Hollywood Utopia

198 Hollywood Utopia
even more scathing of such liberatory potential, contending that they often reinscribe
and even legitimise class and racist values. Holland best exemplifies the
critical feminist fear of cyber-theory when she asserts that such a narrative
operates as a ‘myth to reassert the mind/body dualism and those of sex and gender
that parallel it, where its ideological aims are achieved by first illustrating the
materialist position, and then showing it to be inadequate, naive and in some sense
“morally wrong”’(Holland in Featherstone et al. 1995: 170).
Nevertheless, many feminists and cultural critics often concur that the cyborg
remains the ‘new hope’ for creating a ‘progressive humanity’, at least a
metaphorical representation of this, which will serve to erode barriers across race
and gender and transform even what it means to be human. Such representational
agency (in Haraway’s terms in particular) has an extremely important role to play,
therefore, with regard to the metaphoric expression of a progressive ecological
discourse.
Postmodern Transgression of Boundaries
Many cyber-feminists have tended to place primary emphasis on the moment of
pleasure, confusion and final destruction within the cyber-agent. ‘Transgressed
boundaries, in fact, define the cyborg, making it the consummate postmodernist
concept’ (Robins 1996: 91). At the outset, I must take issue with critics who
dismiss the expression of transgression as not corresponding with any coherent
form of rebellion or the breakdown of boundaries or limits. Forms of transgression
and limits certainly could not exist without one another and, according to Peter
Bebergal, each limit is revealed through such transgression. He defines this as a
‘movement towards a threshold’ - with each interpretive moment uncovering new
symbols, new limits, that it must strive to understand (Bebergal 1998: 1).
Schizophrenia has also become a relatively new metaphor to express and embody
such transgression and is effectively represented by the cyborg organism that
embodies the connectivity between human nature and the patriarchally
constructed scientific environment. More radically, the cyborg serves to transform,
even subvert both, rather than simply connecting these polar oppositions. By the
late twentieth century, Haraway prophetically suggests, ‘we are all chimeras,
theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism - we are all cyborgs’
(Haraway 1991: 149). Blade Runner, which is discussed in detail later, attempts
most specifically to work through such chimeras, to (re)construct a populist
utopian narrative closure which has significant ecological implications.
As already mentioned, conventional representations of human nature find it
difficult to represent, much less embody, a coherent form of sublime transgression,
especially since this offends the dominant scientific evolutionary sensibility.