Cybernetic Imaginations
Marcus K. Harmes (Volume editor)
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Visions and Augmentations: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Science Fiction and Popular Culture (Mark Fryers and Marcus K. Harmes)
- Introduction
- Cybernetics Enter the Popular Imagination
- The Cybernetic Imagination Revisited
- Contexts: The Perceived Need for Regulation
- Contexts: Sexuality, Race, Gender and Technology
- The Chapters
- Bibliography
- Newspapers, Periodicals and Other Sources
- PART I The Cybernetic Imagination
- Cybernetics as Social Science Fiction (Sheryl N. Hamilton)
- Introduction
- From Cybernetic Science Fiction to Cybernetic SF
- The Vibrant Cultural Life of Cybernetics
- Social Science Fiction
- Cybernetic SF as Social Science Fiction
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Asimov’s Cybernetic Plots (Emilio Gianotti)
- Introduction
- Cautionary Tales
- Patricia Warrick and Cybernetic ‘Modes of Plot Development’
- Isaac Asimov and Cybernetics
- The Monkey’s Finger and Nobody Here But
- Future Prediction and Fictional Worlds
- War Games as a Metaphor
- Bibliography
- Normalised Cyborgisation: Cybernetics in the Cyberpunk Franchise (Tonguc Sezen and Digdem Sezen)
- Introduction
- A Brief History of Cyberware
- Normalised Cyborgisation
- Mental Health and Cyberware
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- PART II Bodies
- Cyborgs Are Disabled: Enhancement and Disability in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022) (Rebecca L. Jones)
- Introduction
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: A Summary
- Technology: Cure: Enhancement
- Individual Correction Versus Environmental Accommodation
- Enhanced and Disabled
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- The Fantasy of the Healthy Body: Impairment and Uncertainty in Star Wars (Phaedra Shanbaum and James Williamson)
- Introduction
- Form and Function: Notes on Cinematic Language and the Language of Disability
- A Short History of the Bacta Tank: From Empire Strikes Back to The Book of Boba Fett
- In the Tank: The Narrative Journey of Boba Fett
- Change and Stasis: The Nonconventional Body and the Becoming of Boba Fett
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Re-Animation: De-Ageing, Posthumous Performances and the Life of the (Post)Human (Alice Giuliani)
- Introduction
- Re-animating ‘Bits of Life’
- The Irishman: Re-animating the Organism
- The Humanist Dystopia of Animation: The Congress
- Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen: Animated Simulacra
- A Digital Zoe
- Bibliography
- Emancipation from the Emitter: Towards a General Theory of AI Disability through ‘The Samantha Complex’ (Kwasu David Tembo)
- Introduction
- Embodied Intelligence; or the Haptic Principle
- Disembodied Intelligence; or, Beyond the Haptic Principle
- Disembodied AI and (Dis)Ability; or, the Opportunities and Challenges Beyond the Haptic Principle
- EMH (The Doctor)
- JOI
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- PART III Systems and Structures
- Noise in The Birds: A Cybernetic Re-reading (Julian Sverre Bauer)
- Input
- Noise
- Optical Noise and Feedback
- An Interference as in a Diagram
- Duck and Cover
- Ideological Implementations
- Output?
- Bibliography
- ‘Do You Want to Hear It Talk?’: Mechanised Voices and Technological Anxieties in Science Fiction Cinema (Dario Llinares)
- Introduction: Zombie Voices
- Speaking Machines and Symbolic Representations of ‘Otherness’
- Deterritorialising Voice and Beingness
- Hello Computer?
- Exterminate!
- Rational Tyranny
- Sonic Omnipotence of the Disembodied Voice
- How Can It Talk?
- High Modality Voice
- Gendered Aural Pleasures
- The ‘Self’ Between Thought and Speech
- Artificial Speech = Artificial Subjectivity?
- Voice of the Imagined Body
- Performative Mimicry
- Catching Up with Her
- Deterritorialisation to Simulation
- Bibliography
- From Alien to Avatar Intelligence: James Cameron’s Cybernetic Deconstructions (Nikola Mlađenović)
- Introduction
- The Terminators
- I’ll Be Bad
- The Doomsday Machine
- The Judgement Day
- The Avatars
- Mind and Nature
- Gaia Versus Spaceship Earth
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- The Tyranny of Feedback: Ecological Entrapment in Frank Herbert’s Dune (Attila Márton)
- Introduction
- Dune and Its Ecology of Ideas
- Ecological Themes
- The Cybernetics of Ecological Entrapment
- The Tyranny of Feedback
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- PART IV Identities
- Cyberpunk Periphery: Intruder’s Love and Flashing Out the Visible (Lamia Kosovic)
- Introduction
- The Post-Apocalyptic Voyage: Grey on Grey
- The Intruder’s Song at ‘The Dawn of the World’
- Bibliography
- Trans*-Digital Life-Forms: Technology, Cybernetics and Ontology in Digimon Adventure (1999) (Joule Zheng Wang)
- Introduction
- Entering the Digital World
- The Digivice as Cybernetic Bridge
- The Trans* of Transformation Sequence
- Bibliography
- ‘The Offspring’: What Does It Mean to Have and to Want a Child for an Android in Star Trek: The Next Generation? (Sebastian Lederle)
- Introduction
- The Episode
- Data as a Cybernetic Singularity Among Others
- The Relation Between Data and Lal
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Figures
Figure 1: James Cameron’s Terminator franchise popularised the doomsday scenario of cybernetic technology; Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Figure 2: A common trope of the cyborg film is the confrontation of the self, as here, where Robocop (Peter Weller) is shown his reflection. Visual iconography highlights the melding of man and machine. Robocop (1987, Paul Verhoeven)
Figure 3: The ‘unfinished bridge’ is a pliable visual metaphor for potentiality or for broken progress in the cybernetic imagination in Cyborg (1989, Albert Pyun)
Figure 4: The ‘fluid’ nature of cybernetic representation can provide a challenge to rigid homogeneity. Robert Patrick as the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron)
Figure 5: Opening credits of The Birds (1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to editor Laurel Plapp for her encouragement and guidance.
In memory of Bruce Fryers (1952–2021) – a real ‘steersman’ in my life.
Visions and Augmentations: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Science Fiction and Popular Culture
Introduction
In 2023, film director James Cameron claimed of his seminal cybernetic sci-fi dystopian film The Terminator, ‘I warned you guys in 1984 and you didn’t listen. I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger’ (Ankers-Range, 2023). As this bold claim indicates, the intersection of cybernetic theory and practice with the creative industries engages with the most pressing questions of the age. Yet Cameron was in many ways echoing the work of earlier artists such as E. M. Forster, writing some 80 years earlier. In The Machine Stops (1909 and televised in 1966 by the BBC), written partially as a response to the optimism of the science fiction of H. G. Wells (Warrick, 1980: 46), Forster imagines a nightmare scenario in which the world is governed by a giant machine, and people likewise governed by the machinic cult. Humans live underground, completely controlled by artificial intelligence (AI). They have become vapid, physically degenerate and disengaged from each other – independent movement, travel and breathing on the surface of the planet is possible but discouraged; ‘So nicely adjusted was the system, so independent of meteorology, that the sky resembled a vast kaleidoscope whereon the same patterns periodically recurred’ (1909: 16). Ultimately, the system breaks down and takes most of humanity with it; except for a few surface dwellers – resistors to the cult of the machine.
These texts provoke wider philosophical questions of what it means to be human, what differentiates mind and matter and with the advent of apocalyptic sci-fi, doomsday visions for humankind. Science fiction, be it literature, film, TV, graphic novels, video games or other iterations, continues to engage with these same questions and become the avenue for creative explorations of these ancient and modern hopes and fears.
The term cybernetics, borrowing from classical Greek for kubernetes, the steersman of a ship, has been in the English language since 1948, although cybernetique was used in French scientific and philosophical writing from at least the 1830s (Hui, 2024: 11). Meaning the feedback loops or mechanisms through a mechanical or animal system, the cybernetic theories of mathematician and scientist Norbert Wiener have proved pervasive in science and the popular understanding of science. The advent of ChatGPT and other commercial forms of AI attest to the enduring and still expanding understandings of cybernetics. Scientifically informed science fiction writers have continually found inspiration in cybernetics. Patricia Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction explored the multiple interpretations of cybernetics in post-war science fiction. That work was published in 1980, but since then, few larger scale studies of cybernetics in science fiction and popular culture have appeared.
Cybernetics has fascinated scientists and artists alike (and also challenged the artificial distinction between the two). Current thinking, which this collection addresses, is to challenge binaries and artificial/human categorisation. The current conception of cybernetics suggests fluidity, or at least its potentialities, which include eliding gender, class, race, sexual and able/disabled distinctions, as well as converging with ecology and environmentalism by suggesting vast eco-systems attuned to one rhythm and harmony as opposed to harmful, ridged anthropogenic thinking. Theorist Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan argues in Code: From Information Theory to French Theory that cybernetic theory itself, as applied to a vast range of phenomena, is fluid, responsive and feeds back upon itself in dynamic loops, seeking to ‘dislodge academic theories from an impulse to universality’ and insists upon ‘theory’s place in uneven and changing fields of scientific and political struggle, in which it plays the participant as well as the observer’ (2023, 4–5).
Aligned with this is the interconnectedness of people, communities, states and everything else by telecommunications and information technology (much like Forster’s machine) and what Hayles (1999) defines as the posthuman, which foregrounds informational patterns over physical embodiment as well as the integration of the organic with the machinic. Hayles has further elaborated the necessity for new conceptual frameworks that contest the tyranny of anthropogenic thinking, something they term an Integrated Cognitive Framework (ICT), revealing and contrasting the ‘tribraided origin stories in quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology and, technics’ (2025: 2).
Cybernetics, therefore, remains a compelling source of inspiration and the fruits of this inspiration are currently subject to a revival of academic interest. In particular, it is in the field of literary studies that cybernetic discourse has been notably vibrant within the last decade, as the world grapples with increasingly large data sets and informational overload. Compelling links have been made with the introduction of modernist literature and cybernetic thinking a century hence. Heather A. Love describes the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysees; ‘a veritable onslaught of printed information’ (2023: 1) while ‘Linguistic meaning, it appears, refuses to be contained by any singular context, and instead revels in slipperiness and suggestions’ (2023: 2). The written word, in its modernist context argues Love, helped to bring meaning to the veritable chaos that the machine age and ‘modernity’s ubiquitous and disorienting information culture’ (2023: 2).
A set of important papers in New Literary History in 2023 pointed to new approaches to cybernetics, especially in the humanities. An opening discussion by Lea Pao pointed out that any ‘strict dichotomy between “scientific” and “ideological” unhelpfully excluded from cybernetic discourse not only large bodies of works but also limited that discourse’s ability to interpret how humans use concepts and how figurative meanings of concepts are constructed’ (2023: 1274). The papers in this collection pursued the intersection of cybernetics with different disciplines, including literature and media studies from classical Chinese literature to Victorian novels. In doing so, these papers articulated the richly emergent potentialities in cybernetics which were not merely tied to the digital but to the ‘analog and mediated natures of system, communication, and information’ (Love & Pao, 2023a: 1194). An example is Megan Ward’s interpretation of the nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre as a cybernetic text, especially the bigamy plot which runs through the novel. Ward situates the novel as a product of an information age, including the growth of the science of statistics during the Victorian era and the maturing of institutions and methods of data collection from registry offices to the census. Within the novel itself, she adduces the forms of communication which provide redundancy and repetition from an inscription on a tomb to a certificate of marriage in a church register (2023: 1223). Other papers in this collection testify to a discursive shift of the humanities to becoming a greater part of ‘the cybernetics narrative’ (Love & Pao, 2023: 1193).
In 2024, the major collection edited by Yuk Hui appeared, which expanded the scholarly vista for cybernetics both conceptually and geographically. Chapters in the collection encompassed cybernetics in China (King, 2024), Britain (Pickering, 2024) and Latin America (de los Reyes, 2024), and within the scope of emerged conceptions of the world and cosmos, including the idea of Gaia (Sagan, 2024). While these recent contributions have widened the scope of cybernetic discourse, based on the thematic and disciplinary potential inherent in the fuzziness of cybernetics, Love and Pao note the ongoing need to ‘expand the cybernetic narrative’ as a humanist project (2023a: 1197). This current collection builds upon that intention.
Work on cybernetics in popular discourse builds on Warrick’s landmark survey of cybernetic sci-fi literature, which was published just before an explosion of cyberpunk narratives and cyborgs, especially in 1980s Hollywood cinema. Warrick defines AI as a separate but integrated aspect of cybernetic theory: ‘a subdivision of computer science, [which] attempts to discover and describe aspects of human intelligence that can be simulated by machines’ (1980: 11), a definition we will adopt as a starting point for this collection. Warrick concomitantly posits the exponential rise of robotics within industry at the time she was writing and considers a future in which machine intelligence will join them (1980: 14). This is the crossroads at which we now stand: machine intelligence is causing vexed debates from everything from academic integrity, the replacement of jobs in industries and professions from law to medicine and the creative arts to the inevitable fear of complete human obsolescence as imagined by Forster, Cameron and others (see Figure 1).
Details
- Pages
- 266
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781803744964
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781803744971
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781803744957
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21833
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (January)
- Keywords
- AI and Society Science Fiction Studies Cybernetic Theory Cybernetics and Culture/Society Film and Television Studies Literary Studies Ludology Studies Sound/Audio Studies Anime Studies Graphic Novel Studies Visual Culture
- Published
- Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2025. x, 256 pp., 5 fig. col.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
Biographical notes
Mark Fryers (Volume editor)
Marcus K. Harmes (Volume editor)
Mark Fryers is a Lecturer in Film and Media at the Open University, UK. He has published widely on topics including environmentalism, gothic horror and science fiction and cultural history, including contributions to the Journal of Popular Television and numerous edited collections. His monographs include on The Woman in Black (1989) and a forthcoming book on the Gothic maritime. Marcus K Harmes is a professor at the University of Southern Queensland College, where he teaches legal history in the law degree and communications in the enabling program. He has published extensively in the fields of religious and political history, with a particular emphasis on British religious history and constitutional history.
