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The Cyborg Handbook tells the story of how one particular model,
or one cluster of models grouped under the term cyborg (cybernetic organism),
has come to occupy a key place as a meaning-making apparatus that either
actually or rhetorically involves such disparate areas as: the invention of new
emotions; self-directed evolution; combat and medical augmentation; the
prediction, monitoring, and control of body movement; farming; automatism;
remote or prosthetic operations; reproductive technology. Culling material from
a wide variety of academic sources, The Cyborg Handbook follows the
lead of Donna Haraway, who adds an image-rich foreword to the book, in putting
cyborgs on the map of cultural criticism.
Alongside essays and pieces of fiction, this weighty contribution to the
consolidation of the field (there are over forty texts) also includes facsimiles
of sections of reports from NASA, DARPA, and medical reports: the sort of
material that one might expect writers on the history, sociology, anthropology,
or cultural politics of technology to use as primary research material rather
than as contents. Here, though, the juxtaposition of jargons and intentions that
are often at cross-purposes is quite fruitful as befits such an ambiguous,
chimerical, partial, and contradictory figure. "We can have unabashedly
military cyborgs, liberal cyborgs, and feminist cyborgs just as easily as we can
have cyborgs that undermine such categories"--as Hugh Gusterson reminds us.
Notwithstanding this convergence, it's still not that easy to get the
contributors in the corduroy mixed up with those in the camoflauge. Chris Hables
Gray's dry reading-between-the-lines of a McDonnell Aircraft Company job
advertisement, for instance, goes some way towards making this apparent.
Appearing in the First Great Golden Age of Pop Cybernetics as a figure
to illustrate The Extensions of Man, the cyborg has been powerfully
developed by writers such as Donna Haraway and Sandy Stone to go beyond the
nature/culture division in the re-engineering of a feminist consciousness that
has too often been locked-down in the former term. Although many of the essays
here are still concerned to maintain the domination/resistance paradigm as a
mark of old school cultural studies loyalty, for feminists in particular, this
re-engineering has not just been a matter of theoretical innovation but also a
task of massive urgency. When flesh is becoming increasingly protean, those who
have historically been considered morphologically dubious share the doubled
situation of facing both immense opportunity and of becoming increasingly
subject to alteration and "improvement." Given this urgency (one that
can only be accelerated as those vectors of the cyborg condition such as genetic
engineering and biotechnology, which appear below the level of general
visibility, move increasingly into everyday life-with the minimum of public
debate or accountability), one wonders how long excruciatingly banal reports on
the progressive viewing of Star Trek can remain viable as an alleged life form.
Although, at its usual pace, the academy tends to operate via a careful
permutational unfolding of issues within a defined area, we perhaps shouldn't
expect anything so thrilling and awful as this area of study might suggest.
Nevertheless, there are several writers here that are up to speed. Heidi
Figuerora-Sarriera contributes a short, useful reading of the work of that
curiously retrofuturist figure Hans Moravec. Part Platonist, part transhumanist
jock, Moravec espouses a version of the Cartesian mind/body split as a full-on
mind/body impasse. In his projection of the cyborg, the body becomes "stuff,"
a waste product, whilst the soul or mind, schematically purified into an
electronic pattern, is downloaded into a computer, or any of an array of
fabulously appointed machines. A good counterpoint to the fanfares for the
supercession of the obsolescent body is the entropic subversion in the Philip K.
Dick story, "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," where a ship computer
attempts to maintain the mental balance of a highly neurotic man lying for a
decade in faulty cryonic suspension en route to the colonization of another
planet. Conveyed in Dick's brilliantly convoluted yet dense style, this tale
reveals in part that as chemical and mechanical technologies become integral to
our bodies we also become increasingly implicit in these genera of material
formation--as the component most subject to fault or malfunction.
In a similar vein, another science fiction writer included in this
anthology, Lois H. Gresh, contributes a frenetic story that gives the reader a
hilarious inside view of the strife and melodrama in the life of cybernetically
enhanced pot-plants. In a tightly argued paper on cyborg anthropology tracing
the political ramifications of such study, Gary Lee Downey, Joseph Dumit, and
Sarah Williams state that: "Cyborg anthropology helps us to realize that we
are all scientists. That is, by reconstructing scientific knowledge in new
contexts, including across national and cultural boundaries, we all do science."
Whilst no doubt this would provide an annoyance to many, though not all, "real"
scientists, the reconstruction of scientific boundaries in science fiction in
particular has not only often set the pace for "real" science but has,
alongside the work of more empirically based writers, proved particularly
fruitful in revealing the positive unconscious of what far too often passes as
neutral discourse. Multiple excesses of borders not only of discipline, but of
the skin-bound human individual, are the only surety in cyborg ontology, and
this most intense of liminal skirmishes is explored in detail. Arnold
Schwarzeneggar, as actor and bodybuilder, has often been the site for this
crisis to act itself out on film. Jonathan Goldberg's complex and perceptive
article tracing his career uses a theoretical toolbox including the writings of
Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, and Zoe Sofia, amongst others. And, as the excessive
phallus exceeds even itself, he makes a particularly choice use of Pat Califia's
work to read the improbable family group of Terminator 2.
Whilst it may not be quite this same sly wit making it appear that the book
itself is strongly cyborged--with many of the essay titles manifestly designed
solely to seduce the poetic imagination of library search databases--there is
much in the piece by Sandy Stone. In an article that also forms the introduction
to her extremely juicy book The War of Desire and Technology at the
close of the Mechanical Age, she weaves together "architecture, play,
physicality and metaphoricality, bodies and selves, whereness and politics, sex
and bandwidth, interior and surface and desire" in a way that is
exemplarily playful and robustly pertinent. Making the writing itself something
of a border creature in its play on different cultural >
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f the most suggestive work here. Hybridity and its potential induce
complex mixtures of fear and desire, which are both historically and
contemporarily crucial--as David J. Hess points out, "every age has its
mythical figures that transgress the boundaries it creates between the human and
the non-human, culture and nature." That the cyborg is a figure that,
whilst tending towards the mythical, stands neither outside ourselves, nor
outside society, is a cause for celebration--and for cranking up the
contradictions.
Matthew Fuller lives in London. He edited Unnatural: techno-theory for a
contaminated culture (Underground, 1994). I/O/D the interactive
magazine which he co-edits is available from:
http://www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/
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