CyborgsCybernetic + Organism

A human being who is linked to one or more mechanical devices upon which some of his vital physiological functions depend.

“Our new technologically-enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code.”

Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen

How to think about cyborgs

Two ideas from Mary Midgley:

1. The Power of Myths

2. Convergent Explanations

Myths are symbolic stories which play a crucial role in our imaginative and intellectual life by expressing the patterns that underlie our thought. Myths play a crucial role in our imaginative and intellectual life by articulating the patterns that underlie our thought.

•Focus on cognitive hybridization•The changing nature of cognitive technologies: the significance of the feedback loop•Our biological brains require a technological environment•The extended mind and distributed cognition•Human beings are special and distinctive, we retain a unique nature•Clark focuses almost entirely on mind, brain, self, and cognition•Our plasticity

Perhaps, then, it is a mistake to posit a biologically fixed "human nature" with a simple "wraparound" of tools and culture. For the tools and culture are indeed as much determiners of our nature as products of it. Ours are (by nature) unusually plastic brains whose biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of non-biological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/superman.html

This may sound like futuristic mumbo-jumbo, and I happily confess that I wrote the preceding paragraph with an eye to catching your attention, even if only by the somewhat dangerous route of courting your immediate disapproval! But I do believe that it is the plain and literal truth. I believe, to be clear, that it is above all a scientific truth, a reflection of some deep and important facts about (a whiff of paradox here?) our special, and distinctively human nature. And certainly, I don't think this tendency towards cognitive hybridization is a modern development. Rather, it is an aspect of our humanity which is as basic and ancient as the use of speech, and which has been extending its territory ever since. 

It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment.

A Future With Superhumans - a convo with PhD Daniel H. Wilson

Who cyborgs will be is a radical question

The answers are a matter of survival.•Socialist and feminist “projects” seek to create a just society characterized by equal opportunity for all and lack of exploitation and privilege•Both “projects” essentialize certain subjects, that is, they speak in terms of “the worker” or “women”•She believes that this essentializing is part of the problem and that technology can assist in attacking it

“From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, . . . From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”

"Late 20th Century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert"

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.

Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

• Uses metaphor of the cyborg to discuss the relationships of science, technology, and feminism.

• Argues that hi-tech culture challenges and breaks down the old dualisms of Western thinking -- things like the mind/body split, self/other, male/female, reality/appearance, truth/illusion, and so on.

• Instead, we have become cyborgs, mixtures of person and machine, where the biological side and the mechanical/electrical side become so inextricably entwined that they can't be split.

“The ‘New Industrial Revolution’ is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities, new ethnicities, … emergence of new collectives, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender nor race-neutral”

Intimate dependence on communication & information

technologies:

• Political processes• Modern states• Multinational

corporations• Military power• Welfare state

apparatuses• Satellite systems

• Fabrications of our imaginations

• Labor control systems• Medical constructions of

our bodies• Commercial pornography• International division of

Labor• Religious evangelism

Representation Simulation Bourgeois novel, realism Science fiction, postmodernism Depth, integrity Surface, boundary Physiology Communications engineering Perfection Optimization Reproduction Replication Scientific management in home/factory

Global factory / Electronic cottage

Family/Market/Factory Women in the Integrated Circuit Public/Private Cyborg citizenship Sex Genetic engineeringMind Artificial Intelligence White Capitalist Patriarchy Informatics of Domination

Parallel shifts

The effect of new technologies

•New family structures: patriarchal nuclear family, mediated welfare state family, family of the homework economy

•Robotics put men out of work in developed countries

•Intensification of vulnerability of work

•Altered gender divisions of labor and differential gender migration patterns

•Eradication of “public life” – eg. video games / miniaturization modern forms of “private life”•Militarization of our imaginations/Electronic and nuclear warfare

“Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide”

“The production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated”

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.