#76 = Volume 25, Part 3 = November 1998
Steffen Hantke
Surgical Strikes and Prosthetic Warriors: The Soldier’s Body in Contemporary Science Fiction
The opening sequence of William Gibson’s novel Count Zero, which reflects on the conflict between personal combat and mass destruction, features a device Gibson calls a “slamhound.” “Slotted to [its human prey’s] pheromones” and loaded with “a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT” (1), the miniaturized “smart bomb” will find, identify, and destroy its target with the tenacity and ruthlessness of a well-trained bloodhound.1 The extremely selective, narrowly confined, and well-aimed damage it inflicts is linked with the device’s capacity to superimpose a synthetic map onto the space it traverses and orient itself by comparing the two images. Unlike a car bomb, a machine gun, or aerial bombardment, which indiscriminately inflict damage to the actual target’s surrounding area, the slamhound performs what strategists nowadays call, with an insightful metaphorical acuteness, a “surgical strike”—a military assault on the individual body. This leads to what critics such as Paul Virilio and Eric Rabkin have described as the disappearance of the conventional zone of combat, or, to be more precise, its spatial delimitation: anyone, anywhere, at any moment is a potential target. Unlike the German missile attacks on London and the Allied carpet bombing of German cities during WWII, or the genocidal and ecocidal military campaigns of the US in Southeast Asia, trench warfare in WWI, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the German Blitzkrieg attacks on Poland and France, etc., the surgical strike accomplishes its mission through precision instead of mass destruction, selectiveness instead of saturation, and stealth instead of conspicuous show of force. In effect, this technology erases the distinction between terrorist and military destruction, representing, in Paul Virilio’s words, “the decline of war into the art of de-terrence” (Pure War 27). States, according to Virilio, “act like individual terrorists” (26), pursuing “the same logic of absolute surprise and non-right, a logic, let’s say, of the ‘gratuitous act’” (27).
The fear inscribed as a marginal effect in Gibson’s fictional device, how-ever, is as old as science fiction itself, from Frankenstein on: science escaping the control of scientists; technology seeming more human than humans; the creation threatening to replace its creator in an Oedipal sleight of hand— specters that the designation “smart weapon” is bound to raise, even outside the textual realm of Gibson’s fiction. The much more interesting and complex ideological center to this marginal effect, I would add, is that, in a strangely anachronistic move, the target of military action is now again the individual human body, separated from its environment and its tactical position within it. Considering that 20th-century warfare tends, on the whole, to be preoccupied with massive quantitative destruction, the individual soldier has ceased to matter in the midst of the enormous material resources thrown into the Materialschlacht2—a condition aptly reflected by the absence of bodily representation and the myriad of names written on the wall of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, an impressive testimony to quantity that requires specific symbolic intervention in order to retrieve the individual from the mass. Suddenly, it seems as if the imagination of science-fiction writers like Gibson, as well as of military strategists that think in terms of “surgical strikes,” takes military thinking back to a kind of war that is more personalized, more centered around the body as an individual and separate entity, than anything the 20th century has forced us to confront. How does this reorientation of military technology from mass destruction to the individual soldier’s body affect what Virilio calls “the warrior’s personality” (War and Cinema 84), a construct that, according to military historians such as John Ellis, should have disappeared once and for all toward the end of the 19th century?
In The Social History of the Machine Gun, Ellis argues that, around the turn of the century, military traditions, upheld by officers recruited from the aristocracy, were disintegrating under the influence of the industrialization of warfare. Like Virilio, Ellis suggests that, in these historical shifts, we witness the inevitable decline of social codes predating bourgeois ideologies of instrumental reason. Both critics take for granted that advances in technology lead to a reconfiguration of social and cultural power between the aristocracy and the middle class. Aristocratic officers, Ellis argues, “completely missed [the] point about the increasing dominance of the tools of war. For them war still was an act of will. Military memories and traditions had been formed in a pre-industrial age.... For them, in the last analysis, man was the master of the battlefield” (50). The socially marked belief in the “warrior’s personality,” which comes apart under these historical pressures, is concomitant with notions that become as obsolete in an industrial society as the social classes that supported them—human agency and autonomy, codes of honor and chivalry, and a conviction that the human body, aided but not radically augmented by technology, constitutes the basic instrument of combat.
In the age of the surgical strike, however, a more precisely focused instrumental reason has, if not revived the classic warrior’s personality, at least restored a certain centrality to questions concerning the individual’s experience of embodiment and agency. In discussing the history of warfare and its repre-sentation in science fiction, Eric Rabkin has pointed out that, through the centuries, the “zone of conflict” has become increasingly ill-defined. Having moved “closer to the interior of the defended territory and the interior of the defender’s psyche” (“Reimagining War” 19)—and, I would add, to the interior of the soldier’s body—the battlefield tends to become a metaphor for a state of mind more than a distinct geographical or topographical designation. Since technology can literally move the battlefield anywhere, without consideration of the specific conditions of territory, war is now a possibility wherever we happen to find ourselves on the map. As a constantly present, latent scenario of existence, we must internalize it and make it part of our thinking. But in order to maintain a sense of agency in this process of internalization, we must ask the crucial question of how exactly we represent this condition to ourselves. At the moment when advanced technologies simultaneously close the ontological and widen the epistemological gap between enemies staring and aiming at each other through the machinery of electronic surveillance and computer-enhanced weapons guidance systems, older concepts of armed conflict have to be rethought in terms of their respective representational tactics.
In order to address these issues, I want to take a closer look at three science-fiction novels: Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959), which historically is indebted to its author’s experiences of WWII and the Korean War; Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1972), which can be traced back to Haldeman’s tour of duty as a soldier in Vietnam; and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), which has none of the biographical links to a specific military precedent but nevertheless illustrates an extreme point to which representational technologies in the service of military goals can be taken. An analysis of these three texts cannot claim to describe all of science fiction’s takes on warfare, nor can it systematically analyze how the technologies that allow states to “act like individual terrorists” find their way into the cultural vocabulary at large. What it can do, however, is to demonstrate what this cultural vocabulary consists of. In this context, it can trace a specific inter-textual chain through three “generations” of texts, demonstrating how different writers work through the same set of problems while marking off their ideo-logical differences. And it can raise and discuss questions about the imagery we use to imagine war; and how this imagery, at a moment in history when we can watch the technological paradigms shift, might not be capable of capturing the new realities any longer. This process of gradual modification and accom-modation of discourses in relation to new technological and social realities is the focus of this essay.3
Following the release of the 1997 film version of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, it will be difficult to read Heinlein’s original novel outside the context of Paul Verhoeven’s film. The film has received mixed reviews, some of which have praised it for its underhanded irony in foregrounding Heinlein’s political beliefs by depicting the young American space cadets as Nazi storm troopers. Other reviewers, remarking that Heinlein’s beliefs were hardly subtle in the first place and thus need no foregrounding, have expressed the more complex concern that the film wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants to be a straightforward action film, engaging its adolescent target audience in an unproblematic dynamics of identification and pleasure, yet at the same time it employs fascist tropes in an ironic subtext, in effect erasing any meaningful distinction between both discursive levels for an audience that lacks the sophistication, both as readers of history and as readers of filmic grammar, to respond properly—that is to say, with a healthy degree of critical distance. In short, American audiences, oblivious to the ironic subtext, will cheer the fascist cause.
This miscommunication between Verhoeven and large parts of his audience has found expression in the fans’ complaints, voiced on numerous web sites and in fanzines, that the film leaves out one of the crucial technological gadgets that Heinlein’s readers have embraced as a key image of the novel. What is missing is the troopers’ prosthetic combat suit, which Heinlein’s narrator describes with a good dose of testosterone-driven pride: “Suited up you look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons” (§7:81).4 The image of the “steel gorilla” defines masculinity as something intensely physical, based on animal power, instinct, and aggression. The technological basis for this hypermasculinization of the soldier’s physique is that the “suit has feedback, which causes it to make any motion you make, exactly—but with great force. Controlled force...force controlled without your having to think about it” (§7:82). Being intensely physical, in Heinlein’s sense of masculinity, means, in other words, to be all body, so to speak, and no brains. The integration of the body with the machine, controlled by a human mind that has internalized military discipline after extensive basic training, is complete and harmonious. Technology functions as an unproblematic extension of the human body, which, in turn, functions as an unproblematic extension of the individual human will, which in turn functions as an unproblematic extension of an abstract political rationale, which, again, functions as a pragmatic political extension of sheer common sense.
However, a price must be paid for this fantasy of total integration. And it hardly comes as a surprise that the site where power—military or ideological—is affirmed most vigorously and stubbornly also happens to be the site where this power sees itself most severely jeopardized. The narrator’s affirmation that the armored combat soldier makes “war as personal as a punch in the nose” (§7:80) clearly argues against the lessons of the 20th century: technology does not quantitatively overwhelm, the way it did in the trenches of Flanders or the ruins of Nagasaki, as long as it is geared toward the individual body. To the extent that the soldier’s body becomes a site of tech-nological enhancement, this process implicates the individual in what Fredric Jameson has identified as the “postmodern sublime.” Building on Jameson’s ideas, Joseph Tabbi argues that “Kant’s sublime object, a figure for an infinite greatness and infinite power in nature...[which] cannot be represented, seems to have been replaced in postmodern literature by a technological process” (ix). In this sense, prosthetics serve as the conceptual link between the “infinite greatness and infinite power” of technology and the individual body. Technology enables the finite body to contain the infinite or incomprehensibly vast, restoring to the individual consciousness the humbling and awe-inspiring awareness of its own proportional insignificance. The soldier’s technologically enhanced body becomes a site where nested spheres of power intersect: the prosthetic enhancement represents technology, which in turn represents the vast military machinery, which represents the social and cultural order in which it is rooted. In sharp contrast to this postmodernization of the body, however, Heinlein wants to cling to a construction of technology that remains firmly grounded in human agency and bodily presence. Yet even though Heinlein ultimately privileges the body over its technological enhancements, thus potentially undercutting the force of the postmodern sublime, the merging of the two nonetheless causes a considerable degree of unease.
The causes for this unease go deeper than the soldier’s concern that his powers are in fact the powers of a technology grafted onto him from the outside. They are more intimately related to the fact that the narrator’s description of the powered suit tends to express only obliquely what the source of the “power” behind the suit really is: an aggressive overinflation of masculinity as a response to a complementary femininity that is suspected of being either the source of this masculine power, its rival, or, even worse, its replacement. Hypermasculinized in their powered suits, the space marines are being “unloaded” through “twin launching tubes built into a spaceship troop carrier” (§1:9), which is commonly being piloted by a woman. The narrator attempts, somewhat helplessly in the face of such overpowering feminine metaphors, to reassert the essentially masculine nature of the ship “shooting its load” by comparing the suited soldiers to “cartridges feeding into the chamber of an old-style automatic weapon,” but the attempt fails because, as he admits, when “a female pilot handles a ship there is nothing comfortable about it; you’re going to have bruises every place you’re strapped” (§1:8). As much as the narrator struggles to metaphorize the situation as one of male ejaculation or masculine domination through technology, it keeps sliding back toward connotations of infantilization, pregnancy, and the trauma of childbirth. Being contained inside the ship and inside the suit, at the mercy of a woman at the controls, the marine’s technologically-enhanced body becomes a site of great anxiety and ambiguity, leaving him less empowered than merely “powered up.” Disavowing the condition by overwriting its metaphors seems the best escape from the inescapable consequences, an enterprise that, in Paul Virilio’s words, refuses to acknowledge “the disintegration of the warrior’s personality ...at a very advanced stage” (War and Cinema 84).
Verhoeven’s film version of Starship Troopers, deprived of the battle suit as a readily available metaphor, exudes the same anxiety about the destabilization of conventional masculinity. Verhoeven shows male and female troopers training and fighting side by side, their bodies equally hyper-masculinized, not so much by prosthetic technology as by a conspicuous display of well-toned, muscled, perfect bodies performing with conspicuous aggressiveness. Female figures are clad in the same drab uniform, their physiques indistinguishable from those of their male comrades in the swirling masses of soldiers rushing into battle. Once men and women are shown in direct combat with their insect enemy, however, the ideal of masculinity is systematically demolished. Verhoeven revels in images of soldiers’ bodies being violently penetrated over and over by the insects’ hard-shelled, phallic extremities, bayoneted to death by natural bodies without the technological augmentation of battle prosthesis. In the aftermath of these phallic assaults, Verhoeven shows sweeping camera shots of bodies mangled, crushed to a formless pulp. Both of these forms of bodily destruction—the body violently penetrated, and the body mashed into pulp—are images that critic Klaus Theweleit in his influential study Male Fantasies has identified specifically as forms of aggression committed by the soldier and directed against the female body, aimed at recovering or stabilizing an ideal of masculinity that is perceived as deficient or threatened. This effort of seeing the dreaded (feminine) enemy reduced to pulp, Theweleit writes, is fueled by a repressed masochistic enjoyment of being the object of this transformation. “This points to a reversal of the affects originally associated with the elimination of such substances [i.e., excrement] from the body: pleasurable sensations. The pleasurable sensations have been replaced by a panic defense against the possibility of their occurrence” (409). Barbara Ehrenreich, in her foreword to Theweleit’s study, adds, “In the brief moment of penetration—with bullet or knife,” the soldier comes close—“thrillingly close,” as Ehrenreich puts it—to identification with what he fears the most, “the horror of dissolution” in the female aspect of himself (xiv). Together with Heinlein’s text, Verhoeven’s film enacts this complex and unsettling experience in a scene where the protagonist is publicly flogged in front of his unit, a scene rich with ambiguous erotic connotations. As in Heinlein’s novel, masculinity is affirmed most strongly at exactly the moment when it is perceived as slipping away.
The general fear expressed in both the text and the film version of Starship Troopers is that of the body compromised by technology. Mark Seltzer has summarized these ambiguous feelings we have about the technologically-augmented body:
If, from one point of view, such a fantasy [of the body segmented into industrially “useful” components] projects a violent dismemberment of the natural body and an emptying out of human agency, from another it projects a transcendence of the natural body and the extension of human agency through the forms of technology that supplement it. This double-logic of technology as prosthesis (as self-extension and as self-mutilation or even self-cancellation) begins to elucidate the interlaced problems of the body and uncertain agency that primary mediation entails. (69-70; italics in original)
In other words, as soon as technology begins to get between “ourselves” and “our bodies,” whether we believe that it mediates between the two or radically divides them, our sense of agency is called into question. This description fits Heinlein’s portrayal of the body in jeopardy with one notable exception. In Heinlein, the body is always and inevitably gendered, and to the extent that he is specifically talking about the soldier’s body, this gendering makes it, always and inevitably, male.5 Bringing gender to the forefront of the reader’s attention, transforming it from an assumed natural fact into a category of social construction, becomes therefore a prime target of all texts aiming to refute or at least drastically revise Heinlein. Given Heinlein’s considerable influence on the genre, both as a highly respected and as an intensely reviled figure, it is not surprising that, when a revisionist text does come along, it remains caught up in the same cultural ambiguities that plague Starship Troopers. Both the influence of Heinlein and of the culture whose anxieties his writing articulates are difficult to escape.
A major novel which attempts to do just that, with complex and ambiguous results, is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Writing over a decade after the publication of Starship Troopers, Haldeman picks up the idea of the powered suit as a clear intertextual reference to Heinlein and to the concept of warfare proposed by him. In The Forever War, the first kind of instruction the powered suit requires is “how to stay alive inside this infernal machine” (§1.4:15). The “gee-whiz” element is still present, as cadets are instructed that the “fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built.” However, the fascination quickly dwindles when the cadets are told that “with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness” (§1.4:14). Haldeman systematically debunks Heinlein’s mythology of combat as a “punch in the nose”: cadets die from mishandling the suit which is supposed to protect them, most of them in training rather than combat; and as military action escalates, victory becomes increasingly a matter of logistics. Subject to vast and indifferent material and physical conditions, the soldier’s body is stripped of its exceptional status among physical objects. It is, in other words, demoted to a piece of military machinery. The problems it poses are logistical—transport, preservation, repair, application, storage, etc.
The powered suit, capable of elevating the soldier’s body to new heights of masculine integrity, hardly changes these conditions. Since the suit appears simply as a dangerous object whose potential for inflicting damage must be directed carefully against the enemy, the interface between the soldier’s body and the machine is an uneasy, uncomfortable, and imperfect one. The suit works hand in hand with an advancing prosthetic technology; it will amputate an injured limb in a purely statistical cost analysis of total versus partial destruction. Objectively compartmentalized, the soldier’s body will then be repaired, its damaged or lost parts replaced by means of prosthetic biotechnology. Thus, in the course of repeated combat, the soldier’s body is itself transformed, by slow incremental increases, into a machine. Similarly, the discipline internalized by the soldier is facilitated by the unsolicited administration of drugs; an internal pharmaceutical technology is employed from the inside out, while a prosthetic technology works on the soldier’s body in the reverse direction. If this interface appears smooth, it is because of the violence that brings about the integration: body and machine are forced into alliance, and the erasure of the two constitutive elements of the new soldier is an act of numbing brutality.
The remarkable change inflicted upon this body is one that erases gender as a potential source of destabilizing anxiety—the condition that so painfully plagues Heinlein’s troopers. In contrast to Heinlein’s insistence on masculinity as the prerogative, or prerequisite, of the soldier’s body, Haldeman makes an effort to steer toward a different sexual politics. On the most superficial textual level, this happens when he, like Verhoeven, portrays the military of the future as a fully integrated institution; men and women fight side by side and are, therefore, subject to the same technological intrusions and superimpositions (they are not, however, indiscriminately united under the macho body aesthetic Verhoeven’s film deploys). Haldeman also acknowledges the existence of homosexuality within the military, albeit filtered through the perspective of his narrator, who, as a relic of older times and morals, leaves little doubt that he is uncomfortable with what he is witnessing.
In imagining the technologically-augmented body, therefore, Haldeman’s text is concerned with the un-gendering or neutering of the soldiers and not their emasculation or castration. Gender in general is at stake, not masculinity per se. When, at the end of the novel, the last returning soldiers encounter the androgynous embodiment of the future human race, the crucial point is not so much whether Haldeman associates the disappearance of gender with the abolition of warfare as a masculine activity.6 More importantly, unlike the old order of humanity, which required technologically augmented bodies for survival, the new body—the New Wo/Man—is stripped of all prostheses, wearing only an “unadorned tunic” and carrying books under his/her arm (§4.8:212). Unlike Heinlein’s fears about preserving masculinity in a highly technological environment, Haldeman’s central concern is with dehumanization, which he contrasts quite clearly with the intact, unviolated body —unviolated both from the inside out and the outside in. Humankind in The Forever War functions, as Eric Rabkin has observed in his article “The Male Body in Science Fiction,” as a larger community that neutralizes the fear associated with “male body anxiety” (216). Haldeman erects a new dichotomy in place of male and female. In the encounter between the veterans and the new humans, he juxtaposes gender with non-gendered collective consciousness. This juxtaposition conflates male and female into a single category operating in “the normal, mammalian way” (§4.8:213), and opposes it to its ungendered other. What is at stake is not the distinction between men and women, but between old and new, between past and future, and between the individual biological destiny of aggressiveness and the collective evolutionary destiny of peacefulness.
Since the body is no longer required to stand for individual, gendered identity at the end of Haldeman’s novel, it becomes available to take on new significance. As a metaphor for humanity, for collective rather than individual identity, it now becomes a symbol for the community, which is itself at risk of being compromised and jeopardized by its own technologies. Haldeman’s novel accounts for this shift in meaning by allowing the protagonist to escape from the collective consciousness humankind has evolved into and settle on a planet called Middle Finger, where the last glimpse we catch of him is by way of the newspaper ad that announces the birth of his “fine baby boy” to him and his wife (§4.8:218). Many critics will read these closing details primarily as indications of the novel’s, or the protagonist’s, pacifism at the end of the Forever War; he settles on a “Garden Planet,” in a town called Paxton (the name of the planet, Middle Finger, does not exactly leave much to the imagination either). However, there is also a pattern of references here which points to the discourse on gender I have been tracing. It is hardly coincidental that it is a baby boy whose birth signals the continuation of gendered history. And then there is the raised middle finger, a phallic salute to the order that neither the collective future of the race nor the technological augmentation of the soldier’s body could suppress, an order of gender in which masculinity asserts aggressively its triumph over all obstacles. The future, for Haldeman, is clearly gendered, and there is little doubt what its gender is going to be.
One cannot help wondering if Heinlein’s masculinist discourse, like the Freudian return of the repressed, is making a sneaky comeback in Haldeman’s writing after all. Even though Haldeman tries to rewrite Heinlein from a different perspective on gender, the discursive construction of masculinity, in one way or another, always intrudes. This is not to say that Haldeman, the biographical author, speaks directly through Haldeman, the implied author, or even Mandella, his protagonist and first-person narrator. Yet it appears that Haldeman’s text, whatever its explicit agenda may be, cannot imagine humanity without gender after all, at least not when humanity is to appear as an expansive, active, and energetic agent. Traditional gender roles reassert themselves toward the end, when Mandella’s (female) lover offers, “If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse” (§4.8:217). Before we approach death, Haldeman suggests, we are condemned to a body, prosthetically enhanced or not, that is gendered. However, the individual’s biological destiny will accom-plish what culture—in the form of technological augmentation or collective development—is unable to accomplish: senescence will eventually erase gender once and for all. Near death, at the moment when sexual desire is subsumed into the asexual impulse to care for another human being, we finally become gender-neutral.
Following Haldeman’s suggestion that the soldier’s body, as the incarnation of both gender and humanity, is at risk through the technologies that are meant to enhance and protect it, other writers have explored the question of how to un-gender the soldier’s body in order to uncouple the problem of masculinity from the problem of humanity. Like Haldeman, these writers have inherited their ideological paradigms from Heinlein, even though, like Haldeman, they often try to undercut Heinlein’s political stance. The Forever War, itself an award-winning novel of considerable popularity and renown, in turn becomes a text that triggers intertextual responses, one of which is Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. In responding to Heinlein by way of Haldeman, Card arrives at a solution similar to the one proposed at the end of The Forever War. It is not senescence but adolescence that un-genders the body. Before the onset of puberty, Ender’s Game suggests, there is no sexuality, no sexual desire, that marks the body as gendered. Even though children can technically be divided into boys and girls, the cultural imperative that children are non-sexual, or at least pre-sexual, evacuates them of masculinity and femininity as Heinlein would conceive the terms.
The metaphor Ender’s Game provides for this un-gendered biological period is the Battle Room, which Card himself discusses as the crystallizing point for the novel in his foreword to the “Author’s Definitive Edition.” The Battle Room is a sophisticated technological environment, used by the military as a simulation and exercise tool, in which the human body is suspended weightlessly, afloat in empty space. Cadets in training for combat float elegantly, effortlessly, and acrobatically, simulating with their bodies the complex maneuvers of autopiloted military hardware. Card unveils, in three stages, the literal significance of this environment. First, it appears as an abstract signifier without concrete referent, not unlike exercise equipment which, rather than simulating specific forms of manual labor, isolates specific parts of the body and trains them in abstracted taylorized movements. In the second step, we learn that the Battle Room is in fact a technological simulation of outer space, not unlike a video game which integrates the player’s specific tasks into a concrete narrative or thematic background. And finally, the Battle Room is revealed as a military installation that allows for remote control of specific technology in a specific space elsewhere. The child genius, Ender, and his fellow combatants are trained, it turns out, by the invisible hand of a world government to conduct a pre-emptive strike against an alien enemy.
The Battle Room appears to be, for now, the last incarnation of the combat prosthesis whose development I have been tracing from Starship Troopers on. Like its technological precursors, it meets Mark Seltzer’s description; its embrace is both claustrophobic and liberating, causing “an emptying out of human agency,” as well as “the extension of human agency through the forms of technology that supplement it.” But there is one crucial difference. The Battle Room does not imitate the shape of the human body. Instead, its dimensions simulate the open space through which the metaphorical bodies of the soldiers navigate. In other words, it is non-anthropomorphic, implying the indifferent world of inanimate objects surrounding the body. However, the Battle Room still radiates what Joe Haldeman, in his autobiographical reflections on his tour as a soldier during the Vietnam War, calls “a secondary humanity.” Haldeman states: “Plenty of cold numbers and equations are used up in design and manufacture [of the technology of warfare], but a finished product radiates a kind of secondary humanity, because it was designed for human needs” (Vietnam 94). Secondary humanity radiates from the negative imprint of the human shoulder on a rifle stock, the shape and ergonomic design of the human hand written into the design of a fragmentation grenade, or the connections between the human eye as it extends itself through the crosshairs of a rifle scope. In other words, as long as the soldier’s body figures in the equations of military planning, its presence will ensure that all military technology is essentially prosthetic in nature. Consequently, Haldeman concludes that “we become nervous around artifacts that are patently antifunctional,” probably because they represent a type of object that erases the soldier’s body, even in the traces it leaves behind, from the battlefield.7
Though the Battle Room is “patently antifunctional” in respect to the soldier’s body, it does still perform a mimetic function in regard to natural space. Since the body always exists in spatial relation to its environment, the Battle Room has the feel of “secondary nature.” What it accomplishes is a technological interface between the body and its environment. Practically speaking, this means that Ender’s body can act in combat but is never acted upon. Though Ender does suffer fatigue, exhaustion, stress, and minor injuries in the Battle Room, winning or losing the battle does not threaten immediate physical repercussions. Technology ensures that there is never the need to face captivity, to witness his comrades being injured or killed, or to suffer injury or death himself. Tactical moves are cognitively uncoupled from their concrete effects, shielding the soldier from the potentially paralyzing recognition of the devastation he, in turn, has inflicted on others. Ender can be manipulated into committing genocide because the logic of simulation at this stage of technological sophistication discredits the old distinction between signifier and signified: there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the map and the territory in the Battle Room. Combat simulation contained—or, more properly speaking, concealed—in these technologies inscribes the body exclusively in its performativity: its reflexes, its ability to overlook and tactically comprehend the obstacle course of the battlefield, to coordinate logistics within this field, and to interact with the enemy’s responses. For the soldier performing in this environment, it is battle at its most abstract, reduced to bodily reflexes that themselves have been abstracted from their objectives or contents.
It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that Card is not describing a military version of cyberspace similar to the one Mark Dery identifies as the source of all “discorporation” in cyberculture—the experience of “the cultural post-traumatic stress syndrome induced by the relocation, in technology, of an ever greater number of our cognitive and muscular operations” (234). Like Heinlein’s and Haldeman’s prosthetic battle suits, Card’s Battle Room is a technological extension of the soldier’s body, which is contained, enclosed, and enveloped by it. The boundaries between the body and its technological environment are blurred. But unlike Dery’s notion of “discorporation” (derived from Marshall McLuhan’s “autoamputation”) or, for that matter, William Gibson’s notion of the body as “meat,” Card does insist on the importance of the biological body. Nothing moves, nothing happens, without the soldier’s body performing. Dery or Gibson consider the gender of this body as of little or no importance because all its vital functions are channeled, via technology, away from the ontological ground zero of biology and into the multifaceted realm of cybernetic simulation. Gender in cyberspace is reified as a function of social interaction and/or self-conscious decision: if we can adapt to the gendered persona through which others communicate with us, or actively decide to become whatever gender we choose, then gender itself becomes ultimately useless as a pre-existent marker of personal identity.
In Ender’s Game, however, gender is far from meaningless. On the surface level of the text, where Card responds to the intertextual challenges extended by Heinlein and Haldeman, we witness gender as an empty category. The soldier’s body, Card suggests, can be free of all technological anxiety so long as it is prepubescent. Hence, the Battle Room itself can be read as a metaphor of adolescence. The child-soldier is suspended in a state of weightlessness. The harsh realities of combat always play themselves out elsewhere. He simulates tactical moves that are stripped of their real content; he “plays at” war without exposing himself to its real risks and dangers. And since his body is not fully gendered yet, the conflicts it engages in are exempt from the gendered anxieties that plague Heinlein and Haldeman. As a prepubescent, Ender is hardly concerned with his masculinity, with gender, or with the devastating effects technology might have on his sense of identity and integrity. Masculinity cannot be at stake for Ender because he has not yet acquired a gendered body. It looks as if Card has in fact discovered a way to disentangle the soldier’s body from the dilemma Heinlein’s text articulates.
But Card, like Haldeman, never fully succeeds in freeing himself from the gendered body of the soldier. What could have functioned as the major target of criticism in Ender’s Game—the use of children for military operations—becomes its ideological foundation for removing, or never raising and confronting, the specific anxieties and ambiguities addressed by Heinlein and Haldeman. Masculinity begins to figure strongly in Ender’s encounters with figures of parental authority. There are Oedipal skirmishes with Colonel Graff and Mazer Rackham; the latter of which begins literally with a fight in which both inflict great pain and damage on each other (§14:264). But the argument Card returns to again and again is that Ender’s interest in war games is that of the child who plays “naturally.” Ender’s reflexes and instincts, his physical inventory of acquired and hereditary skills for combat, come naturally to him. The military intervenes before adulthood can dilute Ender’s pure and natural impulses. Military training appears as nothing more than a specialized form of socialization. The disciplinary system the child is subjected to provides a concrete context for his skills and counteracts the childish obstacles in Ender’s path to becoming a perfect fighting machine: short attention span, disappointment during the socialization process, unwillingness to see the necessity for “sacrifice” (in the form of isolation, e.g.). Even though these obstacles manifest themselves physically—for example when Ender is engaging in what Mazer calls “self-cannibalism” (§14:285), chewing open the skin on his hand in his sleep, or when he withdraws into long bouts of sleep in retreat from the pressures of training—Card’s plot explains away the bodily damage as a side-effect of infantile socialization. Ender’s struggles are primarily those of childhood and only marginally, or at best retrospectively, those of the soldier in combat. As Card directs our attention to the effects that Ender’s actions have on his own psychological and social development, these actions are uncoupled from the concrete physical damage they inflict on the enemy, leaving both Ender and Card’s reader detached from, and largely indifferent to, the real nature of these acts. What is cause and what effect is being obscured by the technology of simulation. Growing up, Card seems to suggest, is war; that is, as long as the challenges are construed abstractly enough. While Heinlein tells us that guys will be guys, Card wants to reassure us that kids will be kids.
Read in the context of the Cold War alone, Starship Troopers might come across as a nostalgic attempt to revitalize “the warrior’s personality,” an attempt that is doomed because weapons of mass destruction dominate both the military arsenals of the global powers and the public imagination. Massive retaliation threatens to annihilate not only the enemy, but also the individual soldier’s body in the strategic thinking of military planners. Consequently, when Heinlein re-imagines war as a “punch in the nose,” his politics seem reactionary unless one factors in the body-anxieties that are specifically concerned with the stabilization of gender. Heinlein’s ambiguities about gender, leading to his over-emphatic attempts to shore up a threatened masculinity, suggest that a larger issue is at stake, wrapped in the discourse of military hardware. This issue sustains its cultural significance even when military technology readjusts itself from, for example, carpet bombing during the Vietnam War to surgical strikes conducted with smart weapons against select targets in Iraq during the Gulf War. Even after the military discourse switches to a new paradigm, gender is still the issue, for Heinlein as much as for Haldeman and Card.
Smart weapons, like Gibson’s fictitious “slamhound,” which are aimed at narrowly defined and circumscribed targets, reactivate Heinlein’s body anxiety in the contemporary reader with full force. It is not so much that Heinlein suddenly seems prophetic; Verhoeven’s rendering of the novel demonstrates that ironic distance remains a prerequisite for critical engagement with Heinlein’s technological and political imagination. But the historical development of specific tropes—both within the discourses of genre and military technology—recontextualizes the familiar texts and, consequently, changes the reader’s focus. Subsequent readers of Starship Troopers, among them not only Verhoeven but also Haldeman and Card, rewrite Heinlein’s text, foregrounding the one trope that has demonstrated its lasting significance throughout all contextual changes. Read by way of the intertextual constellation I have discussed here, Starship Troopers speaks to our anxieties that the technologies we use to enhance our physical bodies deprive us of all genuine agency in the world, and that the categories we use to define our identity are being emptied out by these same technologies. The blurring, or perhaps even the breakdown, of categorical distinctions—the Cartesian duality of mind and body, the difference between bodies and machines, and the difference between masculine and feminine—which announces itself in the texts I have discussed, reveals how no single category exists separately from the others and how the wavering of one immediately requires a reshuffling of the others.
If the relative failure of Haldeman’s and Card’s texts to extricate themselves successfully from the problems raised by Starship Troopers has any significance, it is to illustrate that Heinlein’s writing correctly identifies pervasive cultural anxieties. As much as some readers may despise his politics, this cultural diagnosis is something for which he deserves credit. Card, in my opinion, produces the intertextual reading that raises the most problems. His vision of future warfare and his dream of bodily and moral weightlessness can be traced back to what Virilio describes as the uplifting experience of “technological vertigo or purely cinematic derealization” (War and Cinema 84-85) through the experience of high-tech combat. This allows him to strip the experience from all ethical considerations by construing it as a sublime experience that remains primarily aesthetic because it is essentially bodiless, a textual move that brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s warning words about the aestheticizing of politics:
The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. . . [Mankind’s] alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. (242)
Ultimately, perhaps it is the image of the child soldier floating acrobatically in space, and not that of the heavily armed “steel gorilla,” which is reason for concern.
NOTES
1. Given the rampant intertextuality of science fiction as a genre, Gibson’s slamhound evokes echoes—likely intentional—of the Mechanical Hound that stalks the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and the “Geisthounds” that police the data web in John M. Ford’s proto-cyberpunk novel Web of Angels (1980).2. This is a term used by the German military machine during WWI to describe the new industrial type of battle that would be won not by strategy, tactical superiority, or advantages in training or morale, but simply by means of throwing larger and larger quantities of military equipment into the fray, thus overwhelming the enemy in an abstract game of statistical competition.
3. If one is willing to consider that warfare is not an exceptional state in Western culture but rather a logical extension of it, then to look at the relation between bodies and machines specifically in the context of war promises a dramatically heightened and simplified image of that culture. This would be the context in which technology and the body are forced into collusion by the greatest outside pressures; here we see that uneasy union in extremis.
4. Verhoeven himself has stated, in numerous television interviews, that the decision to omit the battle suit from the film’s already impressive arsenal of computer-generated special effects was based primarily on budget considerations. The decisions to cast largely unknown, second-rate actors and to tone down some of the sets to a simple, two-dimensional flatness were also motivated by the financial priority of the special effects. However, Verhoeven has managed to integrate these cutbacks in the film’s production costs into a coherent visual style, a kind of retro-70s B-movie look which underscores the ironic subtext of the film.
5. This is not a shortcoming of Seltzer’s analysis but merely a difference between him and Heinlein in their assumptions about the origins of gender. While Heinlein’s notions on the subject are clearly essentialist, Seltzer, immersed in poststructuralist discourse, presupposes gender as merely one category within which identity is socially constructed.
6. Masculinity here is, as in Starship Troopers, clearly identified with primitivism as well. The returning soldiers (Heinlein’s “steel gorillas”) find themselves surrounded by beautiful young women after they “popped [their] suits” (§4.8:212), following these women’s invitation to exchange their battle suits for “light yet warm” tunics. The refinement of the new world, as much as Haldeman wants his readers to see it as gender-neutral, appears as a feminization of culture in the old bipolar model of the sexes.
7. Mark Dery reminds us that the “argument is sometimes made that a war fought entirely by machines would save human lives” (123). While Dery goes on to question the rationale that relative cultural sophistication would forego diplomatic solutions in favor of “humane” robotic battlefields, the texts I have discussed so far suggest that what is really at stake is not ethics but agency. Would we be willing, critics like Mark Seltzer might ask, to accept human casualties just so agency is not completely surrendered to our prosthetic technology?
WORKS CITED
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt. NY: Harcourt, 1968. 217-53.Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. 1985. “Author’s Definitive Edition.” NY: Tor, 1991.
Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. NY: Grove, 1996.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Foreword.” In Theweleit. ix-xix.
Ellis, John, The Social History of the Machine Gun. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
Gibson, William. Count Zero. NY: Arbor House, 1986.
Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. 1974. NY: Ballantine, 1976.
─────. Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds. Boston: NEFSA, 1993.
Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. 1959. NY: Berkley, 1968.
Rabkin, Eric. “Reimagining War.” Fights of Fancy: Armed Conflict in Science Fiction and Fantasy, eds. George Slusser and Eric Rabkin. Athens: U Georgia Press, 1993. 12-26.
─────. “The Male Body in Science Fiction,” Michigan Quarterly Review. Special Issue: The Male Body II. 33.1 (Winter 1994): 203-17.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. NY: Routledge, 1998.
Starship Troopers. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Sony Pictures, 1997.Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller. NY: Verso, 1989.
───── and Sylvere Lotringer. Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti. NY: Semiotext(e), 1983.
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