‘The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by instituting a threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life and law, between auctoritas and potestas.’
- Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
It has become a norm in contemporary popular culture to represent law and government as mechanism or apparatus for ubiquitous control; most often in the books, movies or tv series belonging to the cyberpunk genre. Contemporary theorists and authors who explore the relationship between governmentality and technology have revealed the fact that cultural objects of the cyberpunk genre generally represents a world that resembles our present world, and they often reveals the mechanisms of control that are employed in the creation of a docile working class (Chun, Control 183). In the age of algorithmic forms of regulations in which we live, such representations often engenders social critique, and reveal forms of ontological relations between human being and technological being. The combination of high-tech and low-life, which is a common feature of the futuristic societies in many cyberpunk and dystopian cultural objects, is precisely the reality in which majority of the current world population lives. In this article, however, I would bring into light an extreme example, the Japanese anime Psycho-pass. In this cyberpunk anime, machine is not simply a metaphor for the revealed hidden structure of the law, but law itself is reduced to machine. In this paper, I would like to delineate the points of intersection between algorithmic technology and law that the show illuminates. At the same time, my goal is to articulate how the main protagonist Tsunemori learns to deactivate and reduce the power of Sybil without completely destroying it.
Continue reading
Parvez Alam 