Cyberpunk, as a storytelling genre and as a subcultural paradigm, has offered critics material rife with opportunities for analysis. It deals explicitly with the organic/synthetic dialectic, theories of consciousness, and notions of freedom and agency in its dystopian iterations, and thereby plays with the larger science fictional question of what is the human condition. Further, as a form of futurism it can throw the cultural norms contemporary to its creation into relief.
Ghost in the Shell makes a particularly good subject because of its relative complexity and because of the influence it has had on the cyberpunk phenomenon. Whether or not it actually originates all of the genre elements generally attributed to it is not an essential question, because its particular use of these elements is unique and seminal. For the narrative critic (or dramatist critic, in Sellnow's terms), several potential implications emerge from film's narrative that call for closer scrutiny. Kusanagi spends a great deal of time breaking rules, and in almost all cases she "absolves" herself by reasons of transcendence — she repeatedly takes unsafe courses of action because her goal (particularly in her attempt to dive into the Puppet Master ghost) outweighs the risk, and probably most notably she treats the physical fact of her body (including its nakedness) as insignificant in the face of her conscious integrity (i.e. the mind is more real than the body).
On the surface, it is possible to say that the narrative of Ghost in the Shell makes a transhumanist argument. As a world in which human thought is digitized, the milieu of the film is essentially post-singularity, a science fictional (or Kurweil futurist) term for the moment when human beings transcend biology, beyond which speculation is virtually impossible. Kusanagi continually transcends biology for a higher cyborg purpose, seeking a further knowledge of self that does not depend on her physical or biological presence. This is what motivates her quest to understand the Puppet Master.
A counter to this argument emerges when Haraway definitions of cyborg come into play, however. In her "Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway asserts that the post-human cyborg is also post-gender, and in being post-gender is also post-genesis. She sees technology and synthetic/organic unity as a sexual equalizer. From this perspective, Ghost in the Shell does not follow all the implications of its narrative and world-building. Kusanagi's frequent choice to expose her body (justified by the requirements of camouflage technology) might argue for the irrelevance of gender, but it might also be that it fetishizes female biology rather than designifies it. When Kusanagi "masculates" her cybernetic body by overexerting herself to break into the spider tank guarding the Puppet Master, she is punished with a loss of functionality. Finally, the Puppet Master's goal of "sexual" reproduction with Kusanagi at the cost of her own conscious integrity negates Karaway's ideas of the post-genesis condition implicit in a Kurzweil world.
In either case, further analysis would be necessary. Haraway is not the last word in transhumanist philosophy, though she is undoubtedly essential to any serious discussion of it, and the complexities of Ghost in the Shell's narrative mean whether or not its narrative makes a transhumanist argument cannot be a foregone conclusion.
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