Entanglements:
Journal of Posthumanities
E-ISSN: 3107-488X

(Article) ‐ Volume 2, Issue 1 (Open Issue)
Programmable Bodies and Prosthetic Memory: A Critical Posthumanist Intervention in Transhumanist Cyborg Cinema
Authored By — Ardra Ann Thomas & Dr Sujarani Mathew

Abstract

The article explores modern technocinematic representations of cyborg embodiments and programmable memory within transhumanist imageries through critical posthumanist perspectives. Focusing primarily on Bloodshot (2020) along with the constellation of films on corporeal enhanced subjects, such as RoboCop (1987), Upgrade (2018), and Alita: Battle Angel (2019), the article argues that these films configure the posthuman body as infrastructural and memory as a programmable interface subject to regimes of surveillance, capital, and control rather than as sites of emancipatory enhancement. These films express transhumanist fantasies of technological enhancement, optimisation, and power, while simultaneously exposing the ethical, ontological, and political contradictions of such fantasies. Reading through Donna Haraway's cyborg ontology, N. Katherine Hayles's account of the posthuman as a material-informational assemblage, Rosi Braidotti's relational posthuman, and Karen Barad's agential realism, the article discerns transhumanist narratives of domination from posthumanist critiques of control and dependency. Through key interventions from memory studies (prosthetic memory, tertiary retention, mediated temporality), the article demonstrates how cinematic posthuman subjects destabilise liberal humanist models of identity. The article thus invites a critical posthuman ethics attentive to the entangled vulnerabilities of bodies, memories and more-than-human entanglements.

Keywords

Posthumanism, Posthuman Body, Transhumanism, Memory, Identity, Assemblage, Cyborg, Agency.

Read/Download Full Article