Cyberpunk: Possibilism
This is the second instalment of a four-part reflection on the Netflix series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
In last week’s post, we looked at the series as an artifact of Romanticism. While that theme can be easily picked up by the viewer, probably a subtler theme which we would like to explore is the show’s metaphysics, something that is more presumed in the characters’ dialogue and actions. More specifically, I would like to focus on the metaphysics of possibilism.
I first wrote on the metaphysics of possibilism back in 2015, during a Syndicate symposium on John Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order. Of all the segments in the book, I found Milbank’s genealogy of this metaphysics most fascinating. While details of that genealogy can be read in that symposium, what is relevant here is Milbank’s observation that modernity and postmodernity are undergirded by a metaphysics wherein what may be is given greater existential weight that what is. Put another way, what is possible is now a higher reality than how things actually are in the here and now.
This is a metaphysics that permeates through our politics, societies, cultures and morality. On that last item, I have written on the link between the metaphysics of possibility and the use of pornography for Humanum Review, and you can find other similar essays in my resource catalogue on Linktree. Given the metaphysics of possibilism baked into pornography, it is thus interesting that interesting that the first episode would make a reference to pornography as a subtle foreground to the central driving theme in Cyberpunk, namely the imperative to constantly augment oneself.
As earlier mentioned, the main reason for David’s marginalisation by the society of Night City stems from the fact that he, at least at first, is found lacking in augmentation. Sure, there are slots at the back of his neck to insert the equivalent of a flash drive, but he does not have any capacity to go beyond his biology until the first augmentation - the military grade spinal upgrade - is made. While that affords him superhuman speed, what becomes apparent is that it is insufficient. As his friends in the Cyberpunk crew demonstrate, being able to keep up with the jobs he does with them requires being in a constant state of requiring upgrade after upgrade, and unlocking more and more potential with each one. In the world of a cyberpunk, one upgrade is only good insofar as it is a stepping stone for the next possible upgrade. We see the end result of this undercurrent of possibilism in the unavoidable fate of the cyberpunk, namely cyberpsychosis, whereby the capacity of what is left of the human body becomes exceeded by the needs of the augment, and the cyberpunk has his or her humanity crushed under the weight of those requirements.
On the cultural permeation of possibilism, Kamila Soh (who has guestposted on this blog) alerted me to uncannily prophetic comment from Hanna Arendt’s The Human Condition, and it concerns man’s struggle to escape limitation and giveness. In the prologue to that text, Arendt spoke of a constant desire for man to “escape from imprisonment to the earth” - and we can read here an escape from the imprisonment by what is, in exchange for a possible circumstance. With this in mind she predicted that
…future man…seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere, which he wises to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself (3)
Interestingly, there is a subtle line that shows that possibilism is not unique to the world of the edgerunners. Indeed the whole of Night City itself pulses with this metaphysics of possibilism, and we get this insight from an unlikely source, the chief villain Faraday, a corporate fixer who both supplies the cyberpunks with work as well as attempts to use them as instruments for his own ambition. In episode 9, there is a scene in which Faraday explains his plans to the edgerunner Kiwi, a seemingly inconsequential compulsory “bad guy unveils plan” scene. However, it is a scene that is most telling about the telos of life in the world of Night City. In one line in that scene, Faraday says that:
There is but one true measure of success in Night City, one’s standing in the corporate world, and to keep climbing, I need your continued support.
Once again, it is a subtle line, for what one’s standing in the corporate world is not all that apparent in Night City. While there are physical manifestations of the corporate world, such as Arasaka Tower (the organisation that drives much of the activity in Night City), the corporate world as such does not seem to have a final end stage. Instead, every place in the corporate world is just another rung in a seemingly endless ladder, one which everyone will have to constantly climb. Even the seemingly powerful Faraday answers to powers above him, powers that he hopes to one day possess for himself, only to find another set of powers to answer to, and on and on it goes.
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