Both Gilliam and Pallin's Brazil (1985) and Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto (1991) portray a postmodern future in which the construction of shared-identity through the control and reassembly of information are the basis of a political system. In both systems, the representation of any object is both removed from and more important than the object itself, leading to a gargantuan information system that (dis)functions as an easily subverted machine.

This interview with Mr Helpmann, the Deputy Minister of Information in Brazil encapsulates a key similarity and difference in approach between Gilliam and Pallin and Haraway's program for revolution in such a context.

INTERVIEWER: Deputy minister, what do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?

HELPMANN: Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game, instead of on the touch line heckling -

INTERVIEWER: In fact, killing people -

HELPMANN: - In fact, killing people - they'd get a lot more out of life.

• (Gilliam and Pallin, 1985, 2)

Both Gilliam and Pallin and Haraway see abstracted representation as primary tools of control. In Brazil, the government acknowledges that this reassignment of meaning is a game, and faults the terrorist's choice to fight in meatspace not as murderers but as bad sportsman. The minister must be reminded that what is going on is not mere heckling but the actual killing of people.

This sort of euphemism is the ministry's primary propaganda tool and coping mechanism. When Lowry destroys a car, explodes trucks, and inadvertently sets several people on fire, his charges relate to missing paperwork and property, and he is quickly bustled off to discuss the financing options for his interrogation.

Although Harraway's description allows for a deep connection between human, nature and cybernetic machine/ system, as opposed to Gilliam and Pallin's severely disjointed existence, Harraway also sees the "deadly game"of information reassignment as the key arena for political battle

"I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game." (Haraway, 1991, p. 161)

Ironically, Haraway's form of revolt is more in line with the Ministry's Game than it is with Gilliam and Pallin's revolutionaries. Her call to subversion still operates within the spectrum of symbol exchange and information reassignment

"This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. " (Haraway, 1991, p. 181)

In Brazil, Lowry's approach towards subversion comes to be more in line with Haraway's information subversion. Acknowledging that identity is entirely constructed and mediated by this disconnected information technology, he "kills"his love by deleting her from the system's files.

Appropriately, as this points to the major weakness of Haraway's argument, Lowry's meatspace subversions are more effective. Building on the terrorists'method, but targeting the information streams specifically rather than the consumer system at large, Lowry sabotages the physical ducts that are the basic material of the network. Joining the out and in tubes of Brazil's paper-based internet into an infinitely recursive loop, he ruptures the network, causing information to spill out into the hallways and eventually, into the streets.

Meatspace reality catches up with both of Lowry's attempts, however, as the tubes are repaired and the woman he had tried to protect by deleting is tracked down and murdered, "again."

The fact that both of Lowry's approaches towards subversion - working within the system and upon the system - fail, would appear to undermine my argument that the meatspace approach is the more effective. However, his final pyrrhic victory against the system unseats not only the power of the Ministry, but also the post-gender cyborg of Haraway.

His love murdered (twice, officially), himself strapped to the torturer's chair, faced with the frightening Noh mask of his torturer-friend, Lowry logs off from the cybernetic system of misrepresentation by withdrawing into his own mind. And while he has "lost" the "game" in that he is still a prisoner of the system, he is happy, humming, elsewhere in his mind. He is living out his fantasy of domestic bliss with his love in a subverted lorry nestled in rural hills.

"The lorry, travelling slowly now, approaches and then breasts the rise beyond which lies ... A STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL UNTOUCHED VALLEY. We ZOOM towards it through a MIX .. Half hidden in the heart of the valley is the truck with the house on its back. Creepers and wild roses have grown up over the truck and some of the house. A curl of smoke rises from a makeshift chimney, which has been attached to one of the walls. A small piece of ground around the truck has been cleared and made into a pretty garden with a vegetable plat. There is also a pretty cow, and some chickens. JILL appears looking like CRUSOE carrying a basket of eggs. It's a happy ending."(Gilliam and Pallin, 1991, 152-154)

The power of the individual, the preserved wall of the skin, the ability to disconnect from machinery and other consciousness despite our increased dependence on machine and system, this is the failure of Haraway's image of a post-gender cyborg.

"One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries- and not on the integrity of natural objects... the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange." (Haraway, 1991, p. 163-164)

I am not denying that re-representation of information and denigration of the symbolized for the symbol are powerful tools in both cybernetic systems. In Brazil, these substitutions occur at the mundane, micro-level (when indistinguishable piles of mush are differentiated only by the photos of the food that represents them) as well as at a systemic and endemic level, in which deletions replace deaths. In Haraway's manifesto, myth-representation of shared identity form the very structure of control that she aims to subvert with her multifarious "speaking in tongues." "It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine." (Haraway, 1991, p. 177) Symbol and symbolized, creator and created all play roles in both Brazil and Cyborg Manifesto, but in the end we can not get away from the fact that a human is an individual encased in skin no matter how post-modern his or her existence becomes.

For example, let's evaluate the approaches to technodeterminism taken by Gilliam and Pallin and Haraway in terms of the role of the meatspace individual.

On the surface level technodeterminism is key in Brazil, but we have the sense that these systems are merely more "modern" and "efficient" versions of an ancient and belabored bureaucracy. Both Gilliam and Pallin and Haraway see technodeterminism as a two-way interface similiar to that of Crary (1990). The ministry of information has created the rules that both perpetuate and render useless their system. Any attempt to work outside the system to develop a more efficient approach is punished, as in Lowry's attempt "to misdirect Ministry funds, in the form of a cheque to A. Buttle," and rogue heating engineer Archibald Tuttle's illegal but successful electricity repairs.

Technology hasn't so much created their ridiculous system as amplified it, and rendered the individual irrelevant. This "complicity in their own domination"(Haraway, 1991, p. 172) is unwittingly propagated by individuals, as Mrs. Buttle signs a receipt proffered by her kidnappers to acknowledge that her husband has been kidnapped. She later refuses to sign receipts when she realizes he has been killed, and is admonished by Lowry for "not making this easy."Lowry later suffers at the hand of his self-propagated de-indivualization when his torturer/ old friend Jack rebuffs Lowry's pleas and retreats behind his torturer's mask, claiming that this has nothing to do with friendship: "Shut up! This is a professional relationship!" (Gilliam and Pallin, 133).

Even the lone sucessful revolutionary of the film, Mr. Tuttle, is eventually consumed by paperwork.

So, the individual creates the network that turns the individual into a part of a system.

Similarly, Haraway sees networked social systems as clearing the path for the cybernetic organism that is the cyborg. "we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action."(Latour, 1984, in Haraway, 1991, p. 165)

People, as a group, created the system that then self-modified in a feedback loop to control the creators of the system. Individuality and even consistent identity is sacrificed to the system, but we cannot deny what Haraway does: that the individual can still withdraw, and is still gendered. Although Gender may not be meaningful at the system level, it is still essential to meatspace social interactions, and nowhere do I see Haraway envisioning the post-biological system that post-gender existence would require. Contrary to Haraway's thesis (1991, p. 161), The "Biotic Component" does not replace the "Organism" but augments it. "Genetic engineering"does not replace "Sex", but modifies it's outcome.

And when Lowry informs Jill that he has deleted her identity from the Ministry of Information's system, effectively killing, she responds "Care for a bit of necrophilia?"

The individual subverts the system not through chaos and manipulation, but through withdrawl. And in this withdrawn state, flesh and skin and gender and sex are all very important aspects of existence.

References

Crary, J. (1990). "Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century."Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gilliam, T. & Pallin, M. (1985). "Brazil."(Motion picture). Criterion Collection. Screenplay retrieved 20 November, 2005 from http://www.trond.com/brazil/brazil_script.htm

Haraway, D. (1991) "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:Routledge, pp.149-181. Retrieved 20 November, 2005 from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html