Query, query, non-compulsory query
I know it's included as a part of the final compulsory post, and we've supposedly covered it in the first tute, but there's a question that's bugging me at the moment: am I a cyborg? The problem I have is that, while it seems pretty straightforward a question, I'm not sure it makes all that much sense.
If we stick with Haraway's conception of the cyborg as some kind of liminal, boundary-transcending, chimeric, hybrid thing, then the cyborg doesn't actually have any identity. What I mean by this is that, if asked what a cyborg is, it's actually impossible to give any kind of definitional answer. It is possible to provide an almost infinitely long list of what a cyborg isn't, but that doesn't really tell you very much at all. The cyborg doesn't seem to fit well with a concept of self-identity, or a 'you.' Thus a question like "are you a cyborg?" seems to have a distinctly contradictory nature.
It could work on a different level as well. Even if you don't take the boundary transgression stuff to heart, and just work with a machine-human hybrid, then I'm curious about digital identity. In theory, the internet can allow you to re-create yourself in any identity that you want. But if you do that, then are you a cyborg? And if you do it more than once, or with different people, which of the 'you' that you present is a cyborg? Again, if a cyborg can consist of a multiplicity of identities, does a question like "are you a cyborg?" make sense? (Also, rephrasing it as "are we cyborg?" sounds pretty cool :P)
Any thoughts?
Anyway, it's early (I'm posting this well after I wrote it), and cold, and I am full of coffee, and have a custard donut and a stack of CDs to do something with. See people this afternoon.
posted by ideaoforderatkeywest @ 12:19 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I'm glad you brought this up, because I've been struggling with some aspects of the question too. I think it's supposed to be provocative and open to interpretation!
My pre-existing ideas about cyborgs are very tied up with movie representations, physical beings with fused machine and organic parts, with very much an alien, not just non-human but often anti-human identity: much like the Borg Queen, though my ideas were more informed by the Terminator series.
Haraway takes such a broad, all-encompassing view of cyborg identity in her joking Manifesto that it very much stretches what I believe (or what I'd like to believe, given that non-human identity is very much deprecated?). While the Bionic Man might be a cyborg, he seems "essentially" human, as do people with artificial hips or contact lenses. And immunisation and ingestion of genetically modified foods as conferring cyborg identity? I can't really get my head around that, because I don't feel that they change the body in an "essential" enough way, in a way that alters identity. Though I have come across a few people, mostly in the natural parenting communities, whose notions of bodily purity and pollution are such that perhaps they do believe this - in some way at least.
Having said that, the aspects of digital identities rather than strictly (non-neurological) bodily alterations are perhaps even more thought-provoking. I'll pull out a bit of what I wrote in week two:
" To many of my friends I am only an online identity so far, a creature of text and digital images. Being mostly housebound, I would feel invisible in the world without the internet, which I use for education, friendship, community, and activism. My social life isn't bounded or even centred in my body these days; my family life is, but not my social life outside of that."
I'm still "me" though, still a single identity, without playing with different or multiple identities, which is what I think your question is largely concerned with.
~~~
I should probably warn my fellow tute-mates now that my allocated way of participating in the tutes is by writing my reactions and thoughts in this blog each week. They tend to come out a thousand words or so, so please bear with me!
Lara
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