The nature and complexities of the 21st century society offer a good opportunity to rethink many of the basic concepts of what we understand as human or humanism. For example, the mass media constructs and deconstructs our desires and offers illusory visions of reality which, as a result, interpellate us, and form our ideologies. According to Althusser, everything is ideology: the clothes we wear, the books we read, the food we eat, the religion we follow. Conflicts between nations are artificially created and wars are being simulated by the leading governments, thus giving us a false perception of the world. However, there are still those who remain aware of the fallacious politics of post-industrial states and who dream of a better future and a fairer society. I am one of those dreamers and that is why I chose to talk about a cyberpunk novel, Body of Glass, also known under the title He, She and It (1991). This utopian vision of society was written by Marge Piercy. My analysis of the novel will focus on two cyborgisation theories concerned principally with the anarchist, and thus utopian, aspect of cyberpunk.

Body of Glass compares and contrasts two distinct types of societies of the near future illustrating the dystopian or dark realities or subjectivities which might inspire readers to think critically about the times they are living. Let me point out just the main issues of the novel briefly. Piercy's novel, which takes place in the United States in the year 2050, is about a love story between a female human, Shira Shipman, and a male cyborg, Yod. Yod has been created to defend the free enclave of Tikva. Parallel to the main plot Malkah (Shira's grandmother) narrates a story about a golem, Joseph, and Chava, his beloved, which takes place in the Jewish ghetto of Prague in the 17th century. While focusing on the golem, whose aim according to the myth was to defend the Jewish people, Piercy offers a deep insight of Jewish cabalistic culture. The stories of the golem and the cyborg are apparently very similar although they are set in two different contexts. These stories lie at the centre of the novel and they both focus on the process of educating and humanising artificial beings illustrating how technology deconstructs concepts such as "nature", "humanity" and "culture". Thus the metaphor of a cyborg might be used to demonstrate how subjectivity is changing in the age of information.

Not only does the novel narrate a love story; it also shows up some of the amazing technological advances within futuristic societies. One might take Yod as one of the outstanding inventions of the future. Additionally, the newest inventions in medicine offer numerous possibilities of changing, augmenting or improving human physiques. A new field in medicine called "psychoengineering" depicted in the novel enables people to interface with different forms of artificial intelligence. The bodies of most of the protagonists are altered through the use of "nanotechnology" which makes use of microscopic implants or various types of prosthesis to cure different diseases.

Since Body of Glass represents the advanced world of the future it also demonstrates its defects: the corrupt world of enterprises with an excess of information pirates or other dissidents trying to set up their own businesses by infiltrating into hidden and confidential data. The novel is thus about the struggle for power between dominating post-industrial corporations.

At the heart of the novel lies an opposition between two societies, Yakamura-Stichen and Tikva. Both places might be taken as a representation of two distinct ideologies. The first would be that manifested by the Cyberfeminist, Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (Badmington 2000). This work suggests a new type of politics. The contradictory enclaves, Yakamura-Stichen and Tikva, might be taken as an example of "how to get from here to there": that is, from the White Capitalist Patriarchy into a New World Order of Informatics of Domination. Piercy's novel discusses how science and technology influence social relations, the construction of subjectivity, ideology and history. The changes suggested by Haraway are reflected in the novel in terms of class, race and gender.

In her cyborg manifesto Haraway proposes a set of dualisms transcended by the societies of the Informatics of Domination. Let me recall some of her dualisms: representation/simulation, organism/biotic component, reproduction/replication, scientific management in home or factory/global factory (electronic cottage), labour/robotics, public or private/cyborg citizenship, sex/genetic engineering, mind/artificial intelligence. According to Haraway, the figure of a cyborg transgresses this system of binary oppositions and might serve as an alternative to the western patriarchal power apparatuses. She uses the cyborg figure as a metaphor of a possibility to overcome the established system of meaning upon which western culture has relied for centuries.

Chris Hables Gray (2001), another cyberculture theorist, also focuses on a cyborg metaphor and celebrates the possibility of integrating cyborgs into natural systems and hence transforming the nature of societies. Gray rewrites the 17th century mechanistic vision of a society as seen by Thomas Hobbes and announces the cyborg body politics of the technoscientific society. Thus the societies of the New World Order depicted in the novel might be represented as a cyborg based on "cyborg power" because they are thoroughly cybernetic; that is, based on information and mass-media. Gray asserts that the cyborg body politics is just a metaphor implying that people are learning to inhabit this utopian/dystopian, ambiguously constructed cyborg body. He believes that metaphors are used to describe real-world phenomena and the term "cyborg power" is used to describe the evolution of democratic politics of recent times.

The cyberpunk dystopian (rather than utopian) postindustrial atmosphere of late capitalism illustrated in Body of Glass is characterised by the proliferation of megalopolis. These enterprises are all involved in open competition, exploitation, and as Piercy puts it: "A certain amount of industrial espionage was part of the system, multi versus multi […]" (BG, 74) (1). Computer information is highly valued. The urban context, very much resembling that of Manga production of The Ghost in the Shell (1998) or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) with the streets full of little stalls selling food, drugs, bodies, implants or computers where the polluted air and the proliferation of viruses as well as uncommon diseases are killing people, produces a stifling sensation. As in most cyberpunk stories, a catastrophe occurred in the past and it caused the Great Famine period. Owing to natural disasters caused by technological changes in the enclaves, the general feeling is that the population and the nation are endangered. In the light of Gray's theory one might conclude that the nation as such does not exist and there are no national boundaries or defence systems.

As has already been suggested, the novel celebrates a clash of ideologies in the creation of the society of the future. Yakamura-Stichen is patriarchal, competitive and hierarchical with mega-corporations controlling the global economy. Its society is not unitary but bisected into "execs" and "techies". This reflects Gray's fear of a possible division of a cyborg society into two contradictory strata: "technopeasants" and the powerful elite called "technocrats" (Gray 2001). Gray advocates that technologies might prove to be authoritarian and hence real citizenship might be assigned only to the privileged with access to, or control over, complex technologies. The division of society into these categories points towards the real dangers of cyborgisation according to Gray. Not only are the citizens of Yakamura-Stichen marked by a strict code of behaviour, they are also forced to wear uniforms for they are all classified and thus controlled within a particular social stratum. Also, the architecture of Yakamura-Stichen is strictly defined and designed. Uniformity as well as prevailing blackness makes the enclave look sombre and threatening and this discourages any kind of inspiration or creativity. It is not only buildings that are designed in a characteristic way to suit the needs of the enclave. People's bodies and faces are surgically modified too in order to resemble Yakamura-Stichen's ideal: "faces [were] as much like the one on the view screen as each could afford" (BG: 4). Moreover, the citizens' attire in each mega-corporation reflects people's status as well as the politics of each enclave. The rigorous code of dressing is based on the prevailing discourse which imposes the standard black and backless business suits to show both men's and women's strong and fit bodies.

Tikva, on the other hand, depicts the utopian blueprint of a society offered by Haraway: it is non-patriarchal, non-competitive and non-hierarchical. In contrast to Yakamura-Stichen's capitalist mode of production the free town is characterised by "libertarian socialism with a strong admixture of anarcho-feminism, reconstructionist Judaism […] and greeners" (BG: 383). The space to express one's freedom here is illustrated in the casual way of dressing as well as in its varied architecture. Yakamura-Stichen represents Gray's idea of a cyborged society based on the image of Leviathan since it is a hierarchy ruled by the head, whereas Tikva demonstrates Haraway's cyborged liberating vision of humanity. Its politics is based on active democracy where citizens participate fully and openly in its policies and budget (such as in the already existing community of Porto Alegre in Brazil). It also favours posthuman beings constructed through biotechnology and nanotechnology in order to improve or lengthen human life and potential. In this technosociety, technologically-modified humans live side by side with 100% robots. Apart from cleaning robots labouring everywhere, artificial intelligence constructs in bodiless forms are a common presence. Shira's house is such a construct; it is an enhanced stationary computer and she has quite intelligent conversations with it at times. As Gray claims, cyborgisation is not only about the technological enhancement of people's bodies, it also affects human subjectivity. Thus one of the essential aspects of technotopias is the fact that people become more closely related or emotionally involved with machines or computers and, paradoxically enough, Shira perceives her house as her biological mother. As a consequence, this excessive contact with machines in the posthuman age results in an underrated natural/biological mother-daughter relationship. This is reflected in the novel in the lack of a relationship between Shira and her biological mother. Furthermore, Shira's father (and fathers in general) are totally neglected in the New World Order. There is no father in Shira's family. All the women protagonists of the novel are single or divorced and thus independent. It can be concluded that in this technoscientific era the Western concept of a nuclear family is destabilised and hence the significance as well as the nature of the term "family" is open to contingency. This is further illustrated in the relationship between Shira, her son, and Yod. In the information age the 'family' unit is open to revision, to re-arrangements or re-definitions.

The utopian society of Tikva has no ideal or uniform image but welcomes variety in all senses. Supporting Haraway's theory, it rejects any dominating or demagogic discourse claiming that:

Cyborg politics is the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentricism (Badmington, 2000: 81).

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work (Badmington, 2000: 74).