MCOM 388:
Week 11: Embodiment, Cyborg and the Posthuman
Chapter
7 – Bodies in Cyberculture
The
body in theory has surfaced in a multitude of ways
Materialist
reading
·
De-naturalizing
Bodies
as embodiments of our self
Feminism
“jacking
in” to cyberculture
Can
the meat ever be really left behind?
Is
about tech augmentation – prostheticization, a new formation
·
Extending embodied
awareness
Cyberdody
vs. psychobody
·
Pros and Cons
(Good
post-human definition on page 146)
AI
machines will replace us, or we will live in harmony with the machines
Medical
prosthesis
“What
makes us human: our minds our bodies, or our mind-bodies?” (p.147)
the
human-techno genesis is another area of post-human
Haraway
Cyborg
types
·
Restorative
·
Normalizing
·
Reconfiguring
·
Enhancing
“We are
always embodied” (p.149)
Everyone
is a cyborg
Haraway
- boundary blurring of cyborgs and binary resisting
·
neither/both human and
machine
·
“The cyborg is
“resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely
without innocence (Haraway, p. 292).
·
Key boundary breakdowns
o
Human/animal
o
Organic/machinic
o
Physical/non-physical
·
Reconfiguration or race,
class and gender (body politics)
Engagements
with Haraway
·
“The cyborg body thus
becomes the historical record of changes in human perception”
o
only shifts in the
human condition
·
hybridization and
crossbreeding
·
US Third World feminism
issues
VHP
body is
·
Replicatable
·
Transmittable
·
Subdividable
An uploaded body?
Gromola’s Virtual Dervish
·
an ironic political
myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism…at the centre of my
ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg
·
cyborg is a cybernetic
organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as
well as a creature of fiction
·
we are all cybogs
·
The cyborg is
resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is
oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence
Boundary
breakdowns
·
human and animal
·
animal-human (organism)
and machine
·
physical and
non-physical
·
So my cyborg myth is
about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities
which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work
political
vs. personal identity
cyborg
feminists are creating new identities
·
We are living
through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information
system
·
self feminist code
·
problems into a
translation of code
·
Micro-electronics is
the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.
new
tech makes possible a change in employment, reproductive, and household gender
roles
·
'Networking' is both
a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy -- weaving is for
oppositional cyborgs
·
resolving contradictions
and creating taboo fusions
·
breaking down dominant
ideas creates new space for new ideas
·
Feminist cyborg stories
have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and
control.
·
Cyborg politics is the
struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against
the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of
phallogocentrism
·
feminist
science fiction
·
Cyborg imagery can
suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies
and our tools to ourselves.
Bartlett
and Byers - Back to the Future: The Humanist Matrix
Posthuman
Cyborgs
as hybrids or as humans connected with machines
·
Examines these issues
via The Matrix
·
Exemplifies “false
consciousness”
·
“struggle between human beings and machines over human subjectivity…human enslavement occurs only when, and by virtue of the fact
that, subjectivity is configured as posthuman”
·
Basically, Neo (humans)
vs. AI (machines)
·
Cyberpunk
·
A rejection of the
material real
·
“In sum, Neo is an icon of
neo-Romanticism, and the film's ideology turns out to be a version of
"natural supernaturalism," in which the superiority of human nature
to artifice, and of humanist to posthuman subjectivity, is guaranteed by the
investment of the human hero with the value of the divine.”
·
Neo as savior/Christ
·
AI as a substitute for humanity (simulacrum)
Apotheosis