„Can Avatars Feel?“, forthcoming in Pierre Cassou-Noguès (ed.): Images de l’homme-machine. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Speaking cyborg: Technoculture and technonature
Zygon®, 2002
Two ways of self-interpretation merged in Western thought: the Hebrew and the Greek. What is unique, if anything, about the human species? The reinterpretation of this problem has been a constant process; here I am referring to Philip Hefner and the term created co-creator, and particularly to Donna Haraway and the term cyborg. Simultaneously, humans have been fascinated by the thought of transgressing the boundaries that seem to separate them from the rest of nature. Any culture reflects the ways it relates to nature. Our nature is technonature, and our culture is technoculture. Our reality can be best approached by the metaphor and symbol cyborg. Donna Haraway's cyborg is not just an interesting figure of speech, it is also a description-of ourselves and our culture. Also, contemporary fiction reflects the return of ontological questions: What is a world? What is the self? The cyborg acknowledges our mode of existence and destabilizes the traditional procedures of identity construction.
Narratives about Cyborgization in the Context of Technoevolution
Logos i Ethos, 2020
We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at.1 1 S. Butler, Darwin among the Machines.
Seeing Like a Cyborg? The Innocence of Posthuman Knowledge
Chandler D. & Fuchs C. 2019. Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data., 2019
This chapter examines some prominent periodisations of the current epoch as the age of the ‘posthuman’ and of 'hybridity'. Looking in particular to the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, the chapter assesses the way these and other theorists look primarily to contemporary technological developments as the basis for articulations of a fundamental transformation of existential experience. The chapter argues that such theories have a tendency to neglect both entrenched global divisions in access to the rewards as well as exposure to the perils that recent technological advancements imply. Moreover, it is claimed they overlook the continuity of historical structures of inequality in their assessments of technological change. The chapter proposes recalling the peculiar conditions from which our conceptions of digital experience are forged, namely contemporary regimes of private property. Not only might this prove valuable for reflection upon the historical horizons of our social theories, but also for understanding the impulses animating them.
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.