Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Technicity, and the Subject

Abstract

This discussion examines how Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Mamuro Oshii 2004; hereafter Innocence) questions what remains of being human and the assemblage of humanity when the human and the machine collide and elide their limit of differentiation. The former, being human, is a question of what philosophy terms ontology: the way or structure of existence or being. Innocence treats the question of reorganising the ontology of humanity (its place in existence) in noticeably technological and esoteric registers. Therefore it will be necessary to dwell on the particular moments in the film when human ontology is confronted: are we to expect a smooth unfolding of an artificial post-humanity where everything becomes a technological fabrication, malleable and easily substituted, or is there an invitation to rupture both the ontological notion of human being and the conceptualisation of technology in the elision of their difference as the definition of humanity is encoded in a technological framework? These questions are linked to the way that Innocence constructs and assembles humanity in the film by renaming subjectivity as a ‘ghost’. Herein it will be shown how the film’s predilection for technology in its narrative content and technological rationalism in its wider conceptual embedding reconstructs humanity but rejects the metaphysical valuation of humanity through notions of dignity, taboo, respect, affect, and so forth. This rejection results in the ghost having the structure of what psychoanalysis calls a ‘symptom’: a ciphered message/signifier that appears in a discourse but is not addressed to anyone in particular. By connecting this twin problematic of ontological difference and metaphysical poverty to the ontological philosophy of Martin Heidegger and psychoanalytic philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, this paper aims to unearth and lay bare the paradoxes inherent in the view of technology and society deployed by Innocence and how the film is able to, in the presence of these explicitly ontological paradoxes, put the question of what constitutes a human Subject into crisis by coding it as a symptom.

Keywords: Ghost in the Shell 2, Martin Heidegger, Slavoj Zizek, ontology, technology, techne, symptom, technicity, psychoanalysis, philosophy