Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self

Ollivier Dyens presents in his article, "Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the PostBiological Self," the argument that because of technology's intrusion in our perception and understanding of the world and because of its constant production of impossible images of the human body, today's representation of that same body must be fundamentally re-evaluated. As one can see in works of science fiction -films and literature alike -such as Terminator 2 or Neuromancer, the body must now be perceived as a quantum-like pattern whose form and essence depend on the human or machine observer. The human body entangled in technology wavers between life and non-life, between biology and matter, between the finite and the infinite and as the cyberpunk genre clearly illustrate, only a re-inventing of ontology and phenomenology can help us re-acquire our own bodies. Ollivier Dyens, "Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self" page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.1 (2000):