I've been writing about cyborgs for a while, and just discovered some other promising sites, including a Cyborg Camp in Portland, Oregon.
Sally Applin gave a talk at this 2010 Cyborg Camp on “cloaked” or invisible cyborgism, which I think merges nicely with some things I am thinking regarding the mundane cyborgs among us. The website for Cyborg Camp [http://portland.cyborgcamp.com/category/cyborgs-4/] includes a description of her talk that mentions examples of cyborgs – an ankle with a titanium plate, Dick Chaney’s heretofore invisible artificial heart (now “seen” due to the external device he has mounted on his chest; shades of Iron Man!). These are reasonably straightforward material examples, and more are easily imagined. But she goes on to discuss what Gray et al call meta cyborgs, such as government policies on extreme genetic engineering, which will have effects both large and largely invisible to most people. She cites Slavoj Žižek on “”trillion-dollar organisms” – patented bugs excreting biofuels, generating clean energy or producing tailor-made food. There are ideas of synthesising new viruses or other pathogens.” This talk seems promising because it marks both more or less mundane cyborgs and links their “invisibility” to the larger and more potentially dangerous invisibility of less mundane, more technologically sublime and massive cyborg projects.
In addition I came across the work of Applin’s colleague Dr. Michael D. Fischer. Besides being an anthropologist at Kent in England, Dr. Fischer founded Anthropunk, “a movement that examines how people promote, manage, resist and endure change; hack their lives (and those of others); and create the context of the individuation of their experiences.” Sally is a founding member of Anthropunk her larger research again sounds promising for my project: she looks at impacts of “technology on culture, and the consequent inverse: specifically the reifications of Virtual Space in Personal Space.”
This work seems promising in a number of ways. First off, I’m interested in the notion of “living” for long periods of time in virtual space (posting and chatting on Facebook, surfing the endless waves of web shopping and information, adopting the almost monk-like position of the serial texter as you hold asynchronous “conversations” with one or ten people) and how these activities in this kind of space might come back, as they say over and over on sports shows, to haunt us. Another quasi-virtual version of this is television and film; we begin to live our lives “as though” they were a film, or being filmed. We take movies of things we do and watch them literally right after the actual event. The amazing golf shot comes to mind; we race to the hole (or basket if like me we are playing disc golf) to retrieve our ball or disc, and all the while moving past the actual event to its reproduction as a video file on our friend’s phone camera.
I sometimes think we begin to feel more real if and when we see ourselves on “TV” – video, or pictures, or audio, or other digital reproductions of daily life. And in turn we have devices to help us achieve filmic reality (or excitement, or meaning) in our lives: headphones for theme and background music; clothing purchased with certain characters and shows in mind; mobility enhancers like skateboards, skis, bikes, cars, that mimic films in which these devices play a central role.
It would be useful to see if there is research in this area, and/or who has written on these topics. The payoff might be considerable, and might include some political implications of how what Applin calls “reifications” affect our ability to make sense of reality.
This term has several meanings, and I’m assuming she is referring to both the simple meaning, i.e., the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing, and the Marxist definition, which I’ve lazily stolen from Wikipedia:
Marx argues that reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade… [It] reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects. This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor.
This notion of reification, and its attendant concepts of alienation and commodity fetishism, is both problematic and productive. The short version for me in writing here might be: when the computer goes from being a person who computes to a machine, something important begins to happen both to the erstwhile human “computer” and to the way humans look at the machines we now call computers.
What cyborg theory does is problematize the idea that you can have a relation with labor, machines, each other, even one’s “self,” that is not in some ways alienated, or complicated. Marx’s concepts are Capital Letter concepts (no pun on capital I promise!) and often imply dualisms that cyborg theory (and especially Donna Haraway’s writings) tries to overcome or move past.
So when we spend hours texting, phoning, web surfing, chatting online, driving, watching films and television shows…what happens to our mundane lives? I’ll end this reflection with a David Sedaris story that I particularly like. He tells a hilarious story of a family that doesn’t own or “believe in” TV (his time period is the 60s) but which is subsequently rehabilitated in the neighborhood’s eyes by buying a used boat. They take the boat out on Halloween, then proceed to trick or treat with their kids on the day AFTER Halloween. Sedaris’s mother demands that the kids offer up some of their candy, and he proceeds to go to his room, perform immediate triage on the loot (including in the A list chocolate bars that give him horrible migraines). When his mother enters she finds him breaking candies to make them un-givable, and stuffing bars of chocolate into his mouth. When his mother goes t grab some of his candy, he tries to speak but ends up spitting bits of chocolate onto his mother’s cashmere sweater.
"Not those," I pleaded, but rather than words, my mouth expelled chocolate, chewed chocolate, which fell onto the sleeve of her sweater. "Not those. Not those."
She shook her arm, and the mound of chocolate dropped like a horrible turd upon my bedspread. "You should look at yourself," she said. "I mean, really look at yourself."
And he begins to feel bad about what he’s done. And then his parents relent, and he and his sisters join the rest of the family as they watch television, a series of stories that allow you to escape from and ignore your own story. Here is the final paragraph (they are watching a Western):
The only alternative was to do as my mother had instructed and take a good look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one's hatred inward, and while I was determined not to fall for it, it was hard to shake the mental picture snapped by her suggestion: here is a boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He's a human being, but also he's a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world, you'd be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there were others. This stagecoach, for instance, coming round the bend with a cargo of gold. This shiny new Mustang convertible. This teenage girl, her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through a straw, one picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on after the news.
There are certainly times and places to escape into narrative. I wonder, though, if the sheer number of narratives available to “us” (those who have all the enabling gadgets, and we are legion, if not universal) does something reality-disturbing to the ways we see our own story. Or the way we find ourselves in a world of hurt and reification, where we know to judge ourselves based on cultural narratives more and more loaded with commodities, lively objects, and objectified viewers always more or less dissatisfied with their own lives and more or less wishing for the lives of the narratives they consume at a faster and faster pace.
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