Archive for the ‘ English 532 (2006) ’ Category
Cyborgs actually exist. About 10 percent of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug-implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin. (N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 115.)
It’s sometimes hard for me to distinguish the difference between this technical definition of the cyborg and the more elusive, metaphoric definition. Probably because, writing about narratives and cultural constructions, I trade mainly in metaphors. But the fact remains, and it should be made perfectly clear, cyborgs are a reality.
A much higher percentage participates in occupations that make them into metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber-optic microscopy during an operation, and the adolescent game player in the local video-game arcade.
In this way– as Haraway’s chimera, as the ever-shifting figmental blur– we are all cyborgs. In the way that Pattie Belle Hastings’ cyborg survey defines it, we are cyborgs. Is it okay for us to think of ourselves in this way? Does it mean anything that I can quite easily define myself and most of the people around me as cybernetic (wo)man-machine organisms?
During our meeting the other day, Q gave me some interesting insight into this documentary by Errol Morris. One of Morris’s more interesting choices is to intertwine the interviews with apparently random scenes of the circus. He told me the key was to listen to what was being said in the interviews during these interludes, and to ask myself what the significance of these scenes might have in that context.
Every junkie, he thought, is a recording. (Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly, 159)
And, according to Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin, perhaps he is more specifically a camera.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Like a machine. Isherwood gives us the view of a posthuman subject. In this way, Isherwood’s detached self-as-camera and the perspective of the posthuman as addict agree. As indicated in part 1, the posthuman subject is a culture junkie, addicted to feeling. Without input to record, without images to photograph, he is like a blank disk, an unused roll of film. We see, perhaps we see more, but we feel only on cue, we feel what the image tells us to feel. And that is one interpretation.
Technology was smooth, you have to admit. Somewhere in all the sweet talk it got to second base and we were so charmed (“It’s so worldly, so mysterious!”) we never saw it coming. Besides, all those cautionary tales we were fed growing up didn’t prepare us for how this would really feel.
Technology, Don Juan for the 21st century. What if we tried stepping on the brakes and cooling the romance? “You’re getting a little too handsy for me.” How would we handle it? How would technology handle it? (Casanova’s probably got millions of flames that burn like LED lights in the middle of the night)
That’s what Robert Plowman tried to do. He said, “You’re a player, and I don’t want in on your dirty little games. We need a break.”
If this is a love affair we’re having with technology, the internet is where things stopped being casual. Is it just me, or is this really real? Sometimes you don’t know how deep you’re in until you spend some time apart.
The Cyberlit Blog 