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November 14, 2006
Chris Hables Gray has a paper entitled Understanding the Postmodern Cyborg. The paper is a covering and mapping of the ground opened up the undermining of artificial-natural, human-machine, organic and constructed by the figure of the cyborg.
Gray starts by delineating the recent shift to postmodernity:
We don't live in the stable modern world our grandparents did. Their belief in inevitable, comfortable, progress has been supplanted by our realization that scientific and technological innovation are relentless and quite ambiguous. Our ancestors' acceptance of the natural limitations of space-time and life and death have been replaced by the fear and hope we feel about space travel, apocalyptic war, immortality, global pandemics, virtual community, ecological collapse, scientific utopias and cyborgization. The modern assurance that we humans control our own destiny has been blasted away by horrific wars, ecodisasters and a proliferation of new scientific discoveries and technological innovations that range from the sublime to the patently evil, as a few hours of television viewing or internet surfing can easily demonstrate.At the root of all of this change is that great creation of the modern era: technoscience. I use this term advisedly, knowing it will annoy a large number of readers who like to keep their science and technology separated, at least conceptually. But while science and technology are clearly different things sometimes, they are also often mixed together in ways that are impossible to untangle.
Now the new technosciences, which are making the nanotechnology revolution a reality, including in particular genetic engineering, promise that we will be creating creatures that can't even be classified as humans. However,
I would have thought that an informational global capitalism would something to do with shift to postmodernity and the emergence of technoscience, but we can leave that to another time. Let us then accept that postmodernity is transitory-- it is a crisis---and shift to the figure of the cyborg and cybernetic systems in postmodernity.
Gray says that though the 'twentieth century human body can be conceived of through any number of rich and insightful metaphors.Though it is a disciplined body, a textualized body, a gendered body, and a resisting body, it seems to him more and more that one of 'the most fruitful metaphors is to conceptualize the human body as a rhetorical and material construction of the discourses and cultures of technoscience, the mass media, and the military; a creature that combines informatics, mechanics, and organics: a cyborg.' He adds:
Many humans are now literally cyborgs. Their inorganic subsystems can range from complex prosthetic limbs to the programming of the immune system that we call vaccinations. In the industrial and so-called post-industrial countries a "cyborg society" has developed where the intimate interconnections and codependencies between organic and machinic systems are so complex and pervasive that whether or not any particular individual in that society is a cyborg, we are all living a cyborgian existence.
Many examples in the military, space exploration, the mass media, art medicine etc are given to illustrate how we are living a cyborgian existence in postmodernity, then explores the phenomena of disembodiment in cyberspace.
He adds that citizenship is being reconfigured by the cyborg technosciences and by the direct challenges to the very idea of the human, which are coming from genetic, medical, computer, and military technologies. If citizenship is worth preserving it must by cyborged, with a full understanding of all the relevant technical, philosophical, historical, and political implications.
One big problem is our limited technical understanding of systems. So it isn't just technological breakthroughs that are driving the information revolution, the revolution in systems thinking has played a key role. Some of the best theorists have returned to Wiener's argument that artificial and natural systems are basically the same. Kevin Kelly, for example, has written a book called Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World that links them together along with the libertarian political agenda that is championed by Wired Magazine, which Kelly happens to be executive editor of. "Out of control" doesn't mean running amok. It means outside of external control; these systems run on their own dynamic. They can't be directed.
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The distinction sketched above -- between the modern and the postmodern, stability vs dynamics, tradition vs. constant innovation -- has by now become very familiar, and so I've become somewhat suspicious of it.
Today I'm teaching Emerson's "Self-Reliance" in Introduction to Philosophy. It's a difficult text -- being Emerson, after all -- but it does some remarkable things. Here Emerson deplores authority, tradition, obedience, and stability, and praises inconsistency, nonconformism, solitude, and wilderness. But he also celebrates a metaphysics of flux and a dynamic self that is never complete but in constant motion, always discovering new possibilities of being. Considering that it was written in 1841, it's a remarkably "post-modern" metaphysics and psychology.