Cyborgs – seperating body and mind

So i was in my module for nature and society, one of the most difficult modules to understand, but once you finally get some comprehension and when it all comes together it becomes one of the most intersting. Our lecture today was on “future natures” and very surprisingly cyborgs came up. As the relationship of the body and nature is a recurring theme. Below are quotes from the slides used. And ill add in some further explanations.

The body and cyberspace
Body regarded as a nuisance.

Cyber enthusiasts dub the body ‘meat’ or ‘wetware trash’ (Morse, 1994).

“For couch potatoes, video games addicts and surrogate travellers of cyberspace alike, an organic body just gets in the way’. Its demands to be fed, to be washed, to sleep and so on, interrupt cyber pursuits and interactions.” (Lupton, 1995)

“The idealized virtual body does not eat, drink, urinate or defecate; it does not get tired; it does not become ill; it does not die.” (Barlow, 1990:42)
Cyberspace
Chatrooms – disembodied spaces?

“Because meanings are read off from our physical bodies and the judgements that are made about particular bodily characteristics such as age, health, race and gender, the body can act as a social barrier to some relationships. The internet therefore offers a cloak of anonymity.” (Valentine, 2001)

So this is in terms of the body being restricted by your biological capacities, and because a body cannot be interfaced into cyberspace it is deemed to be weak. Technology can keep going but the body cant, this is probably why we rely on technology as it betters human “beings” by “doing” processes that we cannot safely do ourselves. After all a body has got to sleep. Whereas biological capcities, criticism, race, religion, creed, appearance do not matter in cyberspace, as there is always the sense of anonymity. Although one thing has to be stated, even with the embodiment of cyberspace, we still have to relate to the real world. You can remove the physical and transform it into the imaginative, but you will always ave an off-line identity, which is subject to biological and spiritual processes as mentioned above.

Critique of the discourse of disembodiment:
On-line textual persona cannot be separated from off-line physical person that constructs them
Disembodied identities and conversations are based on embodied off-line identities
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3. Hybrid natures – the concept of ‘cyborg’

The word cyborg widely attributed to the NASA scientists Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline

Used the term in 1960 to describe a series of experiments that explored how the human body might be technologically enhanced in order to allow space travel

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‘Cyborg’
Gandy (2005): Etymological roots of ‘cyborg’ can be traced to:

eighteenth-century word ‘organism’, and

‘cybernetics’ introduced by the mathmatician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s to describe the study of complex systems of control and communications in animals and machines.
‘Cyborg’
The literature on the cyborg ranges from:

conceptions of the cyborg as an ontological or epistemological strategy to

explorations of specific manifestations of the cyborg in social and material practice.
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‘Cyborg’
Donna Haraway’s A manifesto for cyborgs (1990).
The body and technology are merging or coalescing into the cyborgs

“A hybrid of machine and organism where technology is a substitute or supplement for the flesh.” (Haraway,1990:91)
‘Cyborg’
Science fiction?
Popularized in films: Terminator, The Bionic Man, Robocop:
http://www.mgm.com/title_clip.do?title_star=ROBOCOP

At this point in the lecture the lecturer tried to link to a trailer of robocop of all movies, alas the sounds didnt work, and good thing as i was sat there muttering to myself “terrible film, aweful film” etc I was coming up with many other better examples of cyborg qualities discplayed in films, althuogh the film industry has sought to transform the idea of a cyborg into a dystopia, concentrating on the sinister qualities, when the idea of the cyborg was originally coined for the space program to better adpat humans to space exploration, as the body is seen to be feeble and weak, and machines deemed to be stonger never tiring.
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Cyborg body represented as stronger than the more fallible, vulnerable human body, immune to pain and able to repair injury and damage to self, ‘cheating’ death.

‘Cyborg’
Cyborg as ‘ontological’ strategy (Haraway) =
Concept of ‘cyborg’ breaches three ‘leaky boundaries’:
Humans and animals
Organism and machine
Physical and non-physical

Makes cultural categories & bodily boundaries fluid and indeterminate – possibilities for escaping limitations of gender and other stereotypes.

Idea appealed to some feminists, who seek to resist ‘essential’ constructions of bodies and identities.

Geographers have sought to theorise that the body and mind are seperate from each other, whereas others have said that the mind is contained within the body. With cyborgs there is no seperation and no boundaries, it is essentially one being. It does away with the cartesian theory (descartes – i think therefore i am). So in essence cyborgs and on-line identities seek to do away with stereotypes and moves beyond essentialist construction of the body

Essays

Ive put some of my recent essays for a couple of modules, some bits are interesting, if you have any idea about the modules, although both of them were rushed i must admit. youll find them on seperate pages in my blog (Washington consensus and Contested Natures)