Cyberpunk: Personalism
This is the first of a four part reflection of the Netflix animated series Cyberpunk Edgerunners (SPOILER ALERT), and the philosophical themes that run through the series.
Netflix has been beefing up its selection of animated series of late, including rolling out a number of impressive Netflix originals. While readers might be familiar with my enthusiasm for Violet Evergarden, their latest original, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, will probably be the most impressive listing in 2022.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the spinoff from the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, and follows David Martinez, a teenager living in the dystopian Night City. David and his mother eke out a not-even-meagre living as organic humans in a society where expensive cybernetic enhancements, backed by even more expensive health insurance, are the norm. When David loses his mother, he loses the sole breadwinner and, in disgust at the society which refused to accept him, he chooses a life of crime to support himself. Ironically, key to his rebellion against a society based on cybernetic enhancement is to himself become cybernetically enhanced, attaching a military grade prosthetic to his spine which gives him superhuman speed. Eventually, he teams up with a group of edgerunners, criminals who, because of their high degree of enhancement, are more accurately cyborgs than humans.
What becomes apparent over the course of the series is the urge to be in a state of constant enhancement in order to supersede the previous enhancements. With this urge, comes the almost inevitable risk of an incurable condition known as cyberpsychosis whereby, because of their enhancements, their aggression reaches an uncontrollable level and their regard for their own lives and safety and those of others is thrown out the window. In a full blown case of cyberpsychosis, the enhanced individual becomes homicidal and capable of acts of mass murder and destruction, requiring to be taken down by the city’s elite police. Such is the fate of anyone who undergoes cybernetic enhancement, including David. What is evident as the series progresses is that, while David does indeed undergo high degrees of enhancement, he does not relish it. He does, however, take his descent into cyberpsychosis seriously and, towards the end of the series, appears to embrace it, especially given that the accelerating pace of the onset of psychosis came at the crescendo of the series, when David strives to leave the whole of Night City in a sea of flame and wreckage in order to rescue his lover, Lucy.
What makes Cyberpunk so intriguing, apart from its graphics, soundtrack, script-writing and plot, are the series of philosophical themes that run through the series (some of which are more explicit than others).
The first broad theme to consider is what a movement of twentieth century french philosophers call personalism (a detailed coverage of Personalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy can be found here).
While there are many definitions to the term, it is broadly described as a range of thought currents that focus on the centrality of the human person in philosophical thought. Indeed, some currents posit the person as the fundamental ground of all reality, if not the ultimate reality. As the french personalist Emmanuel Mounier put it, the person is more fundamental to our understanding of reality than the systems, institutions and ideas that swirl around that person.
We get a sense of this in the series in a subtle animated graphic in the background, one that repeats itself in several episodes: the launching of a rocket that goes to the moon. At one level, the rocket launch as a routine event is emblematic of the city itself. It represents the height of technological prowess (if not technocracy or the rule by technology), as well as of the consumerism that is rife within the city (a clue to this is the advertisement for rides on the rocket). At the same time however, the rocket launch is also a stand in for another undercurrent in the series, which is the deep-seated desire of both David and Lucy to break out of the city. In a way, this desire is what drives these two most important characters, as if to tell us that a person’s desire bears within it a force more powerful than the most crushing web of technocratic control.
Another way in which threads of Personalism become apparent is when one considers another narrative thread that runs through the series, namely the process of David’s constant augmentation.
Viewers could quite legitimately see this dimension of the story as antithetical to human personhood, since the increase in the proportion of cybernetic components on a person’s body reduces in turn the proportion of the organic body that is properly his or hers. Viewers could turn to the onset of cyberpsychosis as evidence of the process’ endpoint in the negation of the human person.
Looked at another way, however, there are grounds for viewing the process itself as something expressive of an otherwise hidden dimensions of personhood. The first step in entering into this standpoint is looking at the cyberpunk universe as an artifact of that Udo Krautwurst called “cyborg anthropology” - an account of the person that has integrated both the organic and the cybernetic into his or her own person. This is not as outrageous as it first seems, especially given the extent to which our technological artifacts have - if not fused with our person - have certainly woven themselves into our organic lives as to become virtually indispensable (anyone with a smartphone who pays attention to their own habits of usage could attest to this).
If there is a “cyborg anthropology”, the next step to consider is how aspects of this anthropology overlaps with the older accounts of twentieth century personalism. Key among these accounts is the inescapably social dimension of otherwise individual personality. Everything that we describe as properly ours, the words, symbols, cultures and spaces that mark our own individual expression and understanding, was first in possession of someone prior to the self. Because of this, in Krautwurst’s words, there is no “originary wholeness distinct from each other”, and the cybernetically augmented body, the “technologized body” is for Krautwurst “eminently social, public and contested as well as individual”. In saying this, Krautwurst seems to echo Emmanuel Mounier’s in his Personalism, in which his “personalist revolution” is one that serves the person as who is both individual as well as social, spiritual as well as embodied. The human person, simply because he is a body, is inextricably launched into the world and the public; with it, the person is launched “into the problems of the world and the struggles of mankind”.
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