Cyborg Theology by Midson Scott A.;

Author:Midson, Scott A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5161378
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

NATURAL-BORN CYBORGS

On the one hand, then, we have the evolutionary posthumanist set of cyborgs that start with the human and typically carry some normative part of the human, either as an explorative drive or as a baseline for enhancement, along its course of modifications. Here, the human figure is able to incorporate the cyborg technologies and prostheses within itself as transhuman, or such technologies are defined against the human as posthuman, as part of a binary logic of sameness and difference. On the other hand, cyborg technologies can prompt us to question the plasticity and boundaries of the human, as Haraway's account and some readings of SF show. They allow us to deconstruct that human figure in scrutinising where, if at all, we can locate our understanding of what it is to be human (in terms of human nature, for example). Both of these tendencies – of dialectic (accommodation or othering) and critique – are arguably continued in a further iteration of the cyborg figure, which is Andy Clark's conceptualisation of the ‘natural-born’ cyborg.

Outlining his position, Clark writes:

We shall not be cyborgs in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry.47

Clark attempts to develop a seemingly radical new conceptualisation of the human that emphasises our connectivity with tools. Its strikingness emerges out of its emphasis on fusion, and rather than continuing to mark technologies as ‘other’, Clark depicts them as a fundamental part of being human.

Although this seems to be similar to Warwick's work, and indeed there are notable resonances such as a deep sense of fusion, Clark goes beyond this and begins to deconstruct the notion of the human. Whereas, for Warwick, cyborgs are our future, for Clark, arguably as for Haraway, cyborgs are also part of our present and our past. In this way, Clark connotes Erik Davis, for whom, ‘human beings have been cyborgs from year zero. It is our lot to live in societies that invent tools that shape society and the individuals in it’.48 If this is the case, though – if humans have indeed always been cyborgs, as Clark (and Davis) would have us believe – then in what sense can we affirm the radicalness of their critique? What has changed about humans, or about our understanding of them, if anything?

Clark posits, ‘we have been designed, by Mother Nature, to exploit deep neural plasticity in order to become one with our best and most reliable tools. Minds like ours were made for mergers’.49 What is interesting about Clark's vision of the cyborg is not only that it means that we are, and always have been cyborgs, but that it naturalises notions of technology so that technologies are not read in antithetical ways to the human, as previous iterations of cyborgs (such as cyborgs in space and medical cyborgs) have supposed. What this would suggest is an understanding

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.