Mundane Cyborg four: the meaning of mundane

Well it seems time to consider the meaning of mundane in mundane cyborg.

1

I originally meant mundane to contrast with the more technologically sublime versions of cyborgs: individual human/machine cyborgs, “put together” by huge efforts of doctors, bioengineers, surgeons, and so on. RoboCop is a body that has been all but killed, and reviving that body takes enormous resources, whih only a huge corporation or the government would have available. In the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam, individual humans pilot huge military exoskeletons, merging their intincts and bodily reflexes with the movements of three story building high metal bodies that fly, fire missiles, and so on. In the TV show the Six Million Dollar Man, the cyborg costs…well, $6 million! And that was a lot back in 1974 (or actually, 1972, when Martin Caidin wrote his original Cyborg novel and set the price of a machine man at six big ones).

So in a way writing about the mundane cyborg forces me to consider how to talk about these other cyborgs: the not mundane or not quotidian uses of these technologies, for example. The extraordinary, as opposed to ordinary, cyborg. I think Leo Marx’s use of the technological sublime in his book The Machine in the Garden captures part of what I am after here: according to Britannica, the term “indicate[s] a quasi-spiritual haze given off by any particularly visible and impressive technological advance. Science fiction dotes on the sublime, which ruptures the everyday and lifts the human spirit to the plateaus of high imagination. Common models of the technological sublime include railroads, photography, aviation, giant dams, rural electrification (a particular Soviet favourite), atomic power and atomic weapons, space flight, television, computers, virtual reality, and the “information superhighway.”

The irony of mundane cyborg is that mundane works against cyborg; that is, the cyborg is clearly wildly nonnatural, dangerous, a sign of the posthuman, and so on. You get the sense of the end of the human and the natural and the beginning of some very other world. But this latter telos or aim of cyborg technologies is, I argue, just as likely to come from the ubiquitous small technologies that we merge with every day: our smart phones and iPods and GPS devices and scanners and so on.

So the irony is that the mundane cyborgs will bring about the nonmundane, sublime changes perhaps more radically than the iconic sublime cyborg projects will. This is the core argument of my book.

PS. This is what happens when you use an adjective to modify a noun; you open a Pandora’s Box of other possible adjectives. So for example Chris Gray is fond of categorizing cyborgs as medical, military, sports, entertainment, and so on; also there is the meta cyborg, the intermittent cyborg (you can remove the prosthesis or prostheses), and a host of others.

2

So what does mundane mean? The etymology of the word (found at etymonline.com) has to do with world or worldy:

late 15c., from M.Fr. mondain (12c.), from L. mundanus "belonging to the world" (as distinct from the Church), from mundus "universe, world," lit. "clean, elegant"; used as a transl. of Gk. khosmos (see cosmos) in its Pythagorean sense of "the physical universe" (the original sense of the Gk. word was "orderly arrangement"). L. mundus also was used of a woman's "ornaments, dress," and is related to the adj. mundus "clean, elegant" (used of women's dress, etc.)

If mondain refers to belonging to the world, then its opposite would be belonging to the Church, or to the not-this-world, to the otherworldly (which certainly applies to Terminator, and in a way to the sense that this technology is creating an/other world). And if cyborgs usually create disorder in various ways (category disorders, war and conflicts, crises between the augmented and the nonaugmented), then the mundane cyborgs would be the organic-machine hybrids that are restored to an orderly arrangement. So the newly functional prosthetic arm of an amputee from Iraq may be seen as mundane, insofar as it restores what was originally there in the world.

I found another interesting definition of mundane on Charles Hodgson’s delightful online site Podictionary. He recapitulates most dictionary definitions when he writes that “ mundane means “of the world” and when I hear people talk about things that are mundane they usually mean things that are average, undistinguished, pretty regular every day things.” But then he mentions other nontypical meanings:

• To officials of the Church, people who were mundane were “of the world” and so, non-officials of the church.
• Charles Darwin said that owls were mundane, and by that he meant they were ubiquitous, “of the world” they exist pretty much everywhere.
• Those with a broad perspective of how our planet fits into the universe used “mundane” as a synonym for “cosmic.”
• And finally, mundane has been used with the same winking acknowledgement as the phrase “man of the world” with a meaning that a mundane person was one who enjoyed their earthly pleasures.

But then he references urbandictionary, and as he slyly puts it, “entered a whole other monde.” In RPGs (role playing games), you have your online persona (mine back in the ‘90s was cybunny, before this became a real persona in the the 1999 Neopian world of Neopets) and then you have your actual name outside of the game. This identify is called your “mundane.” Hodgson points out that the definition of mundane from OED as people who are not hard core sci fi fans has been around since the late 1950s.

3

This leads me to the Mundane Science Fiction movement, which appeared in the 2007 edition of Interzone magazine. I listened to an interview with novelist Geoff Ryman on the blogspot http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/ and read around on the blogspot, and decided to just spam in the basic description from Wikipedia and a couple other sites:

Mundane Science Fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction. Inspired by an idea of Julian Todd, the Mundane SF movement was founded in 2002 during the Clarion workshop by novelist Geoff Ryman among others. It focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written.

The central ideas are:

• That interstellar travel remains unlikely; that warp drives, worm holes, and other forms of faster-than-light travel are wish fulfillment fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future.

• That unfounded speculation about interstellar travel can lead to an illusion of a universe abundant with worlds as hospitable to life as this Earth. This is also viewed as unlikely.

• That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.

• That there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe. That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- however, it is considered unlikely that alien intelligences will overcome the physical constraints on interstellar travel any better than we can.

• That interstellar trade (and colonization, war, federations, etc.) is therefore highly unlikely.

• That communication with alien intelligences over such vast distances will be vexed by: the enormous time lag in exchange of messages and the likelihood of enormous and probably currently unimaginable differences between us and aliens.

• That there is no present evidence whatsoever that quantum uncertainty has any effect at the macro level and that therefore it is highly unlikely that there are whole alternative universes to be visited.

• That therefore our most likely future is on this planet and within this solar system, and that it is highly unlikely that intelligent life survives elsewhere in this solar system. Any contact with aliens is likely to be tenuous, and unprofitable.

• That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.

Geoff Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with regular science fiction through the desire of teenagers to leave their parents' homes. Ryman sees too much of regular science fiction being based on an "adolescent desire to run away from our world." However, Ryman notes that humans are not truly considered grown-up until they "create a new home of their own," which is what mundane science fiction aims to do.

I think this latter sense of “creating a new home” is what I would like to do as well; that is, take a look at fictions and nonfictions that try to imagine us shaping these mundane but powerful technologies, as they inevitably and invariably shape us. (And no I am not unaware that the companies that create these technologies do so with certain shapings in mind; I’m just as clear that ubiquitous computing and SMSing are changing patterns of living and communication in ways the designers of these technologies could not have predicted).

4

So the worldly cyborg is also a product of worldly processes (the greed of corporations hungry for consumers, for example, and the cynical realism of those in political power who are happy to provide virtual bread and circuses for the masses while they undermine most of the best parts of American democratic institutions and round up the usual suspects who protest the undermining). And these cyborgs look mundane; usually there is no monstrous bit poking out (though behaviors can become monstrous, as when an entire class is texting while the professor gazes out helplessly…or is this simply the electronification of students who have always been distracted from the drone of knowledge?).

Any feedback on this idea of the mundane greatly appreciated!