Money Machines: Capitalism, Globalization and Our Posthuman Future

This essay will examine to what extend representations of a posthuman future are either implicit within, or serve to complicate, narratives of global capitalism by localising the analysis within two Japanese animated films: Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Innocence (2004). The essay draws upon Donna Haraway's understanding of the cyborg to situate representations of the posthuman within both a critical frame-work and the discourses of global capitalism. The essay uses the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics in order to demonstrate the demobilizing and oppressive effects of global capitalism which succeeds in the creation of a technological underclass. The essay then turns its attention towards the technological resistance to the homogenizing attempts of global capitalism and the consequential reclaiming of certain social spaces. What emerges from this study is the image of the cyborg as both a consumer of global capital and a force of resistance.