Bodies + Machines:

Technologies of beauty

Technologies of health: women and medical

technology; technologies of reproduction

Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the intermingling of people, things (including information technologies), representations, and politics in a way that challenges both the romance of essentialism and the hype about what is technologically possible. It acknowledges the interdependence of people and things, and it shows just how blurry the boundaries between them have become.

(Bowker & Star, 1999)

Cyborg Representations: Origins• Ancient Greece in B.C. (Deus ex machina)

• 1800's ("Ghost" in the machine)

• Late 1900's (Miniaturization is about power)

• Present: Machines are everywhere and they are invisible

Cyborg• As the information systems of the world expand and

flow into each other, and more people use them for more different things, it becomes harder to hold to pure or universal ideas about representation or information, about identity

• Representations of monsters / hybrids are a reflection of that experience of (ruptured) identity (imagined cyborgs in art and fiction, popular culture)

• Real cyborgs (technologies of health, beauty ...)

Cyborg• Picture of possible unity

• Framework is rearrangement of social relations related to science & technology

• Current movement from organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information society

Analyses of Cyborg• AAA annual meetings: cyborg anthropology

sessions (mid-1990s+)• Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1995)• The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1985, 1991)

• historical images of cyborgs emerge at times of intense change that involve thinking of how humanity is impacted by technology (Gonzáles 1999)

‘Cyborg’

Source: www.prairiecon.com [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

‘Cyborg’

Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

Cyborg Representations

• Grotesque images that involve imagining the relationships bw people and things that are interpenetrated

• Bad science fiction or crucial notion for understanding technoscience, and how the knowledge (of science and technology) is shaping lived experience

Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

‘Cyborg’

Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

‘Cyborg’

Source: google search for ‘cyborg’ [accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker

cyborg representations -- hybrid identities

http://www.scrippscollege.edu/~dept/art/CTA/cyborg.gif (go)

Cyborg Representations• List the organic (human) and inorganic (technological)

characteristics of cyborgs you encountered.

• What was your response to these ‘beings’?

• Are they monsters, hybrids?

• What are they not?

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Organic cyborg (monster of multiple species)• Mechanical cyborg (techno-human amalgamation)• Cyborg consciousness (abstract, amalgamated, hybrid)

• Cyborg body politics? -- Gendered cyborg? (social control over woman’s/man’s body)

• Why are robots not cyborgs?

Cyborg Representations• The notion of purity based on membership in a

single, pristine racial, sexual, or even religious group does not hold in the ‘borderlands’ (the margins) that is populated by cyborgs

• Cyborgs are the iconography of modern experience (not natural, but mediated through technology)

• Why do they reflect a process of rethinking human nature? (use examples from your own search)

pre-industrial

industrial

post-industrial

autonomous

automaton

simulacrum

“The dichotomies that reflect a shift from the comfortable old hierarchicaldomination to the new networks I call the informatics of domination”

(Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991), 161

• Representation• Eugenics• Hygiene• Microbiology, tuberculosis• Organic division of labour• Sex• Labour• Mind• Racial chain of being

• White Capitalist Patriarchy

• Simulation

• Population control

• Stress management

• Immunology, AIDS

• Ergonomics /cybernetics of labor

• Genetic Engineering

• Robotics

• Artificial Intelligence

• Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism

• Informatics of Domination

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Cyborg images appear when the current model of a

human being does not fit a new paradigm -- a hybrid model of existence is required to encompass a new, complex and contradictory lived experience -- the cyborg body becomes the historical record of change in human perception in the realm of fantasy

• How is the cyborg body reflecting modern experience in each of the cases that are discussed by González?

• What is the habitat of each of these beings?

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Mechanical Mistress: L’Horlogère (18th century

engraving: body of a woman merged with an automaton) pre-industrial consciousness

• ideology of order, precision, and mechanisation• infusion of technology into human lives (automatons;

optical devices; devices for measuring time)• the precision of mechanical clock; system, regimentation

is an ideal of mechanized identity that culminated in 19th century large-scale industrial production

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• 19th century preoccupation with mechanization and

possibility that people’s identities and emotional lives become like machines

• automaton: servant, toy, master?

• increasing regimentation of life, and human experience• control of population: statistics, censuses • power relations (class distinctions: gentleman / worker)

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Hannah Höch: Das schöne Mädchen (1920) collage• early 20th century experience of modernism: a body in

pieces• allegory of modernization (chaotic vision of the rapid

social and cultural change after WWI; industrial growth; iconography of mass culture)

• The figure of a woman reflects the experience of a ‘modern’ woman (emancipated? subjugated? consumerized? empowered? commodity? customer?)

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Raoul Hausmann: Tête Méchanique. L’ésprit de notre

temps (ca. 1921) assemblage of found objects• early 20th century experience of modernism: a

mechanical mind• cerebral concept of the modern experience;

representation of what has been displaced • a new being for a new age (humanity is insufficient)

needs a body imagined in terms of contradictions

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Phoenix Technologies Ltd. advertisement for Eclipse

Fax (1993) • late 20th century experience of modernism: a gendered

body of a futuristic Medusa (head of wires, blinded with technology; ‘bad boy fantasy prevalent in so many images of feminized cyborgs’)

• touches upon cyborg body politics, exploring the consequences of a montage of organic bodies and machines

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• Robert Longo: All You Zombies: Truth Before God (1990)

• late 20th century experience of modernism: manifestation of the body at war in the theater of politics; hybrid body male/female

• cyborg manifests human, animal, and mechanical sexual potency and violence, ironic (inversion of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading People)

• What does this figure tell about the difference between cyborgs and people?

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles• González: cyborgs represent ‘interface bw

automaton & autonomy’ … • historically connected to increasing pervasiveness

of technology in organizing human lives (industrialization and modernization in the 19th and 20th century)

• political implications of technology infusing human life (potential for domination, control, violence as well as control of nature, freedom ...)

Cyborg Representations: Gonzáles

• Why are robots not cyborgs?

• Why is cyber- (as one of the most used prefixes of the 90s, signifying a world of computer dominance and disembodied experience) included in the notion of cyborg? (cyber-organism)

‘Bill Gates the Borg’

Source: slashdot.org [icon accompanying Microsoft news items; accessed Sept. 25, 2002] courtesy of Sarah Oelker