de-realisation [as in animation, such as Japanese Anime], for example).
Against the backdrop of what was written earlier about Gibson’s Neuromancer, the world
of 2021, as depicted in Johnny Mnemonic, will be readily comprehensible. In light of Rancière’s
insistence on the ‘horizontal’ relationship between artworks and their theoretical counterparts
as mutually setting the conditions of their comprehensibility, as well as the ‘diagonal cross-
fertilisation’ of both artworks and theoretical texts of a given era by other such works and texts
(sometimes historically removed from them), it should be immediately apparent that the primary
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theoretical work that interacts with the lm in question is Rancière’s own, discussed above.
However, one should add what was also discussed earlier, namely the work of Manuel Castells
(2010), which expands the theoretical eld that resonates ‘horizontally’ with the lm (Johnny
Mnemonic), as will be demonstrated.
A brief reconstruction of the lm narrative, set in 2021 Newark and Beijing (which display
all the features that Castells attributes to ‘mega-cities’ today), yields the following. The lm title
already tells us that Johnny (Keanu Reeves) is a high-earning ‘mnemonic’ messenger, or rather,
cerebrally ‘wet-wired’ courier, of very important, if not downright dangerous, ‘memories’ (data,
or information) These are so vital, in fact, that clients who use his services do not even entrust
such data to the Net, which is what today’s Internet has become by then in virtual-reality format.
The eponymous Johnny is not a carrier of information is the usual sense, however; in this age
of neural modications, his brain is host to a gadget, implanted through cybernetic surgery,
which can accommodate 80 gigabytes of information, which his latest assignment forces him
to enlarge to twice that amount through compression. Johnny has paid a price for having this
device neurally installed, however: to his regret, he has lost his childhood memories, but the new
assignment he faces may cover the cost of the neuro-surgery aimed at recovering them.
Having been sent to Beijing by his agent, Ral, Johnny discovers that the client –
a group of desperate scientists – require of him to upload information vastly exceeding his
implanted memory-capacity, no less than 320 gigabytes, which could be lethal, because the
excess information will be accommodated by his own brain and has to be downloaded soon
to prevent irreparable neural damage. Three printed television images are randomly selected
as an encryption code, but when the Yakuza – the Japanese counterpart of the Maa, hired by
the giant pharmaceutical Pharmakom corporation – bursts in and mows down the scientists,
Johnny escapes with only part of this key, after the Yakuza leader, Shinji, severs it with the
electronic lament ‘blade’ hidden in his prosthetic thumb. Johnny returns to Newark, pursued
by the Yakuza, who intend appropriating the valuable information for themselves.
Meanwhile Johnny, realising his life is at stake, is looking for a way to download the
data, ignorant of the fact that his head is literally ‘on the block’. The chief of Pharmakom,
Takahashi – who lost his beloved daughter to a technologically-induced pandemic condition
known as NAS (‘neural attenuation syndrome’) – has ordered Shinji to decapitate Johnny and
return his cryonised head for the data to be downloaded. But when Shinji, having capturing
Johnny, prepares to perform the operation with his lethal electronic lament, Jane (Dina Meyer)
– a neuro-biologically enhanced bodyguard, earlier contracted to Johnny when Ral refused
to employ her (the counterpart of Molly Millions, the ‘razorgirl’ in the short story-version of
Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic) – comes to the rescue and they escape. Jane leads Johnny to Spider,
one of the medics ghting the Pharmakom hegemony and, it turns out, a member of the group
for whom the data were intended, hoping that he can download Johnny’s deadly but invaluable
cargo, which turns out to be impossible without the missing portion of the encryption key, and
too dangerous to do surgically, lest Johnny be killed and/or the data be destroyed. Spider reveals
that Johnny’s uploaded data are believed to be the cure for NAS, which Pharmakom discovered,
but withheld from the public because of prots from medication sold to treat the disease’s
symptoms. He suggests that Johnny consult someone called Jones at the Lo-tek compound for
help with the encryption key.
With a quasi-‘Gothic’ twist to the tale, Takahashi – having discovered the Yakuza’s
intended betrayal – instructs the ‘street preacher’, Karl (played by the huge Dolph Lundgren)
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to perform what one might call a ‘John the Baptist’ operation on Johnny for his invaluable
head. Having followed the latter and Jane to the medics’ hide-out ‘clinic’, Karl ends up killing
Spider, but the duo manage to elude the grotesque executioner, eeing to the sprawling,
decaying building-complex, ironically named ‘Heaven’, where the so-called Lo-teks live – low-
technology activists, opposed to the rule of the ‘high-tecs’, like Pharmakom, and led by the
dreadlock-adorned J-Bone. This is where Jones is located, who could help Johnny. It turns out
that Jones is a heroin-addicted dolphin that used to work for the navy because of his astonishing
decryption capabilities – hence the addiction; it was brought about by the navy to ensure Jones’s
cooperation.
Cutting to the chase, in the course of Johnny being electronically connected with Jones,
and the latter attempting to nd the missing parts of the encryption key, the Yakuza, the street
preacher and Takahashi himself (armed with his Samurai sword for decapitating Johnny) launch
an attack against Heaven. Johnny, Jane and the Lo-teks ght back, eventually managing to kill
the street preacher, Shinji and Takahashi, with the latter handing Johnny part of the encryption
key as a dying compensatory gesture – thus acknowledging that his daughter died of NAS, and
opening the possibility that the cure could be made available to all people worldwide. With only
one portion of the key missing, J-Bone urges Johnny to ‘hack his own brain’ to nd it, and they
recommence the search, with the help of Jones, knowing that this could lead to Johnny’s death.
In the course of the harrowing procedure, the feminine image of an AI (an articial intelligence
that has made its virtual appearance earlier in the narrative), communicating from Pharmakom’s
computer system, appears on the monitors, signalling her/its assistance in providing the last
component necessary to decrypt the key to Johnny’s cerebral cargo of data. The entire cache of
information is successfully retrieved, and as Johnny recovers from the gruelling procedure, he
and Jane watch as the Lo-teks’ transmission of the NAS-cure is disseminated across the globe,
with astonished people in cities gazing at television monitors as the data comprising the cure
scroll down. As a tting concluding image of their victory over the corporation and the Yakuza,
the group of ‘resistance’ ghters are seen looking at the towering Pharmakom headquarters
(representing the ‘police’ order), which has burst into ames. Signicantly, as far as human
historicity is concerned, Johnny has recovered his childhood memories.
Reconguring power relations through bio-technology in Johnny Mnemonic
A Rancièrian analysis of the lm, read in conjunction with Castells’s theory of the ‘network
society’, yields illuminating results regarding changing power relations, or what Rancière would
call the ‘redistribution of the sensible’. As the lm’s quasi-utopian ending demonstrates (‘quasi-
utopian’, because the police order is bound to restore itself sometime after being disrupted by the
moment of dissensus caused by Johnny, Jane, Jones and the Lo-teks), the hegemonic hierarchy
presided over by a conuence of the corporate sector and international crime syndication in the
projected future of 2021 is (that is, by implication can be) dealt a signicant blow, even if this
blow would not be fatal in the long run. For Rancière (2010: location 942-955) this ‘dissensual’
moment marks a eeting manifestation of ‘equality’, insofar as those who have been excluded
from the ranks of the ‘police’ momentarily proclaim, and through their actions demonstrate,
their political equality with every other political subject. In this respect it is important to note
that, given Rancière’s ‘aesthetic critique of politics’, or inversely, his ‘political critique of the
aesthetic sphere’, as cinema, Johnny Mnemonic represents the anticipatory ‘distribution of
the sensible’ in a possible future world. Such a reading is made possible through Rancière’s
recuperation of the concept of the aesthetic as marking, in the guise of the ‘distribution of the
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sensible’, the cratological (power-related) lines of demarcation, both concretely in social reality,
and in art. As such, by way of reminder, ‘the distribution of the sensible’ marks Rancière’s
extension of discourse theory – like Lyotard (1995: 14-17) before him – from the realm of
language, or the symbolic, to that of images, whether in ‘real life’, or in the visual arts, as being
just as susceptible to cratological analysis as discourse is.
A look at the rest of Johnny Mnemonic conrms this. From the very beginning, when a
message to viewers scrolls down, informing one of the hierarchical shape of the world in 2021
and of Johnny’s professional role in this world, segueing into a scene graphically depicting
the virtual internet of 2021 from the ‘inside’, as it were, and then to where he lies in bed and
eventually (after talking on video-phone with his agent or ‘handler’, Ral), departs for his visit
to Beijing to pick up his informational cargo, and further through every phase of the audio-visual
diegesis to the conclusion described above, the scene-sequences can be read, or understood, in
terms of the ‘(re-)distribution of the sensible’. Obviously, in doing so, the ‘material’ for analysis
and interpretation comprises audio-visual images, or signiers – or, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms
(1994: 164), ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’; the ‘objective’ or iconic correlates, inscribed in the lm, of
viewers’ perceptions and affective states (see in this regard Olivier 2018a).
Several paradigmatic instances of this are encountered, beginning with the scroll-down
information at the outset, which reads:
New century. Age of Terminal Capitalism.
The armored towers of multinational corporations
Rise above the ruins of the democracies that gave them birth.
Soldiers of the Yakuza defend them.
Hackers, data-pirates, Lotek media rebels are
the enemy, burrowing like rats in the walls
of cyberspace.
A new plague convulses the cities:
Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, incurable, fatal,
epidemic, bringing fear and misery as old
as the species itself.
But the most precious data is sometimes entrusted
To elite private agents, wetwired to function as
Human data banks.
Mnemonic couriers.
Here, already, the shape and character of the ‘police’ in this futuristic age are neatly articulated
along the parameters of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, as captured by the metaphorical imprint
of images on words. By characterising the ‘age’ as that of ‘terminal capitalism’, one is left in no
doubt as to the identity of the hegemonic power of this era: ‘lethal’ capitalism, the hierarchical
power of which is further emphasised by the epithet ‘armored’, the noun, ‘towers’, and the verb,
‘rise’ (above). Hierarchies have always been spatially characterised in terms of verticality, as
Hardt and Negri (2001: 298-299) do where they distinguish between the vertical, ‘oligopolistic’
axis of (media and information) control and the horizontal, democratic axis embodied in the
internet. Alternatively, in terms borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 474) one could
point out the extreme ‘striation’ of the spaces controlled by the corporations through the Yakuza,
on the one hand, and the tendency towards ‘smooth (nomadic) space’ (without ever actualising
smoothness, or the absence of spatial power relations) where the Lo-teks are encountered – a
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kind of urban desert, or jungle, emphasised by the ‘burrowing like rats’ of the Lo-teks ‘in the
walls of cyberspace’ – in Johnny Mnemonic. The liminal role of mnemonic couriers is signalled
by their description as ‘private agents’ to whom valuable information is assigned – they belong
neither to the rebel order of the Lo-teks, nor to the dominant echelon of the corporations and
their agents, the Yakuza, but move between them, carrying data so vital for their continued rule
that they are constantly at risk of being assassinated. Finally, the verb, ‘convulses’, used to
describe the effect of NAS on human lives in cities serves further to suggest a kind of lifelike
quality of urban space, as if it has a life of its own beyond that of its denizens, high and low.
The sensible realm in the futuristic vision of Johnny Mnemonic is decidedly articulated along
lines of exclusion and inclusion which seem, to any perspicacious viewer, already taking shape
in contemporary society.
An analysis of the scene-sequence where Johnny, having collected the data, his head
bursting with the excess of ‘wet-wired’ information distributed in the neuro-deles of his own
brain, goes to the dubious place where Ral, his agent, has sent him, supposedly to have the data
downloaded, allows one to witness this particular distribution of the sensible in different form.
While two Lo-teks observe the event unfolding below them from a ramshackle building, Johnny
is hailed by a burly fellow to follow him. As an experienced mnemonic courier Johnny attaches
an explosive device to the outer wall as he enters the room, where a fellow with a hacksaw and a
cryogenic container invites him to his own decapitation. When the fellow behind him pulls a gun
on him, Johnny quickly disposes of him, only to be accosted in similar fashion by his would-be
executioner – which is where the explosive device comes in handy. When Johnny sets it off,
it gives him a chance to escape, and he ends up hiding behind scattered debris, from where he
witnesses his executioner – obviously in the employ of Ral and the Yakuza, themselves serving
the corporations – engaging in a ght with the Lo-teks. Eventually, with Johnny’s help, the latter
dispose of the two agents of the ‘police order’.
What does this all mean in terms of the way the sensible order is partitioned, in Rancièrian
terms? To anyone well-versed in the analysis of audio-visual images, it should be immediately
obvious that three different orders of power distribution are presented here: the agents of the
dominant ‘police’ order, that is, the corporations and the Yakuza (the two fellows tasked to
relieve Johnny of his head, with its precious cargo), the rebel order ghting the ‘police’ (the
Lo-teks), and a representative of a liminal zone between those who do not have a place in the
hierarchical police order, on the one hand, and the police order, on the other – a kind of hybrid
agent (Johnny). Power is unequally distributed, given the percept of the would-be executioner,
armed with a sophisticated weapon, standing next to a cryogenic apparatus, and that of the Lo-
teks’ leader, J-Bone, disposing of one of the police agents in a comparatively primitive manner,
with a throwing knife. Johnny, on the other hand, clearly wields power of his own, given the
deftness with which he overcomes his rst assailant, and his use of an explosive device. But
despite the asymmetrical power distribution clearly favouring the ‘police’, the outcome of the
violent encounter demonstrates that those who possess greater re-power do not necessarily
win. At any rate, the important thing is that this scene-sequence, like many others in the lm,
articulates the hierarchical ‘distribution of the sensible’ in the projected world of the future
clearly, and in such a way that it is compatible with the introductory sketch (discussed above) of
the world order in an age when democracy is ‘in ruins’ and the corporations rule in the time of
‘terminal capitalism’ (a phrase with a pointedly morbid ring).
Returning to the nal scene-sequence in the lm, it is to be noted that here the political
function of the aesthetic regime is made most clearly manifest in ‘dissensual’ form, when the
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Lo-teks, Johnny and Jane observe the Pharmakom tower as it burns. In terms of its partitioning
of the sensible, and as briey noted earlier, this scene amounts to no less than restoring
human historicity, insofar as it opens the future to the possibility – if not the likelihood – of
an equal society, in the place of the one closed off from salutary change by corporate rule. (As
such, it resonates with the scene in James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day [1991;
see Olivier 2002: 103], where Sarah Connor comments on the possibility that she, her son,
John, and the ‘protector terminator’, together, were ‘making up history’; that is, they could
open history up for humanity again by destroying the cybernetic means that sealed its fate by
causing the development which would culminate in the rule of the machines, thus closing off the
openness that characterises history.) Minimally, it graphically marks the moment of dissensus,
when equality is afrmed aesthetically and politically: momentarily, eetingly, the dystopian
landscape is (literally and metaphorically) lit up by one of utopian signicance, beckoning one
forward towards the actualisation of ‘equality’, no matter how elusive it might be.
It is also important to note, as far as the theme of this paper goes, that the power stakes in
the ctional landscape of the lm are decisively determined by the bio- or neuro-technological
investments on the part of the actors and agents belonging to different levels of the power
hierarchy. The greatest investments are made on the part of the ‘police’, but not even the Lo-
teks can afford to eschew this altogether. For example Jones, the Lo-teks’ decryption-genius
dolphin, is a marvel of technological neuro-enhancement, and Spider, the medical doctor in the
ranks of the resistance, has done neural ‘implants’ on Jane, which gives her an agonistic edge
over most of her counterparts in the ‘police’ order. Johnny, although being a liminal courier
between worlds, to none of which he really belongs (until the nal stages of the narrative, when
he and Jane choose to side with the Lo-teks), derives his own singular kind of power from neuro-
engineering as well, as does the medical group that Spider belongs to. Against the backdrop
of the earlier discussion of contemporary bio- and neural engineering (in relation to the art
exhibition by Katja Novitskova in Venice and the Unesco International Declaration on Human
Genetic Data), it is plausible, then, to see Johnny Mnemonic as a prism through which a credible
cinematic science-ctional projection of the possible future development of, or transition to, a
fraught state of (already partly existing) affairs can be discerned.
A futuristic cinematic projection of a bio-engineered domain: Westworld
The 2016/17 HBO bio-science ction television series, Westworld, brings to mind the earlier
discussion of the Estonian artist’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2017, which thematised
the bio- and neuro-technologies that are in the process of colonising the biosphere on Earth
today, arguably with unpredictably deleterious consequences for humans and other living beings.
The series is based on an identically-titled Michael Crichton lm (1973), and this, the second
television series based on it (the rst having been aired in 1980), transports us to an imaginary
world where such bio-technologies have led to the construction of so-called ‘androids’ (bio-
robots) that function as ‘hosts’ in a Wild-West theme-cum-amusement park for the bored rich. It
is an amusement park with a difference, however: wealthy ‘guests’ who visit the park are free to
do literally anything to or with the hosts, including raping and killing them, without any effective
commensurate reactions from the latter, which are programmed to be harmless to guests.
Like the lm (and short story), Johnny Mnemonic, the series reminds one that we live in a
time of transition to ‘we know not yet what’. It could be a monstrosity in the shape of something
that is not recognisable according to prevailing sensible criteria of ‘what can be seen and heard’,
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or, more reassuringly, it could simply be an extension of what already exists as the so-called
‘network society’ (Castells 2010), discussed above. As the analysis of Johnny Mnemonic has
already demonstrated, there is a third possibility – in my estimation the most likely one – that
the further development of the network society, along the twin trajectories of what Castells calls
‘the space of ows’ and (time that tends towards) ‘timeless time’, and their fusion with bio-
technological imperatives, will reach a critical point where a qualitative change could occur – a
‘pure event’ in the Deleuzian sense (2003: 73, 119), which potentially reorients the ontological
parameters of the world at a fundamental level. Such an event is capable of spawning the
‘monstrosity’ alluded to earlier, which both Derrida (1978: 370) and Yeats (1920/1921) – see
epigraphs, above – anticipated in their own idiosyncratic manner, respectively. But whatever
mode of appearance it may have, it is highly likely that it will be a properly ‘posthuman’ world.
As is the case with Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, the world that unfolds in the television
series, Westworld, gives one valuable insight into what the emerging bio-technologically
transformed social reality of the future may be like, and what novel, if not perverse, socio-
economic actions or behaviour might be possible in such a world. Nevertheless, the ‘amusement’
space of Westworld may appear to answer to ‘normal’ expectations regarding its appearance:
‘Wild West’ towns, people dressed in the idiom of the era, with long dresses, cowboy boots and
hats, ‘sixguns’ in holsters on men’s hips, and horses tethered in front of saloons; and yet, despite
appearances to the contrary, nothing that meets the eye is normal – something that viewers only
realise gradually as the counter-intuitive narrative unfolds. The hosts are bio-engineered, pre-
programmed cyborgs (cybernetic organisms), or ‘bio-robots’ that look and act, for all intents and
purposes, like humans, while the ‘real’ humans are free to indulge their every sexual or sadistic
fantasy with the hosts – male or female – and many of them do, with grotesque cruelty.
Incongruously (at a visual level), juxtaposed with the Western saloons, steam trains and
horses, one witnesses hyper-modern buildings (that cannot be ‘seen’ by the hosts, given their pre-
programmed life-world), jutting inconspicuously out of a rocky ridge overlooking a dusty valley
below, whose interior harbours extensive bio-engineering laboratory spaces that turn out to be
where the expired, often mutilated hosts are taken, to be given a newly reconstructed, sometimes
even ‘reprogrammed’ lease of life. They re-emerge as if nothing has happened, among the
guests, to be submitted to unspeakable brutality once again, at the hands of humans whose thin
veneer of civilisation has been stripped off by the invitation to behave with amoral carte blanche
towards the hosts. With Freud’s (2006) singling out of the ‘death drive’ (or death instinct) as the
most basic of the drives in mind, this rings all too true – after all, one of its manifestations is
aggression, while its other, conservative aspect, shows itself in the conservative tendency on the
part of people generally, to return to one’s ‘comfort zone’.
Given their robotic status, the hosts/hostesses behave according to a programmed series of
neuro-cortically embedded memories that determine how they will respond, repeatedly, to actions
issuing from guests. This means that their responses are predictable, not only in present time-
sequences, but also after their (pseudo-) ‘deaths’ and consequent bio-engineered ‘resurrection’.
As soon as one has understood this, the series’ name, Westworld, also makes more sense; not
only do guests and hosts sport garb from the ‘Wild West’, initially creating the impression that
the narrative is set in that historical context, but the frequent gunghts and concomitant deaths
of hosts reinforce the implications of the title, that the series represents, and ‘re-presents’, in a
futuristic context, a civilisational regression to a sort of lawless barbarism.
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When this penny has nally dropped, the full, monstrous implications of this projected
world of bio-technological production dawns on one, manifesting what might be called the
‘monstrous sublime’ – that is, something one understands at conceptual level, but cannot really
visualise as a unitary, coherent image (Lyotard 1984: 80-81; Eagleton 1990: 212; Olivier 1998:
205); something always seems to resist its harmonious unication. For one thing, who can
really grasp the elusive, fraught image of the beautiful Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood)
– appropriately so named, as ‘Dolores’ derives from the Spanish for ‘sorrow’ – the ‘oldest’,
yet preternaturally young, host in the park, who is desired, loved and raped over and over, by
various guests, as their fancy might strike them, before being brought back to life in the bio-lab
of the corporation that owns the ‘real-life-and-fake-death’ theme and (grotesque) entertainment
park. For this is what the developers of the ctional Westworld entertainment park bet on: that,
given free rein, clients (‘guests’) would be irresistibly attracted to the prospect of indulging
their hitherto suppressed, aggressive side of the death drive in the lawless space of Westworld,
to the point of destroying hosts in the most brutal manner, just for kicks, knowing that hosts are
programmed not to harm guests. A monstrous world, but evidently a very protable one, thus
compounding its monstrosity, which is ultimately the monstrosity of that abstract beast, the
market.
However, it does not take a genius to realise that the true barbarism lies in the (ctional, but
‘prophetic’) cynical use of algorithmic reason to bio-engineer beings that are human simulacra in
all respects except one – their capacity for engineered resurrection. What also becomes apparent
is that their suffering at the hands of the guests is no less than, or different from, ‘real’ human
suffering, though. Eventually this comes back to haunt the ‘creators’ of the ctional theme
park in the narrative, contrary to their calculated expectations – a sign that they underestimated
the authenticity of the bio- and neuro-contruction of the human simulacra: some hosts reach a
point in their fraught lives where they recall incongruous ‘memories’ of previous ‘lives’ (that
is, what they were programmed to do before being reprogrammed). In other words, they show
unexpected signs of having a kind of unconscious, which makes them even more genuinely
human. Just like the monster created by Dr Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s ‘Gothic’ science
ction novel of 1818 (Shelley 2002), which turns out to want something more human than his
creator anticipated, the hosts in Westworld, too, start showing signs of being more human than
their creator(s) foresaw, with dire consequences.
Put differently, the developers’ gamble turns out to have an unintended side-effect:
contrary to the predictive value of technical parameters, some of the hosts – who should ideally
be reducible to ‘tabula rasa’ (clean slate) status after each ‘death’, before being reconstructed
and reprogrammed – increasingly show signs of remembering ‘something-they-know-not-
what’. And this proves to be the virus that eventually gnaws at the underbelly of the eponymous
Westworld. More specically, Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), who plays the ‘madam’ in the
saloon of the pointedly named Sweetwater, is incrementally troubled by vivid memories of losing
her family to marauding ‘Indians’, and eventually – with the help of a partly fascinated, partly
horried technician in the bio-lab – gains full self-awareness of the dubious role(s) assigned to
her by the programmers of the corporation. The question is, of course, whether this, too, was
pre-programmed into her. Dolores, too, eventually appears to exceed her scripted role in quite
an unexpected way. In both cases one witnesses the dislocating functioning of ‘dissensus’ when
this occurs.
The message should be clear: apart from clearly wanting to keep viewers spellbound by
the intriguing spectacle of robotic humanoids interacting with one another and with humans
105
in a lawless and virtually amoral environment, the developers of Westworld (the television
series, as opposed to the intra-diegetic amusement park) – Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy – have
inserted a subtle, albeit ambiguous warning into the narrative fabric, namely, that technophiles
should not be fooled into believing that humanoid robots, modelled in every respect on humans,
would remain forever in the grasp of human bio-technical manipulation and control. Sooner or
later the kernel of their quasi-human status would manifest itself in something that has always
characterised humans – to the rue of tyrants – namely, the irrepressible desire for freedom from
determination (that is, being-determined), or what Lyotard (1991: 2-3) calls the (un-colonisable)
‘inhuman’ in us. In other words, if this is a plausible representation of the world towards which
we are transitioning, viewers should be forewarned.
If anyone doubts that current bio-technological progress is (or will always prove) incapable
of constructing convincingly AI-humanoid robots, they should look carefully at the introductory
image-sequence of Westworld, where muscle and sinew is spun onto an emerging humanoid
frame, thread by thread. This is more or less the way that 3-D printers work; recently a tech-
savvy friend demonstrated the workings of his 3-D printer to me, and its operation is uncannily
similar to what one witnesses in Westworld as the bio-technical construction of humanoid robots.
Furthermore, a benevolent critic has pointed out to me that signicant advances are already
being made towards the 3-D printing of human organs (see 3-D Organs under Works cited).
The ‘distribution of the sensible’ in Westworld
What are the indications concerning the distinctive ‘partitioning of the sensible’ in the
(Westworld) world projected in largely Western ‘retro’-style into an imagined future, where the
bio-technology of today (arguably already laying the foundation for such future development)
has burgeoned into bio-capabilities for ‘creating’ perfect human simulacra? In general terms,
it is a world where the economic power that accompanies bio-technological investments has
reinforced hierarchical social structures that already exist today, insofar as these are reected
in various ways within the connes of the amusement-cum-theme park. Architecturally, it is
perceptible in the location of the Westworld corporate headquarters on top of, and within, the
excavated and technologically transformed space of a mountain, rising steeply from the desert-
like plains around it that comprise the landscape in which the action involving guests and hosts
takes place. The action never takes viewers outside of the park, although some scenes are set at
the luxurious, high-tech port of arrival by high-speed train, a ‘border’ space where guests get
to choose the Western outts they prefer, before entering the retro-space of yesteryear’s Wild
West. Judging by the clothes that arriving guests are wearing, they belong to the nancial elites
of the world, and more importantly, on those occasions when viewers get to see members of the
governing board of the Westworld park, this impression is conrmed. Similarly, when board
members arrive in the theme park, to be introduced to ‘new narratives’ in terms of which hosts
will be programmed – providing novel experiences of observing inter-host violence – they are
clearly (judging by their clothes and demeanour) people who belong to the exclusive ‘police’
order of the day. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), the executive director of Westworld’s mother
company, epitomises this; she is always dressed in the most chic (read: expensive) outts.
The question of ‘new narratives’, programmed into the minds (via their brains) of the
android hosts, provides a crucial locus for the analysis of the distribution of the sensible in
Westworld, insofar as the bio-technological manipulation of the hosts may be seen as preguring
the possible (similar) future manipulation of people, and to some extent as reecting this in
106
its incipient stages in the biometric developments of today (CNN 2018). In one of Lacan’s
formulations, what makes a person a ‘singular’ subject is that everyone has her or his unique
narrative or story (Lacan 1977: 46-47). When such narratives are technically imposed on
someone, it therefore amounts to a violation of what makes one human, and although it may be
argued that the hosts are not ‘properly’ human, as pointed out before, they are indeed, for all
intents and purposes – as demonstrated in the fact that some of them, specically Dolores and
Maeve, embark on a quest for their own true identities, in other words, their authentic personal
narratives. The scenes in Westworld that testify perceptually to their discovery that all is not
what it seems, instantiate moments of ‘dissensus’. A Rancièrian analysis of some specic scenes
and scene-sequences from Westworld will clarify these general observations.
Seventeen minutes into the 10th episode of the rst season of Westworld, one is offered a
glimpse (repeated from different angles several times before this moment) of the silver sliver of
corporate buildings on the mountain mentioned earlier – a low architectural prole that contrasts
sharply with the surrounding desert landscape, and casts the sensible conguration of this world
in a hierarchical subordination of nature by (technological) culture. This shot (and others like
it) is emblematic of the power relations that obtain in this projected world, where ‘nature’
indexes all instances of it, including human nature. The latter is subordinated to advanced bio-
technological manipulation in the process of its ‘re-creation’ in the guise of the cyborg hosts,
who (unlike ‘natural’ humans) are a combination of organic and inorganic components, but are,
for all functional purposes, perfect simulacra of human beings – except, of course, for their latent
capacity to be bio-technologically resurrected and reprogrammed after ‘dying’ at the hands of
fellow hosts, or of guests. At the same time it may be perceived as adumbrating the hierarchical
social structure of the future (already visible in certain practices of today, as argued earlier).
This shot segues into a scene at the underground railway station, where the members
of the Delos board are about to arrive, and where Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), the
temperamental narrative director of the park, joins Charlotte Hale, the executive director of
Delos, the company under whose control the Westworld theme park(s) falls. In their conversation
it becomes apparent that she has summoned the board seeking their support of her attempt to
oust the co-creator (and still creative director) of Westworld, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins).
As they descend to the platform level on the escalator, Lee insists that he wants full creative
control of the “parks, the narratives and the hosts”, to which Charlotte responds afrmatively, in
this way intimating the positions that they occupy in the hierarchy of power. The scene-sequence
therefore conrms, in socio-economic terms, what the shot of the building atop the castle-like
mountain communicated concerning the way the sensible world is partitioned in this imagined
future, except that it adds the element of ‘narrative control’ over the hosts.
All is not as well as Charlotte believes at this stage of the unfolding of the Westworld
narrative, however. Towards the conclusion of this (the last) episode of the rst season, both
Dolores and Maeve have become self-aware in the clearest manifestations of ‘dissensus’,
perceptually inserted into the narrative as visual rupture of the hierarchical ‘police’ order. Maeve
is determined to escape the park, and with the help of Felix (Leonardo Nam), the reconstruction
technician whose help she has secured, and who has reprogrammed her in such a way that she
is able to draw on all her intellectual and volitional resources, she manages to get onto a train
incognito, but decides to return to the park at the last minute to look for her lost (but alive)
daughter. In Dolores’s case the rebellion is more complete. Having worked out who she ‘really’
is, with the help of Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), the head of the host-programming section (and
himself an android, having only recently been revealed as such), she is intent on revenge, and
107
she takes it, violently, in this way rupturing the police order, metonymically represented by
the assembly of board members and Westworld executives. This happens just as a group of
hosts – presumably released from ‘storage’ and activated by herself and Bernard – emerges
threateningly from the trees surrounding the area where board members have been celebrating
a ‘new narrative beginning’ and listening to Robert Ford describing it to them (appropriately, it
seems, as a ‘journey into night’).
What does this mean in terms of the ‘distribution of the sensible’? Most conspicuously, it
instantiates a kind of ‘slave (or, recalling Spartacus’s revolt against Rome, gladiator) rebellion’
against the owner class. At a more profound level, though, it may be read as a cleverly-scripted
suggestion (perhaps even a warning, intended or not) that any attempt at appropriating the
personal narratives and memories of creatures who are ‘perfect’ human simulacra must reckon
with the possibility, if not probability, that such creatures will eventually rebel, drawing on that
potentially savage constituent of our humanity that Lyotard (1991: 2-3) calls the ‘inhuman’,
which constitutively resists all attempts at complete colonisation of our subjectivity. If this
series is a cinematic reection of a possible future, the transition towards which we have already
embarked on (judging by present developments), this suggestion should be taken seriously.
Conclusion
What I have attempted to show in this paper, via an interpretive analysis of two cinematic
artworks, is that both of them allow one to perceive, in the refracted images of the future they
project, a world where the bio-technology of today has (or will have) become a decisive force
regarding the contours of the sensible world in the Rancièrian sense. Furthermore, given the fact
that, by all accounts, bio-engineering – for example in the guise of biometrics – already plays
an increasingly important part in contemporary society, the representation of a bio-engineered
world in the two cinematic works, respectively, is plausible, if not persuasive. From this one
can infer that one is witnessing a transition of sorts, today, towards the kind of world where
bio-technology is not simply part of the technical landscape, as it were, but will have gained a
position of dominance regarding the probable prevailing power relations in such a future world.
This is not a prediction or a prophecy; as stated earlier, the advent of bio-technology today,
made possible by the revolution in electronic communications technology – accompanied by the
emergence of the ‘network society’ (Castells 2010) – is the adumbration of a ‘pure event’ in the
Deleuzian sense (alluded to above), namely a possible (that is, ‘virtual’), qualitatively different
locus or phase of (bio-technical) development that could potentially spawn something equally
different, in ontological terms, from what has gone before. The actualisation of the event is
therefore distinct from the ‘pure event’, and occurs when the dominance of such qualitatively
different relations of ontological force are concretely realised. Some might argue that, like the
rhizomatic relations characteristic of the ‘network society’, this is already the case, but as the
preceding interpretation of the selected lm and television series, compared with the instances
of bio- and neuro-engineering in extant society, indicates, some distance still separates us from
the imagined future(s) projected in the former. What the commonly shared sensible contours, or
‘distribution of the sensible’ (between the ctional and the prevailing) does suggest, however,
is that one is probably witnessing a transition towards a realm where bio-technology will have
gained preponderance.*
*The nancial assistance of the National Research Foundation and of the University of the
Free State, which has contributed to making this research possible, is gratefully acknowledged.
108
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Bert Olivier’s principal position is that of Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy at the University
of the Free State, South Africa. He has published academic articles and books across a wide variety
of disciplines, including philosophy, art theory, architecture, literature, psychoanalytic theory,
cinema, communication studies and social theory. Bert received the South African Stals Prize
for Philosophy in 2004, and a Distinguished Professorship from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan
University in 2012. He is also an NRF B-rated researcher, and writes regularly on the Mail and
Guardian’s Thought leader-website.
