Change for the machines: the cyborg in fact and fiction into the 21st century (original) (raw)
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Crossing the boundaries: Some thoughts about cyborgs
in "The History of Illustration", 2019
“… I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (Haraway 1985: 101). This statement ends Donna Haraway’s famous and influential 1985 article, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in which Haraway reconceptualises what it means to be human in contemporary society. For her, technologies are a way to reimagine feminism and to challenge and break down binary thinking based on differentiation and othering (for instance, that male and female are clear categories and opposites, with the female considered deviant from and inferior to the male ‘norm’). This provides food-for-thought for contemporary illustration by questioning how the world is represented and explained, while also providing a way to engage with pressing social and technological changes that alter the definition and meaning of being human, animal, natural, artificial, self, and other.
Cyborg: From Science Fiction to Social Reality (working paper)
The emerging technological developments across various scientific fields have brought about radical changes in the ways we perceive and define what it means to be human in today"s highly technologically oriented society. Advancements in robotics, AI research, molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, medicine, etc., are mostly still in an experimental phase but it is likely that they will become a part of our daily experience. However, human enhancement and emergence of autonomous artificial beings have long been a part of futures imagined in SF and cyberpunk. While focusing on the phenomenon of cyborg as a product of both social reality and fiction, this paper will attempt to offer a new perspective on selected SF and cyberpunk narratives by treating them not only as fictions but as theories of the future as well.
This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the 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 international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. 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. Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs -creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics -the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other -the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her 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. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, preoedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense -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. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection-they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals
The emerging technological developments across various scientific fields have brought about radical changes in the ways we perceive and define what it means to be human in today’s highly technologically oriented society. Advancements in robotics, AI research, molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, medicine, etc., are mostly still in an experimental phase, but it is likely that they will become a part of our daily experience. However, human enhancement and emergence of autonomous artificial beings have long been a part of futures imagined in SF and cyberpunk. While focusing on the phenomenon of cyborg as a product of both social reality and fiction, this chapter will attempt to offer a new perspective on selected SF and cyberpunk narratives by treating them not only as fictions but as theories of the future as well. Furthermore, selected examples of the existing real-life cyborgs will show that SF narratives are not merely limited to the scope of imagination but are a constituent part of lived experience, thus blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Cyborgs from Fiction to Reality: Marginalized Other or Privileged First
Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2013
In this paper I will offer an analysis of cyber technology, cyberspace and cyborg from its appearance in fiction to its contemporary realizations, in order to show symbolic place of cyborg has changed, in the light of contemporary power relations. I will focus on the cyborg figure in literature and film, mainly the cyberpunk genre characteristic for fictionalization of the relations between individual, society and technology. e ords cyborg, technology, life, cyberpunk Numerous connections, relations and intersections between fiction, technology, art and life have been named through terms (such as robot, cyberspace, genetic engineering, computer virus etc.) that have been coined in various works of fiction, and are now used in science and technology. I find this important because the articulation of the term is equal with the articulation of the concept, which means that those specific concepts now operative in reality were first introduced in fiction. 2 Same can be applied to a number of technological as well as critical anticipations of social and political relations in cyberpunk dystopian societies. The anticipations at issue have obtained direct or transformed realizations in contemporary society. This is by no means reducible to the trivial claim that science fiction of the past is the reality of the future. Nevertheless, it emphasizes the political and activist potential of fiction.
The Cyborg, its Manifesto and their relevance today: Some reflections
2015
The mere presence of adoring fans has been insufficient to entice Donna Haraway to visit Australia. Only Helen Verran and postgraduates at Melbourne University’s History and Philosophy of Science department managed to interest her once in the late 1990s. So as the first Australian with a doctorate co-supervised by Haraway at the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I have occasionally been called upon to speak when the doyenne of cyborg feminism was, as usual, unavailable down under (Sofoulis 2003). The role of antipodean Haraway always made me uneasy. It is a mistake to project patriarchal (and oedipal) traditions of scholarly filiation onto feminists. In my observation, feminist supervisors rarely seek to turn out clones of themselves and feminist students do not usually aspire to replicate/replace their professors. Like cyborgs, feminist students can be “exceedingly unfaithful to” and quite uninterested in their origins (Haraway, 1991, p.1...
Why is the cyborg a woman? Why is the woman a cyborg?
The world around me started to tremble many years ago when I met postmodernism. After that came feminism, then postcolonialism. My world has been falling to pieces ever since, but now I am beginning to glimpse views of a place to stand on, reinforced by a net of contingent and temporal affinities across the boundaries that my society had drawn for me. This paper should be an attempt to fixate this flash, and with the help of a cyborg fantasy (and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto) to abandon or at least suspend my phenomenological “insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight”.