2014 11-23-resident evil 6

The Reign of Chaos in a Posthuman World: An

Ecocritical Analysis of a Video Game Resident Evil

6

The International Conference on Literature and Environment in East Asia

ASLE-TaiwanYi-Wei Evan Chin

Tamkang University

2014.11.23

Introduction

• There are eight major constituents of the arts include painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, dance, drama and film. Now game is the ninth art.

• The name of Resident Evil in Japanese is バイオハザード, which means Biohazard. But it is called Resident Evil in the Western area. It is a horror survival puzzle solving game.

• There is an adaption movie directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, but the plot of the movie is completely different from the original one.

2014/04/10 Yi-Wei Evan Chin 2

Introduction

• Marc Ryan argues that the video game can potentially be art is the claim being made.

• The relationship between technology and art is a whole.

• Matthew Screech wrote in his book Masters of the Ninth Art:

Each artist has successfully turned the ninth art into an unique and distinguishing feature of cultural life (2).


Timeline of the Release Years



Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

The Zombies in Contemporary Literature


The Organizations

• Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance

• American Secret Service Organization

• Umbrella Corporation – Research Organization of B.O.W (Bio-Weapons)


The Characters in Resident Evil 6


The Plot of Resident Evil 6

• By the President’s side is his friend, Leon S. Kennedy and United States Secret Service agent Helena Harper. Leon is forced to face the infected and mutated President, and kill him. Helena leads Leon to the Tall Oaks Cathedral amidst the zombie outbreak to rescue her sister, Deborah. By the time the pair reaches Deborah, she had already been infected with the C-virus, and the pair are forced to kill her. Along the way, the two encounter Ada, and Helena then discloses to Leon that she was blackmailed by National Security Advisor Derek C. Simmons, into aiding the assassination of Benford.


The Plot of Resident Evil 6

• After Deborah is killed, Leon and Helena escape through the catacombs and are attacked by a shark-like monsters. After going down a large waterslide they eventually kill it with an explosive barrel. As they drop out from the tunnel, they witness the thermobaric sterilizing of Tall Oaks, just like Raccoon City. Derek C. Simmons left the Agency in a hurry and is headed for China. Leon states that they're going to China. Because he knows that China is under a biocrisis.


Chris Redfield & Leon S. Kennedy


Albert Wesker & Jake Muller


Derek Simmons & Helena Harper


Ada Wong & Carla Radames


Oppression to Women and Nature

• The ecofeminist Val Plumwood denfines that Ecofeminism has contributed a great deal both to activist struggle and to theorizing links between women’s oppression and the domination of nature over the last two decades.


• Plumwood provides her philosophical concept of holism as a solution to human/nature dualism. Breaking down dualism is the resolution which involves “remaking the relationship so as to remove the features of denied dependency” (123).


Myth of Feminism, Socialism and Materialism

• Post-humanism

• Donna Haraway’s feminist image of cyborg


What is a Cyborg

• A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.

• The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.


What is a Cyborg

• This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in 'the West' since Aristotle still ruled. The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically.


A Manifesto

• One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices.


A Manifesto

• High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine

• Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.


A Manifesto

• As Haraway says, there is no psychological problem.

• She borrows Zoe Sofoulis’s argument that in Sofoulis’ unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, “Lacklein”, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.


Phallic Mother

• This idea is Haraway’s contribution.

• A 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism.


Real Case - Monsanto Company

• Monsanto Company is a publicly traded American multinational chemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation headquartered in Missouri.

• The company formerly manufactured controversial products such as the insecticide DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange, and recombinant bovine somatotropin (a.k.a. bovine growth hormone).


American Comics


Book about Monsanto Company


References

• 唐娜．哈洛威(Donna Haraway)著，《猿猴．賽伯格和女人(Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)》(張君玫譯)(台北：學群，2010)。

• 吉爾．德勒茲(Gilles Deleuze)著，《電影I (Cinema I)》(黃建宏譯)(台北：遠流，2003)。

• 史密斯．傑佛瑞(Jeffery M. Smith)著，《欺騙的種子：揭發政府不想面對、企業不讓你知道的基因改造滅種黑幕(Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating)》(張木屯譯)(台北：臉譜，2012)。

• http://residentevil.wikia.com/Resident_Evil:_Damnation• http://residentevil.wikia.com/Resident_Evil_6• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto• http://enjoylohas.pixnet.net/blog/post/23949812-

%E5%9F%BA%E5%9B%A0%E6%94%B9%E9%80%A0%3D%E7%B5%82%E7%B5%90%E8%80%85%E4%BD%9C%E7%89%A9%3D%E9%8E%96%E7%A2%BC%E7%A8%AE%E5%AD%90~%E5%AD%9F%E5%B1%B1%E9%83%BD%E5%8C%96%E8%BA%AB%E6%83%A1

• http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B1%B3%E7%B3%A0%E6%B2%B9%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6


http://residentevil.wikia.com/Resident_Evil:_Damnation

http://residentevil.wikia.com/Resident_Evil_6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

http://enjoylohas.pixnet.net/blog/post/23949812-%E5%9F%BA%E5%9B%A0%E6%94%B9%E9%80%A0=%E7%B5%82%E7%B5%90%E8%80%85%E4%BD%9C%E7%89%A9=%E9%8E%96%E7%A2%BC%E7%A8%AE%E5%AD%90~%E5%AD%9F%E5%B1%B1%E9%83%BD%E5%8C%96%E8%BA%AB%E6%83%A1

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B1%B3%E7%B3%A0%E6%B2%B9%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6

2014 11-23-resident evil 6

Education